Klarinet Archive - Posting 000420.txt from 2004/05

From: "Dan Leeson" <dnleeson@-----.net>
Subj: RE: [kl] Hesitating to draw a musical parallel
Date: Sun, 23 May 2004 12:08:00 -0400

-----Original Message-----
From: Ormondtoby Montoya [mailto:ormondtoby@-----.net]
Sent: Sunday, May 23, 2004 8:42 AM
To: klarinet@-----.org
Subject: Re: [kl] Hesitating to draw a musical parallel

Tony Pay wrote:

> That *you* happen to 'like' something in
> isolation does no work at all. [snip from
> multiple posts] Now, having argued against
> individual likes and dislikes as determinants
> of musical value, I want to say that there
> there are aesthetic preferences which the
> majority of human beings pretty much all
> share.

It interests me that --- Without (!) intending to discuss the
usefulness
of the word "dark" --- that the phrase "nice dark sound" is, I
think,
heard more commonly in casual 'I-know-it-when-I-hear-it' speech
as
praise than is the phrase "nice bright sound".

Although I have no statistics to support the assertion, the term
"nice bright sound" is, in my limited experience, very rarely
heard. On the contrary, I suggest that there is an unstated
assumption that a bright sound (whatever the hell that is) is not
a good thing to have. One often hears the assertion that a
person's sound is too bright but one never hears the assertion
that a person's sound is too dark. In effect, "bright" and "nice"
are effectively mutually exclusive.

Perhaps the inclusion of "nice" is significant because it conveys
an
element of relaxed and less strident behavior. That is,
"bright" and
"dark" are each used commonly by themselves, but you don't hear
"nice
bright" as often as you hear "nice dark". This may go
hand-in-hand
with the concept that biting the reed (which generally raises the
pitch)
is also a 'bad' thing.

And it is just one short hop from this "perhaps" to the statement
being put forward as a universal truth, obvious to all but the
mentally impaired.

Dan Leeson

---------------------------------------------------------------------
Klarinet is a service of Woodwind.Org, Inc. http://www.woodwind.org