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Re: Music and Art
by rinaldo, 07.22.02 07:47 pm
I agree with NN vegetarian regime. But, in concerning my natural attributes I don’t know what advantage could I get from not wearing balls – and no one complained about that till now too. She looks really extreme – that’s maybe why she (she?) is virtual - a much more fun and cozy way to be extreme, radical &… cool!
You’ve got a good reason to like the Eroica.
If Nabokov said "all art aspires to the condition of music", then that’s insight what I am trying to clarify but I prefer to view that all art aspires to the same condition, music included. And if a hierarchy was needed I’d put poetry in top instead - even if I prefer music.
About literature NN startles me more, or maybe I’m not so demanding here. I plan to read Dostoievsky as well as Céline again.
Conflicts is what I’m concerning about since I‘m trying to think about art in a non-specific way. In this view, many of the presupposed assumptions restrictedly about ‘visual arts’ are dubious in a more comprising area that covers the 'visual'' and other practices too – music and literature. These doubts, resulting from crystallized dogmas of post-modernism (there we go again) ineffective when applied to works in music and literature, may translate in questioning a lot of recent fundaments of critic over visual arts and architecture (where those dogmas seem to work as if in an internal way)- hence, my interest in Adorno, or better, in followers, critics. It’s in this domain that I think art, music and literature interrelate.
About bucks, in my reading, there are much better ways to get there - even if you have to cheat more accurately than in art.
www.mediamatic.net/cwolk/view/8470
This interesting text above (unfortunately allowing no reply) extracted from your idol NN site, draws a line between what the author calls ‘Academic’ and ‘Non-academic’ composers – it’s a plausible division perhaps; it’s better to distinguish things than mixing them. The gap I find here is that it recalls the quite spread idea that reads: new technologies have made a new music – which is a bold naïf assumption. Furthermore, the same idea absorbed popularly has misled to the conclusion that non-academic (amateur?) digital music, being so up-to-date, is what “contemporary music” is about. It is not just because it has no past, no history like rock or folk or whatever. One of the most common happy findings attributed to post-modernism too (get rid of History). But what happens here is not the strong idea of post-historicism. It’s simply that this music õnly develops “whenever” technology improves, nothing else. So the panorama is that of a tongue-in-cheek feeling kind of “Oh Lord won’t you buy me a media processor so that I make contemporary music; I’m so tired of rock’n’roll and hip-hop, oh Lord let me step a degree higher and be a non-academic composer”.
Academic composers seem to mean here those with a musical formation (how poor). But non-academic composers, dealing with samples of noise (whose aim here reported seems to be scarcely to follow the models of Cage and Russolo - as long as I know, the former, an academic composer too) are in fact much more limited than ‘real’ composers of 20/21th century still dealing with older tools and means: it’s no big news that the possibilities of manipulating sound are much larger in the latter case – that’s why so many composers in the late-50s / 60s gave-up such methods. And their improvement from the 80’s on only has helped when needed as another common complementary tool, in the case of recent works of Boulez for example. This hegemony of digital-means is only “apparent” through light propaganda – there’s no comparison between a composer that uses what he has learnt and one that merely explores a machine or an instrument (if you will).
We all know the possibilities are huge and it’s here that morality enters. Guess how.
Of course contemporary classical music, or academic music (if you will) is not easy. The burden of history is heavy. After Beethoven you still have all the romantics starting with Liszt maybe (an exemplary cultivated man even for 19th cent.) then all the post-romantics that you may try starting with Mahler, then the modern ones - harder to find a start but maybe Debussy to simplify, and at last contemporary music, even more obscure, starting maybe with the generation after the war still dealing with atonal / 12 tone / serialist techniques leading to more recent hybrid generations after the 70’s that either developed serialism or went back to pure tonality mainly through minimalism.
No need to elaborate on how this music resists to several listenings that rudimental-digital music cannot.
There are exceptions to this, of course; Branca comes to mind. Peter Ablinger makes a singular work with white noise and instrumental ensemble; as well as there are lots of contemporary classical (academic) music that are discussable too.
With the advent of digital a few decades ago I remark one thing that’s mostly typical to visual artists: They easily embrace digital music and don’t recognize contemporary music as coming from classical. But simultaneously they show a huge veneration for classical and romantic composers: Mozart, Beethoven, Rossini – that’s the idea that they have of classical. An old thing; it stopped with – who? – Stravinsky?
Re: Music and Art
by maxherman, 07.23.02 07:37 pm
I perceive a qualitative difference between DJ's at a Beecroft show and NN's music software. It's a fine line I know. It brings up the whole issue of sound and image, what it means to connect them. It's been a very literal connection since the advent of talkies, and has gone extrapolar since them.
NN beefs about how the Vasulkas are "null and ultra null," now, because of her. I mean that's where she's heading with it all. The Vasulkas, whose work I have seen and liked, openly criticize NN once in awhile. What if you could do Viola's piece with all the animal eyes and near-stills, and instead of taking audio from the landscape, run a simultaneous audio track of the artist's heartbeat while shooting? It certainly verges into fundamental artistic preference.
I know I'm relying on video art somewhat here. There are issues of composition and execution in video that do not map precisely onto painting as a genre. But then you have these robots that dip canvases, the digitization of facture.
Perhaps it's best to say that sound art affects visual art, but being separate/connected genres they tend to parallel or feedback to each other as they develop? I love "Petroushka," but the Nijinski dancing and the backdrops are all gone now. Sort of a parable.