Forum - Week 3 - Dirty Harry
While doing this course we seem to be constantly forced into expanding our views on what constitutes music. Are we so bigoted in our musical taste that we have to have an endless stream of weird crap thrown at us like so much wet fish? For forum this week we all played our part in performing David Harris' creation "Compossible" (1), which roughly translates to "Composition? Impossible!", coincidentally David Harris' life motto. One big problem- this piece would have been very, very easy to create. I could do the same thing in 2 hours, hand-written and photocopied. It doesn't matter who plays what, who does what or what the result is. The notion of every sound being musical died out in the 1980s, when all the 70s hippies realised that you cannot be self sufficient if your only activities are expanding your mind and sharing needles (normally vice-versa).
I listen to such experimental 'music' and think about the era that we live in. In the time of the Renaissance, people rejoiced in the rediscovered musical writings of Ancient Greece- Ptolemy, Plato et al.- and luxuriated in the aural perfection and purity that these studies unleashed. And now, coinciding with the upsurging of computerised technology, some people feel the need to push music in a new direction- a non-musical direction. After untold millenia of studying what makes good music so good and creating vast libraries of techniques and secrets to fully realise our musical potential as a species, are we really going to revert everything to Paleolithic times? Music was created by humans, humans sculpted it to be what it is today, and it is a crowning achievement over the other animals of our planet. Removing almost all of the aspects of harmony, melody and rhythm reduces music to a previous state of our evolution. We earned our 44+2 chromosomes, and I for one will enjoy the fruits of being part of such an advanced species- namely the delicious peach of harmony, the succulent grape of melody and the dionysian honeydew of rhythm.
I could just imagine it now, the future music industry flooded with an army of David Harri, music stores with chance operations cranked up on the instore stereo.
The revolution is coming...
1. David Harris. "Music Technology Forum" Lecture presented at the Electronic Music Unit, University of Adelaide, South Australia, 15th March, 2007.
8 comments:
I've noticed a pattern in society... in our formative years, we are not to say "This is not music" or "I don't like this", as we are seen as naive. In our educational years, we often make ourselves believe that we really are into it after all (thanks to the analytical side of things). Afterwards, we finally take a step back and look at ourselves and arrive at the educated conclusion that, yes, it really was bad after all. Only this time we are "qualified" to make the same statement...
dionysian honeydew?
i want some of that!?
"Music was created by humans, humans sculpted it to be what it is today, and it is a crowning achievement over the other animals of our planet. Removing almost all of the aspects of harmony, melody and rhythm reduces music to a previous state of our evolution."
a good point, but have you ever listened to birdsong?
i guess i would say that there is something primitive about music as well, especially in cultures that have not invented words with such definitions as harmony, melody and rhythm, but which still have used them.
nice work on the image hahaha!
Birdsong is used for mating or communication, we mainly use it for intellectual or physical enjoyment. And sometimes for mating. I would say a bird has no concept of the musical side of its sound, it has just evolved to the stage where the right 'melody' gets the most attention. Which raises a question- Can animals enjoy music? Still, a valid point about less learned cultures.
I had honeydew at my sister's wedding, so I've got 'dew on the brain.
Was that her name?
What, honeydew?
*LINK REL="SHORTCUT ICON"
HREF="http://www.fileden.com/files/2007/2/24/817993/small.gif"*
instead of both of the ** do < >
Oh SWEET! Cheers, dude. I think a little green 'T' will be sufficient. I just figured out how to keep the page in one spot too.
"I would say a bird has no concept of the musical side of its sound"
This study says otherwise.
Vocal performance influences female response to male bird song: an experimental test
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