---------- Original Message ----------------------------------
From: Dennis DeSantis <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>I'd qualify this by stating that, while music (and the general
>zeitgeist) tends to loop back somewhat, there is also an overarching
>sense of "two steps forward, one step back." And if you reach far
>enough back into cultural history, you'll find a lot of things
that are
>just plain dead - no one's lamenting the lack of influence of 13th
>Century French chanson or Notre Dame organum on contemporary music.
>That music is gone - it exists solely as an historical object.
thats absolutely not true. the music had to have some influence on
something else. whether that influence took it and changed it into
something nearly unreconizeable before moving on is up to someone
who knows more about that stuff to decide. however since all music
is moving along some sort of timeline where what exists before
somehow has some influence on even the "newest" music, its
impossible to say that any music is no longer having an effect on
the most avant garde music. its part of one huge puzzle, you cant
take out any piece and still have the puzzle be complete.
>So in that sense what happened in the past IS no longer relevant.
And
>if you embrace IDM in a modernist context - that what's important
is the
>lack of precedent and the constant striving for the new, then you
can
>make a case that that music is as strong as ever - not in spite
of but
>BECAUSE of the fact that it lacks a connection to its roots.
>
>This isn't a discussion about objective quality - I don't even
try to
>have a stand on those issues one way or another. It's just a
claim that
>some people could make exactly the claims you've made above, but use
>them as a defense rather than a criticism.
so check this out: IDM is made on computers now for the large
part. the using computers to make music didnt just appear out of
nowhere one day. you can follow it back (throught techno and disco
and electro and so on and so forth) to avante garde type
compositions in the early to mid 1900's. and the people making
those kinds of things were all influenced to make their new music
by certain ideas that already existed in the musical plane, most
notably classical music. classical music goes back hundreds of
years. so basically youre looking at 20th generation influence on
IDM of music written by beethoven, channeled through many minds
and many technological advances. its like this: if you took a
child who had never heard ANY music ever before in his/her life,
and sat them down with a laptop loaded up with live or reason or
whatever, and let them figure it out, IDM wouldnt just pop out of
nowhere. its not an objective idea thats floating around (although
i guess jung might argue that it exists in his collective
unconscious, but whatever) that this child could just grab. IDM is
built as a reaction to thousands of years of music. anything that
is reactionary cant be totally new, even if it is unprecedented.
the existance of IDM relies on the existance of all other music
before it to define it. am i making any sense?
tom
________________________________________________________________
andythepooh.com
