Thinkige Kru 2

Long streamers were rising from over Kemble End one large flake loop-shaped, not a streamer but belonging to the string, moving too slowly to be seen, seemed to cap and fill the zenith with a white shire of cloud. I looked long up at it till the tall height and the beauty of the scaping—regularly curled knots springing if I remember from fine stems, like foliation in wood or stone—had strongly grown on me. It changed beautiful changes, growing more into ribs and one stretch of running into branching like coral. Unless you refresh the mind from time to time you cannot always remember or believe how deep the inscape in things is.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins, journal entry, March 1871 

In his journals, Gerard Manley Hopkins used two terms, "inscape" and "instress," which can cause some confusion. By "inscape" he means the unified complex of characteristics that give each thing its uniqueness and that differentiate it from other things, and by "instress" he means either the force of being which holds the inscape together or the impulse from the inscape which carries it whole into the mind of the beholder: 

There is one notable dead tree . . . the inscape markedly holding its most simple and beautiful oneness up from the ground through a graceful swerve below (I think) the spring of the branches up to the tops of the timber. I saw the inscape freshly, as if my mind were still growing, though with a companion the eye and the ear are for the most part shut and instress cannot come.

The concept of inscape shares much with Wordsworth's "spots of time," Emerson's "moments," and Joyce's "epiphanies," showing it to be a characteristically Romantic and post-Romantic idea. But Hopkins' inscape is also fundamentally religious: a glimpse of the inscape of a thing shows us why God created it. "Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:/ . . myself it speaks and spells,/ Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came. "

Hopkins occupies an important place in the poetic line that reaches from the major Romantic poets, especially Wordsworth and Keats, through Tennyson and the Pre-Raphaelites to Hopkins, Pater, Yeats and the symbolists, and finally to Ezra Pound and the Imagists. His insistence that inscape was the essence of poetry ("Poetry is in fact speech employed to carry the inscape of speech for the inscape's sake") and that consequently, what he called "Parnassian" poetry (i.e., competent verse written without inspiration) was to be avoided has much in common with the aestheticism of Walter Pater (one of his tutors at Oxford) and the Art for Art's Sake movement, and sounds very much like the theoretical pronouncements of the Imagists of the early twentieth century.

via The Victorian Web

It seems to me that ‘inscape’ is more about a kind of dwelling, of belonging—an intense, beautiful, belonging, a flaming or scintillating—rather than about ‘acting’, or ‘causing’ as with Duns Scotus’s ‘first act’. And whilst the Parmenidean balance of one and many, of unchanging Being and the apparitional world of Doxa, is of relevance to what Hopkins is doing in his verse, inscape is, surely, above all about the inward. Thinking theologically, this is surely a more Augustinianian than Scotian or Thomist thing. Inwardness is central to Augustine. Phillip Cary goes so far as to argue that Augustine invented or created inwardness, in the modern sense in which we consider there to be an inner self, that is ‘a whole dimension of being that is our very own, and roomy enough that we can in some sense turn into it and enter it, or look within and find things there … Augustine invented the concept of private inner space’ 

- Adam Roberts, Hopkins's Inwardness 

‘As kingfishers catch fire’

As kingfishers catch fire, dragonflies draw flame;

As tumbled over rim in roundy wells

Stones ring; like each tucked string tells, each hung bell's

Bow swung finds tongue to fling out broad its name;

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:

Deals out that being indoors each one dwells;

Selves — goes itself; myself it speaks and spells,

Crying Whát I dó is me: for that I came.

I say móre: the just man justices;

Keeps grace: thát keeps all his goings graces;

Acts in God's eye what in God's eye he is —

Chríst — for Christ plays in ten thousand places,

Lovely in limbs, and lovely in eyes not his

To the Father through the features of men's faces.

- Gerard Manley Hopkins

When I first read this poem it bothered me that kingfishers aren’t red-and-orange, as one might expect a bird ‘catching fire’ in flight might be—though of course, there are various kinds of flame, and it’s very possible that Hopkins is thinking of [his tutor] Pater’s ‘hard gemlike flame’, burning blue from its orange core. But the more important thing is that there is a fire at the heart of things, an inscape fire, as burns in the temple, or the hearth. 

- - Adam Roberts, Hopkins's Inwardness 

“Every moment some form grows perfect in hand or face; some tone on the hills or the sea is choicer than the rest; some mood of passion or insight or intellectual excitement is irresistibly real and attractive to us, — for that moment only. Not the fruit of experience, but experience itself, is the end…..  How shall we pass most swiftly from point to point, and be present always at the focus where the greatest number of vital forces unite in their purest energy? To burn always with this hard, gemlike flame, to maintain this ecstasy, is success in life.”

- Walter Pater, Conclusion to Studies in the History of The Renaissance

TECH-NO 

Philip from It's all in your mind - sorry chaps, keep getting the title of your blog wrong - with the latest on the 'technique' discussion .....

Philip is absolutely right about Indie, I reckon. It has shunned experimentalism without mastering musicianship, so it remains mired in some mediocre nowheresville. Drabness : forget postpunk, even at its most brown-rice earnest, it glistened with psychedelic intensity by comparison with Turin Brakes and Doves. What confuses me about Indie is what people see - and hear - in it: I'm genuinely puzzled about what people feel they get from Indie these days.

To answer my own question: it's all about authenticity isn't it? The Indie fan rejects chartpop because it is too plastic and too manufactured; rejects house, techno, garage because they are too synthetic; he/she cleaves to Indie not because of musicianship per se, but because of what musicianship is taken to signify: authentic self-expression. In fact, and this takes us right back to Philip's original comment, this is a direct inheritance from lumpen-punk's ur-igingal error : its confusion of ham-fisted bluster with a pure expressiveness and its eschewal of all other means of expression beyond guitar-bass-drums. 

Who's interested in lumpen-punk now? It was a fundamentalist misreading: ur-punk was only significant in that it blew open a space for post-punk. And: if you want to talk about technique, well, it's astonishing how proficient some of the postpunk musicians were: Levene, McGeoch, Adamson, Wobble. But it wasn't just technical ability that made them unique: it was their (modernist?) refusal to repeat or recapitulate the past, their conviction that if you weren't getting new sounds out of your equipment, you had somehow failed.

And this is it, really: you can be a master of technique without producing any new affect . Conversely, you might have no technical ability, but a tremendous capacity for discovering new sounds, riffs, stabs... And that's what Pop - in the broadest sense - is about: new ways of feeling, new ways of perceiving. 

[date unknown - 2003 or 2004 - the very early days of K-punk blog, which don't seem to be up on the internet - I found this in an old document of cut-and-pastes from his blog I'd made, as I did with several others blogs at that time. Lucky i was a hoarder, eh? With a presentiment that so much on the internet might disappear - already some bloggers had abruptly deleted their blogs.... more from the K-punk early archive soon]

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Mark is really talking about landfill indie here - the post-Britpop slop

But "Indie" is just as capable of inventing "new ways of feeling, new ways of perceiving", despite its relative lack of technique

Shoegaze is a case in point

And it's something I have riffed in the UK talks last week: starting with the idea that someone at Dissensus made, that critics are sensualists, identifying the new forms of pleasure, the new intensities

As do musicians too of course 

So for instance, hearing My Bloody Valentine with conventional ears, you might think "this is badly recorded rock music, badly played guitar, with barely-there / barely audible vocals".

And this was a common initial reaction even from people who became fans - Patti Smith heard Loveless and she told me that at first she thought there was something wrong with the CD player - others have similarly testified that they thought it was a damaged CD or a badly pressed vinyl record

But then you realise that it's deliberate and that it sounds better than conventionally well-recorded, well-mixed rock

It's the new form of sonic ecstasy

Perhaps you need to be guided by the critic-sensualist towards that understanding (cf hearing jungle as more than just a chaos of rhythm, hearing Auto-Tune trap as not a cheap, nasty, over-used effect but as a emerging field of aesthetic action)

Overall, "indie" is an entire genre that could be dismissed as badly played, badly recorded rock music, sung by people who aren't singers. 

But that becomes its own aesthetic - a set of possibilities opened up by bypassing conventional ideas of musicianship, fine playing, clean production, powerful vocalisation. 

"What trifles constitute happiness! The sound of a bagpipe. Without music life would be a mistake. The German imagines even God as a songster."

"I would believe only in a god who could dance. And when I saw my devil I found him serious, thorough, profound, and solemn: it was the spirit of gravity."

- Friedrich Nietzsche 

“the things I detest, for instance: italicized passages in a novel which are meant to represent the protagonist’s cloudbursts of thought. Then background music, canned music, piped-in music, portable music, minstrel music, inflicted music. Concise dictionaries. Abridged manuals. Journalistic clichés: ‘the moment of truth, the moment of truth!’ Humility.”

- Nabokov

John Gardner, from On Moral Fiction  (1978)

Merdistes! Love it - I wonder if it is his own coinage? And who did he have in mind? 

The easy answer: if you want your writing to be more passionate, write about things you feel passionate about

Otherwise it can feel a bit forced

If you feel neutral or indifferent about something to start off with it, it’s hard to not reproduce that – you can maybe get round it by finding something interesting in the larger phenomenon, or the question of why do people like this...

It’s tricky one, passion, because it’s easy to overdo it and slather on the superlatives and "lyrical" descriptions

Nothing worse than that sort of SHOUTING LOUD prose mode, or uncontrollably gushing , or overly poetic

Because gushing and superlatives can be quite vague – the praise terms are interchangeable, you could substitute a different artist or record’s name – the tricky bit is being precise in your passion

I think the goal is a sort of ‘controlled passion’ or ‘controlled power’ – it’s actually more effective if you ration it out, have a little burst where some kind of excessive feelings cut through

How you develop that, I’m not sure – you could experiment with different registers, more personal elements – do some writing that isn’t for publication, where you write about your emotional responses to films or books or music, how things have related with what’s going on in your life

Then you can see if there’s a way to ease that element into your writing that is published, without it becoming cloying or too memoirist-ic

And read some more criticism – read some of the classics, in lots of different fields, to see how they managed it

Lester Bangs is the king of the super-passionate rock critics, it reads often like a guy who is drunkenly spilling out his guts in a bar (he’s the only rock critic to have a biography written about him and it was called LET IT BLURT), but then later he gets more controlled and elegant while still passionate and moving. E.g. piece on Astral Weeks by Van Morrison (it appears in his posthumous collection of writing but also in the various writers collection Stranded). Try writers on film like Pauline Kael or David Thomson (although his stuff is cooler and calmer in tone)

There is also negative passion, where people denouncing stuff. Mark Fisher was good at that! He called it nihilation. For that to come off, though, you really have to believe in the moment of writing that there is something deplorable and pernicious about the thing you are decrying.

Nowadays that kind of outburst oriented, fiery style of criticism - positive and negative -  has gone out of a fashion a bit. Or at least the younger generation don’t do it as much.  Music writing today seems quite hung up on authoritativeness, knowing your facts, having done your research, and also positioning – where does this fit into the scheme of things, the artist's’career moves, what they are trying to signify, statements being made etc… It’s often done very well and is precisely written, but feels dry to someone of my generation.

What’s too often missing for me is that sense of music’s power to seduce and to break you down – the flooding of pleasure almost to the point of swooning –   the bliss and in a way the violence of music– whether it’s a very physical thing of the bass impacting your body or the way melody and harmony can lacerate you emotionally, because sometimes the softest music has the most powerful effect  - if a record (or a film) can make you cry that is really powerful, much more being noisy or slamming.

There are some great music writers who never go into that aspect and they produce work that is well reasoned and eloquent. But for me, for music writing to be complete, it needs to register at some point the sensual and emotional power of the music. There should be at least a little bit of rhapsodizing about the beauty – that’s what we are in it for, surely, the beauty, the intensity.

Experiment with this element -  listen to things and try to think, why do I like this so much, what is it doing to me?

"Art history has decided that 1958 and 1959 are years when the style called ‘Abstract Expressionism’ or ‘action painting’ or the ‘New York School’ grew tired of its triumph and lay down to die. Jasper Johns’s Flag – Abstract Expressionism’s ghastly patriotic shroud – had its first showing at Leo Castelli’s in January 1958. You might say, especially in retrospect, that Flag was always waiting to be draped over Suburb in Havana’s dream of freedom. Flag never grows old.

‘Lay down to die,’ I wrote. But morbidity in modernist art is a necessary condition, and very often horribly lively. Modernism is an art of endings – of art’s ending – and it goes on elaborating its death rattle. De Kooning certainly did."

 T.J. Clark, 2026

 ‘Content, if you want to say, is a glimpse of something, an encounter, you know, like a flash – it’s very tiny, very tiny, content.’ 

-  Willem De Kooning,, 1960, to David Sylvester in 1960 

"Most of [my recent pictures] are landscapes and highways and sensations of that, outside the city – with the feeling of going to the city or coming from it, you know. In other words, I’m not a pastoral character, you know, I’m not a – how do you say that? – ‘country dumpling’. I am here and I like it in New York City, but I love to go out in a car. I’m crazy about weekend drives even if I drive in the middle of the week. I’m just crazy about going over the roads and highways ... They are really not very pretty, but the big embankments and the shoulders of the roads and the curves are flawless – the lawning of it, the grass. This I don’t particularly like, or dislike, but I wholly approve of it ... I mean, I am not undertaking any social ... I’m no lover of the new – it’s a personal thing ...When I was working on this [Merritt Parkway] picture, this thing came to me: it’s just like the Merritt Parkway."

 - De Kooning, ibid

:There is this strange desire which you can’t explain. Why should you do that? I think I like it because of the ordinariness ... The landscapes I made in the 1950s, such as Parc Rosenberg, were the result of associations. But I had a vast area of nature – a highway and the metamorphosis of passing things. A highway, when you sit in a car – removed ..."

De Kooning, to Harold Rosenberg, 1972

from T.J. Clark's critique of Clement Greenberg

… a new millennium style of pop writing / rock criticism that is cautious about reaching for significance and concentrates instead on a kind of inventory of pleasures, which in turn involves a breakdown of a track into its components and constituent sources, where the song/album/artist is positioned within the genrescape, etc. (A generational sensiblity perhaps, shaped by the internet, mixtapes and playlists, the disintegration of larger entities into the song as unit-of-pleasure). In the case of Ariel Pink’s “Round and Round" that approach fits perfectly because as Mark Richardson notes, the song is exactly the sum of its perfect parts ("an intro, a variation, a funny little break with a sound effect, a section that pauses just before the big refrain, and then that huge chorus"), assembled with an "astonishing level of craftsmanship" and succeeding "brilliantly for the same reason great Burt Bacharach songs work-- because every chord change and turnaround and melodic leap is in exactly the right place." You could substitute "Steve Miller" for "Burt Bacharach" in the sentence and everything would still apply--indeed 70s and 80s "radio rock" is more what Ariel's aiming for. As Mark further notes, those radio artisans "were pros who knew something about intros, codas, and middle-eights, how a certain kind of chord change can cause the turnaround to the chorus to hit a little harder... there's a real sense of musical delight on Before Today; the sections sound logical but never predictable, and there are wild bridges and short bits that emerge seemingly randomly but wind up taking the song somewhere unexpected."

A huge amount of what makes rock and pop enjoyable relates to this level of asignifying craft: aspects of the songwriting and recording process that are far more technical than they are expressive or communicative--how this bit fits with that bit, the way one song section transitions into this song section, bridgework and arrangement, contrasts of texture, hooks, ear-catching gimmicks (the flurry of handclaps in Miller's "Take the Money and Run") and their timing, the swerves that still surprise even when you know they're coming because it's your umpteenth listen. It's something that music criticism generally hasn't dealt with much in the past, because it's hard to do with any specificity, and also there's been all these other levels of significance, resonance, expression, intent, to work with and make a meal of. The emergence of a criticism that attends to this stuff and is "against interpretation" (or at least guarded about it) seems like an interesting and valuable direction. What it would need itself to guard against is lapsing into a kind of culinary conception of music (all about ingredients, the harmonious balance of flavours, etc). In practise, it tends to be a little too plaisir and not enough jouissance for my taste. But then I'm a captive of my own generational sensibility in this respect, no doubt.

"To Generalize is to be an Idiot; To Particularize is the Alone Distinction of Merit"

- William Blake

(in antipathy to Joshua Reynolds belief that "disposition to abstractions, to generalising and classification, is the great glory of the human mind" and his pursuit of "general truth" and "general beauty") 

“Music, I regret to say, affects me merely as an arbitrary succes­sion of more or less irritating sounds.”

- Nabokov, Speak, Memory

"I have no ear for music [...] I am bored beyond measure by the motions of the musicians [...] But I have found a queer substitute for music in chess—more exactly, in the composing of chess problems."

- Nabokov,  Playboy interview 1964

"Without wishing to antagonize lovers of music, I do wish to point out that taken in a general sense music, as perceived by its consumers, belongs to a more primitive, more animal form in the scale of arts than literature or painting. 

"I am taking music as a whole, not in terms of individual creation, imagination, and composition, all of which of course rival the art of literature and painting, but in terms of the impact music has on the average listener. 

"A great composer, a great writer, a great painter are brothers. But I think that the impact music in a generalized and primitive form has on the listener is of a more lowly quality than the impact of an average book or an average picture. What I especially have in mind is the soothing, lulling, dulling influence of music on some people such as of the radio or records.

"In Kafka's tale it is merely a girl pitifully scraping on a fiddle and this corresponds in the piece to the canned music or plugged-in music of today. 

"What Kafka felt about music in general is what I have just described: its stupefying, numbing, animal-like quality. 

"This attitude must be kept in mind in interpreting an important sentence that has been misunderstood by some translators. Literally, it reads “Was Gregor an animal to be so affected by music?” That is, in his human form he had cared little for it but in this scene, in his beetlehood, he succumbs: “He felt as if the way were opening before him to the unknown nourishment he craved.” 

- Nabokov, lecture on Kafka's "The Metamorphosis"

qualification when talking about anything aesthetic is a huge no no. never do it.

everything has to be the greatest thing that ever happened or the shittest.  nothing inbetween

i once believed in that as an article of faith (when i was reviews editor at Spin for a year, i tried to make it so that review grades were either 10s and 9s or and 1s and 0s- ie. just like in the UK music press - my thinking being that if something is a 6 it might as well be a 0 really if you think about it - although the editor in chief was initially attracted by the idea of bipolar reviewing, a dynamic range from gush to snark-sneer.... ultimately this didn't go down well with my employers, who favored the measured New Yorker-aspiring tone. Things got tense and in the end I quit - second-best decision of my life)

however in reality, the truth is there's lots of things in music or whatever that are neither amazing nor reprehensible... there's the aesthetic equivalent of mixed emotions in terms of response to them - movies or records that have some things going for them, but major failings or flaws, wonderful aspects but also off-putting elements

art, like life, is not necessarily black-and-white

so nowadays i quite like the ambivalent, conflicted, attracted-yet-repelled, weighing-it-up approach to criticism 

but perhaps i've just mellowed with age. succumbed to stolidity... 

"Properly, we should read for power. Man reading should be man intensely alive. The book should be a ball of light in one's hands."

- Ezra Pound

 Nowadays, the whale-fishery furnishes an asylum for many romantic, melancholy, and absent-minded young men, disgusted with the carking cares of earth, and seeking sentiment in tar and blubber. Childe Harold not unfrequently perches himself upon the mast-head of some luckless disappointed whale-ship, and in moody phrase ejaculates:—

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue ocean, roll!

Ten thousand blubber-hunters sweep over thee in vain. 

Very often do the captains of such ships take those absent-minded young philosophers to task, upbraiding them with not feeling sufficient “interest” in the voyage; half-hinting that they are so hopelessly lost to all honorable ambition, as that in their secret souls they would rather not see whales than otherwise. But all in vain; those young Platonists have a notion that their vision is imperfect; they are short-sighted; what use, then, to strain the visual nerve? They have left their opera-glasses at home.

“Why, thou monkey,” said a harpooneer to one of these lads, “we’ve been cruising now hard upon three years, and thou hast not raised a whale yet. Whales are scarce as hen’s teeth whenever thou art up here.” Perhaps they were; or perhaps there might have been shoals of them in the far horizon; but lulled into such an opium-like listlessness of vacant, unconscious reverie is this absent-minded youth by the blending cadence of waves with thoughts, that at last he loses his identity; takes the mystic ocean at his feet for the visible image of that deep, blue, bottomless soul, pervading mankind and nature; and every strange, half-seen, gliding, beautiful thing that eludes him; every dimly-discovered, uprising fin of some undiscernible form, seems to him the embodiment of those elusive thoughts that only people the soul by continually flitting through it. In this enchanted mood, thy spirit ebbs away to whence it came; becomes diffused through time and space; like Cranmer’s sprinkled Pantheistic ashes, forming at last a part of every shore the round globe over.

There is no life in thee, now, except that rocking life imparted by a gently rolling ship; by her, borrowed from the sea; by the sea, from the inscrutable tides of God. But while this sleep, this dream is on ye, move your foot or hand an inch; slip your hold at all; and your identity comes back in horror. Over Descartian vortices you hover. And perhaps, at mid-day, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through that transparent air into the summer sea, no more to rise for ever. Heed it well, ye Pantheists! 

- Herman Melville, Moby Dick. 

 "As I looked out into the night sky, across all those infinite stars, it made me realise how insignificant they are." - Peter Cook.

(via David Stubbs)

 "There is not a single case in musical history of a composer being a century ahead of his time: the greatest composers have been perfectly comprehensible to the average instructed music-lover of their day" 

- Sir Ernest Newman, 1925

In partial reinforcement of my thought-probe in the previous post....

Although that said 

a/ a century is long time to be in advance .... how about someone who's five years ahead of their time?

b/ greatest composers being comprehensible to the average music-lover of their day .... how about a not-so-great composer who is incomprehensible to most everybody?

 a lot of stuff that gets retroactively adjudged to be ahead of its time, or farsighted...  it isn't really. it's completely abreast of its time

... there is this corruption of sensibility that sets in after the first few decades as a music nut, where you get more of a buzz from contemplating shit music than good music. 

Not so much actually listening, but the idea of trying to understand it, work out what its appeal is, how on earth the creator thought it was a good idea to bring into the world. 

Shit music can be better food for thought than good music, which somehow explains its existence more simply. 

I say "not so much actually listening to shit" - but there is a stimulus from the sharp tang of something really rank and abject.... it's like an aural palate cleanser.... or a reset (or even 'rest; which is how mistyped it first) of sensibility

You get bored with your own likes and preferences.... the predictability of the reactions, how you're wired 

It's interesting to wonder, what if I was a person who loved extreme metal and only wanted to listen to that.... and had consequently developed finely tuned discrimination for the different shades of aural offal.... what would it be like be like that? 

It's a kind of decadence maybe.... like Des Esseintes in A Rebours, the lengths he has to go, to get off... 

Well, of course, Eno said it first , said it punchiest:

"Really awful is more interesting to listen to than pretty good"

Which is the epigraph at Hardly Baked 2, whose output is largely if not wholly based on this approach (ShitBrit, the Bad Music Era, etc). 

"I think records were just a little bubble through time and those who made a living from them for a while were lucky. There is no reason why anyone should have made so much money from selling records except that everything was right for this period of time. I always knew it would run out sooner or later. It couldn't last, and now it's running out. I don't particularly care that it is and like the way things are going. The record age was just a blip. It was a bit like if you had a source of whale blubber in the 1840s and it could be used as fuel. Before gas came along, if you traded in whale blubber, you were the richest man on Earth. Then gas came along and you'd be stuck with your whale blubber. Sorry mate – history's moving along. Recorded music equals whale blubber. Eventually, something else will replace it."

It's not going to be generative music, though - sorry Brian!

See, one of the things people like about music (or art or anything) is the definitiveness - this is the way it is, this is the way it will be each time I look at it, hear it, watch it, read it....  

This is the way it is, and more than that (as with a novel's plot), this is the way it should be - this is the only way it could ever have been  - 

People like the idea, or sensation, that something has arrived at its ordained form, the best version of itself

Exactly this organized arrangement of colours and lines, or notes and timbres and beats, or storyline and characters. 

That's why there's only ever been a limited ultra-nerd consumer base for alternative takes and demos and prototype versions of e.g. "Strawberry Fields".... or for Director's Cut expansions (like the fairly poor and utterly extraneous additional material in the extended Apocalypse Now) and deleted scenes and so forth...  It's why only scholars of literature like to inspect the first drafts of novels and plays... 

What about remixes? 

Ah but you see - a great remix, a successful remix, achieves its own definitive form....  you want to hear that over and over again, exactly those same perfect decisions made by the remixer....

A remix that remixed itself each time you played it and was majorly or even slightly different - that would be exasperating!

^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

Ah but you say - 

What about jazz improvisation in the live situ? 

What about singers interpreting the great American Song Book? 

What about conductors and orchestras with their different versions of the classical repertoire? 

What about re-staging of plays (modern dress versions etc?)

What about what deejays do in the mix, taking two records and making a third one out of them? 

Hmmm.... well see I like listening to jazz records, born of improvisation though they may be, as if they were composed - it's just a different route to definitiveness as far as I'm concerned. I get as bored with the mega-expanded On the Corner / In A Silent Way etc boxes with multiple takes and prototypes as I do the expanded Beatles / etc 

The fact that you have to do research to find out which is the best version of the Pastoral Symphony or Carnival of Animals or "Trois Gymnopedies"  is annoying to me - the fact that there is a range of opinion on the subject and a bewildering number of options.... I always think, "why can't it be like pop, where's there's only one "Strawberry Fields" that really counts?"  

Different readings of "My Funny Valentine" or whatever is slightly more interesting / appealing to me for some reason...  it's like different actors playing the same classic part...   but I wouldn't want to listen to a whole range of different recordings of Sinatra doing "You Make Feel So Young". I'd want the definitive Sinatra version as captured on Songs for Swingin' Lovers...   A live version would only make me contemplate the ways it departs from that definitive and unimprovable rendering in the studio.

Plays - well yes, I suppose so ... but at the end of the day, the script, the dialogue, the characters, the plot, can only be faithfully rendered. The stuff that is at the discretion of the director, costumer, stage designer and the actors themselves is not the essential element....  although it's true that when misjudged and ill-conceived, or badly executed by the players, it can mar that essence, badly vandalize it. 

I think deejays and deejaying are overrated. There is a ratio between the magic that a deejay can do and the indistinctness of the records being mixed. The more unique and stand-alone brilliant a particular track is, the harder it is for deejays to do their work. 

That's why the really creative deejays like LTJ Bukem or Jeff Mills work with characterless materials, stuff that blends easily or that can be concatenated (DJ tools - unfinished tracks, effectively). 

Bukem created a whole label Good Looking / Looking Good and marshalled a stable of admirer-producers to generate Bukem-a-like tunes for him mix seamlessly. Which he did brilliantly - one of the most amazing dj sets I ever saw was Bukem making this amorphous blob-blur of dolphin jungle in a NYC club, where the whole set was like one shimmering track. 

The inverted ratio at work here: the creativity of the deejay must be correspondingly absent from the tunes they are working with.