simeon alev interview december 12/05- excerpts
simeon alev: one of the things that we all encounter in childhood is the suggestion of adults based on their experience that life is inherently full of various kinds of limitations. in general, what we find as children, if I can identify myself as a child at the moment, at this moment, is this feeling of always wanting to question these kinds of restrictions. musicians, in general, are trained in the context of restrictions of one kind or another, even if, as often happens today, they are being trained as jazz musicians, and jazz is supposed to represent a certain kind of freedom, relatively speaking.
chanceformation: so would you say that the practice of teaching jazz music has actually redefined that liberation to a merely harmonic context?
sa: yeah, its almost inevitable that that would happen. basically, the minute you take an idiom like that and attempt to put it in an educational context where it has rules that have to be learned, it becomes a cliche.
cf: and a paradox, but possibly not one worth exploring.
sa: you mean, in this conversation?
cf: no, i mean that in order for an artist to bear creative fruit, there must be certain paradoxes which must be explained or explored, and the artists role is to do that.
sa: yeah, well, it seems to me that its probably the case that its pretty rare that any kind of curriculum is going to produce an artist.
sa: interestingly, we tend to think of music as separate from hearing. when we hear music, its supposed to have certain associations that are completely separate from the way we actually experience the world through our ears. i don't know why that is but i suspect, taking cues from mcLuhan, that because of way we use our senses, particularly in this culture even now despite the fact that the age of a purely literary relationship to life would seem to be overwe still hear with our eyes... we still hear with our eyes, so that actually, when we hear music, we are still thinking in a way that is largely determined by seeing. and music makes sense to us and pleases us because it conforms to certain visual conventions. this gets back to the whole idea of horizontal and vertical. in music we want to have a horizontal experience that is punctuated by sequences of signposts. within the context of those signposts, we want to have some surprises, but not too many, and then we want to have any kind of overly shocking surprise punctuated pretty quickly by something familiar. and we don't want to have a lot of vertical leaps, despite that fact that in our everyday experience, we hear a tremendous vertical range of soundsin terms of frequency, volume, familiarity, unfamiliarity. but in music we don't want that. we don't want that because we fear the experience of being without our eyes. (covers his eyes and falls backwards in his chair)
cf: very interesting. i remember growing up, watching a lot of music videos, calling up my friends, saying, have you seen the new track by so-and-so. the idea of recorded contemporary pop music occupying a temporal visual element
is very interesting to me. especially in terms of music being used to sell. to sell items, clothing, aesthetics, propaganda, hollywood movies, and so on. you hear a song, a madonna song from the 80's, and you can actually see the clothes she was wearing...
sa: visually.
cf: visually. every element.
sa: which raises the question of what it would take to generate sound that doesn't have those kinds of time associations, or historical associations.
cf: i've been thinking lately about applying the concept of sculpture to sound.
sa: that makes sense, if you say you grew up watching a lot of music videos. tv is very tactile, a way to get beyond it might be to start thinking about touch in a different way. maybe even to experience touch in a different way. to actually tune in, as it were, to touch as a sense in its own right, again, separate from the visual.
cf: so its a mcLuhanesque concept of balancing the sensorium.
sa: or of re-ordering it in a certain way. or just being aware of what the implications are of organizing the sensorium in a certain way, and of what the effects on the organization of your sensorium are of living in, and having been brought up in, a certain culture.
cf: well, maybe those answers will never come, and you'll be left to explore that paradox, much to the benefit of everyone else.
sa: i hope so.
chanceformation: so would you say that the practice of teaching jazz music has actually redefined that liberation to a merely harmonic context?
sa: yeah, its almost inevitable that that would happen. basically, the minute you take an idiom like that and attempt to put it in an educational context where it has rules that have to be learned, it becomes a cliche.
cf: and a paradox, but possibly not one worth exploring.
sa: you mean, in this conversation?
cf: no, i mean that in order for an artist to bear creative fruit, there must be certain paradoxes which must be explained or explored, and the artists role is to do that.
sa: yeah, well, it seems to me that its probably the case that its pretty rare that any kind of curriculum is going to produce an artist.
sa: interestingly, we tend to think of music as separate from hearing. when we hear music, its supposed to have certain associations that are completely separate from the way we actually experience the world through our ears. i don't know why that is but i suspect, taking cues from mcLuhan, that because of way we use our senses, particularly in this culture even now despite the fact that the age of a purely literary relationship to life would seem to be overwe still hear with our eyes... we still hear with our eyes, so that actually, when we hear music, we are still thinking in a way that is largely determined by seeing. and music makes sense to us and pleases us because it conforms to certain visual conventions. this gets back to the whole idea of horizontal and vertical. in music we want to have a horizontal experience that is punctuated by sequences of signposts. within the context of those signposts, we want to have some surprises, but not too many, and then we want to have any kind of overly shocking surprise punctuated pretty quickly by something familiar. and we don't want to have a lot of vertical leaps, despite that fact that in our everyday experience, we hear a tremendous vertical range of soundsin terms of frequency, volume, familiarity, unfamiliarity. but in music we don't want that. we don't want that because we fear the experience of being without our eyes. (covers his eyes and falls backwards in his chair)
cf: very interesting. i remember growing up, watching a lot of music videos, calling up my friends, saying, have you seen the new track by so-and-so. the idea of recorded contemporary pop music occupying a temporal visual element
is very interesting to me. especially in terms of music being used to sell. to sell items, clothing, aesthetics, propaganda, hollywood movies, and so on. you hear a song, a madonna song from the 80's, and you can actually see the clothes she was wearing...
sa: visually.
cf: visually. every element.
sa: which raises the question of what it would take to generate sound that doesn't have those kinds of time associations, or historical associations.
cf: i've been thinking lately about applying the concept of sculpture to sound.
sa: that makes sense, if you say you grew up watching a lot of music videos. tv is very tactile, a way to get beyond it might be to start thinking about touch in a different way. maybe even to experience touch in a different way. to actually tune in, as it were, to touch as a sense in its own right, again, separate from the visual.
cf: so its a mcLuhanesque concept of balancing the sensorium.
sa: or of re-ordering it in a certain way. or just being aware of what the implications are of organizing the sensorium in a certain way, and of what the effects on the organization of your sensorium are of living in, and having been brought up in, a certain culture.
cf: well, maybe those answers will never come, and you'll be left to explore that paradox, much to the benefit of everyone else.
sa: i hope so.
posted by scott peterson at 7:02 AM
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