Once More, With Feeling

Over the last 3 weeks or so I have had some fun expanding the reach of this blog by posting electronic music related blogs to Facebook (which has a much larger potential than Twitter for actually engaging people). It has certainly got me more readers but what interests me more than this is being involved in quality conversations. The reach of those blogs enabled me to set up an Electronic Music Philosophy page on Facebook where some interesting discussions of a more theoretical nature than "look at my setup" have already taken place. As you may know from past blogs, I'm very much a quality over quantity person if that is the choice.

Thanks to this group a video was posted of Adam Neely's. Neely is a guy who chats about music theory on You Tube. This was my first introduction to him and, while I found him a bit overblown and "in your face," I cannot deny that the video I watched (about Vaporwave) was largely informative. In speaking about his subject at hand he made what seemed to me to be a fascinating link between timbre and emotion in music. The vlog itself was largely about the draw of Vaporwave as a form of music and Neely made recourse to the phenomenology of music (how music makes you feel, how you experience it) in order to do this. His point was that a musician's primary tool to manipulate the emotional response of a listener was a timbral one, how a sound sounds and how a sound's sound can be affected timbrally. This, so Neely argued, had the power to affect how someone might hear a piece of music and emotionally react to it.

Unsurprisingly, this got me thinking. First of all, I thought about music from the perspective of what it feels like to listen to something, the experience of listening. I considered that this is something not often discussed. What is often discussed is the more trivial like/dislike that people give to music as it is presented to them or as they hear it. These subjects are linked but I doubt they are much discussed anywhere outside of academic circles. Following John Cage, who has educated what I think were probably my base instincts anyway, I've come to find the like/dislike judgment we all give to music of not much use and certainly no good as a musical guide. If one is to take music seriously as a whole (and as a world of sounds which just are what they are) then we need to get over our egos and snap judgments. They may be marginally useful for deciding which thing I want to hear right now that is compatible with my mood but, outside of that, they should be completely set to one side. If one is going to think about music seriously one needs to have more stamina and insight than this.

The second thing I thought of was a scene from one of the old Star Trek films. In this scene Spock, who had been dead and brought back to life, was once again training and educating himself to get back up to full fitness. During the scene, which you will see if you click the link, Spock is being tested by multiple computers simultaneously. He is passing with flying colours, answering every question and puzzle thrown at him with ease, but gets stumped when a computer abruptly asks him "How do you feel?" Spock says he does not understand the question. He even responds to his inquiring mother that it is "irrelevant". Setting aside the fact that this is a play on Spock's half Vulcan, half human nature, I pondered about this in relation to the musical question before me. I wonder, have you ever listened to music and asked "How do I feel?" Does this question make sense to you as one that might be asked and with useful things to find in the answer? If not, I find this amazing. I don't find this amazing because you have not asked it. I find it amazing because considering music can have such a potentially large effect on human emotions surely its a question we should be asking very much more than we do. Contra Spock, its far from irrelevant.

Music is often used expressly to fuel emotions. One thinks of many locker rooms where loud, supposedly motivational music will often blare out before games. Then there is something like the old Dionysian festivals in Greek history where the idea was to work oneself up into a frenzy using music in order to be on the level of the gods. One thinks of ballads which, if done skillfully, are meant to tug at the heart strings. Gospel music, of which I have some past history myself, is meant to be praise of a deity but also includes a strong motivational vibe in promoting peace, happiness and courage in a particular faith amongst its adherents. Singing, especially in groups, is said to be psychologically beneficial. At many concerts or festivals what people will describe first is how the experience made them feel. In many, many places and situations we see music being used to affect human emotions. And yet, when we're alone, do we ever ask how some piece of music is making us feel? Do we ever study music from the phenomenological aspect? Do we ever write or make music seeking to utilize this phenomenological aspect for ourselves?

I thought about this and considered that it might be a good idea to experiment with it. As I also make a weekly podcast and I quite often choose music I haven't heard before when doing this I thought it might make sense to use this to select some music that I could choose to listen to from this phenomenological perspective. I'd like to invite my readers to do this too since the podcast with the music I've chosen is to be number 26 which will be released around the same time this blog is available to read. I wanted to choose music I had not heard before and make it something outside of the norm. In fact, I expect it will be outside of most people's norm. I ended up choosing the music of eight composers whose music is not generally thought of as "popular music". I cannot speak for anyone else, but they are mostly pieces new to my ears. I'd like to challenge anyone who wants to listen to the podcast to do so. Ask yourself as you listen to each piece how you feel and what emotional response each piece triggers. Clearly, there will be no right or wrong answers, only honest or dishonest ones.

The pieces I have chosen are as follows:

The Last Dream of The Beast by Morton Subotnick

Nachtmusik by Karlheinz Stockhausen

Electric Counterpoint by Steve Reich

Branches by John Cage

Apocalypse de Jean by Pierre Henry

Etude aux Objets (parts 1-5) by Pierre Schaeffer

Theme from For A Few Dollars More and Man with A Harmonica by Ennio Morricone

A Rainbow in Curved Air by Terry Riley

The pieces have been fairly randomly chosen. Only two was I familiar with (Morricone's) due to my interest in Westerns. But even there they are interesting choices since I will need to listen through over 90 minutes of music to get to them. This is because context, too, affects an emotional response to something, something any DJ building a set (as I once was) knows very well. It will be noticed that these are all prominent composers from the latter half of the 20th century. Some are still alive and others are not. Pretty much every one of these composers is known for their use of sound and for their interest in composition. This is to say that they think about music rather than just making it and they are familiar with music at the atomic level, as it were, in that they all know very well it is made up of sounds, these sounds being individually and collectively important. I judge these people, then, to be familiar with the idea that music can stimulate feeling even if, as with Cage, they may be wary of this.

Many of the pieces have a connection with feeling in their creation it seems to me. Subotnick's piece utilizes "ghost electronics", modules created by Don Buchla which are making no sounds themselves but are affecting the timbre, pitch and amplitude of the instruments you can hear as you hear them. This, then, is massaging Subotnick's need to be involved in a music he cannot be said to be wholly responsible for. Stockhausen's piece was written during a seven day period in 1968 when he was going through some personal turmoil. He wrote 14 other pieces during this time too, a prolific spurt of creativity which produced Aus den Sieben Tagen, which Nachtmusik is taken from. Steve Reich's Electric Counterpoint, played in the version I've chosen by Pat Metheny, utilizes looping to create the counterpoint of the title. I think it will function in interesting ways when set after the two pieces before it. 

Then we come to, perhaps, the most problematic piece here, Cage's Branches. This is a relatively long piece of music made up of the sounds of cacti and other plants being plucked by toothpicks. The plants have contact microphones attached to them to amplify the sounds. This piece also contains considerable silences as Cage was apt to have. Cage, notably, repeated many times that he did not need music to communicate to him nor for it to have any message. He wanted sounds to just be themselves. I wonder if that is what a potential listener will feel listening to Branches and how the silences will make them react? 

Pierre Henry's Apocalypse de Jean is verses of the biblical Revelation set to music. This is interesting in itself as the book of Revelation is in the literary style "apocalyptic", a style which is meant to give hope to persecuted insiders such as the Christians it refers to, but to preach doom to its enemies. Pierre Schaeffer's Etude aux Objets was his last study of sounds within the musique concrete perspective. Musique Concrete was literally "real music" by which Schaeffer, and Henry who made such music with him throughout the 1950s, meant a music made from real sounds. This, I think, lends itself particularly to unpredictable emotional responses.

The two pieces by Morricone are from film scores and, thus, lend themselves to dramatic interpretation. Indeed, this is what director Sergio Leone literally did himself as it was Morricone's practice to write the music before filming had even started, something Leone encouraged. Leone would then interpret the music visually on screen. I finish with an influential track from Terry Riley which influenced Pete Townshend to name a song after Riley (Baba O'Riley) and another group of musicians to take the name of the piece as their own (Curved Air). This piece again utilizes looping (and directly influenced Steve Reich's piece earlier) and is improvisational in nature. Riley himself played all the instruments (hence the looping). This track is often claimed as "psychedelic" and so who knows what emotions it might release?

At this moment I'm aware that I've given readers information regarding the contents of the podcast. This information will, of course, colour your listening or potential for listening to the music. But I'm pointing this up right now because I want you to get past it. Listening to music is often regarded by people as a lazy, relaxing activity in which the listener is expected to do no work, they soak up the music by osmosis. But it need not be this. It can be an active listening, a hearing, in which we take notice of what we are listening to. I imagine all the composers I've chosen here both did that and would encourage it.

But back to listening and emotion. This subject takes place in the context of a discussion that really goes back as far as when human beings first started having connected thoughts. This discussion is about the nature of the human being and the supposed war inside each example of that species between reason and emotion or, as its sometimes put, logic and the passions. This opposition is, of course, both false and fake. Human beings are organisms and not discrete parts. Human beings are both thoroughly and thorough-goingly rational beings as well as being emotional ones. There is no means to switch off either faculty within us even though, with effort, we can attempt to ignore or counteract their impulses. How this applies to music is that there can often be a tendency to regard it intellectually, rationally, technically as a collection of notes, time signatures and formal styles but to ignore questions exactly like "How will this make a person feel?" This latter question, under pressure from a heavy scientism in much of society today, seems a little namby-pamby and unscientific. It is a question which appeals to emotion and not reason. However, in these hopefully more psychologically and emotionally aware times, we should beware the idea that the emotions should never be questioned or their impulses buried deep inside and hidden away. Our psychologists would be quick to point out all the possible disorders which could result from that. If we have only appreciated music rationally then we have only scratched the surface.

With this insight its with a wholeness of human being in mind that I raise up the subject of music's emotional power and influence in today's blog. I have no idea if any readers of mine will listen to the pieces of music I've chosen for my podcast and I certainly can't make anyone listen. But I hope some of you will and, should you, I hope you'll think about how the music makes you feel and muse on the importance and uses of this question. I also hope next time you make some music you ponder, maybe even only for a moment, how someone hearing the piece you are making might feel upon hearing it because, to be sure, they will certainly feel something. And that's important too. Its seems to me there is much research that could be done on the phenomenology of music as we ask questions about how it makes us feel and then study the responses to this. This is because the experience of listening to music is perhaps one of the most important things about it. If you made music with one ear open to its emotional effects then, it seems to me, it would be a completely different way to make music, one that might contain many creative possibilities you had never thought of before.

Musical Conundrums and Annoyances

I recently returned to Facebook after about 5 years not using it. Before you rush to add me though please don't bother. I'm not using it as the friend adding exercise that many do. The fact is there are a number of interest groups on there which are useful to be a member of and its where other people have decided to congregate. Sometimes Mohammed has to go to the mountain. However, the problem with the mountain is that it draws all and sundry to it. The breaking news is that there are other people in the world and they don't think the same as you. Now I am, as you may have discerned from reading previous blogs here, a person who appreciates a certain measure of independent thought. However, if anywhere is going to demonstrate that there are lots of people happy to go along with "what everyone else thinks" then that place is Facebook. Nowhere is this more true than with the subject of music.

Everyone, I imagine, thinks they know what music is. Music is all around us and probably most of us hear some of it every single day. But let me ask you a question: can you define as precisely as possible exactly what music is? Have a go now. I will wait.......

Got a definition that you think works and applies to every single thing that could be called music? OK, on we go.

More than once this past week in casually reading posts in synthesizer groups on Facebook I have come across people who say "music" when what they actually mean is "melody". They speak as if "melody" and "music" are interchangeable synonyms and the issue here is that they just aren't! "Melody" is something that may or may not be present within music you are listening to. It is not equivalent with music. So when someone makes a synthesizer poll asking what people do with their modular synth and the first option is "use it musically" I start to wonder what they mean by "musically". It turns out that what they mean is "does not use it abstractly or to make random noises". Because for the poll writer this seems in his mind to be a non-musical use. For him music is equated with being a matter of melody and something all about pitch. Music, for him, is what you do when you take pitches and put them together in a deliberate and pleasing way. Is it just me that finds this both a huge misstep and an incredibly narrow definition of music? 

John Cage defined music as "the arrangement of sounds and silence" (I paraphrase) and this seems to me a much better and much fuller definition of what music is. I have taken it as my own and I hope the now dead Cage will not mind if I do so. Even that very brief definition I find to be staggeringly deep and profound. This is not just because Cage includes absence of sound in his mind-blowingly simple definition of what music is. Its also because he doesn't necessarily infer that this arrangement be deliberate and the result of the actions of a person. Music is not necessarily, within that definition, something someone writes. It could be something someone sets up the conditions for, like building an experiment and seeing what happens when you do, or the arbitrary juxtaposing of sounds, the making of a collage. (Cage did both and I have unashamedly copied him in doing so.) Imagine someone who takes a paint brush, dips it in some paint and then flicks the paint on the canvas. Now imagine a musician doing the same thing with sounds. For Cage, that is music (just as for Jackson Pollock with paint it was art.) For Cage the disinterested, fart noise making noodling of the modular synthesist unconcerned with pitch and the blowing of the wind are "music". For they are both an arrangement of sounds and silences.

This very simple and, for me, profound point seems lost on most people. I'm amazed how many people don't get it even when it is explained to them. They are stuck in a world where "music" is a tune. But its not, not simply so. Some music is tunes. Other music is textures, atmospheres, noises, noise, sounds. Cage himself once stood inside a chamber at a university which was designed to block out all sound. It was meant to be a completely silent place devoid of any noise at all. He discovered that even here he could hear the sound of his own bodily processes, his nervous system, his heart beat. Nowhere on Earth is completely silent. Sound is always with us, a symphony that never leaves us while we are awake. Cage had what I would describe as a fascination with sound and it is one of the things that I hope I have learned from him. Sound is fascinating. I am drawn to musicians who seem similarly fascinated with sound and not just, narrowly, with pitch and tunes. Another great musical area, one often overlooked, is timbre, the kind of sound that is being made. Pieces of music that focus on timbre as opposed to pitch are very interesting to me as are instruments which focus on an ability to change the timbre of a sound. This is why I like synthesizers which are in many respects made to be able to do this by design. Its why in the 40's, 50's and 60's there were people fascinated with magnetic tape. They found they could take one sound and make other, new sounds by manipulating it. Such a focus on timbre strikes me as both thoughtful and intimate. It speaks to me in ways that a tune could never do.

Whatever music is about I think that one major thing about music is its ability to convey two things: meaning and emotion. Each of us dislikes a lot of music. I think that we do that primarily because the music we dislike does not speak to us either in a way that makes any sense to us or in a way that communicates to us. We would say that it does not speak our language. Each of us approaches music differently of course. Some of us do it cerebrally and with much thought. Some of us will have technical insights into the making of music or have specific knowledge about things used to make it. But most of us are just listeners. We don't care who made it or how or with what. We just know if we like what we hear. We are all in the same position there, equals with tastes and preferences.

But have you ever thought what determines why you like what you hear? You like this piece of music but not that. Why? Doesn't it all seem a bit unexplainable and arbitrary? Isn't it the case that in the end even if you can say why you like something its not really an explanation for why you liked it in the first place? Its a retrospective justification for a decision you made somewhat instinctively. I find this both strange and fascinating. To me it seems something to do with things deep within us that sense emotion and ascribe meaning to things. For example, I like the dance track "Hideaway" by Delacy. You may know it. I don't know why I like it though. I can describe its pulsing beat and its lush pad sounds that swell but is that really an explanation? It doesn't tell you how it makes me feel. And that's the really powerful thing about it. It hits some pleasure center somewhere inside me I can't put my finger on. What I'm saying is liking music is not necessarily a rational decision. And it doesn't need to be. We humans are not rationality machines. We are bio-chemical organisms fed as much by emotion as reason. We are fed and informed as much by environment as logic. This is just one reason why it is monumentally stupid to think that you can logically depict good and bad music. Music does not admit of logical description or categorization. How you feel isn't logical and may not even be reasonable.

Thanks to the Internet I am fortunate to have some interesting conversation partners along the pathways of life. Often within passing conversations something is said which starts off a chain of thought. As someone interested in music, noise and sound I know of a few other people similarly interested and its interesting for me to observe their views on what they are doing. Recently in one conversation someone said to me that they thought most dance music was shallow, for example. Now I agree with this and I think that, for the most part, its meant to be. That is the point of dance music. (Surely the banality of what is now called "EDM" is its reason to be?) But then I went past the initial thought (something that's not always done!) and thought again. Surely the best dance music tracks actually break through that barrier? Surely the best dance music tracks are those which encompass and enshrine the meaning of a whole special moment that happened? Every time you hear this kind of dance track it in some way re-enacts that special moment and reincarnates it again for as long as it plays. The best dance music tracks, I thought, are those with that ability to bring some moment, feeling, emotion, sentiment, to life and fill it with meaning - just as the ambient, pioneering 70s electronic music it came from did. But that, to me, seems to encompass a number of things and not merely just a sugary pleasant repeating line of pitches. What makes a dance song great might well be who you heard it with and where you were as well.

In the same conversation the person concerned did not want to produce "shallow" music. Shallow, I guess, was regarded as a negative in this context but it need not be. Good musicians, musicians who think, will have purposes to what they do and will be trying to inscribe feelings and meanings into their work. Perhaps what the musician meant was that they want to feel like what they made means something. This is certainly what I have ineptly tried to do. I imagine that my music only really means what it means for me to me though. What it means for others will be up to them, who they are and where they are, literally and figuratively speaking.  The strangest songs mean the strangest things to the strangest people exactly because its a nexus of things that provide that spark of meaning in the first place. But, coming back to Cage, this is why sound itself is so interesting to me. As I write now I hear the tapping of my finger on the keys but also the faint whirr of the fan inside my computer. Outside somewhere in the distance I hear the sound of something I imagine to be a cement mixer. A car is now coming towards me and will go away again producing the Doppler Effect which is the effect produced by the change in the frequency of a sound wave relative to your own position. This is the background music to this blog. I hear it as a background symphony because I have that framework of understanding. But you may just hear it as noises or not even notice the sounds at all. What sounds are there with you now that you hadn't noticed until you actually listened?

In the last 3 months I have inadvertently made two separate projects of music. One was 4 albums long and one was 3 albums long. One concentrated on the sound of a particular synthesizer and was aiming to showcase a kind of grungy, metallic, distorted synth sound. The other was willfully and deliberately abstract, an exercise in a bricolage of textures. Both of them were focused on timbres. Pitches were irrelevant to me and I barely even paid attention to them. (Cage's statement that "disharmony is only a kind of harmony that you haven't got used to yet" ends the conversation regarding talk of "dissonance" in music as far as I'm concerned.) There are a few melodies and some tunefulness but if you listen for that you will largely be disappointed. It is my feeling that the timbre of a sound can communicate something that the pitch of a sound cannot. Does an F sharp make you feel happy whereas a B flat does not? Perhaps not. But sounds themselves, their timbres, can. You hear the sound of running water, it means something to you. People talking in a bar? It conveys a message. One of my recent tracks is a whole load of recordings of trains and the sounds they make put together as a track. This isn't an original idea but it is, I think, a powerful one. The end result sounds to me like music. It feels like an experience of sound and a journey. This, to me, is what music is. This is why I am so interested in it and why my only criterion as a musician myself is to make something that is interesting to me. Music should be interesting.

I have this crazy idea. The idea is that music should not be something that you graze, something that is entirely bent to the user's will and taste. I have the crazy idea that music should challenge, educate and inform the listener. This idea holds the hope that listeners are not just cows who want to unthinkingly chew grass for their whole lives. This idea has the hope that listeners are people who want to learn, be informed, and maybe even change. This idea is the hope that people can still be curious, can still be open to new experiences, can still be so vulnerable as to allow themselves to be challenged. It is the hope that music can be a means to communicating things, maybe even things that you don't want to be communicated. Its a crazy idea, I know. But its why the music I make is what it is. That music is my communication.

Is anybody listening? Can anybody hear?

My music is at https://elektronischeexistenz.bandcamp.com/