Category: Uncategorised

Art Music as Weapon

The L.A. Times has an article today about using classical music as a crime deterrent. First, some background:
Wesleyan had a symposium last spring about environmental sounds. Someone presented a paper using music to chase away teenagers. The researcher found that classical music doesn’t repel anyone and the evidence is all anecdotal. Nobody has actually done studies. The L.A. Times claims otherwise, but who knows if the reporter actually did research or just reported what everybody “knows.”

The L.A. Times article talks about what it means, socially, to use Art Music as a weapon. They have an elitist take on it, however, and speak only from the point of view of high art types and the police/state. No actual thugs or teenagers were interviewed. Middletown, CT has a parking garage which blares baroque music all day every day. There s a coffee shop on the first floor of the garage. Teens congregate outside the coffee shop. The inside of the shop blasts industrial music to attract the teens. The outside of the coffee shop blasts classical to drive them away. The teens I’ve talked to say they don’t notice and they don’t care. (It drives me crazy though.)
What environmental sound programming actually does is define space. Let’s say you’re in a mall. the whole thing is indoors. There are many hallways, rooms, etc. You have some rooms that are shops that must be differentiated from the common area of the mall and from the store next door. the entire environment is totally homogenous, so they need to use several cues to define themselves as a separate space. These involve things like color scheme, decorations and sound. the large mall has one sound track. Each store has it’s own soundtrack. They contract with companies like music to provide them with a soundtrack which reflects whatever image the store is trying to sell. Sound design in this context is about creating feelings of group membership. This store plays your music and sells your clothes. It welcomes in the demographic that the store hopes to attract.
Using art music on Middletown’s parking garage is basically the same strategy. The music says, “this is not your music, this is not your place to hang out.” Rather than be “uncool,” or somehow cause people to switch to concert behavior, what the music actually telegraphs that public spaces are reserved for the upper classes. and how can you possibly object to classical music? It’s the highest form of art! Anyone who objects to this plan is either a thug or a philistine.
Obviously, public spaces belong equally to everyone regardless of class or any other factor. Things that try to define it as reserved for the rich are objectionable. The weaponification of sound is also extremely probelmatic. This trend is related to the army blasting rock music at detainees. Remember when we invaded Panama and played loud death metal at the Papal Nuncio until Noriega surrendered? Also related to the sound cannons owned by the New York police department. Public sounds used to mean carillons playing noon concerts. Now it’s something to divide and destroy.
and what does it mean for Art Music when the state insists that it’s objectionable and does not belong to youth or the poor? I believe there is a plot afoot to destroy art. We all have to listen to commercial pop and hate and fear all serious art and serious music or else we’re uncool? The future of music is doomed.
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upcoming concerts

Tomorrow, February 11th 8:00 PM Crowell concert Hall, I will play tuba with the Wesleyan Creative Music Orchestra, lead by Bill Dixon. This concert will be webcast, starting from 6:00 PM EST (3:00 PST) , obviously including our rehearsal. The stream can be found at rtsp://snuffy88.its.wesleyan.edu/wesmus.sdp . You must use Quicktime to view the stream.

Saturday, february 12th, at 4:00 pm in Crowell Concert Hall, the Wesleyan Orchestra will play my five minute symphony. This concert will not be webcast, but I will post an mp3.
I have reserved the Wesleyan Chapel for my thesis concert, but I’m going to have to call and ask which date I reserved it. I think April 5th. They want all this information about what I’m going to do. Damned if I know.
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Million Dollar Baby bruhaha

I read some article in the NY Times about the new Clint Eastwood flick. There’s a controversy. The right wing hates the movie. They say it’s in favor of assisted suicide and plays racial politics. I haven’t seen this movie. the times only revealed that the plot twist involved one of the characters becoming seriously injured and wanting to die. Is it clint eastwood? Is it Morgan Freedman? Or is it Hillary Swank, the plucky young woman who wants to become a professional boxer? Take a guess.
Yeah, you’re right. Hollywood wouldn’t seriously allow a woman to break gender roles and succeed without having to suffer suffer suffer. And she dies at the end, which is even better. So the anti-assisted suicide people are in an uproar. As are the disability rights advocates. Becoming disabled doesn’t have to be a death sentence and really, it’s not fair to disabled people to treat disability as if disabled people were better off dead. But where are the angry feminists? Have we gotten so used to women in movies being punished for everything but being a Stepford Wife (the original, dammit) that we’ve given up saying anything? Seriously, the right wing should love this movie and every other one of the 23719547291541253 movies where a woman who tries to succeed gets hurt. They should love the Austin Powers movie where the woman spy decides that she really just wants to marry a spy instead of being one. They should love Clint’s movie Mystic River where the wife of the suspected killer gets to suffer suffer suffer at the end for not keeping her mouth shut.

The best part of the Times story is where Clint tries to defend the movie by saying the bad guys in it are welfare cheats. See, I hate the poor! I’m on the right side!
I haven’t seen the movie. I don’t feel like I have to. I went to the mall today and spent some time standing with Aaron inside a Lane Bryant. Afterwards we talked about enforced femininity and how it is codified, promulgated and largely adhered to. The plucky-hero-succeeding movies are trite and tiresome too. What I like is more like Star Trek. All the positions are inhabited by all sorts of folks. Aliens. Women. Minorities. Anybody can be anything in Star Trek (as long as they’re straight, *sigh*). And then there are just images of different people who have already succeeded and what happens to them afterwards.
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controversy – Hacking Humans

Person who I forgot to ask if I could quote her said

i don’t understand your reply to my comment in your journal
where you said “creepy? you think the idea of me wanting to use possibly dangerous methods to put people in suggestible states and program them is creepy?”

like, i don’t think that most people would get quite how creepy that is, but if you’re flat-out saying that you’re using possibly dangerous methods to put people in suggestible states and program them and that (if i read you correctly) that *is* creepy, then… why would you do it? i mean how would that be okay?

This in reference to my idea to use 10Hz waves to put people in alpha states and then expose them to ideas of peace, love, joy, togetherness, etc. Morality in art is a good discussion to have. I saw an installation L.A. that used real bits of endangered animals. I heard the artist say the point was about vegetarians who wear leather shoes. I felt like killing endangered animals for so little reason was profoundly immoral. so is it wrong for an artist to experiment on people using methods she’s used on herself? I want to make clear that the “danger” here is the possibility of seizures from strobe lights. Every dance club I’ve frequented on the east coast has had a strobe.
I asked my questioner: if I gave participants copies of my research, explained my methods, provided them with printed copies of all text first and experimented on myself before allowing others in, would it be ok?
She said no, you can’t give informed consent to something you haven’t experienced and furthermore, some things, like recreational murder, cannot have the concept of informed consent.
I don’t think I agree. First of all, I can’t try murdering myself and then go murder you after seeing how it went for me. The non-consentability of murder has to do with the finality of it and that it is universally recognized as harmful. People consent to potentially harmful things all the time, like bungee jumping, or even things that are supposed to cause them pain, like kinky sex (everyone who has done it has consented without personal fore knowledge once). Furthermore, it’s not my intent to harm anyone. So, like bungee jumping, maybe there’s risk (but not risk of getting flattened under a bridge), but the goal is a positive experience. There’s some things floating around online that claim that “there is ample evidence that some [altered states] bring about extremely pleasant feelings and can profoundly affect personality.” (http://skepdic.com/altstates.html)
Well, is it immoral? I don’t think I’m going to have time to do this by April anyway and certainly not in any sort of super-master-hypnotist level. I like generating controversy, though. I wonder who would participate if they thought it might hurt them? Why would they? What role would peer-pressure play? Why do people go to Survival Research Labs events? Are they immoral? This is profoundly useful for distracting me from writing chapter 2 of my thesis.
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The End of Criticism

The era of criticism is over. It is the end of the critic, the end of destructive comments, the long-delayed end of an era.

Critics have power as long as we’re willing to listen to them. We don’t have to engage them. We don’t have to listen and we don’t have to participate. Too often, when critics are decried, the decrier means on that s/he should become the critic. “Only I get to criticize music, because of my unique and legitimate position as the arbiter of taste.” That is not my intent.
Obviously, music and art must be engaged and even discussed, or it is the end of music education. Otherwise, no one will ever know of any artist because no one will have spoken of them. It is appropriate to engage music in several ways.
If you are a teacher and the creator is your student, the constructive criticism is completely appropriate. Constructive criticism implies a power relationship. It should exist within that relationship or when requested, other wise, it is exerting authority where none ought to exist. Also, please note, constructive criticism. Saying “this sucks” is in no way constructive.
The way to engage art is to make art. It is very easy to say “this sucks” and to destroy and to complain about other people’s endeavors, but it’s more difficult to create something yourself, now isn’t it? Engaging music with words, then, means talking about what is worth emulating in a piece. If we look at pieces as jumping off points, then learning from them to instruct our own music is beneficial.
And for those whose role it is to talk about music: If somebody invented something, say that. If somebody had made something great, say that. If something sucks, then don’t waste our time by telling us about it. Talk about something that is worth talking about. Perhaps you’re worried that there’s a danger that some terrible trend will go unchecked unless it is criticized. However, it will not be emulated unless it’s worth emulating. It will not be praised if it is not worth praising. Creators of suck will be met with a resounding silence. Their is no danger of something with no redeeming value taking over, unless, perhaps, you are thinking of Thomas Kinkade. Your position as newspaper art critic, angry letter writer, peeved grad student, gallery curator, arts administrator, university professor, or cultural-capital endowedness is not going to stop a consumer-driven trend. You can’t make the unwashed masses like something or dislike something. Instead, they rather object to being thought of that way. Make something better, or you have nothing to say.
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Iraqi Election!

And who could doubt the credibility of such an election, run under an occupational authority which has a perfect record of flawless elections, especially in Florida in 2000 and Ohio in 2004? Who could doubt the credibility when the observers weren’t even in the same country? When the Sunni’s “boycotted” the vote by having virtually no polling places open in their regions?

Al Jazeera is reporting charges of election fraud in Kurdistan. Kurds are the largest ethnic group with no country. During the 11 years of the US-run siege against Iraq, the Kurds lived in a semi-autonomous region. There is a lot of oil in Iraqi Kurdistan. Kurds have reason to want to maintain autonomy. The US has reason to want to maintain good ties with Kurds. So the US media takes a hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil approach to the “first free elections in the history of Iraq.” And perhaps there is widespread fraud leading to a situation where the US gets to help itself to northern Iraq’s oil and the rest of Iraq gets squat for it.
Was there election fraud? How could I possibly know? How could anyone know? The burden of proof is upon those running the elections. The occupational authority needs to demonstrate that they were free and fair. But an occupational government is inherently untrustworthy. Which is why monitors are needed. Without monitors, it’s like having Tinkerbell elections. The US press gives a standing ovation. They do believe in fairies. The folks in the Middle East aren’t as convinced. Democracy should not be a faith-based activity. The elections are only as valuable as they are perceived to be. We haven’t given anyone but US domestic audiences much in the way of persuasion.
Al Jazeera has constantly been annoying us, what with their uncensored reporting of news. It would be so much better if they just repeated Pentagon propaganda. But don’t worry. They’re for sale. Soon Rupert Murdoch will own them too.
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Polls – should I change this blog?

Should I rename this blog (not change the url) to something a bit more highbrow than “groovy zone”? (A trumpet player told me wednesday that playing tuba is not groovy. I was shocked. “Do you know the name of my website???!” I did not say.)

Should I perhaps separate music from politics from what-i-ate-for-lunch and have three blogs?
Is my genre “classical music”? Is tweaking Rush Limbaugh in the same category as Beethoven?
Answer in the comments, if you want to answer.
Unrelatedly, why does everyone want MAX teachers? They should want SuperCollider teachers. I met a guy over the weekend whose book on hacking hardware (for musical purposes) is going to be published by Rutledge. pretty cool.
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