Milo Fine
(available)
Side A :
21:54
Side B:
22.17
Milo Fine: clarinet/electronics
Recorded by Milo Fine in concert at RoadRunner Records, Minneapolis, MN; November 20, 1998
1999 – Fusetron 025 (LP)
Purchase Recordings
Articles/Interviews
Aesthetics Addenda
Aesthetics
Somewhere along the road a creative man has to make what you might call the Exit Decision. Either he decides he is going to be the kind of artist who accepts the conventional disciplines and practices within the range of established standards to the point of excellence, or else he decides he is going to redefine the discipline and move into new areas where there are no established standards except that related to the courage of taking this decision.
If he chooses the first, he is secure. He may fail, he may be mediocre and he may excel even beyond the achievement of his mentors, but he will be secure with a clear identity and an unconfused situation in his society. All people will know more or less, what he does and what his skill is called. As they say "He is the milkman" or "He is the carpenter" or "He is the electrician", so they will say "He is the painter" and "He is the ballet dancer" and "He is the jazz musician"…
On the other hand, the man making the second choice sacrifices all security. He moves out of convention, so, as far as his professional definition goes, he moves out of society. Few people but him really know how successful he's being. Most people, unsettled as always by the unfamiliar, will resent his disturbing them, his taking money whilst refusing to entertain them, will continually call him charlatan or fool…
The artist is peeling his skin back to achieve sufficient sensitivity to be able to say things right, is thus vulnerable to the ridicule, anger or straight indifference he's likely to suffer. He must then, even though he's operating in a private hermetic area, act as a spokesman and salesman for his own work. Without for a moment changing the nature of what he is attempting to do, he must make it readily and obviously available to everybody…People must tread in his art, stub their toes against it, find it in their pockets or buy it, if they want. And whilst the public acts adversely to his presumptuousness, as they are quite likely to, he must build around himself an invisible protective wall behind which he may safely render himself naked as a new-hatched chick…
Finally, he must love humanity as a whole without ever seeking their love in return. If he gets it, so much the good, but to solicit it would compromise his situation, falsify the evidence he brings back from outside the barriers of convention. He must love humanity because, more than any priest or politician, he is the person who actually is concerned for humanity, not how it behaves or what its right may be, but what it is, what it may become and what it is now possible to do.- Jeff Nuttall (from THE BALD SOPRANO A PORTRAIT OF LOL COXHILL)