Quote:
|
Originally Posted by Rob Instigator
SYR 4
have fun
|
There's no 12-tone pieces on there. Honestly. I'm not one-upping you, it's just a simple fact. I mean, I haven't listened to it in years, but I'm very confident of the fact. There are atonal pieces, and improvised pieces, and indeterminate pieces, and sound-art pieces, and studies, but no 12-tone pieces.
This is the problem with music theory. On one hand, I entirely agree with everyone saying it doesn't matter. On another, similar hand, I agree that just by playing people pick up music theory.
I was reading up on Makams and Maqams last night, which are largely taught by listening. They're a bit more restricted than the ragas of North India, but they're not so far away. They're bloody impossible. There's about four sorts of F#s in a Maqam in D, and although I appreciate that in theory, playing it or hearing it requires loads of concentration on my part. The point is that it's not a formal, written teaching, which is mostly exclusive to Western art music (or 'classical' as it's often wrongly called). The majority of the world outside of Europe (and large slews of European folk) don't teach music theory by writing it down.
Anyway. The point of my riposte to Rob - don't try and talk music theory if you know fuck all about it. Throwing a couple of words you've read at a piece of music you like doesn't mean that the words you're using mean what you want them to.
For the record, I get a lot of enjoyment from music theory, and relative to a lot of people here I maybe know a lot. However, I still know fuck all, relative to a lot of musicians I know. I gave one such person a copy of the second part of Fushitsusha's 'I saw it! That which before I could only sense...', and he agreed with me that it's mysteriously nearly a 12-tone piece (although I think he described it as a 'horrifically inadequate, over-amplified pastiche of 12-tone').