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-----Original Message-----
From: Jim Morrison <jim_morrison@SPRYNET.COM> To: F_MINOR@email.rutgers.edu <F_MINOR@email.rutgers.edu> Date: Sunday, February 16, 2003 2:14 PM Subject: Re: review of Gould's Brahms Hey, now you're sounding like John
Cage!
Jim Hey, no need
to get insulting!
Musical minimalism is a style choice,
and de gustibus non est disputandum (or chacon a san gout,
whatever).
But my complaint is a logical thing.
Why use words to waste a half-hour reading, when you could just plunk the darn
thing on the Victrola and hear for yourself what it is ... not a description in
some other medium of what someone else thought it was?
Of course I'm threatening to extinct
f_minor itself, which exists to use words to describe music.
It used to be a little different when I
was a notorious vagrant and layabout on Internet Relay Chat
and Napster (both part of the Axis of
Musical Evil), because at the drop of a hat, you could upload and download an
.mp3 of the Res Ipse and within minutes escape from Word Prison entirely. It
would be Fun, I think, if within the bounds of respecting intellectual property,
we, too, could trade short samples of music -- for example, to illustrate some
technical point about composition or keyboard playing for musical ignorami like
moi.
About the only WORDS about music which
I think have really enlightened and thrilled me nearly as much as the music
itself are Douglas Hofstadter's essays about Chopin and Bach. His thoroughly
humanistic and aesthetic but mathematical microscope just opened up huge vistas
of new understanding and challenging ideas to me -- unlike most traditional
music reviewers who just don't seem to tell me anything I couldn't have heard
for myself.
Anyway, here's a closely related
thought, from Frank Zappa:
"Most rock journalism is people
who can't write interviewing people who can't talk for people who can't
read."
Elmer
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