My Place in Music History

So, I've been listening to several different lecture series on the history of Western Classical Music, and this view of the grand sweep of music and culture since about 1100 to about 1916 has given me some ideas about my own place in music history.

I. Collaboration vs Auteur

First, I can play a part in returning music to a state it hasn't been in since Medieval times. A recent lecture I listened to from a series about Opera made a contrast between the earliest Gregorian chants, which were monophonic (had one melody line), that pretty much followed the words, and early polyphony, in which more than one line was sung at once.  With this fact, that more than one note would be sung at the some time, came the obligation for someone to make choices about which notes those would be, and a requirement for the skill to know which notes would be better than others.  It required a composer, and with that we had a distinction between the composer, the performers, and the audience, whose role was to sit and listen.

The lecturer pointed out that we still live in that world today, which we certainly do, but I have noticed in my own life more and more opportunities for communal music-making.  Community groups like Gamelan Sekar Gemuda bring people of all different ages and musical abilities together to play in an ensemble - ensemble is totally the most important thing about Gamelan, and through playing together we are bonded into a community.  Community education events at the Mile of Music Festival often provide opportunities for music-making to anyone.  The education leaders lead people in rhythm exercises, group sings, drumming circles, and again, Gamelan.  Anyone can do it, and it's an occasion for everyone to do it together.  And my monthly jam sessions are designed to give adult musicians a chance to play together, regardless of expertise or level.  They have ended up being jam sessions for beginner women, but that's fine.  It's a chance for all of us to make music together.  And then church, of course, is a time when the whole congregation sings together, and Episcopalians are known for always singing in four parts.

So I'm doing my part to restore the communal, participative nature of music, which is a move away from the expert-audience divide that has dominated since those polyphonic chants.

II. Craft to glorify God vs Ego

I listened to a whole set of lectures on JS Bach, and a whole other set on WA Mozart.  Both of them were working before the Romantic period.  By the time you got to post-Beethoven, the point of composing was individual expression by the composer.  The compositions were supposed to be about the composer's inner life, either his (usually his) thoughts and dreams, or his emotions, or his memories.  This shift led to a cult of personality, in which composers were treated like rock stars in their own time period, and then the attendant bad behavior - overindulgence, manipulation of groupies of the opposite sex, extravagent lifestyles, etc.  But Bach and Mozart were working back when composing was a craft.  You got hired by either the church or the local government, and you were expected to provide music for all the occasions those institutions demanded.  Plus direct the choir, plus teach the children and direct their choir, plus provide piece to honor royalty, and whatever else your bosses decided to call upon you to do.  The lecturer played two fragments of pieces written by Mozart on the week that his father died.  The first one, yes, sounded dark.  Did it truly reflect Mozart's grief and anguish, which he never expressly reflected in his letters to anyone?  But then the lecturer played another piece, composed that same week, which was light and buoyant and not dark at all.  Neither piece can be concluded to express the inner emotional state of the composer, because that's not what music was for back at that time.  Composing was a craft, at which both Bach and Mozart were very good and accomplished, and they did it because they were paid to do it, and they did it well to glorify God.

Everything always turns out better if you do it out of generosity rather than out of Ego.  Viewing composition as a craft, and a gift to be used to illuminate to others the wonder of creation, that point of view takes a lot of pressure off.  Composition isn't being done to prove what a big deal you are.  You are just one of millions of composers, and your songs are just part of the uncountable multitude of songs.  You are like one of the composers of the many, many Gregorian chants that survive.  You can't listen to one and pick out the composer's particular style, because it wasn't about expressing a particular style.  All those hundreds of composers were working within a single genre, to follow those musical rules and create something that could be sung as part of a formal ritual, inside a church.  Many times per week.

We have lived in the age of the musical Ego ourselves.  Think of the rock stars of the 1960's.  But that era is done now.  The fragmentation of the music industry that everyone bemoans has prevented the possibility of a star of that 1960's magnitude.  No one artist can have such universal cultural domination.  The means of consumption have fragmented - with iPods, streaming, YouTube, random discoveries on Bandcamp.  We are not all listening to the same thing any more, which leads to very specialized niches and subcultures.

More importantly, the means of production are fragmented and have been democratized.  Any person can cut a multi-track album, at home.  Mix it on their computer, load it up online, boom, you are in the music business.  You are a recorded artist.  Anyone can do it.  There are no gatekeepers - record company A&R men (usually men), radio programmers, concert promoters.  The star system is gone.  Which means pursuing music for Ego reasons is going to be unsuccessful anyway.  So you might as well take the more Renaissance approach.  Compose and play and record your songs as a craft.  Compose and play and record as many of them as you can!  It doesn't matter if the marketplace is crowded - in fact, it's supposed to be.  Your obligation is to make a sound in your own voice.  You need to be you, as fully as possible, and so does everyone else, and there is plenty of room for all of this.  This stance takes away the competition, and the rank ordering.  Who cares if I'll never be as good a guitar player as Stevie Ray Vaughn?  Or even Joan Jett?  That's not what the project is here.  My project is to make the music that I would make.  These sounds that are inside me (because of who I am and when I grew up and who I loved and who knows what else?), my job is to get them out, just to do it, not to get rich or famous or be better than anyone else.

We are already living in this world.  The Ego era is over now, and we can go back to being craftspersons of glory.

III.  Spirit -> Mind -> Body

Those Medieval chants have a pure, clear tone, and a peace about them, because they are meant to sound angelic, they are messages to Heaven, and they were written to form a part of formal worship practices.

In the transition to the Enlightenment, the same transition that made composition about the composer, there was also a transition from spirit to mind.  There was a belief in Reason, and in the human ability to put our minds to problems and figure them out.  The human mind made the world perfectable.  The focus came down from God and onto human achievement, leading to progress.

Okay, so if that's true, then where are we now?  What is the focus of 20th century music?  And of course the answer is simple - it is the body.

The most popular music, world-wide, of the last century, is highly repetitive dance music - Rock and Roll (and its permutations - Rock, Pop, Rap/Hip Hop, Disco, Dance, etc).  It wouldn't even sound like music to earlier composers, because it doesn't have the kind of melody lines or harmonization that they would be used to.  It doesn't develop along a path, it just repeats back around, over and over.  That is music that speaks to the hips, and the feet, not the mind or the heart.

The 20th century's music was about the body, and the 21st century's is as well - expanding into World Music, rhythms and sounds from places outside of Western Europe.



So, my place in music history is to write music based on simple, repetitive rhythms, and then play it together with other people, while also playing their compositions too.


Note: This blog post relies extremely heavily on the wonderful lectures of Professor Robert Greenberg.