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Re: [microsound] being 'political' in non-verbal music
On Jun 27, 2005, at 11:01 AM, graham miller wrote:
just to play devil's advocate here, but isn't spoken language just
'signals' too? more complex and multifaceted, yes. more open to
multiple
interpretations and ambiguity? yes. but signals none less encoded into
sound deep within the larynx... ditto for written language... every
form of
communication, which includes art, falls within the scope of
semiotics...
The problem I see is that spoken language is by default a mere copy
of the real thing. We only describe things with spoken languages, we
don't actualize them. In music, things are actualized as new sound,
with an ability to be completely and utterly devoid of context except
that which defines it in the instant it is created. With languages
that use words that have already been created to describe something,
we automatically have a cognitive association with the word, so it
seems to me that it is impossible to simply divorce words from language.
I really like a lot of the work by poets like Retallack (she has some
wonderful poetry, besides the great published conversations with
Cage) and Mac Low that take pieces and parts of language and diverge
their meaning... Cage did a lot of this too, and I also like similar
stuff done by cummings, Joyce and Stein.
i'm not sure there is such a thing as a 'literal language' aside from
mathematics, the only form of communication that holds true
throughout the
universe (more or less...)
But math falls right into the same trap that word-based languages do.
The symbols are only that, signifiers and abstractions of something
that's real. Concepts are only concepts because we enumerate them,
and exist exclusively from the language that describes them,
regardless of whether they are qualitative or quantitative.
m
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