music clip of the day

If you play a recording of American jazz for an African friend, even though all the formal characteristics of African music are there, he may say, as he sits fidgeting in his chair, ‘What are we supposed to do with this?’ He is expressing perhaps the most fundamental aesthetic in Africa: without participation, there is no meaning. When you ask an African friend whether or not he ‘understands’ a certain type of music, he will say yes if he knows the dance that goes with it.—John Miller Chernoff, African Rhythm and African Sensibility (1979)

West African Drummers & Dance Ceremony: Bobo celebration, Mali

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lagniappe

reading table

The End of Music?

We seem to be on the edge of a paradigm shift. Orchestras are struggling to stay alive, rock has been relegated to the underground, jazz has stopped evolving and become a dead art, the music industry itself has been subsumed by corporate culture and composers are at their wit’s end trying to find something that’s hip but still appeals to an audience mired in a 19th-century sensibility.

For more than half a century we’ve seen incredible advances in sound technology but very little if any advance in the quality of music. In this case the paradigm shift may not be a shift but a dead stop. Is it that people just don’t want to hear anything new? Or is it that composers and musicians have simply swallowed the pomo line that nothing else new can be done, which ironically is really just the ‘old, old story.’

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Of course, we could all just listen to all of our old albums, CD’s and mp3’s. In fact, nowadays that’s where the industry makes most of its money. We could also just watch old movies and old TV shows. There are a lot of them now. Why bother making any new ones? Why bother doing anything new at all? Why bother having any change or progress at all as long as we’ve got ‘growth’? I’m just wondering if this is in fact the new paradigm. I’m just wondering if in fact the new music is just the old music again. And, if that in fact it would actually just be the end of music.—Glenn Branca, 11/24/09

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Arrested Musical Development?

I think baby boomers have to a great extent been products of arrested musical development; that is they have stayed with those more popular music genres—even to the point of being more invested in ‘oldies’ of their development years than in current contemporary music—and have not grown in terms of their music sensibilities to embrace the more ‘serious’ forms of music, i.e. jazz, classical, contemporary chamber music, opera, etc. Supposedly when we grow and develop we don’t for example continue to read books and publications that are geared more towards children or teens. So why not the same relationship with music?—Willard Jenkins, 11/10/09