Station Identification

[Dave Monroe]

Something I jjust read that seemed vaguely applicable
...

"While music and language are both semiotic codes,
unlike students of language, music scholars have no
equivalent of a dictionary of musemes (the smallest
unit of musical meaning) or museme compunds as a
starting point, nor are there any parallels to
language-to-language dictionaries available.  (For
example, while one can find dictionaries that
translate between distant members of the same language
family, such as English-Armenian withinb Indo-European
languages, what whould a ska-late Romanticism
dictionary be ...?)"

... from Anahid Kassabian, Hearing Film: Tracking
Identifications in Contemporary Hollywood Film Music
(New York: Routledge, 2001), p. 26.  On the one hand,
I quite enjoy these sort of transwhatever comparative
gedankenexperiments, and I think the Pynchon/Zappa one
is as good as any here (certainly better than the
Bowie, which I read recently elsewhere, maybe in that
Melody Maker [R.I.P.] retrospective volume?), I'm
always leery of what seems to be a misguided attempt
to "ennoble" pop music as "art," "lit'rachure,"
"music," even.  Not because I'm snobbish on pop music.
 Hardly, yr talking to a bona fide bubble gum fan
here.  I just don't think pop should sweat it, is all.
 I love me my Gravity's Rainbow and my Beethoven's
Ninth and my "Sugar Sugar" and my whatever, but they
all have their very own brilliances in their very own
contexts ... well, okay, my rant for the evening. 
I've been saving up my aching hand to complete a
littel excerpt from something, so ...


--- Doug Millison <DMillison at ftmg.net> wrote:

> Comparing Pynchon to Zappa, that's more like it ...

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