OFF: "originals"

[David Howard & Kim Pieters]

In March 1992 the German painter Anselm Keifer delivered the keynote address
to Artists' Week at the Adelaide Festival; he touched on the notion of
originality:

'Like when on the screen of a writing computer you insert a new word or a
new phrase, and whatever had been there is all shifted, displaced, no matter
how much, even thousands of pages. No matter how many temples, pictures, and
poems there are - they may altogether be displaced by one new thing. But it
may also happen that something which had long been away, something that had
so often been displaced and so profoundly been ruined (so that we did not
even remember whether it still was there) - it may happen that one such
thing emerges again and reconquers the place for the one beauty.'

What distinguishes rock music, and accounts for its popularity, is its
capacity to synthesize previously disparate elements in the musical
tradition; we saw this at its birth when Berry, Elvis et al united the blues
with the crooner's songbook; we see this synthetic tendency again in 'World
Music'.

This is not (quite) what the dictionary defines originality as.  I'm an
admirer of King Crimson, who one member of this list has suggested are
'original', yet when we listen to Fripp's catalogue we hear a reactive
intelligence at work. The King Crimson back catalogue is so strong because
Fripp and his fellow musicians bring techniques across from other genres
(eg. Bruford's jazz drumming). While Fripp has scrupulously acknowledged
that Eno introduced him to the compositional techniques used in
Frippertronics/Soundscapes, Eno borrowed those techniques from the
classicist Steve Reich's work with tape recorders. And what was the ground
of Reich's originality? The invention of the tape-recorder; his conceptual
advance was predicated by a technological one, just as Chopin, Liszt and
Beethoven could not have innovated without the development of the piano out
of the harpsichord. From this I conclude that musical influence (and
revolution) is more a matter of technological awareness than of originality
per se.

David Howard