I am including a link to a new essay by Ted Gioia in the Friday Miscellanea tomorrow, but there is one phrase from it, the last one in fact, that I want to just muse on for a bit.
music is too powerful for them to kill
He says this because he sees a grass-roots music revolution turning things upside down the way rock 'n' roll did in the mid-50s. Well, maybe, but back then the music business was a tiny fraction of what it is today so the people running it were proportionally less powerful. Now it is a large industry and more invulnerable to revolution, aesthetic revolution at least!
But let's have a look at the sentiment Ted expresses: music is too powerful for them to kill. The underlying assumptions are interesting. Music has some kind of Platonic Form that has an aesthetic power above the mere instances of it in the world. I might even like to believe that! But I don't think that is the actual question here. It is not music that is being put into a mindless algorithm box: it is rather people's tastes. If you feed people the same thing over and over, they will have no taste for anything different and will even reject it as "bad." In the past there was enough regional variation that music was more of a cottage industry. Every group of producers followed their own methods and formulas like traditional cheesemakers in France. But now we have a globalized homogeneity that is fed to the whole world. That is a pretty powerful creator of musical taste.
But I very much would like to believe that musical revolution is possible. But wait, we had one just fifty years ago. No, I'm not talking about The Beatles, though there is an argument to be made there. I am referring to the so-called minimalist music of Steve Reich and Philip Glass which very much overturned the maximal complexity model of the post-war avant-garde. But this revolution only caused tiny ripples in the music business and hardly affected the commercial models at all.
"Music" --that is, some ideal form of music, may be too powerful for them to kill, but they can certainly keep it locked up in a closet somewhere so it doesn't upset the commercial applecart.
Steve Reich: Drumming
Steve Reich: Music for 18 Musicians
In my teaching I get to hear a lot of amateur music performance, production, and songwriting. I believe that these activities are somewhat immune to the homogenizing forces of the music industry. This is not because of some platonic essence of music; I'm agnostic as to whether there is such a thing. And it's not because kids aren't trying to sound exactly like Ariana Grande - many of them are! But the knowledge and skill required to create an Ariana Grande song is very far out of reach of your typical bedroom producer, so even when a kid is trying to replicate her sound, they inevitably fail. There is so much wildness and variety that comes out of the sheer chaos of people not being fully in control of their software, of their fingers on the keys or the frets, of their voices, and above all, of their conceptual understanding. Usually that just means that their music is inept, but there are also a lot of happy accidents out there. Hip-hop is explosively creative at the grassroots level, exactly because there is so much local activity happening beneath and beyond the attention of the major labels. Sometimes a kid does make it from their bedroom to the radio and attracts legions of would-be imitators, "Old Town Road" being the most dramatic recent example. When I compare the garage band scenes of my youth to the bedroom producer scenes of the present, I hear a lot more variety and unpredictability now. However cheap and accessible guitars were, they are nowhere near as cheap and accessible as computers and DAWs. That means a lot more terrible music being made, but also more wild amateur invention.
ReplyDeleteI'm delighted to hear about this kind of creative ferment. I wish there were more of it in the classical field!
ReplyDeleteI see two reasons for optimism. One is that if you are willing to expand the definition of "classical" music to include "weird music being made with computers", then I don't think there has ever been more of it being made at the amateur level than at any time in history. Every week for the past ten years, the Disquiet Junto has produced twenty or thirty experimental compositions off of a new conceptual prompt. Here's the current project, it's pretty extraordinary:
ReplyDeletehttps://disquiet.com/2022/01/20/disquiet-junto-project-0525-magic-number-1-of-3/
But even if you are going to restrict your definition to notated works, there is a lot going on because of the effortless ubiquity of notation software. My nine year old son is a prolific composer using Noteflight, and you can believe that he is under no pressure from me to be composing that way.
Some very interesting stuff there, and no, I wouldn't restrict the definition to notated music only with the caveat that live performance of electronic or computer music is not terribly attractive to audiences.
ReplyDeleteBut this tends to lead me back to the proposition that what we need is more people willing to listen.
My son is absolutely obsessed with the canonical white guys, especially Bach. That's the music he wants to play on the piano, that's the music he wants to listen to, that's the music he wants to think about. And this did not come about because anyone is pressuring him in that direction. Quite the opposite! Between me, my wife, the kid's piano teacher and school music teacher, he's hearing classical music, but it's not the only thing we're presenting him with, or even the main thing. And yet, that's what the boy is interested in. The more he writes and improvises his own stuff, the more interested he is in how Bach wrote and improvised. There's a bigger lesson here. I reacted really badly to music teachers saying, "This is the best music, this is the only good music, the stuff you like is crap." I only got interested in the canonical masterpieces after I started writing my own stuff. Everything I know about music education supports my belief that amateur creation in the kids' preferred styles is the best way to foster an interest in historical music. It makes sense, right? You validate their interests and musical identities, they become secure in those identities, and then they open up to ideas from outside their comfort zone. It works!
ReplyDeleteThat is so amazing! Mind you, it was Bach that set me on my path when I discovered his music at age 19. Just had no exposure before then. I had no music teachers telling me anything. I think I had one lesson on bass guitar before I joined a rock band. When I finally got into university the main history teacher was focussed on pre-Bach repertoire. I guess I had an odd music education. But most of what I know I taught myself.
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