Music: On missing the point and being ok.

There’s things about the music industry, the music press, and institutionalised music teaching that have always felt just a bit wrong. Sometimes when I think about the way we rate and consume music, and compare that with the way every culture on earth has used music since we stopped being chimpanzees, I wonder if we are missing the point. This post isn’t to point fingers, mind you, because I engage with the modern music industry on a daily basis, and I include myself in those missing the point. I’m just trying to come to terms with it.

I’m gonna juxtapose a bunch of little disconnected stories and then hopefully get to the point at the end.

Story #1. [BAND X] are the downfall of music, they are just soulless ripoffs of [BAND Y] who were criminally under-appreciated, etc.

Go read Collapse Board. Or Pitchfork. Pick any post and read it. Take note of the discourse and value system. I think what you’ll find is the same thing you’ll find in any pillar of indie music press: An expectation of assumed background knowledge necessary to really understand the content; an underlying paradigm where some music is objectively better or worse than other music against a mysterious set of criteria that constitutes “good taste”; and a fierce backing of these judgements that bind the aesthetic with the personal and emotional.

It sounds like I am having a go, but I do like reading these things. The writers are intelligent people, and as a side-dish to the meat of everyday music listening, they can definitely make the meal more delicious. And when you are in on the obscure knowledge required to understand an article, there’s a feeling of being part of a cool exclusive club.

Story #2. This bone flute has an indie sort of tone.

While the Western World has dominated our music culture over the last hundred years, let’s not forget that humans have been making music for about 40,000 years, and that’s way longer than U2 have been around. Research into the 99.9% of music-making in human history that doesn’t involve post 1400AD Western music doesn’t tend to find that cavepeople held band competitions. European peasants in the middle ages used pitchforks, sure, but they didn’t rate their music on a 100-point scale.

Generally what you do find is that many cultures used music as a daily part of life, to strengthen community, create bonds, and have a good old dance. The separation between player and audience is a fairly recent one, and the line between composer and performer is even younger than that.

Story #3. Gee, you’d better not play a wrong note!

I attended a recital of modern classical piano duo a while ago, and it made me angry. I’ve spent the last few months trying to figure out why.

They played a work by an experimental composer, and beforehand they announced they were very proud of the achievement of actually learning the piece. To illustrate this point, they projected some of the score for the audience, who dutifully groaned “aah” or “whoa”, confirming that the score did indeed look totally stupid. It looked like a transcription of corn popping.

They proceeded to play the piece, both players looking very frantic and intense as they did so. I couldn’t help wonder whether or not they could have achieved the exact same effect by simply improvising. I didn’t mind the way the piece sounded, but it seemed silly that they had to spend hours learning note-for-note the very unintuitive scribblings of some lofty composer on high, to create something that could have easily been improvised. It also bothered me that it was necessary for them to show us the score and say “look, it’s really hard! And we learnt it all!” It struck me as symptomatic of a musical paradigm missing the point completely.

Story #4. Musical cramming

Perhaps you or someone you know can relate to this: you buy tickets for a band you really like, but you haven’t really had a chance to listen to their most recent album. The show is in a week, and you know they’re gonna mostly play their new stuff. What do you do? Freaking study. You listen to that new album as much as you can leading up to the show because you know you will enjoy the show more if you can recognise all the songs, perhaps even bleat joyfully along with some of the words.

Anyone who can say in a nutshell why people do this is on the way to understanding what music is about. As for me, I have opinions, but I’m far from totally getting it.

Story #5. Let’s sing together so that I stop hating you so much…

Have you seen almost famous? Go watch this. It’s the scene where they get in the van and back on the road, all grumpy and hating each other. Then one-by-one they start singing along with Elton John’s “Tiny Dancer”, and it turns into a big chorus of love and good cheer.

The point.

So when we consider the history of human music, modern music criticism starts to feel a bit like one of those fashion magazine pages, where they show a celebrity in a perfectly good dress with the caption “WHAT WAS SHE THINKING!” and then next to that, another celebrity in a dress that probably looks pretty similar, with the caption “SO HOT RIGHT NOW.” Arbitrary and stupid is what I am saying here, in case that’s not clear.

Upon reflection, the really important musical experiences in my life have not depended on the music being of a certain quality. They’ve been more like the Almost Famous scene above, where the specific piece of music involved is not as important as the social and cultural conditions around it. Despite my Pitchfork-derived music snobbery at home, if I am in Japan singing karaoke with Japanese friends I will sing Green Day’s Time of Your Life at the top of my lungs, because it’s the only song everyone knows. It’s a beautiful and memorable musical experience, cultural and linguistic barriers are broken, bonds are created. And I really really really hate that goddamn song.

So why is it that how “good” or “bad” a piece of music is seems so central to our musical culture and practice? Even though these days social and cultural factors have earned a place in our analysis of music (thank god), the ultimate aim seems still to be evaluation, justification - deciding how good it is and why. Think about the culture around classical music, conservatoire culture is all about what’s better or purer than other stuff, and the debates can get as nitty gritty as what left-hand technique on the violin is superior, or what interpretation of Chopin’s Études most accurately translates the composer’s intentions (which are of course, of paramount importance).

This is where I feel we are missing the point. From gatekeepers of hipster cool to the classical intelligentsia, we are obsessed with evaluation and the detail of specific compositions. But it seems to me this is all much less important than how we experience music, who with, and what it means.

Being ok with it.

So, being someone whose life consists mainly of studying a composition PhD where I’ll spend 3 or 4 years striving to write better music, running a record label where we select specific music that we think is better than other music and try to sell it to people on the basis of it being good, and playing in a band where we stand up on a stage and play pre-written compositions to a non-participating, silently judging audience… the realisations above knocked the wind out of me a little bit.

But it’s ok. What I realised is that debating about proper bassoon technique is an over-civilised version dancing naked around the fire. Spending your formative years toiling away at learning AMEB’s awfully outdated theory curriculum is just a long and drawn-out version of cramming an album before a concert. Reading Collapseboard or Pitchfork is a snobby version of getting together with your friends and being able to sing together because you all know the words.

So it’s ok, because all this obsession with good music and bad music is just a game. We all take part in the game and express ourselves through it, because dancing naked around a fire is just a bit too raunchy for us, so we have to do it like this (also there are bushfire safety concerns). Critics, musicians, professors, industry people - we all contribute to the dialogue as if it’s really serious, discussing the minor details of little tiny bits of music, when actually the dialogue itself is what we really love. If we truly understand the multiplicity of culture, then surely we realise there’s no justification for calling something good or bad anyway. We still do it because it’s human, social, and fun. Some of us get paid to do it, for the same sort of reason that professional sportspeople get paid.

The problem starts when people get so caught in the game that they actually buy into the discourses within. Thinking that if someone hasn’t heard of Boards of Canada’s Music Has the Right to Children album they are actually not very cool. Or that your family campfire singalong would be so much more enjoyable for everyone if we all sang Radiohead songs instead of Cat Stevens. Or that a certain way of playing the double bass in an orchestra is really going to result in the audience having a better or worse experience, when actually the experience of going to see an orchestra is as much about getting dressed up, having a glass of champagne, and reading the program notes, and later discussing how good or bad it was, as it is about the actual performance of music.

So missing the point is ok, as long as we know it. Don’t forget that it’s a game. Don’t ever actually judge someone on their music taste, even if it’s fun to joke about with friends who like the same stuff. Just enjoy the game.