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Zorn List Digest          Friday, May 8 1998          Volume 02 : Number 360



In this issue:
-
       Magazines (& reviews & reviewers)
       Re: Music & Jargon (a bit long)
       mags
       Re: mags
       Re: Magazines
       Re: Music & Jargon
       Re: Sharpish

----------------------------------------------------------------------

Date: Fri, 8 May 1998 15:09:22 -0500
From: Rusty Crump <[e-mail]>
Subject: Magazines (& reviews & reviewers)

>>
>> I have found Kremsky rather dismissive of most of the music I like.
>> Rather mainstream tastes.
>>
>> DF Sinner
>>

>So let me get this right. If a reviewer doesn't like the music you like,
>he's not any good? Sorta reminds me of the letters poor music journalists
>have to put up with the day after they've expressed reservations about a
>concert. The letters are usually signed "a great fan" and start  "I don't
>know what concert X saw last night, but the one I saw with Y was the
>greatest show ever in the universe..."
>
>Ken Waxman
>[e-mail]
>(whose first jazz reviews appeared in the Gazette's second edition
>in 1971 when they'd remake the obit page to fit in extra stuff from that
>night)
>
>-

A valid point. A critic or reviewer is most valuable not when they confirm
how much of a cool dude I am by liking stuff I like, but rather when the
tastes they express are so consistent that I know whether to buy/avoid
based on them. But even more importantly, they have to have the writerly
chops to be able to get across in words what a recording sounds like, feels
like, tastes like...all that stuff.

I get a little irritated with the philosophy (held by Zappa, perfected by
Zorn) that the only good critic is a dead critic. Good reviewers provide a
valuable service to folks like me, not the least of which is discographic
- -- just to alert us to the existence of material we wouldn't otherwise know
about.

Even the Tzadik web site attempts to get across a sense of what the music
in question is like and what it's about, IN WORDS. But Zorn has shown
"strong evidence of hostile aggression"* towards anyone so pathetic as to
write about music rather than make music. I wonder if the perfume of a
hypocrite's burning flesh would be so different.

A lot of what passes for music reviewing and criticism has devolved into a
clever (perhaps Christgauesque) phrase and a couple of comparisons, like
"This new group is reminiscent of My Bloody Valentine if Elvis Costello
were the lead singer." That sort of crap does nothing for me, and it's why
I've stopped buying music magazines except for the occasional issue of The
Wire (that, and reading Option on the rack then putting it back). In that
regard, I'm completely behind JZ's and FZ's lack of respect for critics and
reviewers insofar as what they do WASTES MY TIME. Time is the only valuable
thing I have (except for my copies of Fantastic Four #48-50).

BUT!! I have to say the Penguin Guide to Jazz on CD is the most successful
volume of reviews and criticism I've ever seen. It was more of a
page-turner than the most exciting, potboiling, testosterone-soaked crime
novel in existence. For me, that is.

So, that leads to a question: Does anybody know when the next edition of
the Penguin Guide is going to be published? I can't wait to read a more
thorough assessment of Zorn in light of his last four or five years' work.

Ramblingly,
Rusty Crump
Oxford, Mississippi

PS -- Bonus points to whoever can guess what order I wrote the above
paragraphs.



- -

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 08 May 1998 13:18:26 -0800
From: George Grella <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Music & Jargon (a bit long)

Chris Hamilton writes:


> > I have to completely disagree with your last full paragraph, though.  I
> > don't see how, in any way, the notion that composers create music out of
> > their own needs, interests and desires as autonomous human beings is
> > ideology.  It's reality, fact!
>
> This is only obviously right if all you mean by this is that it's the
> composer who composes music.  That's trivially true, and so surely
> couldn't be what Watson is denying.  But your use of the word "autonomous"
> suggests that you think composers compose freely (in some sense).  Free
> from what?  Bourgeois values?  I don't think it's obviously true that
> anyone alive today does anything free from those.  (I realize this may not
> be what you have in mind.  You're using jargon here yourself, I think.)
>

By autonomous I mean that the composer makes his/her own artistic
decision based on their own artistic ideas.  Of course, these ideas come
about through the complex blend of education, experience, environment,
i.e. living.  Bourgeois values, whether accepted or rejected, are part
of that.  But to say that music expressed via the composer is therefore
an expression of bourgeois values [even in the most abstract sense] is
far too broad; "epater le bourgeoisie" depends on the existence of the
object, but expresses the opposite of what the object stands for.
Although he lives in a bourgeois world [in general], I cannot see how
Charles Gayle's music is bourgeois in any way, for example.


> > Again,
> > composers who write for the orchestra write the pieces they write, the
> > bourgeoisie as a class is not writing squat for the orchestra.  This is
> > so obvious to me I'm baffled I have to point it out; it is the
> > individual doing the work, not the class system.
>
> If you think, as Marxists like Watson typically do, that individuals are
> always part of the class system, it can be both.  (Compare with your last
> statement "It is the individual auditing my tax returns, not the I.R.S.")
>

I'm sure you can tell that I think in no way like a Marxist!  I think
that individuals can be part of a class system, but that they can also,
through self-awareness, step outside that system if they choose to, if
they reject those values, say, as discussed above.  I especially think
of Harry Partch here.


> > There's some implied aspects to this that I think are mistaken.  One is
> > the common misconception that composers are compelled, either directly
> > or implicitly, to write music that the bourgeois patrons of the
> > orchestra want to here.
>
> Well, if they want their music performed and listened to, someone had
> better want to hear it.  But the claim that orchestral music functions as
> bourgeois expression could be more complicated than this.  It could be
> that the composer's own artistic values are determined by bourgeois
> hegemony.  It would be perfectly consistent with this for the bourgeoisie
> themselves not to like the end product.  (Watson is, even in the full
> work, vague about this, and had you just criticized him for this, and not
> gone on to give your own vague take, we wouldn't be having this
> discussion.)
>
>      My point isn't, of course, that Watson's right and you're wrong, but
> that you're both invoking ideologically packed views of how composition
> works, which is fine with me in both cases, so long as nobody assumes
> without further argument that either one of you is onto the One Truth
> About Music.  (Nor are yours the only two ideologies that might have
> something to say about this.)
>

Granted, peformance is a whole other issue, very problematic.  Again,
though, the individual composer can decide, damn it all, that they're
going to write what they want, and not try and pander, and then work
hard to get performances, or at least work hard on their music and be
patient for the public results.  Examples again; Ives, Nancarrow, Cage.
It can be done.  The composers artistic values may be determined in
regard to bourgeois hegemony, but the result can embrace or reject.  It
may start with the bourgeoisie, but can end with the individual.

If you want to call it an ideology, what some have described as the
romantic artistic hero, the American individual, go ahead.  There will
always be a crucial difference for me, though; while Watson's ideology,
as an example, starts with the general and thereby assumes it explains
the particular, I start with the particular, and try and stay there.
The particular for me is the individuals who are real, those I've listed
above, not myths.  I take their work and ideas, and all others', as they
are, on their own terms, measure their success against their particular
stated aims, not against a theoretical world-view.  Call it what you
like, it works for me.

gg




- -

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 08 May 1998 16:24:51 -0400
From: David Keffer <[e-mail]>
Subject: mags

Hello folks on the zorn list,

I have read the last two issues of a relatively
new magazine called "Halana!"  It features
five or six long articles/interviews, then reviews,
and a compilation cd, featuring the five or six musicians
featured in the long articles.

This magazine is just great and worth reading the whole way=20
through.  It's not like "The WIRE", where usually the most
useful thing is the reviews.  This magazine focuses on
serious, sometimes intellectual, documentary-type articles,
much more similar to the sort of discussion that goes on
in this list than anything in "The WIRE".

The last issue (#3) featured interviews and tracks from:
Charlemagne Palestine, Bernhard G=FCnter, David Grubbs,=20
Motoharu Yoshizawa, Alan Licht, John Fahey
(This issue has a short story by Fahey that is=20
really pretty hysterical.)

Issue #2 featured the interviews and tracks from:
KEIJI HAINO, WILLIAM PARKER, TONY CONRAD,
ALAN LAMB and PAULINE OLIVEROS.=20

More info available at the Halana! site
http://members.aol.com/halanazine/

David K.







- -

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 8 May 1998 15:49:03 -0500 (CDT)
From: "Joseph S. Zitt" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: mags

On Fri, 8 May 1998, David Keffer wrote:

> I have read the last two issues of a relatively
> new magazine called "Halana!"  It features
> five or six long articles/interviews, then reviews,
> and a compilation cd, featuring the five or six musicians
> featured in the long articles.
>
> This magazine is just great and worth reading the whole way
> through.

Definitely! The first issue has an amazingly extensive (less-interested
people might call it interminable) interview with La Monte Young, and the
three issues I've seen have all been wonderful.

 -
- ---------1---------1---------1---------1---------1---------1----------
|||/ Joseph Zitt ===== [e-mail] ===== Human Systems \|||
||/ Maryland? = <*> SILENCE: The John Cage Mailing List <*> = ecto \||
|/ http://www.realtime.net/~jzitt ====== Comma: Voices of New Music \|


- -

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 07 May 1998 22:10:09 -0700
From: Michael Howes <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Magazines

>> >By the way; which is/are the best magazine/s zornies (worldwide) choose
>> >concerning all the music?

 I haven't seen mention of a few of my favorite zines that sorta relate to
the list....
And yea Wire is a staple...and I don't subscribe to Option anymore....

 Others worth noting...

MusicWorks - Exploration in Sound
    More "classical" oriented but my current favorite music magazine. About
15% of it is in french (which I can't read) but it's still well worth it.
The subscription can come with or without a CD that has music from most of
the artists talked about in that issue....
 Check http://www.musicworks-mag.com/ for more info

ND
    This comes out only 3 or 4 times a year...I don't know if the March one
came out yet...I haven't subscribed (really should) but I haven't found it
yet....The web pages lists Stelarc, Alvin Lucier, Maggi Payne, Bernard
Parmegiani, and others for this issue...
 Check http://www.nd.org/intro.html

and how could we forget............

Browbeat
 Our very own list owners and I'm not mentioning this because of that it is
by far one of my favorite zines. He reviews old and well as new music....
 Check http://www.browbeat.com/

So does this Avant magazine have a web page? Is it connected to the
Japanese label of the same name?

Anybody ever read Tuba Frenzy when it was around? That was solid but I
haven't seen an issue in a year or so....

mike
[e-mail]





- -

------------------------------

Date: Thu, 07 May 1998 12:27:40 -0800
From: George Grella <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Music & Jargon

Joseph S.  Zitt writes:

> For a clear explanation of the orchestra as bourgeois capitalist whatever,
> see Chris Cutler's book "File Under Popular".
>
> As a composer myself, much of what I have written is not necessarily "out
> of [my] own needs, interests and desires as autonomous human beings" but
> due to requests from others, writing a work to their specifications.
> Many other write to commissions. It's a valid way of writing, but doesn't
> seem to fit into your "reality, fact". (The American mythos of
> individualism, so prevalent on the Net, sometimes gets in the way of
> people seeing that some people do, indeed, do things to help other
> people.)
>
> And writing a piece and getting it heard are radically different
> situations. A fellow composer was telling me  few days ago about a piece
> he's been writing for the past few years involving a full orchestra, tape,
> and 40 readers seated among the audience. He may well write this
> marvelously, but I'll bet my hat that, within the current
> artistic/economic landscape, nobody ever hears it.

We'll have to agree to disagree then.  I am not one for
political/social/economic theory when applied to the arts.  That was not
always the case, but experience made me an empiricist.  And as such, I
don't seen how the evidence, my, and our, reality and fact support the
notion that a symphony orchestra is a bourgeois expression.

Your personal experience with the commissioning process makes me
curious, though.  The requests from others, what were the
specifications?  If they were for just plain symphony orchestra, in
other words, the only specification being for that ensemble, I don't see
how that makes it a bourgeois expression, and not your own.  You wrote
the piece(s), after all.  That would fit my reality.

Was the form of the piece specified, a concerto for a particular
instrument, for example, or a specific number of movements?  Again, my
view is that the music produced is still the composer's own expression,
and while the commissioner provided limits, those are the same sort of
limits that composers choice when making their pieces, albeit in this
case that decision is out of the composer's hand.  Or were actual
elements of the music provided, i.e. melody, harmony, rhythm, thereby
making your work more arrangement than composition?  In that case I
would agree that expression would primarily be someone elses, but not
only would that other person have to be safely defined as a bourgeoisie,
I would also have to point out that it would be a highly unique
commissioning situation, one where the original material/idea is not the
composers.  I have not heard nor seen such a commissioning proposal
before.

Does the commissioner necessarily have to be bourgeois?  Are ensembles
that commission pieces from composers ensembles of bourgeois
expression?  That's an assumption that has to be made, and I'm not going
to make it.  It's not an orchestral piece, but I think of Carter's
"Night Fantasies" that was commissioned by four pianists.  If it had
been a symphonic work commissioned by four orchestras, would we call the
result a bourgeois expression?

Getting a piece heard once written is a whole different process which
obviously has a lot more to do with taste and economics, but again I
can't agree that it all has to do with "bourgeois expression," which by
the way no one who believes in has defined.  This is where I stand,
ultimately, on the case that no one can tell me what bourgeois
expression, vis-a-vis the symphony orchestra, is, and without that,
there is no way to find actual music that is the bourgeois expression
rather than the composer's own.  That is my empiral evidence, the music,
listening to it, it's sound, it's style, the different ways it is made
by different composer's.  Some contemporaneous orchestral composers were
Howard Hanson, Luciano Berio, Giacinto Scelsci, Roger Sessions and Hans
Werner Henze.  Their work, taken together, is stupendously varied in
techniques, ideas, aesthetic values, sound and style.  Can someone tell
me which pieces among them were bourgeois expressions?  They can't all
be, or else the bourgeoisie has far more varied, deep, sensitive,
adventurous and educated taste in orchestral music that I think anyone
would like to give them credit for.

Unless someone can prove to me otherwise, people are still individuals.
These individuals, if we look at individual composers, may wish to do
things to help others, as Joseph writes.  That in no way at all
eliminates their ability to compose orchestral music, even when
commissioned, that is their own personal expression.  It's not a
zero-sum game.  If we posit that a composer can write a piece of music
for a beneficial purpose, a donation or fund raising situation of some
kind, I would also posit that the music produced is what the composer
decides to produce!  I would say that is an intuitive idea, but it's far
more basic than that, and I'm amazed that there are questions about it.
It's pretty late in the game to still make generalized and deterministic
class-based arguments, especially on behalf of theories that, unlike so
many economic and political ideas, have been tried in the real world and
found wanting.  If the opposite of claims that the symphony orchestra is
a bourgeois expression are those of individualism, than count me as
heterodox.  The basic fault of dialectical materialism is it's dismissal
of individual human qualities and talents.  Fans of John Zorn alone
should realize the power of individual expression every time they listen
to his records.

gg




- -

------------------------------

Date: Fri, 08 May 1998 09:34:54 -0800
From: George Grella <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Sharpish

Benjamin Pequet writes:


> Alright George Grella, only the music... no politics.
> Have you heard, all ? Let's not get into subjective or emotional about music
> then. About politics well ?
>
> But isn't music a political thing, when someone for example (why am I
> thinking of Boulez ?) holds such a position as the one occupied by Boulez in
> France ?
> Or isn't it a political statement to be listening to some kind of music than
> another ? Why on earth are we on a Zorn list ?
>
  and

> The High Modernist International Style ?
>
> What you seem to be have missed is that the society became post-modern
> around 1950 and that we already need to find alternatives to the post-modern
> views on this society. Yes, things changed a lot around the middle of this
> century... That's by the way for a part why I see so many things in Zorn's
> work. And not at all in Boulez's statements. I think we are talking about
> very different things, that Boulez himself through his career contributed to
> hold as separate as he could.
>
> Come back to me with a definition of fascism will you ? I always consider
> useful the one that states fascism as the violence of power.
>
> But please now don't misunderstand what I write, I'm not accusing anyone of
> anything.
>

????  Music is a poltiical thing if it wants to be, or if listeners make
it so for themselves.  Eisler is consciously political and can be
listened to and evaluated that way.  Rzewski is consciously poltiical
and consciously musical and can be listened to either way or both ways.
Shostakovich tried not to be political but was listened to that way and
suffered for it.  But does any of this have to be this way?  No.  No
composer is compelled to make political music and no listener is obliged
to listen politically.  It's a choice.  Benjamin, if you feel you are
making a political statement by listening to John Zorn, more power to
you.  However, the personal IS NOT the political TO ME, and shouldn't
that be my personal/political choice?  I am on the John Zorn list
because I like this stuff as MUSIC, which also means that if there's a
Zorn work I don't like as MUSIC, like "Kristallnacht," then I don't like
it, regardless of politics, which just clouds all the issues of
listening and thinking and enjoying, IMO.

For me, that choice means that I have no taste for Eisler, because I
find his music inferior, regardless of his politics; I love Rzeswki,
because in pieces like "The People United" he writes great f*cking
music, beautiful, inspired and masterfully written; and I think
Shostakovich is one of the paradigmatic artists of the 20th century
because he managed to survive politicial forces that could easily and
literally have snuffed out his life to create music so layered with
seeming supplication [to the political listener] and so steeped in
personal expression and struggle, the two often comingled in endless
later of meaning.

As for a Post-Modernist society, where is it?  How do I live in a
different way philosophically and aesthetically than I would have prior
to 1950?  A lot has changed in the arts since then, obviously, but this
is just too much generalizing.  "Post-Modernism" covers too much ground
with too soft a core to have any real useful meaning to me.  And just
because artist creat consciously Post -Modern works doesn't mean that
the world is Post-Modern for everybody and every musician.  I'm not
speaking philosophically here, I'm talking fact.  Do I have to name
names yet again?  And it's use here by you, Benjamin, along with your
implication of fascism [yes, you did accuse by making that statement],
is far, far more dreadful than my mere mention of a Modernist style.
There is a stench of the tyranny of the orthodox here, that if I'm not a
politically aware, Post-Modern, properly genuflecting Zorn fan here than
I'm wrong as a person on a social, political, asethetic and moral
level.  That looks like a pretty clear definition of fascism to me.

If you [singular and plural] see yourselves and the world as a big ball
of proper political thinking and political music appreciation, as a
place where a vague aesthetic philosophy of pastiche and irony-laden
references is the "right" way to think, then I don't want to be a part
of that world.  I'm frankly surprised that there is a
political/aesthetic orthodoxy to this list at all; I would have expected
the spirit to be far more anarchic and inclusive.  I'm afraid too many
people take the step over from Zorn appreciation to Zorn fan-worship,
where Zorn becomes the object of a cult of personality and his attitudes
and taste become a political litmus test.  Do you think he'd find that
attitude appealing?

I personally find this question of fascism vis-a-vis my arguments
incredibly offensive and then, on second thought, I think it's just
pathetic that that is the reaction when I articulate an opinion and
reasons for it that differ from the orthodox here.  But then, while my
name recognition means nothing here, my "fascism" puts me in good
company.  I don't have the booklet on hand to quote directly, but a
composer favorable to many "right-thinking" listeners here, Gyorgy
Ligeti, wrote a concise, eloquent and devastating rejection of
Post-Modernism in the liner notes for the recent Sony recording of his
Piano Etudes [Ligeti series #6, I believe, performed by Pierre-Laurent
Aimard, pianist with that horrible Ensemble Intercontemporain, under
that dreadful old-fart who recorded Zappa for all the wrong reasons and
who obviously ignored all the signs that one morning he woke up in a
world that was suddenly Post-Modern, Pierre Boulez].  If that makes
Ligeti a fascist, that count me as one.

gg





- -

------------------------------

End of Zorn List Digest V2 #360
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