When I meet someone new, and they ask what I do, and I respond that I'm a composer, the conversation typically takes an awkward turn, if it doesn't simply go moribund at that exact moment.
The following are mentally-noted excerpts of initial conversations I have had with countless people.
Case Number 1:
I'm a composer.
Oh... So, you write music?
(taken slightly aback) Yes... Yes, I do.
[if the conversation continues here, this is usually what happens]
So, are you in a band?
No.
Then... How do you write music?
Case Number 2:
I'm a composer.
Oh, you write music?
Yes.
What sort? Classical?
[there are far too many reasons at this critical juncture to explain the semantic nuance of the word "classical" to a person, typically lay, but I generally make that mistake, anyhow]
-OR-
What sort? Classical? Like Beethoven?
[At this point, I can't fault people for what they know. Music education in this country is abysmal, at worst, and routinely undersupported and underappreciated, at best, so I cannot hold these answers against the responders, even if I feel superbly cantankerous that day and really, really want to. The responder, in most circumstances, is at least a little earnest and attempting to meet me halfway - but can't, for reasons I theorize later.]
Case Number 3:
I'm a composer.
Oh, so... What do you play?
[see bracketed statement above]
Once in a while, I've made the conversationally-fatal mistake of doing the following:
I'm a sound artist.
[suppressing a chortle, grimace, or other facial expression as a means to remain polite] (quizzically) So, you... paint... with sound?
Well... Yes and no...
[and by this point in the conversation, I've lost them forever, unless it's that one person in 982,000 who is interested]
Composers and sound artists are the only creative artists who, I believe, have this problem of nomenclatural proportions. We are the only ones whose tasks and crafts are not etched permanently within the minds of the laypeople. What I mean is this: a person will have a general idea about what an artist does. Most visual artists I know differentiate: I'm a photographer; I'm a filmmaker; I'm a painter; I'm a sculptor. (Rarest of all species is the wily videographer.) Individuals have an exact knowledge already borne in their minds from experience with visual media about them in their daily lives and from the education obtained - typically informally - over their lifespan. The same could be said for the literary arts: individuals make automatic, instantaneous connections, conscious and unconscious, and cognitive leaps to envision what it is a writer does, what a playwright does, what a poet does, what a journalist does. There is even a prompting for differentiation from the uninitiated party: they may, and frequently do, ask the "writer" if they write fiction or non-fiction, short stories or novels, biographies, or (erroneously) poems or plays. There is a kernel of truth within every reasonably-educated person's mind about what each of these occupations entail.
The biggest problem, I think, is not that composers don't reach out to audiences: I think the problem is visual, primarily. This isn't to belittle other things, but from a purely cognitive standpoint, it's major. We have etched into our brains and popular imagination via film and TV and museums the sight of Jackson Pollock painting. We have the sight of photographs themselves - we don't need to see Avedon or Ray, but we have their work. We have footage of visual artists creating, of filmmakers peering through their viewfinders, of sculptors turning pottery wheels or wielding welding torches or chiseling away at stone. Obviously, humans are much more visual animals (unfortunately) than sonic or auditory ones, but that's really subservient to the idea that we have very little footage of composers in the process of creation. The few we have are iconic but all staged: Stravinsky peering into a score, Bruno Maderna poring over a score while chain-smoking and listening to a rehearsal. The most famous portraits of Ravel, Debussy, and Ligeti, for example, may have them at the piano, but this is mere suggestion - and at least in Ligeti's case, many of his famous photographs are emblematic of the typical visual representation of composers: wholly divorced from the act of creation, clad in a cardigan or suit, in the company of other composers, or at some symposium, or in a context removed in sum from the act of composing. I know of no footage that has made it into the pantheon of artistic documentation that shows a composer actually changing pitches or trying out motives on a violin. Of course, the fact that those few (though elaborated) portraits of composers at work exhibit composers with lines of strain in their faces, hunched over score paper in what looks like dim or unforgiving conditions does us no favours, either. Admittedly, my favorite depiction of Hindemith is one of Papa Paul playing viola - not composing; it goes without saying, too, that the most remembered and easily-comprehended visual renditions of Mahler are those of his conducting - despite being the last great post-Romantic voice.
There is, too, paradoxically a visual element that completely does not work in our favor: that is to say, a printed score. Without invoking the hoary discussion of whether it's a universal language, printed music in the Western tradition is an elitist language: it's the Latin of art forms. Few can read it passibly, and fewer still can tease out all of the nuance and delicacy in an interpretive manner that commands respect. I want to make clear that I am speaking of the entire Western population as whole, and the actual reading of music - not performing or the auditory transmission of music. I want to democratize the ability to reach a literacy level in music, as do music educators everywhere, but our resources are meager and our ability to make inroads is kept constrained. So, the ability to read music beyond a very rudimentary level still belongs to only a comparative few. While I bemoan the fact that we still in 2011 do not have universal literacy, 99% or so in the United States ain't bad. And, yes, many of the same problems of subtlety and intricacy exist in written language, but there are a few sociolinguistic and developmental factors at play: there is constant speech around us; we all have a base-level literacy and, evolutionarily, are much more easily adapted to learn and relearn spoken language when confronted with a visual analog if and only if there has been adequate exposure before a certain age; words, despite the many ways can be wielded, have exact definitions that are made contextually clearer in writing; everyone is taught to read (under normal circumstances); everyone is taught to write.
There is, of course, a visual-accessibility component, as well, which is fairly obvious: transmission and mutability. I can pick up a pencil and write a poem. It will most likely be awful. Same deal as with a short story. But I have a base level knowledge of rhythm, diction, syntax. I can write. I can pick up a book and read it. I can take the book with me anywhere. I put the score for Bartók's Concerto for Orchestra in my father's hand, and he can do nothing with it until he hears the recording or performance - and even then, the score does him no good.
This lack of visual-cognitive stimulus is even more pronounced when we get into electroacoustic music - a subject too big for this blog post. (Though not for a future one!)
We also - collectively, as trained musicians in the Western tradition - lack a vernacular common to experience that will allow us to communicate succinctly and efficiently without either speaking beyond the layperson's knowledge or experience, or - worse - insulting them by toning down and diluting how we describe what we do, why we do it, and what sort of art we make. Say what you will about untrained folks discussing visual art - I count myself among these - or, even better, film: there is an accessibility level of describing some technical aspects (I will not say all) that arises organically, almost generically, from repeated contact and experience and from limited visual art education or bits and pieces learnt along the way. I see brushstrokes on a canvas and can describe them as such; I may not know the proper technical terms beyond "vanishing point" in a landscape painting, but I can remark on something approximating it. At the very basic level, the elementary particles of visual art can be discussed almost universally. We don't have that ability in music or sound art. We end up with onomatopoeia or end up discussing visceralities or emotionalities rather than the sounds or music themselves. Certainly, these reactions are valid - but if we're talking about a Miró painting, we have exact language to describe it. Exact language in the world of music happens to be argot.
Debatable to an extent, the dimension of time itself is the only plane of existence for music and sonic art. We create a representation of thought which in turn becomes a simulation of a representation in performance or on a recording; divergent as those two could be, they are essentially the second status of removal from origin; we have the listener's memory, whose variety is mathematically wild; we have the retransmission from the listener in some fragmentary manner. And it all exists within primarily the realm of time. We have the object (score or recording or...) in our hands, but it is indeed just an object-intermediary. The visual aspect has zero bearing. The auditory aspect does have bearing, but it is not frozen in dimensionality, not firmly rooted to a place or a singular moment - a painting, a sculpture (especially a mediocre one), a visual referent: this is something permanently etched and tied to a place, a moment, a history. It can exist anytime; I can recall them at will now, and now, and now. A Takemitsu chamber work? It has to unfold. It takes time. And that's all it takes.
Which leads me back to why I decided to muse over this initially. There is no set visual re-cognition of the composer, her craft, or her process, or her end result. Aside form the transmission issues, lack of more holistic education about what composers do, lack of exposure of of newer - much newer - artistic trends in art music, and lack of visual elements in the composer's art, what else am I missing?
Other than the composer himself, who may or may not be able to communicate effectively what he does, regardless the pseudo-romantic images a layperson may see, regardless the naive and hurtful stereotype that a small but vocal minority has about composers (and musicians in general) being deadbeats, the responsibility doesn't lie completely with the lay audience or everyday people: it lies within the musical community as a whole to, without exoticization, exhibit composers as often as possible1, encourage composers to take more active roles in orchestras, schools, and the like (there is only so much composer-fostered groups of composers can do, for obvious auditory-transmission reasons), and (this is the killer) somehow place composers alongside writers and visual artists in the public eye (pun intended) (and with no intent to disparage or remove renown from artists in different media) and allow them to receive respect and due credit - first, from the musicians who perform their work (I think here of a relatively recent orchestra commission where the composer was given billing far below a featured soloist, no headshot, no introduction or pre-concert talk - way to go!); secondly, from educators (and this is not accusatory to educators, but pleading for those who shape curricula); thirdly, from an investment by listeners and the general public; and, finally, from composers ourselves. It's hard to make listeners and audiences believe us, understand us, support us, tolerate our existence, and appreciate us when we have to explain exactly what it is we do in an almost-defensive manner. It's hard to justify our existences when a wide swath of Americans don't know we exist to begin with and are then skeptical of our cultural place.
I know I leave out a lot in this discussion, but something tells me we're not done discussing this yet. I am, right here and now, but as a culture, we've got some speaking yet left in front of us.
I would like, though, in the future, to have a conversation with someone new and not have to explain what it is that I do as a defense mechanism or to clarify doubt; I'd like to explain it meaningfully, beyond eradicating uncertainty, and allow it to just be part of my identity - and not a conversational or interpersonal liability.
***
1. But not in ways that force the composer to spend down the entirety of his savings account when, without the composer, there is no performer, and there is no audience, and there is no art.
Showing posts with label culture fail. Show all posts
Showing posts with label culture fail. Show all posts
25.1.11
16.1.11
in which I give too much credence to the History Channel
I’m taking a short break from what will hopefully be more posts on music and music-related matters to enter a piece of dismay toward a select population of human beings. I try not to dwell upon the foibles of my fellow sentient, carbon-based, hairless ape bipeds, but there is one in particular that is nothing more than irascible: the idea or suggestion that humans are not responsible for such things as the Pyramids, Machu Picchu, or other ancient wonders of the world, but alien beings, extraterrestrials, are.
On cable television and upon the lips of many a conspiracist there is spoken speculation rife with “proof” hailing from ancient texts that the technologies, drive, will, and inspiration to create early technological wonders and architectural feats of derring-do came from “above.” Prophets of old spoke of visions where they encountered “flying machines” or beautiful creatures that could not appear to be human upon first glance, and many a modern person has taken this out of the original contexts and decided that extraterrestrial visitors imbued us with the knowledge to break the surly bonds of earth. Stonehenge, the Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens – but especially the Pyramids – were, say these modern charlatans of human ability, not just divinely-inspired but extraterrestrially-wrought, with beings from beyond Gaia and the Solar System instructing us how to cut stone blocks precisely, fit them precisely, and orient them precisely in order to serve some astrological or astronomical purpose and to simultaneously fill our fellow human beings with an awe and reverence at the might of rulers.
The bases the current speculators have for these extra-cosmic pedagogues are thin: primarily, the absence of proof of extraterrestrial intervention, in a coup of detournement, becomes the open door for proof that it could have happened. This is akin to stating that because Toronto did not burn to the ground in 1837 does not mean there is no proof that it did not burn down in 1837. Speculators also point to the continual reverence of Sky and Solar deities across early civilizations, be they Egyptian, Vedic, or Indian. The problem here is a lack of grounding in Jung and Campbell: every early civilization created and subsequently revered solar, lunar, and celestial deities. These are universals across Civilization for the very simple reasons that solar, lunar, and celestial cycles were less understood than other natural phenomena. It sounds daringly trite, but the sky was the last unexplored (in a sense) territory of the human condition only until Montgolfier and the Wright brothers: we as a human society could not conquer it, nor tame it, nor show dominion over the actions. As early civilizations slowly progressed, more was learned about the placement of stars, the movement and phases of the moon, and so on – early mystic and mythological associations were attached to Equinoxes and Solstices, to New Moons and Full Moons, and, especially, to eclipses – which, at least with the ancient Babylonians and Chinese, were eventually categorized and compiled into cyclical predictor charts which have proved largely correct. Otherwise, it is easy to understand the naïve logic of veneration for the celestial: to use Mongolian animism as an example, the Sky itself is the overlord deity – it is largely uniform in color, has a predictable cycle, and is the only natural entity that seems to be ever present, unchanging; the only deity from which a human cannot hide. Conflating, however, the mythical mystery of the sky with the notion that physical bodies came from beyond it to give us knowledge is a grotesque denial of our own shared humanity: ingenuity.
The Old Testament and Vedic Scriptures collectively discuss visions of chariots coming down from the sky with people of import on board, sharing ideas of flying machines or tools or prophecies to which humans must heed. The prophets who wrote down or communicated otherwise these visions, these incidents, must be questioned here as well: long before the days of the FDA and NIMH, food and drink were largely replete with toxins, and those with physical or mental medical problems were, if they were from important families or high breeding, treated as prophets or mystics or soothsayers. Today, we would know these conditions by name: dementia, epilepsy, food poisoning, toxemia, and otherwise. (If they were of low breeding or not of nobility, the result is the same as today: a perceived rambling madman occupying the streetcorners of society) The visions are highly figurative, lucid or quasi-lucid hallucinations brought on by poorly-cooked food, spoiled wine, rancid water, or cerebral degeneration, and, with the floridity of the bastardization of translation and reproduction, we cannot take any of this writing literally unless we too are prepared to subscribe to vindicating and verifying occurrences and conversations had on the brink of ephemeral or permanent insanity as utter and complete truth. Those speculators who search out the early Flying Machines in Vedic scriptures supposedly wrought from the gods (confused with Aliens in this case) are as dangerous, intellectually, as Fundamentalist Dogmatics following the Abrahamic traditions. Those speculators’ mission is not far off, either: convince as many nonbelievers through the use of skepticism applied to logic as a transformative means to permanently embrace and sanctify myth as proof. We have no room for that in the study of history, theology, or science.
As already mentioned, the primary source of irksomeness I see in all of this is the absolute denial of the capabilities for human ingenuity and advancement pro se. To state as though fact and believe it as such that Alien creatures visited human beings in order to instruct them in the ways of creating ancient, massive monuments both subtly and overtly points to a fundamental difference in how I and these speculators approach humanity. We are capable of detecting patterns – even domesticated and wild animals detect and sense patterns – and figuring out ways of prediction. We are capable of demonstrating mathematical and technological advances as means to improve our lot as societies. We are capable of creating a culture and lifeways that record and exhort our past and present. It took a few hundred thousand years, but humans eventually figured out how to create fire. It took tens of thousands of years after that, but after generational observations of growth rates of plants and water cycles, we began cultivating our own food and domesticating animals. It took a while, but we developed mathematics. It took a while, but we figured out how to shelter ourselves from the elements. It took a while, but we eventually started assigning mythical and mystical meanings to the world around us – only after we were able to come up with free time and grow to a critical mass that would allow for a creative class of human beings. To suggest that we as a Civilization would never have the ability to create architectural wonders, be they in total vanity or for sacredness, or make technological leaps, to sanctimoniously state that we needed help, has wide-ranging ramifications on our status as human beings now, providing us with an escape mechanism to blame esoteric entities for our perceived, short-term failures as a society, enabling us to think that we are not capable of discovery and innovation, and giving credence to a mental subjugation that has held back advancement and which allows human beings to settle for less. The centralized message, in a sense, is to be espied no differently from core messages of Organized Religions: you are powerless, and you are simply too stupid to solve your own problems and too naïve and cognitively bankrupt to create anew, because The Beyond is the only realm from which inspiration and safety come. The most disturbing and underlying thought here is that humans are not responsible for their own creations. The implications of this statement are all-encompassing, exempting us from any sort of obligation to ourselves, each other, or our own world. This is a powerful sentiment that allows a belief in the anarchic, an allowance for coldness and total detachment from our own actions, an allowance for complete and total disillusionment and despair in the capabilities of humanity.
This is not to begrudge belief – or, rather, Belief. I do not deny the power of it: it is a powerful solace, one that allows us to seek momentary refuge from the antipode of human innovation and creation: destruction and misery wrought by ourselves against ourselves. No matter how rationally and logically grounded we may be, we encounter moments of pure, visceral, incomprehensible pain or worry or loss – our natural instinct is to find answers, to engineer explanations, to invent solace for ourselves during the darkest moments until we are settled enough to reunite with our cogency. But the dependence upon Belief outside of these austere confines promulgates the acceptance of an unseen, indiscriminate authority through which all our actions must be judged and all our movements monitored. Supplication to this perpetual surveillance in an unhealthy manner again permits us to bolt shut the doors of belief in other human beings, the notion that humans can (and do) work jointly in order to solve, engineer, create, and progress.
As such, it is important for those who yield to the blind authority of extraterrestrial speculation to understand that their common ancestry with irrational Religious Fanaticism is pernicious – both rationally and scientifically. To hear the statement “aliens did not teach the Egyptians how to build the Pyramids” and retort “who is to say they didn’t?” is the basest, lowest form of illogic, of creating proof out of the absence of proof. To elevate extrasolar interventionism as the means of our Civilization’s developmental grace is to adhere to statements precluding our ingenuity and reasoning, and is to allow philosophical bases of anti-humanism to take root. It denies our past as problem-solvers, and our future as problem-solvers.
But, then, maybe the little green men will come back and tell us how to fix all our current broken systems since we’re having a difficult time, collectively, correcting the errors and uniting Civilization to correct the errors, despite plenty of evidence pointing to eventual disasters regarding climate, politics, wealth, access to water, and so on. In the meantime, let’s kick back and wait for outside assistance.
On cable television and upon the lips of many a conspiracist there is spoken speculation rife with “proof” hailing from ancient texts that the technologies, drive, will, and inspiration to create early technological wonders and architectural feats of derring-do came from “above.” Prophets of old spoke of visions where they encountered “flying machines” or beautiful creatures that could not appear to be human upon first glance, and many a modern person has taken this out of the original contexts and decided that extraterrestrial visitors imbued us with the knowledge to break the surly bonds of earth. Stonehenge, the Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens – but especially the Pyramids – were, say these modern charlatans of human ability, not just divinely-inspired but extraterrestrially-wrought, with beings from beyond Gaia and the Solar System instructing us how to cut stone blocks precisely, fit them precisely, and orient them precisely in order to serve some astrological or astronomical purpose and to simultaneously fill our fellow human beings with an awe and reverence at the might of rulers.
The bases the current speculators have for these extra-cosmic pedagogues are thin: primarily, the absence of proof of extraterrestrial intervention, in a coup of detournement, becomes the open door for proof that it could have happened. This is akin to stating that because Toronto did not burn to the ground in 1837 does not mean there is no proof that it did not burn down in 1837. Speculators also point to the continual reverence of Sky and Solar deities across early civilizations, be they Egyptian, Vedic, or Indian. The problem here is a lack of grounding in Jung and Campbell: every early civilization created and subsequently revered solar, lunar, and celestial deities. These are universals across Civilization for the very simple reasons that solar, lunar, and celestial cycles were less understood than other natural phenomena. It sounds daringly trite, but the sky was the last unexplored (in a sense) territory of the human condition only until Montgolfier and the Wright brothers: we as a human society could not conquer it, nor tame it, nor show dominion over the actions. As early civilizations slowly progressed, more was learned about the placement of stars, the movement and phases of the moon, and so on – early mystic and mythological associations were attached to Equinoxes and Solstices, to New Moons and Full Moons, and, especially, to eclipses – which, at least with the ancient Babylonians and Chinese, were eventually categorized and compiled into cyclical predictor charts which have proved largely correct. Otherwise, it is easy to understand the naïve logic of veneration for the celestial: to use Mongolian animism as an example, the Sky itself is the overlord deity – it is largely uniform in color, has a predictable cycle, and is the only natural entity that seems to be ever present, unchanging; the only deity from which a human cannot hide. Conflating, however, the mythical mystery of the sky with the notion that physical bodies came from beyond it to give us knowledge is a grotesque denial of our own shared humanity: ingenuity.
The Old Testament and Vedic Scriptures collectively discuss visions of chariots coming down from the sky with people of import on board, sharing ideas of flying machines or tools or prophecies to which humans must heed. The prophets who wrote down or communicated otherwise these visions, these incidents, must be questioned here as well: long before the days of the FDA and NIMH, food and drink were largely replete with toxins, and those with physical or mental medical problems were, if they were from important families or high breeding, treated as prophets or mystics or soothsayers. Today, we would know these conditions by name: dementia, epilepsy, food poisoning, toxemia, and otherwise. (If they were of low breeding or not of nobility, the result is the same as today: a perceived rambling madman occupying the streetcorners of society) The visions are highly figurative, lucid or quasi-lucid hallucinations brought on by poorly-cooked food, spoiled wine, rancid water, or cerebral degeneration, and, with the floridity of the bastardization of translation and reproduction, we cannot take any of this writing literally unless we too are prepared to subscribe to vindicating and verifying occurrences and conversations had on the brink of ephemeral or permanent insanity as utter and complete truth. Those speculators who search out the early Flying Machines in Vedic scriptures supposedly wrought from the gods (confused with Aliens in this case) are as dangerous, intellectually, as Fundamentalist Dogmatics following the Abrahamic traditions. Those speculators’ mission is not far off, either: convince as many nonbelievers through the use of skepticism applied to logic as a transformative means to permanently embrace and sanctify myth as proof. We have no room for that in the study of history, theology, or science.
As already mentioned, the primary source of irksomeness I see in all of this is the absolute denial of the capabilities for human ingenuity and advancement pro se. To state as though fact and believe it as such that Alien creatures visited human beings in order to instruct them in the ways of creating ancient, massive monuments both subtly and overtly points to a fundamental difference in how I and these speculators approach humanity. We are capable of detecting patterns – even domesticated and wild animals detect and sense patterns – and figuring out ways of prediction. We are capable of demonstrating mathematical and technological advances as means to improve our lot as societies. We are capable of creating a culture and lifeways that record and exhort our past and present. It took a few hundred thousand years, but humans eventually figured out how to create fire. It took tens of thousands of years after that, but after generational observations of growth rates of plants and water cycles, we began cultivating our own food and domesticating animals. It took a while, but we developed mathematics. It took a while, but we figured out how to shelter ourselves from the elements. It took a while, but we eventually started assigning mythical and mystical meanings to the world around us – only after we were able to come up with free time and grow to a critical mass that would allow for a creative class of human beings. To suggest that we as a Civilization would never have the ability to create architectural wonders, be they in total vanity or for sacredness, or make technological leaps, to sanctimoniously state that we needed help, has wide-ranging ramifications on our status as human beings now, providing us with an escape mechanism to blame esoteric entities for our perceived, short-term failures as a society, enabling us to think that we are not capable of discovery and innovation, and giving credence to a mental subjugation that has held back advancement and which allows human beings to settle for less. The centralized message, in a sense, is to be espied no differently from core messages of Organized Religions: you are powerless, and you are simply too stupid to solve your own problems and too naïve and cognitively bankrupt to create anew, because The Beyond is the only realm from which inspiration and safety come. The most disturbing and underlying thought here is that humans are not responsible for their own creations. The implications of this statement are all-encompassing, exempting us from any sort of obligation to ourselves, each other, or our own world. This is a powerful sentiment that allows a belief in the anarchic, an allowance for coldness and total detachment from our own actions, an allowance for complete and total disillusionment and despair in the capabilities of humanity.
This is not to begrudge belief – or, rather, Belief. I do not deny the power of it: it is a powerful solace, one that allows us to seek momentary refuge from the antipode of human innovation and creation: destruction and misery wrought by ourselves against ourselves. No matter how rationally and logically grounded we may be, we encounter moments of pure, visceral, incomprehensible pain or worry or loss – our natural instinct is to find answers, to engineer explanations, to invent solace for ourselves during the darkest moments until we are settled enough to reunite with our cogency. But the dependence upon Belief outside of these austere confines promulgates the acceptance of an unseen, indiscriminate authority through which all our actions must be judged and all our movements monitored. Supplication to this perpetual surveillance in an unhealthy manner again permits us to bolt shut the doors of belief in other human beings, the notion that humans can (and do) work jointly in order to solve, engineer, create, and progress.
As such, it is important for those who yield to the blind authority of extraterrestrial speculation to understand that their common ancestry with irrational Religious Fanaticism is pernicious – both rationally and scientifically. To hear the statement “aliens did not teach the Egyptians how to build the Pyramids” and retort “who is to say they didn’t?” is the basest, lowest form of illogic, of creating proof out of the absence of proof. To elevate extrasolar interventionism as the means of our Civilization’s developmental grace is to adhere to statements precluding our ingenuity and reasoning, and is to allow philosophical bases of anti-humanism to take root. It denies our past as problem-solvers, and our future as problem-solvers.
But, then, maybe the little green men will come back and tell us how to fix all our current broken systems since we’re having a difficult time, collectively, correcting the errors and uniting Civilization to correct the errors, despite plenty of evidence pointing to eventual disasters regarding climate, politics, wealth, access to water, and so on. In the meantime, let’s kick back and wait for outside assistance.
9.1.11
if it's all been done already, go do something else.
Perhaps one of my most ardent intellectual and artistic pet-peeves is the statement “everything that could possibly be done has been done.” It may surprise you to know that at one time I held court with this thought as an avid worshipper of the sentiment and its relatively shallow meanings on a daily basis. I called that the first year of graduate study, the daunting, rigorous clanging of hitherto unknown (or only in passing) innovations of the 20th Century reverberating in my ear, creating an inferiority complex that has taken a decade to mitigate, an inferiority complex rampant among many of the most talented – and perhaps least-“accomplished” – composers.
The initial reaction I have to the statement now is, “so, what?” What of it? Is there a quantifiable measure of techniques and harmonic styles and technical details and tedium down to the last sixteenth rest and string voicing that definitively proves that every single thing possible has been composed? And if, by some fiat of magic, we were to unequivocally receive an affirmative response to the query, what would that fundamentally change? Would that prevent artists from creating art, from attempting new techniques and finding new ways to connect – intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually – with themselves, their performers, and their audiences? Would ultimate intellectual knowledge that there can be, essentially, “nothing new under the sun,” preclude any sort of artistic work in any field?
In a sense, it did, as far as I was concerned. When I began graduate study, I would compose religiously and steadily, and in seminars and through peers I was quickly introduced to worlds of innovation and compositional techniques and abstractions of the sonic realm that initially supercharged me but rapidly made me shrink back into an intellectual corner. I would compose a piece or set out with some new ideas, thinking they were peerless (I blame this primarily on naïveté and lack of book-learnin’), and then be, for example, introduced to Giacinto Scelsi’s works of ultra-Klangfarbenmelodie, or to Berio’s collage works, or Lachenmann’s or Pape’s bizarre and successful takes on extended technical writing for strings. I would abandon the ideas I formulated, as – truthful or not, verifiable or not – I would see them not as personal innovations or simply additional techniques I could use, but as tawdry, juvenile carbon copies of the Masters. While I was in college, I had the opposite problem: when first exposed to Messiaen’s early period, all of my music took on an 8 pr 9-pitch modal harmonic language populated by tritones; when introduced to Sessions’s symphonies (and when I finally understood them) I wrote loosely dodecaphonic and unapologetically dissonant work; when studying Bartók’s middle period, all of my music appeared to have Hungarian and Romanian rhythmic elements for no apparent reason. And, clearly, I reveled in this – I relished the idea that I could write things approximating my idols, and, brazenly, thought I could improve on their techniques. Getting my hands on a copy of Messiaen’s Technique of My Musical Language one Christmas, for a hot minute, made me think I’d absorb all of Olivier’s secrets and become the next, better Messiaen. A fundamental shift occurred when I realized that the music I needed to be composing was supposed to be mine and not the legacy of others – the anecdote of when Roger Sessions was playing a student work of his on the piano for Ernest Bloch with the latter screaming at Sessions each of the influences heard is a constructed scene that started on an endless loop once I was thrown into the much larger, much more competitive world of actual professional composition. In order to compete, in order to thrive, in order to succeed and be above the fray, I would have to innovate and unleash my own voice.
The only problem, though, is that I had no idea what that was, no idea how to attain it through the current methods of loving mimicry, no external impetus to hunt for it. As a means to justify writing whatever I wanted as a student, which oddly enough centered around a relatively developed and mature rhythmic-harmonic language, I decided to make “everything has already been done” as a sort of mantra, and I’m sorry I ever did. Rather than allow knowledge of trends and ideas and styles inculcate my musical vernacular and inspire and challenge me, I allowed it to have dominion over me, to intimidate me. The end result was a young, tenuous composer purposefully trying to innovate, making a concerted effort to pioneer new sonic realms. What I had long feared, retrospectively, came true: with increased knowledge came increased sorrow, when, rather, the truth should have set me free.
Innovation rarely happens purposefully in the arts. Innovation seems to arise spontaneously in collective leaps forward while artists are merely attempting to solve critical problems through methods other than ones they have been taught or know very well. I will go so far that innovation in artistic technique is accidental, with intellectual leaps being more like sudden lurches after all the happy accidents. (Not to say none of us knows what we're doing - quite the contrary - rather, change comes like a snowfall, not lightning: gradual, silently, sometimes violently) Picasso, Mies van der Rohe, Klee, Mondrian. Debussy, Stravinsky, George Antheil, Erik Satie. (Well, to an extent, Debussy purposefully attempted to be an innovator, but he had been composing for more than 25 years before he started to seriously refer to himself such) Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henri. La Monte Young. They did not – so far as the historical record and their biographies show – wake up each morning with the words “I will change music and/or art today.” Their to-do lists did not include, after a light lunch and before afternoon tea, “Shake Up World With Groundbreaking New Timbres/Forms/Etc.” As a quietly terrified student, this was all to which I could cling. I did not realize – and only within the past few years have I finally accepted – that innovation of any sort in the arts comes slowly, unwittingly, and after much trial and error. Often, failures themselves become innovations long after the fact of their creation, long after their inception. Le Sacre flopped as a ballet, as a staged work; nearly 100 years later, both the choreographic and musical aspects are seen as hugely pivotal artistic developments, the disastrous premiere itself seen as the fulcrum upon which the weight of 20th Century art shifted away from the Weltschmerz and Wagnerian/Mahlerian ultra-Romanticism of the 19th Century.
Indeed, I was slow to realize this - a charade used to distance myself from questions of worth as I was coming of age. I abstractly knew this, certainly - but it was not a prevalence or truth that I breathed every morning.
For a growing number of currently-working and often largely successful composers, the standard of “there is nothing new under the sun” seems to be the words exhaled through a yawn both when they rise from slumber and when they end their day with drowsiness. This population believes this sentiment, if not reifies it as a daily maxim actively and nonchalantly brandished. My question to this is: why? Why do these composers continue composing? Why continue working? Why create art or attempt to create it if what one writes is nothing but mere, sheer mimeograph? Why, especially, are so many of these people engaged in teaching - and maintain these teaching positions in earnest? Patronage, but for what reason? Educating new composers and musicians, but to what end? The ramifications here are wide ranging: why perpetuate any artform of any sort? Why train performers? Why simply sit stationary? This thinking, this very insistence that Everything Is Done, is the primary intellectual rationale those suspicious of the Arts point to as a means of decrying art and support for its creation and performance; the tenet of Nothing New Can Happen is the very thinking that keeps young people and tenuous musicians and critics viewing the symphony hall as nothing more than a museum, a concertmaster or conductor nothing more than a docent. The statement is monochromatic and incontrovertible; those who adhere to it should, frankly, either eradicate adherence to the mantra and grudgingly create passionately and earnestly, or leave the business of art and music, the institutions to teach art and music, and the life of a creative artist and find a new profession immediately, else those persons who stay entrenched be labeled frauds, or worse. I cannot, honestly, see how one can entertain this notion that their art is, essentially, without intellectual and by extension artistic justification, while composing daily and honestly, thoroughly encouraging young composers and musicians. They are mutually exclusive. One can deride innovation, or be suspicious of artistic intent, in their own music, or in the music of others - but to outrightly deny that innovation can ever occur again and to imply that all music is dead is shortsighted and laughable.
The initial reaction I have to the statement now is, “so, what?” What of it? Is there a quantifiable measure of techniques and harmonic styles and technical details and tedium down to the last sixteenth rest and string voicing that definitively proves that every single thing possible has been composed? And if, by some fiat of magic, we were to unequivocally receive an affirmative response to the query, what would that fundamentally change? Would that prevent artists from creating art, from attempting new techniques and finding new ways to connect – intellectually, emotionally, and spiritually – with themselves, their performers, and their audiences? Would ultimate intellectual knowledge that there can be, essentially, “nothing new under the sun,” preclude any sort of artistic work in any field?
In a sense, it did, as far as I was concerned. When I began graduate study, I would compose religiously and steadily, and in seminars and through peers I was quickly introduced to worlds of innovation and compositional techniques and abstractions of the sonic realm that initially supercharged me but rapidly made me shrink back into an intellectual corner. I would compose a piece or set out with some new ideas, thinking they were peerless (I blame this primarily on naïveté and lack of book-learnin’), and then be, for example, introduced to Giacinto Scelsi’s works of ultra-Klangfarbenmelodie, or to Berio’s collage works, or Lachenmann’s or Pape’s bizarre and successful takes on extended technical writing for strings. I would abandon the ideas I formulated, as – truthful or not, verifiable or not – I would see them not as personal innovations or simply additional techniques I could use, but as tawdry, juvenile carbon copies of the Masters. While I was in college, I had the opposite problem: when first exposed to Messiaen’s early period, all of my music took on an 8 pr 9-pitch modal harmonic language populated by tritones; when introduced to Sessions’s symphonies (and when I finally understood them) I wrote loosely dodecaphonic and unapologetically dissonant work; when studying Bartók’s middle period, all of my music appeared to have Hungarian and Romanian rhythmic elements for no apparent reason. And, clearly, I reveled in this – I relished the idea that I could write things approximating my idols, and, brazenly, thought I could improve on their techniques. Getting my hands on a copy of Messiaen’s Technique of My Musical Language one Christmas, for a hot minute, made me think I’d absorb all of Olivier’s secrets and become the next, better Messiaen. A fundamental shift occurred when I realized that the music I needed to be composing was supposed to be mine and not the legacy of others – the anecdote of when Roger Sessions was playing a student work of his on the piano for Ernest Bloch with the latter screaming at Sessions each of the influences heard is a constructed scene that started on an endless loop once I was thrown into the much larger, much more competitive world of actual professional composition. In order to compete, in order to thrive, in order to succeed and be above the fray, I would have to innovate and unleash my own voice.
The only problem, though, is that I had no idea what that was, no idea how to attain it through the current methods of loving mimicry, no external impetus to hunt for it. As a means to justify writing whatever I wanted as a student, which oddly enough centered around a relatively developed and mature rhythmic-harmonic language, I decided to make “everything has already been done” as a sort of mantra, and I’m sorry I ever did. Rather than allow knowledge of trends and ideas and styles inculcate my musical vernacular and inspire and challenge me, I allowed it to have dominion over me, to intimidate me. The end result was a young, tenuous composer purposefully trying to innovate, making a concerted effort to pioneer new sonic realms. What I had long feared, retrospectively, came true: with increased knowledge came increased sorrow, when, rather, the truth should have set me free.
Innovation rarely happens purposefully in the arts. Innovation seems to arise spontaneously in collective leaps forward while artists are merely attempting to solve critical problems through methods other than ones they have been taught or know very well. I will go so far that innovation in artistic technique is accidental, with intellectual leaps being more like sudden lurches after all the happy accidents. (Not to say none of us knows what we're doing - quite the contrary - rather, change comes like a snowfall, not lightning: gradual, silently, sometimes violently) Picasso, Mies van der Rohe, Klee, Mondrian. Debussy, Stravinsky, George Antheil, Erik Satie. (Well, to an extent, Debussy purposefully attempted to be an innovator, but he had been composing for more than 25 years before he started to seriously refer to himself such) Pierre Schaeffer and Pierre Henri. La Monte Young. They did not – so far as the historical record and their biographies show – wake up each morning with the words “I will change music and/or art today.” Their to-do lists did not include, after a light lunch and before afternoon tea, “Shake Up World With Groundbreaking New Timbres/Forms/Etc.” As a quietly terrified student, this was all to which I could cling. I did not realize – and only within the past few years have I finally accepted – that innovation of any sort in the arts comes slowly, unwittingly, and after much trial and error. Often, failures themselves become innovations long after the fact of their creation, long after their inception. Le Sacre flopped as a ballet, as a staged work; nearly 100 years later, both the choreographic and musical aspects are seen as hugely pivotal artistic developments, the disastrous premiere itself seen as the fulcrum upon which the weight of 20th Century art shifted away from the Weltschmerz and Wagnerian/Mahlerian ultra-Romanticism of the 19th Century.
Indeed, I was slow to realize this - a charade used to distance myself from questions of worth as I was coming of age. I abstractly knew this, certainly - but it was not a prevalence or truth that I breathed every morning.
For a growing number of currently-working and often largely successful composers, the standard of “there is nothing new under the sun” seems to be the words exhaled through a yawn both when they rise from slumber and when they end their day with drowsiness. This population believes this sentiment, if not reifies it as a daily maxim actively and nonchalantly brandished. My question to this is: why? Why do these composers continue composing? Why continue working? Why create art or attempt to create it if what one writes is nothing but mere, sheer mimeograph? Why, especially, are so many of these people engaged in teaching - and maintain these teaching positions in earnest? Patronage, but for what reason? Educating new composers and musicians, but to what end? The ramifications here are wide ranging: why perpetuate any artform of any sort? Why train performers? Why simply sit stationary? This thinking, this very insistence that Everything Is Done, is the primary intellectual rationale those suspicious of the Arts point to as a means of decrying art and support for its creation and performance; the tenet of Nothing New Can Happen is the very thinking that keeps young people and tenuous musicians and critics viewing the symphony hall as nothing more than a museum, a concertmaster or conductor nothing more than a docent. The statement is monochromatic and incontrovertible; those who adhere to it should, frankly, either eradicate adherence to the mantra and grudgingly create passionately and earnestly, or leave the business of art and music, the institutions to teach art and music, and the life of a creative artist and find a new profession immediately, else those persons who stay entrenched be labeled frauds, or worse. I cannot, honestly, see how one can entertain this notion that their art is, essentially, without intellectual and by extension artistic justification, while composing daily and honestly, thoroughly encouraging young composers and musicians. They are mutually exclusive. One can deride innovation, or be suspicious of artistic intent, in their own music, or in the music of others - but to outrightly deny that innovation can ever occur again and to imply that all music is dead is shortsighted and laughable.
Labels:
2011,
academia,
composing,
culture fail,
rants
20.10.10
a small, simple rant
I am a composer and a musician. What I do is relevant and necessary for the perpetuation of culture. I bring meaning, however small, to a life that is otherwise matte, grey, and dull. I bring a set of skills and a particular knowledge into a world that pays lip-service to "creativity" and little else. I can tell you everything you ever wanted to know about the bassoon, woodwind and brass fingerings, string instrument bowing and positions, how to compose a piece of music in any medium from the ground up, anything about post-war experimental music, most things about phenomenology and aesthetic theory, and give a rundown of Western art music's history in surprising detail, from roughly 800 CE to present, in about an hour, and I can go into even greater detail for the Reformation period, the Ars Nova, the Ars Subtilior, and American, German, French, and Latin American music after 1890. Of all of these, I create works of art the best.
A few ground rules.
No, I won't write you a piece just to get "exposure" - I do have bills to pay. No, I won't perform for free for you "as a favor" - it takes time to prepare. No, I won't get a "real job" because this IS my real job: it takes time, effort, labor, skill, and patience to do what I do. I'm damn good at it, even though I'm continually learning and striving to improve.
Let's observe this differently.
Can I borrow your skills, sir, as an accountant? It will give you exposure to potential clients! Can I borrow your time and well-honed abilities as an architect to design a structurally-sound and aesthetically pleasing building for my friends? I can't pay you, but you should be lucky you get to show off your skills in public with the finished product! What about you, there? Can you, bricklayer, carpenter, and mason dwell over a blueprint for a while and build a house perfectly in front of a live audience that has seen houses built faster and better than what you may be able to do? Pay you? You should be lucky we all get to participate in your gifts!
See? See how stupid that sounds?
Beethoven got to get paid, son.
A few ground rules.
No, I won't write you a piece just to get "exposure" - I do have bills to pay. No, I won't perform for free for you "as a favor" - it takes time to prepare. No, I won't get a "real job" because this IS my real job: it takes time, effort, labor, skill, and patience to do what I do. I'm damn good at it, even though I'm continually learning and striving to improve.
Let's observe this differently.
Can I borrow your skills, sir, as an accountant? It will give you exposure to potential clients! Can I borrow your time and well-honed abilities as an architect to design a structurally-sound and aesthetically pleasing building for my friends? I can't pay you, but you should be lucky you get to show off your skills in public with the finished product! What about you, there? Can you, bricklayer, carpenter, and mason dwell over a blueprint for a while and build a house perfectly in front of a live audience that has seen houses built faster and better than what you may be able to do? Pay you? You should be lucky we all get to participate in your gifts!
See? See how stupid that sounds?
Beethoven got to get paid, son.
Labels:
culture fail,
rants
18.8.10
Slowing the Phenomenon Down
I come quietly out of the still and silence of the shadows to ask the eternal question:
who the hell cares if someone slowed down a Justin Bieber song 800, or 900, or 1327 per cent to turn it into an "ambient" piece of music?
The more important question, here, is:
why is this a fad? why has this, in the past few days, received more Internet-based attention than the BP Saga or the horrendous natural atrocity at work in the flooding of Pakistan?
The obvious first criticism from you, then, is: "well, you're giving it attention." That may be true, but I do so without hesitation and without any artistic credence. I have also not listened to this super-slow version simply because I not only know what it would sound like, but I know precisely the technique used to change the duration (without reading about it other than seeing it exists or listening to it).
My criticisms are fairly straightforward, and I blame you, the Internet-loving public, for making this a much bigger deal than it ever needed to be.
The technique (well, the primary technique) used to slow down (or speed up) a sound without altering pitch and without radically altering timbre is a little gem known as phase vocoding (pvoc, for short). I won't get into the heavy mathematical fundamentals of it, but pretend for a minute that a sound is a series of pictures. Let's say a one-second sample of my voice can be divided in 1,024 discrete windows, and each window records three things: the pitch spectrum (the amount of energy present at a series, in this case harmonic in design, of frequencies); the intensity (or volume, which is dependent upon the amount of energy in the pitch spectrum); and, the physical location of my voice: since my voice moves in a continuous wave, each of the 1,024 windows will capture whether my wave is in a positive or negative phase. What pvoc does is take measurements of the information in windows 0 through 1023. Depending on what I want the algorithm to do, pvoc takes the information in window n and compares it to window n+1 up to n+n and compares each window to each other. When I want to, let's say, slow my voice sample down but retain the pitch, pvoc looks at window 0 and then window 1, retains the frequency information as much as possible as well as the intensity information, and using the location of the wave's phase as a guide, inserts x windows in between old windows 0 and 1, overlapping the windows as to prevent discretion and render the new, lengthened section as continuously as possible to provide the illusion of continuity. If I want to slow down a sound and change its pitch, it's a lot easier: I just change the frequency information proportionally, phase values remain the same, and my voice an octave lower, therefore (unless I constrain it otherwise), becomes a sample twice as long.
Sounds complicated. It isn't. Not by a mile. It's one of the easiest things to do with any audio editing software, and one of the stand-by techniques for soundscape artists. As an electroacoustic composer, it's one of my top three processes when I'm sculpting sounds and out of ideas. The famous Mac audio processing software SoundHack -- so famous that it's been around since Mac 8.1 and has been free for over a decade -- is nothing but a pvoc processor with additional features. Sony's SoundForge suite has over 20 options of pvoc processing. Cross-platform, free audio editing software Audacity has a respectable pvoc processor built-in. Hordes of composers/programmers make objects for pvoc for MAX/MSP, pd, jMAX, and CSound just to tweak and alter the method behind the pvoc madness. Anyone with an Internet connection, Adobe Reader, and a few minutes of time to learn the mouse clicks and a few dozen more to wait for the file to render can do this. Computer music composers have been using the technique for 25 or more years, but we don't stop there.
This easily segues into the next realm of contention: could it be a little more obvious? Justin Bieber is an insipid, cheap target, and using as unsophisticated a formula as slowing the song down to lampoon Bieber-Lieder is equally obvious and cheap as a means to transform the song into something else. The end result may be something trippy or not necessarily identifiable as Bieber-songs, but it is fundamentally the same. Congratulations, Internet-fame-seeker! You've taken a six-inch-long fruit rollup and made it 18 inches long! (And we say fame isn't phallic. Ha!) On a deeper level, if such can be said, "Bieber's" "music" (look, even I'm a satirist! Hah!) represents the epitome of the mechanized, the zenith of a cultural industry: an androgynous boy, barely pubescent, singing songs from someone else's brain and pen about love and loss and whatever it is 12-year-olds get gaga over these days. He is a product to be consumed, a marketable commodity to be bought and sold, a totem of profit, an icon of the emptiness of a popularized culture where the target demographic doesn't fully grasp the nature of the messages of the songs yet has lucre endowed by liberal-guilt, allowance-granting parents who don't care about the message so long as it quietly remains within the confines of good taste, moral and political authority, and renounces hazardous independent inquiry, fomented and fostered by a central doctrinal authority (the record company) to capitalize as quickly and as profoundly as possible. Cultural daguerreotypes like Bieber -- those icons that will fade over time and be forgotten -- are easy targets for the antipathy-filled section of the dichotomized audience; note the recent "vote" to send Biebz to North Korea to tour. So, it bothers me on an intellectual level that the perpetrator of SLOW BIEBER did not attempt to, I don't know, rework Breitbart interviews or selectively edit a Lady Gaga song -- or something less in the crosshairs. But then, the obviousness is the capitalizing point: the only reason to satirize Biebz in this way is to gain notoriety from notoriety. Which in itself is lazy as it manifests a desire to be heard, a desire to paradoxically rise above the fray of commonality simply by engaging the most common, the most prevalent, the easiest target. Furthermore, if something truly novel or radical was supposed to be the end result of this experiment, then surely the purveyor of snail-justin-music could have taken more artistic liberties and chopped up the piece and processed it and made something out of a cultural nothing. That would have more cultural resonance and much more lasting power in intellectual terms.
Avey Tare, one of the members of the hipster-icon band Animal Collective, released an album a few years back with his wife -- a former member of Mum -- that was recorded and produced linearly: that is, "left to right," or, otherwise, normal. In post-production, the entire album -- each track (well, each soundfile) -- was reversed. The album was released like this. It sold horribly. Even the hipster completists buried or sold or dismissed themselves from this endeavor, and when the hipster crowd thinks something pretentious, WATCH OUT CHICAGO! The entire album in reverse. Again we have a paradox: pretentious as hell (what are they trying to say? that we're approaching music all wrong?), or is it just cheap? Reversing a sound file is probably the easiest digital audio manipulation one can make. Hell, a person doesn't even need a computer to do that: push the record backward or play-rewind a tape (remember those?). It's not novel. It's not smart. It's simple. Simply simple. And that's all there is to it.
John Cage has a piece going on in Germany. No surprise, even if he's been dead almost 20 years. But this piece is set to last hundreds of years. It takes place in an isolated cathedral in rural Deutschland, and it's for organ; it took almost ten years to fill the bellows, and the piece is on its second pitch out of dozens; it's been sounding for over four years. What the hell was Cage thinking, you may wonder? First of all, let me state that I hate invoking Cage: he's become the posterboy and the de facto excuse for a lot of what gets the third degree in the world of art music, but I have to do so here as it's quite relevant. Cage was a Zen Buddhist who was taken with the idea of reveling, for the fun of reveling, in the world of sound per se. Everything we do is music, he once quipped. This reification and devout love of absolute slowness and meditativeness guided practically all of his catalog. Cage may or may not argue for Langsammer-Bieber's status as a true piece of art; my feeling is that he wouldn't -- despite the concepts of chance and chaos playing into his compositions, it's difficult to imagine he would support naming something "art" using pre-existing material and pushing one solid button and only one to make it different. Even Brian Eno did more than that after he quit Roxy Music.
Hell, even naming Lento-Justin-Canto "ambient" is a slap in the face to the electronic music tradition. Ambient music -- Eno hated having it called that as it became a catch-all for all drone music played late at night on college radio stations -- still has craft, still has direction, still has workmanship and design, still has musicality that results from a number of techniques and approaches, not just one. Setting a variable and pressing "Go" erases all of that. So: in a similar vein, I'm Xeroxing Mona Lisa. I'm not even painting a fake, stroke by stroke, or taking a really good digital image and rasterizing it and retouching it and printing it on fine, aged linen. I'm taking her by her absent eyebrows, plopping her on the duplicator, pressing "Go", getting the blurry, black-and-white afterimage, and putting it up for all to see as a profound reworking.
Just to prove this point, here's a song or two that I've slowed down using pvoc in two of my free editing programs. I loaded the files and pushed a button. I didn't change the trajectory of the work. I didn't make anything new. I'm not adding commentary to it. I'm not saying "the only way to listen to these, heh heh, is to listen to it super slow like you're super baked! I'm not trying to make people marvel at technology -- which, if people marvel at this, as democratized as we are in terms of access to and understanding of digital media and how it's made, they may as well marvel when they turn on a light switch. All I did was slow them down. Can you figure out what they are? Does it matter? Does it provide any new commentary or knowledge about the pieces? Does this create a new narrative? Have I simply injured a boatload of electrons and wasted electrical current making these files? Only one way to know for sure!
first sample
second sample
As a final word, no, I am not angry I didn't think of this first. I didn't want to think of this first. I want to think of important things first. And as far as pvoc goes, I've been using the algorithm in my pieces since before J-Biebz was born. Yep.
*****
[DATELINE] The World, 17 January 2011
I have, in the past 24 hours, learned that there is a SEQUEL to this brainless, formless juggernaut:
The Jurassic Park theme, slowed down 1000 times.
Really? Is this all it takes to captivate listeners, the public, and stoners? It's bloody annoying to learn - again! - that such insipid and bland things are being touted as "awesome" or even a "sonic experience."
Go turn on a vacuum cleaner and let it run non-stop for 45 minutes. You'll get the same effect/headache.
who the hell cares if someone slowed down a Justin Bieber song 800, or 900, or 1327 per cent to turn it into an "ambient" piece of music?
The more important question, here, is:
why is this a fad? why has this, in the past few days, received more Internet-based attention than the BP Saga or the horrendous natural atrocity at work in the flooding of Pakistan?
The obvious first criticism from you, then, is: "well, you're giving it attention." That may be true, but I do so without hesitation and without any artistic credence. I have also not listened to this super-slow version simply because I not only know what it would sound like, but I know precisely the technique used to change the duration (without reading about it other than seeing it exists or listening to it).
My criticisms are fairly straightforward, and I blame you, the Internet-loving public, for making this a much bigger deal than it ever needed to be.
The technique (well, the primary technique) used to slow down (or speed up) a sound without altering pitch and without radically altering timbre is a little gem known as phase vocoding (pvoc, for short). I won't get into the heavy mathematical fundamentals of it, but pretend for a minute that a sound is a series of pictures. Let's say a one-second sample of my voice can be divided in 1,024 discrete windows, and each window records three things: the pitch spectrum (the amount of energy present at a series, in this case harmonic in design, of frequencies); the intensity (or volume, which is dependent upon the amount of energy in the pitch spectrum); and, the physical location of my voice: since my voice moves in a continuous wave, each of the 1,024 windows will capture whether my wave is in a positive or negative phase. What pvoc does is take measurements of the information in windows 0 through 1023. Depending on what I want the algorithm to do, pvoc takes the information in window n and compares it to window n+1 up to n+n and compares each window to each other. When I want to, let's say, slow my voice sample down but retain the pitch, pvoc looks at window 0 and then window 1, retains the frequency information as much as possible as well as the intensity information, and using the location of the wave's phase as a guide, inserts x windows in between old windows 0 and 1, overlapping the windows as to prevent discretion and render the new, lengthened section as continuously as possible to provide the illusion of continuity. If I want to slow down a sound and change its pitch, it's a lot easier: I just change the frequency information proportionally, phase values remain the same, and my voice an octave lower, therefore (unless I constrain it otherwise), becomes a sample twice as long.
Sounds complicated. It isn't. Not by a mile. It's one of the easiest things to do with any audio editing software, and one of the stand-by techniques for soundscape artists. As an electroacoustic composer, it's one of my top three processes when I'm sculpting sounds and out of ideas. The famous Mac audio processing software SoundHack -- so famous that it's been around since Mac 8.1 and has been free for over a decade -- is nothing but a pvoc processor with additional features. Sony's SoundForge suite has over 20 options of pvoc processing. Cross-platform, free audio editing software Audacity has a respectable pvoc processor built-in. Hordes of composers/programmers make objects for pvoc for MAX/MSP, pd, jMAX, and CSound just to tweak and alter the method behind the pvoc madness. Anyone with an Internet connection, Adobe Reader, and a few minutes of time to learn the mouse clicks and a few dozen more to wait for the file to render can do this. Computer music composers have been using the technique for 25 or more years, but we don't stop there.
This easily segues into the next realm of contention: could it be a little more obvious? Justin Bieber is an insipid, cheap target, and using as unsophisticated a formula as slowing the song down to lampoon Bieber-Lieder is equally obvious and cheap as a means to transform the song into something else. The end result may be something trippy or not necessarily identifiable as Bieber-songs, but it is fundamentally the same. Congratulations, Internet-fame-seeker! You've taken a six-inch-long fruit rollup and made it 18 inches long! (And we say fame isn't phallic. Ha!) On a deeper level, if such can be said, "Bieber's" "music" (look, even I'm a satirist! Hah!) represents the epitome of the mechanized, the zenith of a cultural industry: an androgynous boy, barely pubescent, singing songs from someone else's brain and pen about love and loss and whatever it is 12-year-olds get gaga over these days. He is a product to be consumed, a marketable commodity to be bought and sold, a totem of profit, an icon of the emptiness of a popularized culture where the target demographic doesn't fully grasp the nature of the messages of the songs yet has lucre endowed by liberal-guilt, allowance-granting parents who don't care about the message so long as it quietly remains within the confines of good taste, moral and political authority, and renounces hazardous independent inquiry, fomented and fostered by a central doctrinal authority (the record company) to capitalize as quickly and as profoundly as possible. Cultural daguerreotypes like Bieber -- those icons that will fade over time and be forgotten -- are easy targets for the antipathy-filled section of the dichotomized audience; note the recent "vote" to send Biebz to North Korea to tour. So, it bothers me on an intellectual level that the perpetrator of SLOW BIEBER did not attempt to, I don't know, rework Breitbart interviews or selectively edit a Lady Gaga song -- or something less in the crosshairs. But then, the obviousness is the capitalizing point: the only reason to satirize Biebz in this way is to gain notoriety from notoriety. Which in itself is lazy as it manifests a desire to be heard, a desire to paradoxically rise above the fray of commonality simply by engaging the most common, the most prevalent, the easiest target. Furthermore, if something truly novel or radical was supposed to be the end result of this experiment, then surely the purveyor of snail-justin-music could have taken more artistic liberties and chopped up the piece and processed it and made something out of a cultural nothing. That would have more cultural resonance and much more lasting power in intellectual terms.
Avey Tare, one of the members of the hipster-icon band Animal Collective, released an album a few years back with his wife -- a former member of Mum -- that was recorded and produced linearly: that is, "left to right," or, otherwise, normal. In post-production, the entire album -- each track (well, each soundfile) -- was reversed. The album was released like this. It sold horribly. Even the hipster completists buried or sold or dismissed themselves from this endeavor, and when the hipster crowd thinks something pretentious, WATCH OUT CHICAGO! The entire album in reverse. Again we have a paradox: pretentious as hell (what are they trying to say? that we're approaching music all wrong?), or is it just cheap? Reversing a sound file is probably the easiest digital audio manipulation one can make. Hell, a person doesn't even need a computer to do that: push the record backward or play-rewind a tape (remember those?). It's not novel. It's not smart. It's simple. Simply simple. And that's all there is to it.
John Cage has a piece going on in Germany. No surprise, even if he's been dead almost 20 years. But this piece is set to last hundreds of years. It takes place in an isolated cathedral in rural Deutschland, and it's for organ; it took almost ten years to fill the bellows, and the piece is on its second pitch out of dozens; it's been sounding for over four years. What the hell was Cage thinking, you may wonder? First of all, let me state that I hate invoking Cage: he's become the posterboy and the de facto excuse for a lot of what gets the third degree in the world of art music, but I have to do so here as it's quite relevant. Cage was a Zen Buddhist who was taken with the idea of reveling, for the fun of reveling, in the world of sound per se. Everything we do is music, he once quipped. This reification and devout love of absolute slowness and meditativeness guided practically all of his catalog. Cage may or may not argue for Langsammer-Bieber's status as a true piece of art; my feeling is that he wouldn't -- despite the concepts of chance and chaos playing into his compositions, it's difficult to imagine he would support naming something "art" using pre-existing material and pushing one solid button and only one to make it different. Even Brian Eno did more than that after he quit Roxy Music.
Hell, even naming Lento-Justin-Canto "ambient" is a slap in the face to the electronic music tradition. Ambient music -- Eno hated having it called that as it became a catch-all for all drone music played late at night on college radio stations -- still has craft, still has direction, still has workmanship and design, still has musicality that results from a number of techniques and approaches, not just one. Setting a variable and pressing "Go" erases all of that. So: in a similar vein, I'm Xeroxing Mona Lisa. I'm not even painting a fake, stroke by stroke, or taking a really good digital image and rasterizing it and retouching it and printing it on fine, aged linen. I'm taking her by her absent eyebrows, plopping her on the duplicator, pressing "Go", getting the blurry, black-and-white afterimage, and putting it up for all to see as a profound reworking.
Just to prove this point, here's a song or two that I've slowed down using pvoc in two of my free editing programs. I loaded the files and pushed a button. I didn't change the trajectory of the work. I didn't make anything new. I'm not adding commentary to it. I'm not saying "the only way to listen to these, heh heh, is to listen to it super slow like you're super baked! I'm not trying to make people marvel at technology -- which, if people marvel at this, as democratized as we are in terms of access to and understanding of digital media and how it's made, they may as well marvel when they turn on a light switch. All I did was slow them down. Can you figure out what they are? Does it matter? Does it provide any new commentary or knowledge about the pieces? Does this create a new narrative? Have I simply injured a boatload of electrons and wasted electrical current making these files? Only one way to know for sure!
first sample
second sample
As a final word, no, I am not angry I didn't think of this first. I didn't want to think of this first. I want to think of important things first. And as far as pvoc goes, I've been using the algorithm in my pieces since before J-Biebz was born. Yep.
*****
[DATELINE] The World, 17 January 2011
I have, in the past 24 hours, learned that there is a SEQUEL to this brainless, formless juggernaut:
The Jurassic Park theme, slowed down 1000 times.
Really? Is this all it takes to captivate listeners, the public, and stoners? It's bloody annoying to learn - again! - that such insipid and bland things are being touted as "awesome" or even a "sonic experience."
Go turn on a vacuum cleaner and let it run non-stop for 45 minutes. You'll get the same effect/headache.
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