Bill Pirkle wrote:
>Last week I saw a thing on the TV where someone has taught an elephant to
>hold a artist's brush in its trunk and paint pictures. They were quite
>good and most people, even art critics, would not be able to distinguish
>them from today's modern art, AND, they are being auctioned off at
>Sotheby's (sp?) in New York! Surely a person that would pay good money
>for a painting by an elephant would accept a CM composition written by
>a computer.
What made the paintings "good?" What does it prove if critics and
laypersons alike, not knowing their source, equated them with known
paintings by humans? (BTW, who chose the color palette for the elephant?)
I'm not entirely in disagreement with your argument here. There is a
painting in the Minneapolis art museum by a Japanese modernist that looks
like a giant finger painting. The paint is a dark brownish red, the color
of coagulating blood, and is swirled on in great globs (in places over 1/2
inch deep) and stirred around with the artist's feet. You can see skid
marks. It's disturbing in a way. How is this different from the
elephant's painting? Are the facts that a) the museum chose to hang
this work and b) it's assumed to be a creative act by a human being, or
at least a human is responsible for it part of the work, in the larger
sense--meaning we have to take it as a communicative utterance? If the
museum chose to hang the elephant art, that too would be a statement--a
political statement. It may carry more than one message. To some, the
message would be, is this all that art is worth these days, that an animal
can do as "well" as a human? To others, it may say that people are fools
who can look at elephant (or chimp) art and think it's somehow profound (in
the sense that their lives are changed in some way).
The same discussion could be applied to music. You could even have
elephant music, if it could be shown that an elephant had a preference
for certain percussion sounds (assuming the instrument isn't destroyed in
the creative process), and recorded an elephant improv. But in the human
realm we already have a composer, John Cage, who has successfully pulled
the wool over people's eyes (or stuffed cotton in their ears) for decades.
Bill, you said in another post: "The only question concerning a piece of
music is 'did you enjoy hearing it, and would you like to hear it again
sometime'". Meaning the value of music is in the ear of the beholder.
That statement really draws a distinction. If that were the end of the
story, all philosophical discussion of the "legitimacy" of Cage's approach
(in the sense of whether or not it tends to promote or destroy the
development of art) would be a waste of time. For me the more important
question involves knowing WHY I enjoy a piece of music, and how that
affects my sense of community with others. As a music educator, I am
committed to the idea that because I value the nature of my musical
experience, there is potential for sharing it with others and giving them
a valuable human experience. This is not to say that I want all of them to
have the same experience I had when I listened to Beethoven's 9th for the
3rd or 4th time--that experience was the unique interaction of composer,
performer and me--a unique individual. What I hope to reveal to them is
their potential ability to get something out of some music that is as
affecting to them as my experience was to mine. And in order to do that,
they need to hear a lot of music AND develop some listening habits that
foster a higher awareness of what's going on in the music.
I've believed for a long time that the thing that really separates the
"informed" listener (who is much more likely to enjoy classical music and
jazz) from the type of listener who stubbornly identifies with a very small
stylistic subset (likes only rap, for example) is the ability to listen
and notice what's going on in a wide variety of styles. I'm talking about
details of orchestration, as well as nuances of performer expression.
There is definitely a leap of faith that must be taken here--to move the
fan of Dr. Dre to enjoy a Callas performance, for example. The fact that
it can work the other way doesn't say anything about the value of one style
over the other, it's important to note. As I've said before, I've learned
to enjoy AC/DC through somewhat this same process of self-education, i.e.
to look past the at-first-offensive-to-me surface of the sound--the
screeching vocal and head-banging guitar and drum--to pick up on the
musicianship (yes, it's there) of the performers. However, I don't enjoy
this kind of music on the same level as I do CM, especially when performed
in an inspired way. There is just much more to CM than to the most
Platonic archteype of a rock song, and anyone who argues differently (or
that the only reason they prefer CM is because they enjoy it more) is just
plain wrong. But still I would sooner listen to AC/DC than hear one of
my favorite CM pieces ruined by a ho-hum or inept performance.
Chris Bonds
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