Stirling Newberry complains:

>If one needs one of many exhibits as to why classical music is dying, then
>the insular - indeed clubbish - nature of many of its institutions is at
>the heart of the problem.  Musicians complain about closed methods for
>choosing conductors, critics complain that conductors are not local, and
>thus have no roots, orchestra boards complain about the musicians union.

First: I don't see why classical music "is dying".  A CM lover never
had at hand before so many excellent musicians, conductors, orchestras,
theaters etc.  around the world as today.  If you mean by this that
"contemporary music is dying", sorry to tell you that there's a lot of
good, excellent, superb CM composers today.  The problem is that you don't
know them, or you know just a little part of them, that's all.  Second:
"insular"or "clubbish" are adjectives fitted to almost every human
institution since Adam lost his chop. So, I suspect that your analysis
of the supposed death causes of CM is a little childish.  (kind of: "why
CM is dying?.  Because people is bad")

>One might be tempted to call it a conspiracy, but it isn't - it is
>many thousand small conspiracies, each one run by people who, when given
>a choice between doing the ethical thing, and doing that which makes
>their life, job and existence easier in the short term, have no trouble
>justifying doing what makes their life easier.

I myself do this several times a day.  Think carefully: how many times did
*you* do it?.  I think you're too harsh to poor human creatures....

>Pick up a music theory work, and chances are it falls into one of three
>categories.  One large category might be called the mechanical view -
>descended from new criticism, and steeped in the pseudo-mathematicism and
>scientificism of the 20th century, it pretends that one can deal with music
>as pitch classes and diagrams.

This is, properly speaking, musical theory. Sometimes it's useful.

>Another large category might be called the post modern school - which is
>composed of trying to second guess the composer's cultural milieu and
>outlook.

This is simply musical sociology. Sometimes it's amusing.

>A third category might be called the cultural critic view - which emulates
>the old model of the critic mediating between a lay public and a musical
>priesthood, telling us as to what Shostakovich was really saying when he
>wrote this or that note.

This is simply musical hermeneutics. Sometimes it's very funny.

>All of these categories are obsolete and destructive to the real nature of
>music theory.

No. As you can see, they are just different disciplines. And they are very
enjoyable, if you take care of not asking for peaches to an oak.

>And what is that nature? And what gives me the right to tell
>and entire field of well paid farts where to get off.

Please, I'm intrigued.

>The second question is answered by the sheer uselessness of their
>production - what have they written which is worth reading.  The answer
>is that the only musicology people care about is that which is used to
>reconstruct unfinished works - in other words mimetic study.

Most people doesn't care about *any* musicology.  No problem: many
musicological studies have been very useful and instructive to me, and
I simply don't care about people's lack of concern on this discipline.
However, this paragraph of yours could have some sense if you would be
more specifical about whose are those "well paid farts".

>The first question is as easily answerable, and very much to the point.
>Our present theory of music is as true a picture of music as pre-telescopic
>astronomy was a true picture of the solar system.  Pre-telescopic astronomy
>was monstrously practical - it predicted where and when events of interest,
>such as eclipses or tides, would occur.

I will not discuss this paragraph, because I don't want to fall outside
the boundaries of music.  However ...pre-telescopical astronomy was
"monstrously practical"?.  Hmm...I don't think so.  Ask Mr. Copernicus how
"practical" resulted his theory to his contemporaries, and what "practical"
purposes did he have in mind when he draw it up.

>Similarly, our musical theory is completely obsessed with the predicting
>the movements of existing works, and justifying the creations of those who
>engage in theory and composition.

First: there's no single "present theory of music".  There are thousands
of them.  Second: this "justifying-and-predicting" mania is a typical
aspect of aesthetical theories from all times.  I don't see why do you
blame especially to "our present theory" for that little sin.  Third: that
little sin is what makes an aesthetical theory tasty and funny.  Fourth:
what else do you want from an aesthetical theory, except justifications
and predictions?.  However, I would dare to say that you are looking for
a "poietike" where there's only a bunch of aesthetical statements.  You
are looking at the wrong place.

>However, the telescope for the mind has been invented.  Like Galileo's
>Early model, all it has really done is teach us to tear up our old views
>of cognition and throw them out.  However, like the catholic church in
>the late renaissance, our present society has a vested interest in the old
>view of thinking about thinking, and hence is busy burning heretics at the
>stake.

You see, those metaphores about "telescopes for the mind" and those old
tales about bad people burning good guys who only wants to expand our views
are a bit corny.  Despite they sound good and are politically correct, one
can find nowadays that kind of Ideas at the worst magazines.  They're
commonplaces, and you know what? they're wrong: "our present society" has
not an unique interest on anything.  There's not a social hegemonic view
about anything, because our present society is composed of a myriad of
microscopic groups, each one with a different ideology and different
interests.  Besides, nobody burns nobody today --at least in America and
Europe-- except for money (which is very natural, by the way).

>The easiest to dispose of is the theory of "music is a language".  Perhaps
>in some metaphorical sense, but not in the actual sense.  The mechanisms of
>language - grammar formation, noun selection, phoneme translation - are not
>active when listening to music.  Any notion that music has a generative
>grammar that is the same as languages is simply incorrect.  This does not
>mean we cannot make analogies to grammar - as we do with computer languages
>or even physical processes such as the codification of genetic material
>with letters of DNA - but they are analogies only.

I don't think this needs a disposal.  The notion of "music as a language"
has been *always* metaphorical.  Only two or three weirdoes in recent
history took this analogy as an equation.  Music has codified elements and
syntactical structures, and this is the main side from which music has been
studied as a language.  The other side (semantics) is nowadays the object
of many semiotic studies on music.  However, no serious musicologist would
take nowadays the relationship between music and language as anything else
than a pure analogy.

>The cultural view of musical criticism - descended from post structuralism,
>similarly falls by the way side.  Every functioning human being has
>mechanisms which mediate cultural normality.  Malfunctions of these
>regions of the brain cause people to be unable to comply with cultural
>requirements.  They too, are not active during the musical experience.
>If they are not active, then the entire cultural determinacy theory of
>music is dead in the water.

Sorry, but this is one of the worst refutations of a post-structuralist
theory that I have ever read.  As far as I know (which is not too much)
that supposed "cultural determinacy" can be found only in some authors,
who are not focused on the man as a "subject" of cultural determination
(in fact, the notion itself of "subject" is eliminated from History), but
on cultural determination as a set of global social forces that shapes
History.  A malfunction in a single man's brain would be here just factical
data about a single particle of a major organism.  That theory is "dead in
the water" because of other reasons, which I'm not able to discuss here.

Pablo Massa
[log in to unmask]