In Thomas Pynchon's short story, Entropy (1960), there's a jazz combo which takes the elimination of a chordal structure to the next step, eliminating actual sounds, and thinking the music instead.
Nathaniel Mackey's series of epistolary novels (starting with the astonishing Bedouin Hornbook have convinced me that when the writer has the chops there can be a verbal equivalent to the condition of music.
Personally, I'm skeptical of soundless music. 4'33" seems to be about as close as you can get to music without sound, but really it's just music constructed out of the audience's response to the absence of sound. (I suppose you could perform the piece in an empty sound studio and really have no sound, but I'm not convinced.) Cage is just experimenting with ways to notate reality.
(Coming in late, but isn't that what this type of non-structured conversation format is for?)
Much of conceptual art was all about process: the artist would describe what should be done, and it would be up to one or more others to execute that description. That sortof made the visual arts like the musical arts in that visual artists could create a score. The conceptual art "score" describes the activity to be performed by others.
Musical scores are most of the time a necessary evil. They only represent the art so that a performer is able to realize the music.
Couldn't, however, some of the fluxus-style music scores be considered non-aural music? The art is in their creative description. In fact, I remember seeing a Cage score IIRC at the Frick in NYC. It really stood on its own.
(And thanks for they Pynchon reference. I have yet to read Slow Learner.)
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4 comments:
In Thomas Pynchon's short story, Entropy (1960), there's a jazz combo which takes the elimination of a chordal structure to the next step, eliminating actual sounds, and thinking the music instead.
Nathaniel Mackey's series of epistolary novels (starting with the astonishing Bedouin Hornbook have convinced me that when the writer has the chops there can be a verbal equivalent to the condition of music.
Personally, I'm skeptical of soundless music. 4'33" seems to be about as close as you can get to music without sound, but really it's just music constructed out of the audience's response to the absence of sound. (I suppose you could perform the piece in an empty sound studio and really have no sound, but I'm not convinced.) Cage is just experimenting with ways to notate reality.
I'll bite, in the spirit of de-lurking....
I'll say "True."
Honestly, I really don't care. This sounds an awful lot like those "What Is Art?" conversations I hate so bad.
(Coming in late, but isn't that what this type of non-structured conversation format is for?)
Much of conceptual art was all about process: the artist would describe what should be done, and it would be up to one or more others to execute that description. That sortof made the visual arts like the musical arts in that visual artists could create a score. The conceptual art "score" describes the activity to be performed by others.
Musical scores are most of the time a necessary evil. They only represent the art so that a performer is able to realize the music.
Couldn't, however, some of the fluxus-style music scores be considered non-aural music? The art is in their creative description. In fact, I remember seeing a Cage score IIRC at the Frick in NYC. It really stood on its own.
(And thanks for they Pynchon reference. I have yet to read Slow Learner.)
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