Hidden Tracks (ii)

As long-time MFEDI readers know, I've been fixated for some time on the question of the inherent value of art considered apart from it's content. This comes as a direct consequence of the frequency with which I encounter people, institutions, theories, philosophies and public policies alike that take art to be an inherently positive thing simply by virtue of its being art. The most obvious flaw in this idea is that we, collectively, cannot seem to agree on what is and is not art in the first place, and hence, a rational debate is impossible because we cannot agree on a definition of our terms. But what if we could define our terms, proceeded to have the debate, and reached the conclusion that all art is, in fact, wholesome, constructive, and valuable (i.e. the way many seem to have concluded anyway, but which I personally disagree with)? Where would that leave us?

More recently, what fascinates me about this idea is the matter of supply and demand. How much of a good thing can we have before that good thing becomes a mediocre thing, or even a bad thing? Is there anything about art that would lead us to expect it to be immune to this mechanism (other than the fact that because we can't define what it is, we can't really know the answer)?

Supply and demand is an economic principle, but there are parallels to this idea in every conceivable facet of life. There's the physical aspect of it, seen in the principle of diffusion; the geographical/migratory aspect of it, seen in people going where the jobs are, where the resources are, or simply trying to get farther and farther from each other (i.e. suburban sprawl); the biological aspect of it, where practically any element in its purest form is toxic to living things, where we know it is possible to die from drinking too much of the substance most essential to survival (water), and where overpopulation ultimately leads to near extinction.

I lack the formal Philosophical grounding to know if there's an established global term for this idea outside the realm of economics, but one can clearly see that it is everywhere, both in nature and in society. It is not only possible to have too much of a good thing, it is virtually always the case that having too much of a good thing is 100 times worse than having just barely enough, and only marginally better than having none at all. Hence, even if we cannot define art, it would be silly to believe that its case would any different. And so I worry about it. A lot.

Art is everywhere. There's more music available for free online than a person could listen to in a thousand lifetimes. It would be a chore to find a vacant storefront in a bad neighborhood to fix up and turn into an art space because most all of them have already been bought up and turned into art spaces. And then there's the relatively recent idea of finding beauty in everyday objects or sounds (i.e. from Cage, et al), something which I embrace wholeheartedly, sometimes against the complaints of acquaintances and colleagues, but which also scares the living crap out of me as an artist because it would seem to render my work irrelevant, even to myself.

Digging even further, there's the "music is for everybody" issue. There's scarcely a saying I feel more conflicted about than that, since, while I (and everyone else) would just love to believe it solely for it's power to validate what we do, we all know it's not true. Speaking in absolutes is a death wish in rational debate, and this saying manages to do it not once but twice, first with "music" (i.e. ALL music? Music generally? What?) and, more obviously, with "everybody." More relevant to the present discussion, though, is that us musicians are literally putting ourselves out of business with this phrase. This is a brutal irony considering that it is most often trotted out as a marketing tool aimed at getting more kids involved in music, and hence yielding more income both for the music teachers who teach them and for the performers whose concerts it is assumed they will then attend for the rest of their lives. I've bellyached before about the soulless cynicism inherent in that thinking, so I'll leave that issue alone for now. The point is that in aiming to create more and more of a good thing, we inevitably create too much of it, and that it's equally inevitable that this will leave us worse off in the long run than we were before.

Some would (and do) argue that we're not creating the same good thing here, since the vast majority of these students don't become professional musicians, and hence don't offer a competing product (i.e. "professional level" performances). In a world with any justice whatsoever, that would indeed be the case, but we do not live in such a world, for in practice, audiences don't choose "professional level" performances over less-than competent performances; they're more interested in their friends' bands than anyone else's band simply because it's their friends, and they largely can't tell the difference in musicianship anyway where there is one. The retort to that is that more music education creates more astute listeners who can tell the difference. Perhaps, but it also creates more friends who continue to perform at a less-than-professional level as adults, creating a product that friendless professional musicians simply can't compete with, no matter how good they are. Further, it is demonstrable that more and more of these students are pursuing professional careers insofar as that entails majoring in music in college. That's the crown jewel of the "music is for everybody" battlecry, and one which is responsible above all else for its exceptional power to induce the opposite of its intended outcome.

Why the extreme cynicism? Because if there's one thing I wasn't prepared for when i left school, it was what audiences everywhere do and don't notice about musical performances. We've all had the experience of playing a less-than-stellar show and subsequently receiving a warm compliment from an oblivious audience member who couldn't tell the difference. That's not really what I'm talking about, though. I'm thinking more of identity: age, gender, dress, manner, politics and social group all seem to have more to do with success than musicianship does. I won't even tack on the seemingly obligatory "...these days" to that last statement, since "these days" are the only ones I know. Who can say if it's ever been any different? I do have a theory, though, which is that the age of musical plenty we live in has made this even worse than it could possibly have been before. Indeed, it would mark a rather momentous break with countless observable phenomena in nature and human society alike if this were not the case.

It's fun (and very blogospheric of me, I must admit) to list off economic, geographic and biological principles as if I know something about them, whereas in truth, I have only a cursory understanding of each phenomenon I listed. Nonetheless, allow me to attempt to spin this cursory understanding into a halfway compelling recommendation for the way forward. As I understand it, the word "sustainability" is on the tips of a lot of people's tongues these days. This is because we're slowly realizing that economic growth is not mediated solely by our desire to make it happen, but by factors beyond our direct control, like the non-renewability of certain natural resources, or the impossibility of technology replacing more workers than there are left to replace. Hence, instead of continued economic growth benefitting everyone, we are finding that the costs of maintaining a certain rate of growth are so severe as to defeat its utilitarian purpose.

It's more than a stretch to lump modern-day arts advocacy in with fascistic global capitalism, but I don't think it's debatable to say that growth-for-growth's-sake describes the philosophy of one as well as the other, or that there's a tipping point right around the corner in both cases. As we know, too much of something portends that thing's imminent starvation or diffusion or migration or explosion. So-called sustainability isn't so much about surviving that endgame as it is about achieving a kind of equilibrium that prevents the situation from ever getting quite so dire in the first place. So what does sustainability mean in the economics of art? A good start would be to abandon citing extrinsic benefits as the primary method of establishing art's value in the public arena. Nothing could be less sustainable than that smoke and mirrors act. A related action would be to embrace the idea of exposure over that of proselytizing, or in other words, to present music one believes strongly in to new audiences without a hint of superiority or moralization. This ensures a sustainable (if small) influx of new listeners who haven't merely been fooled or seduced into showing up. And last, of course, is to abandon the conceit of music being for everyone.

How could I write such a thing? Besides knowing it not to be true, the idea terrifies me, and not because I'm some elitist snob who'd rather be poor and unknown if it means getting the better of my aesthetic enemies. Sign me up for fame and fortune yesterday, but I'm afraid that what's keeping me from getting there isn't a lack of a musical awareness in the world at large, but rather a heaping, volatile, unsustainable pile of it that just keeps on growing, rendering my contribution to it more meaningless by the hour.

Tribute to an Inheritance

This book review from The Nation touches, in a roundabout way, on a very important subject for musicians and artists of all stripes. Of authors Gar Alperovitz and Lew Daly, reviewer Mark Engler says,

Their foremost ethical question is, given that we owe most of our productivity to a common social inheritance, to what extent can we say that we have "earned" our personal wealth?

Whether you tack the word "social," "cultural," or "artistic" in front of it, this idea of inheritance is one that all musicians grapple with to some extent. Just as political conservatives extoll the "self-made man" as if he exists in a vacuum apart from the accumulated wisdom of his society, so are musicians too often fed the "Great Man" theory of history, by which we are indebted to only a select few towering giants of music, when really, the roster of contributors to whatever tradition we work in (or against) is almost endless. This not only predisposes us to overlook plenty of music we might end up very interested in were we to ever encounter it, but also conditions us to aspire to join the club ourselves someday, this being the ultimate measure of success or failure in our careers. Both of these conditions are unfortunate, the former because it narrows our horizons, and the latter because it begets envy and petty bickering among contemporaries, both over their own status and that of forebears for whom they may feel compelled to advocate, for whatever reason.

One would hope that musicians could collectively do better than the ego-driven hero worship, self-aggrandizement and name-dropping that dominates today's scene, which, the flawed logic of it aside, does more harm than good when it comes to the social side of making music. Cage's writing on this subject presents a more refreshing alternative, as does Feldman's recollection here of a saner ethic prevailing in 1950's New York. ("What a terrific show. Am I glad he did it. Now I don't have to." Can you imagine hearing that after an exhibition or a concert?) Whether it is realistic to expect such an attitude to take hold among large swaths of artists and audiences I'm not so sure of, but it is a worthy goal nonetheless.

While ego-driven personal ambition is an unavoidable part of life, I wouldn't go so far as to say that it cannot possibly be turned into a constructive force. I suspect that one can be both ambitious and successful without falling victim to more unseemly bouts of overt narcissism. Here's somewhere to start: when paying tribute to a musician that is perceived as an innovator, is it not more appropriate to do one's own thing rather than simply aping one's hero? To continue the economics analogies, literal imitation as tribute is more like the "casino economy" of stock brokers, hedge fund managers, and securities traders: just as these paper pushers don't actually produce anything material, literal imitation as tribute contributes nothing new to the fabric of musical life. Only with a healthy dose of oneself in the mix does one produce musical goods that may become a meaningful part of the next generation's cultural inheritance, hence giving back as much as one can (in fact, giving the only thing one really has to give, that being one's individuality, however subtle or extreme it might be). Conversely, merely reiterating that which you yourself have inherited is a regressive act in that it takes more and gives less (and is never as good as the real thing anyway). It is in this way that the most overt tributes too often become the most overt affronts (think Kenny G and Louis Armstrong).

One need not bother building monuments to musical heroes, for to imitate them is merely to be oneself. And let's face it, when it comes to the Tributes to So-and-So that pop up with such regularity these days, it is often all too obvious that our heroes are merely being used for name dropping in hopes of somehow capturing the attention of a fatigued and increasingly frugal audience who couldn't possibly know or care who we are, but might have heard of someone we listen to. In the end, that's not really much of a tribute.

The emphasis on individuality and aversion to stylism is, of course, just as prone to running afoul of the inheritance question, since each of our originalities is really just a conglomeration of our influences. It is this very realization, however, that can inform a more humble approach to one's own place in the grand scheme of things. How much credit does any one person really deserve for their music, after all? Beyond simply expanding the Heroes list from composers, performers and teachers to include inventors, scientists, music theorists, publishers et al, what if we go so far as to consider the effects of parenting, heredity and environment on a budding musician? A concept such as work ethic, which is part and parcel of the conservative notion of "individual responsibility," could then be seen as something for which one was no more responsible than their hair color.

Importantly, by problematizing individual responsibility, one problematizes individual accolades as well. This angle can quickly become an exercise in nihilism, and suddenly, nothing matters at all and no one deserves any credit for anything. There's no reason to take things quite that far, but at the very least, an acceptance of oneself as the product of one's cultural* inheritance rather than an exceptional amount of some sort of innate or acquired merit is a big step in the direction of toning down the petty bickering and egomaniacal crusades over status that are tremendous burdens on both the music world and life in general.


*I cringe at invoking the concept of "culture" at all, since it seems mostly to be used as a bludgeon against anyone who prefers their music free from literary associations and functional obligations, as I do. Even with these particular distractions out of the way, though, there doesn't seem to be any better term to describe the melting pot of ideas that contribute to a musical tradition, however absolute.