What’s Music For?
Filed under: Uncategorized — Giulianna Maria Lamanna @ 6:53 AM
I can never get into live albums. Or remixes, for that matter, or any alternate version of a song that I know. The few exceptions to this rule tend to be songs I heard first and/or exclusively as live versions (Nirvana’s “About a Girl,” for example) or songs unique to that live performance. But in every other case, multiple versions of the same song generally just irk me. At the very least, there’s always that one line that the singer changes a little, or that bass that doesn’t come in at the right moment, that pops out at me and sounds horribly, resoundingly wrong. As you can imagine, for this reason the recent tidal wave of “Hallelujah” covers has driven me completely insane.
Obviously, this is not exactly the healthiest way to appreciate music. It all boils down, once again, to literality vs. orality. The literate concept of the song, like the literate concept of the story, is of something static. Recording technology has emphasized this viewpoint, but it’s been with us ever since people began writing music down. The Song is something separate from The Performance; different people may perform The Song, in different venues, in front of different audiences, on different dates, in different years, and during different times in their lives, but all these performances ultimately boil down to the same single, static Song. You or other people may perform or even record different versions of that Song, with different lyrics even, and people may spend hours debating which version is best, but The Song—the original, the “real” version—still remains.
Naturally, if there’s only one real song, there’s only one real writer, composer, and performer (or a group of them working together under one name). And that’s where the literate concept of music gets nastily elitist: music is for the few to make and the many to hear. Our culture, by and large, believes that only an elite, chosen few (The Artists) are capable of making good music; for the rest of us, going to concerts and dancing and singing along (sometimes even with The Artist’s consent!) comprise the absolute height of our involvement in this music.
This isn’t always completely true—Ben Folds, for example, has toured with only his piano, and when he plays songs like “Army,” he calls on his audiences to sing the trumpets and saxophones, making them an important part of the performance. And as much as the RIAA wishes it weren’t so, the Internet is full of fan-made remixes, mash-ups, and music videos. Licenses like Creative Commons allow artists like Jonathan Coulton to legally endorse and even encourage such practices. But at the end of the day, there is one real version of “Army” (with real trumpets and saxophones), the infamous Grey Album only narrowly avoided being sued out of existence, and that bald guy is totally not Jonathan Coulton, however awesome he may be at Guitar Hero.
I think a part of rewilding our art will involve rethinking what music should be. Specifically, let’s take a look at how primitive peoples experience music. In his book Nature and Madness, Paul Shepard critiques our current idea of what it means to make music:
In conventional history/progress thinking, the complexity and quality of music have steadily grown in the course of cultural evolution from something repetitive and simple like the Kalahari bushman’s plucking his bowstring to the symphonies of the nineteenth century. But a very different view is possible. Suzanne Langer observes that “the great office of music is to . . . give us insight into . . . the subjective unity of experience” by using the principle of physical biology: rhythm. Its physiological effect is to reduce inner tensions by first making them symbolically manifest, then resolving and unifying them. . . . One interpretation is that the more complex the music, the more fundamental the problem; or, one might say, the more elaborate the music, the more fragmented the vision of the world. Composer and musician Paul Winter has said that we are now habituated to an overstructured format, especially in so-called classical music, from which we need to escape into a more informal extemporaneous performance and audition. But if, indeed, music is a kind of final refuge serving to hold things together, this might be impossible in modern life.
Compare this to the Vhavenda of South Africa. John Blacking looked at their music as a harmonization of the individual and community. (Sager, 2006:145)
…they express concepts of individuality in community, and of social, temporal, and spatial balance … the players are their own conductors and yet at the same time submit to the rhythm of an invisible conductor. This is the kind of shared experience which the Venda seek and express in their music making. (Blacking, 1973:29-30; cited in Sager, 2006:145)
In hunter-gatherer bands, every individual contributes to most musical events. (Waterman, 1993:251-252) They don’t have the same hang-up we do of music as something mysterious that distant, unknowable geniuses come up with for us to passively listen to. Everyone participates.
Anthropologists and musicologists have emphasized the importance of the ‘circle’ as the site of both creativity and community in African cultures. The music, lyrics, and dance that emanate from the circle often reflect these attributes: rhythmic complexity and syncopation; individual improvisation and stylization; call-and-response; engagement between individuals and the community at large; commentary in the form of satire, parody, or boastful competition; and a sense of group consciousness. The tension between individual improvisation and communal flow produces and celebrates both a balance between individuals and the community and a safe place for individual expression of daring and excellence. Each value depends on the other. The community rewards both individual ’stylization’ and mastery of a canon. While other traditions around the world employ these dynamics as well, West African aesthetic principles had a clear and profound effect on American culture through music, dance, prose, poetry, and humor. The ’shape’ of West African creativity is a circle, not a line. (Vaidhyanathan, 2001:125)
Now, two melodies, when played at once, tend to harmonize, and no one plays music in a vacuum. Music as participatory performance harmonizes the dancers, singers and players with one another, and then harmonizes their rhythm with the rhythm of the bird songs, winds, and other sounds of the living world around them. Music is not a product to consume, but an experience that brings people together, to participate in each other’s lives and in the world around us, a means of dwelling.
Compare that to modern-day recording studios, designed by people who have gone to great lengths to make sure that nobody can tell these bands are playing songs in the middle of a city. Recording takes away from music as a shared and temporary experience, as a moment in time that arises out of a group of people joining together with each other and with the world around them.
The elitism of the distant, genius Artist has been challenged, mainly by folk and punk music (hell, half the groundbreaking punk bands could barely play their instruments) and now by the influx of otherwise-amateur musicians recording their stuff on their home computers and posting it on the Internet. However, most people are content to just sit back and listen, as if the circle of Artists has widened, but not enough to include them. The next step is for all of us to make music, not worrying about recording it or producing it or selling it, but just making music with each other for the fun of it, because it brings us together. The next step is for all of us to just open our mouths and sing.
REFERENCES
Sager, R. (2006). Creating a musical space for experiencing the other-self within. In Reily, S.A. (Ed.) The musical human: Rethinking John Blacking’s ethnomusicology in the twenty-first century. London: Ashgate Publishing, Ltd. pp. 143-170.
Vaidhyanathan, S. (2001). Copyrights and copywrongs: The rise of intellectual property and how it threatens creativity. New York: NYU Press.
for those who have a hard time bringing themselves to the point of singing (and, I admit, I fall into that category) folk music from around the world encompasses hundreds if not thousands of fairly simple, inexpensive instruments.
options range from a $5 harmonica to a homemade flute or whistle (from recycled PVC, perhaps), a guiro, and so much more.
also, i really recommend trying to “get” blues music. the basic I-IV-V blues progression is simple enough for a “music theory” challenged person such as myself to understand and it’s the basis of a lot of songs you already know, and it’ll really start to crack open that hard, crunchy shell of “The Artist”.
Comment by jhereg — 27 March 2008 @ 9:45 AM
Of course, my attention of late has focused on Song’s cousin, Story, especially with what self-styled “indie punks” have done with story games to break down the mystique of first “the Game Designer,” and then “the GM” to create more participatory story-jamming and story bands, just like punk rock broke down the barriers between “Artist” and “audience.”
I still haven’t finished Tim Ingold’s Perception of the Environment, but its arguments about art-as-process, rather than art-as-objects, ties in here, too. Painting, sculpting, and so on, the “dwelling perspective” does not see these as activities aimed at producing an object of art, but rather, sees objects of art as the remnants of artistic activity. A sculptor leaves a sculpture, a mask-carver leaves a mask and a painter leaves a painting in exactly the same way that a walker leaves a track: not as a purpose, but as a remnant from the pursuit of a particular mode of activity. So Ingold looks at masks carved by native Alaskan people, and how the act of carving it helps them coax out the deeper perceptions of, say, a salmon; in Australia, aboriginal peoples paint by going over the patterns laid down by the ancestors, creating the world anew. The Alaskan people often hide the masks once they’ve finished them; the aborigines care little for the paintings they create. To this, I’d add civilized practices like Buddhist sand paintings. The activity, the process, the performance matters, rather than what that performance leaves behind. And that means you don’t look to art as objects to admire; you look to it as a performance to take part in.
Heh—I wonder what John Zerzan would have to say about that?
Comment by Jason Godesky — 27 March 2008 @ 11:30 AM
Just had to say thank you; I’m talking to a musician to help out with a ritual we’re running this weekend & though I knew why I needed him, I couldn’t articulate it — now I know. SO, thank you!
Oh… and as an aside — Hey Jason! What in the worlds are you talking about — “Song” and “Story” as cousins. Yeesh. Same person. Shapeshifter. Likes being female sometimes, other times likes being male. And other times… well, lets just say “Silence” is as powerful an un-gender as I can think of to include in this list!
So, with that, thank you again Guili.
Best
Bill Maxwell
Comment by Bill Maxwell — 27 March 2008 @ 1:21 PM
Well, I had my suspicions about that, but I didn’t want to make too extreme a claim.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 27 March 2008 @ 4:50 PM
Drum Circle!
Comment by JCamasto — 27 March 2008 @ 6:19 PM
Great stuff Giuli!
I’ve been meaning to start writing on this subject for a long time, since it was largely my experiences with institutional music-making that first made me open (and then quickly sympathetic) to a critique of hierarchy.
Lately I’ve been looking at orchestras and noticing how their structure and organisation are perfect miniatures of industrial societies: division of labour, pre-programmed individual units of production (interchangeable if they malfunction), an assembly line from the initial blueprint with each factory worker performing their task dutifully but with no intrinsic meaning… it’s all there. Holistic artisans no longer, their work only has meaning within a larger context which they can’t appreciate from their position. An orchestra isn’t a circle! If you watch the individual players their attention will most often be focused on the page in front of them or on the conductor (glorious leader?), NOT amongst each other. That’s not communication, that’s a reinforcement of social isolation. They might as well be in cubicles behind glowing screens.
(Ahem. A bit of residual indignation left over here - I’ll have to go into more depth elsewhere and work through it at an appropriately slow pace…)
A strange thing about artists who have been put on ‘genius’ pedestals during their lifetimes is that their work often suffers as a result. It probably must seem like they’ve found a ‘winning formula,’ so any subsequent creative evolution has to stagnate in order to accommodate that one trick which pulls the punters in. Could this be our society’s way of saying: “so much creativity, but no more”?
I think you hit the nail on the head with ‘literality vs. orality’. Improvisation and spontaneity has no place in truly civilised music. The final composition of the genius composer (how can a work of art ever be ‘finished’? - surely you work on it and it works on you until the day you die) is a representation of his macho struggle for eternal, changeless immortality against all natural odds. Like David Abram’s ‘alphabetic civilisation’ (and as Jason is fond of pointing out) it’s the worst animist heresy.
Maybe the jazzers swung the pendulum too far over the other side away from conformity to rigid structure, overall turning the music into a bit of an ego-driven tuneless mush, but I still recommend improvisational fluidity as a key to keeping things live in the short term and a-live in the long. Jhereg mentioned the blues as a solidly anti-elitist base on which brilliance can still thrive (as a teaching example for all in the circle), so I’ll let Stevie Ray wrap this one up for me:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWLw7nozO_U
Rawk on \m/
Comment by Ian M — 28 March 2008 @ 4:35 PM
Thou shalt not put musicians and recording artists on ridiculous pedestals no matter how great they are or were.
The Beatles? Just a band.
Led Zepplin? Just a band.
The Beach Boys? Just a band.
The Sex Pistols? Just a band.
The Clash? Just a band.
Crass? Just a band.
Minor Threat? Just a band.
The Cure? Just a band.
The Smiths? Just a band.
Nirvana? Just a band.
The Pixies? Just a band.
Oasis? Just a band.
Radiohead? just a band.
Bloc Party? Just a band.
The Arctic Monkeys? Just a band.
The next big thing? Just a band.
Comment by Jason Godesky — 28 March 2008 @ 8:39 PM
Hey –
Good Stuff, Giuli!
It struck me as I read that this is probably the core of the origins of the jam band scene. To this day, when the dead play, their music continues to be a work in process, continues to be an experience they participate in with the fans that choose to come out and play with them (play in the ‘game’ sense, rather than the perform sense). Unfortunately, many of the newer ‘jam bands’ are following a ‘formula’ — their music meanders and flows, but often its just following a meander that was once conceived and written down, rather than truly being an ongoing artistic exploration……………. although they too often hold the audience as more participants than the mainstream……
Anyway, beyond that, I’m with Jim… drum circle (guitar circle, sing along, what have you….)!
Janene
Comment by Janene — 29 March 2008 @ 11:44 AM
Ugh Jason! So hard when you hit all my favourites.
Comment by Fenriswolfr — 29 March 2008 @ 8:56 PM
bjork once said something about minimalism (music - i suppose other contexts are appicaple too),something to the effect of it being “an artistic reaction to an increasingly complex world” and i’ve always liked that.
Comment by matt — 8 May 2008 @ 8:48 PM
I play jazz music over in philadelphia in college and the excerpt you posted reminded me so much of the small combo setting of jazz music:
rhythmic complexity and syncopation; (an odd time signature, or complex rythmic scheme)
individual improvisation and stylization; (do I have to explain this?)
call-and-response; (musicans will “trade fours” or play four bars and have another play respond for another four)
engagement between individuals and the community at large; (the individual has it’s own role that contributes to the form)
commentary in the form of satire, parody, or boastful competition; (a sense of humorous playing or “battling”)
and a sense of group consciousness (nobody “conducts” a jazz combo. The bass player, pianist, drummer and horn player(s) all contribute to the time and structure, which is subject to changes, alterations and complete fucking overhauls during the course of a performance)
Comment by Django — 10 May 2008 @ 9:04 PM
How many of the above people who wrote comments plus the writer of the article itself - do not listen to recorded music at all ?
Primitivism with electricity?
Comment by vishal — 13 June 2008 @ 4:37 AM