Dynamics in Pop Music

While the study is several years old by now, a friend pointed me to this study of the dynamic characteristics of top-selling pop songs (full listing of songs here). The author convincingly connects sonogram readings with how people hear the songs. Great example of analysis done right.

George Rochberg, 1918-2005

Without even regarding his music, George Rochberg should forever serve as the paragon of artistic integrity in music. With his much-noted shift in style, he eschewed fashion in order to be honest to himself. Before I even knew his music, he had my profound respect. Once I started listening, I found his work continually demonstrated this daring attitude. Certainly people scoffed when Pachelbel's canon showed up in his sixth quartet, but how many other composers would have the balls to do the same thing with their own music? He asserted the right of the composer to make uncertain moves, showing that the honest effort has value in and off itself. While the keen confidence of so many great composers requires a certain resilience from those who wish to measure up to them, the example left by Rochberg demands an entirely different type of mettle.

Crutches

In my current theory class, the terminal course in the sequence, we're undergoing a whirlwind tour of the latter half of the 20th century. Today we compared two articles, Babbitt's "Who Cares if you Listen?"/"The Composer as Specialist" and Susan McClary's "Terminal Prestige." The latter, though written 30 years later, is essentially a response to the modernist mindset embodied by Babbitt. It struck me that both pieces fall into a similar trap, one that is essentially in opposition with the creation of art.

Babbitt's primary point was that contemporary developments in music paralleled those in the hard sciences. Postwar serialism had long overshot the public's perceptual abilities, therefore it was necessary for the university system to support composers of "serious" music (the position is essentially the same as Adorno's in Philosophy of Modern Music, though Babbitt invokes scientific research instead of a class struggle). McClary attacked this attitude, arguing that the "academic avant-garde" is writing itself into obscurity. Those circles should slacken their objective stance and examine other facets of music, such as its social function.

McClary concludes her article with a discussion of an Earth, Wind & Fire song, "System of Survival." She argues that it is sophisticated music, as worthy of scholarly attention as anything out of the university scene. The troublesome point comes here:

"System of Survival" is, in other words, a song that gives no credence whatsoever to the mind/body split or to the defensive autonomy that infects so much of Western music, especially that of the avant-garde which fetishizes intellectual work for its own sake. At the same time, it is an extremely smart piece: musically, socially politically. It draws upon and celebrates forms of sedimented cultural memory that have miraculously survived a history of extraordinary oppression and that threaten to persist indefinitely—even if not acknowledged within the academy.

A trend throughout McClary's writing is an interest in "smart," socially responsive music. While she essentially attacks academics for overvaluing music because it matches up to their arbitrary criteria (complex construction, etc.), she's guilty of the same crime. She often latches onto music because it's ironic, contorts traditional forms, or responds to class and gender "issues." The music itself may not be full of much deep thought or emotion, but if it hits one of these trigger points, it's worthy of attention from her (witness the entire chapter devoted to Madonna in Feminine Endings).

It's very important to respond to these aspects of music, but my inclination is that McClary is picking pieces to use as vehicles for her own ideas, rather than pieces that expose new ones. This is no different than locking into construction as the primary point of musical interest. The topics of discussion are decided in advance, analysis and criticism are merely used to expound on them. The thought developed through analysis and criticism is often stimulating, but it's preferable to let the approach be determined by the subject. It's difficult to find new truths and forms in art when you're busy looking for old ones. A rejection of one system shouldn't lead to a new set of equally harmful habits. Artists, too, can fall victim to this (look at "indie" film or "alternative" music). Art depends on the restless search for new modes of being. Leaning on crutches—objective stances, gender studies, what have you—only draws one away from this mission.

You know you're a theory professor when...

...your computer has seen so many German terms that AutoCorrect assumes that everything you type must also be in German.

Composers and P2P

For most composers, getting email, maybe even setting up a simple web page, counts as keeping up with the times. Some composers have even set up blogs to air their opinions, but few people have really taken advantage of the internet to distribute their music. It's possible to find some MP3s every now and then, but most composers only post a section or two from the whole piece. If you decide that you want to hear the whole thing, you have to track down a CD. Of course, the composer might not mention what record company released the CD, the CD might be out of print, you might have to special order it...before long, too many problems crop up. Unless the selection you heard was so astounding that you will stop at nothing to buy the CD, you may just give up and move on.

Even if a composer makes full pieces available for download, he's still putting himself at a little bit of a disadvantage. He has to pay hosting fees, design the web site (or pay someone else to), and encode his music. He also has to promote his work, let his audience know about the downloads he has available, and convince them to download them. The composer is responsible for just about everything; these things take time away from writing music and all the musical and extramusical issues associated with that.

CD Baby is a pretty good way to get your music out there. You have to provide them with a packaged CD, but they'll take care of distribution and promotion. However, you're still stuck with manufacturing the discs (either through paying to get some pressed or burning some CD-Rs) and the packaging. This may seem like a lot of work, especially if you don't have a clear sense of how many you'll actually sell. Internet radio is another direction to go in, but it prevents your music from moving beyond the radio station. People are still forced to look for recordings if they want their own copy.

What you really want is a way to distribute your music that doesn't require a lot of overhead, relieves some of the marketing work, and maybe even lets a little money slip back your way. What the classical world needs to discover is P2P. Peer-to-peer networks allow users to download content from each other instead of relying on a centralized server. This means that content creators don't have to maintain websites and find ways to drive people to them. Your audience does the distribution and marketing for you. If you want to release a new recording into the world, all you need to do is send it to a few friends. Eventually it will spread throughout the P2P network. Using P2P also gives you instant feedback on what your audience thinks. If people like your music, multiple sources for it will show in a search for it. Tools like Weed can help you get paid and provide encouragement for people to spread your music around.

Starting up a service like this is incredibly easy, something I would be willing to do myself. However, would other composers be interested in using it? What issues do people foresee in releasing their work like this? Drop by the comments and leave your feelings about this; maybe we can get something going.

Playing Nicely with Other People

“Process music” was among the many classifications first thrust upon what's now usually called minimalism. While not always applicable, a lot of early minimalism was based on the slow realization of a few simple instructions. Some music out of the New York School could be described in a similar way. One of the effects of this attitude is to shift listener attention away from a large-scale developmental thrust towards the beauty of individual moments.

Classical concerts don't engender a lot of social interaction during the concert because development-oriented music requires one's undivided attention. Music that flows between individual moments produces a different kind of relationship between the music and its audience. Since events aren't tied to a large scale trajectory, you can breath a little more while listening to process-oriented music. The experience can become more social. If you want to make a comment to someone you're sitting with, the rest of the piece won't become lost on you. In this way, process-oriented music has a lot in common with jazz and popular music. The larger structure (the band's set) has value as a totality, but its pieces (the songs) are worth something on their own.

It can be hard to get friends interested in a lot of the music I like, but I had a great time listening to Indeterminacy with someone. Its structure allowed us to comment on Cage's stories while we listened. We may have missed out on an entire piece every now and then, but the bits we did talk were absorbed that much more. Listening to the music became a positive shared experience, one centered around the music. Most composers would agree that getting their music entered into part of someone's life is a Good Thing. Writing “process music” is certainly not for everyone, but exploring different forms and how they relate to social experiences is one way to help your music to do this.

Frontispiece

The distinction between form and content informs many discussions on music. Musicians throughout history can't seem to agree which is more important to music (if one should even be more important). Western art music's roots in the church among the so-called "quadrivium" of arithmetic, geometry, music, and astronomy gave its early history a certain scientific slant.

Some remarks in the Guardian on Boulez's recent birthday show that this stance is still alive and kicking today. In fact, Oliver Knussen compares him to a "medieval monk." Among the respondants, no one contests his skill as a craftsman, but several find the content of his music sorely lacking. What's interesting isn't that Boulez polarizes audiences (this has been established for some time), but that the composers called upon mostly focused on either form or content as exclusive entities. Only Thomas Adès really acknowledged that in art there is a dialogue between form and content. If this blog has a "mission," it is to be sensitive to how the two interact and balance each other.