Mclaren-ionian: Difference between revisions

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While Schoenbergian-Boulezian-Stockhausenian hyperrational music withered on the vine and died, pop rock kept getting stronger and stronger—because it did not deny the wild frenzy and no-limits abandon that underlies the visceral gut experience of music.

Those serious composers who have survived the test of time and whose reputations continue to grow—composers like Conlon Nancarrow and Harry ~~Partch—understood~~ this. They explicitly embraced the power of intuition and ritual in their music. There is a strong element of the irrational, of the magical invocation, of the unseen presence of nameless frenzy, behind Conlon Nancarrow's middle and later piano studies and in all of Harry Partch's large theater pieces. It is in this context and at this culminant crux of music history that I have made my case for a combination of both the Dionysian and the Apollonian extremes in music.

Those serious composers who have survived the test of time and whose reputations continue to grow—composers like [[Conlon Nancarrow]] and [[Harry Partch]]—understood this. They explicitly embraced the power of intuition and ritual in their music. There is a strong element of the irrational, of the magical invocation, of the unseen presence of nameless frenzy, behind Conlon Nancarrow's middle and later piano studies and in all of Harry Partch's large theater pieces. It is in this context and at this culminant crux of music history that I have made my case for a combination of both the Dionysian and the Apollonian extremes in music.

Consider, for a moment, the contemporary German government's policy of prohibiting neo-Nazi groups from registering on the ballot. What the Weimar government of Germany never understood in the 1920s is that there must be limits to freedom in the sense that there cannot be freedom to oppose freedom. The modern German government understands this, to its vast credit. If the German government had arrested Hitler and his cronies and shot them in 1928, we might never have had WW II. There cannot be liberty to oppose liberty. There cannot be tolerance for an official policy of intolerance toward any who do not march to some prescribed party line.

Line 55:

It has already failed.

Dionysian chaos is boiling up from the musical underground despite the best efforts of the musical establishment. Microtonality has always been a part of Western music, since before the Greek enharmonic genus with its built-in microtone, since before the Montpelier Codex with its microtonal motets, since before Costeley wrote his chromatic chanson in 19 tone equal temperament in the 1560s. Yet where, throughout academia of the so-called "serious" music journals, will you find this information?

Dionysian chaos is boiling up from the musical underground despite the best efforts of the musical establishment. Microtonality has always been a part of Western music, since before the Greek enharmonic genus with its built-in microtone, since before the Montpelier Codex with its microtonal motets, since before Costeley wrote his chromatic chanson in [[19edo|19 tone equal temperament]] in the 1560s. Yet where, throughout academia of the so-called "serious" music journals, will you find this information?

This, ladies and gentlemen, in what happens when composers and music theorists confine themselves to the repressed, sanitized, anal-retentive world of the WASP ruling class. The gobbledygook of "source sets" and "vector projections" and "hexachord inversions" might play big in the fluorescent-lighted beige-carpeted squeaky-clean walls of the academic ivory tower, but that is not where the primal power of music lurks nowadays. Wade into a mosh pit. The sweat and dark abandon and extemporaneous frenzy of the DJ, who uses digital samplers and digital effects side-by-side with two-turntable setups to mix on-the-fly the latest dance music...this is where the Dionysian power of music can be found today. Not at IRCAM. Not in Lincoln Center. In the churches where Johnny Reinhard performs with his American Festival of Microtonal Music In Denny Genovese's concerts. Not in the musty museum called the New York Philharmonic.

This, ladies and gentlemen, in what happens when composers and music theorists confine themselves to the repressed, sanitized, anal-retentive world of the WASP ruling class. The gobbledygook of "source sets" and "vector projections" and "hexachord inversions" might play big in the fluorescent-lighted beige-carpeted squeaky-clean walls of the academic ivory tower, but that is not where the primal power of music lurks nowadays. Wade into a mosh pit. The sweat and dark abandon and extemporaneous frenzy of the DJ, who uses digital samplers and digital effects side-by-side with two-turntable setups to mix on-the-fly the latest dance music...this is where the Dionysian power of music can be found today. Not at IRCAM. Not in Lincoln Center. In the churches where [[Johnny Reinhard]] performs with his American Festival of Microtonal Music In [[Denny Genovese]]'s concerts. Not in the musty museum called the New York Philharmonic.

Academic music theorists seem to believe that humans are clockwork automatons with tiny calculators whirring inside their ears doing rational calculations to determine source sets and transpositions.

Line 73:

The Dionysian elements in music are beginning to re-emerge...Harry Partch effort's are of a kind with the primal frenzy of the mosh pits and the "summer of love" wildly celebrated throughout Britain in the rave festivals of the late 1980s. (To which the Thatcher and Major governments over-reacted with such bizarre excess that they merely increased the impetus of the movement.) Music students hunger for an acoustical feast but the music schools continue to serve them a diet of ashes...the desiccated nihilism of Cage, the sterile double-entry bookkeeping of Babbitt and Forte and Boulez. Everything exalted and ennobling, every hint of transcendence and epiphany and apotheosis, has been befouled for today's music students by their 12-tone-obsessed music professors—few of whom deserve the name "teacher." These so-called professors are uniformly ignorant of the vast breadth of musical history—they have nary an inkling of the Dionysian power and sweep of the many intonational traditions which energized Greek and Babylonian and Renaissance musics.

Nonetheless, this will change. Despite all the efforts of the current generation of 12-tone-obsessed academic music theorists, the sacred 12 tones are already losing sway over music. History proves it. Intonation has changed many times throughout the course of Western music, and it will change many times again. Time and again one particular tuning has been proclaimed as "the end of musical history." Yet time and again, that tuning was swept away by the currents of history. Just intonation, Pythagorean tuning, meantone, and now 12 tone equal temperament. The old outworn ideals of modernism have been cast off by today's composers. Audiences, with overwhelming unanimity, have rejected late modernist theories and compositions. Today music exists in a state of chaos, waiting for a new paradigm to be born. Microtonality might be part of this renascence (not to say renaissance) of post-modern music, or it might not.

Nonetheless, this will change. Despite all the efforts of the current generation of [[12edo|12-tone]]-obsessed academic music theorists, the sacred 12 tones are already losing sway over music. History proves it. Intonation has changed many times throughout the course of Western music, and it will change many times again. Time and again one particular tuning has been proclaimed as "the end of musical history." Yet time and again, that tuning was swept away by the currents of history. [[Just intonation]], [[Pythagorean tuning]], [[meantone]], and now 12 tone equal temperament. The old outworn ideals of modernism have been cast off by today's composers. Audiences, with overwhelming unanimity, have rejected late modernist theories and compositions. Today music exists in a state of chaos, waiting for a new paradigm to be born. Microtonality might be part of this renascence (not to say renaissance) of post-modern music, or it might not.

The persistent efforts of all too many of the predominantly male predominantly verbal predominantly right-brain predominantly rationalist hyperintellectual susbcribers to this tuning forum are a bad omen. Alas, all too many composers still seem hell-bent on turning microtonality into the same sterile hyperrationalist desert of numbers and theories and crabbed callow critiques of critiques of critiques that modernist 12-tet serialism turned into... Kiddies, this numbers-ueber-alles effort in microtonality is just more of the same. Just another effort to nail the pendulum to the end of the arc of Appollonian hyperrationality. We've had enough of that. 40 years of this kind of denial of the darkly mysterious and the primal, of the frenzied and the elementally Bacchic in music, is more than enough. Been there, done that. It's over, kiddies. Toast. Stick a fork in it: it's done.

The rebirth of music from the sterile gloomy Mutual-Assured-Destruction Balance of Terror nihilism of modernist 12-tet theory is beginning worldwide, everywhere. Denny Genovese's World Music ensemble celebrates the primal mysteries of music; as do Dean Drummond's recreations of Partch's "corporeal" spectacles. Warren Burt's explorations of the mysterious patterns which lurk inside the transcendental number pi and Julius O. Smith's and Chris Chafe's deconstruction of string instrument synthesis into recirculating digital filter theory and self-similar IIR physical modeling paradigms are of a piece. Pierre-Jean Croset's celebrations of the harmonic series on his lyra instrument and Franz Richter Herf's breakthrough into a new world of sound based on 72-tone equal temperament are part of the same joyous kicking-over of the modernist musical chessboard.

The rebirth of music from the sterile gloomy Mutual-Assured-Destruction Balance of Terror nihilism of modernist 12-tet theory is beginning worldwide, everywhere. Denny Genovese's World Music ensemble celebrates the primal mysteries of music; as do [[Dean Drummond]]'s recreations of Partch's "corporeal" spectacles. [[Warren Burt]]'s explorations of the mysterious patterns which lurk inside the transcendental number [[pi]] and [[Julius O. Smith]]'s and [[Chris Chafe]]'s deconstruction of string instrument synthesis into recirculating digital filter theory and self-similar IIR physical modeling paradigms are of a piece. [[Pierre-Jean Croset]]'s celebrations of the harmonic series on his lyra instrument and [[Franz Richter Herf]]'s breakthrough into a new world of sound based on [[72edo|72-tone equal temperament]] are part of the same joyous kicking-over of the modernist musical chessboard.

The stunted and monochromatic minds who have carried on the dead musical tradition of Boulez and Babbitt, Cage and Stockhausen have forgotten a crucial fact. The Enlightenment, which gave birth to rationalism and the modern scientific method, was never meant to imprison the soul, but rather to liberate it. The ability to tread the ridge between the Dionysian and the Apollonian is a skill which has been lost. Harry Partch's music theory and his compositions revived this skill with nonpariel power: while Harry's sensual dramatical/musical spectacles celebrated light, color and movement, his musical system celebrates the Apollonian play of pure number and permutation on a 2-dimensional utonal/otonal diamond. Rock 'n roll by itself is not the future of 21st century music: the purely Dionysian cannot sustain itself any more than the purely Apollonian. Complete abandon leads to madness and self-destruction, as Euripides pointed out in The Bacchae. The most famous rock stars die young, and most rock bands are one-hit wonders. Neither pure reason nor pure sensualism is by itself adequate for a living vibrant music: Western music in the 21st century demands a combination of both. This interplay between the Ionian respect for the senses with the Pythagorean/Platonic worship of reason is all too rare in modern music. It is rare because pushing music to the Appollonian extreme amputated its soul and instead of lifting music to the stars, mired it in a tarpit of cold deaf numbers. Because North Americans and Europeans live in a culture dominated by the puritanical anal-retentive sky god ethos, rediscovering the primal mystery of music will not be easy. Some of you will balk at this. It might seem indeed a bizarre irony that someone trained in physics would espouse such a thing: but learning to solve nonlinear partial differential equations does confer the knowledge that the frontal lobes are sharply circumscribed in their capacity to encompass nature.

@@ Line 47: / Line 47: @@
 While Schoenbergian-Boulezian-Stockhausenian hyperrational music withered on the vine and died, pop rock kept getting stronger and stronger—because it did not deny the wild frenzy and no-limits abandon that underlies the visceral gut experience of music.
-Those serious composers who have survived the test of time and whose reputations continue to grow—composers like Conlon Nancarrow and Harry Partch—understood this. They explicitly embraced the power of intuition and ritual in their music. There is a strong element of the irrational, of the magical invocation, of the unseen presence of nameless frenzy, behind Conlon Nancarrow's middle and later piano studies and in all of Harry Partch's large theater pieces. It is in this context and at this culminant crux of music history that I have made my case for a combination of both the Dionysian and the Apollonian extremes in music.
+Those serious composers who have survived the test of time and whose reputations continue to grow—composers like [[Conlon Nancarrow]] and [[Harry Partch]]—understood this. They explicitly embraced the power of intuition and ritual in their music. There is a strong element of the irrational, of the magical invocation, of the unseen presence of nameless frenzy, behind Conlon Nancarrow's middle and later piano studies and in all of Harry Partch's large theater pieces. It is in this context and at this culminant crux of music history that I have made my case for a combination of both the Dionysian and the Apollonian extremes in music.
 Consider, for a moment, the contemporary German government's policy of prohibiting neo-Nazi groups from registering on the ballot. What the Weimar government of Germany never understood in the 1920s is that there must be limits to freedom in the sense that there cannot be freedom to oppose freedom. The modern German government understands this, to its vast credit. If the German government had arrested Hitler and his cronies and shot them in 1928, we might never have had WW II. There cannot be liberty to oppose liberty. There cannot be tolerance for an official policy of intolerance toward any who do not march to some prescribed party line.
@@ Line 55: / Line 55: @@
 It has already failed.
-Dionysian chaos is boiling up from the musical underground despite the best efforts of the musical establishment. Microtonality has always been a part of Western music, since before the Greek enharmonic genus with its built-in microtone, since before the Montpelier Codex with its microtonal motets, since before Costeley wrote his chromatic chanson in 19 tone equal temperament in the 1560s. Yet where, throughout academia of the so-called "serious" music journals, will you find this information?
+Dionysian chaos is boiling up from the musical underground despite the best efforts of the musical establishment. Microtonality has always been a part of Western music, since before the Greek enharmonic genus with its built-in microtone, since before the Montpelier Codex with its microtonal motets, since before Costeley wrote his chromatic chanson in [[19edo|19 tone equal temperament]] in the 1560s. Yet where, throughout academia of the so-called "serious" music journals, will you find this information?
-This, ladies and gentlemen, in what happens when composers and music theorists confine themselves to the repressed, sanitized, anal-retentive world of the WASP ruling class. The gobbledygook of "source sets" and "vector projections" and "hexachord inversions" might play big in the fluorescent-lighted beige-carpeted squeaky-clean walls of the academic ivory tower, but that is not where the primal power of music lurks nowadays. Wade into a mosh pit. The sweat and dark abandon and extemporaneous frenzy of the DJ, who uses digital samplers and digital effects side-by-side with two-turntable setups to mix on-the-fly the latest dance music...this is where the Dionysian power of music can be found today. Not at IRCAM. Not in Lincoln Center. In the churches where Johnny Reinhard performs with his American Festival of Microtonal Music In Denny Genovese's concerts. Not in the musty museum called the New York Philharmonic.
+This, ladies and gentlemen, in what happens when composers and music theorists confine themselves to the repressed, sanitized, anal-retentive world of the WASP ruling class. The gobbledygook of "source sets" and "vector projections" and "hexachord inversions" might play big in the fluorescent-lighted beige-carpeted squeaky-clean walls of the academic ivory tower, but that is not where the primal power of music lurks nowadays. Wade into a mosh pit. The sweat and dark abandon and extemporaneous frenzy of the DJ, who uses digital samplers and digital effects side-by-side with two-turntable setups to mix on-the-fly the latest dance music...this is where the Dionysian power of music can be found today. Not at IRCAM. Not in Lincoln Center. In the churches where [[Johnny Reinhard]] performs with his American Festival of Microtonal Music In [[Denny Genovese]]'s concerts. Not in the musty museum called the New York Philharmonic.
 Academic music theorists seem to believe that humans are clockwork automatons with tiny calculators whirring inside their ears doing rational calculations to determine source sets and transpositions.
@@ Line 73: / Line 73: @@
 The Dionysian elements in music are beginning to re-emerge...Harry Partch effort's are of a kind with the primal frenzy of the mosh pits and the "summer of love" wildly celebrated throughout Britain in the rave festivals of the late 1980s. (To which the Thatcher and Major governments over-reacted with such bizarre excess that they merely increased the impetus of the movement.) Music students hunger for an acoustical feast but the music schools continue to serve them a diet of ashes...the desiccated nihilism of Cage, the sterile double-entry bookkeeping of Babbitt and Forte and Boulez. Everything exalted and ennobling, every hint of transcendence and epiphany and apotheosis, has been befouled for today's music students by their 12-tone-obsessed music professors—few of whom deserve the name "teacher." These so-called professors are uniformly ignorant of the vast breadth of musical history—they have nary an inkling of the Dionysian power and sweep of the many intonational traditions which energized Greek and Babylonian and Renaissance musics.
-Nonetheless, this will change. Despite all the efforts of the current generation of 12-tone-obsessed academic music theorists, the sacred 12 tones are already losing sway over music. History proves it. Intonation has changed many times throughout the course of Western music, and it will change many times again. Time and again one particular tuning has been proclaimed as "the end of musical history." Yet time and again, that tuning was swept away by the currents of history. Just intonation, Pythagorean tuning, meantone, and now 12 tone equal temperament. The old outworn ideals of modernism have been cast off by today's composers. Audiences, with overwhelming unanimity, have rejected late modernist theories and compositions. Today music exists in a state of chaos, waiting for a new paradigm to be born. Microtonality might be part of this renascence (not to say renaissance) of post-modern music, or it might not.
+Nonetheless, this will change. Despite all the efforts of the current generation of [[12edo|12-tone]]-obsessed academic music theorists, the sacred 12 tones are already losing sway over music. History proves it. Intonation has changed many times throughout the course of Western music, and it will change many times again. Time and again one particular tuning has been proclaimed as "the end of musical history." Yet time and again, that tuning was swept away by the currents of history. [[Just intonation]], [[Pythagorean tuning]], [[meantone]], and now 12 tone equal temperament. The old outworn ideals of modernism have been cast off by today's composers. Audiences, with overwhelming unanimity, have rejected late modernist theories and compositions. Today music exists in a state of chaos, waiting for a new paradigm to be born. Microtonality might be part of this renascence (not to say renaissance) of post-modern music, or it might not.
 The persistent efforts of all too many of the predominantly male predominantly verbal predominantly right-brain predominantly rationalist hyperintellectual susbcribers to this tuning forum are a bad omen. Alas, all too many composers still seem hell-bent on turning microtonality into the same sterile hyperrationalist desert of numbers and theories and crabbed callow critiques of critiques of critiques that modernist 12-tet serialism turned into... Kiddies, this numbers-ueber-alles effort in microtonality is just more of the same. Just another effort to nail the pendulum to the end of the arc of Appollonian hyperrationality. We've had enough of that. 40 years of this kind of denial of the darkly mysterious and the primal, of the frenzied and the elementally Bacchic in music, is more than enough. Been there, done that. It's over, kiddies. Toast. Stick a fork in it: it's done.
-The rebirth of music from the sterile gloomy Mutual-Assured-Destruction Balance of Terror nihilism of modernist 12-tet theory is beginning worldwide, everywhere. Denny Genovese's World Music ensemble celebrates the primal mysteries of music; as do Dean Drummond's recreations of Partch's "corporeal" spectacles. Warren Burt's explorations of the mysterious patterns which lurk inside the transcendental number pi and Julius O. Smith's and Chris Chafe's deconstruction of string instrument synthesis into recirculating digital filter theory and self-similar IIR physical modeling paradigms are of a piece. Pierre-Jean Croset's celebrations of the harmonic series on his lyra instrument and Franz Richter Herf's breakthrough into a new world of sound based on 72-tone equal temperament are part of the same joyous kicking-over of the modernist musical chessboard.
+The rebirth of music from the sterile gloomy Mutual-Assured-Destruction Balance of Terror nihilism of modernist 12-tet theory is beginning worldwide, everywhere. Denny Genovese's World Music ensemble celebrates the primal mysteries of music; as do [[Dean Drummond]]'s recreations of Partch's "corporeal" spectacles. [[Warren Burt]]'s explorations of the mysterious patterns which lurk inside the transcendental number [[pi]] and [[Julius O. Smith]]'s and [[Chris Chafe]]'s deconstruction of string instrument synthesis into recirculating digital filter theory and self-similar IIR physical modeling paradigms are of a piece. [[Pierre-Jean Croset]]'s celebrations of the harmonic series on his lyra instrument and [[Franz Richter Herf]]'s breakthrough into a new world of sound based on [[72edo|72-tone equal temperament]] are part of the same joyous kicking-over of the modernist musical chessboard.
 The stunted and monochromatic minds who have carried on the dead musical tradition of Boulez and Babbitt, Cage and Stockhausen have forgotten a crucial fact. The Enlightenment, which gave birth to rationalism and the modern scientific method, was never meant to imprison the soul, but rather to liberate it. The ability to tread the ridge between the Dionysian and the Apollonian is a skill which has been lost. Harry Partch's music theory and his compositions revived this skill with nonpariel power: while Harry's sensual dramatical/musical spectacles celebrated light, color and movement, his musical system celebrates the Apollonian play of pure number and permutation on a 2-dimensional utonal/otonal diamond. Rock 'n roll by itself is not the future of 21st century music: the purely Dionysian cannot sustain itself any more than the purely Apollonian. Complete abandon leads to madness and self-destruction, as Euripides pointed out in The Bacchae. The most famous rock stars die young, and most rock bands are one-hit wonders. Neither pure reason nor pure sensualism is by itself adequate for a living vibrant music: Western music in the 21st century demands a combination of both. This interplay between the Ionian respect for the senses with the Pythagorean/Platonic worship of reason is all too rare in modern music. It is rare because pushing music to the Appollonian extreme amputated its soul and instead of lifting music to the stars, mired it in a tarpit of cold deaf numbers. Because North Americans and Europeans live in a culture dominated by the puritanical anal-retentive sky god ethos, rediscovering the primal mystery of music will not be easy. Some of you will balk at this. It might seem indeed a bizarre irony that someone trained in physics would espouse such a thing: but learning to solve nonlinear partial differential equations does confer the knowledge that the frontal lobes are sharply circumscribed in their capacity to encompass nature.