Quotes and Notes

Celestial points in an emerging notion of the aesthetics of the modern situation.

"Art has the privilege and the mission to shape, regardless, whether matter-of-fact reality wishes to borrow the experiences gathered in this process. In that respect, true art has always been unselfish, something which is not likely to change in the future." Dick Raaijmakers - Cahier M Page 120

"Among the reproaches most obstinately repeated by these critics, the most widely spread is that of intellectualism: modern music has its origins in the brain, not in the heart or the ear; it is in no way conceived by the senses, but rather worked out on paper. The inadequacy of these clichés is evident. The critics present their arguments as though the tonal idiom of the last 350 years had been derived from nature, and that to go beyond these firmly established theoretical principles were a violation thereof; whereas these ossified principles themselves are actually the very evidence of social pressure. The idea that the tonal system is exclusively of natural origin is an illusion rooted in history."
Theodor Adorno - Philosophy of Modern Music
Page 11

This passage has led me to consider the possibility of acoustically based music (spectral music, or electronic music based on the known perceptual realities) could be an unconscious reaction to years of criticims of modern music being unnatural. The idea being that it is in-fact more natural and perceptually agreeable than tonal music as it is based on factual information that tonal music does not account for.

"When people say apologetically that they don't know anything about music it is quite often that they have a very broad and deep experience of listening to music, with strong likes and dislikes , and in some cases a considerable ability to reproduce music previously heard or improvise new music. What they really mean is that they don't read musical notation or that they know insufficient words about music. Our predominantly symbolic way of communicating musical process has so distorted our general perception of what 'knowing' about music is, that somebody with a command of everything that matters in 'knowing' about music can be made to feel ignorant. Meanwhile the people who have charge of the symbols and words remain reasonably complacent that they do 'know' about music."
David Keane - At the Threshold of an Aesthetic from The Language of Electroacoustic Music edited by Simon Emmerson Page 104


The experience of music.... sound as a medium that is interacted with on some or multiple levels (movement - dance, melody - singing, intellectual - recontextualization, recollection - revelation, extension - perceptual exploration, transformative) is something that is common to all people. The level of awareness and interaction determines what the individual understands of the experience and what they take from it. This is based on the assumption that the "music" that is a genuine and expression of the musician.