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

[Bill Ashline <ashline@xxxxxxxxx>]

On 6/21/05, Damian Stewart <damian@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> How do you get across political messages in music which has no lyrics
> and which has no voice samples?
> 

You can't.  People can read anything they want into music, because
music doesn't have any apriori political signifiers.  The best way to
give a political color to basically apolitical sonics is to use
political titles and packaging.  Some of the most overtly political
music outside of the work of Cardew is the free jazz of the sixties,
and that was all part of a process of social transformation and the
political dimensions of the music came out in the culture that
surrounded it--with tributes to Malcolm X, for example, and some of
the clothes and styling of the musicians, like the Art Ensemble's
tribal paint, etc.  Without the cultural politics, the music isn't
inherently political at all unless the forms are radical, which by now
is pretty unlikely.


-- 
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

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