Musospheres

I’ve had a few glasses of wine, so I’m warning you now, this is going to be a ramble.

Lately I’ve been thinking about how context-dependent music is. The fact that the notes and chords and bits are never as important as the place they are heard, what they mean culturally, the dialogue that surrounds them. A piece of music is given meaning by its relationship to every other piece of music you’ve heard, and everything you’ve heard said about or relating to it. See my previous post for elaboration on this idea.

So in thinking about this, I’ve become very intolerant of views that see music as objective, isolated and absolute. I’ve directed a lot of my ire towards the classical music camp, because I guess I see it as the stronghold of naive musical absolutism. A musical culture which fences itself off in the belief that it is objectively superior to other musics, rather than just in the subjective perceptions of those who already like it more than they like other musics.

Am I being unfair? Read on.

It’s been hard for me to reconcile this with a very strong feeling that I need to appease the art music intelligentsia in the music I write. Being enrolled in a composition PhD in a fairly traditional institution has me feeling under pressure (perhaps more self-generated than anything else) to conform to the western art music tradition.

But what is the Western Art Music tradition? Musically, we transcended a lot of the boundaries in the 70s or before. There are drum kits, guitars, repetition, and simple diatonic harmony in plenty of “serious” music. Avant-garde pop and rock music has incorporated techniques just as earnest and experimental as any art music of the 20th century. So the definition is not to be found in the music itself.

Perhaps to find what Art Music means we need to look at the dialogue that surrounds it. composer vs. songwriter; premiere vs. launch; ensemble vs. band; and suite, work, movement vs. album, track, song; etc. The distinction is in the games we play around the music. It’s in the modes of presentation and distribution, and in the discourse. It’s not in the music anymore… at least not as much. How very McLuhan.

Because of this, it really bugs me when those brought up on classical music seem to show less respect to forms which originate in the pop/rock landscape. It seems like for some (certainly not all), a lack of a published score or a concert hall performance is indicative of a less important music. Having a drummer instead of a percussionist is symptomatic of music which is not “serious”. I don’t think that all conservatoire types think this way, and even those who do may find it difficult to admit, but it is definitely there.

(This video is a good example, if you have the patience to sit through it)

Now for me, from a middle-class suburban background, it is very easy to fire off at the classical crowd for being elitist. I wasn’t exposed to classical music growing up, but instead a steady diet of pop and rock. When I got old enough to find my own music I sought out more and more complex and challenging music to suit my tastes, but I tended to stick within my comfort zone. If I was to listen to avant-garde music it would be John Zorn or Aphex Twin rather than Varese or Stockhausen. I have come to enjoy classical music later in life, and I own and love plenty of it. But, I’m only realising now that perhaps part of my music tastes have been bound by the fact that I’m more comfortable with the artist/album/track format than the composer/work/movement format.

This reminds me a little of a blog post I read a while ago flaming on people who listen to artists like Rachel’s, because they really just want to listen to chamber music, but can’t seem to make the leap to the art music world. The blogger gave a bunch of other examples which I can’t remember, but it was sort of making a point that people are more ready to listen to something packaged in a familiar format than venture new territory, even if the music is largely the same.

So anyways, I guess I’m saying that as an indie music lover, I am guilty of the same sort of preconceptions as the conservatorians that I berate above. I get far more excited about a new work released on limited edition clear 7" via [insert pretentious record label here], than I get about a new work which is to be premiered at the performing arts centre with ticketed allocated seating featuring [insert hotshot conductor/soloist here]. Even if it was the same damn piece of music! If my parents had been inner city professionals perhaps it would be the other way around. Would I be any better or worse for it? No. Does it give me a right to point the finger at others for being snobby? Not really. Do we all just need to open our minds a bit and get along? I think so.

So I’m realising now, that these are all just games. There is a classical music game, and an indie music game, and a dance music game, a North-Indian music game, and gazillions of them. The game is external to the music. So in solution to my earlier conundrum about how to reconcile a general contempt towards the conservatoire culture with the pressure to satisfy the art music types, perhaps all it takes is to adhere to the game, non-musically. Rather than trying to add more tricky modulations or make it more esoteric, perhaps it’s enough to change the names of my tracks from say, “Glacier Process” to “Movement II: Adagio.”