Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!njin!princeton!phoenix!eliot From: eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman) Newsgroups: comp.music Subject: Re: 2nd rate European Conference Message-ID: <5064@idunno.Princeton.EDU> Date: 6 Jan 91 22:03:28 GMT References: <9101051511.AA10253@hplpm.hpl.hp.com> <5056@idunno.Princeton.EDU> <16244@venera.isi.edu> Sender: news@idunno.Princeton.EDU Organization: Princeton U., Music, rm 211 Lines: 109 In article <16244@venera.isi.edu> smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) writes: ;In article <5056@idunno.Princeton.EDU> I wrote: ;>;Date: Fri, 04 Jan 91 11:27:16 SET ;>;From: Lelio Camilleri ;>;Analysis always presupposes a segmentation of the piece in ;>;question, but the criteria for this operations are problematic. ;>Just whose concept of "analysis" is this anyway? I don't know ;>of any post-adornoesque metacritique of analysis that asserts ;>"presupposed segmentation." Of which music, for instance? ;I'm not sure just whom or what you are trying to attack here. Do you wish to ;contest the premise of a tight coupling between analysis and perception? THAT, ;after all, is the premise behind the sentence you have chosen to attack. Yes/2 Steve: that's 1/2 of what's making me vomit. The other half is the premise that "this is how analysis ALWAYS goes," suggesting that "these dumb analysts don't seem to know any better. We will set them straight." "Analysis" means almost nothing: the first question with analysis is always "what is an analysis"? The word (certainly at the level of an international music theory conference) carries with it no assumptions. Adorno's metacritiques insist that there is no such thing, and I tend to agree with him. "Perception" is NOT and SHOULD NOT be "tightly coupled" to "analysis." Partly this is because analysis can't pressupose its own purpose; secondly, it's far too bound up in speculative attitudes discernible in music of virtually any period, and has almost at all times been "tightly coupled" to COMPOSITION, rather than to "perception." This means that "foundations" of composition are themselves speculative, rather than practical; and there are strong cultural/historical reasons for safeguarding that particular foundation. In particular, it's probable that music MIGHT be a mind-expanding experience, something which, at its deepest level, can rewrite the rules of perception. As you know, this is a point that I take very seriously. And if it can't -- well then, fuck that music. ;After ;all, there is no question that segmentation is a critical aspect of perception. ;Even if you reject the various schools of cognitive science and take Edelman's ;biological approach instead, you cannot give up the need to build upon a ;foundation of a capacity for PERCEPTUAL CATEGORIZATION. Even you can never ;get beyond an ability to establish the EXISTENCE and EXTENT of OBJECTS among ;the stimuli you receive, you can never begin to talk about either perception ;or analysis. Steve, this is one very boring approach to music. Go read your Cage, for instance. Even if segmentation is a necessity -- that is, I positively cannot avoid going out into the world and segmenting it, and whether or not I really want to, when I listen to music, segmentation is automatic and absolute -- then you must recognize that only VERY, VERY SIMPLE music permits unambiguous segmentation AT ALL TIMES. How you segment things is how you conceptualize music with your musical mind, as Babbitt says: there are no a priori determinants ("foundations"). There is no "rule" whose "violation" is a priori ineffective because it violates some established factor. There are no such established factors. Let's just take one little example. If you have a bunch of sounds, and then 40 seconds of silence, and then a bunch of sounds again, how will it be segmented? What belongs to what? The most boring music theorist I know will assert, "group 1, then silence, then group 2." I need not give his name. Now it happens that the composer intends the first 20 seconds of silence to be grouped with the first group of sounds; and then the second group consists of the second 20 seconds of silence, including the next group of sounds. The composer is Stockhausen, the piece is Transit. He tries to establish a context to permit the conceptualization of a segmentation across the silence, rather than going with the more obvious arrangement. OPne could argue: therefore the obvious arrangement is more intrinsic. It's an obvious gestaltism. But the only foundation it provides is a desire to escape this particular principle. What role for perception, then? Something of an institution at the sidelines, rather than a foundation: a dialectic, at worse, something to be ATTACKED, NEVER ASSUMED other than as an attackable institution. Nattiez has also written something along these lines, if all this sounds too eliotistic for your tastes. Edelman is probably correct in asserting somewhere the primacy of categorization, but again, only as an institution. Its role in music is the categorization self/other, not "theme 1"/"theme 2". As you'll be reading in a forthcoming non-net article by myself, even this categorization is institutional, that is, posited only as a premise to its attack in music. ;Attempts to discuss issues of terminology are hardly confined to hack work. ;For better or worse, it is a perfectly reasonable position to accept from ;anyone who has decided to adopt Zenon Pylyshyn's COMPUTATION AND COGNITION ;as gospel. Pylyshyn's feet, in turn, are planed squarely upon the shoulders ;of Allen Newell and Jerry Fodor. None of these men are hacks (even if my ;personal point of view is that they never seem to take on any of the really ;critical questions of cognition). We should not be surprised to find whole ;schools of thought trying to follow in their footsteps, and those schools will ;probably continue to flourish until any loyal opposition can finally muster ;some convincing arguments. Mistake here, Steve. I don't give one good goddam for these midgets (your expression, I believe). The best that can be said of "music and cognition" is that its main question is "what should this field be called"? Psychomusicology, Cognitive Musicology, Musical Engineering AImusic, etc etc ad I puke? This game has been the single most discussed matter in that whole pathetic non-field of psychobabble idiots for about 20 years, and what do they have to show for it? Absolute fucking zip. And ditto this utterly meaningless concern with "naming elctro-acoustic" sounds. WELL ENOUGH ALREADY. GET A LIFE. -handelman music princeton