Passion or Professionalism?

 Comments on my Billie Eilish/Towa Bird post have sparked some further thoughts on the subject. When one of my commentators asserted that young listeners today distain professionalism in favor of "authenticity" (I scare-quote that word due to Richard Taruskin's critique of its use in the early music movement) it took me aback. But more and more I am seeing the point and value of that perspective.

The encroaching industrialization of music is likely one of the causes of the rejection of professionalism. I want to step back a bit to look at where this comes from. When I was a young musician, before I even converted to classical, we were always straining against technical limitations. Part of this came from simple poverty: we couldn't afford to buy better amplifiers or quality reel-to-reel tape machines and editing was typically done with a razor blade and scotch tape. Hey, at least we had a Shure mic! As the technology developed, digital audio tape, then digital editing, then compressors, limiters, equalizers and more recently quantization and autotune, all these limitations went away. The prices also came down. I have sitting in my studio a four-channel Tascam digital recorder with built-in microphones and digital editing that is far better quality than the equipment that the Beatles had to record Sgt. Pepper's and it cost me $140.00 US. It is about the size of a cigarette package. I rarely use it because I can do videos with my iPad. Excellent picture, but the sound isn't very good.

The point is that for musicians now there really are not, in comparison, technical limitations. What can't you do with an iPad and a few accessories? There have been songs, and perhaps even albums, produced on an iPhone!

The limitation, as always, is the creative imagination and the aesthetic discipline to know what to do and how to do it. We used to feel that there was a powerful aesthetic urge, being prevented from being realized, by mere technical obstacles. Now it seems as if, since there are no obstacles, that well of aesthetic resources is draining away and there isn't much left.

It is not that too much has already been done. I am reminded of the theorist who, in the early 16th century, two hundred years before Bach, complained that every single contrapuntal idea and resource had already been tried and there were no more possibilities! Or the comment by physicist Albert Michaelson in 1905 that there were no more big discoveries to be made in physics. That same year another Albert, Albert Einstein, published four ground-breaking papers in physics including one on special relativity.

So no, we aren't running out of aesthetic resources or new ideas.

But the kind of soulless music that seems to be typically the end result of relying on the technical tools at our disposal (Pro Tools!) seems to inhibit rather than promote aesthetic discovery. Hence the understandable impulse to go back to some simpler way of making music. But that isn't a solution either, because in both cases--lots of technology or little technology--it isn't the technology that is either the problem or the solution. It is just a tool which may or may not be suitable to the need.

What we are lacking is focus on the aesthetic need, puzzle or challenge.

Right?

For an envoi, here is the last string quartet of Dmitri Shostakovich in which he writes six movements, but every movement is an adagio. Also, the first movement uses the most minimal melodic resources. He said to the Beethoven Quartet, who were rehearsing for the first performance, that they should try and play the first movement in such a way, "so that flies drop dead in mid-air, and the audience start leaving the hall from sheer boredom."