From Wikipedia:
An artisan (from French: artisan, Italian: artigiano) is a skilled craft worker who makes or creates material objects partly or entirely by hand. These objects may be functional or strictly decorative, for example furniture, decorative art, sculpture, clothing, food items, household items, and tools and mechanisms such as the handmade clockwork movement of a watchmaker. Artisans practice a craft and may through experience and aptitude reach the expressive levels of an artist.
The adjective "artisanal" is often used in describing hand-processing in contrast to an industrial process, such as in the phrase artisanal mining. Thus, "artisanal" is sometimes used in marketing and advertising as a buzz word to describe or imply some relation with the crafting of handmade food products, such as bread, beverages, cheese or textiles. Many of these have traditionally been handmade, rural or pastoral goods but are also now commonly made on a larger scale with automated mechanization in factories and other industrial areas.
I've been away from the blog over the holidays, but I'm back and it feels like a new phase in culture so let's talk about it. I've made critical comments about a lot of the trends in popular music such as miming in concerts, industrial production, songwriting by committee and just generally a decline to repetitive mediocrity that we can see in rhythm, harmony, melody and lyrics.
In classical music the criticism clusters around accusations that it is elitist, obscure, outmoded and just generally irrelevant. And when artists like Yuja Wang try to make it more relevant by, frankly, dressing like a hooker, it becomes a caricature of itself.
So it feels like time to refresh and renovate both popular and classical musics. Before I start sounding like a caricature of Ted Gioia (who by the way did an interesting post recently on Anna Akhmatova) let me get to the specifics. The fine arts and the marketplace always have an awkward relationship. I genuinely believe that producing music for entirely commercial purposes is a mistake--at least I am quite certain that it holds no interest to me whatsoever. This is why my career as a concert guitarist was never entirely successful. Careerism, the single-minded focus on advancing one's career, never seemed to have anything to do with music as such.
Of course, musicians live in the world just like everyone else and they have to pay the bills. So one does need some financial security as an artist. In the past, patronage was common, but today, apart from the unreliable support of government, artists find they have to enter the marketplace or an educational institution. For many, it seems this results in a kind of endemic mediocrity.
What still attracts me to classical music over popular music is that so much of it is still artisanal. Aspiring musicians still have to, in nearly all cases, apprentice themselves to a maestro to learn the trade. Often these maestros are found in musical institutions though those are also inhabited by many careerists as well. Playing your instrument is a lifelong hands-on task as is being a scholar or historian. Composers may find themselves seduced by the myriad technologies of music production available today, but that feels to me very like the deal Mephistopheles offered Faust: infinite knowledge and magical powers at the cost of your soul.
A musical experience is for me is one where one hears a performer playing an instrument with no technological processing. This rules out nearly all current popular music, which is ok with me. The reason one wants to exclude technological processing is that it reduces (almost to nothing in some cases) the actual human agency of the artist. A music performance, in order to be aesthetically valuable, has to involve all the subtle shades and nuances that come directly from the artist. Popular music also used to be largely like this.
I feel that one of the strongest urges behind the growth of early music performance is precisely this: it puts the individual human artist at the center, playing instruments that are themselves handmade. The total opposite of this, of course, is the use of Artificial Intelligence to compose and perform music. For human listeners, let's have human performers and composers.
Speaking of Anna Akhmatova, years ago I set this poem of hers:
12 comments:
It is fine not to like electronic or pop music but there is no music unmediated by technology, unless you are singing unaccompanied out in a field or something. Instruments are technology, concert halls are technology, scores are technology.
It is also hilariously untrue that electronic equipment removes human agency. Computers, electric instruments, amplifiers and so on don't do anything without being controlled by a human. If you try programming a drum machine or singing through Auto-Tune, you very quickly discover how little work the equipment is doing compared to how much you are doing. It takes a substantial amount of learning and effort to get the gear to do what you want. Again, it is fine to not like any of that music! But I don't like the myth that some kinds of technology support human agency while others inhibit it. There have been plenty of soulless mediocrities writing scores with quill pens by candlelight.
Thanks, Ethan, for the comment. What I always appreciate about your comments is that they are clear, unambiguous statements. Not that I necessarily agree! But you make your position clear. So first I have to acknowledge the truths in what you say: yes, depending on how you define it, all music save a cappella singing involves some form of technology. I happen to feel that the technology involved in building a guitar or violin is of an entirely different nature than the technology involved in staging a Taylor Swift concert. Or any recent pop recording for that matter. But that is likely just a question of where you draw the line. How to design the internal bracing of a classical guitar and AutoTune are to my mind different, conceptually.
Your conclusion is, I think, faulty. It is not that some levels of technology support human agency so much as they don't directly filter it out. Surely you have to acknowledge that pitch correction, for example, filters out wavering frequencies in the voice--something I regard as inherently expressive. Or quantizing rhythm to the nearest sixteenth note? That is precisely designed to eliminate rubato.
But yes, of course, there were plenty of soulless mediocrities writing scores with quill pens by candlelight (while wearing wigs, you forgot that part!). Now admit that there are also plenty of soulless mediocrities hiding behind drum machines and AutoTune.
Ted Gioia's post about Akhmatova shows, as pointed out in his comment section, a lack of familiarity with her life and times. It's a sad example of the quick low-quality posts that Gioia has to regularly put out, because he monetized his blogging and has to post frequently about something, anything in order to maintain that monetization. I find his way of working just as much a sign of a decayed internet and modern economy as the larger forces that he regularly criticizes.
Yes, I agree Christopher. I was just pleased that someone mentioned Anna Akhmatova who should be far better known.
Bryan, the trouble with that rebuttal is IRCAM has ever existed. :)
For those who read him on the aging of the new music in 1955, Theodor Adorno slammed Boulez, Stockhausen and Cage as embracing integral serialism and aleatory as alternatives to making musical decisions by resorting to technocratic methods that absolve the composer of being a decision-making subject back in 1955. There's nothing you've said about pop music that couldn't be applied to post-Schoenberg and post-tonal composition as an entire field. As Adorno put it, most post-tonal composers were like painters who thought that merely assembling the paints on their palette was the same as having made an actual painting.
All decades before Auto-Tune.
Integral serialism and aleatoric music were very short-lived blips in the 1950s (except for some composers like Boucourechliev who are famous precisely for sticking with such approaches when others had moved on). Mr. Hatchet's claim that post-tonal composition as an “entire field” is tainted by these brief sideshows is, I daresay, not historically accurate.
For example, I've been studying Berio's post-1960 music recently, and it's striking how different his writing became then from the fairly doctrinaire 1950s serialism that he had dabbled in himself. Score after score is exploring new approaches to harmony and tickling his own fancy.
I should probably clarify that my references to Adorno is a historical point about how what Bryan was saying was a distinction between techniques that filter out human agency was functionally the same argument Adorno applied within classical music's avant garde in the 1950s toward those two blips in musical history. In other words the problem is that Bryan seemed to be applying his claim to a modern pop/classical dualism without factoring in the history of the use of this dualism strictly within mid-20th century classical music.
The problem lurks in Bryan's statement "It is not that some levels of technology support human agency so much as they don't directly filter it out.". Has he adequately defined the difference between "technology" (overt) and "technique" (implicit)? Ethan's objection seems to invoke this otherwise overlooked distinction between technology and the techniques that are brought to bear in its use. Adorno made a distinction between Boulez and Cage and Stockhausen (who he appraised negatively) and Varese and Ligeti, about whom he was more positive. I merely alluded to Adorno to point out the problem in Bryan's response being that if his concern is that some forms of technology filter out human agency this was a complaint about mid-20th century classical music long before pop had Auto-Tune.
The quality of the music and the tools used to make it are independent of each other. You and I agree that Taylor Swift is boring and soulless, but she would be just as boring backed by unamplified lute and harpsichord.
Quantizing to the closest sixteenth note is still a choice that requires agency. The computer doesn't do it by itself. And you would be surprised by how much nuance is involved in quantization (by people who know what they're doing.) Hip-hop producers routinely nudge their programmed drum hits off the grid for expressive purposes. One of J Dilla's main innovations was the realization that if you move the snare drum backbeats a little early, it makes everything else feel like it's limping or dragging. He also did a lot of quantizing different layers of the beat with conflicting amounts of swing or displacement, and also did a lot of overlaying quantized and unquantized rhythms. His choices only make musical sense because they are made against a quantized grid; this kind of microrhythm doesn't have the same salience in an unquantized context. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bzhAv1oMKmY
Just because Taylor Swift's producers use quantization in boring ways, doesn't mean that quantization is itself inherently unmusical; that's like blaming the piano for Liberace. You just have to seek out the people who use the tool properly.
Rubato isn't any more automatically expressive than quantization is automatically inexpressive. There are so many people out there playing rubato that just sounds gooey and arrhythmic; I hear them every time I set foot in the music schools where I teach.
Auto-Tune is interesting because when you use it in T-Pain mode (zero retune speed), it adds as much musical information as it removes. This is because the quantized transitions between pitches become rhythmic events. You can't quite hear where exactly the note transition occurs in a slide from C to C-sharp, but the Auto-Tune warble creates a distinct edge, and good singers know how to use the warble for rhythmic effect. Listen to how people in the Arab world and North Africa use Auto-Tuned melisma. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cuG-Gilot_U
@Ethan: I really like the principle you state: "The quality of the music and the tools used to make it are independent of each other." And your two examples from YouTube are both really salient. Am I just an antiquarian, stuck in an historic loop? Well, maybe, but let's look into the principle. Logically, yes, the quality of the music and the nature of the tools are independent factors. But perhaps not entirely. I think of how much a performer depends on the chosen instrument. For myself, I had different guitars that were unsatisfactory until I found the ideal instrument. The value of an instrument is, of course, instrumental, but a poor instrument is limiting. There is a reason why great violinists seek out 300-year-old instruments. But I have, I think, an interesting example. Early in Steve Reich's career he was working with tape loops and in pieces like "Come out" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0WVh1D0N50 he discovered the rhythmic technique of phasing. He decided that this was not aesthetically interesting unless it could be used by human musicians. Out of this came a host of pieces like Piano Phase and Drumming. Isn't it possible, or even likely that certain kinds of tools can be inherently distancing, even alienating? I pose this as a question, because I'm not entirely sure. After all, Kanye's cut "Lost in the World" is a brilliant use of AutoTune.
I really don't buy the idea that the tool itself is alienating or distancing. Tools have affordances, and sometimes the affordances influence the product, but they don't determine the product.
With all due respect to Steve Reich, I don't agree with him about the human performances. I have enjoyed everything he has ever written, but listening to humans do phasing doesn't have the same effect on me that the tape pieces do. The human performers lose the uncanniness of identical repetition that you get from tape; they aren't arrestingly weird. Right now it's in vogue for jazz musicians to play Dilla-style rhythms, and I appreciate the effort, but a human drummer playing Dilla beats falls flat for me for the same reason, I'm missing the timbre of those samples and drum machines, the fakeness of the loop.
I love the effects the human performers produce much more than with the tape loops. But you know what? I suspect that this is really a matter of taste! A tool I might find alienating you might find stimulating.
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