"To act within the marketplace, but not to be governed by the values of the market-place, is a considerable personal discipline."

"A customer acts within the framework of commerce. An audient acts within the framework of a listening community. When a musician believes that musicking is a commercial activity, the music dies inside them.

"To act within the marketplace, but not to be governed by the values of the market-place, is a considerable personal discipline. To see the audient as consumer denies them their humanity. They become a purchasing unit. Our human interaction ends with the completion of the transaction. When musician & audience combine to bring music flying into our world, to be parents to the music, life begins again.

“'Audient' is a description, not a label."

~ Robert Fripp from his Diary - April 15th. 1999

Is it Gustav Holst we have to "thank" for heavy metal

Who's to blame for heavy metal? We have a new data point.

Robert Fripp -- guitarist extraordinaire and King Crimson leader now for nearly 60 years! -- was just sent a passage from the Geezer Butler autobiography (he of Black Sabbath, whose first album appeared in 1970) which contains this observation under the heading 'The Devil in Music' ...

A breakthrough came in May 1969, when I saw King Crimson at Mothers club. As part of their set, they played a version of "Mars," from Gustav Holst's Planets suite. I was dumbfounded, couldn't believe what I was hearing. The following day, I went out and bought The Planets on LP, and I couldn't get enough of "Mars, the Bringer of War." I'd never had much of an interest in classical music, but this was angrier and more menacing than most rock music I'd ever heard.

At our next rehearsal, I was playing the main part, the so-called tritone, on bass, when Tony started playing a tritone riff (in medieval times, the tritone, because of its sinister, foreboding sound, was known as diabolus in musica, or "the devil in music"). That song would eventually become "Black Sabbath."

Naturally enough Fripp's eyebrows were raised.

I've seen it written that Holst invented heavy metal [says Fripp]. That might be stretching things a bit, but you could argue he inspired heavy metal's first riff. And since we wrote that song, the tritone sound has become synonymous with metal.

But did Black Sabbath even invent heavy metal? Nah, says a commenter on Fripp's post. "If he saw King Crimson in 1969 and they played 21st Century Schizoid Man then Heavy Metal had already been invented!"

In which case, since Fripp had pinched that riff from Bartok (String Quartet #5, from memory), could we say that it's Bartok we have to blame?

In any case, the first time the term "heavy metal" was used in print was arguably in a November 1970 Rolling Stone magazine article on the new Humble Pie album, calling them "a noisy, unmelodic, heavy metal-laden shit rock-band."

It's a shame the term "shit rock" didn't take hold instead.

Here's Stravinsky's Rite of Spring.

"Desperate doesn't mean hopeless. Hopeless doesn't mean impossible. Impossible doesn't mean unnecessary." #QotD

"Begin with the possible,
and move gradually towards the impossible." 

"Desperate doesn't mean hopeless.
    Hopeless doesn't mean impossible.
        Impossible doesn't mean unnecessary."

"We do what is possible and allow space for the impossible to enter."

~ Robert Fripp, from his Guitar Craft aphorisms

[Hat tip Make Weird Music]
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