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From: ISSSSM@NUSVM.BITNET (Stephen Smoliar)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: RE: WHY NO ONE CARES WHAT S. PAGE DOES
Message-ID: <9106170116.AA23209@lilac.berkeley.edu>
Date: 17 Jun 91 01:17:23 GMT
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In article <10816@idunno.Princeton.EDU> eliot@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (Eliot
Handelman) writes:
> 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.
>
What you are saying, Eliot, is that music has to undergo a transformation;  and
when it emerges from that transformation, it will no longer be music!  I am not
about to dismiss such a metamorphosis out of hand;  but before you start
weaving a cocoon for music, I would like to take a look at some of those
attributes you pinned on it.  I get the impression that you meant them to
be pejorative, but I suspect that at least some of them deserve a bit of
defending.

Let us start with "time-consuming."  I'm not quite sure what you have in mind
here.  Almost EVERYTHING is time-consuming.  After all, life is nothing but a
continuous interval on some universal time scale during which we attribute some
form of existence to that matter which is the body.  To a great extent the
"business of living" is nothing more than the decisions we make to pass through
that interval of time;  and I see no reason to hang any value judgment on any
decisions to pass the time by engaging in music behavior.

Now I do not want to put words in your mouth, but perhaps it was not the
CONSUMPTION of time which concerned you as much as some measure of the
EFFICIENCY with which that time is consumed.  In other words whatever
it is that allocating x units of time to a music experience achieves
could be just as well achieved by some other activity which occupies
y units of time, where y is significantly (in some sense of that word)
less than x.  I have sort of a mixed response to this approach.  I certainly
do not enjoy doing things which I feel are wasting my time.  My reaction to
such activities is to try not to do them but not to interfere with others doing
them unless they entail some kind of threat to my personal well-being.  On the
other hand while I may object to wasting my time, I am not particularly
concerned with making sure that my span of time on earth is as closely
packed with experiences as I can manage.  Back in my high school days,
I once heard Archibald MacLiesh go on about the blessings of a day on
which you do absolutely nothing;  and the older I get, the more I appreciate
that statement.  What I am trying to say is that efficiency is not a metric
which we use to evaluate the passing of time.  Indeed, such attempts at
evaluation may, themselves, be a waste of time (at least as far as my own
life is concerned).  I guess what I am saying is that life, for me, is more
a matter of making decisions to pass the time than one of making meta-decisions
to evaluate those decisions.

Let us now move on to "repetitious;"  and, in doing so, I think we have to
bring in "non-informative" (as least if we are to deal with the technical
sense of the word "information").  This brings us to one of my own favorite
subjects of expectations.  To a great extent the decisions we make as we go
through life depend heavily on such expectations.  That is, it is often the
case that the decisions we make are guided by our ability to predict their
consequences.  Such expectations have their cognitive foundations in
repetitions--the recognitions that the sameness of the situation begets
the sameness of the consequences.

Nevertheless, perfect predictability is rarely viewed as a virtue in life.
Indeed, if everything could be predicted, life would not be worth living.
There would be no "information," in the technical sense of the word, in our
experiences.  On the other hand the opposite extreme is no better.  When
information is maximized, we lose all our powers to predict:  a decision
made by chance is as as good as any other decision.  In some circumstances
such a situation can be a door to a great adventure, but I suspect most of
us are quite thankful that all of life is not such a radical adventure!

For this reason I believe that we, as behaving agents, tend to seek about a
middle ground between the extremes of absolute predictability and total noise.
I am not sure it is possible to chart that middle ground, nor is it necessarily
desirable to do so.  Perhaps all that really matters is our ability to
recognize when we are drifting into one of the extremes and what we do
to oppose that drift (if we do anything at all).  In any event as far
as music is concerned, I think it is a mistake to accuse it of being
"non-informative."  Music has long been an arena in which we have been
able to exercise this balance between information and predictability.
Music can be BOTH informative and non-informative (perhaps at the same
time);  and I would count that as an asset rather than a liability.
Furthermore, since repetition is one of the keys to the predictable
side of the music experience, it should now be apparent that I would
also regard IT as an asset.

I am not quite sure what you mean by "formalistic."  If you are using the
word to refer to repetition on some high level of construction, then I would
say that it is as much an asset as is repetition at the lower level.  Another
reading would imply some sort of reduction to a formal axiomatic system.  I
cannot imagine that this is what you have in mind, simply because all attempts
to come up with such a system of axioms thus far have yielded virtually no
promising results.  (After all, was this not one of the reasons for holding
Balaban's paper up to criticism?)

Is music "non-visual?"  It certainly is if you close your eyes!  On the other
hand most of us do not keep our eyes closed when we listen to music;  and I,
for one, tend to believe that our different sensory systems tend to interact
whether or not we wish (or will) them to do so.  Part of my own enjoyment of
"live" experiences is visual.  For me music is a behavior, and my visual
observation of motor aspects of that behavior can be as important as my
auditory impressions of the consequences of that same behavior.  Visual
stimulation may not be the DIRECT medium of music;  but I would still be
reluctant to write music off as being "non-visual."

Is music "linear?"  If all you are concerned with is the interval of time it
occupies, then I suppose you can say it is.  After all, unless you want to
start playing games with time travel, the passage of time is, itself, linear.
However, the way in which music FILLS an interval of time is hardly linear.
For better or worse, my initial research into computers and music was
predicated on the assumption that music could tell us things about concurrency
and parallelism which we could not arrive at through intuitions based on
constructs like time-sharing or semaphores.  I think I still believe this
to be the case, by which I mean that there is more to both the definition
and the management of events in a music experience than there is in any of
our current architectures for either parallel or distributed processing.
This does not mean that the study of music will make us better system
architects, but it can at least remind us of stones we have left unturned.

As far as immediacy is concerned, I would argue that a music experience is as
immediate as you make it.  Certainly, the study of theory tends to abstract
away the immediacy of the music experience.  If theory is your only interest,
then your accusation is quite valid.  However, for better or worse, I am one
of those who believes that there are grounds where theory and practice can
meet;  and I continue to believe that the PRACTICE of music, even when it
involves nothing more than sitting in a room listening to a recording, can
be about as immediate as you can get.  After all, if the music passes at the
same rate that time passes, how can it NOT be immediate?

This leaves us with one last accusation:  "uncomfortably entrenched in a
lutheran work-ethic that belies its own marginality."  This is not an
accusation of music but of a society which engages in music behavior.
As a criticism of society, I agree with it.  I am no less comfortable
with prevailing attitudes than you are and probably even more uncomfortable
with those who would suggest that these are the attitudes of "all the good
people."

The question then becomes one of what we are to do about such a corruption of
social attitudes.  I suspect the principle difference between us is that I
spend a lot of time walking around the tree trying to find the best way to
shake it while you are more concerned with whether an axe or a chain saw is
more appropriate for cutting the tree down.  I must confess that I do not
think I have been doing very well.  The tree is far to big for any one man
to have much physical impact on it, and I still do not understand its physics
well enough to properly deploy any volunteer assistants.  Besides, I suspect
I could manage well enough if you were to succeed and bring me into a Brave
New World of experiences.  However, I do not think you could erase all my
memories of past music experiences.  Here in Singapore the radio is quite
unsatisfying, and my own recordings have not yet arrived.  Memory is one
of the few things that sustains me, and I am delighted to see how well it
can work.  I guess what I am saying is that you can (and maybe even should)
hack away at prevailing social attitudes;  but I shall remain in command of
my PERSONAL attitudes towards music.

In concluding, I hope you realize, Eliot, that I am not offering these remarks
as an attack but rather a challenge.  Perhaps what I am saying is that you may
be confusing the baby and the bath water, going after music itself when your
real target is what prevailing trends have done to music.  Now it may be that
you cannot sort out these two aspects, but I felt obliged to at least raise the
question.

===============================================================================

Stephen W. Smoliar
Institute of Systems Science
National University of Singapore
Heng Mui Keng Terrace, Kent Ridge
SINGAPORE 0511

BITNET:  ISSSSM@NUSVM

"He was of Lord Essex's opinion, 'rather to go an hundred miles to speak with
one wise man, than five miles to see a fair town.'"--Boswell on Johnson