[sdiy] OT: Why you guys dont talk about Jarre?

[CCartCat at aol.com]

In a message dated 6/5/05 3:55:42 PM, jbv.silences at club-internet.fr writes:


> One thing I regret is that nowadays, "electronic music" is associated by
> young generations ONLY to synth music... So many times in mailing
> lists I found JMJ or TD or Kraftwerk described as "the godfathers of
> EM"... That's a pity coz there's such a wide (and much much more
> interesting) set of works & composers of electro-acoustical music,
> "musique concrete", etc. that developped between the early 50's to the 80's,
> associated with strong musical theories (Schaeffer, Stockhausen...) that
> make the above mentioned synth artists look rather pale & boring...
> 
> just my opinion...
> JB
> 
> 

Probably old hat to most people here is the book The Ambient Century:   From 
Mahler to Trance--The Evolution of Sound in the Electronic Age.   It looks 
back from circa 2000 electronica etc. to European composers like Satie and Ravel  
 and innovations like the Teleharmonium on through to Stockhausen and Cage, 
musique concrete etc. to trace the cultural and technological connections twixt 
old, not so old, and new music.   

JM Jarre is one of many mentioned in the overall continuum of artists.   
Folks like the members of Can and others who had studied electronic music in the 
mid 20th century sense are placed in relation to that context etc.   

Anyway, my faulty book abstract aside, there are efforts to remember what has 
come before and informed current electronic music.   How that plays out now 
in terms of music making and sound creation technology (ah, almost back on 
topic . . .) is anyone's supposing.   

FWIW, and very OT even for this thread:   I like Jarre.   But even now, I'm 
pretty rockist/poppy in my tastes.   And way back when Oxygene came out (which 
is the only J. I've really listened to), a drop of synth was as good as an 
ocean.   Indeed, I was a bored teen mallrat when I first heard Oxygene through 
some snazzy demo setup of some flat panel mylar speakers.   So I got the record. 
  And I later heard some of Joe Zawunul's work with Weather Report, radio 
hits like "Popcorn", and later still new wave-ish synth (like the Cars) and Lyle 
Mays playing with Pat Metheny.   But it was my slow, late appreciation of 
Brian Eno's instrument treatments rather than VCO-VCF-VCA synth usage per se 
(something I was_really_slow to grasp) that got me paying attention to something 
other than electric guitar, bass etc.   And indeed well before "getting" Eno, I 
heard Steve Reich's "Come Out" tape loop piece, musique concrete and related 
pre-synth electronic music.   But long before all that I had spend my early 
youth listening to easy listening radio (muzak arrangements of "Tea for Two"), 
then later Top-40 with all the attendant scary bits of flash & treacle (which I 
still like--see here Marcel Duchamp's remark on taste:   good, bad & 
indifferent).   So go figure . . .

The above I only offer as a case study in not only how peculiar one's tastes 
can be (I like chocolate ice cream and really dislike pistachio, last I 
checked), but how peculiar and involved the formation of those tastes can be (I 
might be ready to give strawberry another try).   

When applied to music and means of musicmaking, such twists and turns of 
taste can get very gnarly indeed.

Back to lurking,
Kevin
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