[NewMusic] slusser's article

[David Slusser]

On Oct 9, 2007, at 10:32 AM, Jacob Lindsay wrote:
> ...I've been
> giving this a lot of though recently anyway, the "what
> is music?" bit, which you posed in your article.
> Obviously subjective, but still worth exploring,
> especially in our genre, in which there is an emphasis
> on pushing the boundaries of what is music.  You push
> and push, but it IS able to break, fall off the cliff,
> so to speak.  It is what makes this music great, but
> is also it's pitfall.  No boundaries means you're free
> to fall off that cliff at any time (or even worse,
> just dissolve into a quivering mass of goo).
>
> I've been trying lately to just listen to music and
> just listen and enjoy it, without studying it, which
> is hard as a musician to do.  I often find myself
> listening to something really gnarly or difficult or
> so-called "boundary-breaking", studying it intensely,
> and then at a certain point think, "Gee, I'm really
> not enjoying listening to this."  DOH!  So then what
> do you do?

One way to avoid the "is it music?" dilemma is to accept
that some of what you are doing is "sound sculpture" or
"sonic art" (see: Delight at the End of the Tunnel).  Put
in those terms, it takes away a lot of traditional expect-
ations, where the unfamiliar listener may have a more
open mind.  I'm speaking of the lower case and pure
noise ends of the spectrum.  Not so helpful, perhaps, if
you're definitely still coming at it as challenging music,
based on nominally musical means.  This begs the ques-
tion of the necessity of a cultural element in a definition
of music.

Maybe that's the point of the gnarly-difficult-boundry
breaking pieces.  They seem to be asking that question,
stretching it to the point where it's experienced as just
a mental excercise, without the satisfaction of what we
enjoy as "music".  I certainly enjoy a lot of sonic art and
sonic sculpture (and Feldman, Xenakis, Leghetti, Varese
etc are all still well within "music" for me).  Is intent
relevant to the listener?