#86

I agree that there needs to be some competence with a craft in order to be able to express/speak through it, whether it is guitar, paint or woodcraft. But technical ability alone does not make great art. There are dozens of recordings of Bach’s Cello Concerto, with skilled musician playing the identical notes, but most agree that each artist expresses the work differently. That difference is what interests me.

I also agree that intentionally eliminating any craft from expression tends to be self-indulgent. But I also do not believe that you must master a craft before you can express yourself through it. Anyone with a drive to express though a particular medium will necessary achieve a certain level of competence with the medium.

What I meant by ambient is the new punk rock, is that it is a medium that based on the toys available today anyone can express themselves even if they lack technical musical skill. This holds for noise music as well. There is an infinite amount of harsh noise out there now, but there are only a few who make it that I find interesting. There is a true skill to make compelling harsh noise, but it that the same thing as technical skill?

I have recently been listening to Anastassis Philippakopoulos: piano works which I really like but wonder whether it is “the emperor has no clothes” because of its sheer simplicity.

I do believe simplicity can be difficult for an audience to grasp. Many people dismiss painting by Mondrian because they are simple geometric forms, but when they try to make their own they consistently fail.

#87

It seems like we’re pretty hung up on that first clause, but what about the rest of it? I found it interesting to learn, after @zebra pointed out that one archaic meaning of “talent” was a unit of money, that there’s another archaic meaning: “a desire or inclination for something”. Interesting that “talentless” could precisely mean “not driven, not striving”.

I’m trying not to start talking about neoliberalism and…succeeding?

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#88

I generally think about art and craft as axis on a Cartesian plane - with all creative efforts falling somewhere on that plane. I’ve never given much thought to separating out creativity from art, but perhaps there is room for a z axis in my mental map.
My personal preference leans to the lo-fi on the craft axis in both the art I like and the art I create, and I probably fall under the banner of ‘talentless’ using many metrics.
Rather than ‘jack of all trades, master of none,’ I’m thinking (as I write this) that ‘jack of all trades, master of one’ may be a good motto. That one being creativity. That’s the most important to me at least - how you get there maybe doesn’t matter (except when the getting there is the creative part itself…)

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#89

There are no recordings of a cello concerto by J.S. Bach, because he never wrote one; but there are three great ones written by his son C.P.E. Bach!

The one in A minor in particular

#90

Sorry I meant the Cello Suites :grinning:

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#91

Technically your statement was not wrong!

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#92

(replying to that which you replied to while maintaining mutual agreement)

Moreover, some of the most formally innovative music ever was achieved by proposing new definitions of “strong technique” and “chops”—phrases I assume to be entrenched in andro-Eurocentric quasi-Enlightenment notions of virtuosity. The Shaggs immediately come to mind as a significant example of the past 100 years. Does their music propose new ways of approaching rhythmic, harmonic, and structural organization? Yes. Is their music extremely rarefied? Yes. But the same goes for that of Bach or Coltrane. The conditions of such innovation were necessarily grounded in the technical conditions of its performance.

In the age of automation, I hardly find it important to still consider things like rarefied human capacities as something inherently valuable in the same way it might have been 100+ years ago without appearing sentimental. This forum, I would imagine, seems like among the most uncontroversial contexts in which to say this.

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#93

I think there are multiple levels of “express themselves” at work, and I’d argue there is some technical skill involved in making that expression more eloquent.

Maybe what sets ambient or harsh noise apart is breadth rather than depth of those skills. Some understanding of electronics, synthesis, music production techniques, etc. (and in the case of ambient a touch of music theory) are all really helpful. A tiny bit of understanding (where to plug stuff in) will take you a ways, and a little more skill in various areas will help you… let’s not say “master” it even, but will let you express yourself.

But if you’re going to perform on a violin, to express yourself well at all you need to develop skills in tone production and intonation, both of which are extremely difficult at the beginning. Unless of course it’s very punk violin, maybe feeding into some electronics for a harsh noise performance or sampled and granulated for ambient… :smiley:

But going back to the start of this, I don’t think a total lack of knowledge/skill is what the OP was talking about with “talentless”… presumably there’s no trouble holding the guitar, not too much trouble fretting notes and playing a few basic chords for instance.

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#94

Can’t really tell if this is satire or not. Well done!

#95

random thoughts about fragments of this thread;
. i still don’t understand what “art” and “expressing oneself” have to do together*.
. i don’t know about talent or technique or mastery, but i’m pretty sure discernment** is the most important thing to develop as an artist.
. there’s a good chance one’s “talent” will be so specific as to be ignored/unnoticed.
. “growth”, walking a path, being there, that’s all the same to me***.

constellation of Obvious:
* Is it not as much a partial conception than the notion of innate talent ?
**(my own definition of) discernment: tools of any nature (formal, intuitive, scholarly, metaphysical…) to perceive and evaluate one’s work and its context (in the broadest sense) in a feedback loop.
*** i don’t like that more and more words become unusable because their use in media associates them with undesirable things (like, economic growth). I think it’s very important to not let a word become its apparently dominant signification. Plants grow too, and it has nothing to do with being good or bad.

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#97

I’m not sure what you’re implying… I took @qwoned’s response as straight forward and interesting, I don’t think there’s any attempt at being facetious. As was my own reply, where I mentioned a similar idea with less detail than @qwoned added so nicely.

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#98

was just thinking about a quote I read once by Ellen Dissanayake. “Art is the act of making things special”

She views art as the product of “making things special”, and these things may be objects as well as behaviors. That is to say, art evolved to make certain events, tentatively important for survival or social cohesion, more salient, pleasurable, and memorable. Artifacts of art are also said to result from efforts to deal with uncertainties of nature by exerting control over it.

Apart from problematic narratives about control over nature we are certainly living with uncertainties and many of us are making art with whatever tools we have available. Talent is one of those tools but so are a lot of other things. I’m probably up in the night on this but I like the idea. Music as presenting an arrangement of sounds in time… ‘Hey guys, important sounds here.’ Or just ‘I like these sounds this way.’ and many of us do it because it’s a thing that humans do.

Now considering deleting this because I’m not so sure I know what I’m getting at… but gonna jump through.

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#99

Comparing the Shaggs to Bach and Coltrane didn’t suggest that someone might be trolling us?

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#100

I think if you read the comment again you’ll see that it doesn’t actually make any qualitative comparison. What @qwoned does imply is that all three offer new ways of thinking and hearing music. The argument I interpret from that is that even a group as traditionally technically inept as The Shaggs isn’t one-dimensional, that they offer fresh and complex ways of understanding music, expression, and listening. This is in response to your statement that punk is one dimensional. It seems like a well articulated counter argument to me.

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#101

What is fresh and complex in the Shaggs? They’re really terrible. The lyrics are inane, the guitars are not tuned, the drummer appears not to be listening to the rest of the band. They’re just kids doing a thing they’re not very good at.

#102

Never heard of The Shaggs, had to look them up… cool!

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#103

When treated as a trailhead for exploratory conversation, I enjoy the topic of “what is art”. I’m still ruminating Brian Eno’s definition, five years on: “art is everything that you don’t have to do”.

I value the curators, the accomplished creators, the virtuosos, and all the people who help me to find the ones that resonate with me. That said, I feel like the ludic, enriching? (I’m gesturing broadly at the upper parts of Maslow’s pyramid here) value of “doing that which we don’t have to do” is not spoken of enough, and for that reason I value this thread.

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#104

I’m not going to make a specific argument for The Shaggs. Evidently, you’re coming to music from a very different perspective than myself (and a lot of others), which is fine. We don’t have to agree.

Suffice to say, if you’re not into it or don’t get it that doesn’t mean it hasn’t been musically significant… so much so that there’s a BBC documentary, a musical theatre show, lots of covers, and lots of articles to check out if you’re interested in see what people see in them and other bands like them.

I’ll also say that a lot of so-called “punk” bands (some that aren’t like The Shaggs and some that are or are influenced by them) offer their own take on complexity and depth outside of traditional notions of musicianship or virtuosity … but you seem pretty decided about all of this already.

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#105

The Ramones, a band the music industry laughed at, were featured in a solo show at the Grammy museum last year.

#106

I didn’t mean for @emenel to feel like they have to argue on my behalf, so I apologize (or rather, I hope you don’t feel that way). I merely engaged on this topic because ‘talentlessness’ often yields non-trivial results, but perhaps only once systematized (because the results otherwise can’t be recognized as non-trivial if not evaluated according to the system from which it operates, which permits extrapolation and inference). I believe Shaggs—yes, like Bach and Coltrane (gasp)—developed a robustly singular compositional logic for composing and performing music in a systematic (repeatable) manner within ‘traditional’ genre constraints. On a purely technical, musicological—rather than naively aesthetic (e.g. “terrible”, “out of tune”)—level, one could discuss asymmetrical phrase lengths, complex harmonic rhythm, metric modulation, and types of unison as some of the saliently novel textures Shaggs introduced to otherwise “rock/pop band” ensemble music. (But they don’t need valorizations like this in order to be taken seriously, of course.) In other words, their work (intentionally, needless to say) contributed something innovative re: the structural organization of traditional music and the conventions of such. Their contributions were doubtlessly taken up by subsequent musicians and extrapolated. But it seems unwise to carry a discussion with one unwilling to accept its premise.

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