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Post by Bob Porter on Jul 21, 2018 1:43:23 GMT
Holy crap! Gav is whole-sale deleting anything that smacks of the slightest thing Morabito doesn't like.
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Post by socrates on Jul 21, 2018 2:03:43 GMT
I deleted my own post Bob. I did not really have a choice, it would have been deleted anyway.
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Post by Bob Porter on Jul 21, 2018 2:20:11 GMT
Yes, but he's deleting any reference to Fred's post.
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Post by fuguestate on Jul 21, 2018 13:47:06 GMT
I agree that Fred was making a good point. I was just pointing out that some people may not appreciate his brand of humor. But yeah, the reaction from Ning management is wayyy over the top. For a while there was a glimmer of hope that between Gav and Julie the forum could return to its former glory... but it's pretty clear now that it ain't gonna happen. The heavy-handedness is gonna have to change, or that ship is gonna sink within the next few years, probably much earlier.
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Post by fuguestate on Jul 21, 2018 13:56:21 GMT
Whoa. It seems that Fred got wholesale deleted off the forum (!). I change my mind about the forum's longevity. I'll be surprised if it lasts another 2 months before all meaningful contributors are banned. It might be functionally dead by October, if not earlier. I doubt anybody's gonna pay for the renewal of the lease next year, unless Gav or you-know-who has cash to burn. But renewal or not, looks like it's going to be little more than a mere empty shell by then. Sad.
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Post by Dave Dexter on Jul 21, 2018 15:23:13 GMT
I missed some of it, but my experience with FZ is that he combines level-headedness with a low, but fairly civil, tolerance for fluff. Making him an asset in my eyes, but cancer to what Ning has become. I wonder if he was given his warnings or Gav just went . . . "nah, BANHAMMER". What was the content of his ban-worthy posts?
It's extraordinary. Perhaps Gav has become blase thanks to a few new members, or maybe Morebaconlessliver really is the eminence grise and his grubby dollars call the shots. Julie warned me about posting things online that can smear your reputation down the line - I hope she takes her own advice and exeunts asap before that maelstrom of unprofessionalism drags her in. Since it's so clearly obvious that the forum's being run as a private toybox, I don't know why Gav doesn't just say this outright.
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Post by Dave Dexter on Jul 21, 2018 15:24:48 GMT
I have to say that I think Fred was making a good point behind the humour. Atonality has to be met with experience in handling music otherwise chaos and waywardness can ensue - aint no art there imo. Indeed.
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Post by Mike Hewer on Jul 22, 2018 5:28:42 GMT
snigger, snigger
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Post by fuguestate on Jul 26, 2018 20:32:52 GMT
I wasn't going to respond to this, since I don't believe in dogpiling the underdog, no matter how much they may be just asking for it, but today I finally broke down and listened to that ... piece(?), and ... wow. Words fail me. Especially coming right after listening to Mike's masterfully crafted clarinet concerto, the difference was night and day, to say the least. If one seeks evidence of Mike's statement that there "ain't no art there", one need not look further. This "work"(?) sounds like the result of somebody who got just a little too happy with the OMG-OH-SO-SHINY-LOLZBBQ sample library that he has just gotten his grubby fingers on, and decides to throw some of the instruments into an electric blender, blend it to a brown consistency for a good 27 minutes and 19 seconds, then smear the result on the wall without any rhyme or reason, or any knowledge of how said instruments actually work, and calling it "art". Because hey, who needs to learn how to write music, use tempo and dynamics, or such trite affairs as the uninteresting intricacies of how real instruments work, when one can just define the brown smear on the wall to be music, by fiat? And who needs dramatic arc and pacing anyway? Or indeed, any structure whatsoever? Such trite things are older than this morning, and therefore belong to the dustbins of history, unworthy of our attention. It's now 18 minutes into the 27-minute ordeal, and it might as well be anywhere else in the piece and you couldn't tell the difference: the texture, dynamics, register, rhythms ... just about everything, even the average choice of pitches, has basically remained exactly the same throughout. You could cut-and-paste any section with any other section and the result is still pretty much the same old brown stain on the wall. Indeed, if I were to write a computer program to randomly rearrange the notes, I daresay the result would be essentially the same. In fact, I surmise I could write a computer program that spits out arbitrary quantities of this "music" on demand, and the audience wouldn't be able to tell the difference. Now it's the last 2 minutes, and the only thing that has changed is the average volume. Everything else yet remains the same. The brown stain is a tad thicker at one edge, but the color, texture, smell, consistency, and ... ugh ... flavor (which is surprisingly bland, like unflavored oatmeal ), is basically identical to the rest of it. Then it ends just as abruptly and as arbitrarily as it began, and I came away with absolutely nothing, not even a sense of disgust. Just a blank feeling of having wasted 27 minutes of my life that I will never get back again. I might as well have listened to birds chirp in the background, and I would been more edified. At least the birds' calls have structure and meaning to them, even if I can't understand what it signifies. Contrast this with Mike's offering, where there is the interplay of timbres, dramatic pacing, tension and release, masterfully-crafted enhancing of the solo line by the accompaniment (rather than an indescript brown mush), different "terrains" in the soundscape, so to speak, motivic development, etc.. Even one such as I who do not usually listen to this sort of music can immediately tell the difference between the two. Brown mush vs. a plate of colorful gourmet food -- even if said gourmet food isn't exactly to my taste -- I wonder which I would choose, if I had to make a choice? I rest my case.
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Post by Dave Dexter on Jul 26, 2018 20:46:15 GMT
Within 30 seconds of starting Mike's CC I'd already determined to steal some of the orchestration. The only thing that was stolen when listening to That Noise was my innocence. It was bruised and tattered up until that moment, for sure, but those cat-fisted maulings shredded it once and for all.
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Post by fuguestate on Jul 26, 2018 21:23:24 GMT
I didn't find That Noise all that objectionable, actually. It was just as I described: brown paste, completely featureless in texture and consistency, and completely tasteless, utterly bland like unseasoned breakfast cereal (but without the nutritional value ). Like white noise, except with actual notes instead of random wave frequencies. Of course, I dared not pay too much attention lest I be forever scarred by the appalling disregard for how wind instruments actually work, or any number of affronts to the definition of "music". For all I can tell, you could substitute the wind samples with any other instrument or waveforms, or indeed, random bits of white noise, and the result wouldn't be any different. The whole thing was just one long indescript paste of absolutely nothing. You could arbitrarily change any note to anything else, and it would remain the same. Even listening to the dull hum of a refrigerator sounds more interesting than this.
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Post by Bob Porter on Jul 26, 2018 23:28:51 GMT
He is one of those "composers" that isn't the least bit interested in how any instruments work. Just the tonal color aspects. These pieces are electronic only. not real.
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Post by fuguestate on Jul 27, 2018 0:15:19 GMT
Believe it or not, I actually have nothing against compositions that only work electronically. But an electronic-only work can still make sense musically. And I argue that tonal color is being disregarded here. Just listen to the piece. OK, listen to, say, the first minute or so (don't worry, the rest is just more of the same, literally, you won't miss much). Now ask yourself: will it make a difference if you changed the instrumentation to, say, strings? Or piano? Or distortion electric guitar? Or, for that matter, random clips of white noise? I've heard compositions that are only possible with digital manipulation, and they can be very effective within the confines of their medium. This, however, is not it. There is no pacing here, no contrast of color, no drama, no change of dynamics (except a trivial one in the last 2 minutes), no discernible form or shape. It isn't even a case of not being able to comprehend a work because of its utterly alien language, e.g., Penderecki; I question whether there even is any language here at all. If there is any, it must have been so thoroughly, completely obscured, ostensibly deliberately if I rightly understand what the composer meant when he suggested to someone a notation software plugin that randomizes a bunch of notes automatically, that it must be completely inaccessible to any human listener, and practically completely effaced and non-existent, like a computer file encrypted with the latest encryption technology such that you cannot distinguish the resulting bit patterns from random noise. Even if we were to grant the generosity of assuming that this is indeed the point of the piece (i.e., present white noise from which it is impossible to reconstruct the original data), I argue that 27 minutes of it is far too long to get across the point message "this is encrypted data that you cannot ever read, let alone even remotely understand". And by "data" here I mean everything that makes music art and not just random meaningless dots and lines on a page: contrast, tension, resolution, drama, variations, interest, etc.. For all I know, this could just the result of saving the melody of "Mary had a little lamb" to a file in Sibelius, then running an encryption algorithm on it and turning the result to an image, then staring at the image with your eyes crossed until you start seeing (imaginary) staves and notes. The fact that the resulting white noise actually represents the binary encryption of "Mary had a little lamb" is utterly indiscernible and has become completely irrelevant (I could equally claim the same white noise represents the binary encryption of any other piece I choose, and nobody would be able to argue against that). Any contrast, tension, creativity, or other musical quality has effectively ceased to exist, and I might as well listen to my refrigerator humming and imagine that it's actually playing Beethoven's 11th non-existent symphony. And as I said, any schoolboy these days would be able to write a program that generates random numbers and turn them into random musical notes, which you could feed to any notation program to get any arbitrary amount of such "music". It's the ultimate success story: with one click of the button, you can generate hundreds and thousands of pieces of any duration, which you can then sell for a fortune to the hapless masses, then retire to a life of ease and bliss only occasionally inconvenienced by having to press the button a few more times. If this hogwash actually represents the reality of modern music, then I say it deserves all the hate and bad rep it gets. Thankfully, we have people like Mike Hewer to show us what real modern music is.
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Post by Mike Hewer on Jul 27, 2018 7:31:19 GMT
I question whether there even is any language here at all. If there is any, it must have been so thoroughly, completely obscured, ostensibly deliberately if I rightly understand what the composer meant when he suggested to someone a notation software plugin that randomizes a bunch of notes automatically, that it must be completely inaccessible to any human listener, and practically completely effaced and non-existent, like a computer file encrypted with the latest encryption technology such that you cannot distinguish the resulting bit patterns from random noise.Even if we were to grant the generosity of assuming that this is indeed the point of the piece (i.e., present white noise from which it is impossible to reconstruct the original data), I argue that 27 minutes of it is far too long to get across the point message "this is encrypted data that you cannot ever read, let alone even remotely understand". And by "data" here I mean everything that makes music art and not just random meaningless dots and lines on a page: contrast, tension, resolution, drama, variations, interest, Yes, this Teoh. Imo, there is no discernible humanity (and therefore no art) in artificial processes that are employed with a musical sensibility that does not, or cannot, ascertain the subtlety required to emote more appealingly in atonality. The struggle and ultimate victory in imposing our will over music and its processes with subjectivity and especially rigour, is surely a defining quality, one that creates an artistic work imbued (ironically) more with the self than a stream of uncontrolled consciousness. Btw...thanks gents for the nice compliments.
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Post by Dave Dexter on Jul 27, 2018 7:47:20 GMT
I'd feel bad about lambasting a composer behind his back, although he certainly reads this so it's to his face really, but there have definitely been bitter Bobversations about my music behind closed doors. Some of them were with fictional "clients" but sometimes it would spill into the old forum and you could HEAR the vitriol bubbling. So I don't feel too bad. You just keep hitting that "randomize all" button, Bobward. You hit it good.
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