SSC

[Warning: Oh shit I'm going to rant, hold on to your hats~]

But that is FUN! ... To me!

I think the audience as a necessary annoyance is really a nice way to say it in my case. Honestly, I don't really give a shit if anyone understands anything I write or likes it at all, because if I did I wouldn't write half the things I do because I'd be afraid of their reactions and flying beer bottles.

Though it's nice getting good comments, I'm really stubborn when it comes to suggestions. Opinions are one thing, but I have a thing against people who think they should be writing your music instead of, well, yourself.

Which sums up a lot of the "in the know (GROAN)" crowd really. So, honestly I'd rather have an audience who has no idea what they're listening to and hate it because the last thing they liked was a the new linkin park video than a bunch of people trying to describe shit in made-up terminology I don't begin to understand, passing it off as "constructive critique!" If you want to comment, the least you can do is be honest and not buy into the black-wearing artsy-fartsy lie. If your gut hates something, or likes something (or doesn't care), it's FINE if you don't have a 9000 word essay on hand to explain why. Really. It's fine.

Also, the Quatsi Trilogy is FANTASTIC. The music? FANTASTIC. I didn't get into minimalism because of it (almost did though), sure, but it makes me appreciate Philip Glass that much more. His symphonies aren't bad either. I can't disqualify him if he can pull off such a fucking amazing piece of work in my opinion.

Another thing, there's no "wasted" experiences. So long as there's a REACTION then it's not wasted (even indifference can be a reaction?) Sure, the "Message" wouldn't have gone through, but you know what? Unless you print the message out in all languages on your program notes and distribute it on P2P under ParisXXXSECRETVIDEO it's not going to get as much attention as the actual music. The actual music is (generally!) pretty terrible at giving any sort of message, even if the lyrics are right there telling you what the message is (if the music has lyrics!) Look at all the gazillion interpretations of famous Operas, rock songs, ETC ETC.

Hell, I've said it before, but I'd rather people HATE my music and "Not get it" than people nodding pretending to understand what I did and "get it" when there was nothing to GET! I've purposely written things (that have gone into actual concerts with actual audience!) which have NO REAL MEANING WHAT SO EVER and I wrote them on the idea that they sounded pretty.

And then comes some avant-gardistic asshat who claims he "got it" and blah blah blah, finding whatever merits in what otherwise was just a "HAHA that sounds awesome LOL!" musical ejaculation! Likewise, it's like when I write complex 6 voice fugues and people look at me like I have a goddamn doctorate in occultism/magic because I copied a style well enough to poop it out effortlessly.

But just as well, I don't really mean to say anything with it a lot of times and I write it because it sounds "Pretty!" to me. SO I can't really say that copy-pasting lots of cow mooing noises together and adding randomly generated reverb effects and then intermittently adding an old sitcom laugh track on top has LESS or MORE inherent meaning than a 19th century style sonata for piano. People are just conditioned to think one thing, I like them to be angry/scared/confused/? when they're forced to deal with shit they simply can't fit into their little "oh lol this goes here!" mental-organization-system-box-thing.

Needless to say, for best results, mix cow noises with sonata form.

More rambling: Any old imbecile like me can copy styles and churn them out with some creativity and impress people enough in the academic world that you get your pieces played despite never really studying music anywhere ever before then (LOL!) So really, it's nothing to be impressed about nor is it anything to be proud of though it's highly amusing.

From my rather painful experience with the academic world in what seems to be half of Europe, South America and apparently Korea (except everyone in Korea seems to have 100 diplomas/degrees from all over the world for everything from fixing the toilet to applied thermodynamics) for some reason, you can bullshit all you want and you can tack on whatever nonsense meaning to your pieces or anyone else's pieces if it's "cool" enough to people who are old and occupy important places in academic hierarchy!

In the face of so much bullshit what can really be done? If you cater to an audience you're a sell out non-creative asspringle, if you do super-avant-garde(tm) music people will think you're either retarded or you're a modernist pretentious cakefest, if not they'll actually be modernist pretentious cakefests themselves!

IF you cut it somewhere in between people call you mediocre or that you haven't "found your voice!" I think it's only after you've gone through the whole suicide-inducing roller-coaster of measuring audience reception that you learn to stop giving a shit altogether and enjoy when someone doesn't walk away from something you did unaffected by it in some way.

Rant over!

[If this reads weird, it's because I've been watching too many of these: The Escapist : Zero Punctuation so imagine all of what I wrote, but spoken by this guy with those hilarious little illustrations he does while rapid-fires hilarious stuff. From his mouth.]