Composers Forum is a daily web log that allows invited contemporary composers to share their thoughts and ideas on any topic that interests them--from the ethereal, like how new music gets created, music history, theory, performance, other composers, alive or dead, to the mundane, like getting works played and recorded and the joys of teaching. If you're a professional composer and would like to participate, send us an e-mail.
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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
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