Thomas, > By the way: I like modern music - but "cum grano salis" - I try to > detect form and content in any piece. If I cannot find it it's either > above my understanding or bad. > Best wishes > Thomas
I concur. I've heard form and content in rock (although not much lately), and also heard random noise. One of my college friends got involved with 12 tone scale in the fifties, and actually was published by Columbia Records (College Jazz, Modern - 1955), one of the pieces being Wholly Hindemuth. His career, in Europe and the US, has been as a composer of modern operas - none well known, but he made a living in his craft. He is now into micro-tuning where he plays two pianos tuned a quarter tone apart. There is a point here, and it comes from Thomas' "above my understanding or bad". At my forty-fifth college reunion Johnny (the composer I mention) was asked to make a hymn for our memorial service for our lost classmates (about 120 friends at that time). It was 12 tone, and more. His operatic singer wife sang to his piano, and he set most of his dischords into her solo against his chording, just emphasising the sound. His arrangement of an old tone poem was dischordant and incomprehensible to 99% of the congregation - but I saw the form and content. (The chording made the offending chord in McFarlane's transcription of Gypsie's Lilt, that so many of you found offensive - but I found to be a leading chord, sound like a gentle harmony). So where was I? Oh yes, I can listen to the raindrops on my roof, and the sound of the wind, and all sorts of other things without needing to go to a concert hall and, in effect, being told to do so. Cage was an advanced guard of the modern "know nothing" society, or better said, an advanced guard of the gurus. To me, performance art is a form of arrogance. To take the mundane, or the natural, and foist it on the populace as art says to the populace "You are too dumb and unobservant to see the world as I see it. I am an artist, and I hear the wind in the willows and see the sunset in a way that you don't". Nothing wrong with experimenting with new musical forms, I do it and listen to it all the time. And nothing wrong with silence, I love it - particularly as there is no such thing, when the world is silent you can hear the music of the spheres (or at least hear the small sounds that come to the fore). But I have a problem with the performance art gurus, whether timing silence as Cage or painting their bodies in chocolate, telling me what is art. Johnny Eaton's (my friend) work is art in the sense that it is based on a sound musical footing. But is it good and lasting art, personally I don't think so - and remember I'm prejudiced in his favor. I think music requires a form and structure, but that form may come in a number of different packages. I am still on an unsuccessful search for a video of a South African group called Gum Boots that I briefly heard on US Public TV. Unlike Ladysmith (whom I like) they are basically polyrhythm, apparently songs of the mines of the old days. So I don't say that form must be Gradus ad Parnassum, or the Brandenburgs, just that there be some structure on which a theme is varied. Free verse isn't really free, it is a play on the fixed phrasing. Enough, I probably started another "non-lute" bit of noise. But anything that has to do with art and music should apply to musicians. Best, Jon
