Re: [microsound] being 'political' in non-verbal music

[Bill Ashline <ashline@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 6/22/05, mopani@xxxxxxxxxxxxx <mopani@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Not sure about that Bill. I've just heard a simple piece called Cacerolada
> at the Sonic Arts Network Conference in Scarborough, UK that made a very
> powerful political statement on several levels without lyrics or voice
> samples. 

Interesting, mopani, and thanks for that tip.  But it doesn't change
my point.  If you hear that group of sounds devoid of the message
inherent in it, they're only sounds.  The politics comes later. 
Paraphrasing Lyotard:  a cave dweller inscribes a figure on the wall
inside a cave.  Is it art?  Is it language?  It is neither.  The
distinction will come later.



On 6/22/05, Aaron Ximm <ghede@xxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Of course, in cases like this it's the context that makes the recording
> meaningful -- not the sounds themselves... my first reaction is that the
> contextualizing information here serves the same roll as the lyrics in a
> protest song.

Exactly, Aaron.


-- 
What to the American slave is your 4th of July? I answer: a day that
reveals to him, more than all other days in the year, the gross
injustice and cruelty to which he is the constant victim. To him, your
celebration is a sham; your boasted liberty, an unholy license; your
national greatness, swelling vanity; your sounds of rejoicing are
empty and heartless; your denunciations of tyrants, brass fronted
impudence; your shouts of liberty and equality, hollow mockery; your
prayers and hymns, your sermons and thanksgivings, with all your
religious parade and solemnity, are, to him, mere bombast, fraud,
deception, impiety, and hypocrisy--a thin veil to cover up crimes
which would disgrace a nation of savages. There is not a nation on    
  the earth guilty of practices more shocking and bloody than are the
people of the United States, at this very hour.--Frederick Douglass

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