Temperly’s introduction to The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures is intriguing. It definitely explains a lot of his process, but does not begin to hint at what his findings were. I would like to read more of the work, and hopefully as the semester winds down, I will have a chance to.
I was struck by his comment about neurological study of the brain and its functions, especially in regards to music cognition. I have a friend who is a psychologist and have talked briefly to him about some of his work, and about the broader field. It appears to me that most of the studies are funded based on the funder’s criteria, whether it be a grant or institution. This means studies are subject to what the funder deems as critical or important. It’s expensive especially to conduct fMRIs or other imaging of the brain. So who pays for it to examine how the brain processes music? I imagine it would be hard to secure funding for this type of study. It is important, though, especially as it has been shown that studying music can aid students in other types of study, like math.
I liked that Temperly said that trained and untrained listeners share a lot in common in the way they process so much that I stopped reading mid paragraph to write a note about it. I was a little disappointed that he then went on to emphasis the differences, but nevertheless I think it’s an important piece. A lot of the reading I’ve been doing for my paper is about Absolute Pitch (AP) and many psychologists have researched it. One thing found is that though possessors of AP perform very differently in pitch identification tasks, non possessors may be closer to possessors than generally thought. Meaning, pitch memory and pitch identification may be better than previously thought in non-AP people.
I also thought it was interesting in this discussion that linguists ignore the more detailed and extensive education they have when considering their research. I wonder why the two fields have evolved in that way?
I am not sure I totally understand Temperly’s discussion of the piano roll representations but I like the idea of the visual representation of music outside of the standard staff. It’s always been a slightly sad thing for me to admit, but I’m really more of a visual than aural learner, and I’m fascinated by the way that music can be visually represented. My aunt has a player piano, and I used to love looking at the roll. Same for music boxes, I loved to see how the knobs on a canister could move the tines to make the noises that I liked so much.
I found it interesting that Temperly won’t be discussing timbre. Timbre was always a topic or word that my music theory teachers avoided discussing, either because they weren’t sure how to describe it or didn’t think it was important. However, in a reading by Levitin, he mentioned how those of us without AP don’t identify pitches, we identify timbre. We know, generally, a violin from a bassoon from a guitar. Sure, there is fuzziness, and maybe you don’t know the name of the instrument, but you know it’s different. When I read that, I realized how important timbre really is to us as auditory creatures.
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Tuesday, November 17, 2009
Lady Gaga, Capitalism, and 1984
Hakanen’s article Counting Down to Number One : The Evolution of the Meaning of Popular Music was a really fascinating article. I liked how it drew many different disciplines together to assess and dissect such an omnipresent facet of our musical culture. I’m not much of a TV person anymore, but David Letterman’s top ten lists were always a favorite of mine. I also used to fairly avidly follow some of the BillBoard charts. My first radio job was at a station that played a mishmash of country hits and ‘popular’ hits, and subscribed to BillBoard. I read it every week and also read several old books that were around that would have the top 100 BillBoard hits for a certain year and a description, artist biography and other releveant information. Most of them were from the 1980’s. It may have been 1998, but I was my high school’s expert on 1984’s number one hit songs.
One of the things that I felt I learned from the article was not specific to music. The author mentioned the theory behind the counterfeit and its relationship to class. This really resonated with me, and I would love to know more about it. It reminded me of several articles I’ve read in newspaper in the past few years about fashion counterfeit. Upscale designers are angry that the replication of their styles is becoming easier. I understand this for the most part – designers are one of the few jobs that really seem to be artistic and they can make a living from it. Who doesn’t want to be credited for their work? On the other hand, many of the designers who are being copied do not make clothing that is affordable or accessible. Their items, regardless of any artistic value, are symbols of status. At least part of that anger may be that anyone can look like they have the money/desire/fashion sense to buy a certain designer’s item. And, as copies get better and better, who can tell who has the real thing? Again, I’m not much of a TV person, but it reminds me of an episode of the American version of Ugly Betty where Betty somehow gets a very fancy handbag. Her co-workers are jealous, and through some sort of manipulations, she ends up with two bags – one real and one fake. She gives one to a co-worker and keeps one for herself. I don’t remember if it was clear who got which bag, but that was kind of the moral, too. Sometimes the idea of something is worth more than the thing. I also wonder if any of the anger from musicians about unpaid for access to music might be related to previous status given to music owners or consumers?
I disagree with Kakanen’s assertion that “ musicians had little interest in composing their own music because of lack of financial incentive” (p. 102). I think some people make music for music’s sake. Even if they weren’t being paid, I am sure there were people writing music for their own pleasure or the pleasure of others. Also, I think this stands in stark contrast to the argument in The Future of Music that musicians only make music for the sake of music. Neither is entirely correct. People make music for so many reasons that to generalize is offensive, especially if you do not support the generalization with a coherent argument.
The article had an incredible, succinct history of song publishing, music radio & royalty payments. It was such a strong condemnation of the capitalist system and what industrialization has done to music that it almost made me want to stop listening to Lady Gaga out of principle. Almost. Then, the article Analyzing Popular Music made me want to listen to it and discuss her!
One of the things that I felt I learned from the article was not specific to music. The author mentioned the theory behind the counterfeit and its relationship to class. This really resonated with me, and I would love to know more about it. It reminded me of several articles I’ve read in newspaper in the past few years about fashion counterfeit. Upscale designers are angry that the replication of their styles is becoming easier. I understand this for the most part – designers are one of the few jobs that really seem to be artistic and they can make a living from it. Who doesn’t want to be credited for their work? On the other hand, many of the designers who are being copied do not make clothing that is affordable or accessible. Their items, regardless of any artistic value, are symbols of status. At least part of that anger may be that anyone can look like they have the money/desire/fashion sense to buy a certain designer’s item. And, as copies get better and better, who can tell who has the real thing? Again, I’m not much of a TV person, but it reminds me of an episode of the American version of Ugly Betty where Betty somehow gets a very fancy handbag. Her co-workers are jealous, and through some sort of manipulations, she ends up with two bags – one real and one fake. She gives one to a co-worker and keeps one for herself. I don’t remember if it was clear who got which bag, but that was kind of the moral, too. Sometimes the idea of something is worth more than the thing. I also wonder if any of the anger from musicians about unpaid for access to music might be related to previous status given to music owners or consumers?
I disagree with Kakanen’s assertion that “ musicians had little interest in composing their own music because of lack of financial incentive” (p. 102). I think some people make music for music’s sake. Even if they weren’t being paid, I am sure there were people writing music for their own pleasure or the pleasure of others. Also, I think this stands in stark contrast to the argument in The Future of Music that musicians only make music for the sake of music. Neither is entirely correct. People make music for so many reasons that to generalize is offensive, especially if you do not support the generalization with a coherent argument.
The article had an incredible, succinct history of song publishing, music radio & royalty payments. It was such a strong condemnation of the capitalist system and what industrialization has done to music that it almost made me want to stop listening to Lady Gaga out of principle. Almost. Then, the article Analyzing Popular Music made me want to listen to it and discuss her!
Tuesday, November 10, 2009
Journal Week Twelve
I don’t really have much to say about the MML website. I think there could be circumstances under which it would be very helpful. I can’t really think of how I would ever use it personally, but I could see it being useful for music libraries and archives.
Our other reading, from Music is Your Future was interesting. I enjoyed the very clear way the authors laid out how they saw the music business functioning. I guess I was a little surprised that they didn’t feel they had seen how the business worked until many years of working in it. Maybe I’ve been lucky enough to read many different written accounts of people’s experience in the music industry so I feel I have an idea of how things work. I’ve also seen the DIY side of things as a fan, musician and friend of musicians.
I definitely agree with their assessment of the Catch-22 of the industry. It seems the only thing to do is to get out there and do it. Just starting somewhere can seem so intimidating that I understand why people don’t get out there more often. Everyone has to start somewhere, though, whether it’s as somebody’s opening act or on a college radio station or at a coffee shop.
It’s interesting to read the discussion of the big eating the small now, after some of the other reading from this semester. I don’t think anyone is doing all that well at this point and time. There are some large acts that are, and some smaller, independent ones that are. I think we are moving away from a music culture where only a few big acts are successful and to one where regional music scenes are stronger and more independent. And regions may not be geographical, they may be self chosen regions by genre. At least, it is my hope that we are moving toward systems of distribution online and physically that will support or engender this. I’ve seen quite a few US acts find success in Europe and not in the US. It’s not as if this doesn’t have precedence, many jazz musicians were well known and well paid in Europe while unknown or largely ignored in the States. It does make me feel better that there are people somewhere who appreciate music that does not get listened to in the US.
Our other reading, from Music is Your Future was interesting. I enjoyed the very clear way the authors laid out how they saw the music business functioning. I guess I was a little surprised that they didn’t feel they had seen how the business worked until many years of working in it. Maybe I’ve been lucky enough to read many different written accounts of people’s experience in the music industry so I feel I have an idea of how things work. I’ve also seen the DIY side of things as a fan, musician and friend of musicians.
I definitely agree with their assessment of the Catch-22 of the industry. It seems the only thing to do is to get out there and do it. Just starting somewhere can seem so intimidating that I understand why people don’t get out there more often. Everyone has to start somewhere, though, whether it’s as somebody’s opening act or on a college radio station or at a coffee shop.
It’s interesting to read the discussion of the big eating the small now, after some of the other reading from this semester. I don’t think anyone is doing all that well at this point and time. There are some large acts that are, and some smaller, independent ones that are. I think we are moving away from a music culture where only a few big acts are successful and to one where regional music scenes are stronger and more independent. And regions may not be geographical, they may be self chosen regions by genre. At least, it is my hope that we are moving toward systems of distribution online and physically that will support or engender this. I’ve seen quite a few US acts find success in Europe and not in the US. It’s not as if this doesn’t have precedence, many jazz musicians were well known and well paid in Europe while unknown or largely ignored in the States. It does make me feel better that there are people somewhere who appreciate music that does not get listened to in the US.
Thursday, November 5, 2009
Mongolian Hip Hop!
I decided to write my research paper on autism and absolute pitch. One of the books I found that had extensive writing on absolute pitch was in a book called The Psychology of Music. Something I read reminded me of my earlier post about absolute pitch. The author of the chapter on absolute pitch talks about the phenomenon that I mentioned where a person can recall a pitch at will but does not have absolute pitch. It’s called quasi-absolute pitch. It is not a very glamorous name, and I don’t particularly like it. It is also not a very descriptive term. I would prefer something like selective pitch recall or selective absolute pitch.
The reading from Soundtracks certainly jumped right into a controversial topic right away, that of what is and isn’t popular music. It is a thoughtful discussion of an issues that engages musicians and music lovers across genres. Foa very long time I was very dismissive of what I thought of as ‘popular’ music. Now, I understand it as something to be enjoyed. Sometimes I take it seriously, sometimes I don’t. I no longer beat myself up for having ‘bad taste’ for liking the latest overproduced top 40 hit single. I think that this type of discussion was what I was hoping for from The Future of Music. Even if I didn’t get it there, I’m getting in this book.
The second chapter I read was the chapter on lyrics. The discussion of hip hop outside of the US reminded me of this story from NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112514136. It’s interesting in Soundtracks they mention how French hip hop objects to nationalism, but Mongolian hip hop is all about the nationalism.
The discussion about punk was interesting, and made me wonder is punk really a middle class vehicle? I think punk has more of a working class background than the authors give credit to. I would be more likely to say that hippies were decidedly middle- to upper class kids disenchanted. I have seen punk scenes that encompass a little more of lower socio-economic classes. Sure, I have seen enough trust-fund gutter punks, but I don’t know if I would characterize 30 to 40 years of punk movements on that basis. Patti Smith is a bit of an enigma in that way – both obviously well exposed to literature but working in factories right before Horses. Of course, all these issues of authenticity have been hashed and re-hashed in punk scenes since the 1970s.
I would have liked the authors to draw a clearer line between country and punk. Joe Ely toured with the Clash in the 1970s, I’ve heard a rumor that Dwight Yoakam had some sort of relationship with the Sex Pistols, but I’ve never been able to substantiate that. Also, what about Hank Williams III? I am at least glad they mention the connection and debt owed by country music to African American musics. I grew up in the American South (Kentucky, to be specific) and have always lived with a long cultural history of segregation and racism. However, as I’ve gotten older and learned more about the many complicated ways people interact, I think that it often overlooked the interplay between white and black cultures in the South over the years. White culture and black culture, though segregated by law still had a lot of give and take over the years.
The reading from Soundtracks certainly jumped right into a controversial topic right away, that of what is and isn’t popular music. It is a thoughtful discussion of an issues that engages musicians and music lovers across genres. Foa very long time I was very dismissive of what I thought of as ‘popular’ music. Now, I understand it as something to be enjoyed. Sometimes I take it seriously, sometimes I don’t. I no longer beat myself up for having ‘bad taste’ for liking the latest overproduced top 40 hit single. I think that this type of discussion was what I was hoping for from The Future of Music. Even if I didn’t get it there, I’m getting in this book.
The second chapter I read was the chapter on lyrics. The discussion of hip hop outside of the US reminded me of this story from NPR: http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=112514136. It’s interesting in Soundtracks they mention how French hip hop objects to nationalism, but Mongolian hip hop is all about the nationalism.
The discussion about punk was interesting, and made me wonder is punk really a middle class vehicle? I think punk has more of a working class background than the authors give credit to. I would be more likely to say that hippies were decidedly middle- to upper class kids disenchanted. I have seen punk scenes that encompass a little more of lower socio-economic classes. Sure, I have seen enough trust-fund gutter punks, but I don’t know if I would characterize 30 to 40 years of punk movements on that basis. Patti Smith is a bit of an enigma in that way – both obviously well exposed to literature but working in factories right before Horses. Of course, all these issues of authenticity have been hashed and re-hashed in punk scenes since the 1970s.
I would have liked the authors to draw a clearer line between country and punk. Joe Ely toured with the Clash in the 1970s, I’ve heard a rumor that Dwight Yoakam had some sort of relationship with the Sex Pistols, but I’ve never been able to substantiate that. Also, what about Hank Williams III? I am at least glad they mention the connection and debt owed by country music to African American musics. I grew up in the American South (Kentucky, to be specific) and have always lived with a long cultural history of segregation and racism. However, as I’ve gotten older and learned more about the many complicated ways people interact, I think that it often overlooked the interplay between white and black cultures in the South over the years. White culture and black culture, though segregated by law still had a lot of give and take over the years.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Journal Week Ten
The music sites listed on visualcomplexity are certainly interesting. Some of them it's clear that they are produced by academics or academic institutions. Some, it's not so clear who the author or creator is. I also wonder how they get the word out. The academic sites are probably being presented at conferences, sent to funding institutions, given to professors or advisers for grading or otherwise used in an academic setting. How are these sites advertising or presenting themselves? Are they waiting for people to discover them on this site, are they presenting their vision to larger companies like Apple, Google or? The parent site started out as an academic endeavor, but it's a dot-com now. The founder works for Nokia, a for profit company.
I visited http://www.formater.de/wordpress/ from visualcomplexity. I like the idea of organizing ideas around the nodes and having a zoomable interface. It also seems like it would be easy to discover new music through this interface. The interface graphics that they feature, at least in this mockup, are very unattractive to me. It reminds me of the Windows Real Player interface, which I hate. I really like the clean, light colored iTunes, however.
I also visited http://www.reactable.com/reactable/. I want one! It looks like an incredible, fun interface. The colors and graphics are attractive, and look almost like they were designed for children. I would love to play with this. Because of its reliance on physical proximity and relationships, it reminds me of the theremin.
So Google has started a music search. I played around with it for a little while. I like it, but when I followed the link to lala.com I could only listen to 30 second clips. From Google's search page, I could listen to the entire song. Granted, I could only listen to a few songs. I know lala is only one of the services that the search results use, and I'm not sure if it would be the same experience at the other sites. With lala, however, I'm a little resentful that I would have to sign up to get access to the information. You don't have to sign up when you search for videos, you don't have to sign up when you go to read a Wikipedia article. Google, as a for-profit company, rides that fine line between providing information for the public as a service like the library, or providing information to profit off of it. It's a rough little road, and I'm curious to see how they come out the other side, especially when it comes to the Google Book project. An in-depth comparison of Google and the Internet Archive would be really interesting in that regard.
Another thing I found I wanted from this week's lesson is the poster of the Genealogy of Pop & Rock Music. How cool is that? And such an attractive way to display information. In contrast to the more interactive sites from visual complexity, this is an engaging way to draw an audience in without Web 2.0 techniques.
I visited http://www.formater.de/wordpress/ from visualcomplexity. I like the idea of organizing ideas around the nodes and having a zoomable interface. It also seems like it would be easy to discover new music through this interface. The interface graphics that they feature, at least in this mockup, are very unattractive to me. It reminds me of the Windows Real Player interface, which I hate. I really like the clean, light colored iTunes, however.
I also visited http://www.reactable.com/reactable/. I want one! It looks like an incredible, fun interface. The colors and graphics are attractive, and look almost like they were designed for children. I would love to play with this. Because of its reliance on physical proximity and relationships, it reminds me of the theremin.
So Google has started a music search. I played around with it for a little while. I like it, but when I followed the link to lala.com I could only listen to 30 second clips. From Google's search page, I could listen to the entire song. Granted, I could only listen to a few songs. I know lala is only one of the services that the search results use, and I'm not sure if it would be the same experience at the other sites. With lala, however, I'm a little resentful that I would have to sign up to get access to the information. You don't have to sign up when you search for videos, you don't have to sign up when you go to read a Wikipedia article. Google, as a for-profit company, rides that fine line between providing information for the public as a service like the library, or providing information to profit off of it. It's a rough little road, and I'm curious to see how they come out the other side, especially when it comes to the Google Book project. An in-depth comparison of Google and the Internet Archive would be really interesting in that regard.
Another thing I found I wanted from this week's lesson is the poster of the Genealogy of Pop & Rock Music. How cool is that? And such an attractive way to display information. In contrast to the more interactive sites from visual complexity, this is an engaging way to draw an audience in without Web 2.0 techniques.
Wednesday, October 21, 2009
Argh, the future of music.
So it was back to The future of music this week. Again, I found the book’s tone and message a little off key, and I’m not sure if I intended that pun or not. I did agree with the book’s assertion that the real problem will be information overload and not the piracy of copyrighted material. In my LIBR 200 class, our discussion of copyright issues solely focused on whether public librarians are responsible for insuring their patrons are using the c.d.s and other digital media in a legal manner. I thought this was sorely shortsighted. Yes, it should be discussed, but the larger issues is about the copyrights themselves and whether they’re fair to either user or creator and if they still apply to our increasingly digital age. I am glad that I can at least agree with Kusek & Leonhard on this issue.
I found several allusions the authors used annoying. First, they referred to what Paris was like in the 1980s. How do I know what Paris was like in the 80s? I was 7 and I don’t even really know what Paris is like now. I am assuming from the context that Paris had a lot of small cinemas playing art house films to small crowds. This seems a smug allusion to use and a bit alienating. I am an intelligent, well-read audience member but this escapes me. It feels the authors are using almost an in-joke when a short description would have been much more illuminating. And again a page or two later, they refer to the plight of the South Spaniards when faced with Manchester punters. Again, from context I can guess that the English tourists were at best annoying to the Spaniards, and at worse, disrespectful and destructive. The short sentence referring to it is a rather glib way to deal with a situation that sounds like it probably had many complicated cultural implications. And what do they mean, it all comes out in the wash? This sort of glib tone is dismissive and I think demeaning to situations that probably deserve consideration.
On page 166, Kusek & Leonhard talk about the amount of user generated content and whether this will be a problem or not. The tone in the paragraph rather suddenly switches to a very serious, academic tone when they say, “it cannot be really wrong to give some means of self-expression to a larger number of people, provided that potent filtering and selection methodologies exist to help the cream rise to the top.” I am not really sure where to start with this. First, of course it’s not wrong to give means of self-expression to anyone. We are not forced to watch every YouTube video of every kid singing the songs they wrote about their cat. I thought that was one of the beauties of the Internet, that many people could express themselves and find like-minded people. Maybe that kid will tap into a network of many adolescents who like to write about cats and create a community around cat-core songs.
Seriously, I am curious about what ‘potent filtering and selection methodologies’ the authors envision. We are already seeing Google and YouTube favoring corporate content in searches, making it harder to find the homemade content that used to be the only content. Is this what they want? Yahoo’s popular searches always show celebrities who are part of the corporate media that Kusek & Leonhard seem so disillusioned with. I think this touches on a wider issue that I am now convinced that Kusek & Leonhard are either ignorant or not well-informed of: information literacy. I discussed this in an earlier entry, but I think it bears repeating. How do people master filtering and searching? By executing better and more effective searches. And learning how to do so is part of information literacy. On page 169, Kusek & Leonhard assert that younger generations are going to know how to deal with this deluge of information because they will grow up around it. It’s the adults, they argue, that will have the biggest adjustment. I find this argument faulty. I feel like it’s saying that kids are going to learn how to read because they grew up in a house with lots of books on the shelves. Only if an adult takes the books off the shelves and teaches them the alphabet and helps them will the child learn how to read. And, for digital media, it will only be if someone assists the kids in learning will they really become adept at navigating the digital world. I do think it might be a bit more intuitive to someone who has been around the media their entire life, but that is very different than what Kusek & Leonhard assert.
I found several allusions the authors used annoying. First, they referred to what Paris was like in the 1980s. How do I know what Paris was like in the 80s? I was 7 and I don’t even really know what Paris is like now. I am assuming from the context that Paris had a lot of small cinemas playing art house films to small crowds. This seems a smug allusion to use and a bit alienating. I am an intelligent, well-read audience member but this escapes me. It feels the authors are using almost an in-joke when a short description would have been much more illuminating. And again a page or two later, they refer to the plight of the South Spaniards when faced with Manchester punters. Again, from context I can guess that the English tourists were at best annoying to the Spaniards, and at worse, disrespectful and destructive. The short sentence referring to it is a rather glib way to deal with a situation that sounds like it probably had many complicated cultural implications. And what do they mean, it all comes out in the wash? This sort of glib tone is dismissive and I think demeaning to situations that probably deserve consideration.
On page 166, Kusek & Leonhard talk about the amount of user generated content and whether this will be a problem or not. The tone in the paragraph rather suddenly switches to a very serious, academic tone when they say, “it cannot be really wrong to give some means of self-expression to a larger number of people, provided that potent filtering and selection methodologies exist to help the cream rise to the top.” I am not really sure where to start with this. First, of course it’s not wrong to give means of self-expression to anyone. We are not forced to watch every YouTube video of every kid singing the songs they wrote about their cat. I thought that was one of the beauties of the Internet, that many people could express themselves and find like-minded people. Maybe that kid will tap into a network of many adolescents who like to write about cats and create a community around cat-core songs.
Seriously, I am curious about what ‘potent filtering and selection methodologies’ the authors envision. We are already seeing Google and YouTube favoring corporate content in searches, making it harder to find the homemade content that used to be the only content. Is this what they want? Yahoo’s popular searches always show celebrities who are part of the corporate media that Kusek & Leonhard seem so disillusioned with. I think this touches on a wider issue that I am now convinced that Kusek & Leonhard are either ignorant or not well-informed of: information literacy. I discussed this in an earlier entry, but I think it bears repeating. How do people master filtering and searching? By executing better and more effective searches. And learning how to do so is part of information literacy. On page 169, Kusek & Leonhard assert that younger generations are going to know how to deal with this deluge of information because they will grow up around it. It’s the adults, they argue, that will have the biggest adjustment. I find this argument faulty. I feel like it’s saying that kids are going to learn how to read because they grew up in a house with lots of books on the shelves. Only if an adult takes the books off the shelves and teaches them the alphabet and helps them will the child learn how to read. And, for digital media, it will only be if someone assists the kids in learning will they really become adept at navigating the digital world. I do think it might be a bit more intuitive to someone who has been around the media their entire life, but that is very different than what Kusek & Leonhard assert.
Thursday, October 15, 2009
Journal Week Eight
Musicovery.com is a very fun website, I must say. I enjoyed exploring it this week. I really like the websites Professor Simon has shared with us that use software to suggest music. It’s a much more interactive and attractive option than Amazon.com’s suggestions. I don’t buy much from iTunes, so I’m not sure what that experience is like. Of course, I still prefer a friend telling me that I’ll like certain music because they know how many times I’ve listened to a Ted Leo and the Pharmacists’ album on repeat.
The reading on improvisation was fairly captivating for me. When I first began playing music, I would make up songs and play a lot, but as I got older, I thought I couldn’t improvise. Part of this was because most of my playing experience was on the violin, in a classical manner. My grandfather played country fiddle, but that was very different than what I did, at least that was what I was taught. It was very intimidating to be put into a situation with much older musicians in my family and being expecting to come up with something to play. I would usually just pick a drone note - I still do this when I’m improving and I’m stuck.
In Part Five, section MIC- the Instrument, Bailey talks about how people learn how to play an instrument. I think much of the ‘natural’ process of learning how to play an instrument the author and the musicians’ he quotes is stopped. Some of it is seen as abusing the instrument, or simply not the ‘right’ way to play an instrument. I agree that instruments should be treated with care and respect, but I do not think this means that musicians can’t experiment with coaxing new sounds of an instrument in a non-conventional manner. How else will innovations happen?
I object to Bailey’s describing ethnic instruments as having, “very limited capability and that very little instrumental skill is needed to play” (p.101). I had a hard time telling if this was his assessment or if he was only trying to convey what the anti-instrumentalists felt about ethnic instruments. First, I think it reveals an ugly prejudice against non-Western musics. Many people only think that Western music is complicated or capable of being considered virtuosic. This is simply not true. Two examples of non-Western virtuosic instruments spring to my mind: the West African kora and the Indian sitar. Both have long, long histories of music and musicians. Each are at least as old as the violin, and much older than the guitar, which I think of two of the most obvious examples of virtuosic instruments in Western music, the other being the piano. Also, I think it’s dangerous to make blanket statements about all music that is not Western music. Can you really say anything very intelligent about a group of musics that includes Tuvan throat singing, reggae and Native American drumming? Most likely, you will make a generalization that will border on offensive and slip into the assumption that all non-Western cultures are primitive.
I enjoyed seeing Alain Danielou’s name pop up in the book. I suspect it might be in the section on Indian music more, too. I did a little bit of research into Danielou as an undergraduate when I was researching tuning modes in Indian music. The research I did contradicted some of Danielou’s assertions in terms of the srutis in Indian music having very exact measurements. My research was probably not nearly as broad as it could have been, so I would be interested to revisit the topic and see if my earlier findings hold up.
The reading on improvisation was fairly captivating for me. When I first began playing music, I would make up songs and play a lot, but as I got older, I thought I couldn’t improvise. Part of this was because most of my playing experience was on the violin, in a classical manner. My grandfather played country fiddle, but that was very different than what I did, at least that was what I was taught. It was very intimidating to be put into a situation with much older musicians in my family and being expecting to come up with something to play. I would usually just pick a drone note - I still do this when I’m improving and I’m stuck.
In Part Five, section MIC- the Instrument, Bailey talks about how people learn how to play an instrument. I think much of the ‘natural’ process of learning how to play an instrument the author and the musicians’ he quotes is stopped. Some of it is seen as abusing the instrument, or simply not the ‘right’ way to play an instrument. I agree that instruments should be treated with care and respect, but I do not think this means that musicians can’t experiment with coaxing new sounds of an instrument in a non-conventional manner. How else will innovations happen?
I object to Bailey’s describing ethnic instruments as having, “very limited capability and that very little instrumental skill is needed to play” (p.101). I had a hard time telling if this was his assessment or if he was only trying to convey what the anti-instrumentalists felt about ethnic instruments. First, I think it reveals an ugly prejudice against non-Western musics. Many people only think that Western music is complicated or capable of being considered virtuosic. This is simply not true. Two examples of non-Western virtuosic instruments spring to my mind: the West African kora and the Indian sitar. Both have long, long histories of music and musicians. Each are at least as old as the violin, and much older than the guitar, which I think of two of the most obvious examples of virtuosic instruments in Western music, the other being the piano. Also, I think it’s dangerous to make blanket statements about all music that is not Western music. Can you really say anything very intelligent about a group of musics that includes Tuvan throat singing, reggae and Native American drumming? Most likely, you will make a generalization that will border on offensive and slip into the assumption that all non-Western cultures are primitive.
I enjoyed seeing Alain Danielou’s name pop up in the book. I suspect it might be in the section on Indian music more, too. I did a little bit of research into Danielou as an undergraduate when I was researching tuning modes in Indian music. The research I did contradicted some of Danielou’s assertions in terms of the srutis in Indian music having very exact measurements. My research was probably not nearly as broad as it could have been, so I would be interested to revisit the topic and see if my earlier findings hold up.
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