All I would like to know is how the subject of this thread could ever be other than political?

Thank you Alistair


Ian,

Please keep the music topics musical. You can continue discussions about politics and sexuality via private messages with the few who have shown an interest in your views.

John W
Moderator

On various messageboards I have read people calling for an end to political discussions right after sending a huge number of posts of their own to such threads.

Chuck me out for posting again in this thread if you like, but tell me where, other than in one post in the PMD thread, I have posted 'sexual content' (save for the odd innuendo in the Waffle thread and so on, which lots of people do)?

Which is to be, Ian? You're sorry? - or you're not giving an apology? Even you can't have it both ways, surely?!

For my part, I do believe that discussion of the PMD speech, Shostakovich's Eighth Symphony and certain other principally musical issues cannot be sufficiently thorough without some appropriate and relevant reference to matters political which, in such instances, are directly relevant to the issues themselves but, from where I'm sitting, the things that bother me (and I hasten to assure you that I am not one of the complainants) are when political, gender / sexual and other matters are dragged in kicking and screaming to topics where I happen not to believe they belong or can contribute to understanding of those topics - in other words, disproportionate and non-relevant references to these things. That's just my personal view. Others may agree, yet more others may disagree. I know and accept that you disagree in principle over this anyway.

Now - at the risk of repetition - anyone for "Orientalism and music"? Can we - er - "orient" ourselves toward this?...

Best,

Alistair

I do not presume to speak for anyone else, including John W here, but it reads to me as though his meaning was that what he sees as the length and incomprehensibility of the post concerned is what qualified it as unacceptable; whether or not you agree with that premise, it seems to me to be a reasonable one in itself.

Best

Alistair

(moved back from That Other thread)


As far as I understand what he had written here, it relates to the way which we should approach certain types of music.  I've head this from several sources, that these people wish their music to be approached with a certain reverence or, at the very least, seriousness.

Ian touched on this of course with his mention of the Sufi Temple musician, and maybe this comment in a general sense should be placed on the "how does on listen to music" thread, but, say this: for a listener, how does he approach a piece of music that he has been told has oriental features or that he is hearing to feature oriental idioms. Or if she is told that a piece of music is actually written by someone from the orient, can he be accused, by this listener who is uneducated in matters of the east, of employing orientalisms, any more than charged with general inanity?


I personally have often found his register rather humourous in tone.  Of course, here is not the place to talk about it.


Richard, I would be interested in hearing any further thoughts you would have on these matters.

Oooh, yes...hadn't thought much further on that my question might sound like that - indeed, I had to rephrase the following sentence several times to try to avoid such tones.  I mean to be more interested in the phenomenological and psychological aspects than going further and judging the listening practices of music-listeners influenced by these psychologically/sociologically tied-up tendencies though. 

With respect to the last sentence, which I could have phrased so as to cast the "listener" in a better light I'm sure...will put it in first person actually: I might be more careful about how I treat the listener then then.  I know very little solid about music from the far east, and not much at all about middle-eastern or Indian music.  However, I am quite familiar with the traditional Oriental clichés that feature in some works of Western art music.  I might thus accuse a western piece of music that featured these Orientalist artefacts of being rather terribly faux, whereas if I was told that the piece of music actually came from the eastern traditions directly, I might have to let things rest at saying it didn't do it for me, that I didn't understand it, or, heaven forbid, that their entire musical tradition must be terribly, terribly bland.  I guess what I'm trying to get at is might be something like that fact that I feel able to judge pieces of western music on their oriental merits, without knowing anything of the various traditions of music in the orient per se, only their image as seen in the western tradition itself.


I think so also.  This is true of pieces of all forms though - if one was to play a scherzo and tell people it was a nocturne.  A friend of mine had written a small toccata-like piece recently that was mostly diatonic - I remember thinking it could have easily fall into the etude genre, but if one called it that one would associate it with Czerny-esque finger-twiddling exercises far to easily and it might impact negatively on the impression the piece would make as a whole.  This is, of course, a psychologically-based phenomenon that can be found in peoples dealing with all arts, and in most Things In General.  The situation with orientalist-influences in the history of western art music seems, to me, to have a rather distinctive character in some ways (that the example of deceiving people as to the intended structure/character of a piece doesn't exhibit).