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mosc
Site Admin
Joined: Jan 31, 2003 Posts: 18195 Location: Durham, NC
Audio files: 211
G2 patch files: 60
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Posted: Sat Jun 21, 2014 10:36 am Post subject:
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This discussion reflects on how language is very imprecise and always evolving. I've been around long enough to notice that when words take on new meanings, they rarely go away.
Back in the 60's, people who made what was then called "tape music" were criticized for calling themselves composers. Up until then, composers wrote notes on a page, or at least created music that could be written down as notes on a page. The notes eventually evolved into graphical symbols. Some university composer types even published sonographs of their tapes, so they would be official compositions by an actual composer.
Here's a related story:
I was fortunate to have met John Cage in 1971, when I was a music student at Mills College. In a way, Cage was a hero to conventional composers as well to as the avant-garde because even when he wrote random, or chance music, for which he became famous, he notated it. I asked him why not improvise, why bother writing that stuff down. He said he got money for publishing pages with music written on them. By the time I met him, he got paid, I think well, for personal appearances, he stopped bothering with the written stuff.
John told me he really wasn't interested in music. He was most interested in mushrooms - all kinds. When I told him I was from Jacksonville, Florida, he lit up and talked enthusiastically of certain fields, or cow pastures, that I knew of as well. Apparently, some of the best schrooms in North America grow there, in the cow shit. He said he visited Jacksonville often. I think he said he stayed on Amelia Island, a ritzy resort destination some distance from the city center.
Now-a-days, John Cage is long gone, but taken very seriously; he's almost a deity in serious avant-garde music circles. His music is performed with great pomposity by conventionally trained musicians who practice long and hard to get every random note played precisely as notated. I get a laugh over this. I don't deny he was a composer, but I think he was a great satirist; one of the best ever. _________________ --Howard
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Acoustic Interloper
Joined: Jul 07, 2007 Posts: 2067 Location: Berks County, PA
Audio files: 89
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Posted: Sat Jun 21, 2014 12:17 pm Post subject:
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mosc wrote: | I don't deny he was a composer, but I think he was a great satirist; one of the best ever. |
And a producer! _________________ When the stream is deep
my wild little dog frolics,
when shallow, she drinks. |
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Uncle Krunkus
Moderator
Joined: Jul 11, 2005 Posts: 4761 Location: Sydney, Australia
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Posted: Sun Jun 22, 2014 9:34 pm Post subject:
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You could write "music" on paper, as a set of chords and a melody line, and at that stage it could still be interpreted as a country-rock ballad, an orchestral improv, or a punk epic. In this case, I would say it would be valid to say that your "art" includes no production values.
But,...
As soon as you specify that it should be underpinned by the sound of a Polymoog, rather than a bassoon,..... then you are also a "producer".
Well,.... that's the way I see it anyway. _________________ What makes a space ours, is what we put there, and what we do there. |
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