The Sign of the Spectacle

Mark Reybrouck
"Musical Sense-Making and the Concept of Affordance: An Ecosemiotic and Experiential Approach"
(2012)

Music, in this view, is not merely a set of structures, but something that has inductive power and that involves mechanisms of sense-making and reactive behaviour that are grounded in our biology and our cognitive abilities (Reybrouck, 2005a, 2006a). As such, it challenges traditional approaches and paradigms which run through musicology as a discipline, with a major emphasis on historical research, music analysis and performance studies. The latter, however, have received as yet a lot of empirical support from cognitive sciences with a vast body of literature on the effects of music performance as a skilled activity that requires the simultaneous integration of multimodal sensory and motor information with multimodal sensory feedback mechanisms to monitor performance (Gaser and Schlaug, 2003). Several behavioural, neurophysiological and neuroimaging studies have explored the highly specialised sensorimotor, auditory, visual-spatial, auditory-spatial and memory skills of musicians while performing motor, auditory and somatosensory tasks.

Skilled performance, however, is not the most common way of dealing with music. It is restricted to a minor part of music users in general and can be mastered only after years of special training. It is arguable, therefore, to broaden the experiential approach and to conceive of dealing with music at a more general level of coping with the sounds. ‘Dealing with music’, then, is to be considered as a generic term that encompasses traditional musical behaviours—such as listening, performing, improvising and composing—, as well as more general ‘perceptual’ and ‘behavioural’ categories as exploring, selecting and focussing of attention on the perceptual side, and actions, interactions and transactions with the (sonic) world on the behavioural side. In order to encompass all these behaviours, it is desirable, further, not to speak of listeners, or performers—as these embrace only some of the possible ways of dealing with music—but of music users in general as a broad category of subjects that deal with music by means of one or more of these behaviours.

This paper could lend support to certain pet notions of mine, especially the idea that reception/listening may itself be(come) a "practice." But then there is this always-obligatory appeal to the Average Joe, the effort to justify such a project as a major part of something or other, whereas the study of skilled performance and special training necessarily comprises only a minor part .

Blogspot Bingo—Lasch's The Revolt of the Elites and The Minimal Self

Some worthy bloggerel returned by the google searches
"lasch elites site:blogspot.com"
and
"lasch minimal self site:blogspot.com"
:

Galpin—Rural Social Problems

Charles Josiah Galpin
Rural Social Problems
(1924)

[240] And there was George Bull, farmer, financier, musician, hunter, trusted citizen. Can a man farm the land, soil his clothes, be weary with labor, and maintain a refinement of mind like that of the artist? George Bull did. Shall I ever forget the long room in his farmhouse dedicated to music, where on occasions neighbors and friends would gather and listen to the musical re-
[241]
cital given by the Bull family, each member taught to play some instrument of music.

Do you say, "This is a freak?"

No, not a freak, for you must remember that for sixty years the Academy had provided a music department. Music was a commonplace among the thousand farm homes. Again you will note the likeness to the folk schools of Scandanavia. How can I entertain, after this deep experience in community life, the idea that culture cannot step over the farm threshold?

...

[22] The farmer is...our original naïve teleologist; and the worker in iron is our original untutored materialist.

[emailed to self, 21 October 2020]

Lasch—Educating the Whole Child

Christopher Lasch
The Culture of Narcissism
(1979)

[128] The decline of intellectual competence cannot be accounted for, as some observers would have it, on the reactionary assumption that more students from minority- and low-income groups are taking tests, going to college, and thus dragging down the scores. The proportion of these students has remained unchanged over the last ten years; meanwhile the decline of academic achievement has extended to elite schools.

...

Lasch—New Orders from Indigenous Traditions?

Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(1991)

p. 418—re: early 1920s series on the states by The Nation:

Condemnation of Southern backwardness, in a liberal weekly, might have been expected. More surprising was that a series conceived as an exploration of diversity so often ended by holding up a uniform standard of cultural progress, one measured by great works of art and notable achievements in science and technology. None of the contributors asked whether a new order in the South would not have to rest on traditions indigeneous to the region. None showed much interest in the requirements for a vigorous civic life, as opposed to the number of orchestras, art galleries, libraries, and universities. The implication was that "civilization," if it was ever to come to the South, would have to come from outside.

...

[419]
That states as different as Iowa and Massachusetts could prompt the same kind of disparagement suggests that the conventions underlying this disparagement had acquired a life of their own. The equation of civic culture with progress and enlightenment made it difficult to see anything but arrested development even in a state like New York, depicted by Charles F. Wood as a benighted region dominated by "fear and suspicion" of the modern world. ... "Resistance to change is their most sacred
[420]
principle."

Traditions indigenous to the region may not be impugned! Actually, the problem is that they may not be specifically enumerated, at which point the possibility of change is seen to have been foreclosed from the outset by the prescription of indegenous-ness. Populism and Cultural Relativism together at last!

Of course Lasch has a fair point that imposing cultural change from the top down cannot be effective or just. But that leaves only one solution: peoples with incompatible indigenous traditions cannot live justly under a common government. They need to breakup. Sovereignty must dawn again. This seems to be the conclusion, at least, of much of the presently resurgent nationalism in the world, whose trappings I despise but whose conclusions don't seem entirely wrong.