ftp.xmission.com/2014.06.ftp.xmission.com.tar/ftp.xmission.com/pub/lists/zorn-list/archive/v03.n423

Internet Message Format | 2001-05-13 | 22KB

From: [e-mail] (Zorn List Digest)
To: [e-mail]
Subject: Zorn List Digest V3 #423
Reply-To: zorn-list
Sender: [e-mail]
Errors-To: [e-mail]
Precedence: bulk


Zorn List Digest         Sunday, May 13 2001         Volume 03 : Number 423



In this issue:
-
       more fag stuff
       RE: more fag stuff
       RE: more fag stuff
       RE: more fag stuff
       Re: more fag stuff
       Re: more fag stuff
       RE: more fag stuff
       RE: more fag stuff
       Re: more fag stuff
       prince/test results
       RE: more fag stuff

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

Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 15:27:19 -0400
From: "Jeton Ademaj" <[e-mail]>
Subject: more fag stuff

i found it curious that no one would volunteer any specifics when i asked
fer quotes of Charles Gayle's purported homophobic rants...

Calling the dolphy/mingus duets "sublimated cries of homosexual yearning"
may be silly, but why exactly? i'm not at at all clear on their sexual
history, so i wanna know if u guys consider such analysis "trite or
ridiculous" because they were A)obviously straight, B)
obviously hot for each other or because C)"it's not about the sex, mannn"
(especially if it's homosexx??). academic conferences often bring about
discussions that in hindsight could be called "trite or ridiculous" because
people are exchanging occasionally inaccurate ideas with high seriousness.

However, despite the fact that identity is one of the central issues of both
artistic expression AND political organization, "identity politics"
discussions in America have received an especially venomous response from a
(reliably) straight white male demographic. why?

basically it sounds like u guys were winking at each other and speaking in
code (not that there's anything wrong with that?), like Dave Murray at last
year's Vision Festival derisively referring to Bill T Jones dispute with him
(they fell out, Jones attributing it to Murray's homophobia) as a joke:"he
called me a homophobe"<-laughter from himself and audience>.

...and as i wondered quietly then, and typmatically now: EXACTLY What the
fuck is so ridiculous? please explain.

jeton


>I apologize (yes, really) for my inaccuracy of language.  "Comp-lit" has
>been something of an ever-ready, if frequently inaccurate, profanity >for
>me
>ever since I sat through an academic forum at Columbia University last
> >year
>and heard the Eric Dolphy-Charles Mingus duets described, in all
>seriousness, as "sublimated cries of homosexual yearning" - not that
> >there's
>anything wrong with it... - by a tag-team of bona-fide comp-lit types
****************
>What a pile of shit, eh?  I'm sorry you had to suffer through that.
> >There's
>no doubt that in the current intellectual climate in the states, a great
>deal of extravagant and clever garbage surfaces in the conference >circuits
>of academe, the worst cases probably being in these sorts of identity
>politics readings.  I'll concede that.  And I think your comment about >the
>article, as I said, was spot on.  But as I've said a million times >before,
>don't let a few solipsistic extravagances deter you from seeing or >wanting
>to see much smarter applications.  As Herb Levy said a few days ago on
> >these
>pages, sometimes we find the adept aficionado in one area becomes the >most
>mainstream and trite (or ridiculous) observer of another.

_________________________________________________________________
Get your FREE download of MSN Explorer at http://explorer.msn.com


- -

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

Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 13:18:55 -0700
From: "Benito Vergara" <[e-mail]>
Subject: RE: more fag stuff

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [e-mail]
> [mailto:[e-mail]]On Behalf Of Jeton Ademaj
> Sent: Sunday, May 13, 2001 12:27 PM

> history, so i wanna know if u guys consider such analysis "trite or
> ridiculous" because they were A)obviously straight, B)
> obviously hot for each other or because C)"it's not about the sex, mannn"
> (especially if it's homosexx??).

Because D) it's a little difficult -- okay, "ridiculous" -- to interpret the
Mingus-Dolphy duets (or a lot of other jazz or "classical" music, for that
matter) as sublimated sexuality, anymore than it is possible to read
pimphood (pimpness?) in Miles's music.

Having said that, I am aware that it does raise the question of why it seems
"easier" to read race or class (or gender) into non-vocal, instrumental
music, much like Crouch and Marsalis did constantly in "Jazz." So you may
have a point there; i.e., sexuality isn't seen as important enough to be a
marker of identity. But still. I've read descriptions of the
Springsteen-Clemons duets in concert as either -- you guessed it --
homoerotic or reminiscent of Huck-and-Jim, and the analyses just strike me
as overly tendentious.

Later,
Ben

http://members.tripod.com/~tamad2/
ICQ: 12832406


- -

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

Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 16:53:52 -0400
From: "Steve Smith" <[e-mail]>
Subject: RE: more fag stuff

What he said.  Nicely put, Ben.

The need to read such extramusical program content into the music tells me
far less about the music itself and far more about the person posing the
thesis.  Ben's "Bruce and Clarence" example is a particularly choice one.
There's also a famous feminist analysis of a movement of one of the Brahms
symphonies that unblinkingly posits said movement is an aural depiction of a
rape.

People can make such pointless speculations all day long, for all I care,
but it doesn't tell us a damn thing about the music.  And the mixture of
ignorance and arrogance with which many of these theories are posited is
frankly embarassing, or should be, anyway.

Enough outta me.  But Jeton, your allusions to homophobia in the exchange
between Bill and myself are off-base, and unwelcome.

Steve Smith
[e-mail]
NP - Glenn Branca, Symphony No. 9, Polish Natl Orch/von Borries (Point)
... which is not striking me particularly well... any opinions?

- -----Original Message-----
From: [e-mail]
[mailto:[e-mail]]On Behalf Of Benito Vergara
Sent: Sunday, May 13, 2001 4:19 PM
To: Zorn List
Subject: RE: more fag stuff


> -----Original Message-----
> From: [e-mail]
> [mailto:[e-mail]]On Behalf Of Jeton Ademaj
> Sent: Sunday, May 13, 2001 12:27 PM

> history, so i wanna know if u guys consider such analysis "trite or
> ridiculous" because they were A)obviously straight, B)
> obviously hot for each other or because C)"it's not about the sex, mannn"
> (especially if it's homosexx??).

Because D) it's a little difficult -- okay, "ridiculous" -- to interpret the
Mingus-Dolphy duets (or a lot of other jazz or "classical" music, for that
matter) as sublimated sexuality, anymore than it is possible to read
pimphood (pimpness?) in Miles's music.

Having said that, I am aware that it does raise the question of why it seems
"easier" to read race or class (or gender) into non-vocal, instrumental
music, much like Crouch and Marsalis did constantly in "Jazz." So you may
have a point there; i.e., sexuality isn't seen as important enough to be a
marker of identity. But still. I've read descriptions of the
Springsteen-Clemons duets in concert as either -- you guessed it --
homoerotic or reminiscent of Huck-and-Jim, and the analyses just strike me
as overly tendentious.


- -

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

Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 14:23:47 -0700 (PDT)
From: Scott Handley <[e-mail]>
Subject: RE: more fag stuff

- --- Steve Smith <[e-mail]> wrote:
> People can make such pointless speculations all day
> long, for all I care,
> but it doesn't tell us a damn thing about the music.
>  And the mixture of
> ignorance and arrogance with which many of these
> theories are posited is
> frankly embarassing, or should be, anyway.

I disagree strongly, though only generally, as a
matter of principle.  These wild interpretations, some
of them are as welcome, to my thinking, as John Cage
indicating that the performance of "silence" or
twiddled radios are "music", or that whether said
performance-events are "music" at all is rather beside
the the point.  Furthermore, the "point" is conducive
to growth, and the development of attention, and
compassion, and any number of other positive, humane
characteristics.  Need any criticism get to The Point,
do its humble job of advocating The Real Deal, i.e.
the art?  I disagree, though I too found your examples
apt, and awful.  A lot of the music writing I love,
especially record reviews, has a lot more interesting
things to deal with than "the music".  I mean, my
wallet appreciates pedestrian description, which is
about as To The Point and ABout The Music as you can
get, but really, I'd rather read the work of a writer
and a thinker, unfettered by relevance, who wishes to
identify a performance or event as one site of a much,
much larger issue or possibility or condition or
______.  That said, you're damned right about the NYT
piece, and 90% of everything might just be shite.

- -----s, against pragmatism and anti-intellectualism,
but still, somehow, happy to be an American, cf.
Bashline's Neruda quote.

NP: Pavement, BRIGHTEN THE CORNERS
NR: David Toop's fine NYT piece, good luck NYC
e/a-heads

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices
http://auctions.yahoo.com/

- -

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

Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 17:23:55 EDT
From: [e-mail]
Subject: Re: more fag stuff

In a message dated 13/05/01 21:59:01 GMT Daylight Time, [e-mail]
writes:

<< People can make such pointless speculations all day long, for all I care,
 but it doesn't tell us a damn thing about the music. >>

Please speak for yourself!
There is no such thing as people (except when you are into generalisations,
and (to generalsie) we all know the senselessness of generalising). There are
only persons.
All speculations are useless. An of course, for all you care, persons will
continue to speculate, for persons who speculate do not care about your
position on their speculatiing, if you follow my meaning...!
And, consider this:
No word or words ever written by any person or persons ever told 'us a damn
thing about the music', nor ever will, ever...
Keep up the good work!
Best regards
ROGER PARRY

- -

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

Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 14:40:51 -0700 (PDT)
From: Scott Handley <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: more fag stuff

- --- [e-mail] wrote:
> All speculations are useless.

Of course, much better for us to me men/women "of
action".  Ahem.  I'd argue that speculation's
"uselessness" is one of it's grandest features, just
like Dave Douglas' "uselessness" (cf. the hilarious
review from Amazon.com posted a while back..."I can't
dance to it, I can't make love to it, I can't eat to
it, I can't do anything to it...it's shit!").
Speculations are, among many other things,
formulations of the nonexistent (currently, if even
then) or unknown; as such they are utopian; as SUCH
they are imaginary, and such they require imagination.
 But it would seem to me, at this point, that the
logical conclusion of this:

> And, consider this:
> No word or words ever written by any person or
> persons ever told 'us a damn
> thing about the music', nor ever will, ever...

would be an attitude of surrender, of non-thought, and
of subserviance to the Great Works of Art being
foisted upon us.  I prefer engagement and
intervention, even at the risk of being *gasp* wrong,
or ridiculous.  There's also something unpalatably
platonic about rhetorics circumscribing sound- or
art-events being the fifth-best thing to the
sound-event itself.  I think it's different, and
sometimes better.

- -----s

__________________________________________________
Do You Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Auctions - buy the things you want at great prices
http://auctions.yahoo.com/

- -

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

Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 22:19:25 -0000
From: "thomas chatterton" <[e-mail]>
Subject: RE: more fag stuff

>From: "Steve Smith" <[e-mail]>
>
>There's also a famous feminist analysis of a movement of one of the Brahms
>symphonies that unblinkingly posits said movement is an aural depiction of
>a
>rape.
>
This reminds of an event that may have some connection to the subject
currently being discussed, then again maybe not!
A few years ago, some of the volunteer members of the publicly funded
community radio station where I was doing a show put forward the motion that
programmers should be restricted to only playing music from their own
cultural heritage, i.e. African music could only be played by programmers of
African descent, reggae by Jamaicans, klezmer by Jews etc. One of the main
supporters of this idea told everyone that she, being a woman of colour,
felt as though she was being "aurally raped" by the white male programmer
who was doing the African music show. Eventually, for obvious reasons, the
idea was laid to rest, but in the aftermath, when the position of station
treasurer became available, it was given to that same woman, not because she
had any accounting or financial experience, but because she was a "woman of
colour". A few months later she disappeared with most of the station's
financial assets...
_________________________________________________________________________
Get Your Private, Free E-mail from MSN Hotmail at http://www.hotmail.com.


- -

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

Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 17:42:40 -0700
From: "Benito Vergara" <[e-mail]>
Subject: RE: more fag stuff

> -----Original Message-----
> From: [e-mail]
> [mailto:[e-mail]]On Behalf Of Steve Smith
> Sent: Sunday, May 13, 2001 1:54 PM

> People can make such pointless speculations all day long, for all I care,
> but it doesn't tell us a damn thing about the music.

I see what you're saying, but I can't entirely agree -- that is, of course
it would tell us something about the music. Surely we can't listen to Music
as something ahistorical and divorced from any authorial context.

What does bug me is how such readings can be made. I'm not musically trained
at all, but I can't see anything particularly gay about, say, Tchaikovsky's
1812 Overture or Copland's "Fanfare for the Common Man." But still some
scholars persist in reading those meanings into it.

Lyrics, however, are a completely different matter. Take The Smiths' "Hand
in Glove," for example:

Hand in glove
we can go wherever we please
and everything depends upon
how near you stand to me

And if the people stare
then the people stare
I really don't know and I really don't care

It helps to know that Morrissey is gay to fully understand the lyrics.

Now, on a different tack: I was thinking about how it was that a
critic/scholar could easily interpret Coltrane's blowing as, say, embodying
the cries of racial oppression and so on. I was about to say that this may
have more to do with how sexuality is somehow seen as not included with the
race/class/gender "triumvirate" of identity, and that it just isn't seen as
important as those three. But no; it's because jazz is seen as a direct
product of racial oppression and is Something We All Know (or at least it's
long been part of jazz discourse).

Can't think of any way to end this message. Did anyone read how "The Gift"
was trashed in this month's issue of The Wire? Pedophilia! Orientalism!
Violence against women!

Later,
Ben

http://members.tripod.com/~tamad2/
ICQ: 12832406


- -

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

Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 21:25:29 -0400 (EDT)
From: konrad <[e-mail]>
Subject: Re: more fag stuff

On Sun, 13 May 2001, Jeton Ademaj wrote:

> i found it curious that no one would volunteer any specifics when i asked
> fer quotes of Charles Gayle's purported homophobic rants...
>
> Calling the dolphy/mingus duets "sublimated cries of homosexual yearning"
> may be silly, but why exactly? i'm not at at all clear on their sexual

It seems silly to me because it's out of context.  It seems more like the
writer was _using_ their playing to mean that.  To mean something with a
gesture and to say a gesture means something are two different things.
Someone's playing is just that: playing.  It doesn't have to mean
anything.

If they say "our playing represents subliminated cries of homosexual
yearning" we could think, okay, i hear you, because they played it, and in
some sense, they are a good authority on what they played it for.  We
still might doubt them, or find it irrelevant to our perception. But they
get a little credence just for being the players.  Then when someone else
says it, and we don't HEAR it that way, they have to explain it a little,
or set it up, because it seems like they are using the playing to mean
something, whereas the musician can just play without saying a damn thing.

You don't have to have any reason to play music, but you do have to have a
reason for saying it means something.  Then we can argue about the
reasons.  That's a better place to separate out the homophobia.


konrad

^Z



- -

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

Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 22:30:46 -0300
From: mwoodwor <[e-mail]>
Subject: prince/test results

well for anyone who is interested - grand total in the Prince vs. TEST
question I posed a couple of days ago for who I should go see on one
particular evening during the Montreal jazz fest -
A whopping 14 votes (emailed to the group or privately) for Prince and 0 for
TEST, although one person ripped apart
Prince, yet didn't say go see TEST -  I decided on Prince and so off I
go...... HOpefully it will end in time for me to see the 2nd set of TEST.

Question 'music related"  -can anyone rec. some good software that I can
download off of the net for burning CD's  - besides Nero???  Thanks for the
advice

w
NP Morton Feldman - For Philip Guston Volume 2.


- -

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

Date: Sun, 13 May 2001 22:47:07 -0400
From: "Steve Smith" <[e-mail]>
Subject: RE: more fag stuff

I appreciate your point, and yes, of course, music (and all other art
besides) does not exist in a vacuum.  It's great to discuss context.  But at
a certain point, I think there's a danger when a
writer/scholar/critic/whatever imposes his or her own "take" on the intended
meaning of a work.  It's one thing to infer the hidden messages in
Shostakovich as regards Stalinism or the secret agenda behind Berg's Lyric
Suite, because we have plenty of contemporary historical insight into the
contexts for those inferences.  We *know* that Shostakovich was operating in
an oppressive atmosphere.  We *know* that Berg was coding an illicit and
star-crossed love affair into his composition.

But to take into consideration, once again, the Mingus/Dolphy example, there
is absolutely no precedent or context, historical or otherwise, for making
that leap.  We *do* know that in at least one example there is an almost
explicitly vocalized duo passage between the two that "re-enacts" the moment
that Dolphy told Mingus that he was leaving the band - that's part of the
historical record, and it's easy to hear.  But what is the point of making
the further leap that there was some kind of sublimated sexual content?
What does it serve?  On what foundation is it based?  In that case, it's
speculative and specious.  Much the same could be said of the whole "Miles
as Pimp" essay in today's Times - holding the "pimp" up as an iconic part of
American black experience, and then arguing that this was the exemplar of
what Miles was trying to achieve.  It's degrading and ultimately worthless.

It's vital to consider the authorial context in considering a work of art
deeply.  But what's the point of inventing a context to suit an agenda?  Who
benefits?  What do we learn by such suppositions and leaps of logic and
fact?  We could sit here all day and make sweeping pronouncements about the
quality of Zorn's character as reflected by the various unpleasant and
unsavory aspects of his art and the way in which he packages it.  We could
make claims that he's into bondage and pedophilia, and we could probably
even support it with concrete musical examples with which we can seeimgly
illustrate our every assertion.  But unless we have the facts to back up
such suppositions, what point would it serve?

Steve Smith
[e-mail]
NP - Peter Maxwell Davies, 'Time and the Raven,' Royal Phil/Maxwell Davies
(Collins)


- -

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

End of Zorn List Digest V3 #423
*******************************


 To unsubscribe from zorn-list-digest, send an email to
       "[e-mail]"
 with
       "unsubscribe zorn-list-digest"
 in the body of the message.

 For information on digests or retrieving files and old messages send
 "help" to the same address.  Do not use quotes in your message.

 A non-digest (direct mail) version of this list is also available; to
 subscribe to that instead, replace all instances of "zorn-list-digest"
 in the commands above with "zorn-list".

 Back issues are available for anonymous FTP from ftp.xmission.com, in
 pub/lists/zorn-list/archive.  These are organized by date.

 Problems? Email the list owner at [e-mail]