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Zorn List Digest         Monday, June 5 2000         Volume 02 : Number 955



In this issue:
-
       artists and self-estimation
       Re: Zorn List Digest V2 #954
       Re: Zorn List Digest V2 #954
       RE: artists and self-estimation
       RE: Zorn List Digest V2 #954
       touring
       Odp: artists and self-estimation once more
       Odp: artists and self-estimation
       Re: Zorn List Digest V2 #952
       five nights of new music in Boston
       Re: artists and self-estimation (was re: webern box)
       Artists and self-estimation Act III
       Re: artists and self-estimation

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

Date: Sun, 04 Jun 2000 14:19:44 CDT
From: "samuel yrui" <[e-mail]>
Subject: artists and self-estimation

Alas I am only 18 and am perhaps a wee bit over my head among the
vocabularies of "rabid twenty-something" intellect.


<Ljova wrote:
<  "Today, the history of the planet has finally become one
<indivisible
<whole, but it is war, ambulant and everlasting war, that embodies and
<guarantees this long-desired unity of mankind. Unity of mankind
<means: No escape for anyone anywhere."
<-Milan Kundera, "The Depreciated Legacy of Cervantes"
and
<If music continues in the Kenny G or N'Sync sort of braindead idiocy, <then
we're bound to have less and less musicians that think, and a
<tiny audience of people that can truly listen.


     Then we, the audiences who can still listen, and some of us, the
musicians who can still think, will have to accept our losing end of this
war. We must perish among the power chords and cute boys with synchronized
dances. but kitsch has it's charm...;)
        -Samuel







________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com


- -

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

Date: Sun, 4 Jun 2000 15:21:14 EDT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: Zorn List Digest V2 #954

In a message dated 6/4/00 10:48:41 AM Pacific Daylight Time,
[e-mail] writes:

<< Well, considering that Western "classical" and "jazz" musics are among
 the only musics in which harmonic movement is a significant factor, and
 that most musics of the world that have a pulse at all involve some sort
 of rhythmic cycle, you've just called all music except for a tiny corner
 of that which fits into those Western categories "escapist" and "decadent".

 Can anyone, other than someone who has buried himself head-first into
 academic and supposed high culture musics, conceivably believe that?
  >>

Music in any form can represent innumerable emotions, experiences, memories,
etc. to different people, and can obviously contain varying degrees of
musical "prowess."
In other words, musical theory encompasses a broad spectrum of ideas and
might play a smaller role in commercial musics. However, the validity and/or
direct meaning ensconced within a song depends solely on the listener.  The
truth and passion required to create real "art" also fluctuates according to
different cultures, and ultimately contains no absolutes.
Therefore, arguing on an artist's integrity, validity, or musicianship is
quite absurd, because it is wholly subjective.  i realize this could be
restating former posts.....

ben    (new to list)

- -

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

Date: Sun, 4 Jun 2000 12:43:11 -0700
From: "s~Z" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Zorn List Digest V2 #954

>>>However, the validity and/or
direct meaning ensconced within a song depends solely on the listener.  The
truth and passion required to create real "art" also fluctuates according to
different cultures, and ultimately contains no absolutes.

Therefore, arguing on an artist's integrity, validity, or musicianship is
quite absurd, because it is wholly subjective

ben    (new to list)<<<
______________________________________________

Is your position based on absolutes or is it subjective?

It seems to me that people are betraying their position by stating it.

Although universal consensus regarding ANYthing will never happen, to say
that there are not variations in integrity, validity, or musicianship...and
that meaningful discussion and argumentation about aesthetic quality is
invalid is a stretch from my way of thinking. The variations are most
obvious at the extremes...say comparing a 4 year old picking up a sax to
John Coltrane. While they get more difficult to define and agree upon as you
move up the scale, variations in quality seem evident. Doesn't seem that
different than most topics worth discussing. If you eliminate all topics
involving subjectivity and absurdity from meaningful discourse we'll have no
mouths and we must scream.




- -

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

Date: Sun, 4 Jun 2000 16:07:31 -0400
From: "Ljova" <[e-mail]>
Subject: RE: artists and self-estimation

> -----Original Message-----

>      Then we, the audiences who can still listen, and some of us, the
> musicians who can still think, will have to accept our losing end of this
> war. We must perish among the power chords and cute boys with
> synchronized
> dances. but kitsch has it's charm...;)
>         -Samuel

Nay, friend. :)

Decadence has charm, beer, wine, vodka, ice cream, nudity (all decadent),
but kitsch? Not for me.

- -L

- --------
Lev "Ljova" Zhurbin
[e-mail]
http://Ljova.com/
Listen to my music:
http://mp3.com/LevZhurbin/ (compositions)
http://mp3.com/Ljova/ (improvisations)
http://mp3.com/FreeBach/ (Free Bach Project)

"Do not fear mistakes - there are none."
        -Miles Davis


- -

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

Date: Sun, 4 Jun 2000 16:15:49 -0400
From: "Ljova" <[e-mail]>
Subject: RE: Zorn List Digest V2 #954

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [e-mail]
> [mailto:[e-mail]]On Behalf Of s~Z
> Sent: Sunday, June 04, 2000 3:43 PM
> To: Zornithology List
> Subject: Re: Zorn List Digest V2 #954
>
>
> >>>However, the validity and/or
> direct meaning ensconced within a song depends solely on the
> listener.  The
> truth and passion required to create real "art" also fluctuates
> according to
> different cultures, and ultimately contains no absolutes.
>
> Therefore, arguing on an artist's integrity, validity, or musicianship is
> quite absurd, because it is wholly subjective
>
> ben    (new to list)<<<
> ______________________________________________
>
> Is your position based on absolutes or is it subjective?
>
> It seems to me that people are betraying their position by stating it.
>
> Although universal consensus regarding ANYthing will never happen, to say
> that there are not variations in integrity, validity, or
> musicianship...and
> that meaningful discussion and argumentation about aesthetic quality is
> invalid is a stretch from my way of thinking. The variations are most
> obvious at the extremes...say comparing a 4 year old picking up a sax to
> John Coltrane. While they get more difficult to define and agree
> upon as you
> move up the scale, variations in quality seem evident. Doesn't seem that
> different than most topics worth discussing. If you eliminate all topics
> involving subjectivity and absurdity from meaningful discourse
> we'll have no
> mouths and we must scream.

Very well put!   I realize that we live in a polyglot age, with lots of
languages, cultures, musics, and so forth, all converging somewhere in the
collective brain.  But I see no need for the objectivist or the
all-welcoming approach. There's no use for being spiteful, only in that it
makes life entertaining.

I have seen it many times on mailing lists -- there are those that state
their honest opinions, and then there are others who just try to make things
"allright", return the conversation to its proper balance, with "the"
question still hanging, forever undecided.   But if we do not voice our
opinions (and especially negative opinions), then there is nothing to
balance, and whatever flowery conversation is left will surely be one-sided.

- -L


- --------
Lev "Ljova" Zhurbin
[e-mail]
http://Ljova.com/
Listen to my music:
http://mp3.com/LevZhurbin/ (compositions)
http://mp3.com/Ljova/ (improvisations)
http://mp3.com/FreeBach/ (Free Bach Project)

"Do not fear mistakes - there are none."
        -Miles Davis


- -

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

Date: Sun, 04 Jun 2000 13:51:27 -0700
From: Jeffrey Zima <[e-mail]>
Subject: touring

can anyone help me out with regard to a tour schedule? zorn was just
here in oakland with masada and i was out of town.....anyone direct me
to a site or know what he's doing this summer?


- -

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

Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2000 01:13:21 +0200
From: "Marcin Gokieli" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Odp: artists and self-estimation once more

Samuel wrote:
> perhaps could try to be less spiteful about it.  true, Kenny G and N'Sync
> are quite commercialized.  but for the most part i don't really think they
> are offending anyone's morality, so go ahead and dislike it, but don't
state
> objectively how their music is just bad according to universal laws.

What does universality and laws have to do with it? It may be bad for some
peculiar, local reason. It does not make it better then music that is bad
for an universal reason.
Marcin Gokieli
[e-mail]

<<Thanks to this excellent device
man shall reenter paradise.>>
Auden & Kallman, Stravinsky's "The Rake's Progress"


- -

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

Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2000 01:08:43 +0200
From: "Marcin Gokieli" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Odp: artists and self-estimation

Brian Olewnick wrote:
> Ingres once said, "A well-made shoe is more beautiful than a poorly-made
> painting". I just don't see why what we call "art" is somehow to be
> removed from the same judgments we make about everything else.

Well, I do think that one of the greatest challanges both for artists and
the people who just take the art is just to not think about art in different
categories then the rest of life. And I do beleive that it has to do withy
one of the greatest lies present in our culture - namely, that art serves as
a mean for a rest, that it's something 'unessencial', just a 'hobby' or
whatever. Well, it is not; we just choose what kind of art we do in our
lives, and in most cases it is not very inspiring.
BTW, it's great to be back here. BTWII, if anybody posted me any personal
post to [e-mail] i won't be able to reply quikcly - so you 'd
better send me a copy to the new adress( [e-mail]).
Marcin Gokieli
[e-mail]
<<Thanks to this excellent device
man shall reenter paradise.>>
Auden & Kallman, Stravinsky's "The Rake's Progress"


- -

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

Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2000 05:49:38 -0400
From: Jeremy Isaac Mc Cormick <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: Zorn List Digest V2 #952

Sex mob the song is huge in europe.  I hear it on every corner.  The song
that is.

jqh


- -

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

Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2000 07:22:54 -0400
From: stephen drury <[e-mail]>
Subject: five nights of new music in Boston

for those around the Boston area, this could be of interest:
SICPP 2000! --
Five nights of explosive new music for piano and percussion at New England
Conservatory

Monday, June 12 - Williams Hall
Emanuele Arciuli solo piano:  New Music from Italy and America
    Including music by John Adams, George Crumb, and Frederic Rzewski

Tuesday, June 13 - Brown Hall
Stephen Drury, Shannon Wettstein, Thomas Guldborg, Aiyun Huang, Jennifer=
 Choi=20
    Music by John Zorn and Iannis Xenakis
=20
Wednesday, June 14 - Brown Hall
Robyn Schulkowsky: works for percussion and ensemble by John Cage=20
=20
Thursday, June 15 - Williams Hall
Yukiko Takagi and Stephen Drury
    Music by Cage and Satie, including Cage's arrangement of Socrate for 2=
 pianos

Friday, June 16 - Brown Hall
John Mark Harris and Aiyun Huang
Music with Electronics: Stockhausen Kontakte; Nono =85sofferte onde serene=
=85


New England Conservatory
290 Huntington Ave, Boston, MA

All concerts are free

for more info, go to http://www.stephendrury.com

- --steve

http://www.stephendrury.com


- -

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

Date: Mon, 5 Jun 2000 09:03:04 EDT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: artists and self-estimation (was re: webern box)

In a message dated 6/3/00 9:56:00 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
[e-mail] writes:

<< I would suggest that we do suspend critical judgment or at least
interrogate
 it vigorously because if the best we can do when we encounter a new CD is
 repeat the same old tired critical tropes that have been hanging around
 since the days of German Romanticism, than we haven't learned a thing about
 our music or why we cathect with it so regularly. >>


Quite right.

Your other points were as well.

- -matt

- -

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

Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2000 13:25:21 GMT
From: "Bill Ashline" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Artists and self-estimation Act III

Joseph Zitt wrote:

>Well, considering that Western "classical" and "jazz" musics are among the
>only musics in which harmonic movement is a significant factor, and that
>most musics of the world that have a pulse at all involve some sort of
>rhythmic cycle, you've just called all music except for a tiny corner of
>that which fits into those Western categories "escapist" and "decadent".
>Can anyone, other than someone who has buried himself head-first into
>academic and supposed high culture musics, conceivably believe that? <

Well stated Joseph.  I wholeheartedly agree.

Brian Olewnick wrote:

>No strident aestheticist I, but I'm not so sure about that. I'm a bit out
>of my league in so far as the particulars, but I'd imagine someone like
>Edward O. Wilson, among others, might take a different point of view.
><<<>You might be right about ol' JAD Ingres' opinion (though considering
>his time and culture, it might be unreasonable to expect him to think
>otherwise; perhaps today he'd reconsider)<


I should have perhaps pointed out that the issue of "judgment" with regard
to art has a particular history and resonance, which, though reducible in
some way to common sense, doesnÆt operate in quite the same commonsensical
manner as banal everyday judgments about politics or shopping.  My objection
is with a kind of practice with regard to art that always privileges a
determination of "quality" rather than explication or elaboration or that
fails to take into account the diversity of connections or disconnections.
Wilson was a great New York intellectual and one who was certainly a
"product of his time."  Ingres certainly was a product of his time, as was
Colombus, as are all of us.  The objective though is to become "untimely,"
which is what Zorn does in his best moments, those moments where he affirms
the pariahs and the accursed of art, all the while operating within the
expected idioms of precision and sophistication that one expects from an
avant-garde composer.  For me, his peaks are Naked City and Painkiller
rather than Masada, a configuration with which IÆve never really cathected
in the same way.  (And I havenÆt because I donÆt connect in the same way
anymore with that sort of avant-garde ensemble or with the cultural impetus
for the group, i.e. a lack of direct experience with ZornÆs diasporic
existence).  ItÆs in the former two configurations that I find his work most
affirmative as well as extreme.

>But does that intuition have a more purely biological or societal basis?
><<<>I think that's a wonderful (if, in practice, unlikely) set of standards
>to aspire to but, as complex and deep as those formulations are, I wonder
>if the heart of the matter doesn't lie even deeper, down amongst the
>genes.<

IÆd say that intuition is cultural rather than natural; I distrust
explanations that resort to the latter.  I think you have a good point above
regarding, implicitly, the body, since our reactions to music are inscribed
there by culture.  But once again, I would distrust the biological
explanation.  ItÆs a long story that I wonÆt get into right now.

>I think your inversion is right to the point, ie an assertion that "This
>poorly made shoe is more moving than that fine painting" may only require
>further and deeper explication to move it from the area of "preposterous
>sounding statement" to something to seriously consider, with deeper still
>probing... <

It all has to do with "auras" and their production/manufacture.  "Auras" can
attend to just about anything we want them to, and our culture has
conditioned us to attach them to things like art, fame, etc.  In Kandy, Sri
Lanka, one of BuddhaÆs teeth, having apparently been rescued from his
funeral pyre, lives out a notorious existence housed in a series of gold
caskets and reserved for only a select few to observe.  This is a culture in
which the aura of a Rembrandt or Beethoven will never even approach the aura
of a tooth.  And IÆm sure countless other examples can be dredged up.

Mr. SchwitterZ wrote:

>Whether or not it renders the comment absurd depends on the reader's
>presuppositions. Samuel may very well think the quote is an example of his
>point. I put it out there more as a litmus test for readers' positions than
>as a self-evident assertion. But, hell, I am making progress. I've gone
>from 'exhibiting stupidities' to the 'political/aesthetic strategy' of 'the
>silent narrative of juxtaposition.' More personal growth than on most
>wasted Sundays. <

Indeed.  But itÆs all plausible deniability.  You didnÆt claim Samuel to be
stupid.  And I never said that you were.

Ljova wrote:

>Bill Ashline, ladies and gentlemen, Bill Ashline: <

Thanks for the introduction.

Ljova quoted:

"Man desires a world where good and evil can be clearly distinguished, for
he has an innate and irrepressible desire to judge before he understands.
Religions and ideologies are founded on this desireà.This "either-or"
encapsulates an inability to tolerate the essential relativity of things
human, an inability to look squarely at the absence of the Supreme Judge."

Nice quotes.  Drives home what I was trying to say very well, despite all
the humanistic rhetoric.














________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com


- -

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

Date: Mon, 05 Jun 2000 09:22:28 -0700
From: "Patrice L. Roussel" <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: artists and self-estimation

On Sat, 03 Jun 2000 22:40:09 CDT  "samuel yrui" wrote:
>
> Bill said:
>   "Whether we like something or not, doesn't matter.  "Likes" are
>   arbitrary and artists aren't that sneaky, primarily because they're
>   not that interested in duping audiences any more than in pleasing
>   them."
>
>
> Dearest Bill,
>   In your message you communicated something successfully and eloquently
> that I have trying to get across to people for a long time.  I agree in the
> subjectiveness of likes and dislikes especially with something as abstract
> as music.  Suspending some critical judgement, or at least not taking it so
> seriously could do some people a lot of good.  Musicians/artists should be
> respected for the fact that they tried.

For you musicians/artists seem to be all in the same box: you are one or
you are not one. Because the number of artists that can reach us has increased
dramatically in the past few decades, we (the consummers) are faced with a
tough choice: how to filter the superflous and derivative from the true
original and genuine stuff? Maybe you have an answer, but I don't.

This raises the question of who is more qualified to judge music: a mediocre
artist or an educated listener (educated in the sense of having done his
homework)? Is claiming that you are an artist enough for us (listeners) to
turn off our critical judgement?

If every artist was of the stature of Picasso or Cage, I would have never
opened my mouth.

    Patrice.

- -

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

End of Zorn List Digest V2 #955
*******************************


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