THIS is computer music: Ge Wang at TEDxStanford
"Expressive"? Of what? Would anyone ever really want to listen to these peculiar noises? I've watched the whole thing through with the sound off--and I see he's reinvented the the ocarina, and I think, the theramin--but am I even a little bit curious as to what any of this actually sounds like? Not in the least. We all know what a painfully contrived dodecaphonic tone row sounds like. It sounds like shit. Because it is shit. Sorry, Mr. Ge--unless it's Mr. Wang--There's no such thing as computer music. And there never will be.
You're a very personable young man, Mr. Ge Wang, but your "music" lacks, inherently, charm. And what, you may well ask, is charm? It is, to begin with, in Latin, a spell or incantation: Carmen--moving the emotions, indeed the very soul, of the hearer, as if by (and this is a little unfair) magic. Indeed, sometimes wordlessly, or silently--especially in the plural, and when referring specifically to a woman's (or a boys')--"charms." But usually charm is expressed in music by an odd little quirk or unexpected twist--a droll dropping, or peculiar upward inflection, of the voice--that gives character to a piece, and makes the heart beat faster for a couple of moments; of which sort of trick, gimmick or business Englishmen, who lived in the time of Elizabeth the First and James I, always seem to have had the knack. So I tell you what: Go and find a copy of William Byrd's "O Mistress Mine" (theme and variations)--It's in the Fitzwilliams Virginal Book--and teach yourself to play it. Forget about the words--No one knows what they were any more, and the words that have been proposed to sing to it in the past century or so are nauseatingly stupid. But the tune is not stupid, and Byrd's repeated setting of it, and changes on it, are dazzling, wicked-smart.
Anyway, what you've got to understand, Mr. Ge Wang--and you give no indication of understanding it--is that is there is no music (no real music) without charm. There has, of course, ever since Igor Stravinsky turned the Banshees loose in the orchestra by writing le Sacre du Printemps (in 1913), been a stinking shitload of charmless music in the world--but it isn't real music. Before the advent of the First World War, however, there was a lot of charming music in the world--and maybe nothing more charming, end to end, than Schubert's Trout Quintet: Which is full of good tunes; which are repeated, but never too often, and you never get tired of them.
And as for writing your own tunes--tunes, Mr. Ge--You might trying singing them to yourself before you try them on your ocarina or theramin (if that's what it is).
You're a very personable young man, Mr. Ge Wang, but your "music" lacks, inherently, charm. And what, you may well ask, is charm? It is, to begin with, in Latin, a spell or incantation: Carmen--moving the emotions, indeed the very soul, of the hearer, as if by (and this is a little unfair) magic. Indeed, sometimes wordlessly, or silently--especially in the plural, and when referring specifically to a woman's (or a boys')--"charms." But usually charm is expressed in music by an odd little quirk or unexpected twist--a droll dropping, or peculiar upward inflection, of the voice--that gives character to a piece, and makes the heart beat faster for a couple of moments; of which sort of trick, gimmick or business Englishmen, who lived in the time of Elizabeth the First and James I, always seem to have had the knack. So I tell you what: Go and find a copy of William Byrd's "O Mistress Mine" (theme and variations)--It's in the Fitzwilliams Virginal Book--and teach yourself to play it. Forget about the words--No one knows what they were any more, and the words that have been proposed to sing to it in the past century or so are nauseatingly stupid. But the tune is not stupid, and Byrd's repeated setting of it, and changes on it, are dazzling, wicked-smart.
Anyway, what you've got to understand, Mr. Ge Wang--and you give no indication of understanding it--is that is there is no music (no real music) without charm. There has, of course, ever since Igor Stravinsky turned the Banshees loose in the orchestra by writing le Sacre du Printemps (in 1913), been a stinking shitload of charmless music in the world--but it isn't real music. Before the advent of the First World War, however, there was a lot of charming music in the world--and maybe nothing more charming, end to end, than Schubert's Trout Quintet: Which is full of good tunes; which are repeated, but never too often, and you never get tired of them.
And as for writing your own tunes--tunes, Mr. Ge--You might trying singing them to yourself before you try them on your ocarina or theramin (if that's what it is).
posted by anatole at
7:29 PM
2 Comments:
Thanks for putting this up, it was sweet. But c’mon, don’t be curmudgeonly! The fellow himself says "technology should not be foregrounded here". It's an expression of people, not machines.
And technology is involved even with the most portable & primitive of instruments, such as the Aborigines with their sticks & didgeridoo.
I listen avidly to Bach cantatas on the instruments of his time, but we should give thanks to our own creative generation too, surely?
Hi Vincent,
Thanks for noticing. You're right, I'm definitely leading with my chin here, and Im hoping I'm not sounding too censorious, but I am, after all, a composer in my own wrong--and I excuse what I do in this vein, by frankly advertising it as "charming." I think, if you ever heard "Phylis, plus avare que tendre," or "Le Loup, la Mère et le Bébé," that you'd agree that that's what it is. I've even done a perhaps beyond-charming setting of François Villon's 'Ballade des Pendus,' which sort of scares me. Anyway, I hope that you and Mr. Wang will not mind too much if I say that everything, including music, made a wrong turn about 104 years ago, and that the way out of our infinite impasse is with the human voice, not with imitations of it.
Post a Comment
Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.
Subscribe to Post Comments [Atom]
<< Home