On Fri, November 4, 2005 6:29 pm, David Powers wrote: > Unfortunately your entire argument is based on personal and subjective > prejudice, not on any kind of logic.
huh? youre the one who is saying all music is about the subjective interpretation! im saying that objectively there is something inside music which differentiates it from sound. > It is reasonable to say that if someone creates a musical composition > they are trying to accomplish "something". However, it is up to the > artist's personal vision what that "something" is - it might have > something to do with emotion, and it might not. how do you separate a human from their emotions? even the cold calculating people who can do that are achieving it by directly contradicting their expected emotion. theres no way to remove these things from any artistic venture. there is a way to make non-artistic sound without feeling, however. it happens all the time. like i said, its a cynical approach, for sure. but it happens, and people make money from it. plunk down the expected sounds in the expected pattern, press it up and put it out. or make an unexpected sound and put it out there for the people into "innovation". theres a million different ways to do it, and its done in every one of those ways. > If it doesn't have > anything to do with emotion, it's still music - you don't have to LIKE > it, but that doesn't change its status as music. If a musicologist can > study it as music, and a reasonable number of people can agree that it > is music, then it is music. This is a much more objective approach than > judging all musical activity based on your personal prejudices. so we're going to go by concensus to define things? thats obviously a dangerous road to go down. im being as objective as possible. im saying if you put those things into music which make it music, then it is music. if not, its simply sound. > The idea that the goal of music is to create some kind of intense > feelings in the listener is musical romanticism, which comes primarily > from 19th century Europe. It is not the ONLY approach to music. In terms > of all the music in the world, it is not necessarily the predominant > approach. I personally thought that romanticism died in like, 1915. > Unfortunately I guess that isn't the case... so explain tribal drumming to me through your eurocentric view of emotion in music. explain the blues. explain rock. explain jazz music. are they just there to make funny sounds? thats a pretty cynical explanation. > However, if nothing else, this discussion does show that there is > probably a very pronounced split in the techno world, between the > "romantics" and those who are more "anti-romantic" in outlook. The first > would glorify "feeling" as the highest criterion of music, while the > latter group would look to other aesthetic qualities as that which makes > music interesting. I'm in the second group and I'm more interested in > hearing interesting combinations of timbre and rhythm. I still can feel > emotion, I just don't believe it is "in" the music, or what makes the > music interesting. I look at it as a natural by product when I > experience something sonically interesting. so do you read? do you just read random lists of words in order to feel emotion from them? do you look at random pictures instead of watching a film or play? honestly, i still dont understand why you would ever purchase a record or CD or anything music related if you can be just as satisfied by listening to the ambient sound around you. it just doesnt make sense. if you have artists that you like, youre going against everything that youre saying. you should hold yourself up as the only "composer" in the feeling you get from sounds, and for free nonetheless! so in reality i dont think any of this is true, which is why i feel like youre arguing against some imaginairy idea that im not even talking about. you hear the word "emotion" and you start thinking about big string arrangements or something, and while that is one way to express emotion its certainly not the only way. there's something that these artists are doing to intrigue you outside of randomly stringing sounds together. > Anyway, my anti-romanticism > is part of why "Strings of Life" sounds cheesy to me, and I usually > dislike vocals in techno. hey, you can just say "i dont like strings of life or vocals" and that argument would make much more sense than what youre trying to get at. tom
