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Jon Silpayamanant
@Silpayamanant
, 11 tweets, 3 min read Read on Twitter
Thread/ Music as a Universal "Language"
Most ridiculous thing I've read on the interwebs today. Maybe even for the year.
1/ There have been many types of musical notations throughout human history.

silpayamanant.wordpress.com/timeline-of-mu…
2/ Being literate in a musical "language" doesn't mean being literate in all musical languages. Just as being literate in a language doesn't mean being literate in all languages. This says nothing about actual fluency in a music.

silpayamanant.wordpress.com/2014/03/14/mus…
3/ Being fluent in a music would mean being able to spontaneously create it--i.e. improvise. Similar to how we spontaneously improvise words when we're speaking to each other. And also, like language, different musics are not

silpayamanant.wordpress.com/2014/11/14/ess…
4/ For example, I wouldn't even know how to read Korean Chôngganbo. I understand how it's constructed. I've always been fascinated about how its orthography and reading orientation has many similarities to Labanotation (a form of dance notation).

silpayamanant.wordpress.com/2011/11/07/kor…
5/ But I'm not literate in it, nor in Labanotation for that matter, so wouldn't know how to realize either in real time.

user.uni-frankfurt.de/~griesbec/LABA…
6/ I'll set aside the other colonialist and Western imperialist notions in Dawkins statements, but to answer his "How come musical notation is so much more universal than language?" Well, it isn't.
7/ Which means that this is all a non question. We can probably all agree that Dawkins probably shouldn't be pontificating on things he doesn't understand. But we didn't need this tweet to know that, right?
PS/ Please read @LindaHyphen wonderful take-down of the "Music is a Universal Language" trope here:

…nothermusichistorycliche.blogspot.com/2018/01/is-mus…
PS2/ As if to punctuate the implicit Eurocentric colonial bias in the "Music is Universal" trope, I got a knock on the door while writing this thread. FedEx just delivered my latest Tro U--a Cambodian bowed fiddle.
Apologies for 3/ ending mid-sentence. "And also, like language, different musics are not" should read "And also, like language, different musics are not <<mutually intelligible>>"
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Jon Silpayamanant
@Silpayamanant
Thread: What is #ClassicalMusic?

Something that came up in my thread, "Classical Music, the Perpetual Foreigner Trope, and Colonialism," and that has come up in numerous other discussions--especially those around the "Classical Music Crisis".

1/ As anything else, definitions matter. We shape the direction of discourse by focusing selectively on some denotations/connatations. Discussions about #ClassicalMusic are pretty exclusive; this creates specific narratives that are useful to some viewpoints. Some caveats follow.
2/
Caveat 1 - I'm going to focus on Performers & Performing Organizations (hereafter POs) here.* This includes Legacy Institutions (e.g. big budget Symphonies); amateur groups; & student orgs.

*see my Sampling Bias in discussions about Classical Music: silpayamanant.wordpress.com/2014/02/15/sam…
Read 19 tweets
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Jon Silpayamanant
@Silpayamanant
Thread: Classical Music, the Perpetual Foreigner Trope, and Colonialism

I've been thinking how we discuss Classical Music. I've been in lively & robust discussions about Diversity in CM only to be derailed by the "That's not really Classical Music" trope.
2/ Usually this is in response to my bringing up the evolution of Classical Music organizations (e.g. Orchestras) that have been continually evolving throughout the 20th century and into the 21st century.

silpayamanant.wordpress.com/2015/02/01/the…
3/ This evolution of Classical Music has taken forms we don't recognize, & often in parts of the world we don't associate w/ this European art form, even when this evolution (e.g. Mandolin Orchestras) takes place in the 4 meccas of CM (i.e. England, France, Germany, Italy).
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