I have to say that the interview you linked is pretty weak sauce when this guy is premising his distaste for written scores on complete ignorance about them. Your post here is more illuminating than the nothing this guy has to say!
I think there may be a disconnect here between electronic musicians and traditional ones. All the time I played music, nobody thought of charts as some kind of platonic eidetic representation of The Real Music; nobody that is except composition students maybe, who indeed are music nerds in the strictest sense. Charts were just tools. You stuff em in your bag and make em into binders so theyāre easier to carry around and write notes all over em. As long as one human being hears music in their head and wants to be able to tell numerous other human beings how to play what theyāre hearing, scores will exist by necessity. Calling for the death of scores (not something you are doing just talking here) is calling for the death of people playing live music with each other.
in my experience this is the basis of 100% of arguments against music theory and/or formal musical training
It all comes down to either āI donāt understand it, therefore nobody else doesā or āI donāt want THE MAN to tell me what I can and canāt do with MY musicā or some combination of the two.
yeah the interview was pretty whatever, I just thought Iād link it because I didnāt want to type out the gist of it
I do definitely recall instances both in my classical training and in the chiptune community (so, you know, fuckinā NERDS) where there was a lot of value on notation and theory that really turned me off because I didnāt feel like there needed to be a competition behind the music we were making, but that might have been me reacting to the resurgence of weird competitive stuff in chiptune after having done piano competitions for like 6 straight years
but like, I definitely got lucky in that I was able to pinpoint the ways in which learning a repertoire over the course of a year over and over again hampered my musicality and was able to understand how that happened to other people, and I definitely saw how ideas of notation as ācanonā end up at sheet music as ācanonā end up at canon as ācanonā in a pretty stifling way, as in people realizing thereās something wrong with classical music canonizing and thinking that the answer is merely to study both robert AND clara schumann instead of questioning the material within the canon itself, much less as a concept
I do feel like if I get in one of my moods I can trace this conception of What Music Is out to the current situation around just how awful professional musicianship is for most people. I donāt think that the interview I linked gets us any closer to making those connections any clearer but thereās a very small something there
the craft part is not entirely a commoditized thing, hypothetically. in our late capitalist shitworld it almost always means commodity, no matter how hard we try to pry it from those clenched jaws.
it might just represent the spectrum of something like āmanifestabilityā. now imagine multiplying this spectrum manyfold. imagine each as the spoke of a wheel of spectra, gauging aptitude at one of a possibly infinite number of potential tasks, potential challenges to manifestation, barriers to reality.
expression must be the most important component of music as experienced by a holistic human being - manifestability is exclusively a means to expressā¦ SOMETHING, whether it be reference, mood-setting, something more ephemeral. music in its most functional parlance remains expressive - this cannot be stripped away, they canāt be entirely decoupled.
we donāt experience music in a vacuum, so the mere existence (the inescapable ubiquity, actually) of hyper-commoditized manifestabilty-oriented music inherently commoditizes everything else. we have to actively deprogram ourselves to even imagine the situation we would find ourselves in if we could experience media without this baggage
played Oddworld: Abeās Oddysee, which is one of my favorite games from my childhood. I think itās still a masterpiece, but saving all 99 slaves is a test of patience and not much else.
The sequel allows Abe to lead more than one Mudokon at a time, which is a welcome quality of life change, but it sacrifices level cohesiveness.
Iām actively working on de-capitalisming my brain and this is hitting on that effort but I canāt fully express how. Something about not making everything into a product, something about letting things hang in the air and disappear without a trace. I canāt verbalize it but this is a good post
Iāve only ever played Abeās Exoddus. I liked it so much I played it through twice (with a few years in between).
I own the first game as well but for some reason I never made it beyond the first few minutes. Iām not sure why. Maybe I should try it again.
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The game I have been playing lately is Hexceed. Itās basically Hexcells combined with Minesweeper. I think it might be a little too generous with its free content. I can see myself losing interest before I get anywhere near the need for additional DLC puzzles. I watched the latest Tim Rogers video over the course of several days this week but only while doing other things, and this is one of those things.
Trying Prey 2017 on Cubaās recommendation. Seems pretty good. I like it a lot more than Alien Isolation (which I realize has totally different aspirations mechanically but is a similar setting, which is ultimately the reason attracting me to both of them).
I loved the comedy skit at the beginning of being a normal guy in the superpowers test lab. āHeāsā¦ hiding behind the chair?ā. Already thatās way better writing than any of the recent 'shocks.
I was disappointed this game does the quicksave-whenever-you-like thing, just there in the menu with no context or indication of what sort of saving frequency the levels were designed around. I thought we were past that. It reminds me that one reason I loved System Shock 1 was that new floors denied respawn until you found the respawner, making new areas feel like a step into the unknown.
