I feel compelled to point out that even when people do their best to
be *exactly like* someone else, their own imprint is inevitably
present in their production. Someone once told me that Yellow Magic
Orchestra was attempting to sound like the Beatles--they don't sound
like the Beatles to me, but to their own ears (at the time, anyway),
it's entirely plausible. (But just listen to that cover of Day
Tripper!)
>From this point of view, I think it hardly matters what people try to
do. Art ends up evolving just because of the turnover in people as
folks enter and leave the discourse. There is undoubtedly value in
doing one's best to learn and preserve Ye Olde Methode, but ultimately
there's no way to really lock it in in an absolute sense.
-jeremy
On Wed, Jun 30, 2004 at 05:11:51PM -0700, Philip Gelb wrote:
> This authentic style that Brian Miller writes about....what is it?
> Was Yoshida Seifu authentic? Was Shiro Yamaguchi authentic? Was
> Watasumi authentic? Is Hozan Yamamoto playing with bass player Gary
> Peacock authentic? Is Riley Lee playing australian folk tunes,
> authentic? Is Brian Ritchie playing Albert Alyler tunes on
> shakuhachi, authentic?
>
> Has each generation sounded just like the one before? Should each
> generation sound exactly like the one before it? Is such a thing
> possible? Is it desirable?
>
> Now that shakuhachi exists outside of Japan, should non-Japanese
> players (and composers!) sound just like Japanese players? Is such a
> thing possible? If it is possible, why would such a thing be
> desirable?
>
> As European classical music entered other cultures such as Japan, did
> Japanese composers find their own voices within the idiom? Or did
> they choose to compose like the great dead white composers? Looking
> at composers such as Takemitsu, Ichinyanagi, or Hosokawa, it is quite
> obvious that these composers created (Hosokawa is still very active)
> a uniquely Japanese voice while writing for European (and sometimes
> Japanese) instruments.
>
> It only makes sense to me that non-Japanese players come up with
> their own styles, approaches and in some cases, repertoires, while
> at the same time studying styles of previous generations. Otherwise
> we would be awfully boring not to mention dishonest to ourselves
--
jeremy bornstein <jeremy@muladhara.org>
-*-
every word is like an unnecessary stain on silence and nothingness.
[samuel beckett]
-*-
http://jeremy.org/
_____________________________________________
List subscription information is at:
http://communication.ucsd.edu/shaku/listsub.html
This archive was generated by hypermail 2b29 : Wed Feb 23 2005 - 15:42:32 PST