Friday, March 04, 2005
What Is It?
Perhaps the question of what music actually is has no clear answer. Certainly music is many things to many people. Stylistically, chronologically, aesthetically, music forms a remarkably complex tapestry of human creative effort.
We can name the parameters of music. Sound. (But not necessarily always.) Silence. (But not necessarily always.) Rhythm. (But not necessarily always.) Dynamics, pulse, meter, color, the dimensions go on in kaleidoscopic array, but may be present or not, so music cannot be strictly said to be these things. The whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Maybe it's easier to say what it does rather than what it is.
But I think that it has a single common element: the delineation of time. Through an aural medium, we frame a segment of time with a beginning and an end, though some may claim to write eternal pieces. (And some just seem that way.) But if we frame a bit of time in this fashion, within a specified space, then sound, or the lack of it, becomes the medium through which a composer and musicians provide a common emotional, intellectual, or artistic experience--along with all of the cultural context (also framed by time, geography, and perhaps philosophy) that go along with it.
Music exists on a more evanescent plane than any other, and dependent on time as it’s real medium. An experience on that plane can be good or bad, depending on any great number of factors.
posted by Cary Boyce
8:38 AM
Weighing in on terminology
Most of the terms used in art history to define the various style periods and isms seem to have their origins in the negative. Baroque (deformed), Neo-Classical (pastiche), Impressionist (vague), Atonal (incomprehensible) are terms that are borrowed by musicology with mixed results. One of my teachers, Roger Sessions, used to call these terms "filing cabinets." He was not opposed to having filing cabinets, but he did think that one should empty or rearrange your files every few years.
For more information on Sessions please visit the new website < www.AndreaOlmstead.com>. Her three books on Sessions--"Roger Sessions and His Music," "Conversations with Roger Sessions," and "The Correspondence of Roger Sessions"-- are available to be read (or downloaded) here for free. There is much of value here, especially in the "Conversations," on the subject of terminology. In addition, Sessions's Norton Lectures, "Questions About Music," has much to say about the objective evaluation of music and the criteria used for that evaluation.
In my experience, most interested listeners ask composers what kind of music they write simply because they want to know where to buy it (or literally what filing cabinet it's in). So, in the interests of selling music we do fall back on the term "classical" because of its usefulness. It is nevertheless symptomatic of earnest composers to think far too much about this subject. For those of you who wish to think even more deeply about terminology and definitions I would recommend Suzanne Langer's work in esthetics, especially "Feeling and Form." This is a most serious source for anyone looking for clarity on the "big" questions.
posted by Larry Thomas Bell
8:22 AM
Thursday, March 03, 2005
The Music Which Dare Not Speak Its Name
So I've slammed the term "serious music" and I'll gladly slam "cultivated music" as well -- It's less objectionable, but still implies that all other musics are non- or un-cultivated. But really, there are plenty of musics besides the music we're talking about that meet one or more of the standard definitions of cultivated, and "cultivated" is, again, a word with positive connotations (and whose opposite is decidedly negative). So we end up being, while slightly less so than before, condescending. (I have the same problem with the so-called "bright" movement, to give a non-music example -- I'm one of them according to the definition they employ, but think the term is awful.)
But just shooting down other people's suggestions isn't by itself very helpful. I do believe strongly that the use of terminology is both useful and desirable, as long as we understand what we're talking about. (Kyle Gann had a series of posts on the value of terminology last August, and was kind enough to quote my e-mail to him at one point. I'll leave the value of terminology at that for the moment.) So let me propose a set of desirable criteria for a name, and then make a suggestion.
1. Ideally, the term should be completely meaningless on its own -- that way it has no semantic baggage to get in the way of its new duty.
2. Failing that, it should be vaguely descriptive of the most salient qualitative feature of the music. "Bluegrass" is a good name because it carries no value judgment, but by referencing Kentucky Blue Grass vaguely ties into the idea that the music has roots in the rural south. "Industrial" is a good name because it carries no particular value judgment, but illustrates that the music tends to be aggressively mechanical like an industrial process. "Minimalism" is a slightly less good term because "minimal" means something like "as little as possible" which really only applies to a subset of the musics we think of as "minimalist." Also, "minimal" can have a somewhat negative connotation. But it succeeds at describing the salient superficialities of much of the genre, and in that it is a fairly good term.
3. When selecting a term, it's better to go with one that is merely adequate but is already accepted by the public than one that is great but obscure. The point of terminology is communication, and changing the rules on people is a good way to be unclear. That said, if the term in common use is offensive, changing it can be appropriate -- we don't say "negro" any more.
So if you haven't already guessed, I'm in favor of just accepting the problems with the term "classical music" and qualifying it when appropriate. Kyle Gann's suggestion (and the title of his blog) "Post-Classical" isn't bad. I often say "contemporary classical music," or "academic classical music" (although given that many people object to being called academic, I probably shouldn't). In the end, if we say "I'm a classical composer" some people will know what we mean, and the people who don't will at least be wrong in the right way.
posted by Galen H. Brown
11:14 PM
What is music?
David's right, we won't reach a definitive answer on this one.
Rodney's right, it's easy to confuse a definition of music with a qualitative judgement.
So next question: what would we gain by having a rock-solid definition?
Suppose we agreed that Shakespeare's Hamlet is not music and a five year old singing Mary Had a Little Lamb is. What have we accomplished with this distinction?
Don't get me wrong: I'm a great believer in definitions and in qualitative judgements. It's just important to distinguish between them. There is a lot of music that I have limited interest in, and a lot of other things that fascinate me no end.
On an entirely unrelated subject, the potential beauty of a term like Cultivated Music is only manifest when it is inclusive of things that lie outside the Western canon, and therefore can be applied Haydn, Feldman, and Sun Ra. Otherwise, there would be no point in using a new term: we may as well stick with Classical if we're just trying to pin down the same thing that's been pinned down all along.
posted by Lawrence Dillon
7:21 PM
Serious
Wiley Hitchcock, I think, wanted to use the term "cultivated music."
Who's more cultivated: Stockhausen or Captain Beefheart? Feldman or Sun Ra? John Adams or Mary Chapin Carpenter?
I suppose every term, as Galen says, has its problem.
posted by Rodney Lister
9:53 AM
What is it
I think I grew up with definition as organized sound, but Cage and others put an end to that (actually had done by the time I was learning the definition, but we were kind of out of the mainstream, both figuratively and literally).
I think now that music is anything that one, as it were, puts the frame around, in other words anything you decide to listen to as music is music. I have some friends with a political/psychiatric/philosophical background who I once had a very long, impassioned, and in the end pretty tedious dinner conversation on the subject. They objected to that idea on the grounds that it didn't make any qualitative judgement--just anything could be good. I don't think I pointed out that there was lots of stuff that would fall under a much less wide ranging definition which was pretty lousy, but I probably should have. Qualitative judgement, any way isn't the point in this case. They didn't convince or dissuade me, though. That's still my definition.
I'm reminded of Cage's writing somewhere, probably in Silence, about going into what was supposed to be a completely silent room that had been built at MIT. When he came out I told them it wasn't silent: he'd heard a very low kind of rumble, and a very high sound. They told him that the low noise was the sound of the blood running through his veins and the high sound was his nervous system (another quote comes to mind, from Eliot: "...the fever sings in mental wires...). Cage said after that he never worried about the future of music.
As I get older I find I have, or maybe had all the time and am just becoming more aware of it, a sort of ringing in my ears, intermittently. As I have got over being freaked out by it, since it doesn't seem to be associated with any loss of hearing aside from that normally associated with aging, it often reminds me both of the Cage story and the Eliot quote.
posted by Rodney Lister
9:37 AM
Seriously, Folks. . .
Marc Geelhoed has an essay up at New Music Box this month on trying to get a psychic reading on who will win the Pullitzer. It's kinda cute, although it didn't hold my attention and I didn't finish it. I do have one strong objeciton though -- he says:
"I covered the new rules of the Pulitzer Prize for the 15 assembled clairvoyants, including Jones, saying that it wasn't just serious composers who could nominate pieces this year, that it was open to jazz musicians, improvisers, even film composers."
We need to stop using that term, "serious composers." Film composers and jazz musicians are every bit as serious as Steve Reich and Eliot Carter are, and the music that they make is every bit as serious. It's extremely condescending to use such a value-laden term as the label for what we're doing. True, we don't have another term that we can agree on either, but that's no excuse for being rude.
posted by Galen H. Brown
8:28 AM
Wednesday, March 02, 2005
que es la musica?
What is music? That's a really subjective question. For some, it is perhaps a series of harmonies. For me, it's organized sound. But in the end, it's really, really subjective. Right now, I'm sitting at work listening to the last hour and a half or so of Feldman's second string quartet. I really love it, as I do much of Feldman's music, particularly the music composed during the last decade of his life. My wife call's it "whale music." But then, she never liked the string quartet I wrote for her either...
My point is that the definition of music can be stretched, just as the definition of what constitutes art is also malleable. While I blow hot and hold on Cage's music, his ideas were very important. One of these was that any sound is music. I'd modify it as "any sound has the potential to be music." It depends on the perception (all sound is perception anyway), the setting, the intent, etc.
When I was in college and med school, I really got into a 90-minute or so album by the composer Alvin Lucier entitled "Music on a Long Thin Wire." I still like it. Essentially, it consisted of a current passed through a wire, and the sound was recorded for a long period of time. Musically, it would seem to be just a single tone for a long time, much like the sine waves LaMonte Young and his wife Marian Zazeela would listen to on a daily basis. However, MLTW is much more than that, since one perceives overtones/harmonics, and other subtle changes that, to my ear, were often beautiful. That's a matter of taste, but I'm sure many people would not consider it music.
There are also a lot of natural sounds that are music. In the end, it's all subjective. We can sit here and debate (which we probably will) from now until the end of time, but we won't reach any definitive answer.
posted by David Toub
10:26 AM
ideologies in music
I think Galen's insights are pretty well on. More contests, and other things, can be found through the AMC opportunity notes they send out, and contests remian a good way to disseminate ones work if you can find the right avenues.
Galen brings up an interesting point about judging. If it were a more objective field of endeavor, then I suppose computers could be programmed both to discern and to compose "great" music. We could just use an algorithm not only to judge, but also to create.
Computer composers do just that, but the human element still presents itself in the choices of parameters.
So it begs the question: What IS music, that it can be evaluated, and on what criteria should it be judged?
posted by Cary Boyce
8:54 AM
Tuesday, March 01, 2005
Competitive Advantage
Most Composition Competitions are a tool for the promotion of a musical ideology. I don't have a problem with that; in fact I think it's inevitable. Competitions are judged by people, each of whom has a particular taste and ideological alignment, and each of whom was selected as a judge by other people who have a particular taste and ideological alignment. (Bear in mind that "I don't believe in being ideologically driven" is itself an ideology.) These judges pick the pieces that they like and give out awards, and in doing so they reward the composers who adhere to the average preferred ideology of the panel of judges. Again, while these are loaded terms, I don't see anything wrong with the system -- I just wish there were more prizes out to promote my own ideology.
Which leads me to my second point. From the perspective of the savvy composer, competitions are primarily a PR tool. If you can get the endorsement of people with clout and bulk up your resume in the process, you have an edge against the people who have fewer formal endorsements. And it's a competitive marketplace, so go nuts, folks. I would certainly enter more competitions if there were more competitions aligned with my aesthetic; as it is, it's hard to justify the time and money required.
Now the fun part: The very structure of the competitive composition arena is evidence to support my claim that (1) competitions are ideologically driven, and (2) we don't have an objective measure of musical quality, or at least not a precise one. Take football -- everybody pretty much agrees that a reasonable way to determine which team is the best team in a given year is to set up a hierarchical structure where teams have to win a certain number of games to reach the playoffs and then if you win you keep going until there are only two teams left, and then you have a giant playoff game, and the winning team is the best team of the year. I've probably got the details wrong, but you see my point. The criteria for "being a good team" is winning a lot of games, so, ipso facto, the "best" team is the one that can win the most games against the most other teams. If we had an objective criteria for musical greatness, the same piece would win every competition into which it was entered, and the only time a different piece won it would be because the "best" piece wasn't entered. Plus, we'd probably have a tiered structure, and the Pulitzer would be the musical Superbowl. Of course, cheerleaders at new music concerts would be kinda fun. . .
posted by Galen H. Brown
3:42 PM
Monday, February 28, 2005
Contests, Prizes, etc.
Talk about a political subject... Contests may be inherently flawed, but they can be useful. I enter them when it's convenient and I have something handy, as someone has to win, and I can use the money if I get lucky.
But the big ones--Pulitzer, Grawemeyer, Guggenheim, etc.--require building a political support system and some mainstream credibility and profile, so the decision makers are comfortable. And to be fair, I'm on the outside looking in, so this is largely conjecture. But as someone who makes most of his mortgage in marketing, I tend to look for trends--and for years, many of these prizes were controlled for years by a New York/East Coast establishment, and tended to go to people in that arena.) It wasn't until John Adams shook things up with some public negative comments--he wondered aloud if winning meant the end of his career--that they took a good close look at themselves and their past awards--and opened the door to more "populist" composers.
I don't think this is a bad thing, as different arenas of music build their systems of support as they can. I came to the conclusion long ago that the "mainstream" systems of academia and art music prizes were not made with me in mind, so I built my own support system: a top-flight new music ensemble, a tiny but very high-end recording label, a community of support, and relationships with conductors, composers, artists, and performers that enjoy working together, and very important: ways of fundraising that actually work for us.
I still enter the contests, but it's icing on the cake and a shock if something actually comes up. But win or not, it's a good way to get your music heard by some decision makers outside of your particular arena, and one never knows what may happen in the long term.
On a previous subject, my comments on Ms. Spears were not directed at her abilities, which are formidable. But again, based on what I've heard (most of which I like very much), I still think her content is mass market driven. I understand performers like Madonna and Prince had a hell of a battle retaining any artistic control of their product. When that day comes for her, as it will the day she decides to swim against the current, I suspect we'll hear about it.
So...Any thoughts on the Oscars?
posted by Cary Boyce
9:03 AM
Sunday, February 27, 2005
Contests, Prizes and Time
I was reading about a contest this morning and I began once again to wonder how composers mange to participate in these contests. This particular contest wanted something for a particular ensemble in a particular duration that was written since January 1, 2004 that had not yet been premiered and yet had been well recorded acoustically.
I never get a good recording until the piece is at least premiered and often until years later. I never get any sort of recording until the piece is performed.
These contest instructions make me wonder how anyone can compete in these things, and yet composers win them, so presumably they have sent in these recordings. Do these composers teach at universities where the faculty members learn and record pieces for their colleagues? Do composers hire performers to learn and record pieces and make them promise not to perform them before the potential contest premiere takes place? How is this managed?
The Pulitzer is even more difficult since it requires a piece written in the past two years that has had its first performance or recording in the United States during the year. At least there is some logic to this since the Pulitzer has to do with news. But how often do concert music composers write a piece, have a premier, get a recording contract and have the actual recording issued that fast? One of my CDs took nine years from concept through fund raising to publication and included pieces that were almost 20 years old by the time the CD came out. Pieces by concert music composers that can even meet the Pulitzer guidelines are truly magical.
posted by Beth Anderson
10:37 AM
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