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Re: [microsound] being 'political' in non-verbal music
graham miller wrote:
do you not think the structure of music itself is not a statement? that
the choice of using one instrument over the other, or one chord, or one
scale versus another, is not a message in of itself?
oh, it certainly is. I'm an activist as much as I am a composer (I'm in
the process of learning how to be an activist through composition), I
want my messages to reach people (otherwise what is the point of them?)
If you have an audience of people whose experience of music is pop,
which is as you say utterly unpolitical (despite expresses vast
quantities of powerful status quo), how do you reach them? Consciously
choosing one instrument over another is incredibly subtle. I have become
convinced lately that subtlety can't work in reaching these people, you
have to be unsubtle.
Having dealt with the popular music scene for a while (trying to get my
work played on the radio, having gigs and stuff) the strongest reaction
I got was 'hey, that was good.' I got sick of hearing that. I want to
somehow take the energy and the activism that happens inside the punk
movement and deliver it to the non-punks; otherwise I'm preaching to the
converted. It's no use peddling an anti-consumption message to an
audience who already agrees with you. My activist/anarchist bones want
to push the message outward.
Desired response to a composition of mine is for a listener who hasn't
thought about it to /question their assumptions about capitalism./
are looping, repetition, sampling and thievery not political acts unto
themselves?
.... yes, yes they are.
the human voice and the words that it sings are just a serious of sounds
linked together through syntax. how is this any different than any other
musical sound or language?
In a world where rational justifications for ideas are pushed with
little regard for emotional or instinctive or historical justifications,
/verbal/ communication is king. It is very, very difficult to deliver a
rational argument which will be considered as such via emotional means.
I suppose in this case the response would be to ignore the rational and
allow the emotional or the instinctive to show itself that it is every
bit as strong as the rational. Much harder task to do with experimental
audio. It angers me that Coldplay, who are clearly a bunch of fairly
bright chaps, aren't using the very strong, simple emotional angles they
are able to caress out of their music to actually say something
meaningful about human relationships, rather than just continuing to
peddle the same ideas of an inward-looking, individualistic,
noncommunicative approach to 'romantic love'; when all of pop is already
about 'romantic love' to such an extent that people don't actually know
what it means to have love between friends any more.
music is no different. the listener requires the cypher to decode the
meaning in music, and this cypher is acquired the same way we learn any
new language, musical or otherwise.
So what we as 'microsound' composers have to do is sit around and wait
until our musical language becomes understood by the mainstream? Sod
that, I'm not waiting, I want to hit people's assumptions on the head *NOW*.
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