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From: eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot Handelman)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Why No one Cares what S. Page Does (was Re: WHAT HAS HAPPENED TO THIS NEWSGROUP?)
Message-ID: <10816@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
Date: 16 Jun 91 21:32:32 GMT
References: <9106150215.AA13482@lilac.berkeley.edu>
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In article <9106150215.AA13482@lilac.berkeley.edu> ISSSSM@NUSVM.BITNET (Stephen Smoliar) writes:
;
;Eliot approaches with a sinister look in his eye.

Yes.

Let's back up a bit to Stephen Pope's posting a while ago, requesting
responses to a planned CMJ editorial (which I don't think appeared this
month -- but then I don't read CMJ very carefully). 

Pope briefly, in his own way, expressed some concern over his perception
that computer music, as "an art form," is in trouble.

Of course art form qua art form has been in trouble -- in
fact has been dead, completely devitalized, completely without
interest -- for arguably 20 years; arguably 70 years; arguably longer,
but not arguably inarguable. In particular, what happens in "computer
music" is of no interest --- insofar as music is NOT considered,
in the first place, NOT as an impetus for research, NOR as an expression of
technology, BUT as a vehicle which merely ASSISTS in the legitimization
of technology and NOTHING more. 

What I mean is that music is fundamentally of no interest right now. 
It is not an ascendant art: what music's had to do and say, its
various modes of existence, its acheivements and non-acheivements
all belong elsewhere, not within the framework of accelerated 
consciousness. Music is time-consuming, repetitious, formalistic,
non-visual, non-informative, linear, unimmediate, and uncomfortably
entrenched in a lutheran work-ethic that belies its own marginality.
Music is now nothing more than a metaphor of its own inadequacies. Music
is finished and how has to become something else altogether that is non-
formalistic, not time-consuming, not repetitious, an instrument of
information, non-linear, immediate, technological, and insurmountably 
distanced from every claim to non-functionality, to every last 
glimmer of legitimizing aesthetic.

It makes no sense to think about "computer music," or "technology and
music," or "artificial intelligence and music," (or "music and 
cognition") or "composers and theorists." There are only "computers,"
"cognition," "theorists." Music is either grounds for the happy
amateur exchange of synthesizer patches and on a larger scale the
exploitation of certain increasingly dull media interactions. There
is no pure subject attached to "music," no divestment of its own
history. 

This article may not be reproduced other than on USENET or for 
private use without the author's direct consent.

-Handelman
-CSL
-PU
-NJ