Hi Ray,
I've taken the liberty of modifying the Subject because so many sub-threads
have developed under "Downturn . . ."
At 02:45 28/05/01 -0400, you wrote:
>Keith you said:
>> As I see it, governments will increasingly have to concentrate on the
>> taxation of property and visible goods -- as they did in the Middle Ages.
(REH)
>I don't get that. In an age of virtual knowledge imitating art you are
>going to only tax property? Do you plan to tax patents and copywrites?
I'm not planning to tax anything. All I'm suggesting is that I can foresee
the day coming when financial transactions are going to have so many
complex and invisible elements that governments will have to resort to
taxing visible things only.
I don't quite know how you switched into music -- but here we go . . .
(REH)
>The dealing with this was such a bust in the last century that the
>Intellectual Property Rights collapsed as viable businesses. Today such a
>collapse would destroy the internet and all information research, like it
>did composers.
>Indeed musical ignorance reached such a point as a result that even the
>future of music has been cast in doubt as you have pointed out in the past.
No, I haven't at all doubted the future of music. I'm sure it will continue
for as long as man exists. All I am suggesting is that a great deal of
so-called "art" or "serious" music is either totally unappealing to most
people (and even to "serious" connoisseurs -- though they wouldn't admit
it) or, quite simply it isn't music as able to be defined in any sensible
language. For example John Cage's piece of silent piano music cannot be
called music. That would be making nonsense of language as well as music.
I would define music quite simply as a sequence of rhythmic sounds that is
memorable by a majority of the population.
There is, of course, such a multitude of different musical styles that
there isn't enough time in the day for someone to get to familiarise
himself with more than one or two (unless one is a professional) for
subsequent recognition, recall and enjoyment.
In the piece you quote below, David Kraehenbuehl ends by deploring the fact
that most people find it hard to enjoy modern serious music. His get-out is
that children enjoy it and therefore there's something defective about us
adults. Well, I don't at all believe that children enjoy modern serious
music and, if he asserts that, I would like to see the colour of his
evidence. He may know a million times more about music than I do, but I
think he's fooling himself.
Hope I've not offended you. I really don't want to, Ray.
Keith H
>
> To make this point I am attaching an article by a Master composer and
>teacher David Krahenbuhl who was head of the Yale Music Theory Department,
>founded the Journal of Music Theory, was the protege of Paul Hindemith at
>Yale and who decided during the later years of his life to develop programs
>for the next generation of musicians and pianists at the local level. He
>and my old teacher started a Magazine, developed a theory program for the
>first seven years of piano study and wrote vociferously until his death
>about the way to teach the knowledge, enjoyment and theory of new music to
>the next generation. This article was published in last months Keyboard
>Companion Magazine and is a memorial reprint to the work that he did his
>business partner and my teacher Richard Chronister who died last month.
>
>As for alternate currencies. We already do that. But we don't talk much
>about it. With the terrible situation here with "Neo-liberal" anti-art
>policies we are forced to do something that Bill Gates is only now learning
>about. I would suggest that its implications holds more peril than any
>government anti-monoloply suit. However they are all connected. The
>future is up in the air and once again, like the artists pioneering
>gentrification in city ghettos, we have walked the path before the current
>"urban sprawl of noisy home owners."
>
>Ray Evans Harrell
>
>
>
>from the Summer 2001 issue Keyboard Companion Magazine
>
>How Different Is Modern Music?
>
>Article by David Kraehenbuehl
>
>For a composer, this is the easiest question in the world to answer. Modern
>music is no more different than modern music has always been. This means
>that it is a little bit different from music written ten years ago, very
>different from music written two hundred years ago. And that is why so many
>find it too different to enjoy. Most of the music that is taught today was
>written a hundred to two hundred years ago. Many of the teaching pieces we
>use, although written this year, are in styles that are a hundred to two
>hundred years old. By comparison, even the mildest of modern idioms is very
>different. It is this shocking difference between the very old and the very
>new that makes the new so difficult for many of us. But this is no problem
>for a child; and, if it becomes one, it is our fault as teachers. For a
>child, modern music is not different at all. What could it be different
>from? It relates to the world around him, the world that he knows first-hand
>as a kaleidoscopic variety of exciting experiences and exciting sounds. He
>hears it every day in the rumble of a distant expressway, in the sound of
>the midnight plane as he lies awake, in the rhythm of dead leaves rattling
>in the wind, in the summer night's orchestra from the nearby swampy place.
>Like a good composer, his ears are always tuned for the new and different in
>the vibrant world of rhythm and sound that is all around him. Then, too, he
>hears modern music constantly in radio commercials and as the background to
>movies and TV shows. Modern music is everywhere; he can't miss it.
>Obviously, he enjoys it.
>
>Perhaps we should take a very old piece of advice and become as little
>children. We may discover that it is really very easy to enjoy our own
>music, the music of our own time. Unfortunately, for us to become as little
>children is not easy. But let's try an exercise in it. We will try to
>experience a piece of modern music as a child would.
>
>The piece we will use ("Vacation") was written expressly for children by a
>university professor, Ross Lee Finney (see below). Before you look at it, I
>should tell you that Mr. Finney is a very advanced musical thinker who
>teaches graduate music courses at the University of Michigan. To understand
>his very modern music, you must know something about an involved
>contemporary technique of composition called twelve-tone technique. This is
>the same technique that Arnold Schoenberg and Anton Webern used to compose
>their dissonant, atonal music. This piece is atonal because, although its
>key signature is C major, it uses lots of flats and sharps. Atonal music
>isn't really in any key. This piece ends with a kind of A major chord, but
>this isn't a proper tonic. That is because it is atonal. In any case, the
>piece couldn't be in A major because it uses d sharp right at the beginning.
>
>What are you thinking? If my guess is right, most of you are thinking that
>you would rather not look at this piece after all. I wrote that last
>paragraph deliberately to show how easy it is to leave the impression that
>modern music is strange, inaccessible, and probably not particularly
>desirable. The paragraph includes a number of irrelevant, trivial, and
>possibly prejudicial observations regarding a fine children's piece by a
>fine modern composer. And yet it includes nothing but statements that I have
>heard from teachers. Let's see what is the matter with it.
>
>To begin with, we are talking about music that may not have been heard by
>our audience. Furthermore, we are telling them that it will be no use to
>hear it until they "understand" it. Put that way, it is a pretty silly
>request. How can anyone understand a piece of music that he has not heard,
>and what better way is there to understand a piece than to hear it? We
>should never talk about, or listen to talk about, music that we have not
>heard. How many are there who are certain that Schoenberg and Webern wrote
>ugly, distasteful music? And yet, they have never heard a note of either. A
>child wouldn't make such a mistake. Children have opinions about only those
>experiences that they know first hand. Their prejudices about what they do
>not know first hand are learned from us. If we wish to be like little
>children, we must reserve judgment on any musical experience until we have
>actually had the experience. More often than not, we will be pleasantly
>surprised.
>
>My paragraph has another glaring fault. We never find out what Mr. Finney's
>piece is about. Knowing that it is entitled "Vacation" explains its whole
>nature. Vacations are something we all know about; we look forward to them
>eagerly; we make lively preparations for them; we feel like jumping up and
>down with excitement as the time for departure approaches; we anticipate
>freedom ecstatically. Hearing "Vacation," remembering what this meant to us
>as children, we understand and enjoy Mr. Finney's piece at once. He has
>captured vividly every facet of his subject. What difference does it make
>that the piece is constructed from a chromatic scale? Are not the occasional
>sharp dissonances a perfect way to express the confusion of vacation
>preparations? Do not the bright, parallel triads make us feel excited? Isn't
>everyone satisfied with the finality of the ending, proper triad or not?
>What does it matter if some of the sounds are a little unfamiliar? The
>enthusiasm with which a child approaches a vacation is perfectly depicted.
>This is what a child asks of music. He wants a clear re-creation in sound
>and rhythm of an experience that he knows. We, like children, should ask
>first what a piece is about, and second, is it really about it?
>
>I see some puzzled expressions. Is that all there is to it? Don't we need to
>know a lot more about a piece of music than that? Of course we must. But do
>most of the things we tell children about music really tell them how it is
>made? In fact, do most of the things we tell ourselves about a modern
>composition help us to understand it very much? I'm afraid not.
>
>Let's look again at our unhappy paragraph. We say that "Vacation" is atonal
>because it has the key signature of C major and uses lots of flats and
>sharps. What does all that mean? What is an atonal piece? One without tones,
>perhaps? And does an absence of sharps and flats at the beginning of a piece
>mean the key of C? Not necessarily. And, on hearing the piece, are we not
>completely convinced that it ends clearly in the key of A major on a tonic
>triad with an added second?
>
>Our difficulty with modern music is largely our own fault. We have turned a
>number of half-truths and even falsehoods about the nature of music into
>value judgments. And, worse yet, we pass on these hazy value judgments to
>our students. Keys and scales are all-important to us. A piece that isn't
>clearly in a key, that doesn't make obvious use of the notes of a particular
>key-scale, becomes suspect. Parallel fifths are "wrong" and a piece that
>uses them is therefore "way out." Music is made of dominant-tonic
>progressions; a piece that isn't made of such progressions may not be music.
>The list of our requirements for a proper piece or the proper understanding
>of a piece is endless and largely beside the point. If a child can read and
>play effectively a lively piece of music, is his understanding improved by
>telling him that it is made of dominant and tonic chords in the key of A
>major, and the complicated parts are accidentals? Of course not. Who would
>assume that a child's understanding of a lively story would be improved by
>telling him that it uses verbs and nouns from a six hundred and fifty word
>vocabulary, and the complicated sentences are the ones with adverbs and
>adjectives?
>
>What, then, would improve our understanding of a piece of music, any piece
>of music, modern or not? To think as a composer thinks; and, happily, good
>composers think like children. They think about sounds-bright sounds, dark
>sounds, sharp sounds, soft sounds, thick sounds, thin sounds-a whole
>wonderful palette of sounds. And they think about time-time going fast,
>going slow, going steadily, going jerkily, flowing, stopping-all the many
>delightful, dancing shapes that time may take. And they shape time to say
>what they have to say. How do they shape time? By controlling the changing
>of sounds. To play a piece well, we must observe and understand, in its
>proper proportion, every kind of change in it. We must play the piece in
>such a way that important changes sound important, unimportant changes sound
>unimportant. A distorted performance results when we emphasize what the
>composer considered unimportant, when we overlook what the composer
>considered essential.
>
>Let's look again at "Vacation" to see what we can find out about change and
>the shape of time in it. These are the things a performer must understand
>about a piece. The first eight bars fall into four two-bar groups. Notice
>how the composer makes one surprising change just before the beginning of
>each two-bar group. At the end of the second, fourth, and sixth bars, he
>brings one chord in the right hand that is different from the A major triad.
>It is this really different chord, put in just before the bar line, that
>makes us feel the beginning of the third, fifth, and seventh bars as new
>starts. A composer in the eighteenth century would have put a dominant chord
>before each bar line, not because dominant chords must come before tonic
>chords, but because the dominant chord would be a surprising change. Mr.
>Finney, living in the twentieth century, finds dominant chords a rather dull
>change. He chooses a brighter, fresher change to express his lively feelings
>about a vacation.
>Now let's look at the third line. Here, Mr. Finney wants a real change in
>order to start an important new section of his piece. He adds a new highest
>note and a new lowest note to his music. And what notes does he add? G's.
>And if we look closely, we will see that these are really brand-new notes.
>Mr. Finney has never used a g of any kind before this ninth bar of his
>piece. The g's then are a real change, an exciting surprise; and, as
>performers, we know that they are so important that we must bring them out.
>
>There are other differences between the first eight bars and the second
>eight bars of the piece. The second section still has triads in the right
>hand, but they change more often; likewise, the left hand has many more
>sixteenth notes. Time seems to be racing. Why? Because changes are taking
>place much more frequently. As performers, we know this will be a dangerous
>passage. When time gets hectic, we get hectic. We rush or we stumble. Also,
>the sound of the whole passage is more complex, more dissonant, more
>strained than the opening eight bars. The notes do not fit together as
>neatly as they did in the first part. There are many different kinds of
>sounds instead of just a few. Where the bass clef sign appears in the fourth
>stave, the composer has added a lot of notes in the left hand that have
>never been used before. It is with a sense of relief that we come back in
>bar 17 to the more reasonable music that started the piece off.
>
>For Mr. Finney, an exact restatement of the beginning of the piece would be
>too dull to represent real excitement. He has heightened the liveliness of
>the music by making everything higher than it was at the beginning and by
>putting the fast notes on top where they will surely be heard. And, in the
>last line of the piece he uses the highest note of all, a b that he has
>never used before. The piece rises continuously, getting more and more
>excited. As performers, we must make sure that the right hand is clearly
>heard through the fifth and sixth lines of the piece. It is the right hand
>that makes the return of the opening so fresh and exciting.
>
>And now we go off on our vacation, disappearing into the distance. Having
>reached the peak of excitement, we finally relax. How does Mr. Finney shape
>time to depict this? The changes in the music become very few and very
>familiar. Time slows down. The b, which was the last important new element
>to be added, just stays on and on, right out to the end of the piece. We are
>so familiar with it that it doesn't disturb us at all when it lingers on in
>the middle of the A major chord at the close of the piece.
>
>This is the way a composer makes a piece. He doesn't think about keys and
>key-scales, about "proper" progressions, about parallel fifths. He thinks
>about what he has to say and how he can shape time with sounds to say it. He
>starts with a sound, any sound, and then makes a different sound, a lot
>different or a little different, as he wishes. If we could learn to look at
>music that way, we would discover that no music is really different. All
>music is a lively, expressive pattern of sound in time telling us again
>about ourselves, our experiences, our feelings, the universe around us. Any
>child knows this. Why is it so hard for us to learn it?
>
>
>
>
>
___________________________________________________________________
Keith Hudson, General Editor, Calus <http://www.calus.org>
6 Upper Camden Place, Bath BA1 5HX, England
Tel: +44 1225 312622; Fax: +44 1225 447727;
mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
________________________________________________________________________
