Why Improvised Music is so Boring

[jkudler]

what the piece actually did, in the most basic, objective sense.

I'm really impressed by the fact that both Kudlers think it's so clear what the piece objectively did. Because the rest of us are on our fifth page of attempting to figure out exactly that. Please, fill us in.

no, i was making a negative description. the piece very simply was not making any major or real points about pornography. if you think it was, i really have trouble believing you watched the actual video. some of the other stuff earlier in the thread also literally made me wonder if people were referring to a different video than the one i saw last week or whenever. there seemed to be some major confusion about its actual contents. it's also really strange to me that people aren't familiar with the idea of stating something you don't literally believe to be true (even when said statement is meant to be from the mouth of a friend).

-jesse

[RFKorp]

just for the record, there ARE two different videos being discussed at certain points in the thread.

[jkudler]

you mean the titular one and the one with the robot voice? but there is no reason those two should be confused. . .

-jesse

[RFKorp]

no, there isn't but people might not have always been clear which they were talking about. if that's what might have led to your wondering if people had even watched the video or whatever. just a hypothesis.

[bkudler]

However, I think the meaning of this piece is pretty clear, especially with the accompanying text, which I see as part of the piece.

except it's not so clear to most of us. and this thread has only confused matters, wherein Diego has seemed to describe it as a purely aesthetic experiment rather than an attempt to communicate something beyond.

I don't see where Diego says this. It seems clear what he wants to do, when he says "when I imagine things that I can't really understand in full, or that many aspects of them are elusive to me, then I feel the need of doing them, and usually I'm happy about the results. They not only inspire new thoughts on me (and on people around me that I'm interested in), but I can also feel that they are somehow more alive than the ideas that I can somehow understand before doing."

Do people get upset when the liner notes of a record help one understand the music?

I don't really read liner notes, they're generally either too shallow or too didactic....

So what, if that is what you find to be true about that, it doesn't change the fact that many works besides this one have ancillary texts and no one complains about it.

The EAI --or whatever you want to call it-- that was put out this year that was largely seen as the best, were records that posed the best questions. I'm sorry to pick on Motubachii, which was a very important and great album for me, but a big reason people went so crazy for was because it made people ask questions about improv. […] This makes me look at a piece like Motubachii and rather than seeing it as asking questions such as "can these structures be incorporated into improv?," or any of the other questions it maybe ask, I see the questions it is asking as loaded statements disguised as questions.

I don't know which of us is off base but I have never heard Motubachii as being such an album of great questions. it's just amazing improvised music proudly reveling in a set of aesthetics most people don't risk exploring. If you heard it as asking questions before, I'm glad you've realized they're just statements. If they seem "loaded" I think that says more about you than the music. It's incredibly raw to me. Sound laid bare. (but like I said, maybe everyone else agrees with you, and I'm revealing some bizarre personal prejudice of my own)

This I have a lot of trouble with. When Motubachii first dropped people kept saying it was going to change the genre etc... I can find the posts from this forum if you want. In my mind someone saying it changes the genre means it is challenging the genre. By merely saying the this piece does something in relation to the genre, it has to, in a way, ask questions about the genre. It seems to be just me who thinks this, but I always read Motubachii as a record that is a lot about questions. I think if you really look at the work you will understand how I got there and the validity of this statement.

Chamy points out that the questions being asked are not questions at all and really makes me, at least, question the idea and capability of art to ask real questions.

I mean, I could write a whole essay on this part of your post but I'll be succinct. I'm glad you've finally had this epiphany. I don't know how I feel about it being this piece that brought you there. I've been sick for years of this idea that art is responsible (or even ABLE) to ask questions. There's a reason I quit studying any form of art in an academic setting. I don't WANT art to ask questions. I don't even want it to SAY anything.

I don't really know how to re-act to the last part of this. I am unsure how a piece could "not say anything," but then again that is sort of the purpose of music, but then again it is not. I think if we discuss that idea we will merely get into a linguistical argument, let's skip that for now. I will say this, the piece is about questions, so it made me think about questions. How do I know it is about questions? the center of the piece is Diego asking a lot of questions, the title has the word "questions" in it, etc...

what the piece actually did, in the most basic, objective sense.

I'm really impressed by the fact that both Kudlers think it's so clear what the piece objectively did. Because the rest of us are on our fifth page of attempting to figure out exactly that. Please, fill us in.

Well not exactly. I think it is pretty easy to "objectively" say what the piece did. The piece made us discuss the piece on IHM, the piece caused Diego to post the piece on his website etc... If you are trying to say, that I can objectively say what the thesis of the piece is, well, then I admit, I can not. However, I can say that there is material in this piece that leads me to have a certain reading of it. This speaks to Grisha's point as well. There is no way to look at this piece --or really any piece of art-- and say "this is the meaning." I am not trying to do that. It makes sense that anonymous and my brother would have different readings, that doesn't make the piece any less cogent or devoid of statements. What I am trying to do is offer a reading of the piece based on evidence found with in the piece. It seems that this thread started off with people giving criticisms based on readings of the piece that were not based on evidence with in the piece -- this to me is pointless. If people want to look at what the piece says and give criticisms based on that, let's have an interesting debate. It seems people more just want to say "using porn in performance art is old hat," which is something like saying using "tracks that are less that five minutes long in music is old hat" to annette krebs after hearing motubachii. There are more readings than just mine to be done, there are ways to disagree with my reading, there are ways to agree with my reading of the piece and criticize the piece for making that point. However, so far no one has attempted to do this, all people have done is say that trying to read the piece in any way is stupid and that the piece is not self contained enough to be properly read. What should I expect though?
Most have backed away from the thread by now and decided it is "stupid" or "pointless," for whatever reason. Dan, I would like to hear more of your thoughts. I take it by now that you and jon are having a back and forth in PMs on the subject of Werder's work and ignoring this thread, so be it. I would like to hear either of your readings on the piece, and in Dan's case, why you dismiss it so intensely. I honestly am not sure what your reason is for that, I mean that sincerely. Whatever, it's IHM, it's not about discussing music, it's about praising and discarding it. I'll keep my mouth shut until I am told which trend I'm supposed to be interested in next.

[jon abbey]

I would like to hear either of your readings on the piece

I skimmed through the video, this kind of thing really doesn't interest me much. I'm not exactly against it, but I'm not sure I would have attended any of this Instal even if I lived in Glasgow.

[bedouin]

I would have been interested in the answers, if the question (Why Improvised Music is so Boring?) was set to unsuspected folk walking on the street.

[J.F.]

I honestly don't care very much about possible further deep implications of what I saw in the video. I enjoyed it... well - specifically the middle section. The duo improv lost me after 2 or 3 minutes of initial interest, and except for an irksome hysterical quality, I didn't get much out of the voice/dance-part. But the combination of music and talking, on a quite strictly esthetic level, created a kind of tension that worked for me (no matter if that level was taken into consideration by Diego or not).

But then again my reception of the ways music can atmospherically "upload" spoken words can be rather superficial.
- while I, in most cases, easily can keep quite a distance to the used texts.

Watching this video didn't change anything about the way I think about improvised music. All in all I found it to be quite entertaining 30 minutes, and I guess it would have been the same when seeing it live in performance.

[Lothar]

I am totally newbie to this style of music and performance.

I deeply enjoyed the performance. I felt lot of emotion during the 3 phases. This talked to me about the meaning of life and creating beauty.

This connect also for me with the concept of Open Space Technology and how we are responsible here and now to create meaning for us and I had the feeling this is exactly what the artists were doing.

Thank you Diego!!!

[schiksalgemeinschaft]

I would like to hear either of your readings on the piece

I skimmed through the video, this kind of thing really doesn't interest me much. I'm not exactly against it, but I'm not sure I would have attended any of this Instal even if I lived in Glasgow.

Me neither, because I simply don't like explicit meta-art - except when it does change the game (like Duchamp), but it's clear that Diego doesn't fall into this category, because all the questions he asks are old hat, and the form he uses is old hat too.


The funny thing is that the general public and institutions often love this kind of art, because they are, inevitably, somewhat behind, and because such meta-art seems provoking/dangerous but at the same time deals with pretty safe, worn-out questions in a safe, conventional way (like a staged Q&A with an audience).

The part of audience that really tries to keep up with things and has really invested time & effort in certain fields of contemporary art, like most of us here, generally don't have much to learn from such meta-art, since it doesn't bring new insights to the table.

In the case of Diego: there is hardly anything to gain from putting the problems of opinions disguised as questions, blanket statements, etc. to the improv table. It are maybe problems that relate to some discussions of improv (in some reviews or in some posts on boards like these), but they are not problems for the actual music itself.


One a sidenote, part of why Diego's performance fails is, besides the fairly stereotypical content, the fact that the form of his performance is uninteresting, it has no artistic (in an artisanal way) nor aesthetic merit whatsoever: so why would you watch it, since you can't learn anything from it, nor enjoy it on another level?

[faster]

it has no artistic (in an artisanal way) nor aesthetic merit whatsoever.

Dude. Pink pants.

[simon reynell]

Fwiw I much prefer this to the Instal performance: http://www.youtube.com/v/zBkg4DODQEA?fs=1&hl=en_US
It's Diego talking/performing alongside Axel Dorner improvising on trumpet. I find bits of Diego's contribution funny (which I didn't with the Instal performance), and Axel's playing is great & operates in contradiction to but on equal terms with Diego's words, whereas at Instal the musicians were very much secondary/ background once Diego appeared.

[emanem]

There is so much wonderful improvised music to listen to and work with, that I do not have time to read this somwhat boring discussion.

[notoriousd]

Improvised music is boring when people care more about the social connotations of their music than the sound of the music itself. Music is about music, not some unrelated sociopolitical hogwash.

On a sidenote, part of why Diego's performance fails is, besides the fairly stereotypical content, the fact that the form of his performance is uninteresting

pwned. Ultimately there are two kinds of artists, one tries to trip you out with some crazy stuff that they made - which people then label later as art - and the other kind which simply tries to be labelled as an artist. Pseudo-intellectual ****s like Diego are merely attracted to improv because of its cachet and the niche community which surrounds it. They aren't actually interested in what happens inside your head when you try to observe the relationships between sonic events, only that they can be seen as doing something shocking and risqué in front of an audience and considered intelligent or artistic by some other twat.

[anonymous999]

Improvised music is boring when people care more about the social connotations of their music than the sound of the music itself. Music is about music, not some unrelated sociopolitical hogwash.

On a sidenote, part of why Diego's performance fails is, besides the fairly stereotypical content, the fact that the form of his performance is uninteresting

Strange that this performance is supposedly so boring an uninteresting but generates more discussion and engagement that most of the concerts announced in this message board.

[anonymous999]

There is so much wonderful improvised music to listen to and work with, that I do not have time to read this somwhat boring discussion.

So why even wasting time in commenting about it?

Everybody here seems to have the need to make a point
instead of making or listening to wonderful improvised music

[faster]

Everybody here seems to have the need to make a point
instead of making or listening to wonderful improvised music

I know, right? I mean, if someone says he doesn't find improvised music boring, how can he possibly justify taking up to 30 seconds to type upwards of one sentence on a message board?

[Dan Warburton]

There is so much wonderful improvised music to listen to and work with, that I do not have time to read this somwhat boring discussion.

Is this Martin Davidson?!

[jon abbey]

Strange that this performance is supposedly so boring an uninteresting but generates more discussion and engagement that most of the concerts announced in this message board.

the performance has virtually nothing to do with it, it's almost entirely the title of the piece/thread.

[notoriousd]

There is so much wonderful improvised music to listen to and work with, that I do not have time to read this somwhat boring discussion.

Is this Martin Davidson?!

Seems like it... he's pretty good at condemning stuff without being rude! Reminds me of the William Parker quotation displayed on the RogueArt label website: HOW DARE WE SPEND SO MUCH VALUABLE ENERGY ANSWERING SUCH QUESTIONS AS "WHAT IS JAZZ?"