This came up as a random past article. I went back to Joe Maurone's author page here and searched his other entries to read more on the same topic here (The Myth of Orpheus and the Future of Music) and here (The Rise and Fall of Melody in 5.1 Surround Sound). Everyone likes music. Maurone, Bissell, and Engle are working musicians. (Others may be as well, but I am not aware of it. Also, MSK was a working musician but said nothing much in his one entry, unfortunately). That kind of a discussion of what music "is" takes place in a plane different from how music developed. No one says that you must be able to dance to music, though in ancient Greece the two were closely bound, though identified with different muses. Is it not music qua music when an audience sits and listens? In that discussion, it was claimed that a melody must be hummable to be music, "the old grey whistle test." (Derived from this: ".... When they got the first pressing of a record they would play it to people they called the old greys—doormen in grey suits. The songs they could remember and whistle, having heard it just once or twice, had passed the old grey whistle test." -- See Wikipedia here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Old_Grey_Whistle_Test about a BBC program commissioned by Sir David Attenborough to feature non-chart music. It premiered Bob Marley, Billy Joel, and Lynyrd Skynyrd, among others.) Maurone offered Rachmaninoff as unhummable and asked which of the melodies in a Bach counterpoint one is expected to hum. From "The Rise and Fall of Melody" was this: "The birth of stereo brought about the death of real musical appreciation." LaVey claims that while hi-fi stereos added realism to recorded music, stereo only added aural "tricks," but less realism. He argues that music is heard binaurally, but the sound source is usually monophonic. Stereophonics refers to the source of the sound, which is really just a doubling of the sound source. Sounds can be panned around the spectrum; envelope filters increase the width and pitch of a tone; tones can now slide from one pitch to another without a break; but melodies cannot be built this way.
On a different tack entirely, but completely revealing was this: Joe Maurone post 11: "I respect the wishes of Lindsay Perigo, who doesn't want certain forms of music promoted on his forum."
|
