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RE: Rewilding Music

A recent post by whiskeyding about our engagement with music prompted the following thoughts, as an oblique response. I recommend reading it, because I will not summarise the argument here.

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To anyone who is not a musician, these days music experience is probably neatly packaged in well-designed products. Listening to recorded music, as opposed to live performances, has become the norm. Before there were any audio recording technologies, the ladies of the bourgoisie learnt to play the piano so that they could entertain family and friends with popular tunes in piano reductions of the full score. Later, in the Hippie era, everyone had an acoustic guitar and were able to find three chords, enough to accompany their singing of most songs they knew. Other instruments have been in widespread use in various geographical areas and times. No doubt, the easy access to digital music technologies have contributed to a decline in attention to traditional instrumental skills.

Non-musicians don't play an instrument or make music in other ways, almost per definition. As whiskeyding astutely observes (and I'm paraphrasing here), we have come to expect music products of a perfection and professionalism an amateur cannot readily attain; we expect it to sound in particular ways; and those are products to consume, meaning they are not something just anybody could produce.

As a musician myself, however, I see a few more nuances here. Many musics are made with other goals in mind than glitter, fame, and fast money. The impression that only professional musicians (with a reasonable definition of "professional") make music is inaccurate. Surely, the reason why music today seems professionalised and commercialised must be that for music to have a substantial outreach it needs to be commercial, that is, made to meet broad demands of taste, and distributed and advertised through commercial channels. However, even fringe subcultures may have relatively large audiences. Chris Anderson in his book The Long Tail paints a rather nice picture of these fringe elements, the bands and artists that are to be found far out in the fat tail of the popularity statistics. Because, with internet search and "immaterial" storage of digital albums, no matter how unknown the band, given sufficient time there is always a potential audience waiting to discover it. Now, I don't necessarily share Anderson's optimism on behalf of those undiscovered gems. Popularity breeds more popularity by a mechanism of preferential attachment, through recommendation services that suggest you listen to already popular artists or buy what other customers bought. It may be deeply unfair that an artist who spends years on perfecting an album has fewer than five people listen to it, once, and then forget about it, while other artists, the ones we hear about, have a production team to back them up and make sure they reach millions of listeners. The situation will hardly improve when AI tools become more widespread in facilitating music production.

Most of the music being made is situated in the far end of the tail of popularity. It may be hard to find anything really interesting in that segment, because there is so much competition from other unknown artists and so much material of low quality. But focusing on the top ten only, or even the top one thousand, we get a skewed and wrong picture of the wide range of music that is being created. Unfair as it is, that's the reason why most people only get a chance to hear the kind of music that becomes highly popular. That's obviously a tautology, but one could imagine a wider awareness of slightly less popular forms of music than is presently the case.

Professionalisation as such is nothing to complain about. Classical Indian music, as far as I know, imposes exacting demands on the musician, but the music would not be what it is without adhering to the stylistic norms, which could take many years of practice. Specialisation and dedication to the task of learning a musical vocabulary and instrumental technique are essential for being able to perform most kinds of music. There may be simpler forms of music, supposedly more democratic in welcoming the beginner as much as the seasoned expert, such as punk. Even Gamelan ensembles permit (and encourage, I believe) the participation of newcomers. There, the emphasis is on the group, and not on the individual's accomplishments. Folk music may exist in forms accessible to everyone, such as lullabys and work songs, as well as more complex forms that only someone who is able to set aside several hours of practice per week is able to master.

The explosion of available music in recent years is due to several factors, such as the cumulative catalogue of previous recordings of various interpretations of the same classical masterpieces. Another reason is the democratisation of music technology, which enables anyone to become a bedroom producer. You may need a synth, a sequencer, maybe a guitar, or simply a production environment in the box, with a digital audio workstation to manage your projects. No instrumental skills are needed, strictly speaking, although a lack of musical imagination and listening skills cannot be bluffed away. The motor skills of playing an instrument in realtime are not necessary in the slow, sequential build-up of a computer music project or a jam with hardware instruments that run on autopilot. Even a tone-deaf composer of contemporary music may succeed by focusing on timbral and rhythmical aspects instead of trying to build on pitch structures.

In free improvisation, as it developed mainly out of free jazz, there is a notion of the individual musician's freedom to play however they want, to forget all music theory, instrumental practice, and imposed musical norms. Not too surprisingly, the reality of free improvisation is somewhat different. It has become a style of its own, or several related styles with their own expectations, instrumental techniques (always extended!), norms of group behaviour and form. Hence, some practitioners believe there is no such thing as free improvisation, that it's all about the selection, in the present, of small blocks of musical readymades, recombinations of well-rehearsed gestures and sounds that aren't necessarily unique to any single musician. Be that as it may, improvisation differs from playing from a score. While it may be impossible to escape musical conditioning, revealing itself in a sense of appropriateness, well-formedness, or standards of beauty, improvisation is an opportunity to express those norms in one's own way as feels right in the moment.

Further reading

Chris Andersen (2009): The Longer Long Tail. How endless choice is creating unlimited demand. Updated and expanded edition. Random House Business Books.

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