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Music is sound, sound can be music

It was hard to make a title that fit what I wanted to talk about. Reading the thread about the deleted Hip-hop/Rap thread was an interesting window on some of the mindset here (some of which was unfortunate and depressing too but that's the world we live in....). What struck me was the attitude that if it's not played on a traditional instrument it's not music, or it just "sucks" in some way.

First, many instruments today, lots of brass ones especially or guitars didn't exist until the last 100-200 years. Do they not make music?

But you have to learn to use it skillfully, so I read. Knowing how to read and write music surely qualifies one yes? Talented even, if your can write complex pieces?

Ok, then. 25 years ago I worked with early digital audio systems using sequencers and MIDI. My partner graduated with honors from Berklee college of music and was a composer. He wrote some amazing work without touching anything more than a mouse and keyboard. Was it music?

10 years later I worked with another person who did incredible work in sound collage and electronic music. They did use a controller that is essentially a piano keyboard but it only sends note data to the system. She could play wonderfully on a real piano but often used non-linear editing and manipulation to produce innovative soundscapes. Was it music?

There are other examples where people do all sorts of experimental things with sound and not a single traditional instrument is ever used. Is it art?

My point here is if you don't like something that's fine. It doesn't make you a bad, stupid, or ignorant person. Neither are you those things if you don't understand why people create things or how they choose to do it. Of course, you are free to say what you like, that's your right. But don't be surprised when you are considered ignorant and intolerant when all you have to say is negative and derogatory remarks.

Life is too short to spend energy on things you don't like. Move on past and participate in the things you enjoy and let others enjoy theirs. Or maybe open you mind and give something more than a cursory glance if curiosity gets you, explore, read, listen and learn. You may decide it really isn't for you, but then again you might.
jet88
jet88 OP
62 posts
 
I'm very happy about the discussion my thread has sparked. Even the difference of opinions is great. The level of discourse and ideas presented about what music is, or could be is fantastic

Give yourselves applause for showing that this community of audiophiles is full of intelligent, articulate people who can have discussions with maturity, respect, thoughtfulness, and a shared love of sound.

Keep the tent big, welcome the strange and unusual, the different and weird. Yes, there's things out there that are deeply problematic like misogyny, racism, glorifying violence, etc. Together we can try to understand, ask questions, discuss and analyze and sift the wheat from the chaff, and by doing so discover new things worthy of our time and attention. The rest will naturally fall away.

Thanks again, you have all heartened me in rather dark times.
mahgister's avatar
mahgister
13,011 posts
 

https://www.amazon.com/Taking-Appearance-Seriously-Dynamic-European/dp/0863159273



The physicist Henry Bortoft elucidated the Goethe vision in 3 books....

There is many way for a WHOLE to desintegrate itself in relative parts, but there is only one way for the parts to be reintegrated in the WHOLE they never ceased to be anyway.....We must transform ourself to perceive truth of the phenomena...They are not "objects" given to us in a passive distribution set for eternity...

Relativism is the error of considering the desintegration process to be the only one and unevitable because the WHOLE is considered to be ONLY the perception of ADDITIVE external parts...

This is a "vision" and consciousness disease, the WHOLE is in the part and shine through it, and to perceive it we must flow ourself with the phenomena and cease to use language and concepts always in an external participation to the phenomena reducing any phenomena to be an external objects, we must be included ourselves in the phenomena and like Goethe said the language and concepts must come and be born with and in the phenomena...

For example in music the "time" is never the time of an external clock ever....It is a flowing, sprouting, rythmical time where all is included even ourselves and the past and future...An internal time and an intemporal duration...The maestro conduct, feeling this time and transmitting it through the right timing wave of his body/soul to all musicians...In jazz improvisation, this is the feeling/perception of this internal time that is the act of playing together.... Then the improvisation reflect not a sum of accidents but a perfect convergence of synchronised events as feelings in each musician...And in the listeners...

The time of the "discovery" or the time of the observation is not always ONLY an external time either...But i already wrote too long post....
😊



«If all is relative, the absolute posit itself, it is the relation»-Lanza Del Vasto

«Creativity erased all relativism»-Anonymus Smith

«No relativism can write the ninth symphony or create infinitesimal calculus, an integrated perceptive vision could»-Anonymus Smith

«True skepticism is not relativism but the "suspension" of judgement»-Anonymus Smith





hilde45's avatar
hilde45
4,974 posts
 
@frogman 
I see better now. Thanks for the clarification. I think it puts you, me, and Putnam much closer together than I realized. I followed Putnam's career and wrote a book in which he featured. In the end, he attacks relativism, but it is such a wooly word, it's very hard prey to catch. Rorty does a good job of elucidating the issue. In the end, Putnam remains committed to pragmatism and perspectivism (which many equate with relativism because they're both anti-absolutisms), but because of Putnam's background in science, mathematics, and logics, he's a bit more realist-leaning than some others in that camp. We're really in the weeds here. so I suggest, now, that we agree to agree.
mglik
908 posts
 
“Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to objectivity within a particular domain and assert that facts in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed.”

My post about Rodrigo in Mozart in the Jungle hearing music in the sounds of NYC is a good example of Relativism. Going back to the OP, and my post, music-or anything-is in the perspective of the observer.
Rap, Opera, Metal, etc. are all valid musical forms-from my perspective.
mahgister's avatar
mahgister
13,011 posts
 
Each act of perception seat on his roots and engender his own "history" and is relativistic in this sense...

But each act of perception could be re-enacted and opened to the revelation of an " absolute" content....

This absolute content is not the relative content of the perception but the awareness of the content and his conscious possible or potential meaning....His "openness"....

Then all perceptions even the more remote or different one could be translated at the right time and linked together...


The human perception of "sound" create music and music is precisely this conscious working translation and communication between cultures and perspectives...

Then relativism is only half of the story.....Like a particular road is half of the journey without the peak of the mountain....

All musical genres or cultures are justified and communicate between one another but some recapitulate conscious moments more easily than others and even integrate all the others more easily...

At the end, music is ONE universal phenomenon transcending and integrating history....


Someone explained that very clearly in the mid last century: Jean Gebser in the "Ever present origin" one of the greatest book ever written in the last hundred years....

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Gebser





«If all is relative, the absolute posit itself,it is the relation»-Lanza Del Vasto

«Then there is a hierarchy in music like in all activities but it is not a hierarchy of power but a hierarchy of integrated and integrating vision»- Anonymus Smith

«At the end there is a "sound" that recapitulate us all»-Anonymus Smith

« By all chance, is it a gong sound?»-Groucho Marx đŸ€“
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