I have never been able to write off the history of organizational music of the Western world, as I doubt anyone else has. But I think Cage’s obvious contribution here was to bring to light the fact that this hyper-organization was only one expression, perhaps in the most restricted form of such expression, of the lived music around us. The extent to which noise, disharmony, and ambiance have pervaded Western (popular) music in the latter part of Cage’s life is a testament to the power of this thinking. Cage foresaw the coming of the synthetic age, the ambient movement, the “noise” movement, cut-ups, radiophonic experimentation, and the necessary completion they provide to the already-fruitful composed musical cultures.
The above quote is from a nice piece of writing over at Mighty Shocks. He also has some comments about how Cage and post-Cage music relates to Zen practice and meditation about which I have serious reservations. Despite that, it is an excellent essay that I recommend to everyone.
When I first started this blog I was posting music I created on Ableton. The reason that I haven’t done more of that is because the program began crashing on me on a regular basis. In fact it got worse and worse, and eventually trying to make the most basic adjustments caused crashes. So I’ve given up on Ableton. I’m going to look into how well Logic works out in a bit, it seems like a lot of producers I admire have good things to say about it, so that’s encouraging.
Probably the most weird and stupid thing about the world today is that we don’t have awesome music making programs on smart phones. What’s up with that?
I admire a lot of electronic music. The more technology you use, the more chances of failure are possible. So people that are able to overcome these types of obstacles deserve respect, but there’s also a virtue to folk & acoustic music, which has less opportunities for failure.
The financial crisis indicated that human society has not determined how to properly evaluate risk. Is it better to play it safe and do what works, or seek out ambitions that may result in catastrophe?
Similarly, with novels one could create short, concise works of arts, all polished & pristine, without a flaw in sight. But then there are also the authors that write big, sprawling novels, totally messy, chaotic, unable to be tamed into some kind of orderly thing.
Footage of Thurston Moore listening to music by the recently deceased Maryanne Amacher. I find the honesty of this video incredible. You have a performer and a listener, and that’s it. Music is the mystery of the cosmos that exists between those two entities.
Ben Tausig on the problems with best music of the year/decade/etc. lists:
For another thing, and I apologize if this causes tsunamis and solar flares, but albums aren’t the only way people listen to music. This is not wild-eyed technological optimism, nor a denunciation of communities where the album format still obtains. There are just so many different outlets for hearing exciting things. I would personally be much more curious, for example, to read a smart writer’s “10 best YouTube musical compositions of 2009” or “10 best songs obviously written to be ringtones” or “10 best bands from the early 1980’s I heard for the first time this year” than his or her best albums of 2009 list, if only because there is no preexisting consensus for the former three. The further a list’s conceptual underpinnings are extended, the less we can anticipate its contents, and the more likely we are to receive it as useful information rather than an argument crafted, essentially, by rearranging a bunch of checkers.
I don’t have anything else to add to that really. Thinking about music as chronology, although somewhat necessary, has its limits. Music as evolution is interrupted by the recording device, where the past becomes the present and the future. The amen break is just a 5 second transition in 1969. In 1999 it has been an entire genre of music. I like albums, and I like people talking about music they like, but at the end of the decade canons seem more unimportant than ever before. Let the sound of a thousand sound systems boom.
Three gods A, B, and C are called, in some order, True, False, and Random. True always speaks truly, False always speaks falsely, but whether Random speaks truly or falsely is a completely random matter. Your task is to determine the identities of A, B, and C by asking three yes-no questions; each question must be put to exactly one god. The gods understand English, but will answer all questions in their own language, in which the words for yes and no are ‘da’ and ‘ja’, in some order. You do not know which word means which.