Just when you thought this thread would drift lazily down the page and disappear...Nanohedron wrote:What is all this argument about? I think we're down to parsing argument style, here, and it's mighty wearisome.
I've got to disagree with Nano here. Firstly, no one ever used to say "parse" before the pundits and the 24-hour news cycle made it a household word; its true meaning is to break down a sentence, or perhaps an argument, into component grammatical parts and discuss them as such. While I did answer a series of statements one by one, and had my reponses responded to in like kind, no one appealed to the structure of the argument itself (where there was one), so where's the parsing?
Second, if there was a complaint of mine, it was not the style of argument, but the lack of a good one. The original post was about respect for the whistle; I'm somewhere in the middle, as I confess to admiring other instruments more even as I play and enjoy the whistle myself. However, I was pretty taken aback by both the suggestion that classical music is somehow more intellectually serious than ITM, and that the whistle, and by extension the flute and other diatonic instruments in the tradition, are somehow less valid for their lack of chromatic ability in what was presented as standard use. I'm paraphrasing of course, but rather than go into each and every argument presented by the poster of this claim, I'd prefer to focus on that for a minute.
Chromaticism is not a measure of anything in music. Music is also not an evolutionary continuum, itself an inherently fallacious construction and a misappropriation of Darwin, who never proposed anything like the famous litho of the slowly evolving/standing ape-men (read Stephen Jay Gould for more on this). The fallacy would have it that the simplest rhythms and melodies are at the bottom of the ladder, and the most complex are at the top. This would be a fine representation, if complexity for complexity's sake was the goal. Fortunately, music is a human endeavour, and as such contains layers of meaning and complexity that far exceed the manifest note-count and pitch relationships of any piece in question.
Take Chinese music, for example. There may be only five notes in the scale, but the important thing is inflection, even more so than melody, much less "chromaticism." Is Hindemith better than all Chinese music? Ask a Chinese and you may get a different response than if you asked Guinness (billion-to-one odds, I'd say). For that matter, is Hindemith better than Mozart? Is James Galway better than Micho Russell? Is "Flight of the Bumblebee" the most important piece of music in the Western tradition? If I play piano with my arse, is it better than "Chopsticks?"
Music, capital "M," exists entirely independently from the instrument being played. It means different things to different people, but it has much more to do with the human component, with feeling, feeling in playing as well as feeling in response to hearing, than it does with any sort of artificial mechanical measure. The amount of good which can be transferred from one human being to another, perhaps through such a simple conveyance as a tune played on the whistle, is a much more reliable measure of musical value than is the chromatic capability of the instrument itself. When was the last time you were moved to tears contemplating the chromatic capabilities of the trombone?
I for one am glad we don't actually live in a world where the chromatically sophisticated, Western-Classical Gods swirl above us, we humble grovellers in the diatonic primordial ooze that is folk music, pausing in their jubilant flight only long enough to stoop to earth and "collect" some of our inconsequential little melodies for a symphony or a tone-poem. Hang on a minute....
Rob
