Back To The Future... with John Cage

In his book "Empty Words," a collection of his writings from the mid to late 1970s, John Cage has a paper entitled "The Future of Music". It is a fascinating paper to read and, to my 2017 ears, very prescient. Of course, the future of music is not a foreign subject to Cage for, since his first involvement with music in the 1930s, he had always had a far-sighted approach to what would be coming down the musical pipe and where we would be going. It was in 1937, in another writing of his, that he had predicted that music would become electronic and that then music, as we previously knew it, would change forever. He was, of course, utterly correct about that. It is strange to read a paper first delivered in 1974 that is about the future for, of course, I writing this and you reading it are in it. This gives us an angle on Cage's thoughts and pronouncements that he couldn't possibly have had for we know what happened whereas he could only look and imagine. Nevertheless, Cage, as I have already suggested, seems to do remarkably well. Even from 1974.

In "The Future of Music" Cage is suitably modest. Were someone else writing the paper and not he they would have good reason to argue that Cage did his own fair share of heavy lifting to bring in the very future he talks about. When Cage refers to others (for he was surely not alone) who have worked to drag the future into the present he does not mention himself but, of course, he would have every right to do so. Cage was one of a number of those who worked early on with electronics. Before that he had invented the prepared piano, something that survives to this day. He had pioneered the usage of other people's recorded music as something to be reused and altered in performance which later would be called sampling and become the basis for whole branches of electronic music. So Cage was no effete thinker sitting and observing what the future might be like as some academic philosopher of music. He was one of those making it, a practitioner, a doer. And not only did he work to smash the barrier between the acceptabilities of now and those that would be acceptable in the future, sometimes he erased the boundaries of musical acceptability too. Even today, in 2017, a time we would regard as much freer musically, there are those who tut and shake their head at Cage's name. His idea that all sound is music is anathema to them and still an unacceptable outrage.

And yet Cage in 1974 begins his paper thus: "For many years I've noticed that music - as an activity separated from the rest of life - doesn't enter my mind." He goes on to say that "Strictly musical questions are no longer serious questions" for him. There is something going on here and it has nothing to do with music as a discreet subject hacked off from life and treated as something you do in a sectioned off portion of it. Music and life are somehow intertwined here, inseparable. Cage, by this time already about 40 years into his entwinement with music, can look back at how music has changed over several decades. He can see how, when he started, people were still fighting for the idea that noises, then thought different to sounds, were something beyond the musical pail. He mentions Edgard Varese and says he fought with him (against the musical establishment) on the side of noises. He recounts how, in the 1930s, the only notable piece of percussion music was a piece by Varese himself ("Ionisation") but that, already by the 1940s, several hundred had appeared. This strikes me as odd but I genuinely think that many of us know little of how radically music changed between the start of the 20th century and when we came into it towards the latter part of it. We reading this now are the electronic music generation but Cage was one of those that brought it to be. He knew music before electricity whereas we do not. A musical comment of Cage's in the paper makes this point in a way I find vaguely amusing: "Sounds formerly considered out of tune are now called microtones."

So between the 1930s and 1970s Cage sees that music has changed and it was because of musicians being brave enough to step outside of its presumed boundaries and just do something different. This was not always an easy thing to do. Cage himself, for example, was often poor and relied on friends or sponsors to survive. His turn to indeterminate music did not help him in this because it made many a respectable musician (or potential sponsor) turn their back to him and regard him as persona non grata. But Cage was not for turning back and would struggle on with his own wayward, indeterminate thoughts in his head. Music for him, and those like him, was an exploration. Electricity made sounds and combinations of sounds possible that could not happen in the natural world and he was determined to explore them. There was a time this was called "experimental music" and Cage did not like this. But he came to accept that description for it. In "The Future of Music" he notes how the work done in the 40s and 50s presaged a change in the way we perceive both sounds and time and that aspects of both became tolerable that formerly were not. The picture as a whole is one of discovery, of widening boundaries. This, of course, will always scare those who perceive of themselves as protectors of the old or of orthodoxy and Cage, as the prime example, is a composer who divides people straight down the middle with his ideas and approaches. Cage notes that, in 1974, "Anything goes" but he states that, even then, "not everything is attempted." 

One interesting distinction Cage makes here, and its one that has come very much into his future and our present, is the idea of music as process. Formerly, Cage reports, the guiding idea was "structure". "Structure," says Cage, "is like a piece of furniture, whereas process is like the weather." He means to suggest that structure is known and can be probed. It is defined and definite. You can look at a table or a chair and see where all the bits go and how they fit together. But with weather this isn't quite so. We can, of course, observe changes in it but we are never quite sure how it fits together or where the beginning and the end of the changes are. There is no sense, at any given moment, just exactly where we are. In structure we would know. We could pinpoint our place exactly on the table. Not so with weather, our symbol for process. Here we are forever in what Cage calls "the nowmoment" but we are never sure how that nowmoment relates to all the other nowmoments that shall be and shall pass away again. This metaphor, applied musically, changes things. This spatial sense seems to change music itself and alter time, a crucial aspect to music, and how you experience it. Imagine not knowing exactly where you are in your musical piece. Imagine being stuck in a moment and then working within that moment to negotiate your way to the next one. A musical structure is an object rigidly defined. But a process is not and neither can process be rigidly defined. Cage notes that "were a limit set to possible musical processes, a process outside that limit would surely be discovered." Process can include objects too but the reverse isn't true at all. If you are thinking this process conception is very much like a view of the world not as discreet objects but as of all nature together as an environment I would very much agree with you.

Cage goes into a discussion of what he calls "closed-mindedness" and "open-mindedness" and this is a very important section of "The Future of Music". He calls the difference between these two "the difference between information about something... and that something itself." He quotes something written by Charles Ives to strengthen this point: "Nature builds the mountains and meadows and man puts in the fences and labels." Cage says that now "The fences have come down and the labels are being removed." That is, if we are open-minded. The closed-minded still take it that men should put up their artificial fences and apply their fabricated labels to the mountains and meadows of music as if they were inviolable elements. For the open-minded, as Cage sees it, they are not. "An up-to-date aquarium has all the fish swimming in one tank" is Cage's musical vision and this is a tank full of all the sounds and noises that are made, and that could be made, and the musics that could be made with them.

It is here that Cage surveys his musical history and gives reasons for why this spirit of musical open-mindedness has come about and they are interesting ones. First, because "many composers" took up battles for new musical expression, casting off old rules in the process. (This is where Cage could have used himself as a prime example but didn't quoting Cowell and Varese amongst others instead.) Second, Cage notes the changing technology which made changes in sound and therefore music inevitable. This is a point I have made in blogs before but regarding a period after Cage had written this paper. Yet Cage is writing about a period in which tape recorders, sound systems, computers and the first properly usable synthesizers were invented. Of course such inventions would change music. Thirdly, Cage notes that even by the 70s there is what he calls "the interpenetration of cultures" happening. In some spheres this is regarded as a bad thing and much political strife has ensued because of it. But, musically conceived, this has opened up cultures to other ways of conceiving things with the result that the whole is changed. It is to recognise that "music" is not how your culture conceives the rules for such a thing to be at all. Cage's final reason for the open-mindedness is that there are now more of us and more ways than ever to get in touch with each other. Cage could not have known in 1974 how this would exponentially increase. Speaking in his time and place writing the paper he was thinking of telephone and aeroplane. Now we can compose together live on electronic devices linked by wifi or over the Internet. We can musically collaborate with people we will never meet in real time. Cage's point is that when we are exposed to others it inevitably changes us. "Open-mindedness" is the inevitable result.

It is here that we begin to intuit again that, for Cage, music and life are not to be separated. There is some sense in which they are an indivisible organism. As life changes, music will change. As in other places Cage will say we should be open to the life, and so the sounds, that we are living, so here the sense is that our changing lives will be changing music and we should not resist this. We should welcome the change and the new experience rather than, scared and timid, clinging on to rules and formulations which give us a false and unnecessary sense of security. Cage's own change in attitude towards music came when he found he could no longer hold on to the orthodox view of music as communication. He found, he reports in an autobiographical statement, that people would sometimes laugh at music he intended to be somber. So for him the communicative model was a failure. Searching around he found within the Buddhist tradition the notion that "Music's ancient purpose (was) to sober and quiet the mind, thus making it susceptible to divine influences." In modern atheistic ears this sounds a bit queer yet we need to remember that Buddhists are not theists either and they believe in no god. So this cannot refer to actual divinities. The question then becomes what it could refer to and this is a riddle I think each musician should tackle for themselves. In any case, it is inescapable that one must recognise that Cage's musical appreciation after the mid 1940s is completely linked to his Buddhist education. Thus, I think, it is unarguable that this is why Cage sees music and life so entwined. But we do not need to be Buddhists ourselves to appreciate Cage's insights which can be taken on their own merits. This therapeutic use of music, if that is what it is, is much in evidence today (Cage's future) as ever more people listen to or play their own music as a means to relax, unwind or simply be taken out of the space in which their daily lives are going on.

Cage builds upon his reasons for open-mindedness and talks about "the non-political togetherness of people". In musical context he sees the future as being about the collapsing of distinctions between composers, performers and listeners. This has to be seen against a historic background in which these roles were rigidly defined and, indeed, separated. One strand here is the invention of indeterminate music (again, he examples others such as Feldman and Wolff as opposed to himself) which gives performers instructions about what to do but not necessarily what to play. So performers, those who have not written the music they play, then become part-time composers in playing within the instructions they have been given. The idea here is of "co-operation" which is another name for what is essentially the making of music socially. Again, and secondly, Cage mentions technology in this regard as it blurs the lines between the roles of composer, performer and listener. Cage, anachronistically to our ears, refers to the people of 1974 who could afford to buy a camera and so regard themselves as photographers. Today we have phones with music studios inside them. Should we not similarly regard ourselves as composers and performers? Cage emphasizes the social nature of this and, indeed, today "phone jams" are possible as people with the requisite technology play together to create music cooperatively on the fly. So Cage got this development bang on. A third way this distinction breaks down is, once again, because many diverse peoples have come into contact with each other. Places where these roles were never very distinct in any case have come into contact with those where they were and a reshuffling of the deck has taken place. Places where improvised music is normal have met those where it was not. And this changes, and opens, minds.

I stop my flow here to note something Cage says in passing. It is perhaps not widely known that John Cage was not a fan of recording his music or, indeed, of recorded music at all. He regarded recordings as, in some sense, dead music. He did not listen to much recorded music and was less than enthusiastic about the recording of his own works. Here he notes that "the popularity of recordings is unfortunate". He thinks this is so not only for musical reasons (think about all that is involved in a musical sense in the idea of setting one moment in time as a repeatable phenomenon) but also for social ones. The sense I get, and he may well make this explicit elsewhere, is that for him music is a living thing, a constant "nowmoment" or cornucopia of possible nowmoments. These happen live and cannot be captured or fettled into some perfect, preserved form (god forbid!). If you think that music is all around us and alive because all sound is music then what could be the musical relevance of saving and repeating some of the sounds when an endless supply is always at hand? The captive form cannot compete with the living, unpredictable experience. Here in this case Cage argues that it is not the task of music to be collected together in some recording so that one person may experience it but it is, instead, the task of music to bring the actual people together, blur the roles of composer, performer and listener and bring all the people together instead. Thus, he will mention with favour the jam session and the music circus.

Cage goes on to note that musical changes have accompanied societal changes and, indeed, the world of the 1970s was not the world of the 1930s and 1940s. This societal change has only increased since Cage wrote and so has the music. Cage, like Morton Subotnick, foresaw a time when ordinary citizens, not composers or musical performers, would have music-making possibilities in their own bags and pockets and, indeed, we are now in that time surrounded by more people of more differing backgrounds than ever before and with the possibility to converse and communicate musically with people from pretty much any country of the world. This cooperative, cross border music-making vision is something that chimes well with Cage's political beliefs as one who thought that the best government was the one that didn't govern (because it didn't need to). But there is another point embedded here in this which needs to be teased out. This is that while Cage conceived that "revolution remains our proper concern" he didn't think this was something we should plan or stop what we were doing to initiate. He thought that revolution was properly that thing that we were at all times already within. This is not simply a political point but a thoroughly musical one as well. It is, as he quotes M.C. Richards, "an art of transformation voluntarily undertaken from within". I wonder how many people conceive of their music as that or how many even realise that their music could be transformative? Is it the case that many are happy with their therapeutic twiddling, unaware of the power that lays in their hands? This is not thought of as an explosive, violent phenomenon but as revolution as evolution, the music that changes us and so the world.

You see, for Cage this all fits together as one organic whole. Music is not a discreet subject for him, governed by archaic and artificial man-made rules. Music is not something you set a time period aside for to do. Music is life and life is music. What you do in one, you do in the other. What you do musically reflects and affects who you are personally and, by extension, socially. Cage sees his band of future musicians as ready for a new world and as taking part in bringing it about. This is a very particular vision and it embroils music in things much wider than itself from the point of view of those who don't see things this way. So Cage is in an entirely different word from people, for example, who fetishize machines or regard what you use as important. We would not find him saying how great this equipment or that equipment is. He would not like the idea of electronic musicians being led by the nose by manufacturers who egg on the notion that unless you have this device then your musical life is somehow incomplete. Indeed, Cage expressly says in "The Future of Music" that "Musicians can do without government." Cage almost seems to suggest that the kinds of music you make will reflect the kind of person you are and the kind of society you envisage. He speaks of "the practicality of anarchy" and of "less anarchic kinds of music" that example "less anarchic forms of society". The message here seems to be that what you are and what you value will be shown through your music. Its as transparent as night and day if you have eyes to see. Do you value the authority figure, the "composer and conductor, the king and prime minister"? Is music for you about being dictated to from on high by the intentions of others? Or is it something else? Cage sides with social, non-authoritative, intercultural music, music that displays anarchic tendencies, for this is how he wishes the world to be.

But this should not be regarded as a dumbing down for Cage explicitly praises the virtues of musical hard work in "The Future of Music". There is a section of this paper in which Cage talks about "the demilitarization of language" which he regards as "a serious musical concern". The metaphor comes because language is regarded as syntactical in nature, like a marching military. Cage says that it dawns on him that "we need a society in which communication is not practiced, in which words become nonsense as they do between lovers, in which words become what they originally were: trees and stars and the rest of the primeval environment." But this concern is a matter of work for it will not come easily. As a former member of the military myself I know that such discipline and uniformity is taught for a reason. It is so in an emergency you will just do what is required without thinking. It has literally been drilled into you. But, when musically applied, this is seen negatively by Cage who, as stated, wanted the intimacy of a lover's communication rather than the syntax of a military language. The response is work to make this so and the realisation that it may take Herculean efforts to bring it about. Cage notes that a number of his pieces are very hard to play and recounts how some of his commissions came with the request that they be easy to perform (which disappointed him) and his eyes light up at the players who, having realised what they are being asked to perform will be difficult, relish the opportunity. He praises those, such as David Tudor, who premiered many of Cage's works before he himself took up composing mostly electronic works himself, as one who worked hard to expand and modify his own playing techniques, in his case on the piano. Cage reserves special mention for the field of electronic music in which "there is endless work to be done". Cage gives his own definition of music (which he was often asked for) as "WORK". This, he says, is his conclusion 40 years into his musical career.

Cage closes his paper on the future of music with a story about Thoreau who, it seems, accidentally set fire to some woods in preparing some food. He ran to try and get help to put out the fire but the nearest settlement was too far away and he was too late and a decent area of the woods burned down. Yet Cage reports that Thoreau noticed that the people who finally came to dowse the flames were happy for the opportunity of an adventure (all except those whose property had burned down, that is). After this episode, Thoreau met someone skilled at burning brush and, observing his methods and talking to him, developed new ways for dealing with fires and fighting them successfully. He also listened to the noises fire made as it burned, remarking that you can hear this same sound sometimes in any small fire you might make yourself for domestic purposes. He also remarked that fire is not only to be regarded as a bad thing. Indeed, it is now more than ever widely understood that fire can serve a cleansing function in the environment. It ventilates the forest floor and provides a new start. It acts as a quite natural cleaning agent if left to itself in a world not bound up with fabricated and artificial human concerns. 

But what's the musical application here you are wondering? It is that "everybody knows that useful is useful, but nobody knows that useless is useful, too." This is a reference to a saying of Chuang-tzu in a book Cage received as he was writing "The Future of Music" and it seemed relevant to him. It is, as is normal for Cage, a reminder not to cast aside things because they are thought irrelevant to what is regarded as music conceived as a canon of ideas, a discreet subject. It is a reminder that music is all and not just some. I have reported here only a few of the ideas Cage mentions in this paper. The paper itself is overflowing with both them and directions for music to take in the future. Cage was truly prodigious, "a genius inventor" as his former teacher Schoenberg called him. It is from Cage that I get the notion that it is the idea that is the primary currency of music. Professionalism be damned! 

I close by quoting Cage and how he himself finishes "The Future of Music". If you "get it" you will perhaps smile. If not, I hope you will think. I hope you will think about what music is, what music means, what music reveals, what music can and can't do. John Cage did all those things and he helped make the future we all now experience as normal and uncontroversial:

"The usefulness of the useless is good news for artists. For art serves no material purpose. It has nothing to do with changing minds and spirits. The minds and spirits of people are changing. Not only in New York, but everywhere. It is time to give a concert of modern music in Africa. The change is not disruptive. It is cheerful.

Musical Maturity

Having written my blog yesterday and dispatched it both to the archives and to the wilds of the Internet, I went for a walk. I go for a walk pretty much every day (as the fading heels on all my shoes will attest) because, as many philosophers record somewhere in their works, walking is thinking time. Thinking is an activity in which your relaxed mind feels free to come up with ideas, things which might start you down paths that you otherwise might miss. Thinking is thus a vital activity if you don't just merely want to be trapped in your convictions. Convictions, as Nietzsche wrote in his book Human, All Too Human, are more dangerous enemies of truth than lies. Convictions are self-built prisons.

I started off with an idea for a blog today discussing repetition in music. The idea of repetition reminds me of a clearly still important memory somewhere inside my damaged psyche. As a young teen I was still at that stage where I did what my mother told me. And she wanted me to go to Sunday School. I was well into the phase where I found this boring but this particular Sunday we'd been asked to bring a favourite record along to discuss with the group. I took Wings of A Dove by Madness since at that time I was a Madness fan. The staid Sunday School teacher wasn't very impressed by Wings of A Dove which, even for Madness, who I think its not indelicate to say are not the world's most accomplished musicians, is somewhat of a simple song. "Its quite repetitive" was the teacher's only comment before moving along to the next record. As a 14 year old I didn't take this very well.

Wings of A Dove is indeed quite repetitive but, now much older than 14, I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing. The Sunday School teacher clearly took repetitive to mean "not interesting or varied enough" or "simplistic" but even these designations don't tell you anything necessary about an impression some music will make. This is because the more you think about it the more you realize that something's repetitiveness or simplicity is not an easy route to judgment. Right now, if I asked you, I'm sure you could come up with pieces of repetitive and simple music that you both liked and didn't like. Both would be equally repetitive, equally simple, but these qualities would not help you to distinguish a like from a dislike or a good from a bad. There are repetitive songs which I'm sure drive you crazy. There are also dance clubs worldwide that resound throughout the night to a 4/4 beat that never stops.

Repeating patterns, themes, leitmotifs and suchlike are at the heart of much music, particularly in the mainstream, and its very likely that much of the music you hear and make is based on it. Indeed, we may even say that repetition is at the heart of the musical traditions we have received. This is true whether the songs we value are of the "verse chorus verse chorus bridge chorus" type or songs based in a simple repeated riff or hook. When I think about repetition I ask myself why this is so. I think mainly of two advantages it seems to have. Firstly, its a simple structure. This makes it not very difficult to understand or follow. So its easy to get into. This leads into the second feature I think of, its safe and secure. Structure always offers security because in a physical world one needs to know one's bearings. A relatively simple repeating pattern achieves this admirably. So repetitive music offers everything the listener needs. Its easy to comprehend and offers safety in familiarity.

But then I asked myself what a non-repeating song might sound like. What happens if we start to step outside these easy to understand and safe surroundings? Some examples came to mind. The first is the track Flutter by Autechre. This track was composed in a very deliberate way in 1994 at a time when so-called "raves" were being banned by the British Government. These were unofficial parties which would spontaneously be arranged and several hundred people would descend on some illicit location and music and usually drugs would take place. The Government tried to ban these events and, in so doing, defined the kind of music being played there as "repetitive beats". The track Flutter was Autechre's response to this in that, so they claim, no bar of the track, which could be played at 45rpm or 33rpm, repeats at all. As Autechre later said of the process of writing this track, they lined up as many different drum patterns as they could and then simply strung them together to produce a piece of music that never repeats a single bar even once. As such, this could not be banned if played at the raves because it was quite literally non-repetitive. Flutter is still a friendly way into the world of non-repetition though since, if you listen to the link I've given, you'll hear it does have a repeating melody.

A second example of music which eschews the path of easy repetition is that broad swathe of music labeled "kosmische". The example I choose here is Popol Vuh's In den Gärten Pharaos which is much like the music on their previous and first album, Affenstunde. Its a 17 and a half minute piece of studied abstraction. But, if you've listened to it, yes, you will tell me that it contains repetitions within it, not least the percussive sections where repeat rhythm patterns are played on bongos and suchlike. I agree with you that it utilizes repetition in parts but then so did Flutter. My point here is not that one should swap a childish reliance on repetition for the maturity of music that never repeats, as if, in a very crass and stupid way, one were good and the other bad. If anything, its to open the musician's mind and the listeners' ears to the possibilities. I have already noted that repetition or lack of it is, in itself, no guarantee of anything. Neither a repeating nor a non-repeating compositional strategy guarantees a piece of music people will or won't like or, more importantly, that will or won't be interesting to some listener. For example, some people love Discipline by Throbbing Gristle. Others have it as a high contender in the "worst song ever" category and I've read more than one person say its not music at all. What I think it is is a masterpiece of the mixture of repetition and noisy abstraction.

                           "Wreckers of civilisation" Throbbing Gristle

Were this a blog in which I were cataloguing even more and more examples I'm sure I'd spend the rest of my Sunday morning now going on an interesting musical journey through music that uses abstraction and repetition in interesting ways. Should you have examples of such, because everyone's exposure to music is only as wide as their own experience, then I hope you'll note these in the various comment sections where you see this blog. Its good to share musical experiences. However, I'm always conscious that I need to keep these blogs focused and to the point. More than one Facebooker has told me in the past that my usual 10 paragraphs (or so) is too long for him to bother with. These are those for whom music much longer than 3 or 4 minutes is regarded much like a prog rock drummer's 10 minute drum solo. Its dull and boring and who wants to listen to that?

But this comes to be relevant to this blog because, having thought about repetition on my walk, a narrative started to unfold in my mind. It was a narrative of growing maturity. I thought of the younger me. Aged 9 I was a member of my local Cub Scouts. We didn't have a car but the Cub leader had invited me to a local swimming pool on a Monday night to learn to swim. I had to walk (on my own) but it was in a direction I'd never gone before. It was very much out of my comfort zone. Well, inevitably, I got lost and more and more upset. Eventually a passerby asked me, the crying child in the street, what was wrong and if I was alright. I spluttered through my tears that I couldn't find the swimming pool. The helpful stranger set me right. I hadn't walked far enough down the main road to find the left turn I was supposed to take. I arrived at the pool in a strange area just as the session was finishing. But, of course, through all my trauma I now knew where the pool was and had enlarged the local territory with which I was familiar.

It was this narrative of growing maturity, accommodation to new territory and a growing ability to deal with new things that particularly appealed to me in a musical context from this traumatic personal recollection. As children we are used to a fairly tightly defined local area. Yes, we may go off on little adventures but its always within the context of a comfort zone and tied to our personal sense of confidence. This naturally varies from person to person but in each case it can be enhanced and grown. This fits in very nicely with what I was saying yesterday about training the musical sense in each of us. This is not a given, a static thing once and for all the same. It can be nurtured and matured or it can be left to stagnate and become stunted or malformed. As people we go from being children nervous about the world to adults meant to be more confident and able to deal with a bigger territory. A child may stick close to home but an adult might be expected to be able to travel from city to city or even country to country. It is normal human development to mature and develop the skills necessary to deal with this.

So when I now write a blog about musical maturity, which is what this blog has been about, this is what I mean. I mean developing a musical sense which does not stick in one rut. I mean the ability and even the desire to want to tread new ground with a confidence that has naturally developed. It means that, like cities or countries, we do not see going to one or another style of music as bad or good. We just see them as different and as each with their own challenges or good points or bad points. The 9 year old me listened to his mum's Abba records. The 47 year old me still remembers that but wants to explore abstract electronics, music composed by chance operations and music made on modular synthesizers. This is how it should be for to have stuck with the Abba records would have been to have refused to grow, change and develop. In such people something is not ideal and has gone wrong. It is the ideal to spread one's wings if one has them for this is how you learn to fly. So by "musical maturity" I very much mean an appreciation of music based on an analogy to the adult geographical sense. Its an ability and willingness to move about more freely, to accept and even welcome difference, to judge on something more than the local, childish values you had in younger days.

Music as Education

As far as criticisms of my blogs go, I'm happy to take a few hits. You would need to be spectacularly naive and utterly blind to the world to think that you could write a blog which some might take as criticism and then post it 10 or 15 times on Facebook and Twitter without any comeback. Of course, I try to write my blogs in a detached style. I do not write rants here nor use the language of the street. I try to give a calm and sensible discussion of the points I want to raise with at least the impression given of an open mind and a use of reason and argument. If you treat people fairly they will do the same in return is how I hope it goes. Of course, I can't guarantee this and occasionally I come across a less charitable respondent spilling his bile for my thoughts. I regard that more as his problem and not mine. My only golden rule in all of this is that you can think what you like but you need to be able to rhetorically support it with reasons you are prepared to discuss. 

This point was brought home to me in an excellent and thoughtful comment someone left under my blog, now almost a month old, about gear fetishization on social media forums to the detriment of actual music. This is the most popular blog I've ever written (approaching 5000 reads) and probably the most contentious too since I plonked it fairly and squarely into the middle of many Facebook groups that I'll clearly admit are groups about electronic music equipment as opposed to what to do with it or the music I hope ends up being made with it. (That, in many ways, was exactly the point of the blog!) For many the blog was a stumbling block or a blind spot. Others, and I'm warmed to say it was quite a few, seemed to get the point too. Of those, one by the name of "agustin n" made an excellent point which I'd like to snip from the comments to that blog and post here:

"I think the problem is mainly that, to admire someone else's gear, you just need to open your eyes (and say "good synths bru"). But to admire his/her music you have to open your heart/mind and that needs a lot more commitment. Like engage in a feeling with a stranger (over the www) and, in that, expose yourself. "Hey I enjoy your vision and relate to your feelings" is a lot more committed thing to say and... people are usually afraid of exposing themselves. But, nevertheless, I think its important that we as artists do..."

I've noticed a lot of this since I stumbled into writing blogs overtly about electronic music which I then posted to public forums. I was surprised to find they accrued thousands of reads not least since my music posts still accrue barely any listens. But they are different things and there need not be any translation from one to another. Perhaps, for example, my thoughts are interesting but my music is not. However, what I took on board very much from Agustin's insightful comment was that talking about things, objects, doesn't entail very much. If I like synth X instead of synth Y then so what? Looking at a picture of your gear and purring with desire isn't going to stretch me or anyone else in any way. As desirous creatures its as easy as letting a human drive have its head. But getting involved in their music and its ideas is much more intimate. Or, at least, it should be. And this brings me to why we're here today.

I have long had an itch regarding music that needed scratching. When I started becoming interested in John Cage it itched much more than it had before because of the peculiarities of this extremely interesting man. Cage is interesting not least because he is a composer but he is also someone who completely refuses to stop talking about music as an idea, as a set of ideas, as a bunch of compositional strategies or goals and even as something that is part of a bigger whole, life itself. Already, as I'm sure you will see, we have gone far beyond the customary topics in a Facebook group dedicated to swapping pictures of one or two pieces of gear and saying how much you want them or how much you love owning them. To be blunt, it is my general position that music makers should become more like Cage and less like your average Facebook group member. But this is a digression from my point here today. 

Music of Changes is a piano piece composed by John Cage in 1951 and first performed by David Tudor (for whom it was written) on January 1st 1952. It is described by many as a piece of indeterminate music, in some sense, although in terms of performance it is very determined. It was composed using chance operations (Cage's second piece written this way) but does have a resulting score which the performer is expected to follow like any other. So it is indeterminate in its composition but not in its performance. The more well known 4'33" is, of course, indeterminate in both composition AND performance. I use this piece as an example today because it seems to be one that evokes strong emotions. The You Tube comments under the video that I've linked here refer to it as "bullshit" and "masturbation material" and another wishes to withdraw the description "music" from it as if it did not deserve such an artistic description. (Someone also says its not art.) I first heard this piece of music, by listening to this very video, about 3 weeks ago. I had expected to find it difficult (thank you commenters for making it impossible to come to this with an open mind!) but was surprised when I found myself listening to the whole piece (44 minutes worth) without once feeling the need to stop or switch it off. It goes without saying that I am unaccustomed to listening to piano music on a regular basis.

Now I could not say that I "like" Music of Changes. But I can say that as an intellectual musical exercise I find it interesting and edifying and I can even say that I appreciate it. I'm glad it exists. Others seem to have been enraged by it (as, indeed, by 4'33" which came shortly after this in Cage's career). Now when music provokes such strong reactions we have a reason to ask what is going on here. To some the apparent randomness or abdication of authorial responsibility seems to be the issue. The thought is that if someone does not take responsibility then chaos is the result and chaos is bad. Chaos is irresponsible. Allowing chaos to occur is a moral affront to listeners, a trying to get them to accept that anything goes. And, in more general terms, anything cannot be allowed to go. Not, at least, if one calls oneself a composer and composes piano pieces to be performed at piano recitals.

                                      Autechre performing live

Fast forward 64 years to a piece called Feed1 by Autechre from the album Elseq1-5. What do we have here? To the casual listener it sounds very much like an all electronic version of Music of Changes in general terms. Things are happening (from a listener's ear point of view) very chaotically and perhaps even randomly. (Forget that both pieces are not really random at all if you can.) There seems to be no guiding idea behind it. Some describe Feed1 as "the sound of energy" or "the extreme power of electricity" but another pines that he doesn't really understand what people like about it and he asks for musicians to inform him of its point or value. This is a very good question. What is the point or value of any piece of music? I can't help but think that if more people asked this kind of question before they started then there might be less thoughtless music in the world. And that wouldn't be a bad thing in a world drowning in music.

What I think that both John Cage and Rob Brown and Sean Booth (who comprise Autechre) have in common is that they don't just make music. They also think long and hard about how to make it too. It is not some casual pursuit for these people. It is their life's work and purpose and so they take its arrangement and composition very seriously. Neither of them are joking or being frivolous. I would very much like to encourage this mentality in all music makers but especially in the electronic ones which is the music that I generally favour. As a means to this end I think its important to make one big change in our personalities not just as musicians but as people. This change is to move away from valuing things based on a "like" using a value system in which something I like is "good" and something I don't is "bad". Let me put this another way: we need to change from people who value things based on their appeal to us into people who value things based on their ability to change us. Let me explain.

Six years ago both John Cage and Autechre were just names to me. I knew nothing about them except perhaps that Cage had composed a piece of music which had no music. But in the intervening 6 years I have come to be aware of the music of both of them and interacted with a number of interviews I've read from both of them. I am now acquainted with how they sound and some of their thoughts. It is not the case that I like all or even most of the music that they have produced (although I surely do like some in both cases) but, much more importantly than any of this froth, I see them both as vitally important musical influences. They are interesting and original and this changes me as someone appropriating their work. Of course, the world of social media which works on popularity (because this suits the commercial purposes which are the reason social media exists) will not value them for this. Social media wants us to believe that likes, faves and retweets are all that matter. Popularity is king and numbers are what count. Neither Cage nor Autechre are ever going to be mainstream popular. And I say thank god for that.

Cage and Autechre are worthwhile and of value because listening to them might just change you for the better. Or even change you at all. They are musicians who are going to challenge your preconceptions and make you think about what music is and what it is for and what it should do. In this respect it really doesn't matter after that whether you like or dislike their music. If it changes you and makes you think I would regard this as the far greater service than a stroke of your musical ego. Of course, we are now into Agustin's spooky area for to be changed we will need to open ourselves up to new experiences, new thoughts, ones that challenge our status quo (and I don't mean Rick Parfitt and Francis Rossi here!). In order to change we need to first be open to change and this is what the world of likes discourages for to be taught that something I like is good and something I dislike is bad is to be groomed in musical conservatism and conventionality. This way does not lie progression, growth or maturity. Of course, we may feel happy and safe in our conventionality and want to be left within our boundaries. But isn't life more generally about living on the edge, the thrill of taking a risk, the danger of knowing and feeling that you are actually alive? 

I think that it is and, slowly, over many years now I've been trying to educate and encourage a curious musical mind, one that will listen to music I might not like to try and find the value in it. Utilizing this attitude I've discovered Cage, Autechre, Boards of Canada, the whole world of German Kosmische music and many other things besides, ones that probably no one else has heard of and who will never be on the receiving end of a tidal wave of likes. My musical vocabulary, and my life more generally, have been enriched and educated beyond anything I could have imagined. And this was only in a few years. Who knows how much further it could progress? What's more, I've developed new attitudes towards music and sound, ones I never would have thought of by myself with my likes and dislikes. I've learnt that music is not just an education in sound but in life too. 

I've also learnt that the musical sense is not a given, something to be left as it is. Its something to be trained, educated and explored. Indeed, this is the most beneficial way of using it. So you should give things a chance you don't like. You may end up liking it. I've lost count of the things I used to dislike I now like. Because tastes will and do change and we can and do learn new things from new sounds. Even if we don't "like" something it can still educate us in other ways. What a great service some piece of music would do us personally and musically if it made us more appreciative of music or sound in general. What is a simple "like" beside that? And more, as musicians ourselves we should not be afraid to outrun our boundaries. We should try to do things we consider beyond us. How else are we supposed to grow? We need to "expose ourselves" as Agustin suggested. This might encourage failure. But which is better, the setback we grow and learn from or the stunted safety of never trying?



If you like electronic music, have a thoughtful disposition and are on Facebook you might want more chat like this. In which case feel feel to join my group Electronic Music Philosophy there.

The Music of Possibility: A Noise Manifesto

Today's blog starts with a question: what links French composer Edgard Varese, 80s sampling supergroup The Art of Noise, Industrial pioneers Throbbing Gristle, silence-loving indeterminist John Cage, German Industrialists Einstürzende Neubauten, the creator of Musique Concrete (Pierre Schaeffer), the name of a leading Eurorack manufacturer (Make Noise), the first all electronic score for a motion picture (Forbidden Planet), the more abstract entries into the canon of German Kosmische Musik, the harsh and unpredictable sounds of circuit bent instruments, the electronic jazz of Autechre, EBMers Nitzer Ebb, the glitch madness of Richard Devine, the Japanoise of Merzbow and Masonna, the IDM of Aphex Twin, the cut up, breakbeat craziness of Venetian Snares, a Berlin festival called Atonal.... and this list could go on forever!?

The answer is NOISE.

Actually, whilst the answer is noise it is more particularly the musical use and contextualization of noise, noise as a musically useful entity. But what even is noise? If it is members of German band Faust hitting a concrete mixer or Einstürzende Neubauten using electric drills or the weird shrieks of something that has been circuit bent this seems quite obvious but how might we define it? The temptation is to describe noise as unmusical sounds put to musical uses and I'm sure more than one reader was tempted to think that. But is it that simple? As a recent blog of mine showed, such a composer as John Cage, plus other pioneers such as Pierres Schaeffer and Henry, would hardly be likely to agree with this. Cage was so extreme (as some would judge it) as to believe that all sound was music (even including the sounds you might want to call noises) whilst Schaeffer's term Musique Concrete actually means real music, music made from real sounds, or noises as we might call them.

Now it can't really be argued against that many of those who pioneered working with noises (which is directly parallel to the rise of electronics in music) did so in order to be unconventional or counter to the prevailing movements in music of their times. (They might have described it as broadening our conception of music itself, however!) Some musicians simply plugged in their electronic instruments and tried to make normal music, of course. But a large number of those utilizing electronic equipment did not. They were wise to the fact that electronics meant new sounds and noises. A stand out example for me is the work of Louis and Bebe Barron who composed not the score for the film Forbidden Planet, it didn't have one, but what is described in the credits as "Electronic Tonalities". It was likely called this because the sound FX of the film and the "music" of the film cannot be distinguished at all. It is just one endless stream of strange, otherworldly tones. Or noises. The Barrons built their own circuits to make the score and many of them were destroyed in making the sounds they made meaning the score was literally unrepeatable. So outrageous in musical terms was their sound creation for the time that they were banned from being nominated for an Oscar. This was as recently as 1956, or 60 years ago.

An even earlier pioneer with things electronic was French composer, Edgard Varese. Varese emigrated to New York City in 1915 and, as a composer, was beset by the idea of making new sounds. In 1917 he wrote "I long for instruments obedient to my thought and whim, with their contribution of a whole new world of unsuspected sounds, which will lend themselves to the exigencies of my inner rhythm." He went on to compose two avantgarde percussion pieces in the 1920s, Hyperprism and Ionisation, the first of which reportedly created a riot and the second of which used two variable tone sirens but it is in 1930, during a round table discussion in Paris, that he gives his "Liberation of Sound" manifesto and it is worth quoting at length here.

"The raw material of music is sound. That is what the "reverent approach" has made people forget - even composers. Today when science is equipped to help the composer realize what was never before possible - all that Beethoven dreamed, all that Berlioz gropingly imagined possible - the composer continues to be obsessed by traditions which are nothing but the limitations of his predecessors. Composers like anyone else today are delighted to use the many gadgets continually put on the market for our daily comfort. But when they hear sounds that no violins, wind instruments, or percussion of the orchestra can produce, it does not occur to them to demand those sounds for science. Yet science is even now equipped to give them everything they may require.

And there are the advantages that I anticipate from such a machine: liberation from the arbitrary paralyzing tempered system; the possibility of obtaining any number of cycles or, if still desired, subdivisions of the octave, and consequently the formation of any desired scale; unsuspected range in low and high registers; new harmonic splendors obtainable from the use of subharmonic combinations now impossible; the possibility of obtaining any differential of timbre, of sound combinations, and new dynamics far beyond the present human-powered orchestra; a sense of sound projection in space by the emission of sound in any part or in many parts of the hall as may be required by the score; cross rhythms unrelated to each other, treated simultaneously, or to use the old word, contrapuntally, since the machine would be able to beat any number of desired notes, any subdivision of them, omission or fraction of them - all these in a given unit of measure of time which is humanly impossible to attain."

However, there are even earlier precursors to the coming age of electronic noise than this. Around the time of Varese's emigration the Italian Luigi Russolo was writing his now famous The Art of Noises booklet. This booklet, of course, directly inspired both the name and musical practice of the 80s supergroup, The Art of Noise, who utilized the most advanced and expensive sampling technology of their time, the Fairlight and the Synclavier, to turn noises into instruments. A perfect example is their first hit, Close To The Edit. The video to this track is also highly symbolic as four characters destroy a piano with electric saws, a chainsaw and other implements. It almost seems as if traditional music, and its instruments, is being replaced by a new electronic noise music based on any sound that can be made or imagined. A technological, noisy future awaits.

But back to The Art of Noises a moment for within it Russolo describes our emergence from a bucolic past into a noisy present and future.

"Ancient life was all silence. In the 19th century, with the invention of the machine, Noise was born. Today, Noise triumphs and reigns supreme over the sensibility of men. For many centuries life went by in silence, or at most in muted tones. The strongest noises which interrupted this silence were not intense or prolonged or varied. If we overlook such exceptional movements as earthquakes, hurricanes, storms, avalanches and waterfalls, nature is silent...

Every manifestation of our life is accompanied by noise. The noise, therefore, is familiar to our ear, and has the power to conjure up life itself. Sound, alien to our life, always musical and a thing unto itself, an occasional but unnecessary element, has become to our ears what an overfamiliar face is to our eyes. Noise, however, reaching us in a confused and irregular way from the irregular confusion of our life, never entirely reveals itself to us, and keeps innumerable surprises in reserve. We are therefore certain that by selecting, coordinating and dominating all noises we will enrich men with a new and unexpected sensual pleasure."

Luigi Russolo and friend playing hand cranked noise instruments called Intonarumori which produced rattling and scraping noises. These were all destroyed during World War 2.

This narrative we find mirrored in the mid to late 1970s in the UK and Europe when "Industrial" music was born. The first thing to note about it is that it was purposely artistic. Groups such as Throbbing Gristle and Cabaret Voltaire in England were people of musical and artistic ideas. Where they differed was in the sounds they used to express these ideas and this gives them a direct link to the motivations of earlier composers like Russolo and Varese. For the Industrialists, including later ones into the early 1980s in continental Europe, especially Germany, it was the sound of a dark, industrial wasteland that was the sonic inspiration as they sought to probe and make use of sonic extremity. Noise and noises were the sonic materials that they worked with and, in a very serious and composerly way, they knitted together noisy compositions from an acute awareness of sound. It is sometimes common to regard this music as somehow a lesser kind of music because it uses instruments in non-traditional ways (for example, Cosey Fanni Tutti's playing of the guitar) but this is, of course, nothing more than the sniffy disparagement of more conservative minds.

But now we sit here at the end of 2016 and none of this seems very new. We have computers that can hold sample libraries full of terabytes of sounds if we want to. Literally any sound we can record or invent can be used musically. We have 50 years of commercial synthesis to call upon with all the amazing instruments and their timbral possibilities that go with it. Before that we passed through a brief age of music made with magnetic tape and radio equipment. Yet how adventurous are we now? The old divides are still apparent. We take on new habits and these habits become the new norms we must seek to subvert. Is there a sense that we have now done all that can be done sonically? Are the dreams of Russolo and Varese and others like Cage and Schaeffer complete? This is really a twofold question for I am asking if we have now found all the sounds there are to be found but also if we are using the totality of sound when we compose music.

A few things suggest not. One form of music which creates a harsh divide is the appropriately enough named Harsh Noise music. This even has regional forms such as Japanoise, which is harsh noise originating from Japan. This is, in as straight a form as could be maintained, the use of outright electronic noise regarded as music. It can be seen to be on the cutting edge in that so many are ready to denigrate it as either not artistic or as not music. I look forward to those who take either pathway here presenting their fully worked out definitions of both art and music for our appraisal. In a collection of electronic music lectures and documentaries I have collected together on You Tube there is one called People Who Do Noise. Its an 80 minute documentary but I wonder how many who watch it (and you should!) get to minute 80 because some of those minutes contain the harshest of noises. The comments underneath this video (which you should read) are a kind of street fight over what music is, if this is a valid form of it or if it is just, as one commenter thinks, "over pretentious, meaningless bullshit".

Of course, the accusation of pretentiousness has been heard before. In my last blog but one it was used of John Cage's very own noise experiment, 4'33". One thing that seems to link those who work with noise is their utter seriousness of interest in the noise that they make or make room for people to hear. It is often thought that those working with noise must be somehow the opposite, not at all serious or joking, because, so I assume, it seems that some cannot escape the conventionality of the view that real music is melody and harmony conventionally understood. This, of course, is not so and certainly not since the onset of electronics in music. As Varese said earlier, we can now have any scale we like. Or even none at all. From the very first electronic musical instruments, such as the Theremin (the instrument which, lest we forget, got Robert Moog interested in synthesis), electronic noise music and its exploration has been veering away from traditional ideas of music, as Varese pointed out it would have to. New possibilities mean new opportunities. It was thanks to these new possibilities that new phenomena emerged. We now associate space with weird sounds exactly because electronically generated sounds and scores seemed to better fit these mysterious places so alien to our experiences. 

And so it can be seen that noises powered by electronics come to express things that more traditional instruments and forms of music could not. They are an extension of our sonic expressivity. I personally believe that this is all to the good for human beings that always have within them the desire to break new ground, to explore. We are creatures cursed to experience a physical world and that physical world includes sound. So, to my mind, it is utterly human to want to know what can be done and to find out in the doing of it and, what's more, to use new possibilities in sound to better express the experiences of life that we have. To that end, music with electronics had to involve the bringing of noise within the fold of musical creativity and it has immeasurably enriched us all as a result. Of course, conservatism will still hold the mainstream and try to limit, curtail and push back on the noisy neighbors that seek to broaden and strengthen our artistic appreciations and impulses but the boundaries of acceptability must always be pushed if we are to advance. Who one hundred years ago would have imagined the musical possibilities of sound and noise we have today? We live in the world Luigi Russolo's Art of Noises dreamed of. 

I leave the last word to John Cage who, in 1937, prophetically uttered the following words in his lecture "The Future of Music: Credo":

I BELIEVE THAT THE USE OF NOISE

Wherever we are, what we hear is mostly noise. When we ignore it, it disturbs us. When we listen to it, we find it fascinating. The sound of a truck at 50 mph. Static between the (radio) stations. Rain. We want to capture and control these sounds, to use them, not as sounds effects, but as musical instruments. Every film studio has a library of sound effects recorded on film. With a film phonograph it is now possible to control the amplitude and frequency of any one of these sounds and to give to it rhythms within or beyond the reach of anyone's imagination. Given four film phonographs, we can compose and perform a quartet for explosive motor, wind, heartbeat and landslide. 

TO MAKE MUSIC

If this word, music, is sacred and reserved for eighteenth and nineteenth century instruments, we can substitute a more meaningful term: organization of sound.  

WILL CONTINUE TO INCREASE UNTIL WE REACH A MUSIC PRODUCED THROUGH THE AID OF ELECTRICAL INSTRUMENTS.

The question is, how much do we live up to the hopes and dreams of our musical forbears? How much of a music of exploration and possibility do we make?

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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.