On Thu, 20 Aug 2009, Matt Barber wrote:

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And if "ideally" Pd should be just a "musical instrument" that you only have to "tune and play", it's only to go with those musicians who ideally should understand the breadth and depth of Pd's potential, but in practice don't.

Thanks so much for saying this. Think of the kind of acquired skill one needs to expertly "tune and play," say, a violin, with mastery.

I said «that you only have to "tune and play"» meaning a system in which you don't get to do anything else than that.

There are other activities part of traditional music-making, namely: composing music, writing music, reading music, improvising music (in your head or live), following a conductor, being the conductor, mixing the music, recording the music, postproduction, copy, distribution, playing the record, remembering a tune, building the instruments, building any musical tool, ... What we're experiencing nowadays is that more activities can be reconfigured. Already the player-pianos played a score... or is it the score that played the piano? what is sure, is that there was no musician playing it live, and yet it was still music. Nowadays you can make all sorts of hybrids between all of the above. This causes our vocabulary (and assumptions about that vocabulary) to become quite inadequate. So, increasingly, to the question "is it a musical instrument?" there is hesitation: yes, no, uh, maybe, sort of, it depends what you mean by... etc.

The problem is how the phrase "just a musical instrument" is used -- if you can justify spending years learning scales so that you can play in tune and develop technical facility, learning how sound works so you can adjust the instrument, learning how music works so you can play it intelligently, learning how others before you came to master their instrument and how to develop critical opinions about their playing, etc., certainly you can justify the same kind of intense work for any "instrument" (electronic/acoustic/programmed/otherwise) if you care to become competent.

Different instruments are easy or difficult not because of the instrument itself, but mostly because of the level skill that is expected for that instrument. Violin is hard because the standards are high. The standards are high because there is a lot of competition. There is a lot of competition because... etc. Same goes for non-instruments, actually. But if you have a violin, are looking to win a prize, and play 14 hours a day, you're not doing anything else. Therefore I can say "you're just playing an instrument". But even if you don't do it 14 hours a day, and we happen to be talking about music in general, and you don't compose your own score and record on your own, I can still say "you're just playing an instrument". And I can say that it means nothing bad, "no, no, you're playing just great", and then the person can still take it like this: "if he said it's just great, he means it's not any better than great... grumble"

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PS: Just intonation is just intonation.

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