<nettime> a few thoughts and sounds

[Karl-Erik Tallmo <ketallmo@nisus.se>]

Glenn Gould's thoughts on "The Prospects of Recording" (1966) are 
very relevant for today's discussion about automated, sampled, 
networked music - and culture in general, I believe:

"I predicted that the public concert as we know it today would no 
longer exist a century hence, that its functions would have been 
entirely taken over by electronic media."

"Recordings deal with concepts through which the past is reevaluated, 
and they concern notions about the future which will ultimately 
question even the validity of evaluation."

Fellow Torontian Marshall McLuhan:

"The past went that-a-way. When faced with a totally new situation, 
we tend always to attach ourselves to the objects, to the flavor of 
the most recent past. We look at the present through a rear-view 
mirror. We march backwards into the future. Suburbia lives 
imaginatively in Bonanza-land." (The Medium is the Massage, 1967)


Karl-Erik Tallmo evaluates the recent Swedish election with a 
verbo-voco-musical comment:

http://www.nisus.se/audio/wounds.128.mp3 (Thanks for the Wounds)

Glenn Gould again:

"Automation: a crusade which musicians' union leaders currently share 
with typesetters and which they affirm with the fine disdain of 
featherbedding firemen for the diesel locomotive. In the midst of a 
proliferation of recorded sound which virtually erases earlier 
listening patterns, the American Federation of Musicians promotes 
that challenging motto "LIVE MUSIC IS BEST" -- A judgment with the 
validity of a "Win with Wilkie" sticker on the windshield of a 
well-preserved '39 LaSalle."

Karl-Erik Tallmo:

http://www.nisus.se/audio/machinemachine.be.ram (I am Machine Machine Perhaps)

Gould again on authenticity and identity:

"The role of the forger, of the unknown maker of unauthenticated 
goods, is emblematic of electronic culture. And when the forger is 
done honor for his craft and no longer reviled for his 
acquisitiveness, the arts will have become a truly integral part of 
our civilization."

Karl-Erik Tallmo on identity:

http://www.nisus.se/audio/stockhausen128.be.mp3


According to B W Powe, Glenn Gould also said:

"In the electronic age the art of music will become much more viably 
a part of our lives, much less an ornament to them, and that it will 
consequently change them much more profoundly."

Ipods?

And Powe also quotes McLuhan: "In the electronic age we are living 
entirely by music." Powe, however, cannot state the source text for 
this.

See "Noise of Time" at 
http://www.collectionscanada.ca/glenngould/028010-502.10-e.html#d

On the other hand, "communication is making", "The person who sees or 
heeds or hears is engaged in making a response to a situation which 
is mostly of his own fictional invention." (McLuhan in a conversation 
with G. E. Stearn, "McLuhan Hot & Cool", 1967.)

Also John Cage believed that a person who doesn't consider a 
particular piece of music to even be music, still has approached the 
piece in question in a musical way.

Karl-Erik Tallmo

(Overview of audio works: http://www.nisus.se/tallmo/sound)

  _________________________________________________________________

    KARL-ERIK TALLMO, poet, writer, artist, journalist
   
    ARTWORK, WRITINGS etc.: http://www.nisus.se/tallmo/
    SOUND & MUSIC: http://www.nisus.se/tallmo/sound/            
    MAGAZINE: http://art-bin.com
  _________________________________________________________________


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