on 7/6/02 7:00 AM, Bill Ashline at bashline@hotmail.com wrote:
Being able to "play" and being able to "make music" are not necessarily the same. Some who cannot "play" well according to the received definitions of playing can often have musical senses as compelling or better than the ones who "play" well.
That's such an awkward semantic to throw out there that it begs a re-think. The instruments have changed enough that being able to play means something different than it used to, although it really should boil down to the same thing -- being able to play means being able to project your ideas on you instrument, and having enough tecvhnique to do it cleanly and consistently. Since the music has changed so much, the instruments have had to as well. Techinque used to mean something a little different, like the ability to play a lot of notes in a short time. Something like this obviosuly does not apply to a musician like John Oswald, who can obviously play, or Terminator X, who also can obviously play. It's just that you can't play Chopin (or something similar) in a recital setting on their respective instruments (yet -- someone will find a way). Hell, there's not even a universally accepted system of notation for the performance of hip-hop, and that music and the whole slew of new techniques that came with it are twenty-some years old, and is the most recorded stuff in the world. We're past the post-Cage world and into the post-Prince Paul world. But you can tell the difference between Prince Paul and those not so adept as him, and I say that's cuz Prince Paul can PLAY. He can step up to his instrument and get the music across. His technique is spotless. But the music he generates isn't coming out of the aesthetic system as music used to. skip h