Ethan Hein on Jason Yust's April 2024 essay on tonality and racism, some belated thoughts on books by Philip Ewell and John Borstlap as etiological narratives

A word of warning, this blog post is 12,318 words long and includes a rather hefty bibliography.  I am glad Ethan Hein got around to writing about Yust's essay on tonality because it spurred me to finally collect my thoughts about books by Philip Ewell and John Borstlap I read earlier this year and Yust's book Organized Time is a wonderful, challenging read!  I'm glad to read that it seems Ethan and I both found Yust's work challenging and rewarding.  So, here we go.  Warning you ahead of time this is long even by the standards of Wenatchee The Hatchet. 

You can't fix a cracked window by staring at it through a mirror--a riff on metaphors used to describe the arts and criticism by way of windows, mirrors and lamps

 I am about to hyper-extend and torture a few metaphors here.  Debates and conversations about what the arts are and what they are expected to do have been going on for a couple of centuries. I have been reading books on theologies aesthetics, music theory and formal analysis, and a bit of critical race theory in the last year. I have been finding that a couple of meta-metaphors keep cropping up, such as the idea of the arts as a mirror and the idea of the arts as a lamp. I have also come across ideas that the arts, particularly music, can be a kind of window. Of course I have also read debates back and forth that, to stretch these metaphors in advance, ask whether the lamp has burned out, whether the window even opens up to anything, and whether the mirror distorts everything you might think you see through it.  

Take literary criticism, is it really even an art or is it a science? A science?  Who would even regard literary criticism as even potentially being scientific in any way?  If the scientific methods allow you to observe something, propose a hypothesis about it and then conduct experiments to prove or disprove the viability of the hypothesis how has literary criticism ever been a science?  There have been, obviously, those who have contended literary criticism is/was a science and yet that fad (however recurring) is part of the reception history of literary criticism as a discipline.  If the arts “are” mirrors then criticism may as well be the mirror through which you look at other mirrors.  Or is that stretching the metaphor too far already?

 

The metaphors will stretch a lot further as we move along.

Noah A. McGee at The Root has a piece about a recent AI generated song that features black artists without any of their participation via voice simulation

The headline reads "AI-Generated Music Is Creating Black Art Without Black Input"

https://www.theroot.com/ai-generated-music-is-creating-black-art-without-black-1850353845

AI has been used to compose in Baroque styles and emulate the works of long-dead composers.  AI has been used to replicate all sorts of things.  What makes this recent case different is someone used AI to generate an entirely new song from scratch with simulations of the voices of Drake and The Weeknd without either artist having any actual participatory role in the process.  As pop musical deep fakes go that does seem pretty extreme.  

Being a hobbyist composer and musician myself I don't think I'd ever say the AI trends have been cute and dandy.  Your voice is your voice.  I don't doubt for a second other people would regard public figures in entertainment industries as public figures whose likenesses may be used to whatever purpose but in this recent case Universal Music Group disagrees.