Does Melody Even Matter??

[jancivil]

rhetorical question

[vurt]

[jancivil]

OTOH, some musicology focuses on what is going on in the music:
The Perception and Analysis of Rhythmic Archetypes

http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.10.16. ... burns.html


I personally find the behavior of human beings kind of tiresome finally (unless it's funny), so then the notion that a *real* music theory is founded in culture, and then culture is societal norms and how it determines behavior, give us a break.

[jancivil]

What behavior is this in the video? It's all mixed up.

If you just wanna have fun, melody is where it's at

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5CPbg9ljE4M

[Dunbar]

what hack journo are you parroting with that line

I assumed everyone had heard the phrase.

You need more Skiffle in your life, evidently.

[jancivil]

Jan, how many musical cultures are in your country? and your city? and in your building? The problem after globalization is just that. The people that are stuck in Adele don't share your musical culture believe me, and you know it. In order to understand WHY they value Adele so much you have to understand their musical culture.

The arrogance of this would be astonishing, except it's how you always comport yourself.

You talk about culture in the work of a Lomax in extramusical terms all the time, but it suits you now to move the goalpost to "musical culture" to talk smack to me about a statement I made. You're full of shit.

How many musical cultures are in my country? The US of A. All of them, I'd suppose. This is a problem? It is for you, one supposes, because you can't pigeonhole everything as though you live in some older time where people's *behavior* is predictable and this unexamined notion magically leads to this 'musical culture'; again out of extramusical considerations.

There is a "musical culture" for the billion people who clicked on Adele Hello? I can't understand what about this? Tell me what I know. Unbelievable. Look, I understand everything there is to know about the song in hearing it. What culture?
Apparently, at least according to Upbabble's lists, she comes from 'The UK'. Does this figure in?
Do you feel you are conveying anything here?

What musical culture am I supposed to represent? I suppose what you want is something elite or cognoscenti?
I'm a white person from the suburbs, albeit not upper middle class but in close enough proximity to because of choices my mother made. I became interested in blues, particularly guitar, early. I gravitated to Indian Classical Music (for material for one thing, modal melody and complex rhythm) at 15 in a big way; the record I wore the grooves off the most that year though was 200 Motels by Zappa. My father was a jazz fanatic, my mother was a huge Johnny Mathis fan and less inclined to progressive jazz. Neither of them had classical music records. I got into school on classical guitar. He came from Irish Catholics and sang in the choir, she was Presbyterian and her mother hated Catholics. So we weren't real focused on church. Where is my musical culture located?

I don't come from any culture, wise guy. I'm an American, we don't have any.

Of course human agency is shaped by prior possibilities, education, prior exposure in infancy, etc... you can try to explain that. Certainly the agency of someone who had the possibilty of playing stevie wonders songs by age of 10 compared with someone who never played a keyboard will be very different.

So you think to deconstruct a very fundamental thing 'Human agency' to suit your disposition?
I didn't have a viable piano in my house. I didn't have a very good ear for pitch as a child. I didn't have advantages a lot of people just above me in terms of socioeconomic strata - in our neighborhood - had. I didn't have the talent nor did I grow up in near the money my pal Jim had, and I started late comparatively, yet I surpassed him in significant areas.

I used the term agency to try and give you a clue about people making choices in music outside their milieu. The goalpost for you then was explaining musical culture as social culture. You hadn't said anything whatsoever about music.
You always go for extramusical considerations, because with apparently no vocabulary to talk about music it's something you suppose you can pass off on a forum. And pontificate and lecture. Fatuous as f**k.

The reasons for a person having stronger agency or weaker is now reducible to an argument you think you're making? You're full of shit. Neither you nor I are psychologists or have studied this, which should occur to you as seriously complex.

To wit: Why do people vote for the right wing? What makes them lack the agency to vote according to their own real interests? Are none of them C&W musicians? Why is Ted Nugent such a dipshit? Where goes Kid Rock? FFS.
These are rhetorical questions, note well, I'm not launching into any political discussion, I'm just saying, there is nothing useful here with this bogus deconstruction of human agency, you're not schooling anyone on here.

Sure, people might be more musical having exposure even in the womb, but guess what? It's a choice to learn and study and practice all day. What I have said is there are, in reality, people who lack interest in music. (Maybe you don't have my meaning, interest. But in fact there are people who don't care for music at_all.) You have the gall to characterize that as my "belief". I would have to say the people who are persuaded to buy Hello lack strong agency and are probably easily moved by advertising, peer pressure and all sorts of things. I can't know, nor can you how disadvantaged they are by birth, genetics, upbringing, lack of having a piano... (They're all the same person for the purposes of this specious argument, apparently. And I can't be an individual but represent a type or a straw man in your head.)

I can't know. I only know it's sheeplike behavior, which I don't really understand. Musically, they're stuck. Funnily enough you didn't argue that they are. You want to defend their sort of lack of agency, it appears, only in order to suit this 'musical culture' crap. This is a garbage premise. It's not leading you anywhere good.

The terms you use here have no reality, it's just some bullshit.

[jancivil]

The premise is that music is expressive culture. The same way as walking, food, sexual conventions, dress codes, etc... You observe individuals, talk to them, measure some things about them, etc...

You want music to be that. This is a belief. (This is what belief versus dealing in more than belief looks like.)
I have heard people say they don't care for music. I would say that the people surrounding me with their supposed music have no interest in music, or they would be listening to something more musical. A lot of it is rather infantile and to sell this music to people you're relying on people not having a clue, who never heard anything. You can call that their musical culture, but as I said an absence of caring at all can_not be a culture, which has to be a statement in the affirmative.
I don't believe in the things an adherent to Theistic religion believes. That in itself is not anything in the affirmative. You could otherwise believe 100% the opposite of my beliefs and this absence of a definite, particular belief is shared.

'Music is expression just like sexual conventions and dress.' I address this, people do use it like a jacket or their bedroom posters, to form for themselves a style and this is suitable for signaling to the world what they think of themselves as to where they place vis a vis the others. This is not doing music. To make this equation is vapid. You don't appear to understand music qua music really at all. You seem to utterly lack the tools to.

Our first exchanges like this occurred when you created a thread to pontificate on a "real" music theory, but it was only this behavioral "cultural" study crap. It's kind of arrogant to come in here where people look for useful knowledge or information at least about how music works, technically, and posture like that. You don't know anything about it.

A musical culture is, for example Hindustani musical culture. People are born into it typically, a school of it called a gharana and find a guru. Then a truly aspirational musician will live with guru and serve him and obey him.
Here, you can link their culture and home life and lineage and all of this with a *musical practice*.

Yet, there is jazzer John McLaughlin who gravitated to it and worked with products of that culture coming from totally outside the culture. Shakti, then is kind of Indian music, only one of its members is not Indian in the least. JM has a very peculiar accent, because of living long periods in the US and in France. There is no cultural determinant leading to that particularly. That's reductive. It is a choice, not automatism. L Shankar comes from deep within the Carnatic musical culture. Now he's doing pop music. You can't explain that, I can't explain that. It has to do with melody. But his pop melody variates and differs from his ragam melodic style. A real musicological explanation of that has to study the music, qua music. Yes, we observe influence. Someone from a background that leads to ignorance is not going to be so open to new influences. That is not in itself musicology, that is sociological anthropology. Point being, a culture of musical ignorance is not "a musical culture".

When you have these groups, these cultures [...] systematized then you can start findind patters, correlations, testing etc... and then you get homologies and eventually a "real" theory for musics that explains WHY people sing or play that way, and what they value and dismiss in each culture.

IE: people have to be pigeonholed, fitting your notions of how to proceed in understanding. A study of music never enters the equation.

"People have agency". The arguments for differing agency are supposed to make not having a musical practice a musical practice, and we don't know why. But we don't need it to deal in any particulars on musical activity. It's just extraneous.

[IncarnateX]

Sparrow is dead, Jan. You just nuked what was left of its feathers into a black hole. It was not a mean sparrow, just naive. Did not know what is was singing about, obviously, and just wanted to share what it thought it had seen as indisputable beauties of the world unknowingly ignoring it instead.

I will encourage musiologo to continue his studies ALONG with studying science itself. Learn your history of science and its political implications, its philosophical grounding in epistemology and ontology, its internal divisions, its various methodologies and methods, its ethichal implications, its diverse criterions on the topic of objectivity, its internal and external controversies and not at least those logical forms of argumentation, which makes it convincing and sensible in the first place.

[DrGonzo]

If we are idiots, we are less obviously so, which fact lends more weight to our words, which in turn makes them hurt more when they're dropped on someone's head.

Or something.

Wise words to live by

/C

[jancivil]

I'm kind of an idiot at many things, but the thing to do here is stay shut up rather than jump in.

I seem verbose here but a _lot_ of crap was brought in. One of them is I'm unfair to musicology, not at all. I don't do musicology, I'm just a musician.
L Shankar took a doctorate in ethnomusicology, but played his first concert at 7. Imagine from his background, his brother a virtuoso violinist as well, his father a noted pedagogue and heralded singer, his aunt a legendary singer... how rich that musicology is. In lieu of musical study, there is nothing there.

This stuff is actually just sociology. He said that <saying it's "interpretive" science> is a moot point. Except in sociology the debate goes on, interpretivist is kinda sorta anti-positivist.

Max Weber argued that sociology may be loosely described as a 'science' as it is able to identify causal relationships—especially among ideal types, or hypothetical simplifications of complex social phenomena.[44]
Ashley D, Orenstein DM (2005). Sociological theory: Classical statements (6th ed.). Boston, MA, USA: Pearson Education. pp. 239–240.

[Sociology is] ... the science whose object is to interpret the meaning of social action and thereby give a causal explanation of the way in which the action proceeds and the effects which it produces. By 'action' in this definition is meant the human behaviour when and to the extent the agent or agents see it as subjectively meaningful ... the meaning to which we refer may be either (a) the meaning actually intended either by an individual agent on a particular historical occasion or by a number of agents on an approximate average in a given set of cases, or (b) the meaning attributed to the agent or agents, as types, in a pure type constructed in the abstract. In neither case is the 'meaning' thought of as somehow objectively 'correct' or 'true' by some metaphysical criterion. This is the difference between the empirical sciences of action, such as sociology and history, and any kind of a priori discipline, such as jurisprudence, logic, ethics, or aesthetics whose aim is to extract from their subject-matter 'correct' or 'valid' meaning.

— Max Weber, The Nature of Social Action 1922

It's so not a moot point, when empirical sciences was the metric for the word 'science' in the thread. He only has the other disposition so he dismissed this.

I think sociology cannot suss the reasons why a modern-day musician does a thing and I find the notion in the context of a board which functions to talk about 'music theory' a thing to be destroyed. A "real music theory" explains choices of a music (There is a fundamental problem when people are not limited to their backgrounds, who, as I did had multiple interests almost from the beginning, since there are choices.) out of that. I cannot speak to the value of this approach as a whole, I find it utterly wanting for music. Evidently it leads you nowhere good here. NB: hypothetical simplifications.

I like Heisenberg: The positivists have a simple solution: the world must be divided into that which we can say clearly and the rest, which we had better pass over in silence. But can any one conceive of a more pointless philosophy, seeing that what we can say clearly amounts to next to nothing? If we omitted all that is unclear we would probably be left with completely uninteresting and trivial tautologies. however.

[jancivil]

Another thing to prop something up was people who improvise do not respect those who transcribe and present it like composed music, or 'classical music' (one supposes in a concert, on a record?). I actually have never known of people to do that. People transcribe in order to develop technique, nobody just starts to waft and flow independently of everybody on the planet. He said I'm the only person he's seen that thinks otherwise but in fact I have no awareness of anybody having done. Pure Strawman. Pretty sure the whole thing is just a mistake out of ignorance. But he postures anyway.

EXCEPT now, people do transcribe the greats and present a Youtube.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JN2gQndq89k

RESPECT

[vurt]

transcription, i never really got in to doing whole pieces, other than when i had to for exams/qualifications.
it just wasn't "fun" for me. took/takes me a long time, because my ears are far from perfect

but obviously, its a worthy skill, i envy those like my mate si, he can be played something once and pretty much play it note for note back (he also has awesome hair ) or write it down as hes hearing it, i need to loop sections repeatedly, which even for songs you love, gets old fast!

and although im not interested in working out someone elses whole piece, odd riffs here n there for sure, that's how we build our own vocabulary isn't it?


as for transcribing the classics and calling them your own, john williams?

[Aloysius]

that drum video sounds like a bunch of random crappy midi files triggering a drum machine.

[fmr]

.../... i envy those like my mate si, he can be played something once and pretty much play it note for note back (he also has awesome hair ) or write it down as hes hearing it, i need to loop sections repeatedly, which even for songs you love, gets old fast!

You're not alone in your envy. I wish I was able to do that too

BUT (replying to jan) I've seen people that say jazz is superior to classical music because in jazz people improvise, while in classical music players "just play what's written"

So no, not all people admire those that are able to transcribe a piece and/or play it as written down.

[vurt]

BUT (replying to jan) I've seen people that say jazz is superior to classical music because in jazz people improvise, while in classical players "just play what's written"

seems odd calling one style superior to another, surely theyre meant for different things?

i prefer jazz gigs because theyre the one place i can still bloody smoke outside my own house