Re: Paul Lansky pulls the plug

If you don't have something "important" to say, why spend your time doing it? Why should I spend my time (or money) listening to it?

That "dying model" you mention constitutes a refusal to capitulate  to the marketplace, to Adorno's "Culture Industry." This "sacred space" is exactly

the point and purpose of art.

Unfortunately,  most "composers" lack the balls to go toe-to-toe with Beethoven, and if you don't understand what I mean by that, then you are exactly

who I'm talking about. 

My two cents,

Don

On Aug 4, 2008, at 7:29 PM, James Harkins wrote:

On Aug 4, 2008, at 8:29 PM, kernel wrote:

I've thought for a while that something is going on with electronic music.  A lot of people have lost interest from my experience and looked to more 'traditional' music to find concrete or precise emotions or messages or something.  Personally I think I can find all those things in electronic music but you kind of have to intuit it.  I always thought that was part of the deal though.  It is 2008 now and the world has been awash with 'electronic' music for a while.  For want of a better expression I think it has gone back underground, where it belongs?

I think some of this is a function of not thinking through the social aspects of performance or audition spaces. Academia doesn't encourage this kind of thinking because of the fetishization of the musical product. I think the "concert hall" model, where the "composer" has something "important" to say, and the audience goes to this preordained, sacred space in order to listen very carefully to that important thing, is a dying model (if it isn't dead already).

Writing for acoustic instruments adds a social dimension to musicmaking that isn't present in the usual computer music solipsism, but if the music is meant to be heard only on the concert stage (or primarily), then it doesn't really deal with concert hall-itis.

hjh

: H. James Harkins

: jamshark70@...

: http://www.dewdrop-world.net

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"Come said the Muse,

Sing me a song no poet has yet chanted,

Sing me the universal."  -- Whitman