[Date Prev][Date Next][Thread Prev][Thread Next][Date Index][Thread Index]

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*.



--------------------------------------------------------------------- To unsubscribe, e-mail: microsound-unsubscribe@xxxxxxxxxxxxx For additional commands, e-mail: microsound-help@xxxxxxxxxxxxx website: http://www.microsound.org