Shooshie wrote:Maybe the sample composers (and I'm not referring to instruments now, but works -- CD's, LP's, etc.) will hit their stride one day and show us music of their own kind on a level akin to that of Ravel or JoaquÃn Achúcarro, but somehow I don't think that's going to happen. They may think so, but they haven't experienced JoaquÃn's playing. They don't know what it's like to perform that way, or even to listen to such a concert.
I'm not much in favor of having a musical standard set by a specific genre by which we'll judge all other music, especially classical music. If that were the case, the Blues would never have revolutionized modern music and we'd never have experienced Rock & Roll or Jazz for that matter. The great Bluesmen didn't know what it was like to perform in a concert hall setting with dozens of highly trained performers, does that devalue their work? You have to evaluate art on its own terms. I don't listen to Joy Division and think, "
wow, these guys have nothing on Debussy", or listen to Blind Willie McTell and think, "
if only he listened to more Stravinsky" -- it's a completely different idiom with its own standards of quality and to expect it to conform to the standard of another genre/approach is silly. I don't believe in art police. I think all creative approaches are valid and that there are exceptional examples of everything, each one deserving of appreciation. Life is short, true, but there's enough time to appreciate all forms of music, in my experience.
Shooshie wrote:There is a tradition there of lifetime mastery. We're not seeing that. We're seeing 'quick buck' and celebrity showman. I'm hearing that the old stuff is not relevant. But to whom? To contemporary marketeers? If you polled the audience in which I sat last night, they would all say that the stuff being marketed today -- the sampled stuff, especially, is irrelevant, and is causing harm in that it's diverting people's attention from the stuff that DOES matter.
You're falling into the same trap as radicalsaintz, again using poor examples to undermine whole approaches. Yes, a good deal of sampled music is garbage, but these days, the
majority of music that is consumed on a mass scale of
any type/approach is garbage and diverting attention from the stuff that "does matter". You're forgetting that sampling has the potential to give new life to old classics, bringing it to the attention of a new generation. I'm in my early '20s, and hardly know anyone my age interested in Rahsaan Roland Kirk, or György Ligeti, but if I were a popular electronic artist using samples from these musicians, reworking them into a new work more attractive to a new generation, I could hope that they would later seek out the work of those earlier artists, given my CLEAR INDICATION of my source samples.
Some people assume sampling is a means of demeaning or exploiting the source material, and therefore required to pay fees for the use of that material, when I think it has the most potential as a form of reverence, appreciation, and PROMOTION for the source -- imitation ((
or in this case, sampling 
)) being the sincerest form of flattery. Again, see my comments on the importance of citing the source of samples!
