Hearing Modernity (iii)

Olivia Lucas on Jonathan Sterne’s MP3: Meaning of a Format:

The approach to history here is never teleological; instead, it emphasizes the contingency of all events and artifacts. The book addresses the fact that the mp3 could have been invented thirty years earlier than it was, and uses this fact to interrogate the assumption that technological capability alone leads to invention. The emergence of the mp3 in 1993 was the result of a long history of people, institutions and technologies.

Okay, okay, I get it. I mean, not really, but kind of. No musical style or technique is universally applicable anymore, but everyone in a society lives under the same set of social, political, and economic conditions, and the better we understand them, the better equipped we are to make and consume sound/music. The idea of replacing music theory with acoustics in the core curriculum actually has always kind of appealed to me for the same reason: we all live under the same physical laws, even if our Musical traditions are vastly different and irreconcilable. Why not go all the way? Isn't embracing "the contingency of all events and artifacts" going to do more for more students of sound and music alike than sweating out the gory details of how "a minority of aesthetes" chose to spend their putrid little lives?

I honestly am not sure. It seems we will find out in due time. I do wonder, though, just to belabor the point a bit more, what becomes of the last thousand years of willfulness in Western music? Are we to behave as if it never happened? Today, given enough data from which to extrapolate, computers can spit out convincing sound-alikes in the style of virtually any classical composer; and yet simply by virtue of being first, the original works themselves tell us so much more about the world we live in and how it got to be that way. Sociology, meanwhile, can explain or excuse the work, but it can't perform or compose it. The former are ideal academic pursuits; the latter never fit quite so well. Perhaps it's better, then, that academia do Sound Studies rather than Sound Making; that it focus on what it's good at and leave the creative, subjective work that it never really knew how to properly approach or nurture to be done outside its walls. Isn't that what people like me have been saying for a long time? And yet it was the academics' unhealthy distance from real live musical practice that prompted those complaints in the first place. Seen in that light, instituting a yet further distance suddenly becomes a lot less appealing, and the very point of doing so rather unclear. That's my main problem here. As long as there has been music, practitioners have always already been analysts, historians, and most of all, teachers and mentors. That aspect of music predates modern academia and promises to outlive it. The story of the academic perversion of the time-honored mentor-disciple relationship is one of increasing distance from musical practice; of enforced insularity as an inevitable product of a particular kind of hierarchical structure in the organization of such institutions; and of people with no particular interest in or ability for teaching or mentorship half-assing their way through it in exchange for a much-needed paycheck when the society they live in presents them with no alternative income source. The strongest backlash against this monstrosity was bound to come from far enough beyond its walls to ensure that those leading it didn't entirely understand or appreciate the value of a properly functioning version; they simply wanted their own demands met, their own self-importance validated, by whichever institutions they happened to be looking at after being shot with Cupid's envy arrow, and where such things were not immediately forthcoming, they set about burning the whole thing to the ground. Ergo, Sound Studies, the new and improved, politically correct version of Sound Making, where everybody gets a trophy, no one has to practice, and the only prerequisite is fluency in a coded language of five-dollar words. In all seriousness, there is undoubtedly important work to be done here should its exponents demonstrate the ability to learn from the history of the institutions they've worked so hard to penetrate; it so often seems, however, that this history has simply been dismissed as a dark age without being fully digested, the very notion of aesthetic contemplation considered beyond redemption, and our nose thus cut off very much in spite of our face. There are other questions, too, like what becomes of the "music makes kids smart" narrative after every last piece of physical and mental exercise inherent in the traditional Western musical experience has been decolonialized right out of it, and anything less than a Partchian mania for first principles is pathologized as reactionary propaganda? It is not for nothing that Christopher Small, The People's Deconstructionist, builds his widely-read book "Musicking" around the notion that music is something people do; it would seem rather obvious, though, that art which anyone can make, which requires no specialized knowledge or skills, is inherently non-transformative, art with zero "extrinsic" benefits, if you will. Who cares, then, how many people it reaches?

The 21st century postmodernists have let the 20th century musico-academic terrorists win. Distrusting the power of beauty to elicit irrational behavior, or perhaps possessing no ear for it themselves, they can't seem to understand why anyone else would have use of it; and so the play of contingencies and constructivisms is supposed to fellate our minds the way music once did our ears. I'm a smart guy, so...almost. But not quite. I have ears, not ice, where my heart should be.

Hearing Modernity (ii)

More from an essay by Ian Power:

Here was the bedrock for scholarly work that was not about analyzing music formalistically; it was about analyzing the lines between music and daily life, the ways music was controlled and distributed—in studying a modern music politics, it began to become clearer that it wasn’t just music that was political, so was everything surrounding its dissemination. ...Music, seen through this lens, now appeared as a minor cog in the wheel of sound. ...Studying only music restricted us to studying a leisure activity in the face of mounting evidence that the study of sound was always already the study of politics and power, environment and experience. In studying music, we had been studying the actions of a minority of aesthetes; studying sound is, almost by definition, studying everyone.

Again, an omission of sorts that it takes a musician to get bent out of shape about: when we read "analyzing music formalistically" in this context, we of course know that the author really meant "jacking off to magic squares," and not "the instrumentalist's conscientious preparation of musical work(s) for performance." The latter is, after all, something only that pesky "minority of aesthetes" is silly enough to bother with anymore, trapped as they are in the Victorian, Darwinist clusterfuck of determinacy and willfulness, and burdened by the outmoded belief that the intentional refinement of a musical creation in direct reflection of one's own predilections and experiences enhances (potentially, at least) that product's intrinsic value, brightening an irreparably dark world ever so slightly.

In any case, if that's the musical framework that you live (or are trapped) in, you probably have no more patience than the Soundists do for the particular varieties of formalistic musical analysis that have prevailed in American academia. Even so, there certainly is a species of what can only be called analysis that you and everyone else you live (or are trapped) with in this world of music necessarily engage in when it comes time to give a public performance. People like us grew up associating such seemingly commendable abstract values as personal pride and respect for others with the drive to prepare and refine our work; for us, the most destructive force known to music, aesthetically as well as socially, is permission to dispense with them. Such an erosion of standards seems an awfully steep price to pay for something as silly as molding the sonic world into a slightly more idealized political allegory, especially when there's a "real" world of people and institutions out there that could use a bit more attention than it gets through this maneuver alone.

Not all aestheticism is politically naive: if one's musical desires are so destructive (but are they really?), does it not make sense to seek a padded cell for them to inhabit? Without such an outlet, the strictures of accepting the world of sound precisely as it is, simply presented with no hope for change, becomes a form of oppression, and the study of how the world got to sound the way it does becomes deterministic and empty. Aestheticism, meanwhile, was only ever a threat when tastes became institutionalized, just as determinacy is only inherently destructive when accompanied by spectacular deficits of consciousness which both music and sound, I hate to say for the second time in as many paragraphs, are hard-pressed to remedy on their own.

We are all aesthetes, even if only a minority of us are awake to it. The notion that "studying everyone" would be more politically appealing seems to me to overvalue the privilege of being studied while undervaluing that of sonic self-determination. Such a thorough distrust of intentionality and refinement threatens to trap us in the world as it sounds at the expense of how it might sound. Aestheticist music-making, conversely, is less about exerting control over others than about exerting it over one's own soundworld; about being the change you wish to see in that world, as the saying goes.

For its part, analysis (the type does matter, but not for the moment) is part and parcel of being a music-maker, i.e. a practitioner, or at least one worth his or her salt in any musical tradition that still permits its members their own value judgments. It's important to recognize that grain of civility lying at the heart of an early American musico-academic framework that was indeed to go precipitously off the rails in so many other ways. That such institutions can no longer possibly cover enough stylistic ground to make any claim to comprehensiveness in the contemporary musical environment is its own rather separate issue; the exclusive classical music emphasis never suited me either, but the aspiration to achievement sure did, and I certainly find it too important to be sacrificed as collateral damage in the postmodern theory wars. May benevolent willfulness find a way to coexist with Sound as well as Music, and nihilism thus be kept at bay for a little while longer.

Hearing Modernity (i)

From an essay by Ian Power:

For the first ninety or so years of modern liberal arts education in the United States, the study of music meant the study of classical music, much like the study of literature was that of Great Books. As the advent of critical theory in other humanist disciplines began to expand the scope of scholarly study, music (somewhat grudgingly) began look to critical theory as well; with, for example, music theorists looking to phenomenology, and musicologists looking to gender studies. But perhaps most critical to the study of sounds themselves was the rapid expansion of ethnomusicology, which not only exposed academia to different musics, it brought to music departments a laundry list of ways of thinking about and experiencing music that were much different from the Western classical situation. There came to Western ears far more to tell of societies (contemporary and past) in which the boundaries between music and daily life were not so clear; where purposeful noise was integral and not polluting. In addition to these, scholars began to turn ears to contemporary consumers of American popular culture, much of which produced music that was not to be sat and listened to, but danced to, shower-sung to, run to, eaten to, and shopped to.

An important point goes customarily unremarked upon here: in the bygone era of cultural consensus (or the appearance of it), the arts nonetheless did not seem to fit very comfortably into the academic mandate, and it was never particularly gauche to suggest so. Canonical old-world musical figures like Berlioz, Wagner, Debussy, and Prokofiev certainly had their own strained relationships with the academic musical thought of their respective times, which is to say years or decades before music (of any kind) had gained its foothold in American academia¹. With cultural consensus came the threat of enforced convention, and as goes one, so goes the other, or so it seems this cadre of sound scholars would have it.

The distinction here between "music" and "sound" is well-taken, and has shaped my own world more so than my overwhelmingly lines-and-dots-oriented work might outwardly indicate; in any case, I'm certainly not here to argue that classical music is the only kind worth studying. One wonders, however, if a precipitous lurch towards sound necessarily resolves the longer-standing tension, held over from the age of music, between academic theory and real-world practice; or if, in fact, as an almost purely academic construction (and at that, one taking significant cues from, of all places, critical theory), a field like Sound Studies merely threatens to transform the problem of studying music into something bigger, messier, and even less utilitarian than the paradigm it purports to supersede? Insofar as the "practice" of sound is less intention-driven than that of music, does it not pose a proportionately less tractable condition?

Indeed, the disintegration of cultural consensus was never music's problem alone: after all, with the "boundaries between music and daily life" now suitably shattered, what good is the study of sound without 1000 years of music as its contextual counterweight? Could Sound Studies justify its own existence without this backdrop? Throughout the musical era, the glaring and elementary epistemological problems inherent in the gesture of subsuming creative artistic disciplines as they were then understood within the academic environment as it was then manifested were nonetheless papered over, dwarfed as they were by music's (not sound's) larger cultural significance. Sound Studies, meanwhile defines such top-down, monolithic frameworks right out of its worldview; from what source, then, is its necessity taken to spring?

The matter of the arts justifying their own existence, in academia and elsewhere, is a frequent, if often indirect, topic of conversation these days, and rightfully so; yet no one I'm reading from either a musical or a sonic viewpoint is suggesting that both music and sound could be truly endangered academic species. I am beginning to take seriously the notion that they are; that more people think so than say so; and that we can learn something about the whole mess by studying these and other stakeholders' behavior. As a mostly musical creature myself, the rather calculated academic maneuver by soundists to dump the entire weight of postmodern cultural fragmentation onto the backs of us musicians strikes me as an omen, since these are the people that, if they understand anything, understand both culture and academic politics intimately.

Certainly with strict regard to music, the costs of pluralism (of which I have been a strong proponent here) are steep. The first is trite but all-encompassing: as a practical matter, schools of music can no longer provide comprehensive music education when the very notion of music has (rightly, I think) been exploded into something as varied as the individuals who sustain it and as vast as collective human intellectual endeavor itself. In other words, schools can neither expect their graduates to know everything nor can they afford to teach it to them. The second, equally trite and equally all-encompassing point: qualitative evaluation in the arts was a dicy proposition from the start, and in a self-consciously pluralistic educational environment, it is impossible almost by definition. If art and academia were always strange bedfellows, someone is sleeping on the couch for the foreseeable future. Does excising the study of art from the study of sound really solve the problem? Does it create another?

Paradoxically (perhaps ingeniously), the dismantling of cultural consensus short-circuits the possibility of the institutional training of music-makers while securing scalable, nearly unlimited avenues of inquiry for pure scholars of sociology and culture. Discourses of mastery and refinement (with, for Cage and post-Cageans, intentionality as their proxy) were the very first targets of the most vehement deconstructionists; all human beings, it turns out, create sound and shit in equal amounts (lots) and with equal effort (none). In an instant, there were no more musicians for academics to train and an unlimited number for them to study. Is it really all that farfetched, then, given, on one hand, the wide-ranging adademic-political implications of such a trend for what are, for the moment, known as music departments, and on the other, the well-documented limitless pettiness and insecurity of academics in marginalized fields of endeavor, to at least take note of all of this from an academic-political perspective?

"The advent of critical theory in other humanist disciplines" and its bleed into musico-academic scholarship is a topic which I'm neither prepared nor qualified to tackle in any mature scholarly way. I will say only that I suspect it deserves to be presented, as it is above, strictly as a history of academia itself, and as such is otherwise about as relevant to modern day musical practitioners as the list of Prix de Rome winners or the competing conventions for labeling secondary dominant chords. The emphasis on the role of ethnomusicology seems more justified, though this should also remind us that rigid convention, refinement of technique, and formal apprenticeship are not exactly unique to our own classical tradition. It is mere delusion to believe that excising them from our culture is inherently a depathologizing or liberationist maneuver.

As all-encompassing as the impact of critical theory can seem in the right circles, as well as the best of it explicates some important recent trends, and as thoroughly at odds as it is (representing fairly well, I think you could say, the facts on the ground) with the very notion of allowing pre-professional training of musical practitioners to dominate academic musical life as it has for several decades, musical academia itself has, of course, not (yet) truly begun to reform itself accordingly, nor has it ventured very far from the usual high-brow Western musical traditions. Last I checked, in fact, the numbers were continuing to explode. The institution I most recently attended, thought by itself and a few others to point the way forward on just these sorts of issues, is, of course, singularly proud of its accredited performance programs in several non-Western musical traditions, again solving one problem only to create another. It turns out that music-makers, those lovable idiot savants who make the entire musico-academic edifice hum, have a peculiar way of going on the offensive to protect their turf, preserving, contriving, and enforcing their own cultural consensuses among micro-communities just large enough (but plenty well-connected) to sustain the old monolithic ways in politically well-placed pockets of resistance. We are an eminently naive, outmoded and vulnerable species which critical theory has nevertheless completely failed to either reform or depose, not through exertion of external pressure, and certainly not through holistic infiltration of the subculture. (Really, how many conservatory brats could begin to understand the first thing about this literature? See the problem now?) As I continue to read about, study, and observe the world around me, the clearer it becomes that the academic training of practitioners of living musical traditions will remain in perpetual conflict with the values of liberationist critical theory unless or until such training ceases to be undertaken at all. So stay safe out there kids; there are Bolsheviks in our bathroom.


¹Of course, it figures that the differences between (1) an old-fashioned (i.e. nineteenth century) national conservatory system and (2) a modern quasi-conservatory system subsumed within a nation's public and private universities are decidedly non-negligible, and would make for a fascinating angle from which to attack contemporary polemics surrounding the orientation and mandate of post-secondary music schools.