On Mon, Aug 30, 2010 at 4:39 PM, <fons@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > But yes, the early 20th century was surely a turning point in Western science > and culture - mathematics and physics went through a crisis and came out > stronger than ever, and in the arts - not only music - everything was turned > over and the outcome of this is still unsure. but mathematics and science's forward path is presumably in the direction of some kind of "truth", whether one believes in a platonic universe or not. in both cases, even if we cannot define "truth", we can establish metrics by which to judge the motion of math and science, the most obvious one being the simplistic test of "does it work better as a support for our manipulation of the physical world?" .... its not clear whether the arts have any forward trajectory at all, so trying to identify a particular period or a particular outcome as "ahead", "backwards", etc. seems a little odd. is the american minimalism of the late 1960s onwards progress compared to baroque counterpoint? is wagner progress compared to perotin? to me the most obvious thing that has happened to "music" since the mid-twentieth century is the fetishization of *sound* itself. adorno has quite a responsibility there, but his philosophical musings on this were supported and extended by composers across europe and the US, and have found a fertile breeding ground even within the context of modern popular music. most of the great art of humanity seems to me to have emerged from a dynamic in which chaos and control interact in very complex ways; the "serious art" of the late twentieth century seemed keen to see what would happen with more chaos and less control. but the "serious art" world is, thankfully, just one of many we have to choose from; as xenakis was messing around with stochastic music, cage with indeterminism, lots of people with serialism, stockhausen with whatever we want to call stockhausen's work and so forth, we had the jazz world, the world of carnatic music from india, african polyrhythmic music and many other traditions engaged in a continuation of the fine balance between chaos and control. we ended up with some absolutely awesome art, and it had very, very little to do with anything going on in the serious/academic world of "western art music", and very little to do with with fetishization of sound itself that seems to have been the hallmark of the western art music of the last 50-60 years. if i hear one more piece that wants me to marvel at the *SHEER JUXTAPOSITION* of this versus that, i think i'm going to scream. thankfully, we've got a generation fo composers now who haven't even read adorno, and feel free to draw their influences from an enormous, global selection. is this an eclectism that has "little power to survive", or a vibrant source of compost and nutrition for a field that would otherwise be on the verge of a monoculture die-off ? _______________________________________________ Linux-audio-user mailing list Linux-audio-user@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx http://lists.linuxaudio.org/listinfo/linux-audio-user
