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Saturday, January 06, 2007
Wonderful Rainbow Aesthetics, off the Top of My Head
This post continues a conversation that arose in response to Joseph Kugelmass’s No Desert Island: Towards A Gutsy Aesthetics Via Nabokov. At a certain point Joe mentioned What a Wonderful World, “Armstrong’s most clichéd entry in the canon,” and I responded with the observation that “but that’s Armstrong, not the song itself.” Then Joe responded:
That said, in an age of recorded music, it again becomes hard to separate notation from performance. First of all, it would be hard for a modern singer to perform “What A Wonderful World” without either imitating or rejecting Armstrong’s very specific way of performing it, because the recording is as ubiquitous as the written score.
And I found myself on iTunes looking through different performances of “World,” downloading a few, and analyzing them. And things snowballed through Elvis impersonators, The Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band (an upstate New York outfit I played in), Kojo No Tsuke (a Japanese song), world music, and so forth. As Joe said, “an essay on the production and performance of music.”
I rather doubt that that’s what Joe had in mind when he made the initial post, nor is that what I had in mind when I started commenting on his post. But that’s what happened. You can never tell just what’s gonna’ come through these net-tubes.
I started replying to Joe’s last comment and that reply simply refused to listen to reason. It just got longer and longer and longer and refused to shut-up. So I decided to let it have a post all by itself. Joe’s post was looking for aesthetics and so’s this one. I start with a whole pile of information and observations about music production and performance on the table - if only by implication. What does that have to do with aesthetics?
While this post still takes the form of and is a response to Joe’s last comment, much of it should be at least quasi-intelligible to those who haven’t been following that discussion. Somwhere in there I get around to arguing for more live musicking at whatever level of technical skill.
OBJECTIVITY, PRACTIONER’S CRITICISM, AND AESTHETICS
As should be obvious from various posts I’ve made here, and from stuff of mine that is elsewhere on the web, I’ve spent much of my career working on ways of thinking about art that bracket aesthetic judgment in favor of close description and explanation (via models derived from the newer psychologies). I want to know objectively what’s there - wherever and whatever “there” is, the text, the mind, the interpretive community, the culture, society, whatever. I make no apologies for this and hope to spend much more time doing it. However the humanities move forward, that kind of work is a necessary part of the mix.
But so is criticism, aesthetic advocacy. Where do I stand on that? I don’t really know.
I don’t really know. And so in the manner of E. M. Forster, I write so that I can know what I think.
I know a great deal about the critical activity needed to improve one’s musical performance, whether as an individual or a group. I’ve been moderately active as a musician my entire adult life and such critical activity is part of the craft. You think about your own work - both individually and as a group - but you must also think aesthetically, critically, about music you listen to. The practical expression of this activity, however, is in your performance, and your record-CD-download collection, rather than written critical pieces. I’ve also written occasional critical pieces about this or that - from undergraduate reviews of Bergman’s Shame and John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse to more recent reflections on Martin Scorsese’s PBS series on the blues - but that’s never been a major activity.
So, these conversations give me a chance to begin thinking about aesthetics in a slightly more systematic way. Whether I’ll go anywhere with it is another matter, but that will take care of itself.
FOR THE GOOD OF SOCIETY
Now, back to Joe’s remarks:
Let’s look at the three categories into which, in your response, my critique disappears: liking (Kamakawiwo’ole covering Armstrong and Garland), energy (The Out of Control Rhythm and Blues Band), and hard work (the Elvis impersonator).
My initial reaction to the “three categories” was: where’d that come from? Why package my remarks in that way?
Let’s continue on:
These categories do something I don’t personally favor by being antagonistic to criticism. They suggest that as long as the performer works hard, produces energetic music, and entertains his audience, nothing more really needs saying.
This is not clear to me. Obviously I’m working against your criticism, Joe, and I’m doing so by saying “it’s more complicated than that” and then making a number of informal observations about how popular music gets made and is consumed. What’s that have to do with criticism? Well, if criticism is little more than rationalization of one’s own personal taste, than my observations are irrelevant. Your taste is your taste and my taste is my taste and that, ultimately, is that. We can share our likes and dislikes if we wish, but nothing much more than that.
I assume that you’re after more than simply rationalizing your personal taste. But what? I’d guess you’re concerned about the art that’s necessary for a healthy society. The critic’s job is to identify such art and to explain why it is necessary and, conversely, to identify the lousy stuff and explain why it’s not healthy. That is, it seems to me that that’s more or less what critics see as their mission. In particular, they don’t see themselves as rationalizing merely personal taste nor even the taste of some social class or group.
OK, so what does that mission entail? What’s involved in explaining what music is good for society? That’s obviously a big question and different people are going to have different answers and somehow somewhere eventually those answers are going to involve notions of the human, of society, of the universe, and all that. I don’t want to get into all that.
But I’m interested in a narrower question: Do the sort of observations I’m making have some legitimate role to play in considering this larger issue? I note that, in making those observations, I’m not directly concerned about what’s good and what’s not. All the music I’ve listened to in thinking through the issues you’ve raised in this conversation meets some minimum level of “OK-ness.” That doesn’t mean I think it’s all of a piece or that I like it all.
My first concern has been simply to indicate and flesh out “ground truth”: some sense of how this stuff actually works. If that’s all there is, then you’re right, it dissolves criticism. In my defense I note that much criticism that has been offered and justified by universal values that are, in fact, the particular values of particular groups. You know this, and so, I would assume, do most people reading this conversation. But I’ve got more on my mind, and the cases of the Elvis impersonator and of Out of Control get at that issue rather directly: these are real people making live music. Outside of rather local contexts, no one’s ever heard of these people. But without thousands and tens of thousands of such people, there would be considerably less live music.
And I think live music is very important. I also think that the amount of live music in our society is dangerously low. I’ve suggested as much at a few points in Beethoven’s Anvil and I’ve been considerably more explicit in some unpublished notes on music and ADHD - see the final paragraphs of this essay-review of Steven Mithen’s The Singing Neanderthals. What this comes down to is that your concern over which musicians and performances deserve monument status is not the only kind of aesthetic discourse we need. In fact, from my current point of view, that’s not even the central issue, though it remains important. The National Endowment for the Arts has done studies of “arts participation” and those studies indicate that relatively few adults in the USA (less than 10%) are involved in any kind of live music performance even as little as once a year. Unfortunately those surveys did not ask about singing in church on the Sabbath, so they may be under-reporting.
Now, you may think that “live music” is a pretty minimal standard, and it is. But I think that’s where our society and culture is these days. We’re stretched dangerously thin.
It’s not at all clear to me that an aesthetics focused exclusively on major artists and major works is an adequate aesthetics. Just what one would want of an aesthetics that attends to lesser performers and works, that’s not at all clear. One issue is who’s going to do all this criticism, there are scads and scads of these secondary and tertiary artists and works. One part of the answer to that is that local critics will do that work. And then there is the blogosphere. This is about the social structure of artistic and critical activity.
Consider my years with Out of Control. As far as I can tell, there were maybe three or four times in those five years that we played just about as well as any band could play, and when I mean any band I mean BB King or Tower of Power or the Allman Brothers or Springsteen or James Brown. We were tight and loose and heaven was in view. The difference between them and us, of course, is they could play that way night after night, and with their own music, whereas we mostly played, well, their music, didn’t reach the heights nearly so often, and every once in awhile those bands did take it to yet another level.
Just how many such levels there are, I don’t know. No one does. But it would be nice to find out. Figuring that out will require a good deal of empirical work. Yadda yadda yadda . . . .
It seems to me that a healthy musical culture requires that everyone have an opportunity at least to hear a merely local band play as well as the name bands. And, in a way, that also means that everyone has a chance to play in such a band. Is that possible? Does it make sense? A utopian pipe dream? I don’t know. Here’re the final paragraphs of Beethoven’s Anvil, my book on music:
How long can we continue to live on the cultural energy bequeathed us by traditions of active musicking that have become severely attenuated? Are the Western nations living out the consequences of an unholy alliance between Romantic veneration of artistic genius and recording technology? In proper measure, this technology makes a wide variety of music available to each of us, while an appreciation of genius encourages innovation. But the abject veneration of genius devalues the musical capacities of the rest of us and encourages us to substitute recordings for our own music. That path leads to cultural stagnation.
If we wish to hear marvelous new music twenty years from now, we must prepare the way by making our own music now. That music isn’t the responsibility of future geniuses. It is ours.
Wayne Booth struggled with similar questions in a book he wrote after he’d retired from Chicago: For the Love of It: Amateuring and Its Rivals (U Chicago 1999). Booth reflects on a lifetime of amateur cello-playing and, among other things, tries to figure out how hacking one’s way through Beethoven string quartets is as important to one’s musical life as listening to superb performances by the best players. As I vaguely recall, he doesn’t come up with an answer he’s satisfied with.
AUTHENTICITY AND BEYOND
Getting back on course:
The reason “authenticity” is valuable in works of art is that it offers the audience the possibility of a new experience, together with a new understanding of themselves and the world.
It seems to me that this notion of art as offering “new experience” is one that’s specific to a certain cultural system and doesn’t even reflect what’s going on among many people who value “authenticity.” Those blues fans who worry about the authentic acoustic blues are not looking for new experiences. On the contrary, they’re looking for particular familiar experiences repeated over and over and over. I suspect that much of “authenticity” in rock (much less rawk) is of the same kind. And those congregants of charismatic churches, authenticity is everything, in the music, in the preaching, in the conversion, but new experience? That’s not what it’s about.
It actually does not matter whether artists are representing a true self.
Right.
What matters is that the reaction they get is unrehearsed.
???
I know that live audiences for TV shows are sometimes rehearsed, but such rehearsal is not otherwise common. I don’t think you meant actual rehearsal, but I can’t tell what you did mean.
There’s an important difference between the mixed spirits Elvis had to channel in his performances, where he was inventing inflection, gesture, and musical approach, and the simulation of gesture expected of an impersonator.
Yes, but Elvis didn’t concoct a new recipe for each performance. He kept on repeating the old recipe and sometimes it produced magic and sometimes it didn’t.
Past histories of mongrelization cannot be easily imported into discussions of modern pop culture. The traditions to which you refer took place largely before mass media, and before important expansions and refinements of the art market. As a result, there was far less standardization, and fewer demographic niches, two things that have had a stultifying effect on art.
I’m inclined to think that the more demographic niches, the better. Because that means more overall variety.
As for the art market, I think we’ve wasted too much time kvetching about markets and commodification without really understanding how art markets work. We simply know that “markets” are bad, hence their influence on art must be bad.
In the case of music (and film and literature and games and whatever else, but not painting and sculpture, those markets are organized differently - because, I’d guess, they are about the one-and-only original object rather than copies), yes, we’ve got big corporations trying their hardest to control the market. Maybe they succeed from one year to another, but on the scale of decades and larger they fail. Hence the volatility of the music business. Companies die, are bought out, merged, and are born, in no predictable order or fashion.
Whatever these markets are, they are more powerful than the corporations that attempt to control them. That doesn’t mean I think these corporations are benign and can be ignored. I’d just like to see more empirical research on how the markets actually work. Arthur De Vany’s work on Hollywood Economics is exemplary.
The reasons why that would be a risky venture (as Tom Zé’s music is risky) have a lot to do with the sorts of performers and audiences that are constructed by marketing tactics.
1. This valuing of aesthetic “risk” is not eternal or universal.
2. I don’t deny the existence of “marketing tactics.” But I’m skeptical of their long-term efficacy.
There is a difference between the intuitive state sometimes necessary to create art, and the analysis necessary to understand art.
Yes.
A CERTAIN AUDIENCE . . .
The reason to get into the question of why Kamakawiwo’ole covers Garland and Armstrong in particular has to do with the limits of liking. We don’t all get pleasure out of the same performances or recordings, but we can at least try to understand, in specific terms, what a given connection with a certain audience is about. To do less than that does enable a tepid tolerance, but also produces an insuperable distance between audiences.
I don’t know what you mean by “an insuperable distance between audiences,” but I’m not particularly bothered by the existence of audiences for music that I find unintelligible or even offensive. I think “human nature” is sufficiently flexible and culture sufficiently creative so that insuperable distances can have authentic existence. I just don’t want us to go to war over these differences.
As for understanding “in specific terms, what a given connection with a certain audience is about,” that’s what I’ve been up to. For example, let me recall a remark you made earlier in this conversation: “Still, adding “Over The Rainbow” to the mix makes it clear that I don’t think you meant actual rehearsal, but I can’t tell what you did mean. is paying his respects to his audience via their knowledge of Armstrong and Garland.” This seems too “hothouse” to me, like we’re dealing with a four-way conversation between Kamakawiwo’ole, Armstrong, Garland, and his audience, who must know both Armstrong and Garland. It seems to me that you get too quickly from that fact that Kamakawiwo’ole covered tunes written for Garland and Armstrong, to the conclusion that he must therefore be in dialogue with them and with his audience’s presumed knowledge of them.
The world of pop culture is not that intimate. It’s not clear to me that, in making that statement, you have taken the performance history of those songs into consideration nor the way so-called standards function in a certain very large pop repertoire. If you have, then we disagree on matters of fact and someone’s going to have to do some more digging - though it’s not clear to me that the specific examples are so important as the general way of thinking through these puzzles. In any event, let me bring in some more information about that history.
As is well-known, “Rainbow” was written for Garland and she recorded it in The Wizard of Oz in 1938. By mid-century it had become a so-called standard, long before Armstrong recorded “World.” By then it had been recorded by many, including Glen Miller (don’t know who the singer would have been), and Sinatra. By the time Kamakawiwo’ole got to it in 1993 there were probably hundreds of recordings of the song, including those by Aretha Franklin, Art Tatum, Doris Day, Ella Fitzgerald, Ray Charles, and Sarah Vaughan.
I personally identify the song with two performances, an obscure performance by Rafael Mendez (a Mexican-American trumpet player) from the early 60s and a more recent one by Sarah Vaughan. I’m sure I’ve heard more than one version by Garland (I’ve seen The Wizard of Oz and I’ve surely heard at least one of her other recordings at some time). I’ve certainly heard many other versions and I’ve known about Garland’s priority for a long time. That primacy is certainly a historical fact, but it is no more than that for me. I have no direct knowledge of Kamakawiwo’ole’s musical experience much less that of his audience. But I think it very likely that he and they knew of other versions of the song and that at least some in his audience probably associated the song more strongly with some other version or versions. Some may have heard Garland’s version, but not heard of her; some may never have heard any version by her.
“What a Wonderful World” was written specifically for Armstrong (in 1967) and he’s the first to record it. It sank in the US but became a big hit in the UK. Twenty years later it was included in the sound track for Good Morning, Vietnam in 1987, a decade and a half after Armstrong’s death. That’s what got it mass exposure in the US and, eventually, the rest of world. Kamakawiwo’ole’s 1993 version was one of the earliest covers, though not the first. At that time Armstrong’s was the major recording of “Wonderful World.” Chances are anyone in Kamakawiwo’ole’s audience who recognized the song would associate it with Armstrong’s version. This is not the case for “Rainbow” and Garland; the tune is older, has been in the repertoire much longer, and there are were many other recordings of it.
All of that is why I suggested that Kamakawiwo’ole may simply have recorded those two songs because he liked them. More likely than not, he knew of both Armstrong’s version of “World” and Garland’s of “Rainbow.” Armstrong’s because it was just about the only one available, and Garland’s because musicians tend to know something of the history of the songs they sing. But I’d be very surprised if he didn’t know many versions other than Garland’s. I have no way of knowing which versions he liked best. His own version - of both songs - seems pretty much his own.
Beyond this, I’m much less certain about his audience. He certainly knew what kind of music his audience he liked in terms of general style and repertoire. But your “paying his respects” formulation seems odd to me. To me it vaguely implies something beyond simply wanting to play music that people like. Nor does it make much sense to assume his performance somehow played on whatever knowledge his audience had of other performances of the tune, much less of Garland’s performances of “Rainbow.” As far as I can tell he doesn’t play off of any other performances at all. He performs both songs in the same style - his - rather than attempting to mimic or allude to the rather different styles of Garland and Armstrong. If he’s deliberately playing off them, there’s nothing in the music that suggests as much. You can certainly appreciate his versions without reference to those other versions.
Now let’s revisit Joey Ramone’s version of “What a Wonderful World.” That requires further consideration of the tune’s history. Not only was the tune written specifically for Armstrong, but it played to his benign avuncular persona. Here’s what the Wikipedia says:
Intended as an antidote for the increasingly racially and politically charged climate in the U.S. (and written specifically for Armstrong, who had broad crossover appeal), the song details the singer’s delight in the simple enjoyment of everyday life. The song also has a hopeful, optimistic tone with regard to the future, with reference to babies being born into the world and having much to which to look forward.
Thus it’s use in Good Morning, Vietnam in 1987 was authentic period music, but it was also ironic, as it appeared beneath scenes of bombing and destruction. Ramone’s version appeared in 2002.
The thing about Ramone’s version is that it is ironic all by itself. It doesn’t need to work against some extra-musical context. The musical treatment is at odds with the lyrics. Of course, we need to do more than simply assert that; an argument needs to be made. And that argument would cite experimental evidence - much of it recent and including brain imaging, but also some older work - that purely instrumental music has an emotional valence that listeners agree upon.
Without that experimental evidence we’re at the mercy of the view that musical response is entirely conditioned by culture. If that were the case, then detecting the irony in Ramone’s performance would require that you know something about the history of punk and the history of the song itself. As it is, all you need to do is pay close attention to both the lyrics and the sound.
AESTHETICS
Finally, and returning to generalities, it seems to me inevitable that specific understanding is going to lead you beyond your own personal tastes. Does it make criticism in the sense of concern for the health of society impossible? I don’t think so. I’ve already asserted the value of live performance, and that does have critical consequences, though they may be rather minimal from your point of view. But that’s OK.
Minimal though they may be, I don’t think they’re negligible, nor do I have a clear sense of what they are. On the one hand I’ve watched enough of these “reality” talent shows to have heard many performers who seem oblivious to how bad they are. But I’ve also watched a good many YouTube videos of undistinguished performers who nonetheless gave me pleasure. Part of what’s going on is that performers who show up on YouTube aren’t thereby asserting a claim on a large audience whereas performers who audition for one of these reality shows may well be doing that - or they may just be having fun.
Let’s consider, once again, the phenomenon of Elvis impersonators. On one level there is the critical activity that is internal to the world of Elvis impersonators and their audience. The performers criticize themselves in order to perfect their craft. At the same time audiences chatter among themselves and spread the word, good or ill, about performers; some performances will get reviewed here or there. This world of expressive practice can’t exist without such criticism, most of if informal, some of it very exacting. Every aesthetic world is going to have such critical practices as a part of its activity. We need to understand those practices as part of the larger project of understanding how the art works, in both performers and their audience.
At another level we can consider the world of Elvis impersonators as a whole. We can ask why this world exists in the first place, and is that a good or a bad thing? This is a different kind of question from those internal to that world. One can, for example, think that this or that impersonator is superb, while, at this higher level of consideration, arguing that Elvis impersonators are a bad thing for society. Conversely, if one thinks that having Elvis impersonators is a good thing, then the existence of many lousy one’s may not be of much concern. While I don’t think we can make a clean separation between these two levels of function and consideration, I do think we need to be aware of these two levels of process and of analysis.
Just where this leaves us is not at all obvious to me. I think there is an enormous amount of work to be done to establish live musical performance as something a large segment of the population needs to do for the health of society. Some of that work is critical, but not necessarily worrying about who the monuments are and just why they’re monuments. Beyond that, there’s the enormous task of deepening our understand of just how art works. Much of that work is empirical. How aesthetics plays in that game is something yet to be worked out.
Comments
Bill: of course I can’t respond fully to this essay, considering its length and depth, but I will do my best to respond.
In general, I completely agree with you about the primary task of criticism. You write:
I want to know objectively what’s there - wherever and whatever “there” is, the text, the mind, the interpretive community, the culture, society, whatever.
This is exactly what I think scholars should be telling us: what a work of art contains. They should be providing close analyses and explanations.
I also think this is what ordinary people should be telling each other, because it makes for interesting conversation. This will have a specifically personal element, always: I will be drawn to a particular metaphor or melody or figure for my own personal reasons. But I can explain the objective basis for my reaction to another person.
The alternative to this is aptly illustrated by MySpace. A user splatters his profile with a list of things he likes, then adds to this a series of embedded YouTube videos of which he is also fond. The people commenting on the profile page oblige with pre-fabricated postcards, animated .gifs, other YouTube videos, and so on. The result is that he becomes a visible (uploaded pictures) but not articulate pass-through for a series of cultural artifacts that he indicates mutely.
There is no need to go into a study of a work of art with the intention of deciding whether or not it is healthy for society; one merely has to state what is there, at which point an ethical debate can begin. One site that linked to my post on Murakami’s Norwegian Wood thought the book was trash for exactly the same reasons that I liked it, but agreed with my description of it. The same possibility of objective agreement and subjective disagreement exists for Nabokov, Armstrong, and the rest.
*
I’m trying to create aesthetic frames that enable us to go beyond monumental artists. It’s a fact that my own taste is mostly canonical. The reason is autobiographical: I grew up in a small town and then became an English major at a fairly conservative college. Outside of class, what I read was dictated by lists written by people like Harold Bloom or The Modern Library. Same thing with music: my source for music history was Rolling Stone magazine. It wasn’t like I could walk down the street and hear a show at CBGB’s, or tune in to John Peel.
That said, the more taste fractures, the more important it is to be able to speak expansively about what art we like, because the chances are higher that the other person won’t know them at all. As I’ve said before, now is a great time for minor bands, minor writers, and minor filmmakers, mostly because of the ability to create buzz and distribute media through the Internet. (The “buzz” factor also applies to the rest of the arts, though they can’t be digitized.)
There’s a big difference between attending a live performance and making live music oneself. Within certain circles, attendance at live music is a huge part of life; most of the young urban professionals I know inside and outside of academia make a point of going to concerts. They dance, they cheer, and they are exhilarated, but they do not gain technical skills or the kind of intuition needed to create synergy with other players.
I completely agree that consuming music should not replace learning to play it, even on an amateur level. I am ashamed of the fact that I don’t play, although I recognize that I am specializing in writing rather than in making music. However, something changes when I start demanding an audience for my art.
No person is obliged to attend concerts by a local covers band. They might stay at home and watch a Springsteen DVD, or they might go out to hear a new band playing original songs. Ruth Brown is a great singer; I’m delighted that I can listen to her on my stereo without having to seek out a covers band that cares about her music and performs it with the same gusto she brought to the studio.
I’m not suggesting that you were demanding an audience for yourself. I’m just wary of idealizing the kind of restless waiting-for-one’s-turn that happens at open mike nights.
Technically it is possible that a performer and his audience could share “What A Wonderful World” without ever having heard Louis Armstrong. This sort of thing happens all the time. Many people who heard the Alana Davis cover of “32 Flavors” had no idea the song was written by Ani DiFranco, who was resolutely passed over by radio stations. But that’s not creation ex nihilo. It’s just a circumstance of cultural forgetting, like an amnesiac who forgets he’s from the South but still has a drawl. Somebody could write an interesting, historically grounded account of the phrase “rule of thumb” despite the fact that most people nowadays don’t know where the phrase originated.
*
I’m not using authenticity to mean earnestness; I’m using it to mean innovation. It’s not necessary to hear something new every day. In fact, one the best experiences is hearing something new in a familiar piece of work. Furthermore, Elvis is somebody I’ve only recently begun to seek out. He’s new to me even though he’s old hat.
That said, if I’m the sort of person who wants to spend their whole life repeating the same experiences through art (either the same exact artwork, or via a series of highly similar works), that’s significant. Imagine if I said, “I’m looking for the experience of (gentle folk strumming / hardcore punk), which conjures up (pastoral images of a bygone age / a suicidal crisis of bile and despair), to be repeated over and over for the rest of my life.” That would just sound too strange, so instead one says, “My favorite performer is (x), I’m a huge fan.”
There are all kinds of other euphemisms that serve a similar function. “I like uplifting music” replaces “I like to be constantly reassured by everything I hear that I am needed, that my life is significant, that fate is not random, and that love conquers all.” The second formulation makes it clear why a lot of overly positive music is not to be trusted; the first is obfuscatory.
As for the phenomenon of rehearsal: it is misleading to suggest that people seeing an Elvis impersonator are having the same kind of revelation as people did who saw Elvis on a good night. People who saw Elvis were seeing somebody take new material and imprint it with his own style, and perform it that way: in other words, they were seeing the possibility of an articulate personal style. Elvis changed over time, experimented, declined even. Even if audiences in his time had booed, Elvis would have meant something historically, which is not true of an impersonator because the audience is actually part of the act. Original art presents to us the possibility of responding to history through art; imitative art represents little more than a flight from history into an agreed-upon fiction of timelessness.
Finally, markets. I must say that many of my worst problems with markets have been overcome by the growth of the Internet, although that has in turn led to new problems. It used to be the case that record companies were able to successfully push “safe” bands, and got buyers to chase after a recognizable and pleasurable sound at the expense of substance. This strategy was usually based around imitating one successful performer—for example, the Vines were marketed to people who liked the Strokes. As a teenager, I had two choices for music television (MTV or VH1), and I would buy albums that were advertised by music videos, only to find that a) the albums were full of filler and b) the single didn’t hold up after repeated listens. Marketers lean heavily on something being “close enough” to what a consumer likes to be considered worth purchasing.
In other words, much of my current interest in aesthetics has to do with my pre-Internet experience purchasing and listening to entire albums by Joan Osborne, Natalie Merchant, and Blues Traveler (and those are only three examples). Once burned, as the saying goes...but thrice?
Thanks for your response, Joe. I can’t comment on everything, but I do have a few comments. First a further clarification:
Technically it is possible that a performer and his audience could share “What A Wonderful World” without ever having heard Louis Armstrong. This sort of thing happens all the time. Many people who heard the Alana Davis cover of “32 Flavors” had no idea the song was written by Ani DiFranco, who was resolutely passed over by radio stations. But that’s not creation ex nihilo.
But that’s no mere technicality. As you say it happens all the time. I’ve learned many tunes without reference to the original performance or recording, some without reference to any recordings at all. A tune I’ve never heard - though I may have heard about it - is called in a jam session, someone digs it out of a fake book, and off we go. A couple times through and I’ve learned the tune.
That’s how popular music worked before roughly 1960. Composers wrote music and performers performed it. There was relatively little overlap between the two groups. Singer-songwriters (e.g. Ani DiFranco) were rare. This implies that performers weren’t working ex nihilo. They worked from a “script” prepared by someone else. They still had to figure out just how to sing the song - not a trivial matter - but that’s different from creating the material. I’ve no particular opinion on the merits of interpretive artistry vs. “do it all yourself” artistry.
So far as I know, Judy Garland didn’t compose a song. Sinatra wrote at least one song that I know of, but based his career on other people’s songs. So did Armstrong. He did write some tunes early on, and performed them, but for most of his career he performed music composed by other people. If a given song reached any audience at all it was covered by performers other than the first one to record it. The most popular songs were performed and recorded by many artists. They’re just tunes and different people have their favorite versions.
It wasn’t until the late 1950s and early 1960s that increasingly performers started writing and performing their own material. Just why this happened and became the norm in some styles I don’t know. By the time we get to Kamakawiwo’ole’s medley in the 90s we’re deep into an era when a lot of singers and bands performed their own material. I don’t know what his practice was and thus what his original audience expected. Is it possible that some of them would have identified those tunes primarily with him?
Now on to other matters:
There’s a big difference between attending a live performance and making live music oneself. Within certain circles, attendance at live music is a huge part of life; most of the young urban professionals I know inside and outside of academia make a point of going to concerts. They dance, they cheer, and they are exhilarated, but they do not gain technical skills or the kind of intuition needed to create synergy with other players.
I completely agree that consuming music should not replace learning to play it, even on an amateur level. I am ashamed of the fact that I don’t play, although I recognize that I am specializing in writing rather than in making music. However, something changes when I start demanding an audience for my art.
If you’ve got the technical skills and intuition appropriate to having fun dancing to music, then you’re only a few minutes away from the skills and intuition needed to play it. Just pick up a set of claves, or a cowbell and beater, have someone show you a riff or two and you’re off. You can dispense with the percussion instruments and simply clap your hands. And there’s always singing.
For example, once a year my friend Howard has a big birthday party and jam session at his house, 9PM to dawn. Let’s say 70 or 80 people filter through the party in the course of the evening and night. Perhaps 15 to 25 of them join the jam session at one time or another, which takes place in the front parlor and which is freely open to the rest of the house. No one plays on every tune, some people play on many or most (e.g. Howard), and a few on only one or three. Some people hang out in the music room and listen for a bit, but there’s never a formal audience. The music permeates the house so that even those in the kitchen or upstairs talking and munching and drinking are aware of it.
I have no idea how many such parties there are in the country. But I want more of them, lots more. What would it take to double or triple the number of such parties? What about a 10-fold increase? 100-fold? Somewhere along the line it would take a substantial change in cultural attitudes about music, dance, and parties, about what’s important in life, and about how kids are raised and music is taught. But it won’t require the creation of more virtuosi, nor an increase in the musical “talent” available in the population. We’ve got plenty of talent; we just need to use it.
As another example, here’s a piece I wrote about jamming at the March 2003 anti-war demonstration in NYC. The music that happened in that parade - and others - was much better than the parade music we had back in the 60s and 70s. We didn’t have parade music back than, not that I remember. Back then the music happened at the rally after the parade and was led by on-stage professionals (often with audience participation). This recent music happened in the parade itself, was made by groups that emerged within the parade, and that included a few very skilled pros and a bunch of amateurs of all skill levels.
Charlie Keil’s been proselytizing on behalf of a “12/8 path” band format that can easily encompass people at all skill levels.
I’m not using authenticity to mean earnestness; I’m using it to mean innovation. It’s not necessary to hear something new every day.
I tend to avoid talk of “authenticity” because its meaning is so vague. “Earnestness,” yes, but also fidelity to some (particularly pure) model. Innovation, OK.
But none of those things strike me as being bedrock. If the music is dance music, well, what is it that pulls you onto the dance floor and gets you going? That’s where I start. Whatever that is, if you are also earnest, or faithful to some tradition, or innovative, that’s fine and dandy. But first of all, what gets your feet tapping? If it’s not dance music, if it’s opera, what sends chills up and down your spine, or brings a tear to your eye?
As for change, innovation, and history, we’re heirs to this thing called Western Culture, and arts in the West have undergone constant stylistic change for the past millennium. The rate of change seems to have picked up over the years. In pop music, we have stylistic change by the decade. So there’s always new stuff.
But that’s not how things have worked always and everywhere. Innovation has not always been valued or fostered. And, for that matter, the stream of change and innovation that we take for granted has always been resisted by someone. There are still people who think jazz has been down hill since Louis Armstrong back in 1925. There are even a few who think Armstrong himself started the downhill slide.
At the center of Black musical culture in this country you’ve got the Black church, especially the charismatic church, with ecstatic preaching, talking in tongues, and so forth (you can see this in the BB King Bobby Rush episode (The Road to Memphis) of Scorsese’s PBS blues series). Some of those hymns have been around since the last century and before; liturgical music is like that. There is also innovation, some stylistic, but newness is not the point. Making contact with the Spirit is what it’s about. And that doesn’t require novelty. It requires the right rhythms, the right tunes, played the right way, with enthusiasm; and all within a community that values and fosters such music and such response to it.
And this brings us once again to Elvis, because he used to slip into a black church some Sundays to hear the preaching and singing (cf. the first volume of Peter Guralnick’s Elvis bio). That’s obviously not the only music that influenced him growing up, much less the only Black music, but it was important and that musical institution - the Black church - was very important in his musical milieu.
So, Elvis became a hit channeling black music through his white body, Ray Charles got over by dressing gospel performance in secular lyrics, and then we come roaring into the 60s where the British bring it all back to the USA plus interest. Stuff that’s old in one community is novel in another and it all keeps circulating and percolating in a dialectic of innovation, conservation, repetition, and forgetting that’s just barely been documented. As for understanding it all . . . .
BTW, here’s an article about how Kamakawiwo’ole came to record that medley and a little about its subsequent history.
And . . . a very important point. Whatever was going on with Out of Control those few times we burned on through, it wasn’t about technique or polish or even practicing and playing together week after week. It was something else, something you can find in little rag-tag store front churches too.
Hi Bill,
Thanks for sending me the links to this blog. Although Michael Berube is shutting down his site, it is reassuring to learn where some of his familiar readers hang out and write.
captcha: “looking21.” Gosh, how I wish *that* was still true!
Bill, though it must have seemed at times as though we were talking past each other, your last comment here puts the matter in perspective in a way that perhaps makes our arguments complementary.
The key is this sentence: “That’s how popular music worked before roughly 1960.” Exactly. A lot of the differences in the way we’re talking about originality, reference, and so on can perhaps be directly linked to the gradual influence of high-fidelity recording on the nature of musical production itself. As it became increasingly possible for artists to capture their original moment of inspiration on vinyl, the demand for new experiences on vinyl increased, and the need for a local version of established classics diminished.
In my view, there’s no need to classify this trend as either good or bad, or (to modify my original position somewhat) as complete or total. The Julie Andrews version of “My Favorite Things” doesn’t relate too closely to Coltrane’s instrumental, for example, and I’d be the first to say so. Jazz in particular is a genre where “covering” is faithful only in the loosest sense, where each new version is likely to be highly individualized. Some artists and recordings continue to work in a fashion akin to the standard before 1960.
We do live in an age of recorded music now, where digital copies of existing recordings are far cheaper, more convenient, and more portable than live music. It’s not essential to own a second-rate live cover of “Like A Rolling Stone” when you can listen to a beautifully remastered copy of Dylan’s original whenever you want.
So, one should look at the bulk of my comments about music through a historical lens: where many of us are now, given the influence of technology on music and especially on rock ‘n roll.
Technology also affects live performance venues; the joyful experience of watching a live band crank out familiar and danceable tunes has in many cases been replaced by the experience of dancing to a DJ, who is a quintessential figure for things like “reference.”
The same goes for live performance. Of course I can pick up a rhythmic instrument and join in. I really value that kind of participatory activity, and my feelings on the subject influenced my evaluation (in 2006) of the difference between the Coachella Music Festival and the Burning Man Festival. At Coachella, I had the unpleasant experience of watching a bunch of guys who basically looked, sounded, and thought like me, climbing up on a stage in their T-shirts and becoming immediate stars, inaccessible. They projected an image of unpretentious everydayness, and yet were behind an invisible wall. At Burning Man, on the other hand, music performance and everything else was highly permeable, and all sorts of spontaneous events took place where bystanders were invited to join. Ultimately, in the case of Coachella, I ended up preferring performers like Tool or Madonna, whose elaborate shows compensated the viewer for his/her obvious insignificance.
That said, a majority of intelligent, culturally informed people are “skeptical” about Burning Man, and some are even skeptical about the kind of political gatherings you describe. What they tend not to be skeptical about is karaoke, where they directly participate in a heavily pre-fabricated performance of pop. Here, too, modern (postmodern?) aesthetics of kitsch, reference, and appropriation dominate. It can feel more exciting to sing an effective karaoke version of a complicated pop song, than to play cowbell in a loose jam.
I think the world is definitely big enough to hold both the kind of small, community-building gatherings you describe, and the other sorts of experiences possible at DJ events and karaoke bars or booths. Of course, this can never be formulated as an “ought”—no-one ought to find local blues bands passé, and no-one ought to feel that electronic turntablists are somehow artificial or soulless.
A word here about conservatism: the fact that musical and philosophical/religious conservatives exist is not an argument in their favor. Sure, there are some jazz enthusiasts who think 1925 was doomsday, just as there are some people who think music went downhill after Beethoven, or after Sinatra, or after Presley. They always use the same arguments and history laughs at them. There is a big difference between that kind of conservatism, and the practice of looking backwards for new inspiration, or simply playing a beloved record again.
Many religions have a conservative bent to them, and in fact this is one of those places where I part ways with a subset of religious convention. The textual theory of the ultimate authority of the single text (The Bible, for instance) leads to a musical and ritual practice based on repetition and a “steady state” (to borrow from my own post on Bérubé) of connection with the Spirit.
I note with relief the fact that this does not bear heavily on questions of taste, because taste is above all the means of deciding the quality of something new (at least, something new to the individual). The ritualistic approach to secular music is not something I value very much, either—hence my earlier comments about being a “fan” of something (e.g. Deadheads). People singing hymns in charismatic churches may objectively be making good music than can be incorporated into new wholes (Ray Charles, Elvis), but the payoff for them isn’t understood in aesthetic terms.
My approach here is Heraclitean; art has to evolve along with the changing sum of experience. Even familiar works are valuable because of the possibility of new interpretations or more elaborate interpretations. A person is free to use art as a source of comfort, but once again one is then speaking about comfort, and not about taste.
The contradiction involved in “repetition with enthusiasm” should be obvious—if the performance becomes so consistent that all of its moves are choreographed, the visible signs of enthusiasm become fixed signifiers of enthusiasm, at which point even the true believer is thrown back on blankly asserting an enthusiasm we cannot tell if they feel. My guess is that if you go looking for novelty, you’ll find it both present and carefully elided, in the conversion performances of new worshippers, in the subtle alteration, re-sequencing, and “roughness” of performance, and in the persistence of certain forms (like speaking in tongues and other ecstasies) that allow a great deal of imaginative latitude.
Thanks for the response, Joe. I guess my problem is that much of what you say seems to me more grounded in aesthetic preconceptions than in observation and analysis of music.
Consider this statement early in your response: “As it became increasingly possible for artists to capture their original moment of inspiration on vinyl, the demand for new experiences on vinyl increased, and the need for a local version of established classics diminished.” You seem to be invoking some privileged version of a musical piece such that, once it is well and properly recorded, that recording is sufficient. That version is characterized as being one true to some “original moment of inspiration”? Just what is that? Are you talking about a composer’s inspiration, a lyricist’s inspiration, or a performer’s inspiration?
Mozart is said to have been able to write out a composition whole, start to finish, in the time it took him to write out the notes. By contrast Beethoven labored over many of his compositions for years, kept notes, worked and re-worked his drafts, etc. Was Mozart inspired and Beethoven not? Or was Mozart just an exceedingly skilled craftsman while Beethoven had to labor for years to realize the possibility inherent in moments of inspiration? Maybe we’ve got different kinds of inspiration, or maybe inspiration’s simply a word for a pile of things we don’t understand.
And then there’s the actual business of performing. Somewhere in his autobiography, Dizzy Gillespie remarked that he’d only ever played his best four or five times in his life, and none of those times were on records. If that’s true, then is there such a thing as a definitive recording of Dizzy Gillespie? Leonard Bernstein’s talked about how, when he’s really into it, it feels as though he’s become the composer and when the performance is over it takes him several minutes to come to himself and remember who he is what he’s doing. A number of years ago the producer for a classical violinist, Nadja Salerno-Sonnerberg, told me that the same thing happened to Nadja. Well before that I read an interview with (some of?) the Allman Brothers in Rolling Stone, where they talked about “hitting the note” as what they were after as performers and how they managed it perhaps every other night. Eric Clapton says “it” happens perhaps once a show; Branford Marsalis says several times in one’s life. I’ve got a Word file full of such examples that I’ve culled from various sources over the years. It seems to me that such anecdotes speak to “inspiration” in performance, but I certainly can’t make systematic and comprehensive sense out of them nor do I know of anyone who can or has even tried.
Near the end of his Conservatory Method for Cornet, originally published in the mid-19th century, Jean Baptiste-Arban says:
At this point my task as professor ... will end. There are things which appear clear enough when uttered viva voce but which cannot be committed to paper without engendering confusion and obscurity, or without appearing puerile.
There are other things of so elevated and subtle a nature that neither speech nor writing can clearly explain them. They are felt, they are conceived, but they are not to be explained; and yet these things constitute the elevated style, the grande ecole, which it is my ambition to institute for the cornet, even as they already exist for singing and the various kinds of instruments.
When I first read that I was 11 or 12 years old. It intrigued and puzzled the hell out of me. Is he talking about inspiration? Who knows.
As for recording, on the one hand you’ve got any number of musicians who find recording to be a most unnatural and uncomfortable way to make music (myself among them). But you also have Glen Gould, who retired from performance so that he could craft perfect recordings by splicing together hundreds of snippets from various recorded, but imperfect, performances. And then we’ve got albums such as Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, an album full of recordings so dependent upon studio facilities and manipulation that those versions could not be performed in concert.
And, of course, many bands have since followed the Beatles in that practice. Since all this music is, shall we say, indigenous to the recording studio - as opposed to music that mostly lives elsewhere but comes into the studio so we can capture it - perhaps here we can talk about inspiration being captured on vinyl. But where’s the inspiration? Who gets credit for Sgt. Pepper’s, the four guys up front or their producer, George Martin?
Now, I dearly wish that, after all this, I could come up with an account of inspiration that’s grounded in those and a bunch of other examples. But I can’t. Inspiration doesn’t seem to be very predictable. Sometimes you get it on tape, sometimes you don’t. Given these various examples and many more, I’ve got real problems with an aesthetics that is willing to take the notion of “original moment of inspiration” for granted. And if original inspiration is doubtful, then what happens to repetition? Maybe it isn’t necessarily derivative or inferior.
Let’s go to the end of your comment:
The contradiction involved in “repetition with enthusiasm” should be obvious-if the performance becomes so consistent that all of its moves are choreographed, the visible signs of enthusiasm become fixed signifiers of enthusiasm, at which point even the true believer is thrown back on blankly asserting an enthusiasm we cannot tell if they feel.
It’s not clear to me why you say “contradiction,” but, yes, there is a problem. It bothered 17th and 18th century Protestant theologians who wanted to know how you could tell whether or not the enthusiasm was real, whether or not a “calling” was genuine. It bedevils proponents of authenticity too: when it’s easy to adopt the signs of authenticity, how do you tell the real thing? But then, how do you tell worthwhile novelty from cheap novelty? Is that difference in the new thing itself or is it in the population that sustains and, in the long-term, routinizes the novelty?
I don’t know. That’s where I am with a whole bunch of stuff: I don’t know.
If I look at the current musical scene, well, first there’re whole realms of music I’m not familiar with. Leaving aside indigenous musical traditions from all over the world, there’s the continent of hip-hop. I listened to enough in the early days to satisfy myself that some very skilled craftsmen are at work here. If I happen to run into some stuff that I like - such as on the soundtrack of Samurai Champloo - fine and wonderful. But I don’t know the music at all.
As for jazz, that’s certainly where my main interest has been since I watched the Firehouse Five Plus Two on the Mickey Mouse Club. By the time I started listening to contemporary jazz, most jazz styles had slipped into history. As far as I can tell, most of what’s been happening over the past thirty years is recycling, recombination, cross-breeding with other styles. But it all seems to be playing in oldish sandboxes. Same with rock and classical. Minimalism seemed interesting for awhile but ...
Seems to me we’re marking time until we collide into a new galaxy.
Are we?
I think the word “inspiration” may have been misleading; I am not referring to a particular take of a song, or to an imagined identity between the first and final drafts of a piece. I am referring to the ideal of the music that inspires meticulous effort in the studio (the Beatles are a great example), and provides the criteria for judging between live versions.
That ideal can certainly be the product of a collaboration, as it is in any performance by a symphony, or as it was when the Beatles worked with George Martin. My emphasis here is on the listener, including new and other performers as listeners. I’m asking how the availability of classic or apparently “definitive” recordings (including live recordings like the Allman Bros. at Fillmore East) affects the demand for innovation on the part of the audience.
One way to track this phenomenon—the increased pressure to innovate—is the popularity of revisionist covers, such as Johnny Cash’s spare renderings of Nine Inch Nails or Depeche Mode, or Cat Power’s version of “Satisfaction.” The primary question about “Hurt” is now whether you prefer Cash’s version, or Reznor’s, both of which are available in hi-fi anywhere, at any time, for a dollar or less.
Baptiste-Arban is speaking about music the way that mystics speak about God; that kind of thought can certainly inspire a reader (or an aspiring musician) to go on their own search. It isn’t the same as historical or comparative criticism, naturally, and doesn’t invalidate those other forms.
Baptiste-Arban is speaking about music the way that mystics speak about God
There’s an old argument, Darwin certainly, perhaps Rousseau, that it is through music that a bunch of clever apes turned themselves into human beings. This agument is alive and well and has been variously formulated in contemporary intellectual terms. I’m wondering how it would take to theological dress.
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