Nothing 2 Say But It’s Ok

Having had my prehistoric writings excavated by Dennis DeSantis (http://www.dennisdesantis.com/2010/04/30/who-cares-if-you-care), I guess I can weigh in on this subject…yes, from a distance (whatever that distance might be) it would appear that these kinds of conversations are basically pep talks that Interested Parties give to one another, spurs to doing more outreach, more grant writing, finding more ways to induce Thom Yorke or Bjork to do some kind of collaboration (I know, I know…let he who is without sin, right?). And it’s probably not a bad thing, it doesn’t hurt anyone too much to believe that if we all tried harder, we could effect some kind of restoration, set the world right. But even without invoking world hunger or the death of the Gulf of Mexico – i.e., keeping it within the family of ‘kultcha,’ and at the risk of offending friends and acquaintances alike (colleagues, potential critics, whoever) – it does seem like one would have to be somewhat sheltered or at least blinkered to think that the issue itself – the ‘relevance’ of ‘classical music,’ or, excuse me ‘the western concert tradition’ – could ITSELF be relevant….

Partially I think this is because we’re all a little bit greedy about the whole thing, given the self-indulgent nature of what we do. Anyone who has actually delved into the ‘music industry’ – that is, the REAL music industry, where profit is unabashedly the motivating factor and where money at least used to be made – quickly realizes that THAT music business is in fact just that: a business, the sequence of notes and the form(at) in which they appear mitigated in all sorts of ways by whether or not those sequences in those formats can be marketed and sold. Not that there’s anything wrong with this per sé, either as a prevailing ideology, which it certainly is (ask any Republican or, at this point, any Democrat who wants to be reelected), or as something that we all experience as having at least a potentially positive impact on our lives (unless, for example, you think Google and Apple really are motivated by their desire to make your life more convenient). In other words, in every other part of our lives – the non-musical parts, where cultural products in the larger sense (movies, iPhone aps, ‘issues’) DO in fact seem relevant – we are COMPLETELY comfortable with the idea that these are in some sense designed with some combination of content and saleability in mind – calculated, focus grouped and market tested, packaged, etc. And we don’t seem to have a problem with this when it comes to buying our software, downloading our movies (or our guilty pleasure music), choosing our president. In fact at least in the latter case we all seemed grateful for the effort.

And as an addendum to this, I should add that I’m not implying that our indie brethren aren’t motivated by the same lofty artistic concerns we are, of course – possibly they’re simply smart enough, insightful enough, lucky enough to have realized that hitching your wagon to the zeitgeist was a lot more sensible way to garner public attention – that is, at their best, they are speaking a recognizable language, through a recognizable means of transmission, and so why should it be so shocking when folks at the next table (that same young, hip literati crowd who ’should’ be going to the symphony or our own concerts) are discussing how much they like (or don’t like – I’ve heard that conversation too) Dirty Projectors or the National? I seem to recall that Gone With the Wind outsold Ulysses, that Paul Whiteman was a lot more popular than Stravinsky, etc. etc. The level of self-awareness of commerciality certainly varies from artist to artist – without naming names, I’ve seen every variety of this, on every level of the pop music food chain – but I would argue it’s not only always there on some level, but that it SHOULD be – that’s the whole point of popular art.

Which is not to say that there’s anything wrong with us newmusikistas trying to reach a larger audience, particularly when in many cases this is indistinguishable from trying to reach ANY audience…why shouldn’t we do everything we can to try to get people to come to our concerts? And it’d be a bit strange for me personally, as a Usual Suspect, to discount this, given my own efforts in this regard, both within Bang on a Can and outside of it. As Dennis points out, it’s been for many years no small part of Bang’s to try to expand the base – sometimes this works and sometimes it doesn’t, and slowly but surely the world does seem to be able to accommodate us a little more, at least on occasion. But even when it does, I don’t think it’s particularly sane to think that this is going to change the musical landscape in any but the smallest and most incremental of ways – i.e., by getting the attention of a subset of a subset of a subset. If it’s changed (and I think it has, at least a little bit), it’s because of a LOT of factors – social, technological, and possibly random. I’m just happy I’m around to witness it. So yeah, there are all sorts of good reasons to try to make one’s music reach as many people as possible – Be All That You Can Be, all that; but there are also good reasons to keep this in some kind of perspective, and to not blame ourselves too much – whoever ‘we’ may be – for ostensibly losing ‘our’ audience. It may have been elitist for Cousin Arnold and Uncle Miltie. to decide they didn’t care who listened, but come on – who among the hoi polloi really even noticed? More likely most people were too busy listening to music that actually spoke to them to pay too much attention to the music that didn’t.

Because what I’m trying to figure out when this golden age was where classical music ‘mattered’ in a way that could pass muster with Greg Sandow (who by the way I think is a smart and interesting guy) or the 8th Blackbird guy (who I’m sure is interesting as well). Circumstances were simply too different back in the day. It doesn’t even matter which ‘day’ your talking about, 20 years ago (when I wrote that essay) or 200 years ago – because it has to do with not only who’s controlling ‘the media’ (town crier, newspaper critic, blogger, whatever) but who’s doing the counting. What was Mozart’s market share? And how many other forms of entertainment was he competing against? Of those, how many could have their sales figures determined?

To be honest, I’m toying with the idea that the real reason ’serious’ music seems to be constantly fighting to stay afloat – or at least feels that way by those of us who consider ourselves to be doing it – is in fact the OPPOSITE of what is normally suggested – i.e., the lack of exposure, the lack of radio play, the lack of an Oprah’s New Music Club, I would argue – at least posit for the fun of it – the idea that the devaluation of our thing actually comes from access itself – from the ease with which everyone and anyone can listen to all this weird music that’s floating around the planet. Think about Cage and Feldman in the 1940s, desperately seeking out Webern scores at the New York Public Library, poring over these like sacred texts, because there was almost no hope of actually hearing the music itself. In my own case, some years later, I remember wearing out the grooves of my first Sacre recording (Solti and CSO), which I listened to on a portable Panasonic record player with a built in monophonic speaker – basically one step above a Close-n-Play. Transcribing Charlie Parker solos (because this was pre-Omnibook) from a Radio Shack micro-cassette deck. And having to actually go to Bali to learn gamelan. I realize this is kind of ‘in my day we walked ten miles through a blizzard to get to school,’ but I’m suggesting there’s some validity to it. Every piece was a valuable object, you treasured it, you got inside it. Whereas at this moment – not that I’m condoning this, or doing it, just pointing out because I just checked – I could illegally download the complete works of Xenakis in a matter of minutes. And then defang them completely but putting them on a shuffled playlist with ‘Radiohead, Beethoven, Brahms and Brian Eno’ (to quote from today’s WSJ piece about Timothy Andres’ playlist).

In other words, context, the fluidity of which ends up being fairly significant. And which depending on our listening habits becomes form, customizable by the listener. To hell with clapping between movements – I don’t have to listen to all the movements, or hear them in the right order, or all the way through, or in any kind of genre-related or even humanly explicable playlist. And in a situation like this, where we’re choosing much of our music because of ‘feel’, through 30-second excerpts on Amazon and iTunes, or simply by what pops up in shuffle mode, what does this say to us about ‘form’ as a musical necessity? This is definitely the most problematic and intriguing issue out there: not whether content needs form but whether form itself has content. And having dispensed with issues of universality (don’t get me started), I don’t see how it’s possible to make an intellectually coherent argument in favor of it. There’s just too much evidence to the contrary (I’ll spare you the details, but if you want some, drop a line). And yet I’m all for it, and increasingly intrigued by the issue of whether it actually matters. To take a fairly straightforward example, think about somethinglike Arvo Part’s Fratres, any version. I mention it because it actually IS a piece that has ‘relevance’ in the Sandowian sense, the kind of piece you can play for that same elusive audience we apparently can’t seem to get to care about ’serious’ music. Your mother’s friends, a music appreciation class, the folks at the next table – try it, they’ll ‘get it’. What’s intriguing here, as we all know, is that Part’s music – at least from that period and before – is about as formalistic and formulaic as anyone’s: the structure of Fratres is straight out of the minimalist playbook, you can imagine Alvin Lucier or Steve Reich using similar principles. This thrills me personally, but I’m not sure why it does or whether it should. It’s something to notice, something to mention to my students, something to formulate opinions about, but I’m not sure it’s really relevant to what makes that piece so moving. Maybe we just respond to drones and poignant modal melodies. Maybe (almost certainly) Part needed that kind of tight structure to focus his mind and quiet his thought so that he could GET himself to write such a simple, straightforward tune. As it stands the transposition scheme of that piece seems mind-blowingly perfect. But if we shuffled it into a random order and listened to it enough times, it might seem just as perfect, or more so. And when it was excerpted for “There Will Be Blood”, did it lose any of its power? Or did it simply serve as a hipper, weirder replacement for the Barber Adagio, which has already been used up as a signifier of movie profundity?

It’s a little thorny…and maybe thankfully so, as I’d kind of hate to ever actually know the answer…it’s almost a matter of willful ignorance, we have to believe in form because by definition the alternative is formlessness, and god knows we’re all close enough to that already…But since advocates of pieces as different as, say, Piano Phase and Le Marteau would point to importance of form in measuring a piece’s significance, one has to ask: which form of form are we actually talking about? Exoskeletal or molecular; a process or an algorithm? A frame to put stuff in, or the sum of all parts?

I guess I’m obligated to agree with Dennis’ advice togo out and make the music you want to make – particularly since it echoes my own from 19 years ago – but I guess I’d temper that with something that’s equal parts pragmatic and ridiculously idealistic. To begin with, the idea that the music one ‘wants’ to make has nothing to do with one’s time and place is beyond absurd, as it would be to suggest that the words we utter just happen to be in languages we know how to speak. One way or another, we’re engaged. But if, given that, one makes the perfectly legitimate choice to not be overly concerned with popular appeal; that is, if one is going to persist in the fairly rarefied activity ofwriting and playing whatever music one ‘feels like’, ‘expressing’ ‘oneself’ as it were, then one should be prepared to deal with the fact that this solitary activity is going to end up at time seeming, well, a bit lonely. And if that’s unsatisfactory, maybe think about finding some middle ground? In any case, at least for me, on the rare occasions when I do manage to create something that seems (at least to me) to have value – whether it’s deemed ‘relevant’ by others or not – it seems clear to me that I have NO idea why it ended up that way, however well I can remember the experience of writing it or playing it. That’s the idealistic part: at those moments, whether they’re real or illusory, shared or solitary, it’s difficult to not share Terry Riley’s idea that all music is in fact an expression of something universal, that it’s just a matter of whether an individual – composer, player or listener – is able to tap into it or not. And I honestly think it’s kind of a beautiful thing to even be able to make the attempt, whether or not someone ends up talking about how much they like it – or hate it – at the next table.