RE: [LAU] Re: That must suck. For me it's about beauty--musicisjustone path

On Thu, 2007-04-05 at 12:24 -0400, Ivica Ico Bukvic wrote: i know that elvis costello once said that talking about music was like dancing about architecture, but i see this as a good opportunity to rant about a similarity i see between music and architecture. in the middle part of the 20th century, there was a great explosion in both fields of people throwing aside old conventions about how (music|architecture) should be done. it turns out, 20-50 years later, that almost all of the architecture that was produced via these radical approaches is awful on any level except viewing it as abstract art, and even then, they are generally not among the great works of the 20th century. towards the end of the 20th century, christopher alexander started working on his book "a pattern language" which utterly contrasted with the radicalism of the century by attempting to look across cultures and time for architectural patterns that are repeated, used, loved, resilient and robust. rather than try to reinvent architecture from the ground up, he attempted to reach an understanding of what works, based on what people have done over hundreds or even thousands of years. i think it is fair to say that even in those countries in western europe that were once so gripped by the bauhaus and other architectural radicalists, architecture has returned to an attempt to fuse together the kinds of lessons that "a pattern language" documents with new technologies. this is a wildly different approach than the radicalists pursued, perhaps because it also comes without any agenda of social change. the results, to my taste, are all good: we get a wonderful fusion of the new and the old, with reverence and respect for what has worked for a very long time and for a lot of people, combined with excitement and energy drawn from new materials, new techniques and so forth. there are almost no john cages left in the architecture world anymore. gropius is out, gehry is in. in music, i think this started to happen in a similar way when the minimalists started to become visible. tired of endless dissonance and unemotional music, the early works by these composers tried to link together old ideas (rhythm, pattern, phase) with new sounds and techniques. within a few years, they had staged a revolution against 12 tone, serialist, aleatoric and stochastic composition, and were busy linking the old (perotin's early musical structures) with the new or newly discovered (ghanese drumming). the good stuff for me in contemporary composition isn't linked to a social agenda, nor is it attempting to radicalize a process that humans have participated in and refined for a very long time. rather, like alexander's work did for architects, it is taking in the best historical practices ("wow, people really do actually like melody, harmony and rhythm") and linking it with new sound generation and control techniques, new notions of performance, new notions of performance context and in some cases even a few new ideas :) don't anybody ask me for examples, because i'll embarass myself with 20 year old ones :) but check out the kinds of things that bang on a can, piano circus, kronos, the balanescu quartet and others have been doing for 10+ years, and you'll bump into the kind of stuff i mean. which is a long winded way of saying that i am left totally unmoved by almost every piece of "electro-acoustic music" i've ever heard at a contemporary music festival :)) --p