Skip Heller wrote:
-- being able to play means being able to project your ideas on you
instrument, and having enough tecvhnique to do it cleanly and consistently....you're either doing it real good or not. It's more like arranging, and there's a lot of technique involved in arranging....Assembling music is not easy....You need precision..... Constant precision -- regardless of media -- is chops. It's about hitting your mark reliably, and nobody ever had a better batting average for this than the Ramones, who I think had the perfect technique for all time.
Skip, I don't like the way you've overdetermined what constitutes "technique", it's like you're courting predictability or manageability of aesthetics. Reliable? Who wants music that is "reliably" "precise", in just about _any_ sense of that word? I personally don't need more than a short tape of Ramones precisely because they were so, um, "reliable". Nothing is wrong with an artist basically doing one thing, workkking with one vocabulary, and even then with a vocabulary that she didn't invent, but refining is refining, and the examples Biill gave (SachikoM and John Wall) would seem to me to be pretty far from refining, more about defining. As they define what can be done with their chosen materials, they are establishing the very grounds of what is "good" and what "isn't". Aren't you saying that something is done well or it isn't, and pretty much falls on the spectrum, from the get-go, from the moment someone's ears receive it? I don't think it's decided like that. Gene Ammons was good because of the tradition he was working within, and the way his abundant personality just burst its walls in hurry to get out of that horn; John Hartford and Bill Evans were wonderful because of the way they made acceptable and even natural the "unnatural" way they bumped up against the inner membrane walls of their respective genres, allowed for cross-pollination from other places. SachikoM and John Wall work very similarly, with very few important differances, but among those differences, the implicit call for listeners to walk to tightrope, with little to hold on to. It's confrontation in a way, where the initial, natural response of the listener is, "I don't even know if this is music or not, much less whether it is good. By the way, what is "good"? What do I mean by that?" Then, of course, it's a short jump to "What does ANYONE mean by 'good'?" The effect, at its best, for me at least, is the euphoria of independence, it's that punk-ass feeling: total freedom to listen, clean ears, a form of baptism, taking that first breath back above the surface. Really bad experimental music (IMHO) makes me feel like I'm being lectured. Speaking of which, I'll shut up now, albeit with the last parting thought: I'm bothered by your view (as I received it) that in order to appreciate something's "precision", "reliability",and quality, in the context of it's technique, then something NEEDS to be codified from the get go. There is plenty of music that is interesting to listeners, esp. critical listeners, BECAUSE of its total lack of constancy in precision and unreliability in terms of cleanness. Furthermore, how on earth are we to know whether a person's ideas are effectively, much less cleanly and precisely, being comunicated in their music? We can't read their minds. Interference happens along the way, certainly between instrument and listener, btu also between perfromer and instrument. But you never actually said that music had to have technique. It just seems that when the T-word is used, it applies to widely-understood and codified systems of _techniques_. When we say "technique", we aren't just referring to a specific type of motion/approach/attack, we are speaking of a general body of such motions, we are referring to a person's entire method as judged against predetermined standards. But I'm pretty with your comments on arranging. They apply crucially to experimental composers like Bernhard Guenter, even more than they would to someone like Duke Ellington (whose experiments have had much longer to soak into our collective thinking). -----scott np: Edward Ka-Spel, KHATACLIMICI CHINA DOLL __________________________________________________ Do You Yahoo!? Sign up for SBC Yahoo! Dial - First Month Free http://sbc.yahoo.com