This heart of this discussion goes to one's musical value system. If your value system is classically western, focused on organized, complex, and cerebrally analytic structures, you don't need to ask why to frame classical western music theory and reading complex parts as a critical part of music. But if that isn't fundamentally what moves you, it may seem largely irrelevant. I don't see how to resolve such differences, but they will certainly not be breached by polarizing "rants".
- Dave Mudgett
I don't see any
reason to "resolve" them.
More than one thing can be true at once - they are not in any way exclusionary. This is an argument that had been over and done with by the 90's, I thought?
Look, I have three books by Western musicologists on Indian music. They each have their own "system" for classifying and organizing microtones. One says there's 22 notes per octave, another says there's 96, another says there's 48 but that they change according to whether they're ascending or descending - what they all neglected to do was actually
ask the Indian musicians what they were playing. The Indians will tell you that the microtones depend on who your teacher was, what village you're from, the planting season, the time of day - as well as the specific raga. I know that recently, recording, radio & TV have somewhat homogenized this in India, but Indian audiences used to recognize just what village & family a musician was from by what how played.
The problem was, these older musicologists were still looking at it through the prism of colonialism, where they were going to "figure out" what the ignorant savages were doing and help them out by writing it down - and the "savages" had thought they were doing just fine.... but Western music just doesn't DO microtones well -
hey - MAYBE THAT'S WHY THEY'RE CALLED "MICRO". So what? You can still read music, and you you can still listen to, and learn from, microtonal musicians.
There have been a number of attempts to generate microtonal orchestras, quite unsuccessfully (Except for Balinese, and again they're only "micro" cause some ignorant professor guy said so). In classic Indian music
and in blues, you need a very sparse harmonic background to use microtones effectively - listen to SRV, listen to sitar players. Root & fifth drones.... There
is a tradition of orchestral Indian music, (Ravi Shankar wrote a lot of film scores) but they wisely stick to the usual suspects to write harmonies - 4ths, 5ths, 3rds, 6ths. I'm a big fan of the 1999-2000 edition of McLaughlin's Remember Shakti band, with U. Shrivinas (and no vocals!), but they all had
frets - they know they weren't playing microtones, but they're using the rhythms and structures of Indian music with Western harmonies.
(
killer Berklee Performing Center concert, here):
http://tela.sugarmegs.org/_asxtela/Reme ... stonMA.asx
BTW, classical Indian music is also "focused on organized, complex, and cerebrally analytic structures" -
and improvisational as well. People who think it's just a bunch of notes can't hear what's going on, same as any other kind of music that "just a bunch of notes". Listening takes
training - I ask my students to write out the chords of a classical piece, they're like "what chords?" Then I point out that Tchaikovsky stole the chords for his D Major violin concerto from "Hey Jude", and they get it. If you can't remember past 10 minutes and count to 160 or so, Indian music won't make sense either.
There has been criticisms of Gershwin for "stealing" blues notes from black people to write "Rhapsody in Blue" and "Porgy and Bess" - politicizing music... but mixing minor and major 3rds goes way, way back, listen to the finale of Beethoven's Fifth, for Pete's sakes. Western music notation isn't
supposed to write blues notes, but so what? "Rhapsody" is still a great piece of music, it's not meant to be gutbucket blues. Does anyone listening actually think it's blues?
My point is, you can read music, listen to music and play music from the "reading culture", AND listen to, appreciate and play music from everywhere else too. Maybe somewhere out there, there are still people who feel that "writable" and only writable music is somehow superior to "non-writable" music, but I don't know anyone like that - like I said, I thought that was settled a long time ago?
However, it's equally ridiculous to assert that
only non-written music is superior. And as in the example above, it's perfectly useful to use some elements of one type mixed with some elements of another. Is
anti-Western snobbery any less snobbish just because it's not riding in a limousine licking caviar out of a starlet's bellybutton....
Dave has been a big influence for me, as much as I can find.... We talk scales sometimes. He also has an encyclopedic knowledge of jazz, he might be the only steeler you could just set adrift in a New York club jam. He's a forumite, though he rarely posts.
