The Boho Dance, Joni Mitchell.

Joni Mitchell moved to Bel Air, one of the three platinum-gated suburbs of Los Angeles, in 1975. Her previous album^4. had provided her greatest commercial success and generated enough sales to move her out of Bohemian Laurel Canyon. She maintained both houses across town, but lived beside the magistrates and politicians instead of the handcrafters of wooden jewellery. The Bel Air mansion itself was memorialised on the back cover of The Hissing of Summer Lawns, flanked, for some reason, by Burundi natives schlepping a giant snake. The Laurel Canyon house was immortalised in song^5..

In the same year, Tom Wolfe wrote, in The Painted Word, about the Boho Dance^6., a condition with which Ms. Mitchell must have been acquainted. It is, he observed, the series of frantic movements and contorted gestures through which the artist must put themselves to make a living: with one hand, they must flip the Bourgeoisie an offensive, avant-garde gesture, while clasping the middle-class shoulder with the other, lest the Bourgeoisie and their money get away. Who else but the reasonably well-to-do could afford to keep an artist anyway?

Those who impress achieve the act of The Consummation^7., by which they get to move to bigger houses in Bel Air or Manhattan or both. Still, they must try even harder to arrive at the opera in paint-spattered jeans or otherwise show they do not belong with the Bourgeoisie, now that money no longer marks the difference. Even a gruff declaration of genius in an interview may do the job^8..

The musician doesn’t have it so bad as the painter, as they can sell several million copies of a single album. Some even do so. One could hardly do the Boho Dance in 2/4 anyway, but the folkies tried. Ms. Mitchell claimed that she had always been a painter first and foremost^9.; Leonard Cohen was a poet^10.; Phil Ochs was a singing journalist^11.. Each one denying that they were really pop musicians with millions of adoring fans. And, even when those fans wanted Bob Dylan to be the earnest folk artiste, he betrayed them with a Gretsch^12.. He said, with tongue in cheek, that he was “just a Song & Dance man^13..” Fans should listen to you, but never you to them.

People like pop songs only if they sound good, but they like popstars for more complex reasons. Like Mr. Wolfe in the art world, a star is invisible without a theory behind them^14.. There must be some place, some myth, or some imaginary scape where the artist and listener can meet on equal terms. It’s certainly not Ms. Mitchell’s Bel Air palace or her 80 acres in British Columbia. She and her contemporaries, however, are eternally associated with the counter-culture Bohemias of the 60s and 70s.

All the appropriate locales are valourised in song: Greenwich Village^15., Chelsea^16., Laurel Canyon^17., and Haight-Ashbury^18., each with charm or poignancy. Even when Mitchell critiques the Boho Dance from afar, she presents the Greenwich setting as affected but sweet. There are no such paeans to neighbouring^19. Bel Air townhouses or Manhattan penthouses; no one wants to hear about a millionaire’s quality of life. At most, the wealthy suburb is lambasted for being stifling and for the disapproving hiss of summer lawns^20.. No artist ever wants to appear to be on the side of the Bourgeoisie, even if they are the same side of the platinum gate.

Notes
^1. “So no wonder that in certain cities of America, in New York of course, and New Orleans, in Chicago and San Francisco and Los Angeles, in such American cities as Paris and Mexico, D.F., this particular part of a generation was attracted to what the Negro had to offer. In such places as Greenwich Village. a menage-a-trois was completed—the bohemian and the juvenile delinquent came face-to-face with the Negro, and the hipster was a fact in American life.” Norman Mailer, The White Negro, 1957. This before Ms. Mitchell’s jazz collaborations, most notably with Charlie Mingus in 1979.
^2. Scènes de la vie de bohème, Henry Murger, 1851.
^3. The Subterraneans, Jack Kerouac, 1958.
^4. Court and Spark, Joni Mitchell, 1974.
^5. “Our house is a very, very fine house/With two cats in the yard/Life used to be so hard/Now everything is easy/’Cause of you.” Crosby, Stills, Nash, & Young, Our House, 1970; documenting the affair between Graham Nash and Joni Mitchell and the house they shared in Laurel Canyon.
^6. “(1) The Boho Dance, in which the artist shows his stuff within the cirles, coteries, movements, isms, of the home neighbourhood, Bohemia itself, as if he doesn’t care about anything else; as if, in face, he has a knife in his teeth against the fashionable world uptown.” Tom Wolfe, The Painted Word, 1975.
^7. “(2) The Consummation, in which culturati from that very same world, le monde, scout the various new movements and new artist of Bohemia, select those who seem the most exciting, original, important, by whatever standards–and shower themwith all the rewards of celebrity.” ibid.
^8. “Well, sometimes you do get arrogant because there’s no one defending you but yourself. I mean, that’s where my arrogance lives in, you know, defending my work.” Joni Mitchell, in interview with Tavis Smiley, 2007.
^9. “I have always thought of myself as a painter derailed by circumstance.” Attributed and quoted on www.jonimitchell.com
^10. ‘The Poet of Rock Music’ – Subtitle on Leonard Cohen tour posters, 1976. Although, everything that Mr. Cohen says must be considered with the bend of his brow. Like Mr. Dylan, there is the possibility that, while one can snub the fans be claiming to be something other than a pop singer, one can also snub their fanaticism by claiming to be only a pop singer. Mr. Cohen began as a published poet before learning to play guitar in the 60s, reading poetry at his shows throughout his career: “a man in elfin boots, long hair and a cloak who stands up in one of those moments of pregnant, reverential silence which punctuate a Cohen performance and shouts out ‘God bless you, Leonard’ to crackle of sympathetic applause from the rest of the audience; an audience which, in short, substantiates the tag ‘The Poet’ more than it does the description ‘Of Rock and Roll…’” Mick Brown, The Return of Leonard Cohen, Sounds magazine, July 1976.
^11. “Before the days of television and mass media, the folksinger was often a traveling newspaper spreading tales through music. There is an urgent need for Americans to look deeply into themselves and their actions, and musical poetry is perhaps the most effective mirror available. Every newspaper headline is a potential song.” Phil Ochs’ introduction to The Marines Have Landed on the Shores of Santo Domingo from Phil Ochs in Concert, 1966.
^12. “Judas,” audience member at the Newport Folk Festival, 1965, when Dylan first played an electrc guitar as part of his live set. It was a Fender Stratocaster, not a Gretsch, but that rhymes even less with the word kiss.
^13. “I’m just a song and dance man.” Bob Dylan, 1965, in repsonse to accusations that he was the ‘voice of a generation.’
^14. “What I saw before me was the critic-in-chief of the New York Times saying: In looking at a picture today, ‘to lack a persuasive theory is to lack something crucial.’ I read it again. It didn’t say ‘something helpful’ or ‘enriching’ or even ‘extremely valuable.’ No, the word was crucial. In short, frankly these days, without a theory to go with it, I can’t see a painting.” Tom Wolfe, ibid.
^15. Bleeker Street – Simon & Garfunkel, Greenwich Village Folk Song Salesman – Nancy Sinatra & Lee Hazelwood, Positively 4th Street – Bob Dylan, Talkin’ New York – Bob Dylan, etc.
^16. Chelsea Hotel #2 – Leonard Cohen, Chelsea Girls (album and song) – Nico, Chelsea Morning – Joni Mitchell, etc.
^17. Laurel Canyon Blvd. – Van Dyke Parks, Laurel Canyon (album and song) – Jackie DeShannon, Ladies of the Canyon (album and song) – Joni Mitchell, etc.
^18. (If You’re Going to) San Fransisco – Scott McKenzie, Haight-Ashbury, the Beautiful– Ashleigh Brilliant, etc.
^19. “For getting away from the Bourgeoisie there’s nothing like packing up your paints and easel and heading for Tahiti, or even Brittany, which was Gauguin’s first stop. But who else even got as far as Brittany? Nobody. The rest got no further than the heights of Montmartre and Montparnasse, which are what?–perhaps two miles from the Champs Elysees. Likewise in the United States: belive me, you can get all the tubes of Winsor & Newton paint you want in Cincinnati, but the artists keep migrating to New York all the same…” Tom Wolfe, ibid. The Boho is the inverse of the Hobo; one is free of place, the other dependent on it.
^20. “He gave her his darkness to regret/And good reason to quit him/He gave her a roomful of Chippendale/That nobody sits in/Still she stays with a love of some kind/It’s the lady’s choice/The hissing of summer lawns.” Joni Mitchell, The Hissing of Summer Lawns, 1975.

Bohemian Like You, Courtney Taylor-Taylor.

With sixty percent being good middle-class boys, The Rolling Stones were Bohemians from the start^1.. They didn’t need rock’n’roll to work for them, like Mr. Presley or The Beatles did. The others could break the rules once they’d become successful, but Mick Jagger was still enrolled at the LSE and could become a banker anytime he chose. He was into R’n’B for purely aesthetic reasons, meaning that, even if his blues were never very sincere (and he never wanted them to be), the band’s imitation of the blues always was^2..

If The Stones and others managed to mobilise millions of students and teenagers in free-love and drug-use, they encouraged even more to sit in their parents’ houses listening to records. The mass-Bohemianism of the late-sixties changed Bohemia from a place that could be pin-pointed on no map to a state-of-being transmitted through record sales^3.. One could consume Bohemia or live it vicariously; working all day and growing your hair long at night^4.. You could even try and live it, if you wanted, with the rock star as the perfect role-model. Youth culture and mass-Bohemianism became the same, just as rock’n’roll was a synonym for freedom^5..

It was no surprise then that The Dandy Warhols cribbed, knowingly, The Stones’ Brown Sugar, when they mined the platinum snub of Bohemian Like You. Not because The Rolling Stones were a joke, but because the image of the Bohemian The Stones had constructed was still the one to aspire to thirty years later. Or, at least, it was the popular image of Bohemianism, because the music was still popular. It was something upon which even parents and progeny could agree.

The litany of clichés sung were snide, but harmless; they must have applied to The Dandy Warhols once and most of their fans still^6.. The joke was that we could all sound like that if we took ourselves too seriously. And, in the video of the single, the words run along the screen, as on a karaoke video, so that you can sound like that if you wish.

Of course, The Dandy Warhols are singing the song for real, on the records^7. and in the ads^8.. They made the money from it too. The rock star’s success makes them acceptable^9.. Without stardom, one can support the rock’n’roll fantasy from a minimum wage (The Slacker) or a trust fund (The Hipster), but, however it is done, it remains only the moving around of the image, rather than Bohemianism itself. To be successful, one must play by the rules or, at least, cheat discretely. And with success come mansions instead of squats and A* grade drugs instead of whatever killed that guy you‘ve never heard of. Rock stars would be decadents, if they could find the time^10..

Rock is the right medium for the Bohemian; it rejects technique, offering a living without demanding discipline. All you need is someone to drive the van. The Rolling Stones have a bus though and so do The Dandy Warhols. Such are the trappings of success and it is the successful ones that people want to be like. Ever-changing non-convention is easily ignored for the time-tested representation, but when the two set against each other, as in the Dandy Warhols/Brian Jonestown^11. Massacre^12. tour film, DiG!, the difference becomes clear^13.: The Dandys organise their photoshoot in the BJM’s drug-strewn, party-ruined living room. Although, few would have heard of the film, if they hadn’t heard of The Dandy Warhols first.

Notes
^1. “(The Beatles’ success) allowed the Rolling Stones to come along and then be as cool, as obnoxious, as bohemian, as ‘fuck you,’ as in-your-face as they wanted to be. It suddenly turned out that you could act this way and not suddenly burst into flames. You could just get away with it.” Greil Marcus in interview with Jason Gross, June 1997.
^2. “Mick Jagger was never a rocker. He wasn’t a mod, either. He was a bohemian, an antiutopian version of what Americans called a folkie. That is, he was attracted to music of a certain innocence as only a fairly classy–and sophisticated–person can be.” Robert Christgau, The Rolling Stones, The Rolling Stone Illustrated History of Rock & Roll, 1976.
^3. “What was about to happen was an unprecedented contradiction in terms, mass bohemianism, and this is where the idea of “pop” became key. (…) Applied first to low-priced classical concerts and then to Tin Pan Alley product, the word was beginning to achieve more general cultural currency by the mid-Fifties, when London-based visual artists like Eduardo Paolozzi were proposing that a schlock form (e.g., science fiction pulp) might nurture “a higher order of imagination” than a nominally experimental one (e.g., little magazine). Shocking.” Robert Christgau, Ibid.
^4. “There were solid economic reasons for the rise of mass bohemianism. Juxtapose a 20-year rise in real income to the contradiction in which the straight-and-narrow worker/producer is required to turn into a hedonistic consumer off-hours, and perhaps countless kids, rather than assuming their production function on schedule, will choose to “fulfill themselves” outside the job market. (…) for all these kids, popular culture meant rock and roll, the art form created by and for their hedonistic consumption. In turn, rock and roll meant the Rolling Stones.” Robert Christgau, Ibid.
^5. “We don’t care, we want product as cynically as they dish it, too bad. After all, the stones have a lot to stand for. After all, so do we.” Lester Bangs, It’s Only The Rolling Stones, The Village Voice, Oct. 1974.
^6. “The Portland quartet known as the Dandy Warhols were born kicking and screaming in 1993, making music to, ahem, “drink to”, an alternative soundtrack for slackers, stoners, and midnight tokers which celebrated the permanent vacations of the elegantly wasted. Think Keith Richards with New Wave hair.” Matt James, Pop Matter, Aug. 2010.
^7. Bohemian Like You, No. 5 in the UK charts, 2001, taken from the album Thirteen Tales from Urban Bohemia.
^8. Vodafone, Ford Focus, Ford Mustang, Holden Astra,GM Summerdrive, Citroen C4 Picasso, Next.
^9. “Conservatives can accept some Bohemianism, but only for the few to whom it is appropriate, not for the masses and as Allan Bloom wrote, it must justify itself with intellectual or artistic achievement. Anything else is just mass non-conformism, as self-contradictory as it is self-indulgent.” Robert Locke, Sweet Land of Libertarians: A Conservative Critique of Dinesh D’Souza’s What’s So Great About America, Front Page Magazine.
^10. “We’re too busy to be decadent.” Bill Wyman in an unpublished interview with Lester Bangs, cited in Mainlines, Blood Feasts and Bad Taste.
^11. Brian Jones, of The Rolling Stones, died on July 3rd 1969.
^12. Although presented in the film as an unhinged, self-destructive, ‘free spirit,’ the 60s-based music of Anton Newcombe and The Brian Jonestown Massacre is described as: “not an act of invention; it was not based on any pretense of crafting something new; it was a thoroughly post-modern music; it was pastiche of everything.” Carlo McCormick, editor Paper Magazine, DiG!, 2004.
^13. “The Dandy Warhols are the greatest cartoon, that’s what I think it takes to be successful as a pop star. I don’t give a fuck what they do. It’s not for me; he’s not singing songs to me.” Anton Newcombe on The Dandy Warhols, Ibid; “They were absolutely our favourite band. And they were the most interesting, amazing characters, but it’s basically like a pack of fourteen year old boys from abusive, broken homes set loose in the ghetto. Y’know, that’s basically what that felt like. Yeah, let’s go hang out with them, but come on, these kids are all gonna end up in prison.” Courtney Taylor, of The Dandy Warhols, on The Brian Jonestown Massacre, Ibid.

Quite a bit smaller than “The Jazz Corner of the World” that was Birdland was the Café Bohemia, which, according to certain record sleeves, was only “The Jazz Corner of the Village^1..” It was a jazz club only by accident; its owner, hardly interested in the stuff at all, had failed at everything else^2.. One drunkard promised to pay his tab by playing a string of shows there, but, by the night of the first, cirrhosis of the liver, and a few other things, had already killed Charlie Parker – for it was he! The name on the posters, though, had already changed the nature of the place^3..

Oscar Pettiford led the house band for a while and wrote Bohemia After Dark in the venue’s honour. Not in the least romantic, barely even smoky, it is New York hard-bop or, as it said on the door, “progressive jazz only^4..” With no lyric, the piece conveys the atmosphere of the music club through music alone, making it, like all post-swing jazz, nothing more than music for music’s sake: rhythms to which you can nod your head, but never dance^5..

Cannonball Adderley became one of the stars of hard-bop, coming to prominence after sitting in on a session with Pettiford at the Bohemia. He had only just moved to New York from Florida and brought his sax to the club for fear of it being stolen. Within a few weeks, he had already recorded Bohemia After Dark with the Kenny Clarke Sextet. Of course, later reissues would have to put Adderley’s name on the front so that people would buy it, for, by then, he had already played on Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue and led successful groups of his own.

A number of key live LPs would be recorded at Bohemia in the three years that it opened^6. and Mr. Davis would found his first important quintets there. It couldn’t last though, neither as a pit-stop for touring musicians or young tyros trying to make names for themselves: the young players do make their names and the old names go on touring, sending each off to bigger venues. Even the notion of bop as a hard, intellectual music with no white audience couldn’t last^7.. Black musicians may have stopped being merely the white man’s entertainer, but they couldn’t stop white listeners being entertained.

There was a difference between earlier white Bohemianism and black Bohemianism (or Bohemia after dark, if you’ll forgive me): Bohemianism generally meant giving something up or renouncing one’s privilege and most of those young jazz players had neither. So, where in other fields, the artist may prove the purity of their intention by declining the money, Mr. Davis could scowl, refuse to compromise, and take it anyway, without caring what anybody says^8.. Even Mr. Adderley, who had a conservatory education, would do well without compromising any notions of being an outsider, because jazz came from the outside, so, when it moved to the concert hall and the arts festival, it was only fair to charge people to get in.

Notes
^1. As seen on certain reissues of Bohemia After Dark.
^2. “For six months, I tried to make the place pay, first as a bar and restaurant, then with girl shows, and then with various acts.” Jimmy Garofalo, the owner of Café Bohemia, in an interview with The Village Voice.
^3. “The Bohemia’s audience reminded me of cafes in Europe, where people were serious and intense, and paid attention. They regarded the music as an art form, and even acted a little superior about the fact that they were there and listening to Miles.” George Avakian, quoted in “When Giants Walked the Village,” Downbeat magazine, 2005.
^4. “As long as they could, they would create a chamber music – even a soloist’s music – of protest and rejection, playing for themselves as Outsiders. They would accept the fact that the only vitality they could encompass was the nervous frenzy of a jungle turned to asphalt. Their music was their religion in that they put into it all the skeletonic truth they knew. Having played it, they died of consumption, drinks, drugs, or mental breakdown.” Wilfred Mellers, Music in a New Found Land.
^5. “Swing had always been a staple component of jazz in any category, because jazz began as dance music, and without a detectable beat the dancers would have been stymied. (…) No matter how complex, subtle or allusive it became, jazz had always contained that energizing simplicity. Unfortunately bebop had the technical means to eliminate it.” Clive James, Cultural Amnesia.
^6. Charlie Mingus – Live from Cafe Bohemia; Kenny Dorham – ‘Round About Midnight at the Cafe Bohemia; Art Blakely – At the Cafe Bohemia, Vol. 1, 2, 3…; The Jazz Messengers – At the Cafe Bohemia, Nov. 11-23, 1955; George Wallington – Complete Live at the Cafe Bohemia; Etc.
^7. “A new soapbox for minority groups that have special brands of music to get off their little chests.” The New Yorker magazine, 1955.
^8. “If I don’t like what they write, I get into my Ferrari and I drive away.” Miles Davis, Attributed.

Most musicians, I think, would prefer to have the house. Whether or not they get it depends on enough listeners paying rent in the tower of their songs or their passing a civil service aptitude test. Either way, the songs will continue to be written, so long as there is a roof, a boxcar ceiling or a forest canopy over their heads.

The songwriter writes and, for them, the song is an end in itself, a solid collected in the crucible, after inspiration, effort or desperation have evaporated. What they do with the object afterwards is their concern: they may sell it, foist it, plug it or hide it, but their aim was always, first and foremost, to draw together the elements of the song into a demo or a record or tight live arrangement.

The listener comes to the song only when it is objectified and they cannot be blamed if they treat it as if it were a mere object, assessing it for functionality, economy and attractiveness all at once. Ideally, it will be multifunctional, so that they can drift through its many rooms as if it were a house; dancing in one place, when they need to dance; crying in another, when they need to cry. And if, as to a house, the majority of us could commit ourselves to only one song, the listener would take all these things into account and consider them more carefully, as one does when appearing on Desert Island Discs.

In Tunesmith, Mr. Jimmy Webb’s book on song writing, the author makes an analogy between building a house and composing a tune; one must consider its middle eights as vestibules and its choruses as parlours, some parts should lead you to other parts, some should only bid you welcome and sit. The structure of a song, like the structure of a building, should make worthy use of the space that it occupies. His suggestion, though, is that in crafting a song this way, its brickwork should not be visible; that, in fitting it together properly, it becomes more of a whole. But this is like looking at a house only from the outside.

This way, some songs hide their functionality better than others or there functionality is obscured by the fine craftspersonship. Still, whenever somebody begins to play a record, they seek, consciously or subconsciously, to put the record to use: to distract them, to remind them, to drown out one thing or soundtrack another. Where the songwriter began by trying to force the song into an object, the listener tries to force the object into their life. The physical realisation of the song (the record, the sheet music, the live concert) must be slotted into one’s life wherever it may fit. In reality, one cannot live in it, like one lives in a house; it is too small. At best, it can live in one’s life, standing rigidly on a shelf, if it can, or fading into memory, if it can’t.

The thing about a house is that one invests a lot into it: time, money, sacrifice. In most instances, one gives up a house in exchange for another; they are not collected together on a whim. Music seldom ever asks that much from us. M. Cocteau may have desired a single piece that would have endured his lifetime and that, in so enduring, could house his experiences and shelter them, that could hide his private moments and accommodate his communions. No single piece of music could do all this; not even all three sides of Sign O’ The Times. M. Cocteau probably hoped more for a music collection.

Pop music, as a recorded canon, became a sort of music that we can live in. Music had always functioned on a communal level, bringing people together at specific times and regulating season or ritual. But pop music, as a recorded object that could be owned by the individual, began to be organised around or to organise individual lives. Music moved from the spectacle of church and concert hall to the seclusion of the home and, finally, the trouser pocket, from public sphere to private.

But, oddly, as the musical object becomes less of a physical object, it becomes more like a house. Unconstrained by cost or space and untethered from specific plots of earth, the collection can grow astronomically, tending not to be fluid, but being, instead, extended and converted in all directions. The digital music collection is monolithic (black and shiny); it is rigid and mostly only added to, seldom diminished or demolished.

So much music is available and so easily, that it is difficult for one to get a view of music as a whole or how it may be enjoyed by the many – it is not. For most, it is easier simply to take up residence inside one’s own music collection, building outwards when one needs the space. The MP3 player is the house of which M. Cocteau spoke and it can be all too cheaply furnished with musical doodads; your playlists are its many rooms, divided up by function, aesthetic or ambiance, and you may drift through them as you please, living your life here. Even as you leave the house to go to work.

Sometimes mangled as “Strange how potent…” or “Never underestimate the potency…”, it is the ordinariness that is the heart of the statement. When Amanda Prynne leans over that balcony with her former husband, the insistently-familiar tune from a far-off orchestra conspires to stir extraordinary memories and feelings in them both. To anyone else, the hotel band playing sentimental airs in the restaurant or lobby would have been ordinary or accepted; it is the associations that the lovers have with the tune that constitutes the extra. This is its power.

When I was young and dreadful, and my character was cruel, I spent several months in silent separation from a woman who was then, as now, a former girlfriend: the silence, it was hoped, would make friends of both of us. I tried my best not to picture her or mull over my mistakes, but I was struck two times, Proust-like, by, now, bitterly happy recollections. The first was in a restaurant, that late December, when the Beach Boys’ Little Saint Nick played, not unexpectedly, I must admit, from the wall-mounted speakers. The second came when, this time unexpectedly, I heard Mr. Morrison’s Orangefield from a radio or internet stream.

The telling difference, though, is that I had never heard Orangefield in the particular lady’s presence. I had, then, only been in Orangefield once myself, but, then, with a victorious school quiz team. On hearing Little Saint Nick, my mind focused rigidly on the only occasion I remember previously hearing it, an Advent evening, dressing a Christtide tree with her and her parents, in her familial home. I recalled it with crystal acuity and my stomach was filled, instantly, with guilt and regret and my mouth with a little bit of vomit.

Orangefield’s host-album, Avalon Sunset, had played an important part in my childhood, simply by being played throughout it. And, yet, on hearing the song for the first time since then, it did not bring me back to excursions with The Mother or Belfast’s single Our Price store in 1989. Rather, it was of intervening years that I was reminded or, at least, of one autumnal picnic: the only time in all my recollection that fitted the description “A throne of Ulster day.” One song sung to me of loss, the other of what was lost.

This is, perhaps, the potency of cheap music, that it lingers, like a bad perfume (Fig. 1). All its meanings and associations rest heavily on the moments when it was heard and, as a smell might draw you back, so too does hearing it again bring you back there: the radio hit of that summer, the tie-in single of that sporting event. Everything for which it stands or, at least, everything for which you, as a listener, make it stand is tightly bound together; it may not strike you always, but, when it does, it does so strongly.

While much of Mr. Morrison’s work is about looking backwards (and a Jackie Wilson Said or Domino is quite specifically about hearing that one song), the effect is not the same. There is a second sort of music, the meanings of which (if there are any) are malleable, that, rather than dredging up memories, can be applied to memories. Skirting ambiguities instead of making definite statements, it diffuses through all parts of one’s life (Fig. 2). Like a lighter scent, it carries and one is not struck by it, but catches hints of it sporadically. It does not draw you back; it is present.

Orangefield is not cheap music –whatever Greil Marcus might write. To me, it was light and free; how else was it carried on the airwaves. Mr. Morrison’s demeanour may seek to make it dour, but he is only an artist off somewhere and his authorial intent does not reach as far as his music. His grim face aims to make the tell-tale lyric heavy and sad: “I loved you then in Orangefield, as I love you now in Orangefield.” The weight is balanced then and now, but it is the present that is the qualifier and the clincher: if he does not love you now, he can look back on that time without the load of that same feeling. Emotionally, he only loves you then in as much as he loves you now. If he has moved on – if he is light and free – the past need not be potent or a portent: it is only the past.

When I met my Beloved, the woman with whom I will live the rest of my life, I dreamed, one night, of marrying her and the song to be played at the wedding was Orangefield. There is music, as I say, that diffuses through one’s life, not dragging you back, but moving forward with you or, in this case just ahead, as if to announce that there will be yet more “Throne of Ulster days” (although, given the climate change over the past few years…). The old ones are not lost, but the new ones are more pressing; the tune is manumission from nostalgia, just as Mr. Morrison’s haggard face is warning against entrapment. Back then, I did not know how close my Beloved lived to Orangefield, and closer still to Cyprus Avenue. It hardly matters; the lesson of Orangefield is not about returning there time and time again – although, now I cannot help but do so – it is about moving on from there. In the dream though, the song could not be played – there were technical difficulties – and, instead, she walked down the aisle to Mr. Cassidy’s setting of the Vide Cor Meum from Dante (another man rotted from nostalgia). Meanwhile, across town that same night – and this is true – she dreamed of me as well.

Of course, that is not to say simply that some music is ‘timeless’ and some is ‘of its time’; I’m sure that Little Saint Nick will play at Christmas parties long after my last one. Rather that the force of certain songs comes from their temporality and everything they have to offer is packed together, like digits making a fist, in one strike. If Mr. Coward calls such music cheap, he, perhaps, means that it is a cheap trick, one that is easier to pull off than the dirty trick of affecting people. But, having a song infiltrate someone’s life at the right time and place takes luck and timing; both of which are as rare as craftpersonship.

Cheap music may be any music that places a value upon itself and, certainly, music composed to a blatant commercial end will tend to a certain type of potency. Written, perhaps, for a Christmas themed record, to cash in on a current trend or to keep someone famous, having been famous the week before, its meaning is singular, its associations concrete and it is the extra that creeps into the ordinariness of one’s life. It can definitely be powerful and, by all qualitative judgments, good, but that power is most likely to be based on the associations built around it and its power to last on how strong those associations remain.

The potency of cheap music doesn’t come cheaply at all; it pays the price of waiting. Nostalgia requires that its totems and familiars stay mostly in the past. Their weight comes from being remembered and being remembered comes at the risk of being forgotten.

It would not be so difficult to dance about architecture, although, if the building is very big, it may take some time to move all the way around it. Dancing, critically, on the theme of architecture, though, may prove more difficult for a spectator to follow, but it could be done. Both forms hinge on rhythm – or a sort of rhythm where solidity and space alternate – and a skilled dancer could convey the dense succession of columns of San Pietro, the spiral steps in Cologne cathedral or the wayward facades of la Sagrada Família. If a problem arises it is perhaps that dance is difficult enough to comprehend when it is only about itself or that, inversely, it would be tricky to construct a static building that has much to say about the Tarantella.

Composing a score about the tribulations of writing may not be that enlightening, but, certainly, Mr. Strauss’ Don Quixote or Ms. Bush’s Wuthering Heights can be heard as a kind of gloss on the respective texts. In comparison, writing about music seems like a walk in the park, although one usually conducted in an office. If one sees the purpose of music as something to be purely experienced, writing is the best medium we have through which experience can be discussed. Though why more reviews are not written as roundelays, I do not know.

When the music in question is popular song, though, a possible problem arises, in that the presence of a lyric puts composer and critic on equal ground. The song and review have words alike in common and, as language, we hope, is our writer’s speciality, it is with the lyric that they attempt to engage on an intellectual level. The music is discussed in purely descriptive terms and the relationship between lyric and music, only tentatively. Meaning is to be taken from the words and from the music, only sensory experience. Some critics may as well write about reading poetry in a Jacuzzi.

If pop writers lack the technical nous to accurately translate how a piece works and, thus ‘how it sounds’ to those who haven’t heard it (that is, their readers), it is hardly a surprise – for they were only readers once too and learned their appreciation of the form from their forebears. With neither the vocabulary nor knowledge between them (or it being unsound or elitist to presume such knowledge) to express the workings of the work, the best of the writers must use their literary chops to convey the experience of hearing it. It is, after all, the experience for which the consumer pays, not the meaning. That, they will supply themselves whenever they litter the song about their lives.

Whether or not it was possible was not the thrust of Mr. Costello’s much-cited use of the phrase (the first I heard of it, but not the first heard). He suffixed the sentence with the less quip-worthy: “It’s a really stupid thing to want to do.” Certainly, enough people dance about music to suggest that the component parts of the equation do not exist in isolation and need not be left alone. Dancing or not dancing to a piece of music is a valid criticism, but, more importantly, it engages with the experience of hearing – its rhythms are the rhythms of the music, so too are its emphases and its stresses; the movements describe, critique and experience the music all at once, just as the music explores the space of the venue, while being controlled by it.

It is on a different hand, though, that we recall Mr. Bangs’ attempt to write a review of the J. Geils’ Band live with the group onstage. That may have been the moment he, allegedly, said that writing about music was like dancing about architecture. He certainly didn’t write it down then, as he couldn’t concentrate over the music.

Most pop criticism, thus, is a feat of memory or imagination. Like Mr. Bangs, the writer must re-write after the event, capturing, not the experience, but the recollection of the experience. The critical reflection that justifies most writing on art engages with the techniques and the messages of the work and, though the reflection may be artful, one must first take a step back. To reflect upon the experience, which is the role of pop criticism, one must step back from the experience itself, not truly engaging with it, but, instead, batting at reminiscence and trapping vagaries and vaguenesses. An engaged critique would probably not extend past “Wow.”

Writing about pop is hardly writing about music at all; it is writing about the structures that surround the music and, should the music be of real merit, it will be talked around, compared to and implied. Really, writing about music is like dancing about space.

“In that respect I was much better off than he was, for my progress was not slowed down by any Prizes, whether from Rome or any other town since I don’t carry that sort of thing on me or on my back, because I’m a type rather like Adam (the ‘Paradise’ Adam) who never won a prize – a lazy type, no doubt.”
Erik Satie,
From a lecture on Claude Debussy, quoted in Erik Satie by Rollo H. Myers.

Science was once so large that one could as easily trip over it in one‘s spare room as in a nobbled copse or stagnant pond. But, now, it is so small that the electron microscopes needed to magnify it can be housed only across three storeys of a  biology lab and the telescopes required to view it clearly cannot be accommodated on earth at all, but must be sent instead into our orbit. The age of the Gentleman Amateur scientist lasted a period of time, from some first date to a second date, and can, no doubt, be pinpointed with great accuracy by gentleman historians. Within such a timeframe, independent study and wild experiment flourished in middle-class parlours and appropriately-equipped basements, in the provinces, financed by trust fund, inheritance or frugality and resulting in insights both profound and specious. The success or failure of such Naturphilosophs, if I may use broadly a term that others may use narrowly, is of no relevance, for all scientific inquiry requires that the faulty be discounted as much as the truth revealed. And, amidst the smoke of uncontained explosions and shattered conical flasks, the archetype took solid form as Mr. Darwin and Brother Mendel and justified any fallacy through the poetical expressions of M. Fabre and Mr. Darwin’s grandfather, Erasmus. However, as scientific inquiry sharpened its self through empiricism, rather than mere observation, it moved out of the amateur’s reach. The particles to split became too small and the repetitions of experiments too numerous that investigations could only be conducted in collaboration and afforded by institutions. Without attachment to a university or affiliation with a corporation, break-through is beyond the independent individual. This is quite probably a good thing.

Music, though, would seem to move in the opposite direction, for, while scientific knowledge refines its self, in principle, by replacing old understanding with new and winnowing out false theories until only the truth remains, art is accumulative. One work of art does not replace another, but is placed alongside it. Or below it, if the second is not very good.  Many are forgotten with good reason, but it is certain that, at this year’s end, there will be more beautiful tunes in existence than at the same time last year.  So long as time continues in the direction to which we are accustomed, the sum total of art works, of whatever quality, will only increase, for, with the internet as it is and may be, very few pieces now living are likely to die. A second Fr. Savonarola and an infinite number of his vain bonfires would be required to set us back.

If scientific knowledge moves from the general to the specific, while music transmutes from the rudimentary to the bewilderingly diverse, it is also true that, as science progressed from the independent to the institutional, music progressed in the opposite direction. The earliest pieces of music to come to us whole were composed through the support and at the behest of religious institutions, most notably the catholic church, which in the p-Reformation period was the largest institution imaginable. The patronage of composers by emperors, archdukes, viceroys and kings is also known to anybody who has seen the documentary, Amadeus, and it was through one such association or the other that most of the earlier composers with whom we are still familiar were sustained, whether, like Mr. Handel, in the courts of Europe’s monarchs or, like Mr. Bach, as a lowly Kapellmeister. The long-upheld oral tradition, as an instituted body, offered distribution of music in return for nothing more than the composer’s identity, so it was not until Mr. Arezzo developed scoring as we know it that one was liable to equate composer and composition without a formal introduction. A music-as-entertainment industry developed naturally as the means of distributing music became easier and the desire for recreational performance became greater. Thus, composers and musicians began to free their selves from the occasional direction of patrons to the simple appetites of the public, which is how we reached Mr. Foster (http://www.stephen-foster-songs.de), the first person to maintain their selves on the publication of their music alone. But, of course, such success resulted in alcoholism and early death. And, although nothing in life is so straightforward as a paragraph may claim, such a simplification can be seen rerunning, microscopically, as the patronage of major labels loses its allure somewhat to minor presses and self-release. With distribution made simpler, one can cast one’s line to the public, receiving bites from as many as all to as few as none,  rather than creating work to the satisfaction of one sovereign institution. In such a climate, each musician has the independence to explore in any such way as they choose and can organise.

The above compare and contrast of the histories of science and music is so inexact as to be practically facetious, but it is enough to suggest an archetype reciprocal to the Gentleman Scientist – the Musiphilosoph, our own gentleman amateur of music. It would not do, though, to suggest that the Musiphilosoph were merely any such person that practiced music for their own amusement, just as one who bends to sniff the roses is not an amateur botanist. In a time when music can be created or listened to at little cost and with just as little understanding, that broad definition would lead us each to suspecting one another of filling the position, like all of life were a dystopian fiction, rather than the romance Roman it clearly is. Instead, the Musiphilosoph should  be defined by those two traits that exemplify our amateur scientist – independence and a thirst for discovery. They must live and work some distance from the mechanisms of the music industry, though they may be supported by or through her work, and they must tamper with music, not solely to create the beautiful, though that is an admirable practice in its self, but to prod and poke its limits and peripheries. Through their isolation, the Musiphilosoph could be thought to create their own smaller, more manageable world within the chaotic universe of our accumulated musical culture and, like the Naturphilosoph, they are keen to scrutinise its physical and metaphysical laws. The Musiphilosoph is, perhaps, any person that conducts experiments in listening.

Fig. 1

The distance between the Musiphilosoph and the central mechanisms of music production and distribution would appear to be maintained in an equilibrium, as if each side exerted a repulsive force on the other, repulsions that grow stronger as the two attempt to meet in the middle. The Musiphilosoph has the freedom to explore the medium as they wish, because they are not dependent on the patronage of major labels, which requires, explicitly or implicitly, that one adhere to certain notions of commerciality and taste. Equally, they may never take advantage of the benefits such patronage affords in terms of distribution and promotion, because the singular nature of their investigations alienates such a high proportion of the public that the excessive costs suffered by the label would never be repaid.

Unable to sustain their selves through their work as a musician proper, in the way that a rock star of even moderate renown could, the Musiphilosoph must finance that work through other means, of which the most obvious is small-scale self-release. However, amongst the most prominent examples of Musiphilosophistry , there are other, more-colourful ideas – Mr. Moondog (http://www.moondogscorner.de/) was a street-performer and tourist attraction (although his first elpee was released on Columbia, the company soon lost faith and he certainly never lived on royalties), M. Satie (http://www.af.lu.se/~fogwall/satie.html) played cabaret piano, Ms. Oram and Ms. Derbyshire (http://www.woebot.com/movabletype/archives/000053.html) both worked for the beebeecee’s Radiophonic Workshop, while Mr. Nan arrow (http://news.minnesota.publicradio.org/features/199710/29_bakera_Nancarrow/) fixed player-pianos in Mexico and Mr. Lucier (http://alucier.web.wesleyan.edu/), like many others, took a position in a university. In the case of music, a university position is not an institutionalised post in the same way as it is in the scientific world, because the university lab is far removed from the market place, where most people interact with musical culture, and because professors are largely seen as squares, the enemies of the pop rebel. There is an argument that granting music sanctuary in the academy may be as restrictive as the pop charts, for just as many requirements of sophistication must be met before admission is granted. However, the Musiphilosoph is always the exception. Like the rock star, the Musiphilosoph creates an aesthetic that is identifiably their own. But where the rock star’s persona ingratiates them with the public, thus becoming a commodity, the Musiphilosoph is isolated from that same audience by the image they create. The rock star, whether their image is viewed positively or negatively, is a success because they sell records. The Musiphilosoph, even if their identity is sympathetic, is a failure because they sell none; they are, perhaps, a success despite their failure.

Fig. 2

What the Musiphilosoph does exactly is quite probably not important and this not solely because few people will care. Although certain Musiphilosophic investigations can be seen, upon reflection, to have had some influence on the course of music’s progress, this is merely the law of averages operating as usual. For each M. Satie or Dr. Moog (http://www.obsolete.com/120_years/machines/moog/) that is acknowledged a little later in the day than we would have liked (for we had already put on our slippers by then), there is a Prof. Alvarado (http://carlenaltman.blogspot.com/2007/01/tonight-i-met-my-hero.html) or a The Shaggs (http://www.shaggs.com/) that remains only a curiosity. Like the theory of parallel universes that imagines bubbled universes drifting side by side in a vacuum, the microscopic spheres of  the Musiphilosophs float amongst the larger mainstream worlds that one can see with the naked eye, or hear with the naked ear; most come to no harm, interacting with nothing, but occasionally one small bubble will meet the larger and from the collision a third universe comes, not bound by the full laws of either of its parents.

To divide up Musiphilosophs taxonomically may be helpful, if only to show the variety of positions any one can adopt and the distance still between any two of a similar stripe. For example, if Mr. Lomax (http://www.culturalequity.org/alanlomax/index.html) is an archivist, so too is Mr. Tiny Tim (http://www.tinytim.org/interview.html). Would one describe Mr. Moondog and Mr. Ra (http://www.elrarecords.com/1-index.html) as mythologists or political-philosophers or both? It is certainly hard to imagine any two characters at once so similar and yet so utterly opposed. And Mr. Pythagoras, who seems to be progenitor of the field, cannot be adequately housed under just one or any whole roll of labels, yet one rarely thinks of him as a musician. The most effective way, then, of identifying a Musiphilosoph, if one saw any use in doing so, may be to simply believe so and attempt to justify one’s choice after the fact. Defined by their individuality, no Musiphilosoph can be rightly designated by comparison with a pre-existing definition, for it is only through their singularity that they could be admitted to the seemingly contradictory notion of a pantheon of Musiphilosophs. And, needless to say, the many more to come will not make the task easier. Although, the following graph may help.

Fig. 3

Section The Second

“The immoral profession of music criticism must be abolished.”
Richard Wagner.

“But you only have to think of the performances you can have beneath the dome of your skull in order to realise how infinitely superior they are to the best that can be given in any opera house or concert room. You can choose your own work; you can choose your own time and place for imaging it… This is the way to enjoy music, not by the vulgar ear, but by the spirit.”
Ernest Newman,
The Music of the Future.

I have failed to open this section with the phrase “The Musiphilosoph’s power lies in…” because the Musiphilosoph has very little power. Their lot is not to demand, but to make do; their influence is on thought and not on people. They have no power, but rather they are maintained and what maintains them is the force and dedication with which they create their own philosophical environment. While this is the very thing that drives away the majority of the listening public, it is this same that attracts the small number of niche-fans that enjoy, admire and respect their work. It is these few that maintain them at whatever level they manage to attain. And, thus, the internet is the perfect place for the Musiphilosoph, because, as sprawling and uncontained as it is, to any one user it is a series of small, habitable worlds within a wider less interesting or immediate digital universe. The Musiphilosoph’s realm of investigation can nestle down within the wires quite comfortably, because it requires little more work than they, in their fastidiousness to their cause, would have put in anyway and there, as if right beside them, are their disparate patrons, whose patronage comes in encouragement, comment and a commitment to collecting the whole back-catalogue.

Establishing an on-line journal, as part of a more comprehensive web-site, is much to the Musiphilosoph’s advantage, for it allows a seemingly instantaneous connexion between their selves and those whose interest would sustain them, without breaking down the image of the musician that both parties have so carefully constructed. The journal is edited and maintained so as only to intensify what has already been suggested on record, on sleeve and on tour and so the listeners, who think they are getting closer to the artist, know all too well that they are getting closer only to more of the same. Whatever new dimensions to the Musiphilosoph are revealed, they reinforce those that were already existent. So, while the rock star, who is always mystic or alien, would suffer by being shown as a regular human, who thinks regular human thoughts, the Musiphilosoph can never be unmasked as normal instead of transcendental, as they are neither and never claimed to be one or the other. They are only ever an odd individual and proximity proves this: Mr. Momus (http://imomus.livejournal.com/) appears more thoughtful and permissive still than the characters in his songs, Mr. Byrne (http://journal.davidbyrne.com/) an over-analytical art-techno geek and Mr. Darnielle (http://lastplanetojakarta.com/) more consumed with musical thought than even his high record-release-rate suggested. It seems, too, that Mr. Fripp (http://www.dgmlive.com/diaries.htm?entry=10347) does practice every night, as we have all long imagined.

Much more could be written along the same lines as the lines above, but there is an opportunity at this juncture to think over wider things. While musicians may use their websites to write awkwardly about current affairs and politics (though, of course, a number speak more astutely than those politicians currently having the affairs), it is their view on music that will be the best informed and found to be most interesting by their loyal, small-scale patrons. Thus, the musician, who was once the commodity or the salesperson, depending on one’s standpoint, reveals their self as critic and consumer also, in much the same way as the consumer can write reviews and analysis for their own journal or record and distribute their own music at next to no cost. Whether one will be seen as predominately commodity, consumer or critic seems to be judged on what one was doing before the Web 2.0 flood and how thoroughly out of balance one’s skills are in all three fields. It is, however, easy to move from one to another, as demonstrated by the previously-mentioned Mr. Momus, who presently splits living costs between commissioned journalistic pieces, art installations and undeservedly meagre record sales.

It may have been always thus that one could shift from being moderately respected as a rock critic to being moderately respected as a rock star, as Ms. Hynde illustrated, but it has never been so easy to be visibly all three at once, without having earned prestige in one or other of the two professional disciplines first. This trinitarianism allows that one can be a bad musician, uninformed critic and valueless consumer at all once, should you so wish and should you receive from others the scant amount of validation you need to keep going.

However, as the intermediary between the productive world of music-making and the leisure pursuit of music-appreciation, it is music criticism that is most obscured as the three blur into one another. One need only read the differences between those pieces Mr. Frere-Jones writes as pop critic for the New Yorker (http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sashafrerejones) and those shorter outbursts that appear on his personal music blog (http://sashafrerejones.com/) to see that amateur music criticism operates within a separate framework to that of the professional. But the difference is much more than the tone employed, for, if Mr. Frere-Jones thought his authority at the New Yorker was undermined by the more casual independent pieces, I imagine he would not write the latter at all. Mr. Reynolds, who, though widely respected, does not have a permanent position such as Mr. Frere-Jones’, is perhaps more circumspect when writing for his (http://blissout.blogspot.com/) own (http://bringthenoisesimonreynolds.blogspot.com/) multiple (http://ripitupandstartagainbysimonreynolds.blogspot.com/) journals (http://reynoldsretro.blogspot.com/), but the distinction between the two remains: when speaking to one’s readers, as if to equals, one should not think that one is completely right, for they will know something that you do not.

It is only natural that the authoritative tone of the pop critic should quiver and weaken, because its cause and its purpose are both losing their force. The professional critic could once speak with authority because they were an expert in the field, given licence by their occupation to acquire and listen to more music than their readership, but, now that technology has rendered music almost unpleasantly ubiquitous, it is true that any two people can be as informed as one another with only a little dedication in their spare time and that so much music is being created that no one person could be expected to have a reasonable understanding of it all. Without overemphasising the importance of pop trivia, one is left somewhat like Mr. Tantalus in Hades; knowledge is but a hair’s breadth from one’s fingers, but it can never be fully grasped.

Even were their authority not undermined, it would no longer be entirely necessary. For the purpose of critical jurisprudence was, whether intentionally or not, to increase record sales, which would, its self, increase magazine circulation. However, with the new ease of access to music and with all of it there to sample for free, if one wishes, no writer need push one into listening to anything with their big words or heavy proclamations. Never again need a record be said to save your life. Of course, with so much music available, the consumer still needs advice and direction to find their way through the great many options, but with less to lose, in terms of both financial and cultural currency, they don’t need to be validated by an aesthetic arbiter so much as they need to compare and contrast their opinions with those of persons they trust. And, thus, the myriad blogs and websites of the internet, all of varying quality and palatability, although the tone is not so important as the information provided. As the number of sources increases, the authority with which any one can be thought to speak must be considered very slight. It is, perhaps, only the comparative analysis sites, like last.fm, that can use the cold, firm tenor of Mr. Kant’s disinterested judge.

The amateur critic knows greater liberty than the professional too in their levity with the law, by which  I almost certainly mean the flippancy with which they, having no co-dependant economic relationship with record companies, can annotate their writings with a free-to-download-empeethree or a streaming file, for so long as they evade the copyright owner. Therefore there is little call for them to resort to descriptions of the music its self or, at least, not to aggrandise it to excess or, indeed, reduce it to a clichéd formula of algebraic contrasts (“like x fighting y in a z… etc.”). A fine example of this approach is Mr. Ross’ (http://www.therestisnoise.com/) The Rest Is Noise site, in which The New Yorker’s music critic (distinct from the above-mentioned Mr. Frere-Jones, the pop critic), uses sanctioned samples, Youtube clips and links to illustrate whatever passage he is discussing. Thus, a poignant G# can be flagged as such and verified by a recording without the author resorting to such inflated language as would inspire the same feeling through words. The whole is constructed to incite interest in music, whether explicitly or generally, rather than to validate or invalidate any one piece of music. Not being formatted as a review or a feature, but as a starting point for inquiry, no entry can be thought of as mere advertisement. Although, of course, the site its self provides lashings of publicity for Mr. Ross’ excellent book (http://www.therestisnoise.com/2007/01/book-audiofiles.html) of the same name. However, the amateur, with no book to sell nor newspaper column to write, need not seek out official downloads to give away. Persuasion is not part of their position; the piece will do that its self. Their role is to make available. Or, if that is too risky, to redirect.

What this leaves for the paid critic to do is not much. Mr. Marcus (http://www.eyecandypromo.com/GM/Greil.html) has, for example, long been assessing and tabulating the history of rock music and how it weaves in and out of a larger social tapestry. And it has always been the tactic of the music press to elevate performers that can be said to represent ‘nowness’ with pin-point accuracy, an odd balancing act that requires the zeitgeist be defined by a sound that is supposedly defined by the zeitgeist. However, whether such practices will be relevant in the to come is uncertain. One can say that the idea of ‘nowness’ or of a sound being very much of the moment is unlikely to be a driving force of people’s listening motivations when they have before them all the music thus far and continuing to be recorded, especially as the palette of modern music is composed almost solely of all those elements that the past was so kind to construct. Since the invention of the sampler, pop has become a sort of folk music that feeds on its self, whether actually in the form of sampling or in the retrogressive application of supposedly authentic styles. Mr. Hatcher opined that today any song can sound as if it were recorded yesterday, or the day before and, while this leads to an exciting melange of juxtaposed styles, it also means that the zeitgeist of any given moment will be projected against a motley, which is practically indistinguishable from any other motley, or against a background that transmutes so rapidly that, like the chameleon that Mr. Cocteau imagined on a piece of tartan, the zeitgeist will die of exhaustion (that is if a zeitgeist is not, by definition, already died).

To consider and pry apart these disparate components would take a scholar of Mr. Marcus’ dedication, though it may not be necessary for him or her to do so. With so much music available at once, it is hard to imagine a significant number of people listening to the same music concurrently and in such a way as to direct their lives simultaneously. It is certainly unlikely that this would happen on a global scale and doubtful even on a national level. We could all be listening to the same artist at the same time, but we would not necessarily be listening to him, her or them together. And so, as music becomes an interest about which one can be, at once, both passionate and passive and over which one has an almost unswerving control, what artist could be so big as to act on history as Mr. Marcus thought Mr. Dylan did? If the ipod and the individual playlist do estrange individuals from one another, then music can no longer be expected to play the part that it so briefly did in politics and world events. Thankfully, that lesson has been learned. One need think only fleetingly of those artists Mr. Cameron called his favourites to realise that music may not necessarily act as a clarion call for political unity. In the future, people who want to make money by writing books about the music of our present will find it difficult to contrive such heroic social comment as they would if writing about the time of The Beatles or Mr. Dylan or even into the nineteen-nineties. For them, there will be too much to recount and all of it of too little social import. So, to invest what they write with any meaning at all, they will have to study smaller and smaller areas of influence or compose more personal and yet more personal accounts. Thankfully, as Mr. Morley’s Words & Music (http://www.rocklistmusic.co.uk/steveparker/paulmorley.htm) suggests, this would be a lovely thing to happen.

Technical descriptions, social historicism and supposed impartiality may not be dead traits, but they will certainly begin returning fewer rewards for the critic over time. And, as these loci of objective scrutiny receive less attention, critics will fall back on what remains: the subjective, that is the personal reflection tethered only to one’s experience, knowledge or philosophy.  The illusion of Mr. Kant’s detached  observer is dispelled and, in its place, quivers the neurotic but involved pontificator, the same one that materialises in the middle of Mr. Wilson’s Let’s Talk About Love: A Journey To The End Of Taste (http://bookcriticscircle.blogspot.com/2008/02/what-are-you-recommending-alex-ross.html).

Section The Third

“Technology has not only given us a permanent present, but has given it the furniture of eternity. We can cocoon ourselves, if we wish, in a new provincialism more powerful than any of the past empires.”
Clive James,
From the Introduction to Cultural Amnesia.

“We shall be able to look beyond our own systems and to assign our own suns and their planets to their places in a larger constellation, in which perhaps only the suns will count.”
Edmund Wilson,
A Modest Self-Tribute.

“Excellently observed, but let us cultivate our garden.”
Voltaire,
Candide, ou l‘Optimisme
.
There is now so much music filling the air that a cat can barely swing to it, let alone one be swung through it. And with still more being produced as we give birth or evidence, measure love and money, no one person can hope to acquaint their selves with the majority of it. Certainly, it is quicker to consume than to produce, but the thousands writing and recording at once will create more music than can be listened to through any individual’s mere two ears. And consumption cannot be delegated. It must be done for one’s self. The result is that a listener, no matter how dedicated, can never truly be cosmopolitan; the uncurbed expansion of cultural information makes us all provincial, but, if so desired, these provinces can be constructed exactly as we want them.

The purely provincial may be, for many, the most successful approach to take when facing the musically-saturated world. The only-partially-interested may have in their possession more music than their equivalent from decades passed, and their empeethree-players prove it, but this will be acquired through the gentle passage from the known to the familiar to the similar. Their contact points with the foreign or unusual, if they have any at all, will be those that are safely different, for we have, none of us, the same tastes, but some may seem more comparable than others.

However, it is unfair to paint the provincial all the same shades of green and yellow, that is naïve and afraid. Most are simply content with what is; if the world is so big, why not live where one is already? It gives one a head start. And the provincial does not preclude the eccentric nor demand a narrow scope; it requires only that one appreciate how small one is and things are and how small everything is with the exception of everything its self, which may go on for some length. A provincial who is affected can be unpleasant, like the preposterous M. Homais (http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/bovary/terms/charanal_3.html). But an affected provincial may be a delight, like the preposterous Lord Whimsy (http://lord-whimsy.livejournal.com/290610.html?nc=31).

The province of one’s taste consists solely of what one knows and what one knows, in this wash of information, will generally only ever build outwards, rarely leaping from the homely to the antipodes. However, the direction and extent of this development is determined by one’s curiosity. The listener is, arguably, manumitted from the monolithic institutions of taste-making. Or, at least, there are polylithic institutions, all much smaller and with weaker gravitational pull. The listener’s aesthetic environment is under their own control and, as they wish, they may prod and poke its limits and peripheries. Which is, perhaps, familiar. In the motion blur that ran commodity into critic and critic into consumer, the silly archetype of the Musiphilosoph, who has not received a mention for a good many lines, was blurred as well. If the Musiphilosoph is truly any person who conducts experiments in listening, then those who question what and why and how they listen to music is a Musiphilosoph. The technology that gave amateur musicians recording and distribution opportunities comparable with, if not exactly on par with, those available to professionals also made listening hobbyists and spare-time critics consider music with the sort of scrutiny once employed only by industry-insiders and obsessives, gently recommending that they compile thematic play lists and archive monstrous collections. If there are lone weirdoes in the first category, then there may as well be lone weirdoes in the second.

Perhaps my earlier metaphor of colliding universes was too grandiose and, instead, we all inhabit small plots in a mysterious land, where some of the flora is indigenous and some we have planted our selves. From wherever the seeds came, they are now sown in your earth and are part of your landscape, whether they wither or bloom. Like Brother Mendel, we must wait and see what grows and what hybrids may result. Mr. Wilson suggested that the reader should place their own stars and their own solar systems in the skies, but, perhaps, this is speaking of things in too majestic a tone. Or, perhaps, literature, for it was this of which he was speaking, can muster such talk, while music can not. M. Voltaire’s advice, however, is more sublunary: we should cultivate our gardens.

Section The Fourth

Some Criticism Of The Musiphilosoph And The Response

1. Would we not be better served by spelling it Muso-philosoph?

Indeed, no. Muso is an epithet to be avoided, being synonymous with, though not identical to, the music snob.  The Muso may well be heard to drone on about subjects in which his table-mates have no interest, such  as specific scales and art-sleeve printing errors. The Musiphilosoph is defined as being curious; the Muso is merely boring. The Muso tests the tastes of others, while the Musiphilosoph is interested in only testing her own. As such, the Musiphilosoph’s investigations are personal, not solely in the sense that they are conducted in private, although this may be the case, but in the sense that the correlated results will apply only to the experimenter. The Muso, while frequently left alone, considers his taste a necessary part of public record and imagines that personal preference can be altered through debate. One appreciates the objective, the other the subjective.

2. Aren’t we all Musiphilosophs in some manner or another? And what use is there in inventing a term that covers us all and distinguishes not one of us from another?

Do not let me be misunderstood. There was the suggestion, in Mr. Jennings’ Net, Blogs & Rock’ n’ Roll, that the music listener of now may frequently have to make the same sort of choices and ponder similar considerations that music industry professionals did in the 1950s. This is not to say that each listener does or realises that they may have to. For the most of us, it remains that one plays a song because it is pleasing and it is exactly what one wants to hear. However, for the few savants, enthusiasts or how-one-wills, the current cultural climate allows one to explore their own corners of the musical world, making however many or few discoveries along the way. However, Musiphilosophstry requires that the listener do this consciously, amazed by the amount of music available, interested in what small part of it they know and intrigued by the gap between the two. For some, setting an empeethree-player to shuffle, while taking a walk, is a pleasure to be enjoyed passively, while, for the Musiphilosoph, it is an experiment in self-editing that investigates the relationship between the soundtrack and the space.

3. Is the Musiphilosoph liable to appear on beebeecee 4?

Indeed, yes. And he or she is as liable to appear in a documentary about Mr. Wyatt as in a series where Mr. Morley uses his six favourite 45s to examine what it means to be English.

The Musiphilosoph’s natural habitat is The Long Tail (http://www.longtail.com/about.html)

4. Are you not playing somewhat fast and loose with that quotation from Edmund Wilson’s A Modest Self-Tribute? Only three sentences before the one you reference, Mr. Wilson wrote:

“I have been working, as a practicing critic, to break down the conventional frames, to get away from the academic canons, that always tend to keep literature provincial.”

Does this not stand in opposition to what you wrote and how you used the quotation?

Well, indeed, I agonised for several minutes over how much of that passage to include, but decided that the sentence its self was relevant, even if the paragraph and contextual setting were not. What Mr. Wilson said about literature in the 1950s holds true largely, in that literature is mainly canonical and, if one digests the moral of the essay, provincial – provincial in the sense that Anglo-literate readers will mostly read books written in Anglo-English. If they read any of those foreign books, they will, most likely, be taken from the accepted canon of that country, which is the equivalent of buying a holiday home in Provence. Thus, most readers will not have an understanding of literature in a global context, merely in an English-written one.

This does not necessarily apply to music. Certainly, foreign language pop music can be a little off-putting for some, but, if one is truly curious, it proves much easier to listen passed the unfamiliarity than it is to find the plot through an impenetrable, alien text. What I understood Mr. Wilson to mean was that there is a tendency amongst readers of a certain language tradition, by which we can all read English without feeling wholly xenophobic, to consider their province of literature to be the world. Naturally, this is detrimental to both the reader and the written word. However, the whole world of recorded music sits before us at the online empeethree retail store or through the person-to-person illegal download application and , while one may be ignorant of its content, one could never be thought ignorant of its magnitude.

The sentence taken from Mr. Wilson’s essay presumes such an awareness and recommends that the critic-reader, or, in the case of this essay, the critic-listener, explore her own way through this magnitude, posting their own landmarks and points of reference as she goes. The benefit of his metaphor  is the implication that the space one is exploring is much greater than the explorer their self, in fact the universe is expanding. Surely the only one to comprehend it is to chart one’s own way through one small corner of it.

5. Is it not more accurate that these wonderful technologies open up the world to us and give us the opportunity to be culturally cosmopolitan?

The internet no more invented the odd and the avant-garde than budget airlines founded the city of Prague. And a weekend in Prague makes one no more worldly than a season in Hull. Technology may place all of culture in our reach, but this is not cultural cosmopolitanism. Nor is having an eclectic collection of empeethrees. Cosmopolitanism implies having a sophisticated overview of the whole and, as this technology allows artworks to be produced at a greater rate than they can be appreciated, the whole gets bigger while the percentage one can understand of it gets smaller. However, being isolated in one’s own cultural province, that is one’s taste, allows one to explore it how one will, adding to and changing it as one goes along. Such technology does not, then, provide a Hubble telescope through which to see the arts, but offers each of us a magnifying-glass.

6. Isn’t this just something else, but described in a different way?

Many things are.

Addendum To Section The Second

The trouble may lie in following Mr. Bennett’s joke that history is “just one thing after another.” It may well be, but the past is more probably ‘everything, and then some.’ That is, that whatever constitutes the before-hand is everything that ever has been. And even in historic times, during which some small group will always be able to write and read coherently, there will be fewer accounts documented than that silent majority of events that is passed over, comprised of the seemingly insignificant or the un-record-worthy. From the what has been, the historian works with that which is recounted and pieces together history. This is done as one composes a scatter-graph: the points of incident are charted and a straight line-of-best-fit is drawn. Thus, each point of historical fact is recognised as being its own anomaly, the bearing of which on the narrative of history is determined by the subjective gaze of the historian and the clumsiness of his or her hand.

Fig. 4

Such may not mean so much in the story of human progress or, worse still, politics, for it is likely that the most fastidiously documented occurrences will have been of the greatest importance. Or, at least, the documents will have been written by the victors, who can be trusted thoroughly. And yet, the set of things known to historians will always expand more slowly  than the set of things not known to them, for sometimes that is how things are and will be, even if all the people could write clearly and each was self-aggrandising.

Further problems arise in the idea of a musical history. For the incidents of note that populate the musical scatter-graph are largely musical pieces them selves and, as music can represent little more than its self and can reveal no explicit truth, their importance and relationship with other pieces is hard to pinpoint. To understand the development of these ideas requires that one suppose the influencing factors of a composition’s composition, which would beg a full knowledge of the composer’s full knowledge. It is quite unlikely that one would come by this knowledge all by accident, so one need be thankful that many of the great composer’s were avid diarists and letter-writers, who plotted their trajectory in one way or another way. But the pop artist is not quite so particular about posterity of this kind, inadequately annotating their motivations in interviews and liner notes. Certainly not since punk have pop musicians clearly stated the forms against which they were reacting and the aims they hoped to achieve.

A musical history demands that pop conveys ‘nowness’ so that it can be placed within a narrative, as, perhaps, the German Zeitoper, or ‘Now Opera,’ of the 1920s can. However, the circularity of twenty-first century pop does not permit such easy labelling. The resources from which the modern pop musician can draw are many, but few of them are newly-minted sounds or ideas by which one could date any given piece. Rather, innovation comes from the sly configuration of old ideas, while ‘nowness’ is denoted solely by apposite lyrical references to current trends, common celebrities or the rituals of Sheffield night-life. This is not necessarily a bad thing. It simply highlights that, now, for any musician all ideas thus far explored are in equal reach and can be played with accordingly. All music is plotted on the scatter-graph  and the musician adds their own musical-history-of-best-fit.

The same elements lie at the critic’s disposal, but, as critic and musician are different people, the latter is liable to draw a line of a different gradient altogether. As each party’s field of knowledge is bound to be different, it is quite possible for the critic to infer influence from artists that the musician in question has never heard; the only connexion between the two artists being that the critic knows them both. Thus, if the critic is trying to read the artist’s understanding of music from the music they are making, he or she may as well read it as follows:

Fig. 5.

This does not even consider that music so engulfs the world that one could be unwittingly influenced by a nugatory radio song, half-heard, or an invasive mobular phone ringtone. It could well be the critic who is unduly influenced in this way and not the musician.

A second failing of ‘nowness’ is that music may no longer happen in real-time. A magazine published weekly resulted in a readership learning about new groups at roughly the same time and, incidentally, forgetting about them for new new bands at roughly the same time as well. However, so long as online magazines and blogs archive all their work, it is possible to discover articles months or years after they were posted. Print publications have a greater say on when they are read and, thus, can shape the musical landscape, while internet pieces wait around hoping to be read at all. The visible musical narrative, then, will be shaped by those media, like the popular press and national radio and television, that release information at specific times to many people, but these media will always err on the side of commercial caution, which will only ever represent a small portion of what people are listening to. This is probably because dead white men don’t appear on teevee. It may prove difficult to work out what else people are listening to and from which friends, relatives and blogspots they received tip-offs, if they received any at all. However, it is probably true that it now as easy, and as valid, to discover a band performing before one was born, as it is to find one releasing their debut single this week.

“If I kept a hotel room, then I wouldn’t have enough money to hire a copyist to copy the music or to go up to my place (near Ithaca), because to make a trip up there would cost $50, including carfare and food for a few weeks. I couldn’t have the room and the music copying and the trips up there, so I had to make a choice: either keep a room and not go up there, or not have a room and go up there once and a while. So some of the time I would just sleep on the streets to save money.”
Mr. Moondog,
From Soundpieces 2: Interviews with American Composers by Cole Gagne.

“When I wrote the words I didn’t know they would come true – I ran away from all the noise I so abhor. Before I left they told me I’d be back for more… etc. So right they were.”
Mr. Moondog on the piece New York,
From Mr. Byrne’s programme notes for the New Music America concert, Nov. 1989.

Whether escape from the complexity of modern living is a necessity for some or merely much desired is a question pinned for debate elsewhere in these volumes, but the invention birthed by it is indisputable. Mr. Moondog’s invention lies not so plainly in his orchestral music – grammatically-applied counterpoint is only refinement and one-thousand part canons mere ambition – although, it is for this that he hoped to be remembered. Rather, his inventive contributions to music were made in the pieces he composed for the streets of New York. However, the life that called for the construction of his strange, new instruments and alternative modes of notation was so singular (if one’s singularity can be greater than anyone else’s) that his innovations may not be transferable. Mr. Moondog created such a definite image for his self, through the adoption of hand-made, Nordic clothing and mystic philosophising, that the music may be inseparable from the composer, which, in the classical tradition, guarantees death. If the time and place of creation are discernable, the pieces may be left to languish then and there.

However, Mr. Moondog always looked out of time and very much out of place. He eschewed the problems of The Global Citizen by claiming citizenship in a country that did not exist. He imagined his self “A European In Exile,” an idea that should have found resolution when he moved to Germany in 1974, aged 58, but it did not, for the Europe from which he was exiled was one untouched by Judeo-Christianity or the millennia that have passed since it was actual. Through the construction of this philoso-identity, he ensured his position as the eternal outsider, which is a nice spot from which to be a Musiphilosoph. When German admirer and henceforth assistant, Ms. Goebel, took him in, he was given a home, which is not quite the same as being at home, but it was close enough for him to disrobe from the Viking garb without losing his identity. In New York, however, the identity had to be externalised and taking a home was impractical.

Thus it was the streets of New York that made Mr. Moondog the icon with whom we are familiar. Where else but New York could a street performer become an internationally-recognised figure? And where else but New York could forge a figure so recognisable? New York is the focus of such global curiosity that any person who gains recognition there receives it again across the world, which is why Mr. Moondog became a tourist attraction almost as soon as he had taken his Spartan stance on 6th Avenue. New York is also a metropolis with the capacity to grind down the lives of the poor, unless they can find mechanisms by which to cope with it. However, it was through these inventive means that Mr. Moondog refined his persona, allowing it to survive passed his own life-time. By rejecting New York as a home in actualtude, he made his self inseparable from it, in much the same way that his music threatens to be inseparable from him.

A case in point is his recording career, which began with Mr. Moondog drumming in the doorway of Mr. Oller, owner of the Spanish Music Center and studio facilities. Had Mr. Moondog taken to conventional living and followed the more comfortable paths to money open to a musician, Mr. Oller would never have offered to record the three 78s that started the documentation of the musician’s life. Similarly, the sounds central to On The Streets Of New York, Mr. Moondog’s first release, are the percussion-heavy ‘Snake-Time’ rhythms of his Oo and Trimba, instruments designed for their ease of carrying around busy avenues and playing, squat-legged, on stoops and street corners. It was these conditions that required his compositions be short: they were written out of doors, where he was continually interrupted by well-and-woe-wishers; he could barely afford to finance the transcription of his Braille sketches into musical notation (for which he had to invent a new system of minimal scoring that he called ‘Stock Scoring’); and, as they were played in exchange for the pittance that kept him alive, they had to be concise, like jukebox records, to guarantee replay. It was this pop-like brevity that made the pieces perfect for 45s, human interest spots on television news and adoption by counter-culture figures, like Ms. Joplin and her group, Big Brother & the Holding Company. He received no royalties, of course, but whatever improved his visibility on the streets increased the income he could make from busking. This money, in turn, would finance trips to Candor, his acreage upstate, where he lived for weeks on end in a make-shift, tarpaulin grotto, fine-tuning ideas and constructing giant drums from holes in the ground. Occasionally, he would hold jamborees with travelling hippies or risk death walking through the snow from the bus station. This, perhaps, was the closest he came to the imagined home of “The European In Exile,” but it was not a self-sustaining existence, even when he went into a quasi-retirement there in the late 1960s. To fund living in Candor, he had to spend most of his time not living in the big city.

There is no doubting, of course, that Mr. Moondog came to New York with ambition, but he took an odd approach to achieving it. Only an unfair person would suggest that his appearance and ideology were purely to ensure attention, but to imagine that he ignored such effect would suggest that he was mad, which he was not. His lifestyle must be read as part principle and part self-mediation, the results of which were mixed good and ill. It was certainly because of his appearance that Mr. Rodzinski, then head of the New York Philharmonic, granted him unique licence to the orchestra’s rehearsals, where he met Mr. Bernstein and became known within wider classical circles. A shtick, even if not intended as such, will always help a young(ish) composer move up in the world. However, the same Mr. Rodzinski later rescinded contact with Mr. Moondog when the latter refused offers of clothing and other help made by the conductor and his wife – where the religiously-maniacal Mr. Rodzinski had seen Christ in the composer’s face, Mr Moondog had intended Wodin. It is self-creation, perhaps, to wear a horned helmet and carry a spear, but it is principle, or worse, stubbornness, to suffer frostbite on shoeless feet. It was the former that brought him to recognition, but the latter that prevented him being taken too seriously, when, surely, it should have been the other way around.

Transferring to Germany, when the good Ms. Goebel offered to house him, was not the realisation of his European fantasies, but the natural resolution of his New York reality. By the 1970s, he was too old and the streets too dangerous for him to live that way anymore. He admitted, his self, that the unpredictability of drug addicts, more prominent in New York towards the end of his tenure than ever they were before, made him uneasy about sleeping rough. However, there seems only scant difference between this incident and the campaign to house Mr. Moondog that The Village Voice started in 1968, a campaign that resulted in the composer living for a year with the now famous Mr. Glass. As his global renown increased, the more likely it was that persons from further a field would take an interest in him. But, as his renown was based on his image as the blind, eccentric, homeless musician, it is natural that much of this interest manifested its self in attempts to take care of him, many of which attempts he ignored. His ambition was to play such a role as that of Mr. Bach or Mr. Wagner, which he achieved in later life and by the same means as they: patronage. In a Western world, where we are each expected to make, at least, a meagre existence and where most art can be commoditised and sold at small profit, patronage in the old sense is extended only, if at all, to those who cannot seem to do either. Thus, the patronage granted by Ms. Goebel’s was based on the myth that Mr. Moondog had cultivated about his self, the same myth that the terms and conditions of her patronage required he give up. It was what he deserved at that age, rather than the harsh patronage of New York City tourists.

If, towards the end, Mr. Moondog could content his self with wearing only black cloaks and sleeping in an actual bed, these changes would do little to affect his reputation. The myth had already been set and no conversation about his music would ever avoid mentioning it, even though one can discuss Mr. Bach without bringing up that composer’s poverty or talk of Mr. Handel and not his opulence. Because, despite his efforts to seem both timeless and European, Mr. Moondog really existed in America in the time of rock’n’roll, a time and place that emphasised myth even moreso than pre-Christian Scandinavia. His philosophy of escape was defined by the society from which he was trying to flee and the elements of which his aesthetic was composed were the necessities of his counter-intuitive, counter-cultural life.

He composed prolifically because, as a freeman, his time was his own and because his busking commissioners paid for performances and not compositions. It is telling, then, that the majority of his orchestral works remain unplayed, due to his still-moderate reputation and the ambition behind some being too great, while, in drips and drabs, some of the smaller street pieces and shorter works have passed into the repertoires of others. As Dr. Scotto writes in his excellent biography of Mr. Moondog: “For his music to survive his presence it will need interpretations by diverse hands in other venues; it will have to be gently but firmly weaned away from its creator.” It is the creator, created his self, who betrays time and place and, if not left to languish then and there, may at least become a side note. For musically, Mr. Moondog bridged rock’n’roll, which loves the myth of impurity, and classical, which loves the pure ideal, and, perhaps, where he stands between the two, the myth of the man and the ideal of the music can be gently separated so both may live.

“I invented the formula of ‘music composed, arranged and conducted by Ennio Morricone’.”
Ennio Morricone, in interview with Adam Sweeting, 2001.

Mr. McLean strode onstage first, humbled or charmed or one of the states one can’t discern from a distance. The wings of his shirt collar ruffled like those of a roused rooster, his hands wringing the microphone like it were the neck of the same. He had been waiting his whole life, he told us, to announce Mr Morricone to the stage, which seems presumptuous and unambitious. I had been waiting only since the purchase of the ticket to hear him announced, but that is more time than I would allow a Mr. Williams or a Mr. Goldsmith. I have heard the Philharmonic Play those pops’ Pops before.

Mr. Morricone is thought of differently to other composers in his field, although why is not wholly clear. Unlike the Messrs Zimmer and Shore, Mr. Morricone composes directly to manuscript, without plying tunes from the piano first, and all his work is orchestrated by his own hand. But, while this is a rarity in modern Hollywood, one would have been guaranteed the same from Mr. Herrmann, at least, and neither the first wave of refugees-turned-film composers, like Mr. Korngold , nor the would-bes, like Messrs Stravinsky and Schoenberg, would have envisaged working any other way.

But nor would it ever seem that Mr. Morricone thinks himself a composer above mere movie jobs, as the guesswork surrounding the total number of scores written (is it four hundred or more like four hundred and fifty?) illustrates a work ethic that far outweighs any preciousness. And, yet, he appears to recall, in interview, so little about the films on which he has worked, while seldom forgetting to mention his own ‘absolute music,’ that music that comes solely from him and is intended only for the concert hall; although, none of the latter sounds through the Waterfront Hall this evening. However, iconography is not kept by statistics and, had only one of those four hundred scores or fewer symphonies yielded up a melody to the communal culture, his contribution to the world would be greater than my housemate‘s and mine combined.

Mr. Morricone’s exulted position is determined by the pull of these and many other thoughts: that he was raised in a culture with a different relationship to orchestral music than that held by Hollywood’s America; that he worked initially in a movie industry with different, and possibly lower, measurements of success than those of Hollywood and at a time when cinema had finally become accepted as an artistic and experimental medium. The ubiquity of some of his themes and his association with the silver of celluloid make him almost as glamorous as a rock star, while his commitment to music and composorial means, as well as, it must be admitted, his age, give him the air of an elder statesman from the time when classical music was the music of the people, the era of Mr. Puccini, the last hummable Italian. It is the quality of the themes, however, that inspires, this evening, the number of standing ovations that a musician can usually expect only in a dive with no chairs. The audience is so quiet with reverence that one could hear an old man cough and frequently do.

Sir Christopher Frayling dismisses various avenues of discussion before his lecture the following morning, as no body finding its self in the QFT would wish to discuss music so early. Rather, the talk focuses on the Italian Westerns on which Mr. Morricone collaborated with Mr. Leone. This, it would seem, is Sir Christopher’s speciality. And, so the public consensus would suggest, Mr. Morricone’s too. Yet, throughout the informative and amusing address, the composer is approached as one would a man defended by a bodyguard, the bulk of the great director’s body of work hiding the uncooperative composer behind. Set design and casting choices are examined and explained with greater attention than the selection of notes or instruments. However, when the snippets from The Good, The Bad & The Ugly and Once Upon A Time In America are played, it would be hard to argue that the wrong choice of pitch or timbre had been made.

The music, it is implied, must be discussed in relation to the films, as Mr.Morricone’s approach to filmic composition is one of near-organic enmeshment, where the score cannot merely be tacked on, but must play its own role within the piece. It is odd, then, that he refers to his concert hall pieces as ‘absolute music,’ as his cinematic methodology is almost Wagnerian in its commitment to Gesamtkunstwerk, that is ‘absolute art.’ If the music he composes for his own ends is absolute as music, is the movie music incomplete without the accompanying image or somehow compromised by the association?

Certainly, during that afternoon’s airing of The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, the score gives a fine supporting performance. The main theme resurfaces, like a Wagnerian leitmotif, throughout the film, indicating each of the titular characters. However, it is a leitmotif shared alike by the trio, varying only in instrumentation with each actor, to convey, as the whole film does more subtly, that we are each , in part, ugly, bad and good. Not that this would be apparent (and how could it be) without the freeze-framed curlicues that identify Messrs Eastwood, Van Cleef and Wallach with each of the named qualities – or, perhaps, they have been mixed up cleverly. Taken from its context, as must happen to all iconic works, the tune is now used to set Wild Western ambiances and imply shoot-out situes, when the theme became famous, originally, as a departure from the cowboy conventions of Mr. Tiomkin and Co.

During the concert’s simultaneous broadcast on Radio Ulster, Mr. McLean opined that it was difficult not to hear that theme without seeing, from the corner of one’s mind’s eye, Mr. Eastwood, as The Man With No Name. Knowledge of the movie prompts one to see this more easily than Mr. Berlioz‘s own notes conjure a hanging man during the Symphony Fantastique, but, from my seat, I could only just make out the trombonists that nudged one another and newsreader, Mr. Thompson, redden in his role as first male of the Belfast Philharmonic Choir. Hearing that two-note melody on doubled-clarinet, rather than arghilofono or torturous yelp, negates the close associations of timbre with mood so carefully built up in the film. And, when the response to that call comes from masterfully blended strings, instead of a raggedy Sicilian folk group, something is confused – one does not feel the weathered desperation of the Wild West (if music can ever be thought to make one to feel anything against one‘s will), but inspires, instead, a recognition that comes close to certainty and a triumphal admiration of something done well. A one-hundred piece orchestra is not equipped for subtlety.

There is a fundamental way in which classical music differs from pop music. The former floats freely in the imagination of the author, until enambered in the permanence of script. The ideal rendition of the piece, as heard only in the composer’s head, is imprinted, silently, on the page, where it waits for interpretation. While no orchestra, I’m sure, could capture the exact enunciations or elocutions of the writer’s perfect performance, or the subjective ideal of whomsoever reads the script, each recital is right in its own way – no matter how badly played – as an act of inferring the artistic ambiguities left unspoken. Though one can be compared to another, no one of them can be given authorial authority.

Pop music, on a different hand, is written to be recorded and is transmitted from composer to audience by means of performance. The work of the imagination is caught in vinyl instead of manuscript, so that each timbre, each stress, each climax is winnowed to a specific from the possible. Though others may reinterpret the work as they will, all alternate renderings exist in comparison to the original, which, simply by being released, is considered how the composer thought the song should sound.

In this sense, film music is more like pop. For, although, it may be scored and orchestrated by a single composer, as in Mr. Morricone’s case, a documented, definitive version is recorded to accompany the film. In fact, the interplay between music and image could more forcibly fix the recording as being the right one.

Mr. Morricone is, thus, more ecstatically received than any living concert hall composer would be. Not just because his music is largely better, which it may well be, and better known, which it most certainly is, but because it is with his recordings that we are most familiar- he conducted them, he orchestrated them and he pressed the red button. His live appearance grants the event more gravitas than a mere evening of movie greats gamely sawed at by a Philharmonic. That it is him along with his own orchestra gives it almost the pretence of being a rock band; the sense of authorial authority carries through, even if, once begun, Mr. Morricone is revealed to be a static, unmoved conductor, whose clumsy, old man’s hands search for a soloist to take a bow, but direct an uncertain second viola-player to stand up. However, like a seasoned touring band, the orchestra have played through the numbers so many times as not to need a conductor.

“I can’t remember anything about it, except that the director was a beautiful woman.”
Ennio Morricone on Stark System, in interview with Will Hodgkinson, 2006.

Mr. Morricone loves those lovely women. They comprise such a large portion of his orchestra: their stylish white hair draping onto the piano keys; their pursed lips titillating reed and mouthpiece; bowing braids of horse hairs across several rows of strings. To whom else would he grant a silly red rose, but the graceful, obsidian-haired first violinist? Ms. Rigacci, his faithful soprano, whose haunting voice is so completely at one with the Roma Sinfonietta that, at times, one can hardly hear it. One lady, unmiked, could never outsing a one-hundred piece orchestra, nor should she try.

Our own lovely women were there as well, making up two thirds of the Belfast Philharmonic Choir. But where were the great ladies of Radio Ulster? On the broadcast, no Ms. Lenaghan. Or, more worryingly, Ms. Louise-Muir of Sounds Classical, who has compeered so many of the recent opening night concerts. Instead, the show was annotated by Mr. McLean and the avuncular Mr. Cato; between them two film reviewers and a pop fan. The festival’s other large-scale classical event is also a movie score to be played in its entirety.

Films often star lovely women. I have spotted a connexion.

The film score is lucky as a form of instrumental music, in that it is almost guaranteed to be listened to in full and in context; when first heard, it will not be edited down to only the finest moments. Soundtracks comprised of pre-composed pieces offer the complete opposite though and, as such, many people now will be familiar with older orchestral themes and movements, excised from their settings, because they have been dubbed over something on the cinema or television screen. The concert hall and screening room make different demands and, for a piece of music to move from one to the other, it must be groomed adequately. A film score, even ones as well-integrated as those of Mr. Morricone, plays up to the dialogue: filling in its gaps, emphasising its emotions or implicating its ironies. And thus, its pacing is all wrong for the concert hall; the constituent parts are too short and sharp, the whole too long and meandering.

As a result, tonight’s selection hears choices from the full gamut of Mr. Morricone’s career, but each altered, redressed and rearranged to fit into the concert setting. However, to accommodate the conventions of concert music – length, pace, etc. – that seem to have been forged long ago in direct relation to the human leg’s capacity to cramp, they aren’t played as they appear in the films nor played, each tune separately, as an independent piece, but are, instead, reshuffled thematically into an approximation of a symphony.

The Life & Legend Suite, for example, comprises the theme from The Untouchables, Once Upon A Time In America, The Legend Of 1900 and Casualties Of War; an overview of American history that hopes to make mythic the country’s desperation and determination. However, with no thematic connexion (musically), each movement dies, suddenly, upon a muted, upturned chord, and transforms, unexpectedly, into the next. The emotional strengths of each segment, which are apparent when played alongside film footage, seem to build to the same tenor moment and then, with the scattergun narrative of pieces forced together, to go nowhere.

It is only the final suite that sounds like a complete piece of music . And, as it is an abridged soundtrack to The Mission, this requires no further reasoning. But, for completeness’ sake, let us say that it was due to recurring themes, consistent orchestration and a musical arc that, while unable to relate the story of the film, hints towards it subtly. Also, as the score was originally written for and recorded by a full orchestra, it feels appropriate and unadulterated – no odd ends forced together, no distinctive instruments replaced by sterile strings.

An earlier attempt at the Spaghetti Scores puts together Once Upon A Time In The West, The Good, The Bad & The Ugly, Fistful Of Dollars and Ecstasy Of Gold, which sit together well conceptually. However, the notable inconsistency between the rich orchestration of Once Upon A Time… and the simple, folk arrangement of The Good…, the heavy percussion of Fistful… and modal swirl of Ecstasy… requires that each be rearranged all in a line. The result is an Ugly theme that more resembles Rawhide, the very trite scoring from which Mr. Morricone hoped to escape, and a Fistful Of Dollars subdued by the lack of drums and a distant guitar. It would be untrue to think that these alterations diminished writing of this strength, but the significance of each is delicately changed.

It is Mr. Morricone’s skill at arranging, as Sir. Christopher points out, that has resulted in his acclaim and success. The tune of Ecstasy Of Gold is, its self, incredibly simple, but is stretched out to almost four minutes by an intricate interweaving of instruments and ideas. Even when those instruments are substituted to suit the sinfonietta, the ideas remain. When the strength of the piece lies in the interconnectedness of the melodies, rather than a single strong theme and its relation to specific timbres (as in The Good, The Bad & The Ugly), then it can be reimagined in many different ways and can be played, not only once as an integral movement, but twice as an independent encore.

Notable exclusions:

Pazuzu’s Theme from The Exorcist II: The Heretic – Mr. Morricone’s seventh highest grossing film.
The Man With The Harmonica from Once Upon A Time In The West
Piume Di Cristallo from L’uccello Dalle Piume Di Cristallo – With its haunting similarities to Mr. Komeda’s score for Rosemary’s Baby – the two being written less than a year apart.

Mr. Morricone and Sir. Christopher Frayling are in disagreement. Sir. Christopher has brought up, more than once, as has more than one interviewer (how many times was it mentioned in all?), the influence of Mr. Cage on Mr. Morricone’s film work, most significantly the integration of everyday sounds with music, be they ticking watches, parped harmonicas or Bach fugues.

As Mr. Morricone rightly points out this is a nonsense. His scores are so strained over that they could not be left over to chance as so much of Mr. Cage’s music was. The substitution of real-life for music that is central to the latter’s 4’33 is far-removed from the integration of the two that gives, admittedly, a small portion of Mr. Morricone’s its power. In both cases, the presence or absence of music, intensifies the action or, indeed, the lack of action – one draws attention to a musician, in the background, who lacks an audience; the other, an audience, in the background, lacking a musician. Rather, as Mr. Morricone has said, it was the musique concrète works of Messrs Schaeffer, Stockhausen and that sort that has made his work so populist.

That is not suggest that there is an absence of ticking watches at the concert. They keep their time just as well as the old men expel their phlegm. But it is the musicians that make the most noise, though not solely those sounds intended. The rock musicians, who, during beat-long rests, slouch at the back of the stage like the bad kids at school, click and clack throughout: the extraneous drum-kit and its snare bleed at every pop of the electric bass; the guitarist inserts his jack noisily over a solo piano interlude, but is barely audible when The Good, The Bad & The Ugly needs him the most – never has a guitarist pulled so many faces to make so little sound.

“It is the definition of a wall of sound,” Mr. Farrow, the festival organiser said on the previous night’s Arts Extra. But, it seems, the wall of sound is only just blocking out a teenage rock group rehearsing in the next room. There is an odd separation between the unity of the acoustic instruments, which were designed to blend together, and the amplified electric guitars and synths and the heavily miked drums, which sound distant or layered sloppily on top. Unlike the film scores, these disparate parts do not integrate seamlessly. They are not balanced, as they would be in the perfect recording – whether that be film or record – but it is that disparity and failure to get it just right (and the old men coughing) that reminds us that this is a real event happening in real-time. And you can hear none of it on the radio broadcast.