music-research@HPLPM.HPL.HP.COM (01/08/91)
Music-Research Digest Mon, 7 Jan 91 Volume 6 : Issue 4
Today's Topics:
2nd rate European Conference (2 msgs)
My Address
Research at MIT Media Laboratory
*** Send contributions to Music-Research@uk.ac.oxford.prg
*** Send administrative requests to Music-Research-Request
*** Overseas users should reverse UK addresses and give gateway if necessary
*** e.g. Music-Research@prg.oxford.ac.uk
*** or Music-Research%prg.oxford.ac.uk@nsfnet-relay.ac.uk
*** Back issues, index, etc.: send "help" in a message to archive-server
*** @uk.ac.oxford.prg (in the UK) or @hplpm.hpl.hp.com (elsewhere)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: 6 Jan 91 19:56:28 GMT
From: davisonj%en.ecn.purdue.edu%noose.ecn.purdue.edu%sparkyfs.erg.sri.com@gov.nasa.arc.ames (John M Davison)
Subject: 2nd rate European Conference
To: music-research@prg
Message-ID: <1991Jan6.195628.20624@en.ecn.purdue.edu>
Eliot isn't the only person around whose eyebrows were raised
(and not in enlightenment, to paraphrase D. Hilgenberg) by the
announcement of the 2nd European Conference on Music Analysis.
The topic that surprised me was that which follows:
>b) 'Popular music': analyses of songs from the 1950s to the 90s
>
>Song-form, linked with means of mass communication, has been
>radically transformed in recent decades. Generations of youth
>have been brought up on this repertory. For the critical
>understanding of it, it is essential to develop adequate
>analytical methods.
This is perhaps the most patronizing statement I have read in
a conference announcement. Would someone please vindicate the above
passage?
-davisonj@medusa.cs.purdue.edu
------------------------------
Date: 6 Jan 91 22:03:28 GMT
From: eliot%phoenix@edu.princeton (Eliot Handelman)
Subject: 2nd rate European Conference
To: music-research@prg
Message-ID: <5064@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
In article <16244@venera.isi.edu> smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) writes:
;In article <5056@idunno.Princeton.EDU> I wrote:
;>;Date: Fri, 04 Jan 91 11:27:16 SET
;>;From: Lelio Camilleri <CONSERVA@IT.CNR.FI.IFIIDG>
;>;Analysis always presupposes a segmentation of the piece in
;>;question, but the criteria for this operations are problematic.
;>Just whose concept of "analysis" is this anyway? I don't know
;>of any post-adornoesque metacritique of analysis that asserts
;>"presupposed segmentation." Of which music, for instance?
;I'm not sure just whom or what you are trying to attack here. Do you wish to
;contest the premise of a tight coupling between analysis and perception? THAT,
;after all, is the premise behind the sentence you have chosen to attack.
Yes/2 Steve: that's 1/2 of what's making me vomit. The other half is
the premise that "this is how analysis ALWAYS goes," suggesting that
"these dumb analysts don't seem to know any better. We will set them
straight."
"Analysis" means almost nothing: the first question with analysis is
always "what is an analysis"? The word (certainly at the level of
an international music theory conference) carries with it no
assumptions. Adorno's metacritiques insist that there is no such thing,
and I tend to agree with him.
"Perception" is NOT and SHOULD NOT be "tightly coupled" to "analysis."
Partly this is because analysis can't pressupose its own purpose;
secondly, it's far too bound up in speculative attitudes discernible
in music of virtually any period, and has almost at all times been
"tightly coupled" to COMPOSITION, rather than to "perception." This
means that "foundations" of composition are themselves speculative,
rather than practical; and there are strong cultural/historical reasons
for safeguarding that particular foundation. In particular, it's probable
that music MIGHT be a mind-expanding experience, something which, at its
deepest level, can rewrite the rules of perception. As you know, this
is a point that I take very seriously. And if it can't -- well then,
fuck that music.
;After
;all, there is no question that segmentation is a critical aspect of perception.
;Even if you reject the various schools of cognitive science and take Edelman's
;biological approach instead, you cannot give up the need to build upon a
;foundation of a capacity for PERCEPTUAL CATEGORIZATION. Even you can never
;get beyond an ability to establish the EXISTENCE and EXTENT of OBJECTS among
;the stimuli you receive, you can never begin to talk about either perception
;or analysis.
Steve, this is one very boring approach to music. Go read your Cage,
for instance. Even if segmentation is a necessity -- that is, I positively
cannot avoid going out into the world and segmenting it, and whether
or not I really want to, when I listen to music, segmentation is
automatic and absolute -- then you must recognize that only VERY, VERY
SIMPLE music permits unambiguous segmentation AT ALL TIMES. How you
segment things is how you conceptualize music with your musical mind,
as Babbitt says: there are no a priori determinants ("foundations").
There is no "rule" whose "violation" is a priori ineffective because
it violates some established factor. There are no such established
factors. Let's just take one little example. If you have a bunch of
sounds, and then 40 seconds of silence, and then a bunch of sounds
again, how will it be segmented? What belongs to what? The most
boring music theorist I know will assert, "group 1, then silence, then
group 2." I need not give his name. Now it happens that the composer
intends the first 20 seconds of silence to be grouped with the
first group of sounds; and then the second group consists of the
second 20 seconds of silence, including the next group of sounds.
The composer is Stockhausen, the piece is Transit. He tries to establish
a context to permit the conceptualization of a segmentation across the
silence, rather than going with the more obvious arrangement. OPne could
argue: therefore the obvious arrangement is more intrinsic. It's an
obvious gestaltism. But the only foundation it provides is a desire
to escape this particular principle. What role for perception, then?
Something of an institution at the sidelines, rather than a foundation:
a dialectic, at worse, something to be ATTACKED, NEVER ASSUMED other
than as an attackable institution. Nattiez has also written something
along these lines, if all this sounds too eliotistic for your tastes.
Edelman is probably correct in asserting somewhere the primacy of
categorization, but again, only as an institution. Its role in
music is the categorization self/other, not "theme 1"/"theme 2".
As you'll be reading in a forthcoming non-net article by myself,
even this categorization is institutional, that is, posited only
as a premise to its attack in music.
;Attempts to discuss issues of terminology are hardly confined to hack work.
;For better or worse, it is a perfectly reasonable position to accept from
;anyone who has decided to adopt Zenon Pylyshyn's COMPUTATION AND COGNITION
;as gospel. Pylyshyn's feet, in turn, are planed squarely upon the shoulders
;of Allen Newell and Jerry Fodor. None of these men are hacks (even if my
;personal point of view is that they never seem to take on any of the really
;critical questions of cognition). We should not be surprised to find whole
;schools of thought trying to follow in their footsteps, and those schools will
;probably continue to flourish until any loyal opposition can finally muster
;some convincing arguments.
Mistake here, Steve. I don't give one good goddam for these midgets
(your expression, I believe). The best that can be said of "music and
cognition" is that its main question is "what should this field be
called"? Psychomusicology, Cognitive Musicology, Musical Engineering
AImusic, etc etc ad I puke? This game has been the single most discussed
matter in that whole pathetic non-field of psychobabble idiots for
about 20 years, and what do they have to show for it? Absolute
fucking zip. And ditto this utterly meaningless concern with "naming
elctro-acoustic" sounds. WELL ENOUGH ALREADY. GET A LIFE.
-handelman
music
princeton
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 6 Jan 91 15:02:38 PST
From: kravitz%foxtail@edu.ucsd
Subject: My Address
To: Stephen.Page@prg
Message-ID: <9101062302.AA18946@foxtail.uucp>
Stephen,
Thanks for posting my question about the MIT Media Lab. My email address
somehow got garbled in the header. For the record, my correct address is
shown below.
Thanks
Jody
Internet: foxtail!kravitz@ucsd.edu
uucp: ucsd!foxtail!kravitz
------------------------------
Date: 7 Jan 91 00:32:17 GMT
From: minsky%media-lab@edu.mit.eddie (Marvin Minsky)
Subject: Research at MIT Media Laboratory
To: music-research@prg
Message-ID: <4739@media-lab.MEDIA.MIT.EDU>
kravitz%foxtail@edu.ucsd asked about music research at the Media Laboratory.
The MIDI piano man is graduate student Michael Hawley,
mike@media-lab.media.mit.edu. As for written musical scores, graduate
student Alan Ruttenberg (alanr@media-lab.media.mit.edu) is just now
finishing a thesis on an optical score-to-preformance system -- that
is, a score-reading system. It is tuned to a particular publisher,
because Ruttenberg designed it to use in a system for making musical
analyses of certain Schubert string quartets.
------------------------------
End of Music-Research Digest