In our last issue, my close friend and fellow Troubadour founder Dominic Marcella wrote a stimulating piece on contemporary composition. This is a response to his argument regarding the decline of contemporary music in the academic world.

I’d like to preface my response by noting one thing that my partner and I agree upon. What someone else thinks of the music you listen to does not matter. If you think it is valuable music, than it is. This would seemingly assert that the music you find void of value is, in fact, not valuable, which presents us with an obvious contradiction. As unpractical and unnecessary as it may seem, this provides many academics the excuse to attempt to define music, or at least discover the boundaries of music. Marcella offered his boundaries, and now I’ll offer mine.

Organization of sound by a human mind is a popular way of describing music. But this raises some questions. Take the following video for example.

Elephant Orchestra

In many cases, the elephants were given instruments and were allowed to improvise. The result was a sonic experience that any unknowing listener would mistake for a beautifully composed piece from an Asian ensemble. Should this not be considered music? What about the more natural processes? Whale calls, rolling waves, and the ambient noises of the forest are all considered emotionally provocative sounds by many individuals. Is a chorus of wind chimes music? Why shouldn’t it be?

My point is that there are only two qualifiers of music. First, it must be a sound or many sounds. This simply differentiates music from other forms of art. Second, it must elicit some form of emotional reaction from at least one individual. If one person thinks it’s music, than it’s music.

Music need not be performed in a group. The endless hours of fiddling alone in my dorm room on my Yamaha keyboard and my Warwick bass guitar are more important to me than any live performance I’ve ever seen. Those sounds are intimately involved with my psyche and my emotional being, and they artistically represent more of myself than any song I’ve written with any band.

Music can never be unsuccessful unless no one is emotionally affected. As long as one person has gotten something out of a musical experience, even if it’s just the lone performer, that music has successfully performed its function.

Music does not need to move anyone, if by move you mean all of the connotations of beauty that go with the cliché. If an encounter with death metal (not to stereotype death metal, which is not frightening by any means to many fans) has truly frightened an unsuspecting listener, than it has elicited an emotional reaction. Not a moving one, but a reaction nonetheless.

Music does not need to intellectually stimulate. Background music plays an incredibly important function in society. The term Soundscapes is now being used to describe an entire genre of music. As long as it adds to the scenario, even the simplest background music is as valid as a mathematical masterpiece.

At the same time, music can benefit greatly from mathematical and technical principles. Being brainy and dodecaphonic can in itself give a piece of music emotional charge. Awe over intellectual and technical ability is an emotional reaction.

Just because a certain piece of music did not move you as a listener does not mean it cannot move someone else. “Imaginary Landscape No. 1” moves me. To think that John Cage has influenced music to such a great degree, but to credit his actual compositions as experiments and not music seems contradictory. “4’33” is successful for this listener. The ambient noises can become very musical and emotional if interpreted as such.

Separating the traditional composers of the past from modern composers is also problematic. Why does tradition have to mean ancient past? Didn’t Cage compose in the past? He’s already composed, and his compositions already exist in history. So why can’t they be more of an influence for someone than Mozart? Conversely, people aren’t influenced by everything just because everything exists. If you don’t like jazz, you won’t be influenced by Gershwin, no matter how historically significant the composer was.

The idea that Cage plays a specific role for all listeners alike, different than Beethoven’s role, is highly subjective and simply incorrect. Webern gives me more emotional satisfaction than Beethoven or Bach. The following Webern string quartet is a delicate, provocative masterpiece.

If a critic suggests that people listen to Beethoven because of its emotional value and listen to Cage for entirely different reasons, than that critic is only looking at music as it appeals to them.

I will agree that not being open to all tools, including historical and traditional composers, is a deplorable act. Any composer should understand the value of all music. But actively choosing to only use certain tools is intuitive and natural. How would music have any diversity if artists didn’t pick and choose their influences?

Much of the musical dialectic that I have recently encountered emphasizes the notion of expressivity in music. I have often heard it argued that a particular piece of music is either expressive or not expressive (and is consequently either good or not good), but to focus on such a notion of expressivity is to equate music to metaphor, and that is to ignore the “music itself”.

This is not inherently bad, but it is limiting. Igor Stravinsky, for instance believed that,

There are different ways of loving and appreciating music. There is, for instance, the way that I would call self-interested love, wherein one demands from music emotions of a general sort – joy, sorrow, sadness, a subject for dreaming on, forgetfulness of ordinary existence. But that devalues music by assigning it a utilitarian end. Why not love it for its own sake? Why not love it as one loves a picture, for the sake of the beautiful painting, the beautiful design, the beautiful composition? Why not admit that music has an intrinsic value, independent of the sentiments or images that it may evoke by analogy, and that can only corrupt the hearer’s judgment?

What Stravinsky referred to as “self-interested love” can be more aptly described as the Heideggerian concept of Gestell (enframing), which relates to the way in which the world reveals itself as a resource. Utilitarianism pervades our perceptions of the world around us to the point that even human beings become a resource by virtue of our valuation of a person’s ability to carry out certain tasks (which vary according to context). For example, I think of my father as my father, my friend as my friend, my waiter at a restaurant as my waiter, and the farmer who grew the produce I buy as a farmer. These people are all defined by the service with which they provide me, or by their utility. The same thing is happening (and has been) with music.

By evaluating music based on its expressivity, whether wholly or partially, we turn music into a resource – something that is there in order to provide us with a particular feeling or experience. But, then, how should we perceive music? To emphasize its aesthetics would still be enframing – when Stravinsky mentions “the beautiful design” and “the beautiful composition” he uses “beautiful” not in an aesthetic sense, but in a neo-Platonic one.

He emphasizes “la musique elle-même” (which at first seems ironic for a composer whose most famous works were ballets), but this is a notoriously difficult concept to define. In fact, Stravinsky himself defines it only by negation: it is not “the result of a reflection”, it is not evocative, and it is not the structure or the method of organization. It is certainly not music theory – to think about a piece of music as diatonic, octatonic, serial, atonal, etc. requires one to think about each pitch in terms of its purpose, and that would be enframing.

Musicologist, Pieter van den Toorn explains that the secret to “music itself” is the listener’s relationship with the music. He says, “This relationship is given immediately in experience and is not open to the inquiry that it inspires. Moments of aesthetic rapport, of self-forgetting at-oneness with music, are immediate. The mind, losing itself in contemplation, becomes immersed in the musical object, becomes one with that object.” At first, this seems like an admirable solution, but how do we enter such relationships? “Moments of aesthetic rapport” implies that they are still based on emotiveness or expressivity, or another aesthetic phenomenon, which in turn reduces music, once again, to a resource.

Our minds have been conditioned to enframe. “Function” and “purpose” are central tenets of our systems of logic and reasoning. Heidegger claims that the presence of enframing in these systems makes it impossible to use them to escape enframing. Perhaps, then, there is no logical, positive definition of “music itself”. To define it through negation may be the best method we have of comprehending it, and is not entirely impractical.

There is certainly a virtue in defining music by its expressivity, or by “assigning it a utilitarian end”. It has brought joy to countless listeners, and will undoubtedly continue to do so in the future. Yet, it is important to remember that this is just one way of perceiving music. It is not the “right” way, nor is it the “wrong” way. A work cannot be considered unsuccessful music, “Because it is not moving,” or “Because it is not emotive or expressive.” These claims have relevance only within a single system of perception, and as Heidegger and Stravinsky point out, there are others in which they do not remain valid. We should enjoy these characteristics when they are present, but we must always remember that it is possible to perceive or appreciate a piece of music in more than one way.

It’s hard to know what to make of post-modern music. Sometimes, one might wonder if it is music at all.

There is no clear-cut definition of music – musicians, philosophers, and scientists have been arguing about it for years. But why bother? In an ideal world, everyone would simply listen to whatever he or she enjoys, regardless of what it is called or how it is classified. Unfortunately, this isn’t an ideal world (obviously), and I believe that certain pervasive misconceptions about the role of music have been leading, and continue to lead today, to a decline in the quality of contemporary composition.

Now, I’m not audacious enough to posit a comprehensive definition of “music”, but I will submit that it must have certain qualities. The first quality is intentional organization. Whether one is listening to tonal, atonal, pantonal, or even chance music (chance music still requires someone to choose the context and a mode of interpreting and organizing the notes), it has been, in some way, structured by a human mind. Other requisite qualities are more obvious, and include rhythm, timbre, and dynamics.

Another thing to consider is that music is interactive. It is not inherently so – I can go play an instrument alone in my room for hours devoid of any human interaction – but any form of music that requires more than one person to be played or is performed for an audience is. Now, the purpose of any interactive music is, on the most basic level, to stimulate the listener.

Based on the previous suppositions, all sound can be organized into three very broad categories: successful music, unsuccessful music, and non-music. The difference between successful and unsuccessful music is the degree of stimulation experienced by the listener. Music can be considered successful when the listeners are emotionally “moved”. I say “emotionally moved” because, as Balzac so wisely put it, “The heart must be within the domain of the head.” Feelings are a mental process, and the act of feeling presupposes mental activity. A piece that requires more mental activity is that much more successful. As humans have proved over the years, intellectual stimulation is essential to being, yet, at the core of music is the aesthetic principal, and this cannot be ignored.

Successful music appeals not merely to a part of one, but to one’s entire being. Music that has only cerebral appeal is not successful. Its aesthetics – the way it sounds – not merely the nature of its sonic organization is important. Successful music can be beautiful, ugly, graceful, brutal, or anything in between, but it must appeal to our (figurative) hearts. Arnold Schoenberg understood the importance of balance in music:

It is not the heart alone which creates all that is beautiful, emotional, pathetic, affectionate, and charming; nor is it the brain alone which is able to produce the well-constructed, the soundly organized, the logical, and the complicated. First, everything of supreme value in art must show heart as well as brain. Second, the real creative genius has no difficulty in controlling his feelings mentally; nor must the brain produce only the dry and unappealing while concentrating on correctness and logic.

To assume that one is more valuable than the other is dangerous; one risks limiting the amount of stimulation and consequent pleasure a piece of music can provide. Similarly, to assume that one is easier than the other is equally foolish; a dry, brainy dodecaphonic piece is often easier to compose than an emotionally charged romantic symphony. (A brainy yet emotionally charged dodecaphonic piece, on the other hand, is quite a marvelous thing.)

In order to help illustrate this point, I will provide links to two examples of unsuccessful music. The first has been created with insufficient intellectual activity. The result is deplorable. It is an improvisation performed by Bruce Coates and Han-Earl Park; have a listen:

The musicians thought only about the feelings they wished to convey. They did not think about sonic structure and how they could organize sound to elicit an emotional response. The result is interesting, but not moving. I would not go so far as to say that it has no value, but its value is not musical. It is interesting much the same way in which two children poking each other with sticks is interesting (that is, merely as a quasi-fascinating interaction between two people).

The second example is a piece entitled “Imaginary Landscape No. 1” by John Cage. Cage employed an interesting strategy in composing this piece, emphasizing rhythmic structure. It is interesting, clever, and well-thought out, but by no means moving.

“Imaginary Landscape No. 1” works better as a sonic experiment than a musical composition, and in that respect, it is successful. Cage is showing his audience different ways that sound can be organized, and is encouraging them to think about the effects this organization has on human perception. He has taught audiences to reconsider cultural notions of the relationships between sound and music. In “4’33” (a piece in three movements that is essentially four minutes and 33 seconds of the performers not playing their instruments), the performance becomes about the ambient noise audiences overlook or intentionally tune out.

Cage is more concerned with making a point than composing successful music as I have defined it. The question, then, and here is the crux of the matter, is who cares if I consider his “music” successful or not? In an ideal world, absolutely no one would or should care about how I classify his work. The problem is that many, many contemporary composers prescribe to a ridiculous notion of musical evolution. They see what people like John Cage are have done and believe that it is modern music, and so they emulate, try to improve upon, and take inspiration from it, while largely ignoring the compositional systems and modes of the past.

This is not necessarily a bad thing in and of itself. Their work still has value, but most people don’t go to see a performance of Cage’s work for the same reason they would go to see one of Beethoven’s. Many post-modern composers refuse, whether from pretentiousness, fear of seeming “backwards”, or a ridiculous desire to be modern, to compose with all of the tools available to them.

Igor Stravinsky’s three famous ballets, The Firebird, Petrushka, and Rite of Spring are excellent examples of successful, modern music. They have both emotional and intellectual appeal, and are limited only by their aesthetic considerations. In The Firebird, for instance, Stravinsky uses polyrhythm extensively, and though there is relatively little melodic movement, the ballet is indisputably moving. In Petrushka, Stravinsky makes clever use of bitonality, and in Rite of Spring there are even atonal sections.

Stravinsky was intelligent, inventive, and courageous. He was not afraid to break from tradition, nor was he afraid to embrace it. He was willing to use any means necessary to create the desired sound. This should be the attitude of all contemporary composers. Only then will their work truly be the result of unbridled human expression and not of a method, trend, or imagined obligation.

Why should we bother? Why write about music? And furthermore, why read about it?

Well, the obvious answer is “because we enjoy it”. But that’s not really getting to the heart of the matter. I believe that, in order to understand what makes music worth writing about, we must understand the source of its appeal, and the best way to do that is to look at its function. Why do human beings make music in the first place?

In an essay entitled “Why I Write,” George Orwell asked the same question (though of writing), and came up with four universal reasons for producing a work of literature. Orwell may have chosen to focus his essay specifically on prose, but his reasons can be applied with equal pertinence to any art form, including music.

Orwell’s first reason is “sheer egoism”. This is hardly ever a musician’s only motive for composing a piece, but it is almost always present. When a musician writes a song, he wants the world to know that it is his song – that it came from his creative mind and reflects his creative and technical abilities as a singer or instrumentalist. Musicians want to be talked about and remembered.

In moderation, egoism is a good thing. The desire to be the best, or at least to be “good”, drives musicians to improve; and, in fact, without egoism, musicians would seldom have reason to perform for others. Why would a guitarist take the stage unless she felt that she had something to offer? If she is going to play for an audience, she must first believe that she is worth hearing. Audiences may value a self-effacing demeanor, but the mere act of performing implies that the musician has pride in herself and her work.

Despite its ubiquity, egoism is only one motive for composition and performance; there are certainly other, more “selfless” reasons for creating music.

One such reason is “historical impulse”, or music composed for the sake of posterity. Think of the medieval troubadours who wandered from court to court, singing stories of heroes and brave deeds. Think of the American folk music that chronicled the stories of the Old West. Think of opera, the Japanese Shinnai tradition, or even Sergei Prokofiev’s Peter and the Wolf.

The historical impulse is equally present, though perhaps slightly less obvious, in the popular music of today. Whether you’re into bluegrass, pop, or metal, think of how many songs tell a story, or describe a break-up or an otherwise particularly good or bad day.

If it’s beginning to seem as if the historical nature of music hinges solely upon the lyrics, I would like to refer you to programmatic music (so named because it was originally intended to complement a text, or program, that recounted a story). It has long since become commonplace, however, to compose programmatic music without an accompanying text. Two more famous examples include Haydn’s Time of Day symphonies and Johannes Kuhnau’s biblical sonata, which delineates the epic battle between David and Goliath.