from an interview with Frank Zappa
FZ: Once you realize what your limitations are and realize that even if you “achieve” something it doesn’t make a f**king bit of difference anyway, then you can be “okay”.
I enjoy sitting down here (in the studio) all by myself typing on the Synclavier. I can do 12 hours and I love it. And I know that ultimately it doesn’t mean a f**king thing that I did it. It’s useless.
That’s okay; it makes me feel good.
Q: It seems that for most people that kind of isolation would lead to loneliness.
FZ: Try to imagine what the opposite of loneliness is. Think of it.
Everyone in the world loves you? What is that?
Realize that you’re in isolation. Live it! Enjoy it! Just be glad that there aren’t a bunch of people who want to use up your time.
Because along with all the love and admiration that’s going to come from the people that would keep you from being lonely, there is the emotional freight you have to bear from people who are wasting your time, and you can’t get that back.
So when you’re lonely and you’re all by yourself, guess what you have? You have all of your own time. That’s a pretty good f**king deal. Something you couldn’t buy anyplace else.
And every time you’re out being sociable and having other people be “nice” to you so that you don’t feel “lonely,” they’re wasting your time. What are you getting for it? Because after they’ve done being nice to you, then they want something from you. And they’ve already taken your time!
Loneliness, once you come to deal with it so that it is not an uncomfortable sensation, so it doesn’t feel like drowning or something is not a bad deal. It’s a good deal. It’s the next best thing to solitude.
I’m not talking solitary confinement. Solitude. If you’re sensitive to loneliness, then you’re gonna be in trouble, because then the loneliness turns into something really painful, a horrible depression and then you die.
One way or the other, you just die. So who needs that shit?
Does Melody Even Matter??
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- Banned
- 3946 posts since 25 Jan, 2009
Yup. One shouldn’t miss the KISS-sentence as the most important entry point to academia:
Keep It Simple, Stupid!
We are not here to make things harder to grasp than they already are, but the opposite.
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- Banned
- 3946 posts since 25 Jan, 2009
And another good entry point to academia, @musiologo, is to learn the basic distinctions between natural science, social science and the human sciences. Anthropology is grounded in social and human science and is often developed in direct oppostion to the positivism of natural science. So they would not claim they are as rigorous and scientific in the simplistic sense above, but rather emphasize that they are interpretation-based and qualitative disciplines, not quantitative. Thus their results are always open for discussion and further development as well as rejection.cultural anthropology is for me the only rigorous, scientific way to explain the musical practices. If others feel otherwise and are happy with other explanations...
You gotta learn to crawl before you can walk, you know, but I think your motivation seems promising for an academic career. You have earned that recognition, surely
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- KVRAF
- 26033 posts since 20 Oct, 2007 from gonesville
I personally need to be alone, to live alone, to not have any pressure on me to not be this or not be this other thing, which I will tend to be.
Then there's the solitude, I don't have to justify my own expenditure of time. So in actual interaction with people, there is a choice and I would tend to be more patient a listener or whatever, and there is no problem with 'ok, need to run now.'.
Whoever this 'you'll die alone' was directed at, he doesn't know people or that they should care they'll die alone. There is a certain disposition I've seen most of my life 'We all die alone'. I'm aware I will, big deal. OTOH my mother didn't because I kept in touch and was the last person she talked to and she knew how much she was loved.
Then there's the solitude, I don't have to justify my own expenditure of time. So in actual interaction with people, there is a choice and I would tend to be more patient a listener or whatever, and there is no problem with 'ok, need to run now.'.
Whoever this 'you'll die alone' was directed at, he doesn't know people or that they should care they'll die alone. There is a certain disposition I've seen most of my life 'We all die alone'. I'm aware I will, big deal. OTOH my mother didn't because I kept in touch and was the last person she talked to and she knew how much she was loved.
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- KVRAF
- 26033 posts since 20 Oct, 2007 from gonesville
"The social sciences' is a science like 'music theory' or 'literary theory' are scientific theories. It's not really a science. The theories do not have to have a proof or be tested in experiment or anything.
In context, talking about people with no real interest in how music works as an alternate value system is not rigorous in the least, it doesn't look like a very examined premise to me, so 'the word value is jargon from science' chafes a bit.
In context, talking about people with no real interest in how music works as an alternate value system is not rigorous in the least, it doesn't look like a very examined premise to me, so 'the word value is jargon from science' chafes a bit.
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- Banned
- 3946 posts since 25 Jan, 2009
Social science is social science and it does not make sense to say it is not a real science because then you have to take another science’s premises to judge it, which often would be the natural sciences. But it does not compute since social sciences do not claim such an objectivity is even possible in studies of a socially contructed world.
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- KVRist
- 350 posts since 11 May, 2008
I'm sorry Jan and IncarnateX, but your late replies have shown you didn't even read the basic references provided. Lomax work was both qualitative and quantitative. And there was testing involved, like any other natural science. The premise that social sciences are just "interpretive" is a moot point.
I consider those myself frauds. IF you have an hypotesis you have to test it. And then you are able to build a theory. Again, please read the Lomax work and then the Savage review regarding his probably short sample and shorcomings and objections, but THAT's science and that is how it is done.
Otherwise what you're telling is that biology is not science. Because ethology and the observation of individuals birds, horses, etc.. works the same way.
Jan, regarding "people who don't care how music works" constituting an "alternate value system" is a misunderstanding and a belief that here are "people who don't care how music works".
ALL people have a musical practice, but THEIR musical practice might not have the same concepts and behaviours than yours, and that's the whole starting point. So they wouldn't care how YOUR music works, because they are not sharing your values, but are caring how THEIR music works.
I can point 2 examples, and that's what I did when I started telling "stories" - individual cases to illustrate just that.
I've met a guy in a village that valued folk song. He would play I-V-I-V or i-v-i-v chords on a guitar and tell life stories on top of it. Their concept of music was more or less grounded on this practice. What mattered what the quality of the lyrics (form, rhyme scheme, semantic content) and the ability to sound sincere in your vocal delivery, by improvising word-based melodies each time you tell a story and sound compelling. In this musical practice therefore the words are of paramount importance and the vocal delivery as well. Harmony not much, rhythm and instrumentation not much as well. It's not they don't know how "music" works, it is more than THIS is their concept of music. If they hear a symphony or a Zappa instrumental they will say "stop that, that is just nonsense noise" or "do you call that music?", when they hear some ballad singer like adele or whitney houston likes they would call them "vocal acrobats" and dismiss them, because the words became meaningless and do not sound "spoken as sincere", their ornamented and exxageration seems out of place in their concepts. When they hear pop or dance music its also meaningless because all those rhythms and harmonies dont add anything to the story, are just noise. So it's a different musical culture alltogether and we have to understand their terms and what is valued or not.
You can do this exercise for thousands of other musical cultures to understand what MUSIC is and how it is acted. Of course, then when we talk to this other guy who was raised as the son of a musical instrument shop, and played guitars and keyboards since a kid, and by the age of 10 already was imitating stevie wonder and phill collins records, his concept of music and his behaviour are totally different. For him, playing complex melodies and harmonies is key. Vocals not that much. He doens't like songs, he cares little for words, he praises invention and counterpoint and the constant syncopation and deviation. When he listens to the folk song of the guy above he says its infantile and that that guy doesn't even know music because he only plays I-V-I-V and then renders a half-detuned tune with a rasp voice on top of it. How is that music at all? From his point of view it is poor music. So it's a different culture. They have different value systems, and you can't say the second one is "right" or it is "good". The second one might believe he is "superior" to the first one, but that's his belief system.
Now you do this same exercise for thousands and thousands of individuals. And you start getting the picture. You get patterns, you get communities of practice that share the same values, you get "groups", and you start gettin what concepts and behaviours and sounds they entail, and you start getting the "musical cultures" of the world (as in systematically grouping and tagging them together) pretty much as biologists did for species, and as Lomax did for humankind.
When you have these groups, these cultures alltogethered decribed and systematized then you can start findind patters, correlations, testing etc... and then you get homologies and eventually a "real" theory for musics that explains WHY people sing or play that way, and what they value and dismiss in each culture. and they are all valid and alternate value systems. You cannot just say that because some cultures lack some parameters or don't consider them, that's not a value system. They often have others you don't consider - In some aborigenal some cultures they don't consider discrete pitches in a melody to identify a melody, rather the way a pitch goes into the other. So what I would consider 10 different melodies they would consider the same. And what I would consider always the same melody they can make thousands of different ones just because the way I define "melody" is not the same "they define".
Musicology for me it is a real science when done properly. One of course just needs to know the references. Because as in every scientific area there are better scholars and researchers than others. That's what has been done for the past 70 years. I really invite you to read Lomax chapter 25 and Savage review and then draw your own conclusions about that work.
Again, what i tried to do to answer to OP question was to explain how in many music groups or communites of practice melody in form of tunes is what matters most and why. and how in some others melody is not that important or it is irrelevant at all. But I tried to paint a complex overview to explain how humankind arrived at that point. Now dismissing all music cultures and individuals for whom folksong IS music as "they don't understand or care how music works" as if there was one music is missing the point all together.
I consider those myself frauds. IF you have an hypotesis you have to test it. And then you are able to build a theory. Again, please read the Lomax work and then the Savage review regarding his probably short sample and shorcomings and objections, but THAT's science and that is how it is done.
Otherwise what you're telling is that biology is not science. Because ethology and the observation of individuals birds, horses, etc.. works the same way.
Jan, regarding "people who don't care how music works" constituting an "alternate value system" is a misunderstanding and a belief that here are "people who don't care how music works".
ALL people have a musical practice, but THEIR musical practice might not have the same concepts and behaviours than yours, and that's the whole starting point. So they wouldn't care how YOUR music works, because they are not sharing your values, but are caring how THEIR music works.
I can point 2 examples, and that's what I did when I started telling "stories" - individual cases to illustrate just that.
I've met a guy in a village that valued folk song. He would play I-V-I-V or i-v-i-v chords on a guitar and tell life stories on top of it. Their concept of music was more or less grounded on this practice. What mattered what the quality of the lyrics (form, rhyme scheme, semantic content) and the ability to sound sincere in your vocal delivery, by improvising word-based melodies each time you tell a story and sound compelling. In this musical practice therefore the words are of paramount importance and the vocal delivery as well. Harmony not much, rhythm and instrumentation not much as well. It's not they don't know how "music" works, it is more than THIS is their concept of music. If they hear a symphony or a Zappa instrumental they will say "stop that, that is just nonsense noise" or "do you call that music?", when they hear some ballad singer like adele or whitney houston likes they would call them "vocal acrobats" and dismiss them, because the words became meaningless and do not sound "spoken as sincere", their ornamented and exxageration seems out of place in their concepts. When they hear pop or dance music its also meaningless because all those rhythms and harmonies dont add anything to the story, are just noise. So it's a different musical culture alltogether and we have to understand their terms and what is valued or not.
You can do this exercise for thousands of other musical cultures to understand what MUSIC is and how it is acted. Of course, then when we talk to this other guy who was raised as the son of a musical instrument shop, and played guitars and keyboards since a kid, and by the age of 10 already was imitating stevie wonder and phill collins records, his concept of music and his behaviour are totally different. For him, playing complex melodies and harmonies is key. Vocals not that much. He doens't like songs, he cares little for words, he praises invention and counterpoint and the constant syncopation and deviation. When he listens to the folk song of the guy above he says its infantile and that that guy doesn't even know music because he only plays I-V-I-V and then renders a half-detuned tune with a rasp voice on top of it. How is that music at all? From his point of view it is poor music. So it's a different culture. They have different value systems, and you can't say the second one is "right" or it is "good". The second one might believe he is "superior" to the first one, but that's his belief system.
Now you do this same exercise for thousands and thousands of individuals. And you start getting the picture. You get patterns, you get communities of practice that share the same values, you get "groups", and you start gettin what concepts and behaviours and sounds they entail, and you start getting the "musical cultures" of the world (as in systematically grouping and tagging them together) pretty much as biologists did for species, and as Lomax did for humankind.
When you have these groups, these cultures alltogethered decribed and systematized then you can start findind patters, correlations, testing etc... and then you get homologies and eventually a "real" theory for musics that explains WHY people sing or play that way, and what they value and dismiss in each culture. and they are all valid and alternate value systems. You cannot just say that because some cultures lack some parameters or don't consider them, that's not a value system. They often have others you don't consider - In some aborigenal some cultures they don't consider discrete pitches in a melody to identify a melody, rather the way a pitch goes into the other. So what I would consider 10 different melodies they would consider the same. And what I would consider always the same melody they can make thousands of different ones just because the way I define "melody" is not the same "they define".
Musicology for me it is a real science when done properly. One of course just needs to know the references. Because as in every scientific area there are better scholars and researchers than others. That's what has been done for the past 70 years. I really invite you to read Lomax chapter 25 and Savage review and then draw your own conclusions about that work.
Again, what i tried to do to answer to OP question was to explain how in many music groups or communites of practice melody in form of tunes is what matters most and why. and how in some others melody is not that important or it is irrelevant at all. But I tried to paint a complex overview to explain how humankind arrived at that point. Now dismissing all music cultures and individuals for whom folksong IS music as "they don't understand or care how music works" as if there was one music is missing the point all together.
Last edited by Musicologo on Wed Feb 27, 2019 10:07 am, edited 1 time in total.
Play fair and square!
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- KVRAF
- 26033 posts since 20 Oct, 2007 from gonesville
I'm not buying that as a way to define the word. Here are definitions:
"... modern science is a discovery as well as an invention. It was a discovery that nature generally acts regularly enough to be described by laws and even by mathematics; and required invention to devise the techniques, abstractions, apparatus, and organization for exhibiting the regularities and securing their law-like descriptions."— Heilbron 2003, p. vii
"science". Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Merriam-Webster, Inc. Retrieved October 16, 2011. 3 a: knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method b: such knowledge or such a system of knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena.
Alan Lomax interviewing people and immersing himself in folklore, drawing inferences in order to write his opinion up is not scientific endeavor. Regurgitating it trying to support an argument based in premises which don't seem really examined is even less so. Negative numbers.
It's not like I'm dissing Lomax or whomever, it just isn't that thing. So it just strikes me as needing to support opinion using the word, I don't agree with the use of the word. I think my reasons for it are supportable.
"... modern science is a discovery as well as an invention. It was a discovery that nature generally acts regularly enough to be described by laws and even by mathematics; and required invention to devise the techniques, abstractions, apparatus, and organization for exhibiting the regularities and securing their law-like descriptions."— Heilbron 2003, p. vii
"science". Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. Merriam-Webster, Inc. Retrieved October 16, 2011. 3 a: knowledge or a system of knowledge covering general truths or the operation of general laws especially as obtained and tested through scientific method b: such knowledge or such a system of knowledge concerned with the physical world and its phenomena.
Alan Lomax interviewing people and immersing himself in folklore, drawing inferences in order to write his opinion up is not scientific endeavor. Regurgitating it trying to support an argument based in premises which don't seem really examined is even less so. Negative numbers.
It's not like I'm dissing Lomax or whomever, it just isn't that thing. So it just strikes me as needing to support opinion using the word, I don't agree with the use of the word. I think my reasons for it are supportable.
Last edited by jancivil on Wed Feb 27, 2019 10:18 am, edited 1 time in total.
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- KVRAF
- 26033 posts since 20 Oct, 2007 from gonesville
Maybe you could 'prove' that the people who are whatever, music derived from slaves in the cotton fields was brought in, behave the same always; so up to a point it's kind of like science. Where do they deviate? Do they never have a creative impulse and change the ways and modes?
What is the actual use value, because that isn't what I glean from say Lomax. If it is to someone, well that's up for debate I think. I'm not exactly just spur of the moment deciding 'Musicology isn't really science'. But what I said here really was "I'm quite sure you're not doing science'" when it was implied I was never fair to musicology. My POV is that Musicology cannot replace musical work, and that if you're going to say things such as the musicians who did the thing live don't respect the people who transcribed it and replicated it, the thing to do is try and know WTF you're on about. Even if you study it like musicologist would, you may want to interview more people and get a better sense, that is if you ever did. And no. So at the end of the day the quality of that assumption seems as good as what I'd expect from say, someone who knows basically from Youtube covers phenomenon.
It's a supposition. Science is never just supposition.
I'm one of the people he expects to have this viewpoint and I don't, pointless YT covers notwithstanding.
What is the actual use value, because that isn't what I glean from say Lomax. If it is to someone, well that's up for debate I think. I'm not exactly just spur of the moment deciding 'Musicology isn't really science'. But what I said here really was "I'm quite sure you're not doing science'" when it was implied I was never fair to musicology. My POV is that Musicology cannot replace musical work, and that if you're going to say things such as the musicians who did the thing live don't respect the people who transcribed it and replicated it, the thing to do is try and know WTF you're on about. Even if you study it like musicologist would, you may want to interview more people and get a better sense, that is if you ever did. And no. So at the end of the day the quality of that assumption seems as good as what I'd expect from say, someone who knows basically from Youtube covers phenomenon.
It's a supposition. Science is never just supposition.I'm one of the people he expects to have this viewpoint and I don't, pointless YT covers notwithstanding.
Last edited by jancivil on Wed Feb 27, 2019 10:12 am, edited 1 time in total.
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- Boss Lovin' DR
- 14312 posts since 15 Mar, 2002 from the grimness of yorkshire
Pity no-one ever told old Ted that, the tosser. I still have the cod sweats even now...IncarnateX wrote: Wed Feb 27, 2019 6:36 amYup. One shouldn’t miss the KISS-sentence as the most important entry point to academia:
Keep It Simple, Stupid!
We are not here to make things harder to grasp than they already are, but the opposite.
https://www.iep.utm.edu/husserl/#H2
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- KVRist
- 350 posts since 11 May, 2008
The premise is that music is expressive culture. The same way as walking, food, sexual conventions, dress codes, etc... You observe individuals, talk to them, measure some things about them, etc... it's really like Ethology. So biology is not science when grounded in Ethology? How to study behaviour?
And then when you formulate hypothesis you TEST them. That's how science works. It's the production of TESTED knowlege.
Have you REALLY read the lomax paper and the canthometrics project? Because it's not really just what you just describe. All the data colected goes well beyond interviewing - there are the behaviours and sounds themselves, the description of the practices using the 37 categories and then building models and quantifying everything and using regression, etc... you don't seem to know cantometrics that much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantometrics
If anything I would point to would be the sample size sometimes too small, due to limitations of technology and time, and I'd love to have that study improved and enlarged to be more robust, but everything seems well-designed. And I think the global jukebox project is very promising.
And then when you formulate hypothesis you TEST them. That's how science works. It's the production of TESTED knowlege.
Have you REALLY read the lomax paper and the canthometrics project? Because it's not really just what you just describe. All the data colected goes well beyond interviewing - there are the behaviours and sounds themselves, the description of the practices using the 37 categories and then building models and quantifying everything and using regression, etc... you don't seem to know cantometrics that much.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cantometrics
If anything I would point to would be the sample size sometimes too small, due to limitations of technology and time, and I'd love to have that study improved and enlarged to be more robust, but everything seems well-designed. And I think the global jukebox project is very promising.
Play fair and square!
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- KVRAF
- 26033 posts since 20 Oct, 2007 from gonesville
Most of what composers did was improvise something. Actually I think if you have a genuine musical idea, I mean one of your own, you are making something up, which is improvisatory action. So really every piece of music on paper which classical music mechanics reproduce is that thing, which was supposed as behavior the improvising musician has this problem with. Noticing there is a difference in performance practice doesn't change anything.
So, I brought in something I was talking about in the other thread, and which I'm actually engaged in for the last two days: things which Steve Vai was employed to transcribe, since he was so phenomenal at it, some of which became fixed pieces; and I am recreating bits of two of them in the sequencer, as a basis for a composition.
The guitar solo which through a quirk of naming ended up known as "Pre-C Instruments" became part of Sinister Footwear 1st Movement. Which was never performed or recorded, and was a worked-over whole thing by the time it took on the form it appears in the orch score anyway.
Everything I make is some form of improvisation, edited and worked over. So if there is someone that wants to see it in notation, I'm not the straw man you made who thinks that's toss. I never heard of such a notion in all my life, and I started composing ca 1980 and am somewhat familiar with the matter.
So, I brought in something I was talking about in the other thread, and which I'm actually engaged in for the last two days: things which Steve Vai was employed to transcribe, since he was so phenomenal at it, some of which became fixed pieces; and I am recreating bits of two of them in the sequencer, as a basis for a composition.
The guitar solo which through a quirk of naming ended up known as "Pre-C Instruments" became part of Sinister Footwear 1st Movement. Which was never performed or recorded, and was a worked-over whole thing by the time it took on the form it appears in the orch score anyway.
Everything I make is some form of improvisation, edited and worked over. So if there is someone that wants to see it in notation, I'm not the straw man you made who thinks that's toss. I never heard of such a notion in all my life, and I started composing ca 1980 and am somewhat familiar with the matter.