By Anthony Benigno

As hip-hop gets more and more ornery, there’s something refreshingly old-school about three of the greats working their magic over bare-bones beats. “Wu-Massacre” isn’t a proper Wu-Tang record, but it’s almost better that way; the Clan’s troubled ’07 album “8 Diagrams” faltered amongst reports of clashing egos, so having just Method Man, Ghostface and Raekwon show up on “Wu-Massacre” means less cooks in the stew, which translates to a much more efficient album.

And clocking in at a half-hour, “Wu-Massacre” is nothing if not efficient. The verses are fast and furious, the beats are sparse and vicious, and familiar guest stars (the Wu’s Inspectah Deck and a bizarro cameo from comedian Tracy Morgan) pop up for some great cameos. Hip-hop fans who grew up in the Auto-Tune era are likely to hate “Wu-Massacre,” which plays out a lot more like a ‘90s rap record than one from the 2000s. There are a few samples here and there – the MJ one on “Our Dreams” is particularly effective – but that’s about as gimmicky as it gets.

Instead, the album is anchored in Meth, Ghost and Rae’s lyricism, which hasn’t diminished a bit. The guys spin B.I.G.-esque yarns on “Miranda” and “Pimpin’ Chipp,” and the finale “It’s That Wu Shit” is a great throwback gem. It’d be a lie to say the whole thing doesn’t seem a bit outdated as rap moves further and further away from the gangsta trend, but that doesn’t diminish the precision with which the guys go about their business. The time for an album like “Wu-Massacre” may have come and gone, but it’s still pretty nice to have it all the same.

At this years’ NYU Strawberry Festival you may be getting a little more than your fill of strawberry short cake, sweets, fun games and prizes. Come Friday April 30, you may find yourself getting a little jolt from the screams, convulsing-upbeat guitar work and hard drumming of New Brunswick, NJ band Screaming Females.

The Festival’s live music line-up, which will also include smaller bands like Little Lungs, Hop Along, Fiasco, and JEFF the Brotherhood, was booked by NYU Freshman Shannon Murray and Junior Lauren Monaco.

“When I was thinking of a lineup, I guess I just reverted back to bands I’ve grown up seeing, who despite their increased popularity, have really remained true to DIY [Do-It-Yourself] ethics,” said Murray.

Murray heard of the band about a year ago when they played a show in New Brunswick, close to her own hometown, Westfield.

“Both Screaming Females and Little Lungs have a decidedly more pop-y sound but combine it with elements of grunge, punk, and hardcore which just works really well,” said Murray of her picks.

So who is Screaming Females?

“Screaming Females is Marissa, Mike, and Jarrett. Without that lineup it is not Screaming Females,” says drummer/manager Jarrett Dougherty.

Other members include Bassist King Mike and guitarist/singer/screamer Marissa Paternoster.

Screaming Females have played several shows in NY since their birth, sharing the stage with numerous other scene bands. (They do play here quite often, so if you truly enjoy their show, you’ll be glad you live in NY.)

Dougherty points out Shellshag and Stupid Party, both Brooklyn, NY punk bands, as some of the most notable groups he’s played with.

But there is a difference in the two scenes, according to King Mike.

“NJ is much smaller so you end up playing with and seeing the same bands more often,” he said. He continued on in jest, “In NJ people bleed a lot at the shows because the bands tend to cut themselves while performing much like pro wrestlers.”

Screaming Females started about five years ago, says Dougherty, and have since released three LPs and an EP earlier this year.

“We also have a whole new album recorded but the finishing touches are giving us issues,” said Dougherty. “That will come out some day.”

The band is definitely a growing name, and not just in NY and NJ. They are known far beyond the borders of NJ for their extensive touring, Jarrett estimating their latest count at about 420 shows. Some of these performances have included shows with Dinosaur Jr., Arctic Monkeys, and even Jack White’s latest side-project Dead Weather. They are currently touring with Ted Leo and the Pharmacists.

So how did Screaming Females end up scheduling a show at NYU? And what can NYU expect from this popular New Brunswick band come the day of the Strawberry Festival?

“We had been talking with show organizers at NYU for a while about Screaming Females playing some event,” said Dougherty, “This one worked out well for everyone involved…I hope they have a good time.”

King Mike’s goal: “I hope to successfully stay dry and have a good time.”

Murray’s choice for contacting the band came from her appreciation and pride of the New Brunswick music scene.

“These are bands that are equally talented, and genuinely care about the music they are making,” said Murray. “I guess I just wanted to introduce students at NYU to new music they might not have been willing to expose themselves to otherwise.”

Neu! 1972 by Peter Lindbergh

NEU! Vinyl Box Set

Groenland Records

By Eugene Reznik

Road tripping, sitting at the wheel, hypnotized by a big wide-open road, listening to the beat beat beat beat and the buzz of the engine and road humming and the wind howling and anything that comes across your path over and over again.

This is Krautrock. Or, it’s as good a stand-in as any. I’m talking about one song, NEU!’s 1971 “Hallogallo.” It may be just a single connotation, and it might not fit with the German narrative, but for those of us who weren’t hanging around Düsseldorf in the seventies, for the American audience that has to listen and live with its aftereffects, it became the archetype and the paradigm. Those who like to scoff and talk about the real Krautrock, they’re right to call it a “phenomenon.” But the experimental rock phenomenon was not restricted to Germany. It happened here too and it came by way of the record.

It’s the 4/4 on the floor “morotik” beat, the driving rhythm that’s always repeating and yet progressing with a forward motion, and the endless layers of panning, pulsating, dopplering in and out filters, phasers and synths that can put you in a hypnotic trance or prompt revelations. This must be what it’s like to drive on the autobahn. The song creates an atmosphere and it flies by in ten minutes. You put it on when you’re driving and before you know it, it’s gone. Maybe it distracts you from time; maybe it just makes you think you finally understand relativity.

This form they pioneered is what we came to associate with the genre. Knowing it could be a moment of clarity for those of us often thinking where the hell all these ambient “experimental” bands today came from and what they listened to. It also makes you think what the hell these NEU! guys where listening to. On the experimental, electronic end, they were pretty much at the forefront. Michael Rother and Klaus Dinger started NEU! after leaving their original band, Kraftwerk, considered to be the root of popular electronic music and one of the first to use Moog synthesizers.

On the other hand, morotik’s a great label, but they obviously weren’t the first to use an ostinato rhythm. We couldn’t know what NEU! was listening to in 1972, but we can still draw a parallel to The Velvet Underground. It’s not hard to superimpose some motorik on the Velvet’s 1968 “Sister Ray,” clocking in at 17:26 in the studio, but the sound, with its songwriting emphasis on repetitive rhythms and improvisation makes them really similar.

The chaotic “Sister Ray,” however is probably more apt for rocking out in a dope-induced stupor than chilling out in a (different) dope-induced torpor. It can’t have the same smooth mechanic or spacey connotations. What NEU! did was blend rock and electronic. They became the stand-in for Krautrock, maybe because they were more palatable for the American audience with their use of real drums and guitars, or maybe because they were more imitable.

Once you break down “Hallogallo,” you can start to hear it everywhere. In spite of, or maybe because it almost can’t be covered, the song’s been the object of mimicry and parody ever since it came out. It’s almost as if every band, at one point or another, recorded or not, did some semblance of a Krautrock song, did their Krautrock song.

We started to see Krautrock done live.

The jubilant background wall of “pa pa pa pop’s” and “oo wah wah oo’s,” and the clean, easy strumming of the guitar might make this more apt for a Parisian bike ride than a cruise down the autobahn, but halfway through, the song breaks down, the synth takes over and the motorik comes out full force. You can look through Stereolab’s catalogue, or just hit next track, and hear “Hallogallo” all over.

This starts off pure motorik and pure “Hallogallo” but manages to transition flawlessly to pure Wilco. On top of that, Jeff Tweedy uses the 10-minute form to bust out his nastiest tone and most delightful ear piercing screeches where he couldn’t have elsewhere on A Ghost is Born.

Woods uses track 4 of their 2009 Songs of Shame largely to the same end as Wilco. “September With Pete” isn’t exactly motorik driven until late in the song, but once again at 9:40, the form allows them to break out their trippy, unstructured psycadelic side amidst an album full of harrowing pop masterpieces.

These guys seem to miss the mark and their repetition dances the fine line with boredom. A lot of the talk surrounding The Horrors’ Primary Colors centered on how much they outdid their debut album, Strange House. Lost in all this, however was the fact that Strange House just wasn’t any good in the first place. Primary Colors may have been a step up from the debut, but songs like “Sea Within A Sea” show that they started to sound like a whole bunch of other great bands, like NEU! and Joy Division, but have little to show for themselves.

The truly good songs that came out of “Hallogallo” and the Krautrock “phenomenon,” don’t simply mimic the form, they appropriate it. Stereolab, Wilco, and Woods blend their own elements, make the form theirs and steer clear from trying a sort of cover.

Fujiya Miyagi makes a bunch of cute but admirable 4-5 minute attempts at it, adding vocals on its 2007 Transparent Things. Yo la Tengo’s “Spec Bop” might be the closest thing to a “Hallogallo” cover, fading in with all the right elements and holding strong for 10:41, but it still manages to assert its own identity.

Sonic Youth’s “Listening to Neu” is obviously noteworthy. It opens with a comically slow half-motorik, the cheesiest of department store synths and a kind of irony that can be amusing for a few seconds, but virtually unbearably thereafter. But the song might not be a parody of “Hallogallo” as much as it is a parody of the endless “Hallogallo” sound-alikes.

Everyone does motorik, some bands more than others, and nothing really beats the original. “Hallogallo” was only the beginning, track one, side one, album one. NEU! built up on it, they sped it up, slowed it down and layered it with all kinds of stuff over the course of three studio albums. On May 10, they’re re-releasing a catalogue box set with the original three albums, an unreleased fourth album, NEU! ’86, live recordings and singles, and a book of very cool and very rare photos.

“NEU!” is pronounced “noy” or “noi.”

Merge Records

By Sedera Ranaivoarinosy

When actresses suddenly decide they want to sing, there are legitimate reasons to worry. It’s easy to try to make profit off a prominent personality, even by having them do something they might not be great at.

Zooey Deschanel has always sang; her goal when studying drama in college was to do musical theater. And while she first had that “actress to singer” apprehension when She & Him’s Volume One came out in 2008, she passed the test with flying colors.

But now she must face the other hurdle music journalism has imposed on recording artists – the sophomore album test. And all is good, She & Him’s Volume Two doesn’t disappoint.

Deschanel and M. Ward, known for his own folk singer-songwriter skills, have worked out a perfect team arrangement: she writes, he produces. The combination offers fresh pop songs that bring back the sound of the 60’s with their use of harmonies, reverb and even a cover of NRBQ’s “Ridin’ In My Car”.

“Don’t Look Back” is the quintessential surf rock tune, and feels like it was taken from a Beach Boys’ album. “Lingering Still” even sways into a Hawaiian mood. Everything feels sweet on this album, whether she’s singing about dysfunctional love in “Thieves”, or wasting time in “I’m Gonna Make It Better”.

The record has a wonderfully playful, almost childish quality. The call and response game between the piano melodies Deschanel plays and Ward’s sharp guitar riffs makes you bob your head from side to side without you even noticing. It’s perfect for times when you’re feeling down. Deschanel’s voice is beautiful and clear and all the arrangements are slick and polished while staying simple enough so you can sing along.

The release of Lady Gaga’s video for Telephone, her second collaboration with R&B golden girl Beyoncé, was an event like we rarely see anymore: the video is more than 9 minutes long, and the next day, everyone seemed to be talking about how cool it was that she used Coke cans as rollers for her hair and that her sunglasses had burning cigarettes over them.

Not too long after that, Lady Gaga’s music video collection reached a billion views, thus crowning her the current queen of the mainstream pop industry and the only performer today whose visual world holds as much weight as her music.

All this branding of Lady Gaga as the only artist able to “revive” the music video is not exactly accurate. Music videos were never dead. In fact, they’re doing quite well. But unsurprisingly, they find a better home on YouTube than they ever did on MTV.

In her piece for CNN Online, Who Killed the Video Star, Breeanna Hare says that “a blockbuster, big-budget video no longer means blockbuster record sales.” And she’s right. The excitement and anxiety for the release of the Telephone video came because the EP, The Fame Monster, from which it was taken had already done well in the charts, not the other way around.

But as she wonders where the video star has gone, she forgets that in our world of internet addiction and viral videos, Indie artists are the ones making the most of the medium and becoming the new video stars.

In 2005, OK Go took the world by storm when they released their homemade jewel “Here it goes again” on YouTube, delighting viewers of cyberspace with their quirky treadmill choreography. The video was so successful that they performed it live during that year’s MTV Video Music Awards (and only messed up once).

This year they struck again with the video for “This Too Shall Pass”, which reached 6 million views a mere six days after its release. This time, they presented a Rube Goldberg-inspired succession of tumbling dominos, rolling Lego cars and cascading water motion systems. Not only are they being inventive, they manage to do even better that which big budget videos did in the past: instead of just reaffirming an artist’s position in the industry, it imposes one for those who might not have gotten the attention otherwise.

And OK Go is just one example of musicians who have fun with music videos and turn them into a master tool for Internet buzz. The duo Pomplamoose got its push with its lo-fi video and fresh cover of “Single Ladies” by Beyoncé.

Even YouTube has noticed and launched a new channel, “Musicians wanted”, made specifically for those who rely on YouTube video views and shares on personal blogs, Twitter accounts, Facebook pages or any other social networking sites. Through this addition, musicians who upload videos will be able to make money off the plays they receive, and keep it all for themselves instead of sharing it with the labels.

So maybe it seems like the video stars are dead because, instead of having an army of marketing people provided by their label behind them, they really just have themselves. And the product that we get in the end has a lot more heart in it.

Apparently the balalaika can only be found in hell, and the viola just doesn’t exist in the afterlife. Or at least that’s what Louis Andriessen seems to think. Thursday April 15th was the New York premiere at Carnegie Hall of the concert version of his opera La Commedia, which was based on portions of Dante’s Divine Comedy as well as a polyglot collection of other texts. The opera was presented in five sections (as opposed to Dante’s original three), three of which were set in hell, including a long episode narrated by a female Dante. The opera itself was fairly plotless, following the basic contours of Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven but mostly consisting of vignettes sung by individual characters.

The work was performed by the orchestra-like Asko-Schoenberg Ensemble, in conjunction with the talented Synergy Vocals and Brooklyn Youth chorus. Claron McFadden played a luminescent Beatrice while Cristina Zavalloni played an impassioned, seemingly possessed Dante that was accented by stalking around the stage and exaggerated dancing to the music. Jeroen Williams made for a creepy Devil in the third section and a bizarre fast talker in the fourth, while Marcel Beekman sang a lovely aria as Casella from the last box of the first tier.

The piece itself was rather like a Jackson Pollock painting; blotches of jazz here, streaks of dense cluster chords over there, a Broadway finale down at the end. The piece was not a refined intellectual exercise, but rather a hundred sprawling minutes of comedic gestures, sarcasm, dense cluster chords that seemed to lambast the audience, and a collage of the jetsam and flotsam of the classical music world. The work was entertaining, but in the end much of it was not very affecting. There was one brilliantly creepy moment during Lucifer’s aria when he sang (in Dutch) of the new world he was going to create and a gentle pastoral theme played behind him, but it was soon lost in the overwhelming tide of noisy diminished chords that characterized hell. It would have been far more interesting if he had picked up the irony and shock of the moment of Lucifer’s aria.

For the neophyte, trying to figure out the new music scene can be both confusing and overwhelming. The many splintered traditions as well as the huge variety of music out there can make it quite intimidating to get an idea of the bigger picture. That’s why the new Contact! Series organized by Alan Gilbert and the New York Philharmonic has the potential to be a dynamic force in getting people interested in new music. Between the first concert in December and the second April 16th and 17th, 7 commissioned new works by 7 different composers were premiered by members of the New York Philharmonic. Alan Gilbert and composer-in-residence Magnus Lindberg chose a wide variety of composers that painted a nice picture of the different facets of composition today. The concert on April 16th and 17th (Friday at Symphony Space and Saturday at the Rainey Auditorium at The Metropolitan Museum of Art) featured new works by young composers Sam Shepard, Nico Muhly, and Matthias Pinscher. Each piece was a startlingly different take on the heritage of esoteric music in the West.

Shepard’s piece, These Particular Circumstances is best described as neo-Impressionist, drawing inspiration from and even quoting Debussy and Ravel. The piece’s seamless seven movement structure, would have been more interesting if one could have told Floating apart from Grinding. There were lovely moments and details in the piece, but there was something wanting in its overall structure. Nico Muhly’s Detailed Instructions drew obvious inspiration from minimalism, jazz and even indie rock, but found its own identity by creating a mood and staying within it. Though developmentally static the piece still grabbed the audience’s attention with its changing orchestration. Matthias Pinscher’s piece songs from Solomon’s garden featured baritone Thomas Hampson singing Hebrew text from the Songs of Solomon. The strong vocal line was backed by diverse orchestration, at times sparse and at others dissonantly dramatic, evoking quite a varied and interesting garden.

Beyond the pieces themselves, the concert was particularly impressive for the laidback and intimate feel generated by conductor Alan Gilbert. His amusing pre-performance interviews with each of the composers and obvious enthusiasm for the project did away with much of the stuffy institutionalism that can characterize Lincoln Center. One can only hope these concerts will continue with this enthusiastic and welcoming take on new music that encourages strangers to become fans.

By Anthony Benigno

Like any punk band worth their salt, the Dropkick Murphys live are loud, rude, and crude, which makes for great mosh pit antics but has the unfortunate effect of drowning out their (well-constructed) music in sound and fury. So the most remarkable thing about their live record, “Live on Lansdowne, Boston MA,” right off the bat, is how fantastic the whole thing sounds. The production on the album is phenomenal; the songs sound rawer and rock harder than they do on the studio record, yet listening to them is a much softer experience than if you were actually at the show.

Recorded during their six-day, seven-show stand in Beantown on the week of St. Paddy’s Day 2009, “Live on Lansdowne” captures the Murphys at their most powerful. The track list favors the songs over band-audience banter, so it’s tough to get a sense of the group’s fabled camaraderie with its fans. An easy mistake to forgive here, since the album is a catchy listen all the same.

There are a few things to nitpick at. Sometimes the mix exaggerates the Murphys’ Celtic accoutrements over the rock n’ roll ones (Tim Brennan’s guitar gets shafted early and often by the tin whistle and pipes), which doesn’t work as well as you might expect. The accordion on “The State of Massachusetts” is jacked up to 11, which makes the song sound more like a pirate jig than the welfare-anthem it happens to be.

Luckily, there’s little time to dwell on the record’s faults, since the Murphys are barely out of one song before they blast into the next. Fan favorites like “The Dirty Glass,” “Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ya” (the heaviest thing here) and “Captain Kelly’s Kitchen” sound great, and singer Al Barr’s craggy voice sounds full and powerful on the album’s best track, “Bastards on Parade.” The whole thing is a ride worth taking despite its polarizing heaviness – the album barrels along its 20-track length with no respite for the weary but is accessible enough for non-fans as well. By the time hell breaks loose on the finale “I’m Shipping Up to Boston,” you’ll either be begging for mercy or a bona fide believer.

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.