Standards for "good" music

As usual, Professor Gann nails it — the whole valorization question that I've wrestled off and on, whether a musical work is "good" or not. I've never really been able to tell, because a whole lot of music that a whole lot of people think is Tony-the-Tiger-Great leaves me bored witless. And while I'm willing to concede that craft and skill exist, music still has to speak to me, and so much music appreciation comes down to taste. And Gann goes deeper, a registry of specific musical virtues such as innovation, craftsmanship, depth, which in turn can appeal more or less to specific listeners, depending on their backgrounds and, well, taste. Nobody owns a value hierarchy on these virtues:

There are no objective standards. But there is an infinity of objective facts, there is a quasi-infinity of musical virtues, and no majority or plurality has the right to proclaim that we all have to content ourselves with the music that embodies their particular favorite virtues.

Kyle Gann: musicologist, composer, bullshit-detector. As they say, read the whole thing.

Sound art at the academy

Leigh Landy is a composer and scholar interested in the accessibility, or rather its lack, of electroacoustic music. Several years of performing and study have led him to the creation of an all-encompassing web site, EARS (the ElectroAcoustic Resource Site), and the publication of a recent book, Understanding the Art of Sound Organization, that introduces the site. Landy believes that electroacoustic music (the term he prefers is sound-based music) would be much more accepted among a serious listening audience if there was more agreement among its devotees on categorization and terminology, as well as a more common foundation among its scholarly advocates. To this end, Landy has written a short but comprehensive overview of the state of sound-based music studies.

Landy has been concerned about accessibility for several years, and in the early 1990s he investigated the "something to hold on to" factor before launching a more thorough investigation in the Intention/Reception project. Here, he played sound-based music three times in a laboratory setting, providing a little bit more information for each subsequent listening, and followed by various questions for the listeners. The book goes into considerable detail about these topics, including a complete set of questionnaires for the project.

The real meat of the book is the long second chapter, where Landy tackles the current state of theory of sound-based music. Occupying almost half of the book, the survey is a more comprehensive overview of scholarly literature than anything else I've found. In nearly every section, I found myself flipping back and forth between the text, the end notes and the bibliography, trying to follow references for more information. It's a staggering amount of food for thought, and summarization is impossible. Highlights include:

• Musique concrète and the solfege of sounds originating with Pierre Schaeffer and continuing through Michel Chion, François Bayle, and Denis Smalley. This is an extremely well developed body of theory, but little of it has been translated into English. Canadian Denis Smalley has continued work in this vein, and fortunately he writes in English (even if it's published in obscure journals and academic books). Schaeffer created a detailed taxonomy of sound objects that I've always found tantalizing, although I've never actually tried to apply it.
  
  
• Soundscape composition, originating with R. Murray Schafer and continuing with Barry Truax. In his accessibility studies, Landy found that the presence of recognizable real-world sounds created a focus for listeners. Similarly to the musique concrète composers, soundscapers work from the material up, but the soundscapers attention to ecology and the environment is a substantial difference between the two groups.
  
  
• The search for new sounds, including microsound and noise. Microsound's primary theoretician is Curtis Roads, but the examination of different timescales in music is very broad. New sound discovery also leads to a brief discussion of noise (mostly because of Paul Hegerty's work) and lowercase artists.
  
  
• Formalist approaches, where the composer has a preexisting model for the music, which can range from a strict serial approach (early Stockhausen, for example) through Xenakis' mathematical models to spectralist and algorithmic models.

Landy acknowledges two different origins for sound-based music when he follows German critics with E-Musik (Ernst, or serious music, i.e., high art) and U-Musik (Unterhaltung, or entertainment, i.e., popular music). But even though he admits the lines between the two have become blurred, since few U-musicians write scholarly articles, the emphasis here is clearly on E-musik. Performers and composers outside the academy are relegated to short blurbs or the end notes. Similar concerns arise for electroacoustic improvisation (EAI), to my mind a substantial and important genre, but completely overlooked here. Landy's only source for improvisation is John Bowers, an academic associated with the Sonic Arts Network, primarily because he published an ethnograpic of his own performance experience. As one example, Keith Rowe has written very perceptively on his improvisations, and certainly EAI has provided several examples that will rank with the best sound-based art. Finally, Landy alludes briefly to valorization, how to decide whether a piece is "good" or not. He doesn't cite any relevant work, and indeed, the term doesn't even appear at the EARS site. Although people bandy about the quality of various works, I'm unconvinced that these discussions reflect anything more than the taste of the viewer. As Landy points out, even in traditional classical music, a violin interpretation can be a delight to one person and irritating to another.

From a primary goal of setting out firm theoretical foundations, Landy's oversight of non-academic sound-art practitioners is understandable. Academia takes a long time to digest current practice, given an unremitting lack of resources for theory and analysis and a burgeoning set of new approaches to sound-based music. Landy's book contains a wealth of information and is a superb resource and incitement for further study. But active musicians, unconcerned with the articulation of their psychologies in favor of creating the next musical piece, progress much faster than careful and methodical professors, leading to an inevitable and widening gap between the two.

The Age of Complexity

Kyle Gann has a recent thought-provoking post on complexity in music. After outlining two complementary attitudes commonly found for new music (1. complex new music is incomprehensible, and 2. complex new music has its admirers, who should be permitted to do so), he asks the key question, "how much complex, opaque music can the world afford? How many more complex, opaque pieces can I be expected to internalize in my life than the couple hundred or so I've already absorbed?" He points out that he acquired a taste for a lot of the complex music he admires in his younger days, and no longer feels compelled to listen to a new piece multiple times as he might have done thirty years ago. Rather, he finds great virtue in simplicity, in composers who make their ideas as appealing as possible on first listen, so that listeners want to keep returning to the piece to learn it better. I'm greatly simplifying his points, so interested parties should of course read the whole thing.

I nodded in recognition during most of his points. I too have a greater fondness for the Stockhausen and Boulez pieces that I had on vinyl back in the day, whose scores I own and have studied (although not to the degree of Professor Gann). I want very much to admire the spectralist composers such as Murail, Grisey and Radulescu, but have found them fairly challenging and difficult to approach (not to mention that their scores are hard to locate and very expensive). I listen to a great deal more music now than in most of my adult life, and I still have a fairly large stack of CDs in shrinkwrap sitting on my desk.

Perhaps this article resonates so well because I've been listening to a new Xenakis CD (about which more in a future post). Gann describes the process for digesting a new CD which mirrors my own, which is that music that has an immediate and visceral impact is the music I want to hear again. If I like it enough, I import it into iTunes and it goes in the rotation on my iPod. Most of the CDs that I've written about on this blog are in this category (although there are a couple that were sent to me for review). I truly believe that everybody has their own criteria for a visceral impact. I get it from drones, ambient music, electroacoustics, and a couple of other genres. I don't get it from ultra-complex music like Xenakis' instrumental works (although I love most of his electronic pieces). My new Xenakis CD had a harpsichord piece on it, and my reaction was immediate and visceral — I guess I should have said "positive" as well. The fact is, there is so much new music out there that nobody can hear it all, much less listen to it. There is no reason anybody should subject him or herself to music they find unattractive more than once.

Pandering? or do I really like it?

Tim Rutherford-Johnson (the Rambler) has a post on music pandering to its audience, with a number of links to other blogs, including an article by critic Simon Reynolds casting similar glances at an Evan Parker concert back in the 1980s. Both posts discuss the cliquish aspects and in-jokes of musical "scenes" and the degree to which outsiders may be intimidated by these behaviors. Both are worth reading, including the links they reference, but I had a couple of other thoughts on the subject.

For starters, there is a tendency to ridicule the inner circle as fanboys, and to extend that ridicule to the artists that produce the music. But there's no accounting for taste, and it is very difficult to say why a particular music is "good" or "bad" (these are value judgments, not substantive critiques). And not every piece of music serves the same purpose. Years ago I heard an interview with Lester Bowie, the great trumpeter from the Art Ensemble of Chicago, where he said, "When I go to a party, I don't want to hear no Art Ensemble!" Tim mentions various cover bands as examples of fanboy music, but so what? When Roger Waters toured with a Pink Floyd cover band and played Dark Side of the Moon last year, was it fanboy music because they basically duplicated the classic, 35-year-old album note for note? All of the air guitarists in the audience (and I count myself among them) knew the solo in Money exactly, so we would have been sorely disappointed if the solo had been completely different. Maybe it was pandering, but it aspired for spectacle and entertainment, succeeding admirably on both counts.

Anyone who has spent a lot of time listening to music (or digging into any serious art form) will find that some work resonates, and some does not. The most interesting music writing attempts to explain why a piece of music succeeds when we take it on its own terms. It's a waste of space and time to say that a given piece of art sucks, because it merely reflects the author's value judgments, which are highly unlikely to match anyone else's. Music listeners are faced with an impossible amount of music to absorb, much less hear even once, so we have to choose carefully what albums or songs we listen to, what artists we support, what music we purchase. And every serious musician, sooner or later, will find an audience. For more obscure music, such as the kind I write about here, the audience is very small and scattered around the world, but it's there none the less. The Rambler's article centers on music with obscure references that only the cogniscenti will find, but what makes them a less valuable audience than the couple hundred people who buy boutique CDs from respected labels like Mystery Sea, Die Schachtel or 12k?

In addition, Reynolds finds himself attracted to John Butcher's oppositional stance as expressed in a recent Wire interview, and therefore more willing to revisit his music. But just because Butcher expresses a "bracingly stern stance" doesn't mean that I have to agree with it in order to like his music, any more than I need to be an anti-semite to like Wagner or Céline, or mentally ill to appreciate Van Gogh. Reading about an artist's motivations are interesting and may shed insight into the resulting music, but the artist's perspectives are just as unique as the listener's. I read a lot about John Cage, but the most interesting writing illustrates how his philosophy (which I find appealing because of my own personal history) manifests itself in his music, and not how his father's vocation as an inventor may have influenced his thought processes that led to the prepared piano.

We all have individual and completely unique personal histories which make up our tastes, and we make decisions every day that have as much to do with our personal aesthetics as anything remotely functional. Our clothes, the decorations in our homes, and the music that we listen to, all gives our lives an aesthetic meaning — and it doesn't matter if we are the only ones who understand all of our own references. If there is any pandering in music journalism, it's the glib turn of phrase that turns humiliation and ridicule into amusement. The appeal to our baser instincts is the least common denominator, analogous to the negative campaigning that too often passes for political discourse.