Every good musical idea will eventually find its way into the charts

Mark - this is sort of what I'm getting at, this mechanism of 'watering down' - does it invalidate the idea to find it within a 'pop' context?

- Extended drone pieces.
- Merzbow-style noise.
- Very quiet tiny-event music (I don't know what the name for this is, Bernhard Gunter etc.)

(OK no it depends what the 'idea(s)' is/are in musique concrete surely)

Ronan - that's a problem which it's up to the person defining the non-chartbound 'idea' to defuse, surely?

This is because pop has not expressed enough vocal styles (despite vocals being a very strong element of course).

I think also any of that arabic singing or flamenco has not got through in the pop charts as well. no one has popularized it.

morton feldman type 'stuff' hasn't too.

b-but all good musical ideas are experimental maan!

Blueski re Scooter - novelty cover crossing over into hey-actually-this-is-ace

also no one has mentioned improv yet.

With regard to the charts, what I'm saying came from me thinking well has there ever been a really hard dance tune in the charts, like really hard techno or something, even something like Vitalic, would it chart? And then I imagined people saying something like Hey Boy Hey Girl, and me thinking oh well that's not really what I meant.

Also dance is interesting because lots of things that are hits, become hits when someone suddenly decides "oh lets give this some cash". I mean, lots of things don't ever get this push, half this board haven't heard "At Night" by Shakedown and with any kind of backing it could have been number 1 and loads of peoples single of the year. I'm not sure if it charted, it may have so it might be a bad example.

Er it might help if you clarify what you think I'm saying, just to make sure we're on the same wavelength.

I don't think anyone is into just chart-dance, on the contrary I reckon loads of albumdance fans think chart dance is shit, by definition.

Did minimalism ever work its way into the charts?

Minimalism in the Reich, Glass sense has definitely charted yeah - certainly Glassworks was a big seller.

b-but all good musical ideas are experimental maan!

then maybe i should have said: "apart from music that is too good for the average listener...". but that's not what i think.

In free improv a melodic element may emerge but it may not, it also can't be bottled up within a time limit and performances are not repeatable.

the nature of the music goes against the very idea of the charts...

*as far as I know!

well you've got to tour haven't you.

''That leaves melody -- is melody the key to all chart music?''

In my experience of listening to top of the pops every now and again: yes. a melody or a regular beat. improv has neither.

yes hehe sorry you're right.

Also remember that a lot of what we think of as free improv, is not just informed by popular music, but by other famous improvisers (i.e., Peter Brotzmann is probably an intense guy, but he might also be a big Coltrane fan).

Julio, are you familiar with Zorn's game pieces? These might be examples of "structured free improv", if I can say that.

Having read abt it it sounds like a post-cageian (chance) procedure.

do correct me if I'm wrong.

Hmm, maybe so. See if this sounds right: Zorn develops some loose rules for group of players, regarding when they will play, and sometimes the nature of what they play -- but what actually comes out of their instrument is completely up to them, and playing off what other members in the group are doing is a major factor as well. Kind of like structured group improv, then.

after reading the above i'd call it music which has elements of improvisation in them. but of course the question is if you listen (in a blindfold test) can you make out whether its fully improvised or not.

I don't if you have heard simon fell's thirteen rectangles. every note is written and yet to me it sounds like free improv. i couldn't make out (i heard the version broadcast on radio 3 but if you're interested then purchase it from Bruce's fingers though i haven't heard it myself but i'll get round to it).

I've read about Fell, but have never heard him. The list is growing hourly.

Also about structured improv, Otomo Yoshihide's recent Cathode and Anode pieces seem to fall in, though I have no idea about the methodology.

anyway I'll carry this on tomorrow (if it carries on). my back is starting to kill me!

i think by definition a structure would have to be pre-planned, and reproducible — w.different constituent parts? — elsewhere and elsewhen

it's actually something i've always meant to ask EP: how much does he actually remember of a performance afterwards? could he provide a map to it, subsequently (without listening to a recording)

OK so as opposed to composition, which is another way of ''producing and processing musical ideas''. sometimes I relegate whatever I have been listeinig as either composed (pop, electronic, indie, anything that can be described as a song) or improvised.

''i think by definition a structure would have to be pre-planned, and reproducible — w.different constituent parts? — elsewhere and elsewhen''

isn't some psych rock just like that!

since
a. i think chartpop is a huge collective argument using readymades, and
b. the charts are by defn a gathering or artefacts, whereas free improv as a practise is ambivalent to the point of contradiction abt the function and value of artefacts
i guess i think there's a dividing line that's CAN'T be crossed here

(i also think the charts as a gathering routinely produces more valuably random effects [at a macro — ie juxtapositional — level] than improv, by dint of its hunkered-down we-are-not-that community spirit, can)

I probably shouldn't have said "dodged". I was trying to be provocative, I guess. It's true that you have been approaching the same question, albeit from what I see as a slight difference of perspective - ie., what does a musical idea consist of? Whereas my focus was more on, what do musical ideas leave out?

no need to apologize. this is exactly what I'm thinking as well. though to dilute, etc. does not necessarily mean that something unexciting will be the result. not always anyway.

i think your stance — if you mean it as i think you do — makes you anti the entire history of jazz, rock, hiphop, reggae, etc etc etc

you're prob right but having listened to some of it in the last 5-10 years I don't see it like that (10 years is not the enitre history i know).

it's ok o-nate, i'm still being pedantic about ideas as molecules, cz i think THOSE the charts are a great vehicle for (even exploitatively), and in fact ravenous for

what's lost is something more elusive (and i'm tempted to argue eg that what AMM wd lose if a frag of AMM-music ended up in the charts — part of a sample? — is what they've ALREADY lost in their self-enabled conversion from live to recording)

dilution= taking elements and incorporating it into something (a bollywood sample maybe) but if its a rilly good single it produces something er, substantial despite taking that element.

dilution isn't a negative comment.

''i'm still being pedantic about ideas as molecules''

can you expand on the above.

See the internet, well-tempered keyboards, etc. The question then becomes, is that chart completely comprised of modifications/elaborations of pre-existing ideas, or can it work the other way around? Pop charts reporting ideas which are taken somewhere else entirely by some other collective?

very distance voice: it's true and you can't deny it!!

the old charts like the old jazz charts are quite rightly better and ripe for pillage, but the continual -ve dilution is producing the all-one-off or all-the-same over-done under-ripped ideas of yesterday rather than the cocktail of various ingredients, the potent potion, that they could be used for (and occasionaly are) -- the cocktail can be diluted, but should only be at the expense of meaningful ingredients

as long as there are charts for all these different private niches and fetishes and that's the music business, then we're at sea, as the correct composition compilation juxtaposition work about the real world is a too thinly spread and too easily mastered computer skill, when people let the computer simplification of the method do the work (ai) or even gain ideas using the internet -- this method will through sheer magnitude of marginally related information and computer as filter preference fail -- the musical evidence is thus everywhere

"meaningful ingredients" in chartpop is in the ear of the beholder

the computer argt is really interesting but i think you HAVE to bring in technical specifics, george, to make it count: "the musical evidence is thus everywhere" also backs up the counter-argt (ie the evidence all told is conflicting, which is what you'd anyway except)

hyperthetical, but i see no reason why resemination of information won't evolve out of the computer systems untainted, deliberately or otherwise -- some information systems work, and there's that little anarchist village in spain (if i remember correctly) that people like to promote as an example of some version of disorganised presumably hopefully non-chaos, but the randomness inherent in the non-morphic-resonant and non-chinese-whisper or just plain non-gossip, it's just new technology, un-tested except for us, it's randomness to the power of three compared with the normal evolution of things -- ok the normal order was/isn't perfect and some of us live in the most civilised of times and places, even if it might all be about to change again

they used to talk about the power of education -- right -- now it's educated to do what ? computer user = factory cog ?

software writer as hack to get story out on time under budget with features to distract from the opposition -- too many things routinely go wrong here as too many things are set up to potentially go wrong unintentionally, and maybe only one's enough -- one in every four software implementation project of six months or greater scale fails -- software engineers' rule of thumb for most systems at least up to '99 -- complexity upon complexity -- the wrong decision delegated to the computer created the '88 crash, for instance

so the undirectness is fresh, ships that pass, happy accident hopefully, but to me the 'net more often promotes provincialism, obsession, bad advertising, propoganda -- and that's half due to the undirectness, half due to cynicism and greed -- the invention of television played into madisons hands -- college radio is a bastion of free thinkers being manipulated by record companies -- why ? to get to the charts, to reach the critical mass, the mob

the evidence for me is that as simon napier-bell points out music has gone full circle, tommy steel and cliff richard through vietnam jefferson stones joni's a geffno mass zep punk as anti-thatch unemployed boredom creative second hippy wave reaction ground simplified into grunge (sonic youth got it wrong) back to stadium metal wrestling commodities, or one computer music too similar to another because of the dilution of the craft, the tricks of the trade that we like, not giving them away, so the simple every boy and his electric guitar version on most computers will annoy your neighbors

the tricks, that's plugging this gadget into that computer and then changing the button on the gadget into a swinging knob or foot pedal that in tandem modulates a feedback loop, resonates -- that's real-time variable manipulation aka playing a musical instrument -- some of these effects are undirectness, but regardless, this sort of invention is in the 2% minority

it's just that the charts could do _better_ for the behearer, communication of ideas would be improved (how about some actual lyrics), like fifteen years ago

"in a" capitalist "democracy the people get what the people deserve" -- adlei stevenson or spiro agnew ?