Sony G90 - Manual (Page 56)

attention only if you care to give it some. I admit I’m skepti-
cal about the need for so much commentary. Shouldn’t the
music speak for itself? But then maybe the techniques really
are so new that we all need orientation.
Still, I knew we were in trouble when Reynolds tells us,
with all the emotion of a librarian reading the phone book,
that “meaning” will “arise” in his music from his “syntacti-
cal” use of space. There it is, that old fallacy of music as a
language, with not just grammar, but syntax (a collection of
rules that can turn languages into well-developed logical
systems). Reynolds’ statement – I’m not going to be shy
here – is utter, total bilge. For one
thing, notice that we don’t talk
about painting as a language. We
don’t look for “syntactical” rela-
tions between green and orange
splotches in Jackson Pollock, or
between the breasts of dancing
women in Matisse.
In music, talk like this arises
only because (and forgive me for
getting technical) harmony –
chords and chord progressions –
can be talked about as if it fol-
lowed rules. From a music theorist’s point of view, what I’ve
just written is a laughably simplistic statement, but these
theorists, if they have even the lightest mist of compassion
in their blood, will forgive me for sparing you the full com-
plexities of their theories. What readers should understand,
though, is that Reynolds is way too impressed with the
mathematical explorations of music common among acade-
mic modernists, and has forgotten something very basic.
Yes, theorists can find all sorts of relationships among
chords, but any attempt to find something similar in other
areas of music – rhythm, loudness, and tone color, for
instance – has essentially been laughed away with the acad-
emic equivalent of a Bronx cheer.
So when Reynolds says he can create “syntactical” rela-
tionships from the spatial placement of sound, he’s whistling
in the dark. All he means is that he can create patterns of a
reasonably elementary sort – you know, like saying, “Hey,
w o w, Kenny dies in every South Park episode.” Anyone can
understand that this might give the show some continuity;
nobody claims it’s any kind of South Park syntax.
To me, the comments by Reynolds and his colleagues
are badly sunk in jargon. “Instantiation” (meaning the way a
sound begins), and “sense modalities” (meaning ways that
we perceive things) are two examples. When Schick, the
sober, well-meaning (and certainly skilled and sensitive)
percussionist referred to his “practicioning,” I was ready to
throw the DVD out the window. “In the course of my prac-
ticioning,” he said, “I’ve found…”
(or words to that effect). What he
means is not much more than
“When I play my percussion gigs,”
or, to stretch things as far as pos-
sible in his favor, maybe “When I
play a wide variety of percussion
gigs.” The benefit of all this jargon
is all too clear. It serves, con-
sciously or not, to inflate the
importance of Reynolds’ music.
And by distancing the conversa-
tion from everyday life (and, in
fact, from any kind of human emotion), it enables all con-
cerned to sidestep what seems quite plain to me, the unre-
markable mediocrity of Reynolds’ work.
There are four works on this DVD. The first, Eclipse, a
1980 piece for computer-generated sound, originally “spa-
tialized” on seven channels, is a collaboration with video
artist Ed Emshwiller, and it’s his contribution that makes
the time spent watching it worthwhile. Reynolds, ever the
conscientious modernist, evades direct comprehension of
his meaning by swirling shards of poetry around us in sur-
round-sound space. His processing of human voices leads
to wonderful moments, especially when the voices blend
together in an unexpected chord. But these are only
moments. To me, at least, the whole thing feels old-fash-
ioned, stiff, and, to use the word again, too conscientious.
Emshwiller, meanwhile, unfolds images that range from
The first music DVD with
full 5-channel capability:
The composer is a special-
ist in electronic music. A
pairing made in a
virtual heaven, or…?
gongs and cymbals shimmer from the depths beyond.
Within the piece E c l i p s e is a poem comprised of multiple
voices that move in time and space to form shifting patterns of
c o m p r e h e n s i o n :
Female voice : Male voice:
On the night of the quiet moon Her luminary reflection
He would be awakened Her constancy under all her phases
By the fleeting train music Rising and setting by her appointed times
Of thunder dawns Waxing and waning
That brought on ruinous floods Her power to enamour
And left a desolation of tattered gowns To mortify
Of dead brides To invest with beauty
On the branches of the almond trees To render insane
Of the quiet moon The tranquillity
(repeats) Of her visage
(repeats) Her omens of tempest
At the former Dutch lunatic asylum! And of calm
Male voice : The admonition of her craters,
her arid Seas, her silence silence
silence
silence
Silence!