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Re: [microsound] Lemur!



Oh snap!

I humbly stand corrected.

kp


On Feb 17, 2005, at 9:07 AM, David Powers wrote:

The history of violin playing, the virtuosity that must be attained, is
precisely what makes it an esoteric and aristocratic discipline,
something inacessible to most of us.  I love violin playing, but in a
hierarchical society founded on wage labor and dead end jobs, it's not
an option for most people, and to hold it up as a musical ideal is
tantamount to declare that music is an activity that should only be
accessible to the privileged few.

Button pushing, on the other hand, is very relevant to the
post-industrial experience.  I am a trained composer, who makes my
living as a secretary at a university.  If the only possibility of
creating music was to play an instrument like a violin that takes a
lifetime to master, I would not be able to make music.  Even if I rely
on others to do the playing, I'm in a similar situation - I wrote a
string quartet that has never been played, due to my lack of ability to
pay good string players to play it, or even read through it!

So if I can create music through the use of buttons and sliders,
computers, cheap consumer electronics, and anything that is readily
available and affordable to the working person, that's an incredible
opportunity! I'm a piano player but I don't own a piano, so the
availability of cheap keyboard instruments is also an amazing asset. I
don't understand why some people want music to be an elite activity only
available to a privileged few.


I can make beautiful music through button pushing, it's a way of
transforming the drudge work of button pushing that I do in my office
monkey job into something totally different. In my personal artistic
philosophy, I look at art as the transformation of every day life, a
micro-revolution where the mundane undergoes a secret mutation to become
extraordinary and potentially liberating.


~David

fscthaw@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx 02/10/05 03:10PM >>>
Aside from the lesser level of physical minutiae involved in the act of

pushing buttons/twiddling knobs, it seems important that virtuosity on

a violin is also the result of hundreds of years of technique,
training, and experimentation... when you listen to the playing of a
violin, you're engaging with that history as much as you're engaging
with the physical process of playing. This is something that simply
doesn't exist for Lemur-type instruments, synthesizers, etc., at this
point in time.

- Scott Carver

On Feb 10, 2005, at 11:37 AM, Frank D'Urso wrote:

Oh dear God I hope you're kidding, but if you're not, that's a jaw
dropping statement. I don't see how anyone can consider themselves a

musician or even a lover of music without being awed at a display of

mastery over a physical instrument. The amount of minute motor
control
honed over decades, synapses working in perfect harmony with
appendages, the mind performing astronomical calculations on the fly

in order to make horse hair dragging over cat gut sound beautiful?
It's one of the greatest heights to which a human can aspire. I'm
sorry, but it doesn't take a tenth the skill to twiddle knobs (even
if
you built the box and wrote the software) that it does to master a
"dead-ended physical instrument". kp
------------------------------------------------------------

ha, in my first real band I often would get into this argument with
our ham fisted guitar player, he likened my magnus air organ to
"pushing buttons"

This is my first post here, I'm Frank D'Urso of Roman the Edge from
Boston.  Interesting discussions, I like it here.

Frank "RtE" D'Urso



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