Shooshie wrote:I'm having a little trouble understanding what some people are arguing about. Specifically, those who say that looping is just as much composition as anything that Bach or Beethoven did. It's not true.
Saying that trained musicians leave you cold doesn't make a case for looping.
Let's get back to the basic facts: looping is a valid form of creativity. It is not musical composition. The product resembles musical composition, but someone else did the composing/arranging. The looper is RE-arranging. Now, that's a valid art form. Yessiree. It is. But composing is what Bach did. What John Williams does. For that matter, it's what MIDI Life Crisis does. Looping and composing are two different things, and it does not matter what any dictionary in the world has to say about it. The dictionaries haven't gotten the memo yet about looping.
The most extreme example of this that I've seen is the photographer in the link back up the way who makes millions exhibiting his blown-up pictures of commercial magazine ads. In other words, he takes pictures of pictures. He receives credit (and tons of money) for his pictures of someone else's pictures, but someone else took the picture. Someone else waded out into the snow, measured the light and shadow on the subject, calculated the exposure, and took the picture when his eye told him it was right.
The "borrower" gets credit for it.
Where do you stop with this? I say it stops on the level of notes. If I sample a Steinway, and it's absolutely a wonderfully programmed set of samples that makes you feel like and sound like you're playing a Steinway, then if you use those samples to create a beautiful performance of any piano piece, you've basically created a musical performance. There was nothing unique about my samples except that they resembled the real thing, enabling you to create performances that are moving and/or entertaining.
If, on the other hand, I create a set of samples of pre-made portions of some piano pieces, and all you have to do is plug them in the right order, or to be REALLY creative and plug them in a different order, it's still me doing the playing.
The more mundane the sampled music fragment, the more creativity is passed to the looper. If it's down to simply instrumental tones, which then must be shaped into notes, chords, articulations and dynamics, then the person using the samples is pretty much 100% responsible for the content. But when you sample an entire bass line or chord progression, and if it was performed with expression, then that sample retains some percentage of its creative content even when it is applied to someone else's loop-work.
If we go to hear a band like Negativland, we already know that we're going to hear a lot of content generated elsewhere. The enjoyment comes from what they've done with it. Perfectly valid art form. But they aren't doing what Bach did, nor are they making such a claim. Thus, it's a different thing; it's not similar to that kind of composition.
We have a dearth of language here. We simply need to agree on words and definitions of the new stuff, without trying to deconstruct or insult the old stuff. It was here first. It is called musical composition. The new stuff may sound musical when it's done, but there has to be a word to differentiate the fact that the arranger/looper indeed did not play the music. Any looper who tries to lay claim to the actual content of the loops, as if they did that, is of course lying. BUT THAT'S NOT WHAT THEY CLAIM TO DO. No looper worth his samples is going to make an outlandish claim like that except maybe in a Monty Python sketch. No, their claim is to the arrangement of their borrowed content. It is borrowed! They know it. We know it. Everyone is fine with it until someone says "there's no difference between that and Bach." Then we run into trouble.
So why can't we just make a genre for looping? Why does anyone want to compare it to musical composition? Why does anyone want to say it's the same thing? Same process? It is not.
Saying something is different or other than is not the same as saying it's better or worse. We don't compare Bach to Beatles. Why should we compare Bach OR Beatles to Negativland? We can discuss this without bending reality.
So, I'm going to take a chance and venture forth with a principle that I think explains this stuff:
The creative content of a looper's work is directly proportional to their unique application of the borrowed content and its juxtaposition within the whole, and inversely proportional to the dependency on the uniqueness of the borrowed content itself.
To illustrate what I just said:
Ivory is not borrowed content. It's got no inherent creative expression on the note level. It's simply an instrument to be played, and one can indeed play Bach using ivory. When you do, the dependency on the uniqueness of the sampled content is zero. In performance, it functions no differently than an actual piano, harpsichord, synth, or other keyboard instrument. Take a recording of Glenn Gould playing Bach, sample it, then use it as loops, and the further away from Gould's recording you get in your re-application of the loops, the higher the creative uniqueness goes, and the more it becomes the looper's work, and not Gould's. However, if you simply take Gould's recording and put your name on it, then obviously you're just lying. But that's simply an illustration of the principle at work. Nobody in their right mind does that... except for that photographer who photographs other people's photos, then reproduces them down to the pixel as his own.
Ok boys, rip it to shreds!
Shooshie
) of this thing here.
