Does Melody Even Matter??

[Bombadil]

I bet the OP never thought his thread would lead to such a wide-ranging and intelligent discussion!

[vurt]

I bet the OP never thought his thread would lead to such a wide-ranging and intelligent discussion!

if comments where clicks hed be making dough!

[vurt]

he also got parodied, which in turn was parodied.

[Bombadil]

I luv this place!

[whyterabbyt]

he also got parodied, which in turn was parodied.

Parodied, lost.

[vurt]

vanessa parodies

[whyterabbyt]

So, do medleys matter or not?

[Digivolt]

this thread

[Dunbar]

So, do medleys matter or not?

It would take the energy of many medleys to create matter.

[jancivil]

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.

Well, I'm certain I never said I did, I never heard of it.

You're just reinforcing a general impression you've produced in me that you can use language to act like you know a thing well enough, while not understanding the thing at all really. EG: science. You can reproduce the words and form the sentence which is part of the definition just fine, yet it doesn't actually work as a description of the thing you want to be that thing.

"song measurements" - this may not have occurred to you but I have analyzed musical compositions and performances in detail myself. I could probably write a defensible thesis on certain things. I reduced what my impression of what is done to 'I suppose you could prove the behavior is always the same, so it's kind of like science', and as glib as that seems, it really is good enough afaic. That's what is done. I didn't say I disrespected it, in fact I said that already. I don't buy it as doing science, though.

I agree with Karl Popper, that if a hypothesis or a theory cannot be proven wrong, it isn't scientific. You may find that something in Cantometrics has been proven, but even my quick read of the article reveals resistance among musicologists as to the capacity to prove anything of the sort, statistically speaking. So, I have to wonder if it can't quite be falsified or say reverse engineered. Another defining feature of science may be absent.

"Will another sample of a similar kind taken in the same culture produce a similar performance profile? From this point of view, I believe that the majority of our samples will hold up. " - Lomax.
So, what, there are outliers? It's a study of culture, culture is not physical reality. Science is like "The Origin of Species".
Is he able to predict where a music will go, or is the sample of a given time the end of it? Because what he wants, and what you love about this kind of work, lies here:

[Lomax's homology supposedly] Distinguishes ten musical styles, dealing most fully with Eurasian and Old European styles. These are correlated with sexual permissiveness, status of women, and treatment of children as the principal formative social influences. The musical styles are at the same time symbolic or expressive of such social influences, especially in the various musical communities of Spain and Italy, and are stable, persistent.


So do you read the criticisms of such:

Richard Middleton (1990, p. 9-10) argues that "such theories always end up in some kind of reductionism – 'upwards', into an idealist cultural spirit, 'downwards', into economism, sociologism or technologism, or by 'circumnavigation', in a functionalist holism." However, he "would like to hang on to the notion of homology in a qualified sense. For it seems likely that some signifying structures are more easily articulated to the interests of one group than are some others; similarly, that they are more easily articulated to the interests of one group than to those of another. This is because, owing to the existence of what Paul Willis calls the 'objective possibilities' (and limitations) of material and ideological structures, it is easier to find links and analogies between them in some cases than in others (Willis 1978: 198-201)."


But back to my own contention: we're up against the problem of induction.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Problem_of_induction

[jancivil]

So biology is not science when grounded in Ethology? How to study behaviour?

Are you grounding your supposition of things in music in biology now?

Lomax is there basing musical culture in human behavior; in order to explain a music. I find that inadequate.
I'll touch on why: musical influence may come from outside the culture, and may have always had some influence in a culture. It may turn out that this or the other culture is just that insular, and it may turn out to be true enough, the inferences which are drawn in such a closed system. However, a given premise itself can't be true for all cultures. So it's too anecdotal for me.
Cf: it is easier to find links and analogies between them in some cases than in others.

I'm interested in the music itself. If I decided this music is the way it is, I need more than society's pressures and so forth.
You never have appeared to be. So as far as it strikes me, it's abusing music for your own profile and such.

[jancivil]

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.

You're an idiot if you think this does anything.

You described something as though indicative of a set of values and I described the same thing noticing what_you_said involves the absence of interest. You're simply bullshitting me, and I find that kind of thing obnoxious. ALL people, bullshit. People that don't have a practice don't have a practice, simple enough. They may think they know why they like something, but it could well be, and could well be studied methodically or whatever that they are pressured by such as: peer pressure, personal insecurity and the need to fit in; it could be all manner of things a musicologist would get into, the expression of what is really a toxic masculinity, racial identity or even hatred, all sorts of things could be driving a choice of a music which are nowhere located in a musical practice. I found long ago that a music genre or style is unexamined for more than <does it present a personal look, like a jacket, to show the world how you place yourself vis a vis society>, for_most_people. Only a musician has a musical practice; or do you not even know what the two words together mean? Some people have no thought as to what makes a music at all.

I was feeling a little bad before I saw this, am I too rough on this individual. But this is not respectable at all. You are a serial bullshitter. So thanks for that.

[jancivil]

Also thanks for revealing my reception of your word 'values' was just accurate and that you trying to snow me on it was just that. Your intellectual dishonesty could be remedied by having to write papers to be assessed by professors. I mean what you're doing at this point is not defensible. A couple of proper Ds or Fs would do you some good.

[jancivil]

One thing you shall ignore at your own peril, intellectually, is the problem of induction.

To wit -
Pyrrhonian skeptic Sextus Empiricus wrote:

When they propose to establish the universal from the particulars by means of induction, they will effect this by a review of either all or some of the particulars. But if they review some, the induction will be insecure, since some of the particulars omitted in the induction may contravene the universal; while if they are to review all, they will be toiling at the impossible, since the particulars are infinite and indefinite.

applies here in the biggest way

[jancivil]

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?

You went - in order to argue an absence of interest enough in music to know more as equal 'ethically' to having an advanced interest - for a reduction, of why I have interest, to "behavior". I do not think I'm predisposed to a behavior out of social pressures or norms, or sexual convention, nor did I worry about dressing the part. You may find that I as a teenager moved away from norms of dress in a big way, and you may want me to be a rebellious person musically to agree with that. But the thing is, I got into traditions. Traditions outside my ethnicity, in more than one area, traditions that my parents had no great attraction to, interest in the music qua music.

How do you explain interest in more avant-garde musics by a reduction to culture/ethnicity/sexual mores ad naus? What if you have the conservative-looking insurance man Charles Ives being so out-there in music? It's particular. You can talk about being a New England rustic sort of a person and it will have some bearing, but he was influenced by his father to do things not too many people would ever do if only because it's 'weird'.
People have AGENCY.

How do we explain musicians from India deciding to go west and mix with jazz? How do we explain the Bach Bouree in E minor lick showing up in Ali Akbar Khan's Mishra Bhairavi in one performance? IT'S CROSS CULTURAL. Out of, one supposes intellectual curiosity or simply liking the thing for itself. Music qua music.

So upon reflection, I'm not reducible in the ways you need for this whole kind of argument. I don't think I really know anyone else, so I should talk about myself for the illustration. So you like Alan Lomax's work. I find it fascinating, but I don't live, never lived in a culture that's so easily reduced. That work strikes me on one level as patronizing.

You want to reframe what you did as on-topic to whether or not melody in music matters (as a reason to go into your trip).
Guess what? I realize it just based in this or the other music as is practiced.

I find you have a great avoidance strategy going for you. I don't think about musicology unless it's brought into these threads by you. I think the musicology you've gravitated towards is quite inadequate compared to a study of music itself, it pales in comparison. It even seems misguided in itself.