Groove: an aesthetic of measured time

As I work toward my future book on the theory of groove-based music, I’m reading up on the existing literature. There is not a whole lot of it! Most of the scholarly work about groove is about the social side rather than the music side. That’s why I was excited to find Mark Abel’s book, Groove: an Aesthetic of Measured Time. But then I was disappointed to discover that it’s a work of critical theory more than musicology, and I gave up on my first attempt to read it. Now I’m trying again.

Abel makes a book-length rebuttal of Theodor Adorno’s polemics against dance music. But Abel does not want to abandon Adorno’s Marxist critical framework; instead, he hopes to use that framework to come to a different conclusion about dance music than Adorno did.

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Repetition legitimizes, funk beautifies

David Bruce made a delightful video about the role of repetition in Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring

While this piece is hair-raisingly dissonant, it’s also remarkably popular (by classical music standards, anyway.) David explains this fact by showing how repetition makes the previously inexplicable seem more meaningful and less threatening. A crunchy chord might be weird and scary when you hear it once, but when you hear it repeatedly, it becomes more familiar and acceptable.

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Remixing Bartók’s Mikrokosmos No 133 – Syncopation

Béla Bartók’s Mikrokosmos (not the BTS song) is a six-volume collection of short pedagogical piano pieces. The early volumes are beginner-level exercises, and the later ones are professional-level challenges. They’re all pretty strange. My favorite is number 86, “Two Major Pentachords,” a counterpoint exercise where the right hand plays in C major and the left hand plays in F-sharp major. “Hot Cross Buns,” this is not.

Mikrokosmos Number 133 is called “Syncopation,” and as the name suggests, it’s a study of complex rhythms. Here’s a recording of it by Bartók himself:

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We got both kinds, country and western

In a few weeks, I’m going to be doing some guest blogging on NewMusicBox. I’m very excited, but also a bit nervous, because I’m an outspoken anti-fan of avant-garde modernism. I don’t want to antagonize NMB’s readership, so I’m trying to figure out how to write about this stuff without being a jerk. I’m using this post to do some thinking out loud.

NMB’s mission statement on their web site says that they are “dedicated to the music of American composers and improvisers and their champions.” To get a clearer sense of their musical identity and mission, I went and listened to their 2014 staff picks. The list encompasses tracks that sound to me like showtunes, jazzy chamber music, bluegrass-ish folk, artsy funky indie rock, avant-garde jazz, modern classical played on Japanese instruments, ambient, modernist opera, classical voice over glitchy electronica, and “regular” modern classical. Only a few of these tracks fit my image of what new music is, which just shows how out of touch I am. But my confusion could be forgiven. Does anyone even have a clear definition of “new music”?

One might naively say that new music is all the music that’s new. A Google search of the term brings up many web sites devoted to new music, ranging from rock to pop to hip-hop to everything else. Every tribe has their specific idea of what “music” constitutes. The Blues Brothers puts it best.

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The definition of music

There is no single universally agreed-upon definition of music. We know it when we hear it, but what you might hear as music, I might hear as noise. Who’s right? We both are.

The entire high modernist movement of the twentieth century was devoted to finding out just far you can push the limits of the conventional definition of music. John Cage considered all of his work to be music. A normal person would likely consider just about none of it to be music. I consider it some of it to be music, mostly extremely annoying music, and some of it to be clever or not-so-clever conceptual art. There isn’t an ultimate authority we can appeal to who will rule on whose opinion is the “right” one (though my NYU professors would disagree with me there.)

John Cage, noisemaker

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A modern classical fan responds

I’ve talked a lot of smack about high modernist music on this blog recently. Yesterday I got an email from a composer named Evan Kearney with some thoughtful reactions. Here’s what he had to say:

[Y]ou wrote that you didn’t ‘get’ High Modernism (serialism, Webern, Pierre Boulez, Elliot Carter, etc.) and what it offered for the average listener. I can tell you that their music had an immediate impact on me. It is unlike any tonal or post tonal music though. It hits me hard in a very startling way.

It is as if your soul is being bared to the harshness of reality and you can gain some sort of epiphany through the almost psychedelic nature of the atonal soundscape. Granted, I prefer pre-atonal composers like Bartok more than true serialists, but nonetheless, that is my way of appreciating it.

One more thing — interestingly, I have converted two of my friends, who, like myself (before I started getting in to jazz and classical about six years ago) were big “prog” rock, electronic music, and “progressive” hip-hop fans.

They still are, of course, and with the current influx of amazing music via the internet that will probably just increase. My point however, is that after a few reviews of modern classical, I have gotten them to genuinely enjoy it. And they both cite the same reasons for liking it as me — the pseudo-altered-state of mind, high-alert, thrill-ride-esque journey that goes with it.

So there you have it, folks, as articulate an explanation of this music and its attractions as you’re likely to find. You may also want to check out Evan’s own works on his SoundCloud page.

How has the representation of the human body changed in modern and contemporary art over the last 100 years?

Big question! First, a little philosophical throat-clearing: I don’t believe that modern/contemporary art is as radical a break with the past as it likes to think. I had an art professor in college argue that, really, all abstract art is representational, and all representational art is abstract. Any abstract art has to refer to particular sensory impressions that the artist has had, because there’s nothing else we have to draw on for material. No matter how crazy the art is, we can’t help but look for signs of the physical world in it. Meanwhile, even the most photorealist painting is still abstract. You’d never be fooled by a painting into thinking you were looking out a window. Ultimately, it’s just static blobs of color on a flat surface; you have to do quite a bit of interpretive work to be “convinced” by the illusion.

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Silver Apples of the Moon

Discussing “Silver Apples Of The Moon” puts me in a quandary. I like Morton Subotnick personally, and very much enjoyed studying with him. I appreciate his desire to liberate the world from the shackles of keyboard-centric thinking. There’s no question that his music is personal, original and forward-thinking. But I find myself unable to emotionally connect.

Allmusic’s artist profiles include user-submitted “moods.” The Allmusic artist moods for Subotnick are: Cerebral, Clinical, Detached, Reserved, and Hypnotic. I couldn’t have described “Silver Apples” any better. Subotnick certainly isn’t reserved in person; his willingness to sing and dance spontaneously in class is his most charming quality. But like most of his high modernist cohort, Subotnick’s music is austere.

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Who cares if you listen?

I pride myself on having big ears, on listening to everything I can and trying to find the beauty in it. I’ve learned to enjoy some aspect of just about every kind of music. Every kind except one: high modernist twentieth century classical music. I just can not deal with it, at all. But I’m in music school now, and am having to confront modernism, listen to it, write about it, and produce it. So I’m trying to figure out whether I’m missing something, or whether the whole musical academic elite is out of its collective mind. Spoiler alert: I lean toward the latter.

The title of this post refers to an infamous essay by Milton Babbitt. He says that modern classical will never have an audience beyond its practitioners, and that it shouldn’t even bother to try.

I am concerned with stating an attitude towards the indisputable facts of the status and condition of the composer of what we will, for the moment, designate as “serious,” “advanced,” contemporary music.

I do not like the terms “serious” and “advanced” when self-applied by classical composers.

The general public is largely unaware of and uninterested in [the contemporary composer’s] music. The majority of performers shun it and resent it. Consequently, the music is little performed, and then primarily at poorly attended concerts before an audience consisting in the main of fellow ‘professionals’. At best, the music would appear to be for, of, and by specialists.

My question is this. Are we all missing out on something important because we’re unwilling to do the work? Or are we rightly shunning the music because it’s unbearable?

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