As always, shamann, well expressed and thought out.shamann wrote:What vurt does, and often does well, also comes out of a fairly specific history, from the point which music could be recorded and saved in perpetuity, a point at which we can manipulate, dissect, and study any sound. His (or rather our) music is not of the "let me dazzle you with my googaws" variety, but rather microscopic. "Let me show you something I've heard. Let's try to hear old sound in a new way." It's as much about listening closer, as much about sound in its physical state, as it is about its humanized form and calculation. One point that often comes up in these discussions is that of authorial excellence, the "If that is music, then I'm not special" argument. And they are right, they aren't special, none of us are special. We simply are, everything else is just the result of some power struggle.
But I wonder if it is rather too sweeping a statement.
I do believe that musical evolution is occurring at a rate that no theory can keep up with. And I also think that there are many different ways to look at the organization of sound. One of the things that few people seem to have noticed is that with the advent of recording technology (circa 1877) the nature of music was fundamentally changed. The definition of music has, since that advent, grown and changed with a positively protean ferocity. One wonders if the word "music" is elastic enough to keep up with this change. Any innovations in this regard would be welcome. To me at any rate.
But all that having been said, I have to say that some musicians do seem to be special. Without thinking for a second that western cultural values should dominate the world, is there really nothing special about the guitar playing of Robert Fripp as opposed to the playing of say, the guitarist who used to be in Creed?
After all, the former has spent countless hours developing a set of skills and (more recently) a pedagogy to transmit those skills (and the attendant personal disciplines) to others. He can do things that others simply can't do. Does he not accordingly deserve respect? Must any respect payed him (or others with comparable skills) involve harmful cultural prejudices? Obviously, if one adopts a completely relativist stance, nothing is "better than" anything else. But can such a stance be maintained consistantly? Would that not eventually lead us into a corner in which a really, really stupid pop song sung by Brittney Spears and Bach's "Art of Fugue" are 'neither better nor worse than the other, just different'?
Would not such a viewpoint be missing something rather important?
although I appreciate the patience and thoughtfulness that some have shown