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| Home > Writings > Intervention #1: Musical Openings - Conscious Reader Essay (10th Edition) |
| Intervention #1: Musical Openings - Conscious Reader Essay (10th Edition) | | Date Created: May 06, 2005, 03:17 PM |
Intervention #1: Musical Openings - Conscious Reader Essay (10th Edition)
Date Created: May 12, 2005, 07:01 PM
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Cristian Amigo
Conscious Reader Essay
March 29, 2005
Intervention #1: Musical Openings
Part 1: Intro
Music is a notoriously difficult subject to speak or write about. The first time someone sits down to write about or explain it, their enthusiasm usually hits a wall of silence…itself a kind of music. What is music, anyway? We assume its reality and acknowledge its central part in our personal and cultural lives, listen to it every day, and spend a substantial amount of our incomes on it. We identify with it and take offense if our favorite music is slighted, and we know what we like and especially what we dislike. We buy it, download it (legally and illegally), shape it with software, dedicate our lives to it, study its organizing principles, make love to it, teach it, turn it up, call the police about it, vibrate our cars with it, perform it on instruments, express it in song, collect it, and mark our histories and identities with it. We worship with it, marry to it, animate ritual with it, call down the orishas, and specify what we want played at our funerals. We tease and harass with it, torture with it, and kill with the pumped up feeling it gives us. We sound it at parades and political events to inspire and express identity, solidarity, and patriotism, and we sing it to denounce war and political positions we find offensive. So what is this it, this quasi-object we collect and that we experientially and empirically understand as a fact—a known quantity in the world?
Words fail us. We resort to adjectival expressions (awesome, rocking, dope, astounding, miraculous, pedantic, fucking great, stupid, boring, ecstatic) that intimate how we feel, but nothing about the music itself. We speak of Bowie, Shankar, Björk, Miles, Gardel, and Stravinsky, as channellers or icons of music. We name bands, orchestras, conjuntos, styles, genres, places and cultures. We pontificate, circumscribe, limit, and expand upon it. We recognize talent in music and deny the label of music to the “noise’ that other people make. But what is it we expand upon and deny to Others?
It is a quandary, especially for Westerners, to be unable to express in language something they experience as true or real. Those who claim this sort of knowledge are usually labeled mystics or religious fundamentalists. One difficulty in knowing stems from the seemingly unbridgeable divide between the thing music and talk about music, a situation the American musicologist Charles Seeger once described as the musicological juncture. If you agree this is true and break down the musical experience into the two categories of music and talk, it follows that they are two distinct phenomenological domains. This position emphasizes knowledge of music as experiential, distinctly embodied, and independent of conceptual understanding for its meaning. Further, it implies that music must be understood in its own terms as vibration and experience—not as the formal structure of sound as expressed in Western music theory terms such as counterpoint, melody, and harmony, and definitely not in talk and writing about music which is confused with music itself. Do you find yourself frustrated when talking about music? Do you sense that you never quite get to it?
Musicians and composers often take this position and in so doing unfortunately make their work and artistic process mysterious to the non-expert. Popular musicians generally have a mistrust of musical speculation. They consider academic writing and/or critique spurious, self-serving, and intrusive. At the same time they hope for positive reviews and articles (maybe only negative feedback is spurious). This attitude obscures the interdependent relationship between the artist and the critic, and also feeds into the romantic mythology of the musician as the ever-suffering culture hero whose Orphic skills render him above mere mortals. Just think of all the tantrum-throwing prima donnas in pop music with larger egos than talent, or the sad never-ending cases of self-destructive musicians, and you can see how obnoxious and tragic this myth can be.
Not everyone agrees that there is a divide between music and its description in words, especially academics and writers whose livelihoods are dependent upon their writings ”on” music. Writers assume there is a relationship between music and social structures, ideologies, class, ethnicity, race, gender, etc. and that these relationships can be expressed through language. Although stylistically the writing of academics and journalists is usually very different, they both work under the assumption that talk and writing about music are worthwhile and plausible (related to reality) endeavors. Academics, concerned with tying music to the social sciences or humanities, have developed a critical sociology of music and cultural studies types of approaches that reveal the life of music in many different contexts. Journalists still serve their classic function of “thumbs up” or “thumbs down,” but the best ones show a subtlety of thought and insight that is a valuable corrective to the stiffness of most academic accounts.
In contrast to their “mythological” counterparts, other musicians and composers, especially academic ones, are so tied to their conceptual apparatus that they have to invent entire metaphysical systems and rationales before they feel they have the authority to sound even one note. They are composers without bodies—just brains, soft pencils, and music notation software. The pressure to give a coherent rationale to artistic creation even infects some of the most gifted improvisers, most of whom have banished the consideration of the embodiedness of talent and intuition from their own accounts of their craft, instead falling back onto a technical language that mimics the intellectual absorption of Western music theory and its absence of bodies. This is partly because the symbol “body” has been historically ascribed onto bodies of color in opposition to the supposed superiority of the white Western mind, and this symbolic violence has an ongoing affect.
As a working artist, I. like many other contemporary composers and musicians, try to walk a middle ground between oral and written tradition—one that is cognizant of the intercultural and (especially in the U.S.) racial tensions inherent in such a project. It’s a hazardous course full of false starts and rabbit holes. With a million possibilities in front of us, we have to make some choices from among them, then work with the elements that we hope will make sense together. Intuition about these choices is becoming increasingly important. Intuition in the service of perfect technique is our impossible but worthwhile goal, and being culturally informed is our responsibility as artist-citizens. Today, everybody is eclectic. What you do not want to be is miscellaneous.
This is all very interesting, or not, but have we strayed from our initial question about the identity of music? It seems we have, and that is the point: straying is inevitable. Fortunately, there is no ultimate answer to our question. Nobody can say with certainty what music is. Music is mediated by the body through culturally and personally specific concepts, metaphors, and experiences. And music is activated through action: active listening, thinking, creation, and performance. In human life, music is about music as, of, and, in, on, for and about X, and the answers are inextricably linked to personal and cultural value. Anthropologist John Blacking’s definition of music as “humanly organized sound,” is perhaps one of the best open-ended attempts at answering the unanswerable question: “what is music?” His egalitarian definition identifies the two crucial components of music: people and sound. Perhaps you have never thought of music this way, or perhaps it is obvious to you? In any case, music is not just about sound and its structure, nor exclusively about music-makers, listeners, and celebrities.
Definitions of music are mostly circumscriptions, impositions, limitations on its scope and importance in our lives. A definition is tied to an agenda. It has something to prove—usually at the expense of others and to the benefit of the definer: “we’re the ones who know real music” is the basic assumption. Overly wrought closed definitions limit both sides of the argument in the American culture wars. Both tightly wound conservatives and fussy avant-gardes know what’s best, and best for you and me. . . . If only we could understand the question of value as they
do. . . . If only we were as intelligent as them. The point is we do understand the question and we are as or more intelligent if only because we entertain the possibility of possibilities.
As an artist and scholar, I hope to open the door to myriad interpretations of, or contexts for, playing, thinking, and talking about music. In a sense we’re all experts in music: we’ve had a lifetime of exposure to it and we know what is good and what sucks. But we have to be careful about the certainty of our knowledge and opinions. As the Zen monk Shunryu Suzuki once said: “In the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities; in the expert’s mind there are few.” I hope this essay inspires some and riles up others who see this as yet another claim to cultural relativism in a time that requires sure knowledge of everything including music. These people view music and art as “optional” components in a formal education, an innocuous pastime that shouldn’t say anything except “buy me” or “let me entertain you,” and that is engaged in between “serious” moments such as the production of widgets and reading, ‘riting, and ‘rithmetic. However, even a cursory examination reveals music as an artistic and cultural resource with the potential to model cooperative forms of sociality, and that is thus an important part of a basic education in the contemporary world.
The poet Wallace Stevens writes, “music is feeling, then, not sound.” For the Argentinean novelist Julio Cortázar, music (from Latin American boleros to tangos to Louis Armstrong) is the soundtrack and a touchstone for his reminiscences of Paris and Buenos Aires. For the Kaluli people of Papua New Guinea, music is linked to the “acoustic ecology” of the rainforest. The Oxford Dictionary of Music does not include a definition for music and this is a wise editorial choice. The Webster’s Collegiate takes a stab at it and defines music as, “[t]he science or art of ordering tones or sounds in succession, in combination, and in temporal relationships to produce a composition having unity and continuity.” Why “succession” instead of a pile or mass of sound? Why ordering instead of disordering or randomness/indeterminacy? Why unity instead of chaos? Why continuity rather than non-linearity?—no reason at all, just convention and the unquestioning assimilation of a life-long truisms about the question: “What is music?”
Part 2 Development: Musical Exercise
Musicians spend a lifetime working through exercises that build and maintain their technique. The following is a musical exercise designed to build your music culture chops (a geek word meaning music skills). It is an open-ended exercise that I begin but do not conclude. I have compiled a preliminary list of single-words that fit the statement: music as, of, and, in, at, on, for and/or about X. This list is not comprehensive, but it reveals many different paths to thinking about and engaging with music. From this list, I randomly chose terms and annotated them with opinions, quasi-definitions, definitions, and stream of consciousness associations. The possibilities are endless and my own annotations were only limited by the word limit of this essay. The complement to my entries are your own annotations (opinions, quasi-definitions, definitions, and stream of consciousness associations) that will exponentially expand your view of music and give you an invaluable resource from which to draw out ideas and sounds.
EXERCISE
music as, of, and, in, at, on, for and/or about:
sound, art, function, commodity, vibration, identity, silence, space, waves, digital, copyright, culture, loop:
music as loop. Using a short loop of Cuban percussion may give a digital groove a nice “Cuban,” flavor, but if that is the extent of the creator’s engagement with Cuban music, she should perhaps refrain from claiming a Cuban influence unless she goes back for more tastes of, or a thorough immersion in, Cuban musical cuisine . . . a deep art. Contemporary Cuban musicians do eat rice and beans and use sampling technology in their own work, but eating rice and beans and using samples does not make you Cuban…¿entiendes? How many times can you say Cuban?,
thunderous, pompous, plane, plain, rhythm, movement, groove, funky, swing, adjective, volume, discovery, culture, distraction, commodity:
music as commodity. In an increasingly commodified digital age, it is easy to assume that owning a computer, a sampler (with a couple of sitar samples) and digital recordings (MP3s, CDs, itunes, video), and cultivating a look, automatically makes the consumer an artist—the consumer-artist. Corporations know the artists’ lifestyle is attractive, and they sell the artist-identity to anyone who can come up with the purchase price of their hip products. If your credit line is high enough you can purchase genius credentials. Of course, artists do use computers and global influences (and samples) for realizing their work, and they, as well as consumer-artists, do find themselves increasingly engaged in working with digital processes that composer Brian Eno describes as “curatorial. “ (i.e. selecting and mixing pre-existing materials as opposed to creating sounds and forms from scratch.,
thinking, ethnic, form, theory, education:
music in education. 1. In America, formal education in music is still the Western classical one of conservatories, with the addition of a jazz curriculum since the 1970s. Quick, how many of your favorite classic, mostly African American jazz artists learned how to play in conservatories like these?,
musicians, immigrants, artists, color, shape, soundtrack, style, spatial, silence:
music of silence. On September 11, 2001 dancers moved to a silent milonga—unsounded, but heard—in New York City’s Central Park.,
ritual, television, stage, dirge, opera:
music in opera. If the drama isn’t sung it isn’t opera.,
concentration, camp:
music in camp. 1. A Jewish women’s orchestra is forced to accompany the Nazi slaughter at Auschwitz.,
history, memory:
music and memory. Berkeley-based Chilean composer Quique Cruz uses his music and art to critique the Chilean military junta’s brutality against its own people since 1973.,
story, vocal, instrument, weapon:
music as weapon. See torture.,
depressant, text, written:
music as written. A melody of mine from Michael John Garcés’ play points of departure.,
oral, polyrhythmic, business, structure, dark, corny, hip hop, metal, violence, software, instruments, guitar:
music on guitar. Jimi Hendrix, Paco de Lucia, and Baden Powell.,
composer, orchestra, location, ambience, cage:
music as cage. John Cage’s experiments with indeterminacy and open structures challenged the dominant almost metaphysical belief in the evolutional superiority of Western, especially German, music, its rational and “scientific” basis, and the teleological structure of its melodic and harmonic principles.,
emptiness, form, definition:
music in definition. Music is the infinite sonic possibility of finite beings.,
zen, war, other, logic, mind, study:
music as study. Acousticians, systematic musicologists, and physicists think about music in scientific terms: as waves; as envelopes of attack, decay, sustain, and release; as pressure on the human body and other materials; as empirical analysis of musical perception and cognition; aesthetics; tuning systems; and so on. Ethnomusicologists originally focused on non-Western folk and classical musics (Hindustani, Balinese, Japanese), but now study all forms of “world” and popular music, their primary focus being the relationship of music to culture, the latter a concern they inherited from anthropology and now share with the rest of the social sciences and humanities. Musicologists come in different types and sizes. Some of them are still concerned with the three B’s (Bach, Beethoven, Brahms), but others are interested in heavy metal, country, girl groups, queer studies, etc.,
theory, power, safe, monks, spheres, myth, nature, motive, fragment, sequence, anger, career, song, voice, tone, timbre, gender, class, poem, copyright:
music and copyright. Why do some companies protect copyright while at the same time producing and selling the technology to “infringe” upon said copyright? If we outlaw samplers, then only outlaws will have samplers.,
muslim, faith, busy, minimal, maximal, god, broadway, gamelan, stupid, dumb, race, nazi, terror:
music and terror. See torture.,
baroque, repetition, hope, asia, gay, disco, porn, medium, liquid, beat, dj, platonic:
music as platonic. A fantasy universe where music has an objective reality outside of time, space, and the stain of culture—where genius is a humanly transcendent and transparent fact accessible to a reasonable, always Western, usually male, mind.,
music as alternative. Is alternative a quality or a specific style?,
musical, street, soldiers, death, vietnam, baghdad, minorities, expression, overwhelming, healing, airports, autos, silk, wood, bamboo, prayer, happy, joy, infinite:
music as infinite. John Coltrane and Charlie Parker knew that music was always one step ahead of their musical efforts—they never controlled it in a way they found completely satisfactory. I once heard Herbie Hancock say that music, if not respected, can “kick your ass.” I believe Herbie.,
musicology, systematic, major, dope, feeling, texture, grain, leading, magazines, prison, space, gang, entertainment, tradition, new, postmodern, evolution:
music in evolution. As late as the mid to late-nineteenth century, misreadings of Darwin were used to support the evolutionist belief that culture evolved in discrete stages with the European stage forming the apex of the evolutionary triangle. It was thought that by studying the music of “primitives,” Europeans might discover something about what their own culture and society was like when it too was “barbaric.” Only toward the beginning of the twentieth century was this belief finally discarded through the efforts of the anthropologist Franz Boas and his students. They insisted that since culture(s) evolved differently, cultural manifestations such as music and art needed to be studied in their own cultural contexts.,
resistance, gun, witness, torture:
music for torture. A 2005 article in the New York Times noted that, as a part of normal interrogation procedures, prisoners in Guantanamo, Cuba were being forced to listen to the music of rap-metal band Rage Against the Machine at physiologically destructive decibel levels.,
fame, live, live, recorded, serial, control, german, old, contagion, sin, outrageous, within, children, animals, offices, airports, supermarkets, dance, facile, martial, length, volume, society, ancient, primitive, salvation:
music of salvation. Religious music played a central part in the indoctrination of colonial subjects whose own musical expressions were replaced by the music of the Catholic church. In this way, Spaniards in colonial Mexico were able to eliminate most Aztec knowledge of their own music and culture in the span of one generation.,
samba, produced, raw, intro, outro, segue, cartoonish, character, foolish, ghoulish, tight, timing, feel, real, jazz, wanting, mambo, gagaku, library, building, additive, subtractive, architecture:
music as architecture. Music is talked about ad infinitum despite the popularity of sayings such as “talking about music is like dancing to architecture.” If you find yourself looking at the Brooklyn Bridge and its rhythm, form, and structure don’t physically move you, well . . . look again.,
street, secondary, first, party, groove, ocean, stream, dream, article, subliminal, exotic, flowers, royal, toil, hierarchical, revolution, protest, status:
music and status. The Koran regards music as a vice and corrupter of virtue. Does anyone remember the Taliban’s proscriptions against music? A low regard for music and musicians is not unique to the Muslim world. Until fairly recently, while considering music a central component of national culture, Latin American society shunned the figure of the popular musician, and considered him (usually a him) a marginal figure whose only function was partying, chasing women, consuming his host’s wine, food and resources, and drinking his own life away. His status changed, of course, if he happened to be famous, his success ensuring social approval and adulation from Mexico City to Santiago, Chile.,
sloppy, sick, rolling, owned, buddhist, crude, odd, playing, swaying, orphic, perfunctory, obnoxia, enchanting, thrilling, killing, woman, allegro, adagio, trophy, man, crystalline, child, event, school, sports, elite, license, mood, predictable, incomprehensible, scattered, festival, parade, computer, aid, social, performance, rational, bolero, cuba:
music as cuba. A floating conservatory.,
contested, superior, war, movies, suave, trio, quartet, nonet, score:
music as score. In Western “serious” or classical music, the written score is such a naturalized part of the culture that it is often thought of as the music itself rather than as a set of instructions for realizing a musical performance.,
mystery, talent, electronic, chant, rant, punk, policy, dying, gift, british, phallus, technical, queer, sacred, africa, lecture, popular, collage, science, bit, waveform, decadence, sustain, release, relief, meaningful, meaningless, therapy, sex, love, future, work, drama, theatre, institution:
music as institution. Classical music has suffered from dwindling public support that makes the future of current musical institutions such as orchestras and conservatories uncertain. Often these two, the institutions and the music, are conflated, and the death knell of the institutions is equated with the end of “music.” The reality is more complicated, and I am optimistic about the fate of Western classical music. Its contribution to the cultural history of the world is an unprecedented tradition of artistic accomplishment. Perhaps the classical music community will find a way to reanimate its relevance in a postmodern world, and in that way keep their jobs to their and our mutual benefit. But, the elitism has to go. Nobody appreciates being snubbed, especially people who are potential patrons. Hopefully, the institutionalizers of jazz will also take heed and not tie their futures to a “classical” model that is clearly not working.,
action, philosophy, literature, strings, transcultural, american, body, formless, harmless, ponderous, lovely, wicked, vicious, ghetto, thought, energy, impression, painting, abstract, concrete, dada, luxury, savage, insistent, polyrhythmic, polytonal, polyester, oldies, folk, artifact, process, system, glorious, enlightenment, maya, mantra, pain, seasonal, mix, muted, math, symbol, numbers, singing, open, improvisation, closed, chord, dynamic, medium, language, hymn, indigenous, drum, line, concert, show, group, notes, growing, tempo, slowing, stopping, held, list, old, brown, farce, satire, comedy, drama, ruined, saved, played, fate, book, false, writing, notation, stars, crazy, weak, shit, tribe, town, radio, tame, game, village, hindu, pop, bomb, misused, commitment, political, . . .
Part 3: Outro
Music is too large to contain, even for the biggest egos and talents. That is why I do not believe anyone who identifies themself as, or plays, an “expert” on music—it’s an exorbitant and unrealistic claim to make. This does not mean that there are not people of wisdom, insight, and experience from whom I can’t learn. . . . There are many, and I do learn every day. I try to keep my mind and ears open to suggestions and sounds that often come from unexpected places.
I do not claim “expertise” in all matters musical, and I can only suggest you avoid becoming experts yourselves. That way you don’t turn out like those bores who claim to be objective barometers of cultural value. Leave that nonsense to politicians. Instead, try to keep the excitement of a “beginners mind,” that active, interested, even naïve part of yourself that always sees things as if for the first time—fresh and new. Trust your insights, but challenge your and others’ assumptions about the place of music and art in everyday life. It is always larger than you imagine. And if you can, make some music or noise yourself. Freedom of expression, artistic and otherwise, is our human and American inheritance. It is not given to us by government, and it’s not meant to be controlled from without—it’s inherently ours—our creativity belongs to us to do with as we see fit. Let’s pass it on.
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