Re: anti-looper bigots

[Brian Good <bsgood@gmail.com>]

Jim Goodin wrote:
> Love the Slayer story Kevin as well as the church forbidden 'tri-tones' 
> and to take that further when I was a freshman music major studying 
> first year theory according to Paul Hindemith, we were instructed to 
> avoid parallel fifths in all of our assignments, strangely that was the 
> writing on the wall for me and was to become my favorite interval in so 
> many directions.

I know there are authoritarian clowns who insist on rule-following with 
no rational justification. But I've always taken rules like "no parallel 
fifths" to be things you work with while you're learning, temporary 
limitations you agree to in order to develop compositional control. You 
learn to recognize parallel fifths, you learn why you might want to 
avoid them in a particular style of music--and then you do what you want 
when you're making your own music.

An old teacher once told me that he didn't introduce rules so that his 
students would follow them rigidly. He presented the rules he used to 
get his sound as a case study. When a student of his went on to develop 
a musical language of his/her own, with different rules, he considered 
it a great success.

I've recently been infatuated with a Jon Hassell sort of 1-2-5 parallel 
voicing on my soprano, using a pitch shifter. Everything I play that way 
incorporates parallel fifths. Nobody has tried to punch me out yet for 
doing it.

Brian