[lbo-talk] Language, music, and Kenneally

Chuck Grimes cgrimes at rawbw.com
Wed Sep 2 10:40:37 PDT 2009


This sounds mighty fishy. One would like to hear more about these "experiments and studies." For one thing, the "twelve tone chromatic scale" is an extremely recent Western European invention. Michael Smith

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Remember I am basically reporting what I read. I don't know much about making music and only a little history. I have a good friend in music. I was over at their place for dinner last year and they were trying to explain many of things you mentioned. I didn't really understand it. But it sounded to me like what they were showing me amounted to the idea that many different kinds of scales can be derived by beginning with 12 tones and then reducing it to various subsets and then altering parts of the subset.

My main question was what's the difference between western sounding music and middle eastern. P and J tried to show me, by playing some short phrase and then dropping something and changing the order in something else and it sounded like it was a middle eastern phrase. Like I said I didn't really understand what they were doing. J plays and studies all kind of music.

I am afraid you're going to have to get the book and read the section and decide for yourself.

I have my own troubles with both Kenneally and Badiou. The search for some underlying structure in language seems to me something of a mistake, because much of the work depends on deriving a sense of structure from within language. My suspicion is that the structure isn't `in' language per se, but comes from without, and my candidate is something in the world.

With Badiou I have problems with his insistance on the primacy of number. My preference is to privilage motion and space.

CG



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