i hate this

every day this week, I've sneezed within 5 minutes of arriving in my office.

when is "classical" not?

Just wondering how the labellists out there decide the grounds between what belongs in classical and what belongs in "new age" (not that THAT label has any real meaning anymore, either).

Case in point, I picked up on a whim, Steve Reich's 18 and I absolutely adore it, but aside from the instrument choices, it doesn't really strike me as "classical".  Its a product of its era, and sits more comfortably side-by-side (on my shelf, anyways) with Tangerine Dream, Jean-Michel Jarre, early pre-rock Mike Oldfield, and a large amount of Robert Fripp's output, along with a number of various synth artists out there.

The only difference seems to be that Reich's performers, like Glass and Riley, play every note, while the pioneering synth artists learned how to program a computer to do the repetitiveness factor that would drive must human musicians nuts.  Certainly one can debate which is harder, playing such patterns consistently to the point of achieving music or programming the old sequencers to do the same, and one can marvel at how the patterns that Reich developed are now so subconsciously standard that pretty much any sequencer has them built-in out of the box, ready to be abused in creating another "pop" standard.

So really, when the late 20th century is looked at in hindsight, will these artists still be separated into the labels ("classical", "new age", "rock") that they currently are in (from a marketing view, not a historical one), or will successive generations look to this school of the late 20th century as a whole?

Actually my real question is can labels change as music is looked at from the hindsight perspective?

For a while, the Brahms/Schumann vs Wagner/Bruckner distinctions seemed to overwhelmingly split the view of the 19th century, but Mahler impressively combined the two styles (stretched symphonic form of Brahms plus the harmonic ambiguity of Wagner) into one, while Debussy and Stravinsky launched into realms of dissonance and tonal ambiguity as to make the critical fight between the two sides seem downright silly.  We just look at it all as late 19th century music now, reflective of the attitudes of the time.

So will the same happen for our century?  Will Stravinsky's embracing of serialism at the end of his career (I finally dug into Agon this week and adored it) be the joining point that will have historians stop treating the two main schools of mid-20th century music as separate?  Will minimalism's influence on electronic music (and vice-versa) lead to a unification of it and that subset of "new age" in the historical view?  How would such a merging evolve, critically, when we're all still so tainted by the labels attached to things in the record stores today (something that wouldn't have had an influence on how the early 20th century saw 19th century music)?

just random thoughts.  seeing how history evolves as new primary documents are presented, i tend to wonder how things today will be viewed differently given our *awareness* of the importance of primary documentation.  as more of how we view the world today is preserved than decades past, will our view taint how successive generations view this one?

(this all started in my head over 20 years ago, when my father once insisted that Dark Side of the Moon will someday sit side by side with a late Mozart symphony in the respect of music lovers in the future; little did he know that XM's Fine Tuning would almost do exactly that!  he's been right before; back then he also predicted that we'd be able to hold a symphony in a tiny chip on our fingertip, which is exactly what you can do 100 times over with a 1-gig SD card today).

on For Better For Worse

prompted by a discussion from jocelyncs . this is slightly extended from what was originally left in the comments there.

the converstation led to the idea that Johnston's characters' "lives" were becoming her own.  I disagree with that simplification, thinking there's more to it than that.

actually, i think the "life" thing is the problem as a whole.

for most of the strip, the characters were a reflection of her family and her personal life, abstracted with the humor emphasized because, well, its a comic.

the problems started after her own kids finally grew up and moved out. she no longer had prime source material to draw from.  she had already invented April, seeing as she didn't have a third kid of her own, merely to give space for other memories of her own kids combined with the stories from friends of hers who still had young kids that she could relate to.  For at least 10 years now (given that her kids are as old as I am), she's had no kids in the house, no drama, nothing new to write about as she sees these other people coming up with crazy stuff for her to capture and exaggerate for all to remember.

the result?

she's had to make it up, a lot more than she would have before.

Some of what she makes up, perhaps, may come from her sensing a need for new drama in her life, since as a successful businesswoman, artist, and mother, she's pretty much had the ideal life most can just dream about.  While you have kids, there's always *something*, but if you don't have that drama continue after your kids move out, the complacency can be maddening.

when an artist paints reality, its always relevant and we can always relate to it.

when an artist has to *invent* a reality to paint, we notice.  we see patterns drawn not from the absolute human experience we all share, but from the specific example of things that we know happen but not always to us. things look exaggerated rather than believable; coincidences become contrivances.

this is the point where something becomes a "soap"; the situations are contrived to give the characters something to react to, rather than the characters themselves being the driving force behind the direction lives take.

that in the end leads to the discomfort. characters we can relate to are those that take control of their lives; the characters in FBFW *used* to do that, but as she's grown older and her family has moved out and she no longer has the examples around her of how people do that, things happen to her rather than by her. By extension, things happen to her characters, rather than her characters doing things to others.

doonesbury, by contrast, has these things happen to his characters in order to give a personal touch to the impact of the actions of those in power.  its a completely different attitude.  to give an example, the most striking of any comic strip incident (more so than any of the 4 deaths he's had), BD wasn't hit because Trudeau wanted to have more drama in his strip.   he was hit because Trudeau had been collecting in his head a thousand war stories from friends and fans, some of which he knew from the first gulf war.  Those stories needed to be told to a wider audience, an audience that needed to be shaken up to the reality of the world, the war, and what's its doing to people.  there's the difference.  Trudeau creates coincidences in his characters' lives order to show reality to the audience, particularly those aspects of reality that are the personal choices of men in power who know nothing of the consequences of their decisions, or worse still, intentionally ignore those consequences.