Vox and I had a brief chat recently and the topic of complicated music came up. As everyone knows, Vox is not a trained musician and admits he can barely play an instrument, yet he was a top 40 Billboard recording artist in the early 90's. Contrast that to a formally educated musician who works at Starbucks. How is this possible?
We got on this topic because I mentioned a time that an asset I had written for a company was rejected because it was too complicated. Vox recounted his experience with musicians who wrote songs that only other musicians would enjoy, and I explained - glibly - that was why I quit jazz. In my opinion the hardest skill for a musician to learn is how to hear music as it sounds to non-musicians. Vox wanted more: "If someone is skilled, how can he not know that? I know how to imitate writers, why is this tough for musicians?"
I was able to give a partial answer: there is in music a similar dichotomy as exists in persuasion, namely, between music that is dialectically correct and music that is rhetorically effective. It's a different set of skills. There's what you learn eight hours a day in a practice room, and there's what you learn in front of an audience.
Only half satisfied with that answer, I want to revisit my original assertion: "the hardest skill for a musician to learn is to hear how music sounds to non-musicians." Why is this so?
One reason might be is that music is perceptual. Most people cannot focus their attention on each separate element. To make music at a high level of skill, however, you need to be able to hear each element in isolation. Once you can, however, it's easy to forget that a non-musician can't. The next thing you know you're creating music for people that can only hear it the way you do.
As your ears become more refined you must not be lose track of the big picture. Mixing helps in this area, by guiding the listener's attention from foreground element to foreground element.
In music the meaning of a sound is different depending on what surrounds it. This differs from language where the meaning of a word has finite definitions from context to context. In music a single sound has infinite potential meanings - except for when it doesn't. There is no such thing as a musical dictionary. A minor chord in the key of E mean somber, unless it means groovy, upbeat, or something else. To compound this our sense of how context functions changes depending on what we've been exposed to. Musicians, by expanding their knowledge in pursuit of their craft, are exposed to more possibilities, and can't always remember how Green Day used to feel before being exposed to Ligeti. It becomes difficult to express yourself honestly in a simpler idiom.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tnn4Y9FbEaQ
Sometimes musicians have bad educations. My relationship with music theory is akin to Vox's with economic theory. After much questioning, I concluded that most of what they teach undergrads is worse than useless. The fundamental problem is that harmony is placed at the center of the theory curriculum and it's the least important element of music. No one has created an adequate theory of rhythm, which is the basis of harmony, so it's not formally taught in school.
Western functional harmony is fundamentally a cycle of three types of chords: tonic, predominant, dominant - and back to tonic. To identify where the cycle starts you need to analyze the large scale rhythm. Most harmony textbooks acknowledge this, but then say "but it's beyond the purview of this book to analyze rhythm." It follows that a proper undergrad music theory curriculum would start with a theory of rhythm, with the aim of teaching students how to formally recognize the beginning of a rhythmic cycle, and only then move on to harmony. Instead, the vast majority of music curricula do not offer even a single course on rhythm.
There's very little out there in terms of formal rhythmic analysis. What little you find usually presents itself as an introduction to a field that has only begun to be explored - and this has been going on for decades. So it's possible for a music student to finish school thinking he understands harmony because he's learned everything there is to know ahout Neapolitan 6th, false cadences, and set theory. But he's never studied rhythm beyond a professor offhandedly telling him "well, you just kind of have to feel it." So he becomes one of Nicholas Taleb's "Intellectual-Yet-Idiots." He can speak for hours on a topic without realizing the foundation is faulty.
Contrast that to a naturally curious autodidact making Hip-hop beats at home. Without a teacher to distract him with a foundationless theory of harmony, he gets a ten year head start studying rhythm, and when he's ready to use more interesting chords, they are anchored in a solid rhythmic foundation.
There is also the aspect of finding the right symbols to connect with your audience. You can't learn that in a practice room. You learn that on a stage or whenever non-musicians candidly respond to your music. There's a genius that knows what symbols resonate with culture in a particular moment in time. It has something to do with freshness, timing, context, and other intangibles. It's a skill more like public speaking than writing. It's has more to do with fashion than architecture. All of the musical elements, rhythm, timbre, space, harmony - all these do is add up to a gesture. A formal music education can teach you how these elements add up to a gesture - they can form a coherent statement - but to know how they whether they resonate with an audience, you have to interact with one.
Formal music education isn't necessary to make music that people will pay for. All you need for that is curiosity and an audience. Creative longevity, however, requires wide exposure to many styles, and formal education can help with that. Many one hit wonders make a splash, but then run out of gas because they can't do anything else. You'll find that the truly great musicians have spent a lot of time in front of audiences and have also investigated many styles of music beyond the ones they perform.
To be honest, writing music that is popular is very close to writing stories that are popular.
ReplyDeleteYou can be a Hahvahd-trained genius who knows all the "great works" frontwards and backwards, but if all your work is is just a reference or allusion to said great works, then it's not going to appeal to the common denominator, people who haven't read said "great works".
Of course the problem is that any self-respecting creator doesn't want to just create mindless schlock that appeals solely on the base level. That's why you create a work that hits all the keypoints of the common denominator, but add in bits that add another paradigm to the work when you start to examine it. The story core remains the monomyth or whatever you're using, but you also appeal to those with a slightly higher thought pattern by filling the fictional world with real breathable characters, or by vaguely hinting at background stuff in the prose -- it's stuff that doesn't detract from the common denominator by any means, but rewards those who look.
The same way happens with music, where it's very tempting when writing the melody to just start going wherever and with whatever. What that gets wrong is that repetition is part of the common denominator. Repetition is part of the common denominator. As the composer you've seen that melody line dozens of times in your head already probably, so you want to get off it and go somewhere interesting and new - but the listener doesn't want that. Either they want something simple to just hook up to their emotions or they haven't heard this track before.
There is a lot of people who think that if you just have the highfalutin stuff, that the common denominator stuff will just fall into place and the masses will love it. Sort of like the Star Wars Prequals, where the second and third film was just a bunch of boring walking-and-talking and the first film wasn't really clear as to who the protagonist was. But boy did it sure try to fill in the fictional world and vaguely hint at background stuff! Except it was boring. Don't do that.
You could call the common denominator stuff "rhetoric" and the interesting frills or whatnot "dialectic". There's a shade of truth to that, because the vast majority of people are convinced by rhetoric and if you don't have that on lock, there's only a very limited number of people you can appeal to. However dialectic doesn't quite rest on rhetoric the same way a story needs to rest on its base appeals/common denominators. And dialectic, done well, can be its own rhetoric.
No, instead it's basically all rhetoric, since this is all about appealing to and affecting human emotions.
I'd tentatively suggest that reading a book on persuasion may be of surprisingly great use to both writing songs and stories.
"I'd tentatively suggest that reading a book on persuasion may be of surprisingly great use to both writing songs and stories."
ReplyDeleteThat very thought has crossed my mind and I need to learn persuasion for both networking and dealing with curmudgeonly producers. ;) And I would agree, in the strictest sense of the word, music is pure rhetoric.
But!
Would you accept, in music and story, this analogous distinction (boy am I glad I said analogous) between rhetoric and dialectic:
Rhetoric is what makes someone like it immediately.
Dialectic is what draws someone to it even after repeated exposure.
In music or story, liking something is akin to it being true. Certainly within the narrow field of music... if there's truth at all, if it's not all artifice (and it's my job to think this) then truth - real truth - is when a piece of music stands the test of time.
Would you accept this? Or would you prefer surface and structure? Fashion and architecture?
Would you accept, in music and story, this analogous distinction (boy am I glad I said analogous) between rhetoric and dialectic:
ReplyDeleteLike I said, there's shades of truth in that, but it's an incomplete analogy. It's not wrong, but there's more to it.
For example, when you say:
In music or story, liking something is akin to it being true.
There are several, several low-brow pieces of music and story which are full of "rhetoric" but zero "dialectic". And they are wildly popular.
Instead, the analogy I'm going to go with this time is beauty. The "rhetoric" would be the person's outward, skin-deep beauty. There are multiple layers of beauty.
Someone who is only beautiful skindeep is like cheap fastfood or films filled with nothing but raunch, or another microphone gangster waxing lyrical about nothing much. These are appealing on a very base level, but they do appeal.
Next layer of beauty would be someone who looks beautiful and also fakes being beautiful. Then the next layer after that would be someone who looks beautiful, and behaves in a beautiful manner when they're not tempted or under pressure. Then the next layer after would be someone who looks beautiful and behaves beautifully even when under pressure.
Eventually you'd reach a layer where someone is completely beautiful in thought, mind, word and deed. But that person doesn't exist on earth because we're imperfect.
So thus are our creations, which are just as imperfect as us.
Anyway, the key thing to remember with these different layers is that people perceive different layers of them. With intelligence, they start to grok more of them. But not everyone is going to be able to see into the hearts of men and just grasp how beautiful someone is, but almost everyone can look at the beauty that's within someone's skin.
So thus, someone who makes an overcomplicated mess of music that has no real appeal to the common masses is like an acne-riddled overweight girl with bad breath but has a heart of gold.
Yeah she'll be a great friend, but she's not going to be prom queen.
Postscript: Beauty and truth are strangely interwoven with each other as well.
Terminology sherminology. OK, I'm use the word "dialectic" wrong.
ReplyDelete"So thus, someone who makes an overcomplicated mess of music that has no real appeal to the common masses is like an acne-riddled overweight girl with bad breath but has a heart of gold."
I wish that was as bad as it gets. Unfortunately, there's people who write complicated messes (or willfully obscure messes) of music that don't even have anything underneath the surface. It's basically just composers signalling to other other composers. "Look at me! I don't need an audience." And it becomes an emperors new clothes thing. Read the essay "the composer as specialist ." It's awful.
It's this reverse signalling thing where to even get in the door as a "new music" composer you have to make something normal people would hate. That's the surface. But mostly it's composers signalling their intelligence.
A lot of midwittery. People who can think of no better use for their intelligence than to demonstrate how smart they are.
"Repetition is part of the common denominator. As the composer you've seen that melody line dozens of times in your head already probably, so you want to get off it and go somewhere interesting and new..."
This is so true! I've probably hear my melodies 500 times more than anyone in the audience. And somehow you have to remember how it sounded the first time.
"There is a lot of people who think that if you just have the highfalutin stuff, that the common denominator stuff will just fall into place and the masses will love it."
My undergrad.
"Anyway, the key thing to remember with these different layers is that people perceive different layers of them. With intelligence, they start to grok more of them."
Yeah. Intelligence and also repeated listenings with an open mind.
I wish that was as bad as it gets. Unfortunately, there's people who write complicated messes (or willfully obscure messes) of music that don't even have anything underneath the surface. It's basically just composers signalling to other other composers. "Look at me! I don't need an audience." And it becomes an emperors new clothes thing. Read the essay "the composer as specialist ." It's awful.
ReplyDeleteYeah, what you're describing is more of a result of people trying to claim that ugly is the new beautiful. Nu-art, if you would, or the modernist and post-modernist claptrap. Even "Healthy at every size". It has its tendrils in every aspect of humanity in which we evaluate and consider beauty.
This is so true! I've probably hear my melodies 500 times more than anyone in the audience. And somehow you have to remember how it sounded the first time.
I approach it as it being better to be lazy. Why write new stuff every measure when you can (and should) just 'string' out the basic motif for a couple of phrases? The average joe isn't going to notice, and if you want to throw in something for the more discerning listener you can slip little stuff in there. It's more entertaining that way as a listener too, in my opinion.
My undergrad.
Do you mean the other people around you, you yourself, or everyone in your undergrad did this?
Yeah. Intelligence and also repeated listenings with an open mind.
I was using intelligence to mean general quickness of thought, curiosity, *and* general experience with music. Intelligence like the RPG stat, but also intelligence as in counter-intel or recon (aka "info").
In undergrad, as a jazz trumpet player, I understood harmony and form before I understood rhythm and timbre. Everyone else had there own battles to fight.
ReplyDelete"Yeah, what you're describing is more of a result of people trying to claim that ugly is the new beautiful. Nu-art, if you would, or the modernist and post-modernist claptrap. Even "Healthy at every size". It has its tendrils in every aspect of humanity in which we evaluate and consider beauty."
Partially. They're embarrassed to do something people would pay for. It's mark of privilege, which they paper over with Marxist politics.
So they say nonsense like this to justify their music:
"Everything about the piece—its composer, the musicians for whom it was written, the form, its external references, the listener’s experience, the circumstances of its production—is provisional. It is the instantiation of the contingent, if such a thing isn’t a contradiction in terms."
In other words, "I wrote shit I liked, but I need to sound smart to get grant money."
Now listen to the song.
https://vimeo.com/120482732
And guess what? Cultural Marxism!
http://www.newmusicbox.org/articles/chicago-new-music-as-assemblage-or-why-are-we-doing-this/
Now he's signaling he's a good little Marxist.
"To be less slippery, I buy a basic Marxian approach to culture (articulated and developed by, for instance, Adorno and other Frankfurt School theorists) that “means grasping[…] forms, styles and meanings as the products of a particular history” (to quote Terry Eagleton), as the results of a set of socio-economic conditions."
Now poke around that site and contrast how ugly the music is to how nice people are in the comments sections. It's the mark of a dead scene. It was the arguments and rage on video game forums that convinced me that games had a future. It reminded more of the energy of the 1940's bebop clubs, where you would get your ass kicked if you played badly.
I know I'm a mediocre composer because I don't get death threats.
You really need to read the "The composer as specialist." It was the original "audiences don't have to be your audience."
ReplyDeleteIn undergrad, as a jazz trumpet player, I understood harmony and form before I understood rhythm and timbre. Everyone else had there own battles to fight.
ReplyDeleteI have a story for you:
So it was opening night of a new program and the Trumpet Soloist falls ill. No one else knows the solo, and they can't get ahold of any subs. In a panic, they notice a jazz club across the street. They go over and see this old grizzled trumpet player. They ask him if he had played any classical before. He said he had when he was younger. He finally agrees to play the solo.
The first movement begins. To everyone's suprise, the trumpet player sounds good. Very good. They all give a sigh of relief and play through the first movement flawlessly.
The second movement starts, the grave section, with a sweet, quiet little melody in the flutes and obes. Suddenly, the trumpet player steps forward,
"doo waa do wapa ba do be do ba.." just screamin on his trumpet. The conductor cuts him off.
"WHAT DO YOU THINK YOU ARE DOING!" he says in an angered whisper.
"Hey man, the music said "Tac it" so I did!"
Partially. They're embarrassed to do something people would pay for. It's mark of privilege, which they paper over with Marxist politics.
Well yeah, but they only do stuff *that way* because it is touted and taught as "good and correct". The inversion of beauty is the zeitgeist, and most people go along with it in varying degrees of belief.
Some are trufen stormtroopers, some more are simply passive idealists who think it's a good idea but just hasn't been done "right" yet, while other people are embarrassed about it because it just seems kinda odd but they do it anyway. Either way they still swim with the stream.
"To be less slippery, I buy a basic Marxian approach to culture (articulated and developed by, for instance, Adorno and other Frankfurt School theorists)[...]
Funny, I thought the Frankfurt School was just a vast right-wing conspiracy. /s
It's the mark of a dead scene.
More accurately, it's the mark of kiss-asses and zero passion.
I know I'm a mediocre composer because I don't get death threats.
Nah, not getting death threats doesn't necessarily mean your skills are mediocre, it just means you're not well-known enough yet. Skills can lead to notoriety, but they're not the same thing.
You really need to read the "The composer as specialist." It was the original "audiences don't have to be your audience."
I'll give it a shot sometime, but I'm not sure if wading through what sounds like schlock is going to be a good use of my time.
I recognized that trumpet joke from the first three words.
ReplyDeleteWhen it comes to weird sounds, noise, and dissonance, I can tell you for a fact that many musicians sincerely like that sort of thing. The second level of Elveteka is noise music with a smattering of melody. The troll song has really weird harmonies.
The pretense is how they frame it - as if those kinds of sounds were no different than a folk melody. In the right context, anything sounds good to a layman - but you can't pretend that weird shit isn't weird. But to cater to the sensibilities of of hoi polloi - it's embarrassing to them. So they try to be conceptual by presenting weird shit as normal. (In that sense you're spot on.) They're not participating in a project to invert beauty, necessarily - you're project that onto them - they really think we've been socially conditioned to accept certain beauty standards and isn't it interesting to imagine what it would be like if this was pretty instead - or maybe there's no such thing as prettiness, so let's invest completely new categories. And the audience is somehow expected to walk into a conversation having missed the first half and no what's going in.
So, they are sincere. It's just utterly indulgent. "Music is for the benefit of musicians" is their rally cry, when they're not doing social justice. But say "health care should only be affordable to doctors" and that would strike them as unfair and selfish.
Also, I can't blame a musician for wanting to do something new. All the pieces that can complete on an even playing field with Beethoven have already been written. BUT... it's really hard to do anything truly new... so they complete on a conceptual level, which now has devolved into a truly dreary virtue signaling game. ("Look at how ironic and detached I am as I 'engage' with this material! I'm so non-committal. It's proof that I'm sophisticated! Does this leather elbow patch make me look fat?"
In this scene, your real job is blogging, writing, program notes, posturing. The sound is a byproduct of all that. It's sad.
That's what I mean by a dead scene. Everything has been figured out. It's been solved. So that's why there's no arguing. So all that's left is posturing and signalling. It's dead in the creative sense. They haven't done anything new in 50 years. BUT THEY CALL IT "NEW MUSIC."
So of the songs are nice, but Stravinsky and Ives already mined out this territory before 1950.
"Nah, not getting death threats doesn't necessarily mean your skills are mediocre, it just means you're not well-known enough yet. Skills can lead to notoriety, but they're not the same thing."
I switched into poetry without a warning label.
They're not participating in a project to invert beauty, necessarily - you're project that onto them - they really think we've been socially conditioned to accept certain beauty standards and isn't it interesting to imagine what it would be like if this was pretty instead - or maybe there's no such thing as prettiness, so let's invest completely new categories.
ReplyDeleteThat's basically mostly my stance as well. Most musicians are accepting the basic assumption that there is no intrinsic sense of beauty. But, there are people who were and are intentionally inverting beauty, but they are small in number.
They also tend to worm their way into high academia.
And the audience is somehow expected to walk into a conversation having missed the first half and no what's going in.
And if the audience doesn't somehow "get" that conversation, then well gosh golly gee, they must be worthless.
It's strange how this is true for music as it is for so many other things that this ugly mindset has invaded.
Also, I can't blame a musician for wanting to do something new. All the pieces that can complete on an even playing field with Beethoven have already been written.
Slightly off topic (but not off topic with the blog as a whole), this is why video game music is so interesting to me. It IS a new topic that is still in its infancy.
There are instruments and techniques that are only really used in older video games. Electronic instruments have been around for a good while now, but working within the very heavy constraints of, say, the soundchip for the NES or Gameboy has resulted in some musical techniques I hadn't run across anywhere else.
And graduating past the older days of chiptune, you have days of video game music before they started using orchestral score for most things. Then it was an interesting balance of making the track circular enough that it looped, interesting enough that you liked it, but not intrusive enough that it distracted from the actual game at hand.
I switched into poetry without a warning label.
You went full poetry. Never go full poetry.
"There are instruments and techniques that are only really used in older video games. Electronic instruments have been around for a good while now, but working within the very heavy constraints of, say, the soundchip for the NES or Gameboy has resulted in some musical techniques I hadn't run across anywhere else.
ReplyDeleteAnd graduating past the older days of chiptune, you have days of video game music before they started using orchestral score for most things. Then it was an interesting balance of making the track circular enough that it looped, interesting enough that you liked it, but not intrusive enough that it distracted from the actual game at hand."
100% on topic and also more interesting.
Actually, I'd like to write a blog post on this.. "Why Video Game Music." I was thinking about that when I was finishing up the Troll song.... "this is why I got into video game music." That song wouldn't work anywhere else. There's no other place where it would be tolerated - but left to my own devices its the kind of music I'd write for myself. I'll throw up the post this weekend and maybe we can continue the conversation there.
"But, there are people who were and are intentionally inverting beauty, but they are small in number.
ReplyDeleteThey also tend to worm their way into high academia."
Highly likely.
My most influential teacher in grad school was an Adorno acolyte. Great musician... but so utterly embarrassed at saying something clear enough that he can actually be pinned down and critiqued. So he either does Jelly Roll Morton stuff (no joke) or variations of "post-Cage" noise music.
Basically, if you're doing conceptual music it's really bad to say "I like X" because now you've presented a target that can be made fun of, critiqued, deconstructed, etc. (And this is a moral imperative because we're all bad Western Capitalists so everything has to be deconstructed to the point where nothing has any meaning at all, ever.) So if you make X vague as fuck, no one can make fun of you, and you can make music, sort it.
So noise and randomness is a great X because it's basically impossible to pin down, because it can be anything.
So... to climb to the top of this hierarchy (because it's all about teaching positions and grants) it's all about running the most removed self-awareness loop / detached metacommentary on everything else while being vague-as-fuck about your own positions, unless you're doing identity politics. Then its OK to like something.
So my teacher did a lot of Jewish stuff mixed with noise.
Unfortunately, I have no connection to Irish music... the closest I have to folk music is... video game music. (That might have to go into my "why video game music" post.
Anyway, as you can guess, this scene is cowardly as fuck. Wear black, speak in riddles, don't let on that you actually like anything - no one can make fun of you.
Or, as avant garde Joe Morris (not my teacher) said - direct quote from a masterclass - "If people figure out what you're doing they won't like it."
So yeah, it's all cowardly, self-hating trash.
Back to my old teacher being an Adorno fan. He'd say "Adorno's musical analysis are laughable wrong, but he's right about everything else." A perfect case of the Murray Gell-Mann Amnesia effect, unless my teacher really was trying to destroy art.
That might explain the writing block that happened to me as a result of being influenced by him - until I decided once and for all to abandon this kind of avant garde music. Just a guess.
Unfortunately, I have no connection to Irish music... the closest I have to folk music is... video game music.
ReplyDeleteCombining the best of both of these worlds, there's a really good album of music from the Suikoden series called "Genso Suikoden Celtic Collection".
And not in video games but I still love it, there's the album "Bells of Dublin" by The Chieftains. Check 'em out, they're both great.
Basically, if you're doing conceptual music it's really bad to say "I like X" because now you've presented a target that can be made fun of, critiqued, deconstructed, etc. [and rest of the post, really]
That strikes me as being more of a Gamma trait than anything else. And really, Gamma midwits are really overrepresented in academia as well.
They latch on to beauty inversion because it's trendy and it exonerates them for not being beautiful in how they act and look.
So you got screwed over because you had believed a Gamma's lies, I'd say.
If a Gamma is a secret king who can't come to terms with reality, what do you call an entire scene that doesn't have to?
ReplyDeleteA person who's successful within that social structure isn't a secret king so much as a fraud.
I played the tenor sax for 8 years in school. I know exactly what you mean when you say musicians hear music differently than non-musicians. It happened to me and was annoying as crap. Whole swathes of music became boring, or worse it became unbearable.
ReplyDeleteIn the last 3 or 4 years of playing the sax I was only hearing the mistakes in any music I listened to. Music stopped connecting emotionally to me. I felt like a cripple. That time coincided with a particular perfectionist band director.
It took me two years after graduating high school and not playing the sax anymore to be able to really enjoy listening to music again.
It sounds like you had a bad teacher. You can't let formal education replace your own curiosity and passion. The dirty secret is that all musicians are self-taught. A teacher can only point you in the right direction and inspire you.
Delete