The Musiphilosoph, Explained.
Section The First
“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.
