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I have been reading, silently, the discussion, which I
have really enjoyed. Here are some thoughts: 1- physical instruments What I see in hardware/hands-in-stuff/instrumental music is what I learned at school as "haptic" knowledge: Something like body/muscle´s memory, that makes it possible to sculpt in mud a face in complete darkness, or draw a body for the first time without looking at a model (in case we are male, a male body. It wouldn´t be the same drawing a body we don´t haptically know). In this way of thought, darkness is an important concept, because we are talking about playing an instrument not referring our phisical acts to a visual knowledge. Learning piano (or guitar, flute, etc.) is suposed to be more haptic, meaning that it is not really learning where the keys are but learning how my arms, hands and fingers feel when I play certain key or sequence of keys until we do it naturally, as walking. So they say that good piano players play with the whole body (same for guitar or any physical instrument, I guess). I believe it is possible to get this haptic knowledge to start helping us in computer music, but for that I personally would aim for a less visual interface (that´s why I am learning arduino now, in order to build a phisical controller that reflects at least some of my body possibilities without requesting my eyes to confirm anything). Nevertheless, when playing piano or guitar, the body must remember (eventhough it is not really simple) not a lot of stuff: where a note is, how to make it sound hard or soft, how to variate the sound in some other limitated ways. Computer music gives (or makes possible) a lot more parameters to be modifyable. In a complex work it wouldn´t be impossible to find ourselves needing to tweek more values (sound properties-event shoots) than "body-tools" we have, and if we change the sound basis from time to time (playing several instruments at once, changing program...) the values we might want to change will perhaps also change. That means that we will need to teach our body for each interface landscape, and then, when playing live, switch between haptic knowledges on the run. Might sound as something complicated or fun, depending only of our mental flavour. 2- About academic-high culture-Art and popular-low culture-art Art is suposed to be a free environment, meaning that it should be guided or conditioned only by the artist. So the artist should not be naive in order to understand what are the forces surrounding his acts... and inside his acts. We are suposed to learn art in order to not being naive about our creation. After learning art, are we suposed to: - do only a particular kind of art? - do any kind of art but in a particular kind of way? - do any kind of art in any kind of way? If you answer yes to the first question, then probably you are an academic artist that despises popular art and its context, or you are a popular artist that rejects academic constrains or its context. If you answer yes to the second, then you might be an academic or popular artist, but what really matters to you is that you will try to make a difference in what ever you do in order to give a personal view that takes distance from "canned" productions. If you answer yes to the third, the probabilities are that your mind is twisted after years of taking drugs, and maybe it was already twisted before you studied art or started taking drugs. Sorry, I was joking... what I really should have said was "if you answer yes to the third, then you probably don´t mind about any quality rule and you just want to get a life doing whatever takes you to your goals while having some fun, but you seem not really emotionally involved with creation or you don´t know what quality is, or your goals are not related with art history/world" Of course in these three questions I was only having fun while being retoric, because relativity dismantles concepts as "making a difference", "quality", "being emotionally involved" and even "academic" or "popular" (history shows lots of examples that would complicate the difference between the last two). The same happens with concepts like "poetic" or "aesthetic experience", but I will try to give them use in a non-absolut way to follow: Poetic is suposed to be a certain kind of relationship between concepts and the way in which these concepts are presented to an observer. This "certain kind of relationship" is (again, suposedly) the particular one to awake the aesthetic experience. That means that if you are presented with something poetic, then you should have an aesthetic experience, and if you have an aesthetic experience, then you must be in the presence of poetic. But here comes relativity again, because poetic is a complex relationship. That means that the relationship is not an absolut relationship between (only) the concepts in front of us, but between those and the concepts inside us (our memory, our emotions towards our context, our feelings, our inner storyes and previous experiences). We are not outside poetic as modernity stated, but deeply inside. So when I believe that there is poetic in something, someone else might totally disagree, and in order for him to understand what poetic is to me I would probably have to explain him what relationships I see, but even at that point he might disagree. At the end, anything could be poetic, as it mostly depends on who we are at that wright moment. It ends as a matter of self-perception. And as perception is not transferable, neither is poetic or aesthetic experience. That gives us a lot of possibilities, none better than other, only differents. It is possible for an academic musician to find his aesthetic experience in academic music because he "feels" its separation from any other known experience. It might happen that this musician stops looking for anything else once he feels that the feeling of poetic he feels will not stop, standing outside the "dictatorship of newness". But it might be possible for the same musician to find poetic in popular music if he wants and he takes the job of looking inside it for something to develop in the way to make it different from any other known experience (again, his known experiences). It is also supposed that someone not educated would be more able to find poetic in anything, because for him anything would be different from anything he knows. That is why we commonly despise the creations of early students, forgetting that in history teachers stole several times the concepts of students that "weren´t clever enough to realize the jewel they had in hands". And of course, art history shows also a lot of examples of artists looking for the strangeness in other distant cultures. But, stop! where am I going to with all of this stammering? Is in escaping or not to the "dictatorship of newness" or the "monotony of already known" where the importance of art lies? Maybe these "escaping stuff" are stated from outside the act of creation, from a sistem or environmet generated around art some centuries ago, from an universalist and maybe perished or at least outdated point of view that considers that art is in constant evolution that, again, gives better after what before was better but now is not that better than what before... Maybe there is no evolution but only change after change. Maybe what matters is what are we doing with art, not if we are the on-the-edge-of-time ones. Perhaps art is just a place where we just may be free of even that conditioning, and where we may be sincere about ourselves and what we enjoy, and even, as Tarkovsky says in other words in a video I saw on the net, put there in art our dubts and our hopes. Those last words sound quite romantic, so let´s take the romanticism out of it and say "off the record" that music, as an almost abstract art, is perhaps one of the most problematic environment to do what Tarkovsky says (he was a fim maker, not a musician, so he dealed with concepts through images+sound+speech). Or let´s just say that maybe the best art to do is that one that we simply enjoy the most, or that the best art to do is that art that we need to take to life because we don´t see it around us and some way or another we´ve always missed it, regardless of wether it is more "dance music" or more "academic electroacustics" or whatever. Hope I didn´t give you drowsiness... Best |
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