Fusion ( yes, I did miss this )…. ” Cross-over”…. Oh Dear ! CRASH
A lot of this musical stuff is not non-trivial ( – Yes, you got me right : it is trivial ). A lot of what Whang On A Can or Ensemble Smersch or The Kitchen Smoke, what the boyos play . This is what I call ” The New Dirt” – i.e. what you actually hear coming out of the din doesn´t give a damn about the beautiful sheen of the clarinet that´s struggling against the tape – or the live electronics which accompany it with fine, dirty black, primitive sound-dirt , and with little or no care taken to give us an interesting, crafted, complex sound.
It palls within seconds. Is bound to. It does , too . – No complexity of any kind for the seeking and seeing ear to linger lovingly, longingly over….
Still, to every man his dirt, say I . To every can its bang.
I´m a quadrivial merchant myself , inclined to the musical work as crafty and crafted sound- sculpture which remains interesting enough to have my eary imagination come back
again and again to.
Take my Third String Quartet which the Calino Quartet will premiere in Dublin on January 13 2008. In this one – movement ” discourse” I have plenty of knots and knarls and snorts and starts and wild string-rhapsodic passages broken by the hunger to unify or derive or develop every atomic unit out of those opening polyrhythmic fits on one string or four. Many shades of quartet-colour, too. The whole argument-in-tones over the top, sure. But it´s not ” The New Dirt” .