Saturday, January 24, 2004
Two kinds of censorship: the explicit one, in Cuba, where internet was banned. The implicit one, in the United States, where the media controls what the citizens will want to search in the internet anyway.
Thursday, January 22, 2004
Yesterday I saw again, after many years, the Wall in Berlin concert. It's a huge Roger Waters concert celebrated because the Berlin Wall was falling, back in 1990. There's a documentary in the DVD, and I couldn't help but trace a parallel between two apparently totally different facts: our Falklands/Malvinas war and the Iron Curtain fall.
In 1982, we had a military dictatorship with Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri as the head of it. The government wasn't very popular by then: thousands of missing people, tortures, death, lack of freedom: the usual reality of the Latin American countries by then. "Galtieri took the Union Jack", as Roger Waters wrote it, and the war began against the United Kingdom. The United States, the country that educated Galtieri in the (in)famous "School of the Americas", swore to support Argentina, and all the people were by then in the main square cheerleading. I was a kid by then, less than ten years old, but I still remember that extraordinary excitement, supporting the government or the country, I don't know, showing a patriotism that only football can provoke on Argentineans. It was a stupid war from day one, and of course the United States didn't back us up but England, our kids went to the islands to die, while we were shown figures saying we were winning the war. Again: I can't take out of my mind that image of people enjoying the war, to say it somehow, again the same metaphore: like watching a football match. Now, more than twenty years later, it all seems pretty ridiculous. What we were doing? What kind of a spell was that? What was that we were celebrating?
And then, now seeing that documentary on the Berlin Wall, I saw the same: the Berlin Wall falling, and all those people with champagne in their hand, toasting for a new age, the cold war was over, and everyone was talking about... peace. Roger Waters then made a big statement against war, and it was suitable at that moment. He was singing "the tide is turning", and at that moment it seemed really so, that the cold war was over, so the logical conclusion was that there won't be any more wars. I remember Umberto Eco saying that humans were no longer able to think about wars, that humans finally grew up. And all those people there, with the champagne, drinking to the "true values of capitalism and democracy", id est, toasting to the United States, the winner of a cold war by becoming the biggest military power and, paradoxically, the harbinger of peace? How could we be so stupid to think the USSR was the only "enemy" around? How could we be so stupid to think that all those weapons would be destroyed, as there was no evident use for them? And it's only little more than ten years since then. It's no longer important "who holds the aces, the east or the west", as Roger Waters was singing back then. During the Falkland wars, again, he wrote in a song:
fuck all that, we've got to get on with these,
got to compete with those wily Japanese:
no need to worry about the Vietnamese,
got to bring the Russian bear to his knees.
Well, maybe not the Russian bear,
maybe the Swedes.
We showed Argentina, now let's go and show these:
make us feel tough.
More or less ten years later, the United States brought the Russian bear to his knees, and people began to talk about a new peaceful age. More or less ten years later, in the United States they only have left the language of war.
In 1982, we had a military dictatorship with Leopoldo Fortunato Galtieri as the head of it. The government wasn't very popular by then: thousands of missing people, tortures, death, lack of freedom: the usual reality of the Latin American countries by then. "Galtieri took the Union Jack", as Roger Waters wrote it, and the war began against the United Kingdom. The United States, the country that educated Galtieri in the (in)famous "School of the Americas", swore to support Argentina, and all the people were by then in the main square cheerleading. I was a kid by then, less than ten years old, but I still remember that extraordinary excitement, supporting the government or the country, I don't know, showing a patriotism that only football can provoke on Argentineans. It was a stupid war from day one, and of course the United States didn't back us up but England, our kids went to the islands to die, while we were shown figures saying we were winning the war. Again: I can't take out of my mind that image of people enjoying the war, to say it somehow, again the same metaphore: like watching a football match. Now, more than twenty years later, it all seems pretty ridiculous. What we were doing? What kind of a spell was that? What was that we were celebrating?
And then, now seeing that documentary on the Berlin Wall, I saw the same: the Berlin Wall falling, and all those people with champagne in their hand, toasting for a new age, the cold war was over, and everyone was talking about... peace. Roger Waters then made a big statement against war, and it was suitable at that moment. He was singing "the tide is turning", and at that moment it seemed really so, that the cold war was over, so the logical conclusion was that there won't be any more wars. I remember Umberto Eco saying that humans were no longer able to think about wars, that humans finally grew up. And all those people there, with the champagne, drinking to the "true values of capitalism and democracy", id est, toasting to the United States, the winner of a cold war by becoming the biggest military power and, paradoxically, the harbinger of peace? How could we be so stupid to think the USSR was the only "enemy" around? How could we be so stupid to think that all those weapons would be destroyed, as there was no evident use for them? And it's only little more than ten years since then. It's no longer important "who holds the aces, the east or the west", as Roger Waters was singing back then. During the Falkland wars, again, he wrote in a song:
fuck all that, we've got to get on with these,
got to compete with those wily Japanese:
no need to worry about the Vietnamese,
got to bring the Russian bear to his knees.
Well, maybe not the Russian bear,
maybe the Swedes.
We showed Argentina, now let's go and show these:
make us feel tough.
More or less ten years later, the United States brought the Russian bear to his knees, and people began to talk about a new peaceful age. More or less ten years later, in the United States they only have left the language of war.
Monday, January 19, 2004
I - The Bulgarian Rhythm
I received yesterday another CD of Bulgarian folkloric music. Listening to it, a musician besides me said: "what's that rhythm?". That rhythm, naturally, was the so-called "Bulgarian Rhythm", totally unusual for the cultivated European style musician. My friend said: "the musical measures we are used to are natural: we can walk to rhythm of our music; I wonder if they walk to that rhythm, that would be something interesting to see". That simple observation made me recall a similar observation picked up by Béla Bartók:
One of our most famous musicians, after hearing for the first time a handful of melodies with Bulgarian rhythm, exclaimed: "but, in the end, these Bulgarians are all cripples, to have melodies in such a lame rhythm?"
Bartók says that such rhythm is to be found nowhere else but Bulgaria, and some parts of Turkey. Our ears are not used at all to this, or so it seems:
The ancient cultured European music never knew a measure other than the two or three beats measures, id est, the 2/4 and 3/4, their duplications and subdivisions.
This can be widely applied to the popular music as well. Bartók was surprised that accomplished musicians couldn't play musical scores with Bulgarian melodies; I was surprised to know that common people perceive them as normal. Once, for some guitar collective task, I reproduced one of those strange melodies, and watched for the reactions. The musicians, naturally, said "what the hell is that?". Some tried to follow it, and their ears got dizzy, if such thing can be said. Some smiled. I asked them to sing the melody, and they couldn't. Then, I asked "normal" people, id est, not musicians, whether they could sense something strange in the song. Not a single one perceived it, most of them could sing the melody with no problems whatsoever.
I always found this fact something weird: those rhythms were created by simple, uneducated people, not in a laboratory as a kind of intellectual experiment (as Frank Zappa's asymmetrics rhythms). Béla Bartók, again, enunciates this feeling in similar words:
These rhythms are natural. I mean: they were not invented by composers after stoutly tormenting their brains out, they were produced by the country, by a totally spontaneous formation process.
So I thought: if these rhythms are totally natural for them, if they can dance to that rhythm, if the old ladies can sing them, if the kids can whistle them, then our 4/4 conception is as artificial as theirs. The fact that non-musicians could accept them as natural proves that. Adrian Clark said
What's great about their rhythms is that, despite the complexity, it all sounds so natural and organic.
And he's completely right. They sound natural, but I'm interested on that bit: "despite the complexity". Once we shed our cultural light over them, it turns out it is complex? That's non sense, if it's natural for the unaware (to avoid negative connotations of the word "ignorant"), it's us musicians who have the problem. We are educated to box knowledge, and we lose a lot in the process. As a picture scanned in a computer, colours are reduced and what was continuous becomes little dots we call "pixels". Bartók understands this is an education problem:
If those who study music would become familiar since childhood with such rhythms, musicians, orchestra instrumentalists, graduates, they wouldn't stand open mouthed before even easier rhythmic formulae, as if they were seeing something written in Arabian.
I'm not sure of this, I'm not sure we should add just another box to our collection. Such examples make me think that formal music education as we know it is also an empoverishment process. How many times I noticed that graduates are not able to compose? They are skilled instrumentalists, but they cannot think in terms of creating something. What doors do they close during training? How many times I saw a teenager pick up a guitar, learn a handful of chords and immediately compose a new song? Seems that cultural environment (hearing music in the radio, for example) was more useful to that teenager than years studying strict theory.
II - The Natural Flow
A closer look to Roger Waters' compositions revealed something odd: he occasionally drops asymmetrical measures in his songs. What's odd on this? Roger Waters, the Pink Floyd bass player and main composer, is not an educated musician. His compositions never include more than a couple of conventional chords. An album like "The Final Cut", for example, has songs that can be classified either in the "F/Bb/C" pattern, or in the "G/C/G/D" pattern, with minor variations. In his career, he rarely abandoned that path. Not to speak about the rhythm: mainly 4/4, sometimes the 6/8 waltz. He's that kind of composers that depart from a vocal melody, instead of the harmony. He has a wonderful melodic intuition, and works his songs clearly from the lyrics. Now, if we want to actually write them in a music sheet, we suddenly realize that not always he's been regular, to say something. The two chorus parts of "Pigs (three different ones)", from the Animals album, sound the same to the ear, but they are different once written down. There are irregularities in the very simple "Mother". The blues called "Sexual Revolution" is not symmetrical. There are many more examples, all with a common denominator: they all sound natural to the ear, but they have a hidden unevenness. I bet Roger Waters is completely unaware of this, or he was when he composed those songs, at least. Most of those things can be explained in terms of "natural flow": for him, it was natural to resolve the song that way, intuitively he put that part, and it was easy for him to play it. For the highbrow such things are mistakes, for the casual listener, there's nothing wrong.
So again we come to that unpleasant sensation: something gets lost in the formal process. As Pitigrilli once said:
The grammar is a complex instrument to teach you a language, but at the same time it prevents you from speaking such language.
Someone said that the language is the most complex, the most interesting thing we have invented. Language is something alive, that can't be framed within grammars. That language is something complex is something any person who had tried to learn a foreign language could verify. The incompetence of the automatic translators shows that languages are far away from being framed in a set of rules. The failure of artificial languages as esperanto also demonstrates that people won't accept anything out of the "natural flow": intellectual constructions are not welcome. Music, that other language (someone said beautifully that is a language we can understand, but we cannot translate to any other), has many of the complexities or irrationalities of the spoken tongue. There is a formal structure for both that pretend to "catch" the natural flow. Unlike with language, the structure proposed for music in the Western World led to stagnation. The Western music, according to the famous Grout/Palisca book called "A History of Western Music", was a sequence of adding new formal paths to what was known. This means that music grew in an academic fashion, not by mere musical intuition. All the system was structured, until last century at least, with the tempered scale and the even ryhtmic structures. The twentieth century innovated in the harmonic field, but the ryhthmic one was almost completely untouched, not to speak about the old twelve notes. Meanwhile, other countries do not know of pitch limits, or rhythmic patterns. The Western music was completely framed after Pythagoras/Aristoxenus. According to Grout, the aristotelian thought on education simplified the Greek music to a set of rules. Aristotle himself says that musicians should be educated
...only until they are able to feel delight in noble melodies and rhythms, and not merely in that common part of the music in which even some animals find pleasure.
to avoid extreme focusing on technique.
The popular Western music, mainly a simplification of the classical world, shows nothing different. The dynamic flow of the spoken language has no parallel in music; we have lost, through education and academy, the "natural flow" on music. The small examples I wrote here show that such flow still exists inside us, but is gradually covered by cultural assimilation since we are born. The most constricted ones are, paradoxically, the musicians themselves.
I received yesterday another CD of Bulgarian folkloric music. Listening to it, a musician besides me said: "what's that rhythm?". That rhythm, naturally, was the so-called "Bulgarian Rhythm", totally unusual for the cultivated European style musician. My friend said: "the musical measures we are used to are natural: we can walk to rhythm of our music; I wonder if they walk to that rhythm, that would be something interesting to see". That simple observation made me recall a similar observation picked up by Béla Bartók:
One of our most famous musicians, after hearing for the first time a handful of melodies with Bulgarian rhythm, exclaimed: "but, in the end, these Bulgarians are all cripples, to have melodies in such a lame rhythm?"
Bartók says that such rhythm is to be found nowhere else but Bulgaria, and some parts of Turkey. Our ears are not used at all to this, or so it seems:
The ancient cultured European music never knew a measure other than the two or three beats measures, id est, the 2/4 and 3/4, their duplications and subdivisions.
This can be widely applied to the popular music as well. Bartók was surprised that accomplished musicians couldn't play musical scores with Bulgarian melodies; I was surprised to know that common people perceive them as normal. Once, for some guitar collective task, I reproduced one of those strange melodies, and watched for the reactions. The musicians, naturally, said "what the hell is that?". Some tried to follow it, and their ears got dizzy, if such thing can be said. Some smiled. I asked them to sing the melody, and they couldn't. Then, I asked "normal" people, id est, not musicians, whether they could sense something strange in the song. Not a single one perceived it, most of them could sing the melody with no problems whatsoever.
I always found this fact something weird: those rhythms were created by simple, uneducated people, not in a laboratory as a kind of intellectual experiment (as Frank Zappa's asymmetrics rhythms). Béla Bartók, again, enunciates this feeling in similar words:
These rhythms are natural. I mean: they were not invented by composers after stoutly tormenting their brains out, they were produced by the country, by a totally spontaneous formation process.
So I thought: if these rhythms are totally natural for them, if they can dance to that rhythm, if the old ladies can sing them, if the kids can whistle them, then our 4/4 conception is as artificial as theirs. The fact that non-musicians could accept them as natural proves that. Adrian Clark said
What's great about their rhythms is that, despite the complexity, it all sounds so natural and organic.
And he's completely right. They sound natural, but I'm interested on that bit: "despite the complexity". Once we shed our cultural light over them, it turns out it is complex? That's non sense, if it's natural for the unaware (to avoid negative connotations of the word "ignorant"), it's us musicians who have the problem. We are educated to box knowledge, and we lose a lot in the process. As a picture scanned in a computer, colours are reduced and what was continuous becomes little dots we call "pixels". Bartók understands this is an education problem:
If those who study music would become familiar since childhood with such rhythms, musicians, orchestra instrumentalists, graduates, they wouldn't stand open mouthed before even easier rhythmic formulae, as if they were seeing something written in Arabian.
I'm not sure of this, I'm not sure we should add just another box to our collection. Such examples make me think that formal music education as we know it is also an empoverishment process. How many times I noticed that graduates are not able to compose? They are skilled instrumentalists, but they cannot think in terms of creating something. What doors do they close during training? How many times I saw a teenager pick up a guitar, learn a handful of chords and immediately compose a new song? Seems that cultural environment (hearing music in the radio, for example) was more useful to that teenager than years studying strict theory.
II - The Natural Flow
A closer look to Roger Waters' compositions revealed something odd: he occasionally drops asymmetrical measures in his songs. What's odd on this? Roger Waters, the Pink Floyd bass player and main composer, is not an educated musician. His compositions never include more than a couple of conventional chords. An album like "The Final Cut", for example, has songs that can be classified either in the "F/Bb/C" pattern, or in the "G/C/G/D" pattern, with minor variations. In his career, he rarely abandoned that path. Not to speak about the rhythm: mainly 4/4, sometimes the 6/8 waltz. He's that kind of composers that depart from a vocal melody, instead of the harmony. He has a wonderful melodic intuition, and works his songs clearly from the lyrics. Now, if we want to actually write them in a music sheet, we suddenly realize that not always he's been regular, to say something. The two chorus parts of "Pigs (three different ones)", from the Animals album, sound the same to the ear, but they are different once written down. There are irregularities in the very simple "Mother". The blues called "Sexual Revolution" is not symmetrical. There are many more examples, all with a common denominator: they all sound natural to the ear, but they have a hidden unevenness. I bet Roger Waters is completely unaware of this, or he was when he composed those songs, at least. Most of those things can be explained in terms of "natural flow": for him, it was natural to resolve the song that way, intuitively he put that part, and it was easy for him to play it. For the highbrow such things are mistakes, for the casual listener, there's nothing wrong.
So again we come to that unpleasant sensation: something gets lost in the formal process. As Pitigrilli once said:
The grammar is a complex instrument to teach you a language, but at the same time it prevents you from speaking such language.
Someone said that the language is the most complex, the most interesting thing we have invented. Language is something alive, that can't be framed within grammars. That language is something complex is something any person who had tried to learn a foreign language could verify. The incompetence of the automatic translators shows that languages are far away from being framed in a set of rules. The failure of artificial languages as esperanto also demonstrates that people won't accept anything out of the "natural flow": intellectual constructions are not welcome. Music, that other language (someone said beautifully that is a language we can understand, but we cannot translate to any other), has many of the complexities or irrationalities of the spoken tongue. There is a formal structure for both that pretend to "catch" the natural flow. Unlike with language, the structure proposed for music in the Western World led to stagnation. The Western music, according to the famous Grout/Palisca book called "A History of Western Music", was a sequence of adding new formal paths to what was known. This means that music grew in an academic fashion, not by mere musical intuition. All the system was structured, until last century at least, with the tempered scale and the even ryhtmic structures. The twentieth century innovated in the harmonic field, but the ryhthmic one was almost completely untouched, not to speak about the old twelve notes. Meanwhile, other countries do not know of pitch limits, or rhythmic patterns. The Western music was completely framed after Pythagoras/Aristoxenus. According to Grout, the aristotelian thought on education simplified the Greek music to a set of rules. Aristotle himself says that musicians should be educated
...only until they are able to feel delight in noble melodies and rhythms, and not merely in that common part of the music in which even some animals find pleasure.
to avoid extreme focusing on technique.
The popular Western music, mainly a simplification of the classical world, shows nothing different. The dynamic flow of the spoken language has no parallel in music; we have lost, through education and academy, the "natural flow" on music. The small examples I wrote here show that such flow still exists inside us, but is gradually covered by cultural assimilation since we are born. The most constricted ones are, paradoxically, the musicians themselves.
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