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I tolerate this century, but I don't enjoy it.
All of the ephemera that is far too trivial to be bothered with elsewhere on this site or, depending on your point of view, a meta-commentary on it. This ephemera includes, but is not limited to art, music and literature. Most of the content here will be discussed in terms that are as abstract as possible, reality being a singularly overrated concept.
Wednesday, April 19, 2006
Daniel Barenboim's Reith Lectures have provided some interesting thoughts about the respective roles of sight and hearing:"Antonio DeMasio, has taught us many things about human emotion, about the human brain, and also about the human ear, and he says that the auditory system is physically much closer inside the brain to the parts of the brain which regulate life, which means that they are the basis for the sense of pain, pleasure, motivation - in other words basic emotions. And he also says that the physical vibrations which result in sound sensations are a variation on touching, they change our own bodies directly and deeply, more so than the patterns of light that lead to vision, because the patterns of light that lead to vision allow us to see objects sometimes very far away provided there is light...
... And not only we neglect the ear but we often repress it, and we find more and more in our society, not only in the United States, although the United States I think was very active in starting this process, of creating opportunities to hear music without listening to it - what is commonly known as muzak."
Camille Paglia's once observed that cinema was always implicit in Western culture and it's certainly true that literature is replete with visual description and imagery in a way that is not nearly as marked for the tactile or auditory senses. Nonetheless, it seems to me that much of the difficulty identified by Barenboim stems not from neglect as such but from both hearing and sight being abused in much the same way. Just as we are bombarded each day with imagery, so too are we bombarded with sound. For instance, while it is obvious why Barenboim feels that muzak devalues the concept of listening to the intricacies of music, it nonetheless seems to be the case that muzak is very far from simply being background music. I'm thinking of Brian Eno's experiments in ambient music, where Eno's sleevenotes for Music for Airports described his idea thus:"The concept of music designed specifically as a background feature in the environment was pioneered by Muzak Inc. in the fifties, and has since come to be known generically by the term Muzak. The connotations that this term carries are those particularly associated with the kind of material that Muzak Inc. produces - familiar tunes arranged and orchestrated in a lightweight and derivative manner. Understandably, this has led most discerning listeners (and most composers) to dismiss entirely the concept of environmental music as an idea worthy of attention.
Over the past three years, I have become interested in the use of music as ambience, and have come to believe that it is possible to produce material that can be used thus without being in any way compromised. To create a distinction between my own experiments in this area and the products of the various purveyors of canned music, I have begun using the term Ambient Music.
Whereas the extant canned music companies proceed from the basis of regularizing environments by blanketing their acoustic and atmospheric idiosyncracies, Ambient Music is intended to enhance these. Whereas conventional background music is produced by stripping away all sense of doubt and uncertainty (and thus all genuine interest) from the music, Ambient Music retains these qualities. And whereas their intention is to `brighten' the environment by adding stimulus to it (thus supposedly alleviating the tedium of routine tasks and levelling out the natural ups and downs of the body rhythms) Ambient Music is intended to induce calm and a space to think. "
The theory behind ambient was, and remains, a fascinating one but it nonetheless seems clear that theory never translated into practice. Modern muzak continues to be too intrusive to truly qualify as background noise, while the influence of ambient on dance music only saw it too becoming more complex, more engaging and less minimal. Equally, it has become much more common to have TV screens in public areas, allowing imagery to be piped as easily as music.
Update: A related piece from Stylus Magazine (via here) on how the dynamic range of modern music has become increasingly compressed, with less variance between the quieter sections of a record and the louder:"Levels have crept up over the last decade though, and alarmingly so. Nevermind is 6-8dB quieter than, say, Hopes & Fears by Keane—to contextualise this, those 6-8dB will make Nevermind sound approximately half as loud....
By the time you've listened closely (or tried to) to a whole album that's heavily compressed, you end up feeling like Alex at the end of A Clockwork Orange—battered, fatigued by, and disgusted with the music you love... The story goes that Brian Eno “invented” ambient music after a car accident, when he was forced to stay in hospital dosed on painkillers, and someone left a radio playing so quietly that he couldn’t properly hear the music it emitted no matter how much he strained... It strikes me that the way many people are listening to music these days—on trains, in offices, on the street—is not a normal listening experience. It is neither conscious engagement nor ambient enhancement. It’s a hermetic seal, a blockade to the outside world. It’s the opposite of ambient music, in that it doesn’t become a part of or complement the environment it is played in, but rather destroys it."
posted by Richard 7:28 pm
Thursday, October 13, 2005
An interesting piece, using Kate Bush's Hounds of Love to highlight the differences between classical and popular music;"Structure was carefully delineated, verses and choruses written out fully and marked up in colour, and she talked of the sound quality in the most graphic terms... In other words, while it had to fit, Kate wanted it to sound "collaged". This superimposition of foreign sources is a technique pioneered by visionary composers like Ives and Stockhausen.
I have always been fascinated by the difference of dynamics at work between popular artists and conventionally trained classical musicians... gifted "pop" musicians like Bush and U2 are far more demanding of themselves in the studio than classical musicians can afford to be, and will spend days working on a tiny fragment. On the other hand, they envy the technique that allows classically trained composers to write something down that can be realised by good sight readers almost instantly. "
As suggested here, classical music was already receptive to the idea of sounds as a concept in its own right rather than as part of overall harmonic structures (John Cage's experiments in creating aleatory compositions springs to mind). I suspect this critical difference is more likely to be due to the role of recording in popular and classical music; the former is noted and can be endlessly recreated and reinvented depending on the player and instruments while, with the latter, the focus is on a single moment. In classical music much of the interest is on how the performance will interpret the music, in popular cover versions are often, though not always, regarded as something to look down upon. Just as photography made the role of realistic art somewhat redundant and created a role for impressionism, expressionism and surrealism, sound recording seems to have shifted the balance in favour of what Brian Eno called creating imaginative worlds.Labels: Music
posted by Richard 6:56 pm
Monday, February 21, 2005
An article I meant to comment on a while back, arguing that modernism was a death knell for classical music:"What is the most recently composed piece of classical music to have achieved a genuinely established place in the repertoire? ... Shostakovich's first cello concerto, written in 1959, perhaps? Even that is stretching a point. A more truthful answer might be Richard Strauss's Four Last Songs, composed 56 years ago in 1948... South African scholar Peter Van der Merwe reckons that by 1939, the year of Rodrigo's Concierto de Aranjuez, the flow of music that is both genuinely modern and popular had all but dried up. Van der Merwe nods towards Khachaturian, late Strauss and the Britten of Peter Grimes [but] For the general public, he argues, classical music ceased to exist by 1950."
As is often common for such arguments, he cites Schoenberg's modernism as representing a deliberate trend towards an elitist renunciation of popularity. As I've noted before arguments of this kind are to all intents and purposes political; with art through the ages having relied on patronage (Kreutzer, Maecenas, Medici; in the twentieth century both Woolf and Ives relied on private incomes rather than book sales) rather than popular appeal, the laudable democratic instinct behind denunciations of elitism usually seems irrelevant to me. For example, John Carey argues that The Intellectuals and the Masses, which describes the interrelation of elitism and modernism. Carey's analysis is interesting but equally irrelevant; no-one had taken Lawrence, Eliot and Pound for egalitarians but that is very far from devaluing their literary standing in favour of the likes of Bennett.
A more robust argument was that of Camille Paglia who, like the above author, argued that the popular culture of film and rock music had displaced elite culture. If one considers film composers like Bernard Herrman or rock musicians like John Cale some kind of transition might well appear visible. On the other hand, I tend to be a Marxist in such matters (i.e. I don't believe the question of artistic production can be divorced from the culture in which it occurs); if a culture fails to produce art then it is probably simply because said culture is increasingly unable to do so; from my perspective, popular (AngloAmerican at least) culture seems increasingly anodyne and moribund.
Of course, I should admit to being a contrarian in such matters; the modern composers I would cite as being important all broke with modernism; Tavener, Glass, Adams, Part and Reich as counter-examples (given his ubiquitous use in television adverts Glass can hardly be accused of lacking popular reach).
posted by Richard 9:28 pm
