Monday, June 1, 2009

…but what is music?

Hey! It worked!

This is a blog about music. I will use it to write some of my ideas and opinions on music in a general way. I will do it in english because it’s not my native language, so I can get some practice (please correct any mistakes!)

 

But before I go on about music, I should answer the question: what is music?

 

This is a tough one… going back a few centuries, to some time around 1700 or 1800, the “music” that comes to mind is classical music. Famous and important guys like Bach, Mozart, Beethoven and so on… In their time, music was something much easier to define. It was built upon 3 pillars: harmony, melody and rhytmn. To simplify it grossly, you needed to have some nice little tune going on, in a determined tempo, with some diatonical (that’s major, minor, dominant, etc) chords to back it up. Then, you had music.

Howeeeeeeeeeeeeeever, during the end of the 19th and throughout the 20th century, things got a liiiiittle more complicated. Some composers, like Richard Wagner, Gustav Mahler and Richard Strauss started to really “stretch” the good old diatonical harmonies to their breaking point. Their music started to shy away from conventional tonality, in order to expand the possibilities of music. It makes a lot of sense, since music had been composed with conventional tonality for some 200 years. The point is, these guys were striking one of the pillars on which “old” music was built upon.

But it is in the 20th century that the shit really hit the fan. The aforementioned composers influenced others to go further and further away from tonality in search of new musical possibilities. A guy named Arnold Schoenberg went so far, but so far, from conventional tonality, that his music, many times, had no tonal center. You know that great big final chord rock bands usually hold for a long time in the end of the song? That chord is the tonic chord, the chord that, in that given song, releases the tension. Well, when you have no tonal center, there’s no tonic chord to return to. This may be hard to imagine, but a lot of Schoenberg’s music after 1910 or so is composed like that. Since he was sailing through uncharted waters, he devised a compositional method to aid him in his search for new sonorities. This is the famous twelve-tone method, which basically consists of creating an order for the 12 pitches that make up an octave and only play the notes in that order. That is, a note never repeats until the whole set is played. Some of the most famous users of this method from that time are two of Schoenberg’s disciplies: Alban Berg and Anton Webern. Both of them took Schoenberg’s method and gave it their own spin, achieving quite interesting results. But the point here is: this “thing” they were creating was still called “music”, despite it’s obvious distance from music made before that time. In other words, good bye conventional harmony!

A while latter, some composers figured: if you’re gonna establish an order for the notes, why stop there? Why not determine an order for de duration of the notes, for what instrument plays, for how the instrument plays, for how loud the instrument plays, etc…? A French guy named Pierre Boulez did just that. Another guy, from the USA, named John Cage, went further: since the 12 tone method is pretty restraining, why not completely alienate the composer from the selection of notes, durations, etc and leave that to, say, the flip of a coin? He did just that. But before that, some guys in France and Germany started messing around with tapes and using them to achieve even more freaked out sounds. Things were getting pretty odd and, in spite of all that, the result was still called music!

By this point, you could say that music didn’t need melody, harmony or whatever; music is just organized sound. So the same John Cage, refusing to give me an easy time, writes a piece of music named 4’33. The piece is scored for piano, but may be adapted to any instrument (or number of instruments). It is composed of three movements, all of which are completely silent. The music consists of the noises heard during the 4 minutes and 33 seconds of the piece’s “execution”. So now, not even “organized sound” is vague enough to define what music is.

I’m keeping to “classical” music in this analysis, but heck, I don’t need to. Nowadays, an electronic musician like the Japanese Aube, who creates music from the electronic processing of sources such as flourescent lamps or crackling fire, is doing something that is completely despised of conventional rhytmn, harmony AND melody. And, still, we call it music.

So now here we are in the 21st century and I’m trying to write about music and I’m having a hard time just defining what exactly is music. I’m not going to try and give a final answer to this discussion, even because I do not believe such answer exists. But I still have to adopt some definition of music, just so we know what exactly is being talked about here. So, here’s the point I’ve been aiming at all along:

For the purpose of this blog, music is defined as being any sound recording, in any format (CD, DVD, limited edition triple 7 inch or even written down in a score), made availible to the public (in any format, even if limited). There, I’ve said it. With this definition, I’m making sure that, whatever it is I’m talking about here, you guys can hear it in some way. If you’ve made sounds of any kind, but did not record them for future reference or do not have any way of describing it exactly (like a musical score), then it’s not music, exclusively because you can’t prove it’s existence (wow, we’re going pretty far here).

So, every time I write about some specific piece of music, I’ll be sure to provide references as to how it was released and how it can be found. Most of the time, though, the music I talk about will  already be wiiiiiiiiiidely availible for purchase or for download in the nearest blog. Mostly, I’ll talk about pop/rock and electronica, mostly recent stuff. My aim is to go reeeeeeeally deep into the albums I talk about. Example? The view of Postmodern society in Iron Maiden’s Brave New World album. These things take some time to properly analyse, but it’s pretty cool. Just hope there’ll be someone around to read it and leave a coment!

By the way, in case you got curious to hear some of the wacky music described up there, some of it (as well as a much better description of some of the technical terms I used) is availible to stream from here

happy listening!

1 comment:

  1. Hi there! I think that your idea of going really deep into the albums is really nice! Your analysis seems very intersting! Oh! Love your definition of music by the way!!
    See you...(Juno)

    ReplyDelete