I just ran across a Rick Beato clip about classic rock music, from the 50s to the late 90s, and more recent music which he describes as "perfect." Yes, he's correct, in technical terms, anyone with Pro Tools can now create "perfect" music, that is, music where all the beats and subdivisions are perfectly placed (that's a feature called quantization), all the notes are perfectly in tune (that's a feature called autotune), the tempo never varies and all the phrases are exactly eight (or perhaps twelve) measures long. Oh, promised land, how sweet are your fruits and flowers! Rick doesn't quite work out the implications of what he is saying and mixes two separate issues together, but his points about music production are accurate.
Reminds me of a science fiction short story that doesn't end well. I've been saying for a long time now that the problem with current popular music is that it is an industrial product, mechanically rolling off assembly lines. What makes it, theoretically, an aesthetic product is that after the perfectly crafted musical machine is assembled, the individual artist/diva then slobbers soap opera level emotion all over it to make it seem "real." And that's pretty much it, isn't it?
Lots of exceptions of course. There is lots of pop music I like, but while it may use some of these techniques, it is still music and not just an industrial product. Kanye West is a pretty good example. There are older artists like the Rolling Stones still cranking out imperfect music with actual feeling.
Several months ago I got quite interested in GarageBand, the Apple app that is a do-it-yourself song generator, but I soon realized that the first thing I would have to do is learn how to defeat all the defaults and it hardly seemed worth the trouble.
What I want to do as a composer is elicit and platform the aesthetic expressivity of real musicians. I always think of the dumbest thing that George Martin ever said when he was talking about Ringo and said that while Ringo wasn't a perfect drummer, he always seemed to wobble the beat in just the right places. Oh duh!
There is nothing more unmusical, inhuman and boring than technically perfect "music." Even the classical world, when it elevates mere virtuosity over expression, can fall prey to this aesthetic misconception. Art is always about expression and thinking expression can be "perfect" is really just a category error. Expression is something that flows from the complexities and imperfections of human beings and their dreams, fears, hopes, desires and visions. It's always imperfect because it is an expression, not a material product.
I admire an artist like Grigory Sokolov because, while he has all the tools of virtuosity, the true perfection he strives for is musical, aesthetic and expressive, not technical perfection. Listen closely to this performance. Listen to how the notes of the melody are all "placed" for their expressive value, both dynamically and rhythmically. Imagine the horror if this performance were quantized (where every note is fixed exactly in relationship to the beat).
"Imagine the horror if this performance were quantized (where every note is fixed exactly in relationship to the beat)."
ReplyDeleteI have actually met a few classical music fans who prefer MIDI files of certain piano repertoire, because they are a pure representation of the score – these listeners found the rubato and "interpretation" of human recordings to be a turnoff. As the pop music that everyone grows up in has become quantized, I wonder if these expectations will become more prominent within classical music, too. And note that some complex modern ensemble repertoire is already conducted with the aid of a click-track.
Interesting... I once did a recording, triple-tracking a piece for guitar trio, with a click track. The composer had to modify the score, replacing fermatas with measured long notes. Some music doesn't suffer at all from a rigid tempo. But it depends on the repertoire, of course. One has the uneasy feeling that the HIP folks have accustomed audiences to hearing their Mozart, Haydn, Vivaldi and Bach with a rather rigid, cheery tempo, which was most certainly NOT what audiences of that time heard.
ReplyDeleteI like to think that the pervasive presence of tempo rigidity in much music makes performances like those of Sokolov even more inviting?
On Youtube you can find people like Camila Pinto Pereira (fake name) and Claudio Colombo (real name) who do unbelievable things like performing all piano works from a particular composer (e.g. all Scarlatti sonatas) ‘perfectly’. What happens is that they just feed midi-files into a Yamaha piano :)
ReplyDeleteThanks, Auke! I wasn't aware of either of these "artists."
ReplyDeleteThough I do sketch with pencil on paper, I do most of my composing in Finale. I have to say that with the "human playback" feature that shapes dynamics at the end of phrases and provides for tempo flexibility in fermatas and other places, not to mention the ability to manually adjust tempos, this music software is far more musical than these midi piano files.
Good illustrations of the limitations of "perfection."