Part 1: Groundwork

Chapter One: Dancing About Architecture

or Dance, Sing About ArcheTexture

or Dancing a Bout (ArcheTexture)

you pick one, reader 

consult w/ Sheron Wray about how best to borrow her term;

wrk in Stravinsky?

https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS615US615&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=stravinsky%20on%20music
https://www.google.com/webhp?sourceid=chrome-instant&rlz=1C1CHFX_enUS615US615&ion=1&espv=2&ie=UTF-8#q=writing%20about%20music%20is%20like%20dancing%20about%20architecture

define analysis of same as a tracking of the musical/mythical decisions improvisers/composers make that declare what they do as both musical, first, and of a given quality (AB's "identity state," finally--as opposed to just noise and/or bad music; on the musician’s end, it’s about intention/sensitivity/mindfulness in the transmission, and the same in the reception on the analytical audience’s end (both are also "friendly experiencers/listeners"

This chapter’s mission is to both convey and question the contextual and methodological assumptions and practices underlying the various amateur-cum-professional/public roles of writers about music--fanzine-type writers, journalists, critics, advocacy writers (grantwriters, ad copywriters, press release writers, public relations writers), academic writers...even musicians writing about their own work/genre/peers, etc.

The fiction’s conceit is that the book is the memoir of a famous music scholar looking back over a career that included all those roles. He recounts their arcs in his autobiography from his first childhood engagements with both music and writing. In the course of doing so, he notes what he thinks is good and salvageable about each and which problematic, to be renounced and discarded. The good mostly entails tricks of the art and craft of writing, and insights into the nature of music gained thereby. The problematic mostly entails the baggage of naïve, immature, ego-driven and underdeveloped personalities in the writers [nail that description more precisely]; of careerism, consumerism, and the other capitalism-driven concerns of commercialism; and the intellectual-historical taints of colonialism and imperialism in academia.

What I’ve done in my private drafts with this so far includes ?? words recounting my own real history in those roles, laced with the fictional details appropriate to the fiction. I exclude that here because at this point it all seems tedious and flat to me in the reading now, and I’m not sure how or whether I’ll use it, or how much and which if I do.

I am pretty confident in the deconstruction of the roles themselves and the reconstruction of their contexts into that of my new paradigm/mythodology of Treeunity: a process that couples the core “musico-“ with the suffixes “-graphy, -ology, and -osophy”. The current draft spells that out; I expect to prune, tweak, and refine it more, but am posting it as essentially what I want to say and work on. The excluded rest I’ll figure out what to do with later.

<text between these < > tells the reader what is being omitted in this draft>

[text between these [ ]  replaces small patches of fiction with an appropriate patch of nonfiction]

ellipses...separate unexplained omitted text, usually notes to myself about what to write there that are still too indigestible to share here 
 bolded parts include little notes to myself here for various reasons, as well as rough notes to be worked into finished prose

Having surveyed the cultural-historical contexts couching the music and its makers, we now turn to their intellectual-historical counterparts—its general aesthetic, the metamusical soul suffusing the music from soil and root, and the analytical tools and theoretical frames that might serve it best. As we get to each musician in turn, her work or his will suggest, evoke and cue such frames and details best fitting each. All, however, co-inhere in an overarching musical discourse and community, at once archaically and emergently global; that community shares a tradition that each of its members draws on and helps shape. That tradition, spanning chrono/geo-graphy, thus merits a touchstone survey of its own (Chapters Two and Three).

First (this chapter), let’s examine the surveyor’s methodological tools.

Initial Disquisition

Not everything that can be counted counts, and not everything that counts can be counted.

                                                      --Albert Einstein

Why write about music, above all other subjects? In my case, like most who do it, the first love was for the art form itself, not for any literature about it. It was something I loved to listen to, then to play and create myself; that engagement led me to want to read about and, later still, write about it. That primal preference for the music over words about it stretches back to a time before my adult memory can reach, well before I could read and write proficiently enough to enjoy a story (told on a silent page to unhearing eyes) as deeply and viscerally as a song (heard or sung), with or without words. (In this, of course, my ontology, like that of most people, never mind fellow music scholars, recaps our species’ phylogeny’s musical and oral/aural evolution, launched eons and organs [soundwave sensors preceded lightwave sensors]fn that before our literacy, and so much deeper in our organisms.)

In the half-century of my professional history as a public writer about music, I have enjoyed a series of firsts that launched many more of their kind. A quick scan will reveal my personal microcosmic “let me count the ways” of writers’ words about music:

·      first published journalism

·      first regular column as a critic

·      first grant proposal accepted for a musical event

·      first press release about such an event from a major presenter 

·      first mentor-reviewed publication as an academic Master of Arts (in Music)

·      then as Doctor of Philosophy (in Ethnomusicology)

·      first peer-reviewed published paper in music-scholarly journal

·      first book as a music scholar
·      first discursive chapter in a book with fellow scholars' chapters

Each of the firsts catalogued above has defined the arc of my work to me as an ascending one. To liken it to a ladder, as is often done for careers, would be both too spare and too domesticated; it suggests a businessman hiring on at the entry level of a corporation and climbing the steps fixed in place to the CEO position, or a politician starting local and shooting for the presidency, or an academic seeking tenure. One knows the ladder, sees its rungs clearly from bottom to top, and knows what one must do to climb it.

My path has been more like a climb up a mountain--similar in the simple attribute of ascent, but wilder and less predictable, rougher and slippier, riskier and deadlier as well as more gorgeous and glorious. Every step of the way, while conceptualized from the safety and distance of my pre-climb ground, was a new and unforeseen challenge impossible to grasp in the necessary detail until I was close enough to hang in its balance.

The view from each such higher station along my way has always delivered the thrill of bigger, better, brighter re-enlightenment that kept me lusting after the next such view through each successive (and ever more grueling) climb. I always knew there would come a point when summit would turn to descent; the only question was whether it would be a sad slog back down, a rapid plummet in a parachute, or an even more rapid plunge without one. [My current age and stage] have added a new option: the ever-present risk and uncertainty of the latter fate, the resigned certainty of the former two...tempered by the play of my fledgling set of skills on the wing. The flight back to ground now promises to be more breathtaking, panoramic, multifaceted, pro- and interactively surprising than any static flash of a snapshot from any new plateau attained, however high.

The “first” that I mark with these words, in other words--my

·      first self-publication

--marks my leap off the peak of that climb, just where it turns to descend, under the wings of a custom-made, state-of-the-art hang glider I had placed and waiting for me there.

That said, a better metaphor than the rise-fall hierarchy might be that of Chinese boxes within boxes, or Russian dolls, with the smallest coming first; better still, let’s call them a series of tree rings--more organically immanent, free of the awkward agency of some transcendent box- or doll-maker. That organism-over-construct preference also serves the key motif of this section: the relationship between my (emic) truth and (etic) “truthiness” (to borrow from one such fellow traveler, more from whom ahead; more too about what some may see as a brazen hijack of the emic/etic and similar acadelicate rubrics peppering my exposition ahead). I started writing in the smallest ring, when it was the whole tree, which never stopped being true, vital, and valid after I grew out of it into the wider rings. It rather took its place among them as their core, no longer the tree in toto.

Now that I’ve mixed those three metaphors, allow me to fuse them into a triune one, within which I will toggle between them as suits my task. Let “surveyors tools,” then, describe that new set of wings on a frame that will grant me this experience: to survey the terrain below from unparalleled heights, yes, but more grandly, from the countless perspectives made possible by the mixed motions of chance and piloting, and gradual ups and downs on currents that keep me surfing aloft as short or as long as I can ride them, while also getting me closer via gravity and every glide to the lays of the land in my sights, those details I’m straining to see and record before touching lightly down to live out my golden years in their silence-gilded climes.

Towit: now that I’m leaving both the aspirant and fully professional contexts of those firsts behind here--writing for no editors or publishers, no mentors or employers, only myself, you, and the fellow musicians and authors with whom I discourse—as I retrace the personal evolution of craft and art that unfolded through all of them, I also want to deconstruct all the above roles and their contexts and salvage from them the writer’s tools I’ve gained from them to reconstruct a new paradigm and methodology--my hang glider--better suited to this project. Am I a journalist, critic, musicologist, ethnomusicologist, music analyst, music theorist? All, in a sense; but I want to present myself rather as a musicographer, who frames his musicographical work with musicology and musicosophy. I want first to define those first and third terms, as my own neologisms, and redefine the second one, to my own new usage.

If I may mix metaphorical images again, picture them as a Treeunity, something like this:

^

|

musicosophy

<--(past) ground of tradition musicography new ground, broken (future)-->

musicology

|

     v

Musicography maps the phenomenon--the sounds, the contexts of culture, history, musicians and groups--like a geographer maps terrain; musicology grows a root system down into the soil of that terrain that frames and feeds its features for analysis and coherent discussion; musicosophy grows above both into a whole and visible tree, with unique aspects of both specie-all and individu-all--and ineffable, sui generis--mystery and transparency at once.

To bring this metaphorical embarrassment of richest desserts down to earth, poke around with me in my favorite dictionary. A handful of suffixes, as defined by Merriam-Webster (M-W), describes well both the sequence of firsts recounted above and the ways the world generally thinks of the process of writing about music. I want to sift through them for the definitions that apply most directly to the writing (-graphy) process and its various contexts themselves, and add to them with some more entries and new words that better parse and capture them as I’ve come to live them...

***

Musicography

            Writing about music is like dancing about architecture.

                                                            --Goethe
http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/337462-music-is-liquid-architecture-architecture-is-frozen-music

When they lose their [emic] sense of awe,

people turn to [etic] religion.

When they no longer [emicly] trust themselves,

they begin to depend upon [etic] authority.

Therefore the Master steps back

[into the One (sophic) field that holds those 2 poles: emic/etic {a.k.a. immanent/transcendent, here} where S/He may toggle between the two at will/whim]

so that people won't be confused.

He teaches without a teaching,

so that people will have nothing to learn.

                                          -- Tao Te Ching

(The bracketed parts are my interjections, obviously; I’ll elaborate on them more later.)

To the gist of the first epigraph above I’ll agree that the musical and literate impulses often do not easily or happily inhabit the same intellectual/emotional spaces, nor the same socio-cultural ones. Our Western tradition is a logocentric one; that said, as it has spread throughout the world, it has been powerfully shaped and reshaped by the influences of its own and others' oral traditions, especially in its musical expressions. As often as not, the contests between the literate and oral have themselves been contested, as philosophers, theologians, essayists, poets, novelists, journalists, critics, hard- and soft-scientists, and musicians themselves have tackled the art form in their various ways. find egs of that And anyway, who says you can't dance about architecture?  It sounds like a dance I’d like to see and do. think of the dancing bees

We who are as enamored with the many ways of writing about music as with those of dancing about architecture know well, from experience and love, how to count them. Their limits and their glories collude to suggest the best steps to end our own dance with them, once the latter’s purpose has been plumbed, and to walk them away from the floor and such foreplay to our more intimate stroll outside in the evening air. That image begs an account of the second epigraph; just what is that “religion,” those “authorities,” in this context? Who are these people writing about music, and why should we read them?

The etymological sense of “musicography” makes it a good umbrella term for the kind of writing I’ve been doing in different (and progressively more sophisticated) amateur and professional contexts—young fanzine unpaid reviewer, freelance journalist, granwriter/p.r. writer, graduate student, peer-reviewed scholar—since I first started doing it some five decades ago. While the quality of the writing (I hope) improved as it morphed from those avid-amateur roots to their most seasoned-professional fruits, the process as musicography has held, whether perceived and received as an everyman’s subjective op-ed, a critic's more informed screed, or a scholar's microscopic report or macroscopic tome.

The separation of the rubrics of “religion” and “the authorities” from that of “Master” in the passage above suggests that the turn from faith to doubt in oneself in favor of a “higher truth/power” is in fact a decline from, not ascent to, wisdom and truth, and that the real “masters” among us know that, and know how to facilitate rather than obstruct that faith in self, by teaching without a “teaching”—a doctrine, a “-logy” (which, as we’ve been told by the Christian apostle John about logos, is the effable co-substantiate with the ineffable, from time out of mind)--some Platonic macrocosmic, universal esoteric knowledge or system outside one’s own Aristotelian-idiosyncratic versions of same.

Musicography is always going to be focused on what Marx called “the one history,” undivided by the different frames (political, intellectual, cultural, economic, etc.) used to explain it. Those frames, on the other hand, can be infinitely many, and are no more the history they explain than is any map what it maps. I think of 

• musicography as inherently one, more emic than etic (though both), and cataphatic; 
• (my version of) musicology as inherently many, etic, and cataphatic; and 
• musicosophy as inherently many, emic, and apophatic. (Again, terms and usages, flung down now, unpacked later.)

I can best unpack and explicate “musicography” by playing around with M-W’s variations on its suffix as affixed to other stems. Thus, I liken my work more to that of a geographer than a geologist, first, foremost, and last. The “geography” of a place can refer both to its physical details (M-W: “the geographic features of an area”) and to the conceptual and graphic mapping of them (M-W: “a science that deals with the description, distribution, and interaction of the diverse physical, biological, and cultural features of the earth'’s surface”). If we replace “geo-“ with “musico-“, we get from the second definition a better (more thorough and precise) primary one than that given for “musicology”—“the study of music as a branch of knowledge or field of research as distinct from composition or performance”--above: “a science that deals with the description, distribution, and interaction of the diverse physical, biological, and cultural features of the world’s music.”

It is better because it covers the specific aspects of that “branch of knowledge or field of research” defining musicology, and it does so truer to both the etymologic of the descriptor and the material nature of the described.

As when coupled (grapho-logically, at the “o”) with bio-, autobio-, historio-, theo-, geo-, etc., -graphy, in my usage, thus takes Merriam-Webster’s second definition as primary:

2 : writing on a (specified) subject or in a (specified) field ²eg., hagiography³

Again, musicography is what I started writing in the smallest ring, when it was the whole tree, which has never stopped being true, vital, and valid as I’ve grown out of it into the outer rings. It rather took its [emic] place among them as their core, if no longer the tree in toto.

Once I described, phenomenologically, this or that aspect of music to my satisfaction as a musicographer, I took on the task of the (noumenological) technical-cum-specialist writer by analyzing it according to this or that system or aesthetic. That second ring I call musicology [etic]. Merriam-Webster’s own primary definition of –graphy comes into play here:

1 : writing or representation in a (specified) manner or by a (specified) means or of a (specified) object <stenography> <photography>

The act of writing about music is the process of musicography, as writing about saints is hagiography; to use musical notation or an audio clip to make the same kind of descriptive, analytical, or theoretical points within that musicography is to use a musicographical object, even as an iconograph of a saint is a materially engraved picture within the larger hagiograph.

Thus my musicography becomes musicology when it morphs from words about music (ie, phenomenological, descriptive, not prescriptively determined by any paradigm other than general-usage language for all readers) to musical notation (again, conventional/traditional or ad hoc/idiosyncratic) itself--not to drive or aid performance of music but to make analytical points driven by a system spelled out by such notation, such as that of Common Practice, the chromaticism of bebop or serialism, modalism, or idiosyncratic scores spawned by composers such as Joseph Schillinger, Harry Partch, John Cage, Anthony Braxton, or (as I will employ it here) Jin Hi Kim, Fred Ho, Pauline Oliveros, Jason Kao Hwang, Miya Masaoka insofar as they compose, or theorize, using such symbols, in addition to freely improvising; or spelled out orally, by traditions (both literate and oral systems and traditions are countless, with countless more waiting in potentia to emerge). Such musicology entails technical writing, specialist writing, the writerly tools for the special logic of the thing graphed.

In the arena of my work, then, musicography is a fresh rubric by which a Master can teach without a teaching by stepping back first into sheer phenomenological description of all things music. S/He doesn’t presumptively tell you what to think about it (per the assumed standard of an aesthetic or system, broadly established or idiosyncratic), or why to think that (per faith in some metamusical “religion” [broadly defined, a narrative, an argument, a thesis, a theory, that cobbles together loose ends floating free of context into a definitive coherence], or even in the so-called “laws” of [the] physics [of sound, acoustics] or [the] biology [of the brain, the ear])—no teaching—but s/he does teach: first through the writer’s conscious and feeling selection of the data described (s/he “graphs” it by “connecting its dots”), then by the craft and art of writing itself.          I underscore writing here; while the more modernly-immediate referent the word “graph” conjures is a visual construct, the etymology of the word goes back to the time when words and pictures were more conceptually entwined, especially, as is still true, in Asian texts (think “pictographic”; this is where M-W definitions one and two above organically fuse, as also musicography and [my] musicology). In this way, s/he teaches-without-a-teaching by conveying the patterns and features of her or his own unique and innate genius (what Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins called the “inscape”), not to impose upon so much as to ignite and inspire that of his/her readers.

Musicography-as-process still holds when the phenomenological gives way to noumenological reportage. Biographies and autobiographies of musicians, ethnographies of music communities in cultures, historiographies of histories of music, descriptions of musical performances live and recorded--these are all phenomenological, a bank of information more or less detailed. Noumenological descriptions are of the ideas and theories, in literature and/or orature, that coexist out there in the phenomenal world with the musical phenomena themselves. A writer moves from reportage to discourse when s/he moves from phenomenological to noumenological description; more precisely, s/he moves from reporting on the phenomena to sounding one of the many voices of that discourse on the phenomena that has accreted and is ongoing, in literate- and oral-traditional media (which are themselves phenomenal). To lean on the geography analogy again, we have one physical land mass, which one man maps with borders and calls owned; another declares known, but unmappable and unownable; and countless others describe and map in their own different and similar ways.

Theory comes into the picture, finally, when I feel bold enough to derive from both the phenomenological description of the musicographer and the technical/noumenological appropriation thereof by the musicologist a statement of the music’s meaning, soul, or spirit, I assert myself as a musicosophist [emic]. at some point, connect these three terms to AB's system of sonic/geometric/identity state

My case being made as fully as I can make it, I’d like to say I rest it—but again, that would be the death of the living tree, and would manifest more as binding than the obiter dictum it more precisely is. That third ring of the tree gives way to the next, taking its place with the first two as the future tree’s new core, growing into its fresh start on the all-encompassing, ever-core process of musicography that will give rise to new logics and sophics in its rooting stretch down and shooting out and flowering/fruiting up through spacetime. (Conceived so, it mimics most truly the thing it graphs: music, like “the one history,” is a single phenomenon born at a singular time down a singular line, yet through many times, people/s, and places and ways. )

When I collect and present the musical information I want to discuss, along with discussions of it already launched by others, I am doing musicography: selecting and graphing the data, connecting its dots. When I turn from that to offer my own new analyses, opinions, theories, poetic or mythic impressions about the data, I am moving into (my redefined) musicology and/or musicosophy.

A perennial naïveté is what lets me attach musicography to the passage from the Book of Changes above. It signals that the musicography produced in the flush of the novice’s first reflexive, unreflective love still beats and shines in the monography of the reflective, unreflexive wizened master. To think of it as putting itself away as a childish thing when it takes on the “authority” of the professional critic or scholar is akin to losing one’s faith in oneself as writer or reader and turning instead to the “religion” of (academic, arts) professionalism.

This bit might benefit from a weave from my Jazz History lecture:

Both of my earlier books invoked headlines from the music press of the time that I felt resonated with my topic. I’m struck by the fact that I didn’t choose that opening with much deliberation either time (the second was not a conscious repeat of the first). Both tactics were more spontaneous, instinctive, driven mostly by the steam of two decades of writing as a journalist. Even though they were drawn from my work as a cloistered graduate student writing first for thesis and dissertation committees, when the book versions went to press (even to academic presses) my opening gambit for optimal readership was a reversion to the more public and general fan base.

Starting out under the “journalist” hat, I engaged a tradition in Western arts and letters ranging from a high end of the literate, erudite, music-savvy and -sensitive critic to a low end of undiscriminating hacks and fans. High or low, it’s all musicography—primarily reportage, description, written more for mass than for trade or specialist publications and their readers. If it does include music-technical terms or graphics, and/or offer judgments of worth or “meaning,” it does so in an everyman’s voice, with apologetic simplifications of the technical and just-this-author’s-opinion caveats after any insight or assessment expressed.

That said, more deliberation and strategizing did go into what I chose to say to those readers, and into explaining how and why I chose to say it, once I (hopefully) had their attention. In a nutshell, that was:

·      this will be more from a musician’s than a fan’s point of view;

·      it will thus include some music-technical jargon and iconography, but that will be designed accessibly for lay readers

·      it will also include aforesaid “metamusical” expositions—social-political, traditional-historical, esoteric-occult, religious-philosophical—but they too will fall at the readers’ feet for consideration as servants to their pleasure, edification and enlightenment, rather than enthrone themselves as masters demanding submission.

Accordingly, even as I brought in voices and information from arts and letters far afield from the jazz press fan base (which includes the musicians), that base remained both my target audience and the group I myself primarily identified with.

That remains true here, but it is a group that has grown out of its earlier bounds, as I with it in my role as both reader and writer. Specifically, we have grown from the rubrics of “jazz” through “free jazz” to “creative/improvised/experimental/exploratory/world music,” if I may just fling that glob of wordpaint down to be spread around and worked ahead; and I have grown in my own role as writer about it as it morphed so.

journalism

1 a : the collection and editing of news for presentation through the media b :

the public press c : an academic study concerned with the collection and

editing of news or the management of a news medium

2 a : writing designed for publication in a newspaper or magazine b : writing characterized by a direct presentation of facts or description of events without an attempt at interpretation c : writing designed to appeal to current popular taste or public interest

In recounting the genesis of scholar fiction, I mentioned several influences from genre and nonfiction literature. One was the (then) New Journalism school of prominent novelists plying their art and craft to journalistic projects and equally prominent journalists expanding their craft with the techniques and palette of the novelist. It was the example of that coterie that inspired me to major in journalism when I went back to school, in 1973, after my abortive single semester at UCLA as a composition major and a summer session at the Berklee School of Music, both on scholarship. (Again, after cultivating myself as both writer and musician since 13 or so down those parallel tracks, whenever I got deep in my musician mode I felt alienated from language, both spoken and written, and vice versa. That is making me wonder now, how much [my current] appropriation of both tracks out of all public careerism, is an organic manifestation of such total immersion, at a depth beyond all crossroads they later took.) there’s a logic to that; shd I spell it out or let it hang?

this boxed part = rough stream-of-consciousness notes to work up into prose about professional journalism-cum-criticism as a musicographic enterprise:

for all these reasons, from jrnlstc to creative, the reportage/poetic stage is where one learns to write, as an art and craft, as well as where one learns one’s first lessons about one’s subject

talk about my decision to get a jrn degree, after self-identifying as a musician, and the process of learning how to be a music jrnlst

also, pt. abt reportage: while it is best when nonpartisan, non-agenda, objective, etc., to give the discerning reader/voter/musicbuff the info s/he wants/needs to feed/grow, the best reporters, obviously, are choosing the info that most floats their own boats, and presenting it with one choice of words above all others; the heart in the best writing will always come thru, even when it’s “just the facts, ma’am”

also, once one does get one’s reportage chops together, emicly as opposed to insincerely-dutifully-formulaically, one edges up seamlessly into the ology & osophy of it, whenever one shifts into a musical explanation of how the thing reportage describes is exciting/important (the knowledge of authority; logos), and an extramusical one of the same thing (wisdom of authority; sophos); latter = opinion w/ weight, former specialist knowledge

Music felt too important to sully with the kind of education and professional tracks in academia that I saw at the time; I felt I had the heart and chops to be a real musician, didn’t want to be a local player/teacher/pedant... distrusted  not only aforementioned models of such career tracks but also the Western Common Practice, the run-the-changes chromaticism of bebop, & the overdetermined serialism; all seemed like systems to be played, not the very Word of God, if I may, that I felt in my own potential power to utter in my own musical creativity <felt & loved all such traditions of -logies, but not as reified paradigms, such as logy-as-study implies; logy is a wing of the hang glider, not the frame> I aspired rather to be the kind of Master described in the Tao te Ching--one who “teaches without a teaching”; I was then and would remain through all subsequent “firsts” and career plateaus, passionately interested in engaging them, but just as passionately averse to being captured and defined by them, at the expense of continued freedom and growth. In that sense, I was always more comfortable with the self-image of perpetual amateur than ambitious professional (Braxton’s version of this spirit has been to call music his “hobby,” and himself a perennial student of it).

I dedicated my writing to the task of learning most effectively how to articulate what I felt I knew about the music, with no “authority” of a tradition or institution (both senses of  “school” as noun) behind me, only on the strength of my own voice and words [ie, I was prepping myself to be a sui generis original, by eschewing the security of “settling” for career in this or that enclave...that seemed important, doable, and challenging—and the “best practice” for the best life]; as I seriously considered but then rejected with disdain music as my major, I made a similarly considered decision not to enroll in the MFA in Creative Wrtg prgm on the strength of a work my neighbor Ken Kesey had written a letter of praise about (same school, U of O): I had beentheredonethat as both writer and musician on my own, I wasn’t about to subject myself to the humiliation of being “taught” and judged by the professional pedants in those fields, even if I was humbled by the school of hard knocks I had just graduated from by the skin of my teeth…any more than my brushes with addictive drugs, alcohol, tobacco were going to send me to the lame massages, pharmaceuticals, and manipulations that passed for “therapy,” “medicine,” or “rehab” in that time and place and in most since (themselves reactive distractions added on to the initial distraction of the problem); the more proper and appropriate response to said humbling was, as with the grosser objects of addiction out to get me, to simply put my creative life/muses as writer and musician in their proper place in my life, and move on to the next levels of health and happiness. Generally, that meant taking on a brand new path; specifically, the choice of journalism as a major satisfied that then in several ways.

put in a graf abt the hist/trad of jrnlsm as a folk/political thing--free press, 4^th estate, etc.--a leftist thing, Tom Paine, pamphlets, Mencken, muckraking, novelists like Sinclair Lewis, etc. Recall Dad’s influ in that way, his respect for it so; that’s a slightly diff nuance than  New Jrn, which is already highly professionalized and artsy, more literary. Mention hist of jrn schools dating from late 19^th cent, same time as jazz born, & sci-fi. Music jrn, then, for its soc-pol angle of Civil Rights in my time. [see Wik history of it]

then pt: what one is can be louder than what one says. All those trads/categories can just be one’s ticket to careerism. It’s like having a brain that can talk a talk but never walk a walk: Freud (materialist), or Jung (spiritualist) brain-mind paradigms, both resigned to that crappy situation; result is always going to be “all the truth in the world adds up to one big lie.” when “heroes” end up pathetic, frauds, flawed, crazy, nasty. (egs = anyone who becomes a sad caricature of his/her earlier self/glory)

My alt: the suffix/emic/etic thing, as paradigm; then that as actual brain too, posited as such in Story 1 (fn article about neuro rsrch)

re: that: why do we enjoy multi-layered/leveled stuff, in literature, art, music? because our brains are not one irreducible superorganism, are rather a confederation of systems/organs within and alongside and containing systems/organs, often mutually indifferent/independent/at odds, but needing to collaborate & cooperate to keep alive and thriving and growing as organism--e pluribus unum. (Indeed, a fair semblance of the American political body, especially as I write.) (and of improvised & experimental music)

That said, the sheer compulsion to write—at its most extreme, hypergraphia, considered clinically to hover somewhere on the border between disorder and creativity, “madness” and “genius”—may be just the irresistible literary force to meet the near-infinitely heavy  immovable-object-of-a-subject as music. support that w/ story of my own drug-fueled hypergraphia, in the years I was learning to play and write both, 1963-77 , professionally; the unpublished fiction, morphing into the journalism degree, settling on music beat; both thesis & dissertation, and both books, are egs of it--mostly the diss. Developed both logy & sophy chops there. I wanted to lrn the workaday craft, after my wild-oats years of writing like a Henry Miller, James Joyce, Hunter Thompson wannabe. had a daughter; plan was to wrk as a jrnlst and/or tech writer while playing music on the side until, hopefully, it took off What might dissipate into the lexical diahrrea of a manic depressive overflowing the capacities of a topic more logophiliac may finally morph into a shape that can hold itself in its match with one similarly boundless. The disorderly may tip thereby decisively to the creative-artful, the overreach of the hyper- to the underpin of the hypo-graphic. clean little secret = hypergraphia is served, not stifled, by discipline; like the multipartite brain, it grows fast and weedlike into an apparent monolith beyond any human power to achieve thru the mundane actions of a little ant-like work every day

work in glances at Tri-Ax, Phillip K. Dick’s Exegesis, Ray Kurzweill’s book, Urantia, etc: the literary impulse as Icarus, overreaching, overwriting…something I’m prey to, both as reader (of Proust, Joyce...but not so much any more, with their lesser torchbearers) & writer, want to avoid (one way I wd do so was part of the 25-on embrace of writing expositorally, and that about  people and parts of the outer world, rather than my own inner)…by trying to ride that dragon here, whipping each section’s draft into shape before it flies off on its own

That may explain why now, in any case, I feel compelled to read and write about music even more than to listen to and make it, when listening and making were my first and most primal motivations to read and write. (I’m recalling Anthony Braxton’s words “music is a young man’s game,” spoken more than a few times over my years around him. My shift to writing about it more than making it—certainly more than making it with or for others, or making a “career” out of it--does feel like that of a one-time serious athlete aging into a coach, or an Augustine finally ready to put down his love life to confess it with his pen. The mercy of aging: as the door closes on past glories, one experiences—delusionally?—the new door opening onto what was previously feared as decline as rather a new and greater glory?)glance back at the opening stuff about hang gliding down, etc.

Musicology reframed

musicology

: the study of music as a branch of knowledge or field of research as distinct

from composition or performance

ethnomusicology

1 : the study of music that is outside the European art tradition

2 : the study of music in a sociocultural context <the progression here—from music as comp/perf (emic) to “branch/field” (etic, but emic to West) to Rest (etic to Rest, emic to West) to “music in culture” (etic all the way)—charts an arc of transcendence, similar to the widening circles such as from person to family to kin to nation to world that we see in, eg, American franchise of rights, or Maslow hierarchy

review where in my work that first started, in embryo <wd have been, eg, something like  Sketches of Spain, where jazz/West was unquestioned, a priori pov, flavored by the Other>, and when full blown, as Treeunity. Here, just say it’s best matched by the formal education begun as a grad stu, some in MA, most in PhD.

“Musicology,” per Merriam-Webster (M-W), is defined as “the study of music as a branch of knowledge or field of research as distinct from composition or performance.” I’m happy  enough with the definition, but not so much with the word, for what I do. I want to take issue with it on two counts: again, the cultural-historical and the intellectual-historical.

M-W’s first definition of my academic discipline of ethnomusicology (“the study of music that is outside the European art tradition”) suggests what it might well have listed as a significant second one for “musicology.” With the 19^th-century emergence of anthropology (both cultural and physical, covering, respectively, the cultures and the biology of the human species throughout spacetime), and its subsequent spinoff into first “comparative musicology” and later “ethnomusicology,” the previously stand-alone, self-contained discourse-cum-discipline of musicology stood exposed as a Western-parochial pretender to the throne of Study of the World’s Universal Music. That M-W lists only the one definition that resonates with that is an indicator of the pretense enduring.

By the time I got to that love child of Western musicology and those various anthropologies, ethnomusicology had grown into its second M-W definition, as “the study of music in a sociocultural context,”  clear but general, yet easy enough to specify in this communion with the dictionary by drawing on the DNA of ethnomusicology’s parentage on the anthro- side. “Sociocultural context,” in my own past and present work, includes (from “anthropology”):

1 : the science of human beings; especially: the study of human beings and their ancestors through time and space and in relation to physical character, environmental and social relations, and culture

2 : theology dealing with the origin, nature, and destiny of human beings;

...(from “cultural anthropology”):

anthropology that deals with human culture especially with respect to social structure, language, law, politics, religion, magic, art, and technology;

...and (from “physical anthropology”):

anthropology concerned with the comparative study of human evolution, variation, and classification especially through measurement and observation.

===

I said that my move away from “musicology” as a general rubric covering “the study of music” was driven by undesirable historical baggage I wanted to cut loose. Also driving it, as with my other suffix choices, is the etymology of that one. Like -graphy, M-W’s -logy definitions are two, one process-centered, the other object-centered:

1 : oral or written expression <phraseology>

2 : doctrine : theory : science <ethnology>

===

A phraseology is a style, a writer’s way with words; accordingly, a musicology is a musician’s way with music. Both are processes. Again, a musicology, per M-W, is also a “study of music as a branch of knowledge or field of research as distinct from composition or performance.” In this, as in all other fields suffixed by -logy,  it resonates with -logy’s Greek root Logos, which M-W defines as

1: the divine wisdom manifest in the creation, government, and redemption of the world and often identified with the second person of the Trinity

2: reason that in ancient Greek philosophy (and reaffirmed by Kant and others far and near in time) is the controlling principle in the universe (my emphases)

 “Musicology”—not to be conflated with the conventional nomenclature for my academic (prefixed by Ethno-) or its parent discipline—is what I call that aspect of musicography that does venture into the technical writing/graphics that comprise the tools of analysis from this or that aesthetic tradition or system. Modalism, Common Practice, serialism, jazz chromaticism are all such systems I’ve schooled myself and done such work in, as well as those idiosyncratically devised by composers and improvisers such as Anthony Braxton and, here, Jin Hi Kim, Pauline Oliveros, etc. [these lines duplicate same above; reconcile that…]

Musicography turns musicological when one starts discussing the nature and particulars of “the elements of music”: harmony, melody, rhythm, meter, instruments and instrumentation.

===

Next comes the music-analysis community, and then theory: both do have that danger, killing the spirit of the music, first love; not only that: the wrtg one produces there, unlike the reportage, de-inforces rather than reinforces itself. One starts with a bolt of inspiration and lust to use the powerful new tool/skill (techne)of analysis.—akin to a master surgeon or engineer—to be able to open up the body/machine and look under the hood, to then inform one’s sheerly subjective creative wrtg with the nuts & bolts of what makes the thing tick, know it inside out like the musicians must to make it, to repair/heal/improve/enlighten...and one ends up feeling like Dr. Frankenstein, so far removed from the innocent healthy life lived in the making of and reporting on the music (in which crafts/mechanics of music and writing, respectively, were in fact learned just as artificially, at first, but then internalized, like riding a bike, forgotten naturally in the wind of one’s rapture); one fills up with hubris & remorse, driven along more like a slave than a master in the souped-up-engine car...

one does push on, tho, or not. That bubble is the life of the analytical-theoretical specialist (Forte, etc., me, in that part of my wrk); it includes people like Schoenberg, and can be bearable if one is an artist and not solely a dry pedant; or if one is indeed the latter...

criticism

1 a : the act of criticizing, usually unfavorably... b : a critical observation or remark...

2 : the art of evaluating or analyzing works of art or literature; also: writings

expressing such evaluation or analysis...

3 : the scientific investigation of literary documents (as the Bible) in regard to

such matters as origin, text, composition, or history [mention my choice to avoid music and take many classes on Eng Lit and Bible in school, for just that reason; Bible, because I was getting to the bottom of Western music as rooted in J-C/G-R culture, and Af-Am in black church; Eng lit to give me the overview of the underpin of my correlative writing influs/trad]

Criticism definitely more erudite than journalism’s reportage, deeply informed, literary, but also ideological, in the more pamphleteering lineage: Shaw is good example, Chesterton, & Adorno, then Baraka/Crouch/Murray. Scan work for more egs. Mainly, I got into that level by landing jobs/freelance regular gigs that specialized me as a “music critic” whose expertise was clearly authorized by his wrk as a musician…so I consciously forged a voice & style I cd live with, as one who still had eyes for being the musician himself <ie, how to give constructive and meaningful crit to my peers, something they could respect & use, when I did so—also, how to shoot down the frauds and fools, by the same authority/lights>; glance at AB’s wrds about critics, as presumptuous; in AB book?

grafs about my training & decisions about how to write. re: 1: how the critic couches critiques constructively/compassionately, how/when to attack (Bo Diddley v. Curtis Salgado, Dane Rudhyar, D Friesen/Mingus, Old & New Dreams; others?); scan all for all these in my past work...

how I approached criticism, & letting sources in on my words or not.

2, mention distinctions btwn jrn & crit: 3, mention my education in that area, and how it applies to my brand of music-historical research <ie, selective to taste, not promiscuously analytical to the total spectrum, like a god’s eye; “objective” jrn leads naturally to the clinical scholar, subjective crit more to the devoted specialist, area expert tie that in w/ part that explains my choice of musicians NOT being one to embody the whole scene>; how church/religion play into music history, and spiritual adventurism of Now

Musicosophy

The musicosophy done from such musicological analyses constitutes that part of musicography that tells the reader how to assess and understand the music so (musicographically) described and (musicologically) parsed. It is a process of making, asserting, arguing for connections between this or that aspect of the music and this or that extramusical (psychological, social/political/cultural, physical, philosophical or metaphysical) phenomenon or noumenon, and is closest to the conventional enterprise called “theory.”

it is metaphorical [music is a bitch], where logy is analogical [music is like a bitch]

graphy/logy/sophy is like AB’s sonic units/geometric scheme/identity state

p. 33 in Acks talks about the lit devices used in diss; relict human is one, and works in Chap 2 for Sheldrake/Grauer angle

===

ALL 3 TOGETHER

That too I want to unpack and work into a more clarified butter here, before the other. ie, the surveyor’s tools, before making the survey

By clarified butter, I mean this: my varied hats of amateur and professional writer—journalist, music scholar (musicologist, ethnomusicologist, music analyst, music theorist)—all have their separate niches (journals, disciplines, discourses, angles) in the world; they overlap in subject matter and concerns, but more often than not they are at odds with or isolated from each other. I see that situation and the variegated historical baggage behind it as mostly irrelevant to what I do, even though I’ve done it in all their disparate contexts. Since those contexts have mostly been self-evident, I’ve felt little need to spell out their contours for readers; people know when they’re reading general reportage about music, or more technical or academic texts, and what they’re getting from each. While I am writing for all such readers and more this time, the product here is more that of, again, a substance rendered from my own secret recipe and procedure, drawing on to distill out the essences of said contexts to constitute its brand new blend. 

That “butter” I clarify from them has three ingredients: musicography, musicology, and musicosophy. (It also has two further possible states once so clarified, but I’ll get to them in due course.) The two unfamiliar words are my neologisms, and musicology is one I’m hijacking away from its conventional usage. All three, separately and together, cover the way I’ve written about music from my beginnings as a young student to now, in all degrees and circles of expertise. When I unpack them and their compound in the abstract, I will spread the latter on the bread of the music as a whole, then on each musician’s piece of it.

more rough notes to work in to above:

musicography as like geography--geography as the terrain itself, also as the map of it--at the center, because that’s where we live. Geology is a drill down from there, driven mostly by our need to understand/exploit/work with our geography, and our lives there; theology like that, grounded in immanence more than transcendence. Theosophy more like a “drill up” to transcendence, thru art/imagination more than engineering/knowledge; it too, tho, of primary interest (indeed, only such) only as it feeds into and off of our ground, of graphy. Thus the pic w/ arrows.

Contrast that to putting logy as the center and whole. Platonic as opposed to Aristotelian...but even deeper, rationalistic as opposed to holistic, as the pre-Socratics were, but then less so...and even more so, elevating the human-noumenous ordering/explaining response to phenomena to the level of them: mistaking the map for the terrain. Logy & sophy have their place, as conditional mutable tools w/ which to navigate that changing terrain; not as terraformers of it

[dial it back; just stick to the description of what you do, and contrast it to what you see the conventional words doing instead] compare the nature of the latter’s flaws to those of the cult-hist bag

===

nxt go into why -graphy for a base, not -logy; see -logy & its vars in MW (they come down to “a study of” anything, and “literary language” <philology, friendly with lit lang, not with “study of”). graphy = wrtg about something <hagiography> or wrtg via something <tele/distance, photo, steno/short, mammo/xray>. I write about music, and I do so with music as well as with words [ie, when audio clips are included, as with my diss, & Grauer]. biography/biology, geography/geology, mammalogy/graphy (study of mammals, xray of breast)

graphing on the lowest level is the craft of wrtg; on the highest (sophy) it’s the art (poetic, literary)

===

In musicography-as-reportage, the descriptions/explanations are all patently naïve, uncommitted, child-like in their nonjudgmental openness to all things having to do with the music (countered by the judgment implicit in the unreflective decision about what is worthy of its attention/curiosity and what not)—like ancient Greeks calling the world Gaia, or the sea Poseidon—or, simultaneously or alternately, one of the “Four Elements” (earth, air, water, fire), or atoms; pathetically and patently anthropomorphic, on the one hand, insufficiently materialistic on the other, knowing better on both hands, but also unapologetic about settling for each or both, knowing they’re the only hands one has, closest to the truth of the world and sea, the essences thereof, that one can get via words/concepts): EMIC = phenomena made by words into noumena, seamlessly; ETIC = a split btwn the 2 in the same process

pt abt reportage: it’s essentially an arrested devlpmt of writing abt music: wide-eyed wonder committed to the phenom like a moth to a flame, without taking either its measure (-logy) or meaning (-sophy). circles of hipness & wannabes, phenomemic word-painting ranging from penny bubble gum to $100 crème brulee—cheap-to-pricey sugar highs (the very highest, indeed, rising to literary arts of poetry & prose), no-to-questionable nutrition (ie, the very best of lit art, w/o the ology/sophy part, falls short; with it, it rises to full potential); -ology is a step up in the sense that it uses lit/graphic tools to delve into the music in as craft-responsibly as musicians themselves do (thus Herrera’s “equal genius” idea for analysts)...but even that is still only halfway from zero to full (sophy)

the latter is where the adult writer rubber meets the real road—because you need to have the right and best story/soul behind yr virtuosity as both reporter/poet/novelist and analyst

===

Again, it’s all musicography—the –logical and –sophical components are just elements in the compound that can be isolated or submerged, distilled or dissolved as desired, to optimize the aesthetic and intellectual effects of the writing as a whole. They can and often are even missing altogether at the most basic level of description and expression of unrationalized (some arguably unjustified) emotions, taste, or opinion. Practically speaking, I and the colleagues and predecessors listed above typically have all the hats from daily-deadline journalism to academic monographer hanging in their closet to doff and don regularly as needed.

If asked why I feel the need to replace that conventional disciplinary nomenclature with my own, I say it’s mainly because of the conceptual slumgullion I see in its usual application and practice, on the one hand, and conversely too much mutual isolation on the other. Journalists both general and trade, freelance and staff; and degreed professional scholars, whether tenured or independent, all tend too often to do all three of my music-suffixed functions in the course of their work without conveying a sense of their distinct natures and relationships to each other, or to do one in too much isolation from the others. The latter (isolation) flourishes in curricula/careers/journals devoted exclusively or primarily to analysis, or theory, or ethnography; the former (slumgullion) simply lies in the confusion of what should more properly be called -graphy lumped with both –logy and –sophy, as I describe them, under the one disciplinary heading of Ethnomusicology, or Musicology; or in confusing and conflating analysis and theory by blurring or omitting distinctions between their more properly logical and sophical aspects.

Musicography as a full-grown tree, then, sprouted from those three suffix-seeds. But wait: as conceived and described here, it is really only one of them (-graphy) that gives rise to the other two. I thus revisit the graphic so:

^

|

musicosophy

<--(past) ground of tradition musicography new ground, broken (future)-->

musicology

|

v

The –graphy seed breaks open downwardly to sprout the –logy root system; closest to the surface, the systems (examples above) are most historically recent and explicated, more cultural and abstract than visceral biological drivers of the music (such as I invoked when I suggested the entoptic images of prehistoric cave art, or behavior patterns of nonhuman primates as explanatory of aspects of Braxton’s work, in first book); upwardly the –graphy seed sprouts to emerge from the soil of the here-and-now in process to a new world of greater dimension, interaction with other organisms, and its own new life as a growing tree (such as my explanation of some European improvised music as part of a Dionysian cry against Apollonian oppression in both broad sweep and current moment of Eurasian cultural history, in second book). The soil the plant draws on and the air it expands into is a mix of what came before (tradition) and what new things came from that; it draws on them on the ground and feeds both back out in the air. mention Sainkho’s words in Roulette film about looking back v. looking forward as eg

It’s the “life” and “growing” part of the analogy that make it musicosophy even while still musicography; let it die from disease to stand to decay, or be felled or uprooted to serve some life other than its own, and you have a musicographic description—a material object with the design of its roots, trunk, branches and leaves intact, in the short time until they do decay or are cannibalized—but the logic and wisdom no longer apply beyond the level of arbitrary patterning and platitude. (As such, the ontogeny and fragility of this tree recapitulates the phylogeny of the music itself as it has unfolded through its prehistoric and historic life, also amenable to such mapping, as are similarly hoary/fresh genetic and genealogical pre/histories, more on all of which ahead.)

The tree analogy works, for some points, so I’ll let it stand. But the better map for the brain sans hats plying that triune musicographical process to that phenomenon called music is...well, that of a brain (hopefully not overheated for lack of the hats).

(I’m also struck, looking back over my previous most ambitious writing projects, at the care I took in my opening pages to thoroughly acquaint the reader with myself-as-author. specifically around the professional conventions of jrn/scholar, & my activities as musician A bit of this, of course, is usually part of conventional nonfiction—one wants to establish oneself not only as a reliable but also an interesting narrator vis-à-vis one’s subject—but I’ve seemed to need more of it than usual, here as priorly, to the point of undue egotism for some readers, I fear. I hope my best depiction, of my writerly methodology as a brain, having grown and milled the tree), will make my case for another way to read this measure of self-disclosure, once I follow it up by revealing the source I modeled it after.)

Think about it: when you read anything above the cognitive level of a phone book—nonfiction or fiction, dealing with any area of knowledge, thought, or opinion (even dictionaries, or catalogues of goods to buy, come with hidden agendas and biases, disparate styles and worldviews, unconscious motives)—you tender whatever antennae you have for such things, to calibrate them to your own versions of them as you read. Once you do that, you assess more general features: the writer’s intelligence and skill, mental/emotional health as suggested by the writing, his or her insights and their relevance to your own interests.

Finally, most fundamentally, you assume a consciousness common to you both. That is most likely to mean one shaped and textured by the popular scientific image of the brain: a primeval core called “reptilian,” governing the sheerly instinctive, largely automatic actions of eating, mating, fighting and killing to do either or both; a “limbic” layer, driving the mammalian biology of social life, play, emotions; and the most distinctively human, most evolutionarily recent and outer “cortical” layer, where abstract conceptualizing, thinking, sense of—consciousness of inner self, other inner selves, of outside world known, half-known, unknown, will and power to decide this or that—take place. We all tend to share the agreement that these aspects coexist on a continuum in the healthy brain, make for both conflict and cooperation with each other, and constitute a fair picture of our organism’s “human nature/condition.”

To that base will likely be added the Freudian or a post-Freudian (Jungian/transcendent, Skinnerian/immanent) paradigm of mind (as opposed to brain), philosophical or religious or occult variations on which themes have pervaded our Western and much of global cultures and zeitgeists over the last few generations: a core layer of pre/un/subconscious that bleeds gradually up into the sensual-conscious in the moment we all share (the herd/pack/body life, thisworldly, social, cultural, political, personal) that aspires (or not) to a transpersonal-otherworldly overmind/self/system where holiness and goodness clarify and resolve all the mud, conflict, disease, death and evil of the two lower levels. Whether monistic-immanent or dualistic-transcendent in conception, these rough sketches of brain and mind, I suggest, are virtually universally agreed to and assumed between people as they go about their lives alone and together in reading and writing, as everywhere else.

more rough notes to work up & place:

My three-ring method-brain’s core is the –ography part, where a physical brain’s reptilian core is. it’s just what is, perceived, reported, from the pov of the receptor of the phenomenon transmitted, by those musicians, shaman-like, who (per article about them as tricksters, deceivers <find that in bookmarx>, and per PK on Empedocles & his peers back then>) create Grand Illusions in the minds of the uninitiated, gullible, open-to-it

-logy is the place where all the magicians’ tricks are spelled out

-sophy is where the things the illusions allude to—goodness for Santa Claus and God/dess/gods, badness for etc.—redeem the trickery from lies to expression and communication of truths

emic/etic: moving from one ring through and to the others can be tricky; one can lose one’s connection to the life of the music in both analysis and theory, in different ways. It’s like the process of falling in love with it music in a callow way, then learning it inside out to become a virtuoso in all its mechanics,  then forgetting all that in the higher love of one’s virtuosity; that’s the natural path, but not always a clear or successful run

wrk this into the twist ending:

"We know from literacy studies in Peru that the ability to read changes

our brain structure. Our brains are a product of their environment."

--Kevin Kelly, What Technology Wants

http://theeuropean-magazine.com/350-kelly-kevin/351-what-technology-wants

===

To set up a segue into Chap 2: turn again to past work, for 3^rd time, and be struck by their draw to the Big Picture, tho thru such little ones (one man’s art, in one young local art form; then a small grp of friends’ same); bring in my explanation of that, listed in NSSM, extend that via Eurojazzland; conclude that such inference of the arche from the particular is akin to Bohm’s explicate/implicate order, Sheldrake’s morphogenic fields, and, more concretely, Victor Grauer’s Home Base Culture (HBC), this book’s version of Sachs & others in NSSM

emic/etic reflects the split brain; like two eyes make for a 3-D rather than flat field of vision, so do 2 brains (right & left, both three-layered) make for a knower rather than sheer data, undifferentiated. <see article on this> it is precisely “the many” (starting with 2) that makes “the One” (Cage: 1+1 = 1; Parmenides, Empedocles, etc.: Love & Strife, yin/yang, tangled hierarchy, matter/field dynamic (per Bohm & Sheldrake; revu Goswami film)

article says that brain is not only spirit, it’s cacophonically fractured--a perfect pic of improvised/experimental music as music (unity, signal, emic) rather than cacophonic noise (etic, in the sense of phonetically lrng a foreign language, not understanding its phonemes)

jump right into Sheldrake et al, and wrk the 3 suffix terms in as you go:

·      Sheld resonates w/ sophy

·      VG, Lomax w/ graphy, logy

·      Fukuyama w/ sophy

glance back at the Deep History marking bks; say each went back further than the previous, and here even further; note, tho, that it literally is still here, tho others don’t agree; and that w/ Sheld, Bohm, & Goswami, I take it back as far as possible, and more specifically than my “arche” chart

end by introducing the emic rubric as covering that. It’s emic by virtue of the writer’s commitment to its depiction as concrete, not abstract, truth.

more Chap 2 setup/segue:

explain each; then return to the bks & diss for their shared interest in deep history; add the pt that, even more clearly than when I wrote them, my wrkg assumption is now that their relevance to the living music is that they have never disappeared from the earth, however archaic/ancient. Bring in VG, & Sheldrake: this bks version of Sachs, Lang, Chailley, etc. (VG) and all the scis & phils I brought into diss (Sheld)

then move to “Part of my concern as a scholar, & iron it out from larger file

This is a graf from

http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/the-hardest-problem-in-science/40845?sid=at&utm_source=at&utm_medium=en

to support my portraits of Sheldrake (re: cell diff, action at a distance)

To be sure, there are lots of other hard problems, such as the perennial

one of reconciling quantum theory with relativity, whether life exists on

other planets, how action can occur at a distance (gravity, the attraction

of opposite charges), how cells differentiate, and so forth. But in these

and other cases, I can at least envisage possible solutions, even though

none of mine actually work.

what drove me to do deep history in both bks was my own internal intuition <quote
Simha Arom? in VG>...what he expresses is a touchstone for the winding path of all my life’s excursion thru this music, cued by the outer expressions of it I mention (in here, & NSSM intro, abt turns to ancient arche)

A great musical work is always a model of amorous relations.

                                                                        --Jacques Attali

acknowledge that I’m using that again, for emph

all emic stuff, sophos, theoremic

musicosophy

then  ethnomusicology, meaning here the mode that focuses interdisciplinarily on any music in any larger context—social/political/economic, cultural/intellectual-historical, occult/mythical/religious/philosophical THEORY OF IT; one generalizes, both about the music down from that in which it is embedded, and up from the music to same...though they are also speculating each other (in Marius Schneider’s sense); this is where the up-down arrow part might go

in –osophy, one restores the EMIC of reportage, only, per TS Eliot, back to the beginning as if for the first time: the wisdom of maturity that again believes in—nay, knows—God, Santa Claus, Love, Evil, etc., as living holons now, not childish fantasies that were grown out of. Full Circle.

I see myself as part of that generation/school of Ethnos who turned from “world-as-Other” to “Self-as-Other” (Western jazz/art/newmusic), as an Ethno—like H Kingsbury, new musicologists—which was basically an ETIC-2-ETIC move, which pointed out its wrongheadedness (compar musicology was less wrongheaded, because it sought to “expand the circle,” per Pinker, rather than pen Others in corrals; when you Etic your own Emic, the act of vivisection that it is finally does hit home. Western Emic was, like all native peoples, self-identification as “the people.” Nimipu. take a step beyond that, since you spot its fatal flaw; figure out a segue into this next bunch of influs?

**some influs frequent  both Western Etic (looking at all, even self, as other) and compar musicology (looking at all, even others, as selves), and are generally more worldly (E Said, Szwed, etc.)...likewise cherry-pick, and add to (Sheldrake, Fukuyama, etc.; glance at sources for Euro-J, GL-JAMS, response to Tenzer’s email about books that connect the dots btwn music & other things (like architecture, cosmology, etc.; also my Jazz History syllabus; summarize my sources for books and diss, or characterize...

glance at similar sources more specific to the musicians: bks on PO, Jin’s & Fred’s bks, D Wong, Dessen & Iyer, Zorn Arcana books, etc.; Ball’s overture chap speaks here too); note that it is a precarious prospect, easily dated/parochial, as I found out in my last 2 bks & diss.; ^^consider moving the parts in Acks about how I’ll frame & theorize this, from “folkloristics”, to this part; mention Lomax, Sachs, Grauer, Rouget, as those who build their theories on vast rsrch [per VG’s pt about Ethno starting out as a quest for “grand narr” in comp musicology, anything less arguably consigns it to the status of intellectual pomo popcorn criticized by conservative guardians of classical-canonic curriculum; instead of shying from being another face of modernist overreach (like West, or De Barros’ neocons), it shd offer a new & imp “grandnarr” to compete with the old outgrown Western-cum-Af-Am one];

recall my critique of Walser’s comment that ancient music has nothing to do with present music; peg it to VG’s opening words about same; counter that the obvious lie in that is the notion of a linear teleology that consigns musical styles to a past, when in fact virtually all of them (and by virtually I mean all we know about) are still present in living people who have embraced and nurtured, preserved their traditions (caveat: recall M Veal’s pt that a preserved origin is impossible)

sketch out mine, as arcing from the history and current moments of the world those authors showed, thru the stages above to the subjective-eclectic sources here, bottom-lining in Sheldrake/Bohm (creative rubric, from Sheldrake; also, his keystone contrib. here builds on the edifice of all such biophenomenology I charted in 2 bks, and esp. in diss; sum that up; Sheldrake’s basic vision is a dynamic between the fields [software] & the organism [hardware], w/ each [unlike computers but like brains] having formative influence/power over the other. Remember: the morphic field comprises one’s own experience, as well as others’, past & present. It’s like cloud computing, as opposed to stand-alone hard drives), Grauer (relevance of arche, Sheld’s atavism; link Grauer acct of emergence of hierarchical power-over cultures from peaceful-egalitarian to my own earlier looks at that, in culture, music, and its counters in imp & Af-Am music), to arc back up again thru the individual musicians’ fields, and into an alt/counter to globalization-as-problematic/imbalanced: a grassroots scene that is wired, nonhierarchical, noncommercial, consisting of the various wrld music/jazz/art music elements as it does...which leads us to the articulation of an answer to De Barros, a match for his clear vision of the Af-Am thing.

this music is the expression of the grassroots ground from which power-over states/empires/religions/aesthetic systems have risen & to which they revert; it is the Lord (ground) which has given and will take away; like the storms of nature that come and go, the reactive storms of culture that rise to respond to them—wars, powers-over—are also transient, tending to default to the equilibrium of peace and justice (or as MLK put it, the arc of history bends toward justice) insofar as America/China/Israel/Islam (etc.) have become idols/devils rather than the Lord (their “first love” best selves; the routinization of charisma), that laying-low is their power-of swallowing up their power-over

also: my amazing experience has been to see one Other after another make his/her case, express his/her pov, in increasingly sophisticated English & Western cultural literacy, up from their various “nature” (often “primitive”) expressions; Sheldrake p 286 =  atavism, reversion to arche (re: the music); 316-17 = creative rubric, resonates with AACM usage, & AB’s restructure

my personal gauge for my own emic/etic head: if it’s something I do and assume organically, unreflectively, it’s emic (like when I improvise on a standard so radically that it becomes my own new original work); if otherwise—duty, faith, sus of disbelief, etc.—it’s etic; the diff btwn easy/organic and stressful/abstract complexity

segue = once we have established the properly humble place of words so, we can tweak Lao-Tzu’s famous words [etc., words are like nets to catch fish, once caught, not needed; show me the man who needs no words, I wd have a word with him]; wrk in diss use of Ferrara, w/ analyst/theorist moving from (system)etic to (syst)emic in his move from abstraction to subjective impressions: creative, rather than scientistic, say, moving with the artist from the musical mechanics to the soul/passion/genius that rides in/on them.

These musicians and their oeuvres, I claim, are all similarly idio-syn-cratic, idiosyncr-etic, and universal at the same time. The way I’m presenting them covers that tripartite holism, as well as the other aspects of them covered by other writers.

then the master = all the above, plus self-defining; weave in yr story w/ those 3 areas, & end on the Master note, looping back to 2d lede quote—he teaches w/o teaching, so the people will have nothing to learn. Also, like the scripture that says in the last days no one will teach about the Lord because everyone will already know.

In the course of my work, that 3^rd quote has been about Eros in the music, on which it will be expanded here. But I’m not arguing to persuade, rather describing what we all know; peg to Empedocles’ Love & Strife.

So that much will spell out that I’m going to write about cre-imp music in all 3 ways. That’s the methodology. Following are the specific results

Retroflection <remaining pages in Eurojazzland>