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Almost any music is disturbing, Nutman. You could say it's its only goal. It disturbs your feelings, almost controls you for a number of minutes. What's so different here?

A person with no direction or contextual information is allowed to have an opinion, however to consider his opinion as valid as more informed ones.

Sorry, that's why I called buttler a "prince."

Music is not this primitive thing you never had to learn to appreciate.

And all experiences are not meant to be made or worth to talk about.

If a blind person tells me he really enjoyed those paintings at the louvres, well I might be interested in their opinion and their experience, however it's clearly not what the painter's intended audience was.

And thus, the worth of the painting to society should not be determined by that person's experience. Not until we are all blind. Not until we have to consider the unfortunate, that we have no chance anymore to recover vision.

You still *cannot* take a recording of 4'33 on your ipod.

It's not a recording of silence. It's a piece of music with you know, a SCORE.

I don't believe that for one second (there are more nuances to it than that).
I do believe, though, that some music requires an effort to understand and some music is simply uncomprehensible to certain people, but that goes both ways. Just aswell as fans of Britney (dunno why we pick on Britney, but we do..yeah) most likely don't understand Stockhausen, fans of Stockhausen most likely don't understand Britney (but due to different reasons).

Besides, this thread has spread itself very close to the point of just being arguing about semantics, so maybe we all should just agree to disagree and try to have a more sober debate the next time?

Which reminds me: Did a painter ever present an empty canvas as a piece of completed work? Or perhaps an entire showcase with nothing in it?
Nosfe, you must know this?

Yes. Actually one such piece was vandalized recently by a young woman kissing the canvas to leave a red lipstick mark.

Nutman, you can believe whatever crap you want however please then address the argument that is, why do we, when first listening to a piece coming from a foreign country find it weird, confusing, sometimes ugly, sometimes unbearable?

Knos: does it need to come from a foreign country to be perceived as being weird, confusing, sometimes ugly, sometimes unbearable? ;)

No, simply put: I don't understand what you're asking. Please try a different approach.

OMFG - the outrage.

Oh, well - no harm done. Just smack up a new canvas. Or did that just ruin the whole idea?

1. take a foreign country or distant culture.
2. notice that they do produce some organized pieces of sound that they seem to enjoy very much.
3. notice that you find those sets of sounds unharmonious, with unregular rhythms, sound out of tune.
3. notice that when subjected to what you call good music they turn in digust or fail to be interested. Until you point a gun at them.

Like learning a language, the enjoyment of forms of music is not innate.

Notes, rhythms are not arranged along absolute sets. What certain cultures put the emphasis on in music, is downplayed by other cultures. (Polyphonic vs monophonic, harmony vs melody, complex rhythm vs regular structures)

She got sentenced in a court of law. So society seems to say so.

Hah. The last sentence cracked me up. ;)

...

Hans Christian Andersen was a wise man, indeed.

I actually don't even mind 4'33, though I'm not going to bother listening to it. By extremely limiting the content, there's hardly anything left but for the audience to think for themselves using what they already had (you get the given duration, the silent content, + what you already had). It's not too distracting, and that can be a good thing.. though I wouldn't bother calling it music. It's the length of a radio edit, so it makes me think of the content-shaping effects of media that is funded by obtrusive advertising.

I can see a bit of an attribution problem with the lipstick thing. After the kiss, it would probably appear that the artist had put it there. If you're going to vandalize something, you ought to make it more obvious.

well.. I guess 4'33 is a bit long for a radio edit. It's more like a track on an album. It's all somewhat related though.

Oh yeah I remember it. THAT was so cool ! The woman was really smart. The artist was trying to be provocative with his empty blank frame (loosy attempt !). And suddenly, out of blue, one woman in the crowd just performed a live-act and gave a whole new meaning to the show !
She actually transformed a weak art piece into something much bigger and much more interesting : she showed how the crowd can REBEL against artists. She showed that the crowd is not stupid and uneducated, she showed that artists ought to dig a bit deeper than "blank screens" if they want to create anything really compelling. She showed normal people can sometimes do art with a much greater impact than official artists.

She didn't vandalised anything. She actually _made_ art. And History. (And that's usually the moment where I cheer and shout "In your fucking face, Picasso !")

Of course, it could only be a on-of-a-kind event, and every godamn copycat attempting to vandalise, deface, destroy or modify a painting in a museum should be properly prosecuted. It wouldn't be art anymore, it would only be utterly stupid and redundant.

But somehow, I found it amusing that people can sometimes actually "show" how they feel to artists who don't try hard enough to push the limits. My point being : the people ain't stupid, try harder if you want to impress them.

All I know about art:


We all have an innate artistic capacity, which develops under the influence of cultural factors. Thus, it's possible that the first stage of drawing (between the ages of 1 and 2) is when our art is most pure.

I wouldn't use the word "pure". "Raw" would be a better choice, imho.

knos: music tends to keep to certain ideas everywhere though. There's almost always a rythm, or a melody, or some variant of harmony. It's not like you go to japan, and find they're into randomly filtered white noise, or you go to africa and they really dig the sound of a dog chasing a cat.

Mainly it's only the language and the style that changes. The rest is pretty much universally recognisable.

i agree with texel!

also, boom-boom-boom music is kinda universal :>

is there a civilization who did not invent drums ?

zest: i'm no expert on it by a long way, but I know of drums being used in africa, asia, and america. Not sure on australia. But how about europe? We have lots of drums now, but I think there wasn't much drumming going on a few hundred years back. Odd, considering that we invented drum and bass :)

also, it would be interesting to analyse the effect of music dematerialization through heavy use of mp3 and ipod-likes, which tends to make disappear all the (useless??) folklore around music : stage theatre, weird wears, stardom, marketroism, etc... it's like a return to roots, a refocus at what music essentially is : musical sounds and voices, but dematerialized ones, with no human beings nor the original instruments under your eyes.

of course this trend is to be put parallel to some other cheering musical movements in our mediaworld : the rush to live shows and the use of music as soundtrack for all other medias.