Quick question... what is music?
I went to the Proms for the first time the other day. Very impressed with the whole experience but a little nonplussed by the sprawling Messiaen piece that Simon Rattle and the Berlin Phil were performing.
Now I'm no expert on classical music but quite a lot of it sounded like random noises, scrapings and pluckings. It was over an hour long so I had plenty of time to sit there and ponder the question: What qualifies as music?
Is it simply music because it's being played a bunch of chaps in suits who we've all paid to watch? Does something need a tune to be music? Does it need a beat? Does it even need to be made by a human, can birdsong or whale calls be counted as music?
Does recording something make it music? In that case is Revolution 9 music? What about John Cage's infamous silence?
When you wander into the outer reaches of the musical sphere, away from the certainties of I Wanna Hold Your Hand, Vivaldi's Four Seasons or Billie Jean past Burial and beyond Sun Ra, do you eventually reach a barrier, over which there’s no music any longer, just sounds and noise?
Unfortunately I didn't manage to resolve any of these questions before the evening ended, we all clapped for far longer than was necessary and then dashed off to catch a tube.
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I know what you mean
Most forms of music, even the most difficult ones, get easier to listen to eventually. I don't find this applies to a lot of music trading under the "avant-garde" banner. I suspect that much of it is more motivated by the need to be different from that which has gone before than the usual reasons that cause people to make music.
I have been very impressed by something Clive James wrote about the difference between Ben Webster and John Coltrane. He reckons he can remember every note of the former's solo on "Cottontail" but when it comes to the latter's solos he resents the way that "shapelessness and incoherence are treated as ideals".
"The impressiveness of the feat depends entirely on the air it conveys that the perpetrator has devoted his life to making this discovery: suprmeme mastery of technique has led him to the charmless demonstration of what he can do that nobody else can."
I agree..
that a lot of "avant-garde" music is motivated by the need to be different, and that a lot of "difficult" music eventually gets easier to listen to, probably because something new comes along that makes the previous "difficult" music sound extremely melodic in comparison! However, I definitely don't agree with Clive James view of John Coltrane! It's obviuosly just a personal thing, but I don't find his solos shapeless, incoherent or charmless.
I find Coltrane's playing to be very uplifting, and can hear a lot of melody in it. I wonder is James a huge fan of earlier jazz (which I love too!), and doesn't like the more modern stuff? I know that there is a lot of technique involved, but I know a lot of musicians that would have amazing technique but would bore anyone to tears in minutes because they haven't figured out that this alone does not lead to making good music. It just sounds like they're practising!
However, when I listen to Coltrane I hear, in his music, someone who has total passion for what he is doing, and not just doing it to show off his incredible technique. Saying that, anytime I try to put it on at home I'm told get it off immediately! (unless it's his "Ballads" or "My Favourite Things" albums!), and, no I'm not a saxophonist!!
Clive James
There's a chapter in May Week was in June in which CJ recalls attending jazz concerts as a student in Cambridge. One performer in particular (and I don't have the book to hand, but it was one of the giants) caused debate among James and his friends because some insisted that he had transcended the previous limits of performance and created a whole new dimension to music , while James, correctly, insisted that he was just stoned out of his gourd.
That is
excellent!! I'll get the book based on that!!
Get Clive James on the Podcast!
Or at least a column in Word...I just spat tea through my nose reading that!
Agree with you about Coltrane
He had a later phase that many find unlistenable (me included)like other purely free jazz, but much of his stuff is quite melodic, moving, accessible and brilliant, in my view. 'My Favourite Things', 'Coltrane Plays The Blues', 'Live At The Village Vanguard'. 'Chasin' The Trane' from that live album is an amazing, exciting piece. I think artists of all kinds want to do new things in their own field to make it more interesting for themselves partly. Sure they are doing it first and first foremost to make themselves happy (not the word I would use though - excited perhaps). That's the motivation for many of the best writes, moviemakers, painters, etc isn't it? - they just hope others will like it too enough so they can make a living sufficient to keep doing it. There are other artists who seek to entertain and make money first and foremost too - also can come up with the goods. More than one way to go about it. But you need some people to be pioneers and try new things otherwise where would be for goodness sake!
I can't listen..
to the later stuff either!! I tried, but gave up when I decided it was too much hard work trying!!
Your point about forms of music getting easier to listen to...
is a very interesting one. In the sphere of 'alternative' rock, I am always surprised by how different 'Smells Like Teen Spirit' sounds in 2008 from how it did back in 1991. I remember hearing it for the first time back then and thinking it was just so loud, raucous and radical, whereas now it fits comfortably into the Radio 2 daytime schedule...
The Sex Pistols
are the same for me. I was listening to them and my 9 year old son thought they were good pop songs. Not sure Mrs LB was happy with him sing "I am and anti-christ" but it did hammer home how little shock value they have now.
Qucik question - long answer
I thought initially that it relates to an emotional connection. Then it sort of dawned that, to me, it's around a emotional connection that I enjoy or appreciate - if I hate something because its all discordant parps and noise then I may conisder it to not be musical. But that clearly only works at an individual level - so what I would call music isn't what others would necessarily call music. And vice versa.
So music is noise that is musical to the individual listener. The I looked up the dictionary and it says:
1. an art of sound in time that expresses ideas and emotions in significant forms through the elements of rhythm, melody, harmony, and color.
2. the tones or sounds employed, occurring in single line (melody) or multiple lines (harmony), and sounded or to be sounded by one or more voices or instruments, or both.
3. musical work or compositions for singing or playing.
4. the written or printed score of a musical composition.
5. such scores collectively.
6. any sweet, pleasing, or harmonious sounds or sound: the music of the waves.
7. appreciation of or responsiveness to musical sounds or harmonies: Music was in his very soul.
Which sounds ok to me.
But
surely you also could hate something you believe to be musical, which you don't consider noise but which you consider just plain crap? Doesn't have to be something you enjoy or appreciate, in other words, to be music.
Erm
I was going from the point that for me to consider noise to be music I would need to have some form of appreciation or enjoyment from. Other than that it will be noise. All music is noise but not all noise is music. And it would have to be the ears of the listener that decides.
I know
but all I'm saying is that it's not just music if you appreciate it or enjoy it. I don't appreciate or enjoy a lot of music but that doesn't mean I don't consider it to be music nevertheless.
I sort of agree with you
but I like the concept that, absolutely, music is in the ears of the beholder. I suppose it kind of depends on why I don't appreciate or enjoy it to a degree. Theres some stuff I wouldn't listen to but I would consider it music but I would still argue that ultimately, I am allowed to decide what I consider to be music and what is noise.
Good to see this hasn't been resolved
seeing as Plato first had a crack at it.
Are some things musical innately? The chinese and other eastern music use a different scale to western music and so can sound dischordant and unmusical to our ears and yet to their ears ours presumably sounds equally "wrong"?
One thought experiment would be to raise a child solely on "avant garde" music and see if they find "I wanna hold your hand" appealing.
I think unlike the visuals arts music isn't music if musician say's it is ,something to do with it having patterns/connections we can recognize?
Where this leaves the 25 minutes of feedback at the recent MBV gig I don't know.
Organised Noise
My understanding is that all music, regardless of quality etc., is in fact "noise". What makes it music is that it is noise which has been structured or organised by the musician. Something apparently totally unstructured, like a Sun Ra free from extravaganza, is organized in that he makes a conscious (or unconscious) decision what note to play next, so it still qualifies as music. Whereas (say) the noise made by water flowing down a stream is not music since there is no consciousness behind it. Personally, of the two examples above, I would usually prefer to listen to the non-musical one ...
John Cage's silent piece "4 minutes 33 seconds" does qualify as "music" by the above definition, since by specifying a precise length it does have a structure, albeit the most basic, minimal structure possible. Which is the whole point of the piece I think - it has been suggested that he specified the length of 4 minutes 33 seconds since that is 273 seconds and minus 273C is the lowest temperature possible - absolute zero, absolute minimum.
But
That means that something is definied as music not because of what it is but simply because of the process that went into it. So if I picked ten numbers randomly out of a hat and then played the corresponding notes on a keyboard that wouldn't be music. But if I sat down at a piano and chose which ten notes to play and then played them then that would be music. However there is a possibility they could be the exact same notes. So two processes could produce two identical peices, one is music and one isn't.
That's surely a fatal flaw in your argument.
I suspect Brian Eno
would be a tad upset to hear it wasn't music, too!
It is music
see below...
Well
It's just a theory - didn't make any claims to flawlessness! Looking at your example though, I think there still is a conscious decision (a "creative process") in your "numbers from a hat" approach i.e. the conscious decision to create some music by this method. Therefore both pieces constitute music of a sort (probably a not very good sort but that's not the point here). I'm pretty sure people have consciously used randomness similar to your suggestion in their muscical composition - they certainly have in the visual arts - Jackson Pollock and the Abstract Expressionists for example.
Repetition gives structure
Choosing 10 notes at random, and playing them once, wouldn't be music (probably). But playing them several times, then playing sub-sequences of them in succession, would be music. That's the whole essence of Schoenberg's concept of the "tone row". Although later on he "cheated" by choosing the tone row aesthetically, that wasn't necessary.
Let's suppose our 10 notes are (using letters instead of notes) T-C-H-A-I-K-O-V-S-Y. That's 10, discarding the duplicate "K". So then you play, say:
T-C-H-A-I-K-O-V-S-Y-T-C-H-A-I-K-O-V-S-Y (3 times)
T-C-H T-C-H T-C-H O-V-S-Y O-V-S-Y (4 times)
T-C-H-A-I-K (4 times)
...then repeat the whole thing. Then play around with it. Because the notes appear in the same order, even if fragmented, your ears start to hear it as a tune, with repetition. It's the same notion as a scale, but with the notes in a random (but fixed, for the piece) sequence.
So it becomes music, though the seed is random.
Something like that, anyway - I'm a mathematician, not a musician, and even less a music theorist!
Fascinating
Taken to its logical extreme that could result in computers producing music based on randomness from programmes that ensure they produce peices simple and repetitive enough for our brains to appreciate but complicated enough to hold our interest. Pete Waterman's dream and 1984's prole music machines made flesh. I think Westlife should start watching their backs...
4'33"
Does Cage own the publishing rights for this? If so ,does he get PRS royalties if a public space falls silent for 4 minutes 33 seconds?
This is my favourite version....
Slightly spoilt by the National Coughing and Snot-Rocket Championships between the 2nd & 3rd movement.
Cage
I believe that he does own the copyright. Mike Batt put a silent piece on one of his albums, credited it to himself and Cage, whereupon Cage sued, and won a six-figure settlement.
So let me get this right
If I sleep for 8 hours I could claim to have performed Mr Cage's opus roughly 105 times. And as I am married, technically, I have an audience to my performance in my wife (although I could argue that she is simply a fellow musician) and I could be liable to performing rights payments to Mr Cage?
What's to stop me claiming I had composed an 8 hour piece then?
My head hurts.
the counsel for the defence
True or not, I vaguely recall that part of Mike Batt's defence was that John Cage's piece had been written for piano while his was clearly for clarinet and therefore couldn't be plagiarised.
If true, I think Mr Batt had a much better grasp of the ludicrosity of the situation that Cage, the lawyers or the judge.
What Batt should have done
Is extend the period of silence to cover the whole album. That would have stopped any risk of plagiarism and also would have increased the enjoyment for the listener.
John Coltrane...
...I first heard 'A Love Supreme' a few years ago and to this day, I still don't find it a 'difficult' album and I still enjoy it- it's certainly not 'charmless'. If anything, I personally struggled more with a lot of the earlier be-bop I heard. Must confess I've never bothered with his free jazz excursions; exposure to Eric Dolphy's 'Out To Lunch' and a few other things I heard on documentaries put me off that for life!
The concept of 'emotion' in music is a spurious one, I find. Calling any style of music 'emotionless' as Clive James seems to hint in his summary of Coltrane I find utterly ridiculous because it assumes that every listener has the same emotional responses to music.
I don't go a bundle on lots of 'experimental' music; certain tracks on heavily-lauded Can albums and Tangerine Dream's 'Zeit' for example I personally find to be endurance tests more than anything else. But they must work for other people.
Must have missed that
Who said "emotionless"?
Oh no the jazzers have
escaped quick get nets and cricket bats.....
And we're..
armed with John Coltrane records!!
Hmmm.
A series of intervals, a series of different notes at different pitches, a sequence of notes forming a rhythm? Poetry? Can that be classified as music?
Interesting topic anyway!
I strongly link music with emotions - but whether it's a good or bad emotion, if a sequence of sound or a stabbing noise creates an emotion in me, it can be called music.
Speaking isn't music but reading poetry is?
Sorry, i'm rambling as usual!
The Trout Mask Replica test
I tend to be attracted to some form of order in music. My brain isn't built to follow things that don't obey some sort of structure.
Having said that I can listen to many things that most people would consider, in the words of Alan Partridge, "just a noise". But even within that I am drawn to those things where you can make out the pattern beneath the apparent chaos.
I'm one of those people who approves, in principle, of Captain Beefheart's "Trout Mask Replica" but I would happily give you the rest of the (double) album as long as I can keep "Moonlight On Vermont". Bizarre though this is I can listen to it as happily as I might listen to Big Joe Turner doing "Honey Hush" because the tension between order and chaos achieves a perfect balance.
As soon as a piece of music (or art of any kind come to that) reaches the point where the only person with a clue where it's going is the artist I think you're in troublesome territory.
Trout Masking
Moonlight on Vermont is one of the only tracks on that album that can be counted as a 'song' I feel. However my favourite is the primal one chord accapella chant of Well, it sounds like the worksong of the hordes of Hades.
But I don't care what the Cap'n or Frank Zappa claim, I refuse to beleive that the band practised each peice on that album until they had each note in exactly the right place before recording it. They just played randomly and then made up the whole story afterwards.
i think if you go back to where/how music started
i suppose we must consider that our ancestors sat around banging sticks off other sticks and forming simple rhythms and from there figured out that the way you hit some things meant that sounds had a pitch that could be identified and that some were more pleasant to the ear than others.
What was the motivation for them to do that? Dunno. Frankly I haven't the foggiest, but most of me thinks that it would probably have been some sort of mechanism for creating inclusiveness amongst a group of people. The soundtrack to dancing around a fire or something, celebrating the fact that it was a good day for clubbing wild boar or something, and the fact that they'd not go hungry.
No doubt there was also music 'devised' to celebrate/indicate other things. I've only got Hollywood movies to go on (!) but no doubt there was more 'sinister' or solemn music for primitive rituals, the forerunners of our 'religious' services and the like.
However primitive these early stabs at 'music' were, they must have had some class of design behind them and certain things were played in a certain manner to convey a type of emotion
"Ug, don't rattle the crocodile eggs so much, this is a victory dance; we're not sacrificing virgins until FRIDAY night"
And we've progressed from there; the common thread would be, I'd think, whether Viennese Ball, The Ministry of Sound or a busker playing American Pie at Finsbury Park tube station, that music is a series of sounds arranged in a manner that 'connects' with us.
Upbringing in this neck of the woods means that we're more programmed to accept something in major key and with a four/four beat to be the 'vanilla'.
As newer 'types' of music evolve with more accent on the manner in which it's created and how many 'rules' are broken in the same creation it's where the lines between
1)'music' in the old sense,
2)'art' in general, and
3)'pretentious wank' start to blur.
"Avant garde is metal for
Avant garde is metal for twats
avant garde is actually
the music you'll like tomorrow !
Fucking hell
Tomorrow sounds shit.
Revolution No.9 is still unbearable - will that sound good tomorrow?
yes
when Oasis have run it through their take anything edgy off filter it'll knock coldplay off number 1 !
Ha ha ha ha ha ha
Touche
I have the answer!!!
Relax everyone - here it is: -
Turangalila!
That was Messiaen's Turangalila Symphony you were privileged to witness there, matey boy! A stupendous roller coaster of a piece that (to my ears) is almost as exciting as Beethoven's 9th or Shostakovich's 4th. I heard it for the first time when I went to a CBSO concert in Brum, where it was conducted (as here) by Simon Rattle. I was absolutely gobsmacked by how exciting I found it, by the sheer density of what was going on, and by the unearthly wails of the Ondes Martenot, an eccentric electronic instrument somewhere between a synthesizer and a theremin. My companion for the evening, however, hated it - she's an orchestral clarinettist, and so wasn't unaccustomed to orchestral music, so that didn't explain the difference in reaction. On the strength of that experience, I bought a CD of Rattle conducting the piece, and it's become a firm favourite. Yet I've no patience myself with the sort of random honkings and parpings that bedevilled jazz in the late 20th century, before it reconnected with swing and hard bop. So clearly my ears found appealing patterns in what I heard that night. I believe that we enjoy music that strikes the right balance (which varies with the individual) between predictability and surprise. Among many other factors. Obviously my own personal wavelength was close enough to that of Messiaen. An intriguing thread - thanks for starting it!
I think I'm with your companion
However the little old lady sitting next to me was very excited and explained beforehand everything that everyone was playing in great detail. I did enjoy the Ondes Martenot but thought it was criminally underused. The chap playing it only needed one finger and didn't look particularly challenged, I wanted to see him really attack it and see what kind of strange electronic soundscapes he could wring out of it.
I wonder whether Kraftwerk ever heard one or managed to get their hands on one before they invented electronica.
Life is short
There are trillions of opinions. I realised I didn't need Clive James's (on music, at least) the day he described Aretha Franklin's singing as a triumph of talent over taste.
Good question.
And I do not have an answer to it...
Just some random thoughts.
As my dear piano teacher kept repeating: music used to be a science, now it is showbiz.
I recently read an interview with the founder of the Downtown Music Gallery (NYC). He said that CDs/records are NOT music, but rather "audio postcards". Music, he claims, is when there are people playing live in the same room that you are in. A great thought, IMHO.
Re the Coltrane/showing off comment: I agree, there is always a very fine line between musicians who are technically fantastic, but musically not on top of their game. (Steve Vai comes to mind.)
Since I am a musician myself (and I love some of the people who are considered "avantgarde"), I know that we spend time analyzing music, that we sometimes try out new things, etc. etc. I feel that not all of those experiments need to be done in front of an audience, but there can be certain times and/or places where it is appropriate. Musicians who do certain things only to be different, are not musicians, IMHO. Kind of goes back to the science/showbiz remark I made above.
Any sounds can be music.
It's up to the person listening to them to consider them so. They might be listening to bird sounds, or trains passing, or someone making sounds, or they may even be making the sounds themselves. Others may or may not agree that those sounds are music of course. That's what I reckon anyway.
Musical relativity
This would probably be Einstein's favoured definition.
Mine too, thanks.
Randomness in art
Its been used many times not least by Cage and his choreographer collaborator Merce Cunnigham - they call the process aleatoric. In Cunningham's work the process has resulted in some fine dances, in Cage's he misses more than he hits for me but his piece Roratorio - based on the writings of James Joyce is a fabuluous riot of sound and text. Cunnigham made a dance with it which I saw at the Royal Albert Hall in 1988, it was wondrous.
Can I just say...
... that I wish I noticed this thread earlier on.
I can think of nothing interesting to add, my own thoughts have all been included by previous posters and there's no need to write them down again, but what a fine bunch of thinkers and theorists you all are! This really is the only site I bother to read what's posted on...
Anyone got any thoughts ...
on what art is?
Here's Robert Hughes' attempt
At defining art in The Shock Of The New, quoted by Clive James in one of the collections of his Observer TV criticism, The Crystal Bucket :
"The basic project of art is always to make the world whole and comprehensible, to restore it to us in all its glory and occasional nastiness, not through argument but through feeling. And then to close the gap between everything that is you and not you, and in this way to pass from feeling to meaning"
Couldn't have put it better myself.
or Art is..
everything that's not music or jelly or Debbie Gibson
Oscar Wilde has had a few goes at this
and he would be a fine Word blogger. Some below:
- Life imitates art far more than art imitates Life.
- It is through art, and through art only, that we can realize our perfection; through art and art only that we can shield ourselves from the sordid perils of actual existence.
- Consistency is the last refuge of the unimaginative.
- Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months.
- The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it immensely. All art is useless.
- No great artist ever sees things as they really are. If he did he would cease to be an artist.
- One should absorb the colour of life, but one should never remember its details. Details are always vulgar.
- The true mystery of the world is the visible, not the invisible.
- All art is at once surface and symbol. Those who go beneath the surface do so at their peril. Those who read the symbol do so at their peril.
+ Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.
- Every portrait that is painted with feeling is a portrait of the artist, not of the sitter.
- Nowadays people know the price of everything and the value of nothing.
All You Need Is Love
Was watching the programme from the recently released on DVD series of the above-named TV show from the seventies about jazz, and someone referred to making music as a chance to be, or is like aspiring to be, Godlike. Making art likewise, I would say - you aim to create a kind of world, somehow you have an urge to do so, to exercise control in one place where you can have it, whereas in other aspects of life you maybe don't have much - except of course it's not that simple. You are most likely going to fail! Doesn't have to be that hard I suppose but often is. I guess occasionally it can seem effortless when it's all going right. I speak as one who has wielded a paint brush in an attempt to express himself on more than one occasion.
definition of music (sort of)
I'm aware that I've come to this a bit late (cos you're talking about Art now), and I have a half-remembered quote from *insert avant-garde composer whose name I've forgotten* which said something to the effect of: music is what I listen to when I put myself in a frame of mind to listen to something musical.
So that settles that one.
As always, Tommy Vance has the answer
At the end of the Top 40 rundown on Radio 1 on Sunday evenings, he would always say:
"...and I leave you with this thought (long, dramatic pause)
Isn't (pause) music (pause) Great?"
Tyres O'Flaherty has the answer of course - music is everywhere!
I think John Miles said it all
"Music was my first love and it will be my last
Music of the future and music of the past"
I think that says it all really.
Don´t call me a loser, call me a rebel -
- but that leaves out Music of the now.... which, occasionally, is almost as good as Music of the past and certainly way, way better than Music of the future.
Answer: 42
It really depends what the question actually is, and what you would do with the answer if you ever got one?
For instance, if we came to an agreed conclusion about the criteria to be met for a piece to qualify as "music", I can bet there would be thousands of earnest angry young British men who would revel in the fact that certain of their treasured mp3s failed to qualify as music: it would become a badge of honour.
A bit like those BOFs who complained in the early 60s that what the Stones were doing wasn't "really" blues; as if it matters?
Interesting thought experiment, though.