the space needle is two years younger than me!

[dubdobdee]

and plus: i met lots of nice ppl and only saw ONE really poor paper and am feeling super-psyched for thinking about music (possibly)

Comments

this was the proposal

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

TITLE: "... b-but does it pass the test of SPACE?!!!" Why rotten
music-writing creates worse history; how the music that this damages -- not
to mention the music it doesn't -- suggests ways writers can do something
about it (possibly); how we can bring the lost moment back to life without
destroying it...

SYNOPSIS:
We've all heard of the "test of time", the test that music has to "stand" to
be any good; in the heat of the wrong argument, we've all doubtless invoked
it. The problem: by second-guessing the attitudes of the historians of
tomorrow, we unavoidably misdescribe the phenomena we're chronicling. Musics
that aspire to significance shape their self-analysis -- and all too often
their delivery -- so as to disguise the role of the trivial, the ephemeral.
150 years ago composed music and the written aesthetics it generated had to
battle for centralised library space, to garner the canonic approval basic
to the paper-based monument to past achievement. Today the many technologies
of sonic documentation have enabled a vast archival hinterland, a
disorganised, distributed storehouse of the private microgesture, the key to
music as used and valued and loved in the context of countless ordinary
lived lives. The paper will discuss writers who've teased at this issue --
from Nietzsche to Meltzer -- and will examine the curious double role played
by said technologies, making possible both the petrification of everything,
from symphony to whispered sigh, and the divisions and rebellions within pop
culture against anything so ossified as legacy-making. It will look at
musics arguably wrecked by the writing they suffered -- jazz, punk, the
avant-garde -- and others that writing somehow doesn't spoil, playful
counter-genres that catch at, foreground and personalise exactly the energy
stripped out in the trudge towards a higher timelessness: dance musics,
fashion musics, silly musics. How exactly does this song -- or this opera --
jostle along in life's arena, alongside TV, food, friends, children, work,
war...? Wouldn't that be the test of space?

Re: this was the proposal

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

re the line "Why rotten music-writing creates worse history"

deanin' bob xgau said to me in the lift that he was 'peeved" that i didn't pursue this more -- i said in my intro that i had cried off reading and analysing loads of rotten writing, bcz when it came to it i just couldn't face it

Re: this was the proposal

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

i imagine Xgau kind of floating over the whole conference on the monorail like some sort of AETHEREAL CLOUD, questioning all to make them clear up their thinking...

call him by his etc

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

bobbin' dean xgau is better isn't it? i blame h.jetlag

Re: this was the proposal

[nicolars.livejournal.com]

I really would have liked to have heard this.

Re: this was the proposal

[jeff-worrell.livejournal.com]

We can still get to read it... yes, mark...? Or are you saving the print version for your book?

Re: this was the proposal

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

well there isn't really a "print" version -- i prepared some readings (from adorno, meltzer, and j.l.austin's "a plea for excuses", as cited in the aesthetics of rock) -- and then having read them discussed them kinda ad lib, so the structure was pre-prepared but the sentences not so much

Re: this was the proposal

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

GOOD WORK, freejazz paper givin' :)

apparentlysimonreynoldswasmumblingintohispieceofpaperandreadingitverbatim again...

Re: this was the proposal

[dubdobdee.livejournal.com]

yes there's an interesting cross-tension = even though the academics often write less engagingly they have a better sense of length and of how to deliver to a class of bored infants students, while the journos write better but have next to no delivery skeez

(tho it's actually not that cut and dried, and plenty of the papers were good both ways)

Re: this was the proposal

[koganbot]

I'm in a writing group and I've discovered that I can't read for shit, all the various tones of voices, shades of meaning, etc. that I put into my writing to make my writing read as a voice don't help my actual voice to sound like a voice when I'm reading. Whereas I can speak well and animatedly, even though I "um" and "you know" and [laughs] far too much (and haven't spoken much for a formal audience). I would probably go for the notes thing if I ever had a "paper" to give. But I'd try to make sure it was recorded.

Re: this was the proposal

[dickmalone.livejournal.com]

He really was! And then, being ignorant of these things, I couldn't really understand the lyrics in the sound clips he played, so I got really lost.

I think next time (should there be one) I'm definitely going to go from notes too--some of the best presentations I saw did that, as they were generally more lively.

Re: this was the proposal

[carsmilesteve.livejournal.com]

hehe, sorry, i did borrow the simon thing from yr review, but that's EXACTLY THE SAME as when we saw him talking about rip it up in London

Re: this was the proposal

[nicolars.livejournal.com]

I can't hate on him for that, that's pretty much how I present. :(