Klarinet Archive - Posting 000212.txt from 2004/09

From: joseph.wakeling@-----.net
Subj: Re: [kl] Organic change
Date: Mon, 13 Sep 2004 16:55:59 -0400

Tony Pay wrote:

> But one way of looking at the problem involves
> the notion of 'organic change'. Something is said
> to undergo organic change when some aspects of
> that something change, whilst other aspects stay
> the same.

I'm not sure I agree about this. The thing is, I don't think there's any
change that *isn't* organic, by this definition. The only way you can
effectively have an "inorganic" change is to define a context so that some
things are outside your system. Is this really what you mean by organic
change?

> Finally, I think that the notion of organic change
> can also help to explain why it is a particular
> departure from an established style (such as Klezmer,
> perhaps) may be justifiably criticisable. It could
> happen that the departure is too radical, and that
> buying it 'blots out' important nuances used by other
> practitioners. If the departure is 'organic', and
> made by a great artist, that may be acceptable, and
> buildable upon -- then, it counts as an extension of
> the language. But if it is done superficially,
> without understanding, it may be worth killing off.

I was going to disagree about this point---the idea that there could be a "too
radical" change---but then I realised you had already made the caveat I
wanted. But it seems to me to suggest that the issue is surely not whether
the change is major or minor, but the question of whether what comes out is
"self-justifying". That is, if the resulting work has an internal "sense" to
it.

And it seems to me that the question one should ask about a change is not
whether it's "organic" in the sense you described above, but whether it
creates or destroys internal sense. I wonder if this might be a better way of
conceiving change as organic or inorganic.

This reminds me of a piece I heard once at a new music festival. A small
group of musicians---I think a clarinettist, a flute player, a pianist and
maybe a few strings---tooted away at this thing which was basically a
conventional Western structure just using an Indian scale. I guess the
composer wanted to write music that "sounded Indian". But of course what
makes music really "sound Indian" is not the notes (any more than the major
scale makes music "sound classical"); it's the way those notes are combined in
melodic, rhythmic and harmonic fashion, often combined with a specific set of
performance rituals. So this piece didn't "sound Indian" (except in a very
superficial way) because it lacked all these things, and it didn't "sound
classical" either because the Indian scale wasn't classical. This could have
been a good thing because it could have then sounded like "something else".
But it didn't, because no rapport had been created between its elements---they
were just slapped together. It was a bit like watching a married couple who
talk at each other but don't listen to each other.

... Yet the combination of elements from Indian and Western music can actually
be done very successfully, as in the cases of Debussy, Messiaen, the Beatles,
Nitin Sawhney, and others---composers who don't just "mix" cross-cultural
elements but who create dialogue between them. (Funnily enough, the album of
Nitin Sawhney's that came after his remarkable "Beyond Skin" failed precisely
because he stopped doing this: he went from a music that very delicately mixed
and balanced elements from a wide range of musical styles, to one which just
used "ethnic" riffs accompanied by drumbeats.) The result may sound more or
less like parts of its source material but always has the feeling of being
*itself*.

The thing is surely to be sensitive to the dialogue that occurs between
artistic elements, to whether this dialogue is "working" or not. That applies
just as much to music that is written "within" a style as to music that mixes
stylistic elements, I'd say.

-- Joe

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