Friday, August 27, 2004

On aesthetic recombinantcy

Music Wonkery

It occurs to me that I should clarify some intellectual slippage in my post on the music of the early 1990s. Why is it better, subjectively, that Kurt Cobain draw on the Pixies “Doolittle,” than for, say, Franz Ferdinand to pretend that Gang of Four didn’t do what they do first?

Up front, I will say this: I don’t know. Aside from murky arguments about aesthetic purity, integrity, and honesty, all of which amount to so much handwaving, there is no concrete reason that one should be considered better, more legitimate than the other. At the end of the day, all music is derivative. It has to be. Just as there are maybe a dozen stock plots that drive 99% of all the popular novels and TV shows out there (not to mention all Shakespeare’s plays, etc. etc.), all of which are clichéd and hoary, there’s only so far you can go with twelve notes and four beats to the bar.

In fact, music should be derivative. If it weren’t, it wouldn’t be enjoyable. Without ties to prior experience, a piece of music exists in a cultural/historical vacuum, and people don’t like that. By nature and by training, people prefer to experience things that remind them of other things. I’m not enough of a philosopher to posit this as true for the entire range of human experiences, but even when people “try something new,” they enjoy it best when it can be tied in some way to something they already know.

Just look at Mozart. Although arguably the greatest composer of the high-Classical period, he wasn’t doing much that was terribly new. The rules of harmony he clung to were codified by Bach, he took lessons from the brother of Haydn, and his melodies relied on certain stock constructions that, though his own, he reused time and time again. And yet the whole is much greater than the sum of its parts.

When music is consciously totally new, it tends to either suck, or gain a cult/academic following that proves the rule that most people like new things. Schoenberg, Webern, and Berg, for example, saw twelve-tone serial music as not only the conscious next step in the evolution of Western music, but as a total and revolutionary break with the past. The results are, to the average listener, at best unlistenable and at worst aggressively off-putting. It is not too often these days that you hear serial music on the radio.

This is so because purely serial compositions eschew any connection with the past save one: the acceptance of the twelve tones of the chromatic scale. Later composers, of course, went farther. In college, I was a big fan of a piece by French/Greek composer Iannis Xenakis that sounded like an air duct. But, again, I was a music major and have spent a lot of time seeking out ostensibly “new” sounds. I’m an exception that proves the rule.

The debate, then, is really about the balance between “just novel enough” and “boring.” Nirvana: just novel enough. Sum 47: boring. Truth: subjective.

[wik] I’ve written about related matters here, and have been carrying on a conversation in my own head for at least ten years now. I probably need to get out more.


Posted by Johno on 08/27/04 at 02:40 PM
Music Wonkery • (1) Trackbacks • Permalink