VLVL(7) Bass notes

[Doug Millison]

>223.7-224.1:  ""taken the frets off [...] Jazz Bass"
>224.10:  "woo-woo-woo-type"

On a guitar, the fret lets the player cleanly play one or another note,
either A or A# for example, because the fret shortens the string at the
right distance to produce the required frequency. Removing the frets
removes this 0 or 1 limitation.  Guitar players have always been able to
"bend" notes by pulling the string in between frets, creating the "blue"
notes of blues, jazz, and folk/traditional music, of course, but no frets
expands the tonal possibilities along that rainbow of sound.

Van Meter's notion of a "restoration of a premodal innocence in which all
the notes of the universe would be available to him" (VL 224.3) could let
him fall next in line after Anton Webern, reaching  a new pinnacle of
"maximum freedom" in music, as lamented in GR by Gustav the composer:  "
'I'm not so much for Beethoven qua Beethoven,' Gustav argues, 'but as he
represents the German dialectic, the incorporation of more and more notes
into the scale, culminating with dodecaphonic democracy, where all notes
get an equal hearing. Beethoven was one of the architects of musical
freedom [...] Webern [...] The young barbarians coming in to murder the
Last European, standing at the far end of what'd been going on since Bach,
an expansion of music's polymorphous perversity till all notes were truly
equal at last. . . . Where was there to go after Webern? It was the moment
of maximum freedom. It all had to come down. Another Gotterdammerung--"(GR
440)

There may be relevant musical references in M&D that tie into this VL
reference, too, but I don't recall them off hand.

Anybody have any idea why Jazz Bass is capitalized?


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