Freely improvised and non-academic electroacoustic music {as}[by] urban folk[s] ~ part 7
from: Emergence at the frontiers and in fringes & trenches of contemporary music
In his contribution “Necessity and Choice in Musical Forms: Concerning musical and technical means and political needs” to [RJ], Chris Cutler gives the following four characteristics of the ‘Folk Mode’ of human music making (which he considers in dialectical opposition with the eye (notation) based bourgeois ‘Art Mode’):
_ the medium of folk mode musical generation and perpetuation is based in human memory, it centres around the ear;
_ the practice of folk mode music is an expressive attribute of a whole community;
_ there are no finished or definitive pieces of folk mode music, and there is also no element of personal property, though there is individual contribution;
_ there is no productive distinction between the roles of composer and performer, the generation and production of folk mode is a socially seamless and single process in which improvisation plays a central part.
One readily verifies that Cutler’s four characteristics coincide with the defining properties, as outlined in the above, of the working modes and the (intuitive) methodology of large sections of contemporary networks of independent artists active in the fields of free improvisation and non-academic…
