From Alex Reynolds Sent Fri, Dec 25th 1998, 08:28
From Alex Reynolds Sent Fri, Dec 25th 1998, 08:28
[For some, this critique will get boring fast, so read on only if you are an Advanced Music Critic or Artiste who Gets Off On This Sort Of Thing. All others may delete and immediately resume their Teletubbies-consumption activities. After the last mess, Standard Disclaimers regarding Opinions and the inalienable Right to Express Them are invoked in advance. -Ed. note] A Rebuttal to Mr Pete Green's "Machine Statement" Mr Green, Largely speaking, 'classical' string-based instruments are mechanically simple: length of string determines the pitch; user plucks, hammers or uses compressed air to vibrate strings to obtain said pitch. The "user interface" for such devices is thus fairly straightforward: pull fingers, press ivories, or purse lips and vibrate air through the instrument. Before mass-production, instruments were sold on the basis of custom requirements of the musician. The design of the instrument was determined solely by the mechanical sound qualities demanded by the user/musician. Why? One, because of the hand-crafted nature of instrument manufacturing; and two, because of the economics of the the music industry. Not everyone had the cash or skills to own or make these items. Because the musician was playing live to the audience, each performance was a unique, one-time function grounded in the cultural base of the audience, the emotional makeup of the musician, and the time and surroundings in which both the artist and audience interacted. By contrast, the output from and design of the mass-produced, MIDI-based instrument is dependent less on the requirements of the user/musician than on the whims of the programmer/music industry. To get back to the user interface metaphor, the human user takes from the digital instrument only those sounds which the programmer will allow, within the boundaries of certain user-controllable variables, such as attack, delay, etc. As such, the user must shape his/her activities around the mass-produced interface-demands of the instrument. Mass-produced sounds largely homogenize the artist-audience interaction. "Live" DJ sets make a joke of the word 'live', because the artist is basically doing what has already been done. The nightclubbing crowd loads up on the chic drug of the day and shakes booty to tracks that are 'here today, gone tomorrow,' ala Chemical Bros. or Prodigy. With very, very few exceptions, today's user/musician who makes use of electronic instruments restricts himself to the conceptual landscape of the instrument's designer. History is turned on its ear as control is quite literally wrested *away* from the musician-audience interaction. To say that the use of machines should be a transparent process is a misnomer. Until musicians learn to code, mix and press their own tracks, and control distribution and performance issues, they will always be working within the framework of the person who designs the tools and those who control the music industry. It begs the question of who is really the electronic musician, from a creative standpoint: the guy who throws the chips together or the guy who tells the chips what to do? This extends to the DJ-sampling versus 'original'-source debate, which is (in my mind) still very much an unresolved grey area/playground of creativity and plagiarism. +++ "However, modern (technological) musical composition is now able to transcend certain traditional notions of what a musical work, it's use in society, and it's physical function are. It is now possible to percieve music as the closest way that human kind (in any conventional sense) is capable of achieving any degree of 'telepathic' communication." +++ This is a very controversial statement, bordering on 1-900 psychic phone line boosterism. If music is now transcending 'traditional notions' of what constitutes a work, it is only because of the exposure of Western culture to the East concurrent with the invention of sampling tools in the twentieth century. Throwing some record scratching or a sitar riff in your latest pop song/anthem does not mean you are telepathically 'reaching out' to your fan base, it usually means you work for Aerosmith or the Beastie Boys and you're trying to sell a few more 'units.' Simply put, while the technical boundaries have expanded, the 'artistic message' has not. Music is not much closer to capturing the human spirit than it was before European musicians 'discovered' the savage, strange, and oddly captivating music of non-European cultures. In fact, the framework of intense technical detail and conflict of egos in which this music is created *implies* a priori distortion and further alienation from the listener: You have so many cooks stirring the pot that the soup becomes a noisy -- one might say, meaningless -- mix of conceptual influences, even before the poor listener gets a taste. *If anything, musicians are further away from communicating directly with the audience than ever.* +++ "The obvious and imediate arguement against this is that (listening to) music is of course a subjective process, and any information extracted from a musical source is simply the listeners interpretation of their personal inner self and not that of the composer. However because music has no physical analogy it cannot be quantified in the sense that a painting could because it has no physical presence, and is therefore only identifiable in terms of completely abstracted forms." +++ This is technically and philosophically incorrect. Music can be described as a quantifiable measure of compressed air packets. This physical metaphor, along with other metaphors, allowed scientific Artistes to invent the tools to capture and translate 'music' into other means. (Compressed air vibrates magnet within metallic coil -- a microphone -- stimulating an electic current which is 'written' to media, etc.) A painting can be framed in analogous technical metaphors: compressions of electromagnetic waves instead of fluids; metaphors which, for example, allow college freshmen to purchase and hang realistic copies of Edvard Munch's "The Scream" on their dorm walls. This description, of course, does no justice to the *artistic content* of this physical phenomena. But this not only involves a subjective interpretation on the listener's part, but that too of the artist(s) involved. To use Eastern metaphors, this subjective framework is the 'dance' of the artist-audience interaction, and what makes the art so fruitful. +++ "Music has no form or substance it exists only as 'pure' energy, because of this is it not inherently unstable such as any other communcative device exhibits, and cannot be subjected in the same way with rigourous inacuracies as other forms are subjected to... Music cannot contain these these distortions because it does not contain a physical substrate, it is transparent in transmission and reproduction." +++ This paragraph is meaningless, new-age bullshit, with no grounding in reality. Purse your lips and whistle; there: you've now created the stuff, the physical substance of music, which is very unstable. (Otherwise, you'd go insane or deaf from the unending note.) Furthermore, try whistling in a vacuum. Before you choke to death trying, you'll quickly learn that music's substrate is air or any other compressable fluid. +++ "Therefore because music does not undergo any ambiguous generic conversion processes ( such as how, for example, a writer would need to convert their perception of a rooms environment into a form capable of being writen down on paper), it can be percieved as the closest thing to a direct linkage to a persons (composers) brain." +++ This is also incorrect. A simple analogy: Writer uses 'positive' and 'negative' adjectives and a particular style to describe the emotional energy of the subject. Likewise, the musician can use generic 'minor' and 'major' chords and various time signatures to evoke the desired emotion response on the part of the listener. +++ "This has only been a feesable proposition since the introduction of the grammaphone and mass duplication of musical material, since this technology for the first time enabled what the composer wanted to communicate to be reproduced as it was made without the obvious interpretational inacuracies that a manuscipted score would have. In this sense, since music is essentially mechanistic in its function, what the composer heard from the final production of thier finished work as it left the factory could be percieved as a direct 'digital' transfer of all the composer's thought processes that led up to that point in time." +++ This is not always true. My good friend, who works as a sound engineer at a local studio, tells me that a lot of demos come in sounding like shit, because the musician used a pair of headphones to mix tracks. Depending the musician's equipment, the studio's equipment, and the ears of the engineers and producers, what the musician 'expected' sounds dramatically altered from the original. The steps involved in publishing music are hardly 'digital' and involve the biases of many people and the technical boundaries of the recording equipment used to record and reproduce these 'thought processes'. So let's recap. You feel that it is important the musician's work to get spiritually closer to the listener. You feel that electronic instruments, a product of the industrial age, have made the gap smaller or nonexistent because this form of music has special technical and psychic properties which other forms of art lack. You must divorce the physical act of creating music, grounded very much in the noise and laws of reality and the biases of the creator, from the neurochemical act of listening to music, from the act of interpreting music. A couple recommendations to get started on your new career/spiritual rebirth as an Artiste: -- drop all electronic equipment from your act; sell out and somehow do "Unplugged" DJ sets for MTV -- take an introductory course in physics or art history If the acoustic thing doesn't work out and you don't want to bother with that whole, non-groovy "grading thing": -- retake as much control of the creative and publishing process as you can As a musician, if you make your own sampling tools, if you produce your own tracks, if you publish with an independent label or put out MPEGs on your band's web site, you are making the purest, truest artistic statement that you can. One example of such an artist is the guitarist Robert Fripp, who exhibits as much control as he reasonably can over the artistic content, performance environment and distribution of his solo work. Taking back control of the artistic process at all steps will save electronic music (and any other art form, for that matter) from the hegemonic death of becoming just one more corporate acquisition; it will save musicians from the emotional idolization/alienation that results from becoming a celebrity; and it will go a long way towards reclaiming the intimacy of the musician with a now cynical audience, and hence improve the quality of the experience shared between the artist and audience. I agree that electronic music can expand the emotional vocabulary of the human species. (Thanks to music, I, too, have been on the Edge; and I didn't have to dial any 1-900 numbers, either.) But I do not agree that this is happening on the grand scale that you imply in your largely non-sensical treatment. Best regards, Alex Reynolds __________________________________________________________________________ Alex Reynolds E xxxxxxxx@xxx.xxxxx.xxx UPenn : SAS Computing : Biology Dist Support V +1 215 573 2818 http://www.sas.upenn.edu/biology/ F +1 215 898 8780 'The central message of Buddhism is not "every man for himself"!' -- Wanda