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From: eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: 2nd rate European Conference
Keywords: segmentation, absolute perceptual unity
Message-ID: <5376@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 15 Jan 91 06:20:09 GMT
References: <15268@sdcc6.ucsd.edu> <5121@idunno.Princeton.EDU> <16384@venera.isi.edu>
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In article <16384@venera.isi.edu> smoliar@vaxa.isi.edu (Stephen Smoliar) writes:
;In article <5121@idunno.Princeton.EDU> eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot
;Handelman) writes:
;> The deeper I go into a piece of music the
;>less likely it is that I'm going to discover some "category of listening"
;>or "paradigm of perception" sitting there at its core. So, thinking 
;>about analysis in that way, of a way of getting one's musical mind
;>ever more twisted in the convolutions of musical experience, what
;>I'm aiming at is UNDOING various "perceptual" prejudices and rebuilding
;>them in a manner expressive of those particularities that I most want 
;>to focus on. And a good analysis of a piece of music is something 
;>that makes just that undoing possible. In other words, DE-categorization
;>seems to me that aspect of listening most worth exploring analytically.
;
;I'm glad you want to debate these matters, Eliot, because I am having about as
;much trouble with your texts as you claimed to be having with Chris'.  I
;extracted the above passage because I feel it is a good case in point.
;The words all go very well together, so that my first impression is that
;you really have something there.  However, further reflection as to WHAT
;that something is leads to puzzlement, as least on my part.


;Now perhaps one of your missions is to get me to chuck that further reflection.

Not at all. 


;In other words you are encouraging a path of mysticism, perhaps along the sorts
;of lines that Cage pursued in his early writings.  

I'm a musician (a very strange sort of musician, I admit, but for many years
I was a less strange sort, though the strange sort kept trying to break
away from the less strange sort, and now I've more or less dispensed with
the less strange sort part of myself altogether). Let me expand that 
parenthesis a bit: part of what it is to be a musician, I think (since
to me thinking and being a musician go hand in hand) involves very many
degrees of freedom in deciding just what it is to be a musician. That's
the heritage of the historical avant-garde, which certainly includes Cage.
Being a musician extends to how you, the musician, listen to music; if
you're going to assert your freedom in the way that you compose music,
say, then clearly that freedom ought to come to bear on how you listen,
how you analyze, how you do theory, and certainly also, as in my case,
how you choose to talk about music, including how you talk to
other people who talk about music -- that's also part of being a musician,
I think. Basically this amounts to deciding where you're free and where
you're unfree. 

Now I think of music as the art of mind, the art like no other art,
and therefore what the musician does, according to me, is to invent,
and extend, and to elaborate, individual mind. It really doesn't matter
to me whether you hear music the way I do, or think music the way I
do, or envisage music the way I do: that's my business. I'm not trying
to write hits.

I don't think the discourse of science is quite appropriate to the discourse
of music, because I think science is more concerned with unfreedom than
with freedom. Not: you can do science like this, but: you can't do science
like THAT. "Scientific" discourse about music, in any case, tends to be
prohibitive, rather than liberating. I am thinking of a paper that Fred
Lerdahl wrote, published in Sloboda, called "cognitive constraints on
composition," or something like that. He arrived at a bunch of unfreedoms,
like "you can't do this or do that," "you can't redefine 8ves," etc.

My downstairs neighbour is complaining about my typing, so I'll leave
it there.