Privatizing Profit, Socializing Risk

"We should not try to return to ‘business as usual’. It is business as usual which has got us into the mess. What we need is a paradigm shift. We cannot simply return to the old mixed economy, balancing the rampant follies of the so-called free market with appropriate government ownership and intervention. We must address the underlying issues. Behind the sudden new squeals for help from the very rich we must listen to the long-term cries from the very poor."
-NT Wright (You can read the full text of the speech on the Empire Remixed blog).

Amazing how quickly those cries get answered isn't it? Corporations, banks, and financiers start floundering because of their own greed and stupidity... and it's the one crisis that governments all over the world actually respond to -- and quickly. Debt relief? Global warming? AIDS in Africa? Nah.

Existential Angst and Cute Dim-Witted Dogs

I swear I laughed at loud at every panel of this comic.
(Click on it to enlarge it).

Artistic Voices (Assembly as Authorship)

We make out of our quarrels with each other rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.
-Yeats

I write plays because dialogue is a more respectable way of contradicting yourself.
-Tom Stoppard

If you are too serious you are in danger of having everything taken at face value, instead of being allowed to have layers.
-Joanna Newsom

I don't know why people can't see entertainment and enlightenment as part of the same concept.
-Evan Rachel Wood

Most of our funniest songs are about the saddest moments in my life.
-Derek Malakian


A poet is by the very nature of things a man who lives with entire sincerity, or rather, the better his poetry the more sincere his life. His life is an experiment in living... while we honour those that die upon the field of battle, a man may show as reckless a courage in entering into the abyss of himself.
-Yeats

My best writing cannot exist without my worst self. Or so I say.
-Johann Kwan

I'm not anything to get terribly excited about, but I want people to listen to my problems.
-Chris Ludecke

Merry Christmas!

Courtesy of me, Joy Electric, and some painstaking Lego animator.

Girl vs. Woman

This is something my gir-- err, lover -- wrote up for me, after giving a good rant to me about it on the phone. It definitely made me pause and think; I trust it will the same for you!

I decided the other day that I would rather be called a woman than a girl. I think that calling adult women 'girls' infantilizes and disempowers us. A girl is a child, weak, impressionable, requiring parental supervision and guidance, unable to look after herself. A woman, on the other hand, is an adult, strong, competent, independent. A girl is somebody that a man can control; a woman is someone who can stand up to him, doesn't need him, and won't take his crap. When was the last time you saw a sign at a strip club that said "Women!?" You didn't, because they all say "Girls!"

I am not going to apologize or pretend that I am not what I am. I am a woman. I'm intelligent, educated, competent, I'm completely capable of taking care of both myself and, if need be, others, and I even have body hair. I'm not going to be horribly offended when somebody calls me a girl, but I think a culture that hesitates to call women what they are is one that is still afraid of what they are. I think that kicking the 'girl' habit is a small way of erasing the persistent paternalism that, at this point, really shouldn't be informing us any more (not like it ever should have to begin with, but we can't change that).

Over-the-Counterculture

I think this just might be my favourite sentence I've written so far. (Though I'm not sure that's saying much. For one thing it's only dubiously grammatical and definitely a little run-on, but I'm going to say that's for rhetorical effect).

"Today we live in a marketplace of identity, with people adopting a consumeristic attitude toward the construction of their greatest purchase — themselves — picking and choosing from the available styles, ideas, cultures, and spiritualities; customizing the details of each element to suit themselves; yet always remaining non-committal and un-affiliated, instantly discarding whatever element isn't appealing; individualism on crack, on steroids — 'it's all about me and what I want.' "

Railed the guy busy constructing an on-line identity via a blog.

(It originally occured near the end of Part 3 of my previously mentioned Deconstructing Religion post, in the section called 'Dipping a Toe in Postmodernity').

It's Done!

I finally killed it. (It almost killed me).

All the parts to my ' Deconstructing Religion ' post are finally done.

"For a while I wanted to be uploaded into an immortal machine intelligence when I died, but then immortal machine intelligences got all popular..."
(The character 'Hannelore' from Jeph Jacques's Questionable Content).

Melody and Avant-Garde Notational music

Okay. So I admit, one of the big reasons I want on that two-post rant about how 'classical music' is a really inappropriate term is so I could could post this, and not be annoyed by being forced to use dumb terms.

I came across this while reading an issue of Gramophone (an ironic name since they're a magazine devoted to what I call 'notational' music). It's two composers talking about the perils of using melody in modern notational music, and I found it interesting. In talking about why there's so little melody, so little tunes one can sing or hum, in modern/avant-garde notational music, they're getting right to the heart of why it's so 'hard' and inaccessible to most people, in a very practical way.

"I do admit to a sadness that we have almost lost the permission to include a tune that the world will remember in a contemporary concert composition... I don't think creative artists and certainly not many of the critical fraternity have really accepted the artistic consequences of social and political democracy. Most of our ideas of high art are still formed in a pre-democratic age -- when not many people had access to arts and culture. I wonder if we haven't got to make some sort of re-adjustment for the fact that many people now have access to music. Of course that audience -- those who perhaps haven't studied music deeply, but none the less love it -- is being catered to (I suppose you'd say that's what pop music's for, or musical theatre, or Raymond Gubbay concerts of favourite classics) but I just wonder whether there might be room for new composers to find something that will transcend these boundaries of taste and education.
"Having said that, I absolutely respect the right of every composer to write music they have to write. Composers stand somewhere in the spectrum of being explorers or magpies. Those who are called to explore and discover new sound worlds and new structures must do that. Those of us that are really magpies just gather sounds in the air from wherever they come and use them to just fill in their nest and make something of it. And I would like there to be a bit more permission for magpies."
- Choral composer John Rutter.

The other composer, Julian Anderson, had this theory that maybe in the wake of the two world wars, "idealism become discredited to a degree that immediate access to emotion of melody" was viewed with suspicion and could no longer be allowed. He said today, composers need to
get beyond this taboo, but without ignoring "the marvellous side of what came up between 1950 and 1970 [in avant-garde music] in terms of colour, harmony, texture, and so on."

(It was the March 2008 edition of Gramophone if you really must know, and the interview was called "Where are today's tunes?").

Notational Music and the Story of Harmony

In my last post I said that the fact the music is notated has had a defining impact on the music that we traditionally call 'classical.' (For some of the reasons why this is an inadequate and inappropriate name, see the last post). If we think about it as 'notational music' we are close to putting our finger on something essential about it; the fact it is written down has both formed and informed the music itself.

For example...
One of the unique things about music in general is how fleeting and intangible it is. It isn't like the visual arts, which produces art you can take in at a glance; there's nothing material about the sound itself that you can perceive or interact with. Music unfolds within time, structuring time even as it flows through it, all by means of distinct sound events linked by time, if nothing else.

Notation is a very powerful tool that allows you to visualize-conceptualize these 'sound events' (I'll oversimplify and call them 'notes' from now on) by mapping them onto a grid, reducing their placement in time to something you can see right in front of you. This makes it easy to see how each individual note interacts and relates to every other note that is occurring both simultaneously and sequentially (i.e. all the other notes happening at the same time, as well as before and after).

This visual representation allowed European musicians to conceive of the notion of harmony in the first place: first as several simultaneous melodies (polyphony - think of a fugue by Bach), then as chords progressing to some tonal goal, supporting a main melody (homophony - think of a Mozart sonata, where, for example a violin plays over piano chords). Without the device of notation, it would be near-impossible for one person to hold all the information in their head that makes up the harmony of even a relatively simple 'classical' piece. People that do memorize the full harmony of a simple piece (for example, a solo piano piece) can generally only do so because they have become so fluent with the notation that they have internalized it. They have basically memorized and internalized a series of rules and conventions of harmony that could not have developed independent of a means to write them down.

(A rough analogy: it's not that hard to imagine memorizing a play -- say a monologue -- but it's hard to imagine someone writing a whole play in their head. Or better yet, someone could, but it would probably be in verse, with a lot of repetition, rhyming, parallelism, and other mnemonic devices, like in the epic poems that bards from various cultures recite. It's impossible to imagine a whole genre of long prose plays developing without the medium of writing.)

So there we have it: notation made possible what is often called the distinctive development of Western music -- harmony. On the other hand, it also helps explain the traditional rhythmic deficiency of this notational music -- rhythms are easier to feel than they are to write. So while Europeans developed the art of combining simultaneous tones to high level through notation, cultures like those of India and Africa developed rhythm to great heights of complexity and dynamism through aural and oral means.

Notational Music

So what do you call music that's currently being produced by composers that are heirs the modern-day European classical music tradition (Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and friends)?

'Classical music' is just silly because there's nothing classical about it -- it's modern, contemporary music being made now, or in the past few years. It's also just plain confusing, because 'Classical' refers to a period in European music and art (painting, architecture, etc.) coming between the Baroque and the Romantic period. Properly speaking, Bach isn't a Classical musician; he's Baroque. Neither is late Beethoven; he's Romantic. (Mozart and Haydn are Classical).

'Art music ' is elitist. As if the only music that qualifies is 'art' is created by this very specific group, the educated elites of Euro-Western society.

'New music' betrays how narrow the listening interests of anyone using it are. It only makes sense if all you listen to is music from this genre.

Same thing with 'avant-garde.' Obviously, there's avant-garde music outside of this genre -- free jazz, 'pop' musicians like Captain Beefheart, Aphex Twin, and Yoko Ono (yes, gawdammit, some of us do like her music), maybe things like grindcore and even punk itself.

'Elite music' doesn't take into account the shift in our society from an aristocratic to a democratic model. Sure, fans and performers of this music are still disproportinately drawn from the ranks of the rich and best-educated, but it's -- at least in theory -- accessible to anyone.

Therefore, I propose the following term, after much thought and frustration with existing terms and ways of referring to this tradition:
Notational music. This term does not have any judgemental implications, and in simply describing how the music functions it is quite accurate and says something insightful about the music itself -- and the culture that surrounds its creation and performance. In other words, the fact that it is written down and transmitted through writing has a defining affect on it. (More about this in the next post). This distinguishes it from popular, folk, and jazz music, which may be written down, but for whom notation is never necessary, and which has never been central to how it is typically composed, learned, performed, criticized, or talked about.

It also distinguishes it from other elitest 'art' musics in other cultures, who sometimes use a form of notation, (China and Japan, for example), but for whom this writing is more a reminder than a recipe. No one will get a proper idea of what a piece of music sounds like without hearing it performed. But within the Western notational music genre, a piece is considered complete and self-sufficient when it has been written down for the first time by the composer. It does not necessarily need a performance to exist -- or be discussed and criticized -- though one would be nice. (Thus the habit of many of composers of quietly salting away pieces that don't receive performances for many years, if even in their lifetime).

Yep, notational music.
I'm sure it won't catch on.

If they did, then why can't we?

Chapter 11, Article 9 of the Japanese Constitution. "Aspiring sincerely to an international peace based on justice and order, the Japanese people forever renounce war as a sovereign right of the nation, or the threat or use of force as a means of settling disputes with other nations.
For the above purpose, land, sea, and air forces, as well as other war potential, will never be maintained. The right of belligerency of the State will not be recognized."

Why do you have to lose a war and get an atomic bomb dropped on you to institute such measures?

I'm old-fashioned

I still like to read the newspaper. Here's a few tidbits from today's edition of my daily rag of choice, the Ottawa Citizen.

"If you live in an electronic world... everything on screen in front of you has an egalitarian meaninglessness"
-Naomi Lakritz, commenting on those who watched Abraham Biggs commit suicide on a webcam.

"Vegans sneer at vegetarians the way nuns sneer at premarital virgins. Amateurs."
-columnist Jack Knox

"Teaching music doesn't work. Teaching the child to love music does work."
-Valery Lloyd-Watts, (retired concert pianist, Suzuki method proponent, and apparently one of Canada's Top 100 Most Powerful Women, according to a list that was just compiled)