Watered-down sound keeps ear of listeners

One strange thing about complex society is that we outsource art.

We entrust specific, full-time segments of society with the creation of everything from music to film to sculpture, rather than making it ourselves.

On the surface, this doesn’t seem to have any strange implications, especially since aspects of almost every other element of life involve specialists. TV not working? Call the cable guy. Really, no one understands how to do these things themselves, and without specialists things just wouldn’t get done.

This is true for a lot of music, as well ““ either the technical aspects of performance are too difficult for the average person to reproduce themselves, or the compositional ideas are too unique, or the sounds are just more believable when coming from someone hyped, coiffed and filmed.

As much as this facilitates artistic life ““ we can listen to brilliant music while we make our own specialized contribution to society, or don’t ““ it can bring about some questions that don’t have parallels in the case of the cable guy. Music’s functionality isn’t so obvious, and I can’t hope to capture it here, but the point is that when it becomes someone’s business to make sounds, you can get art or music that exists in some theoretical space without depending upon people’s enjoyment for its existence.

This is the situation of the esoteric snob, or the misunderstood genius. The difference is that when people lived in more small-scale societies without economies that could support such specialization, music was probably much more of an accessible element of life, something that was turned on for time spent relaxing or in ritual, most likely by some layman or other with a knack for an instrument.

Now that the identity of musician exists, some of the sonic commentary ventures off into the opaque ““ into the widely alienating world of deep analyses, theoretical understandings and the deliberate flaunting of convention. I’m the last to claim that music needs to be widely enjoyed to be valuable, but all of this does raise the question that artists have asked themselves throughout the history of complex art in a complex society: what does it matter if no one is listening?

Aaron Copland, the poster boy of indigenous American concert music, is an example of a musician who experienced exactly this type of crisis. Somewhere in his early career, in the middle of intellectualized experiments with serial music and tonalities that were more than slightly divergent from the tradition, he started having doubts about his approach to the business of music. In a change of heart that no doubt aroused the disgust of his purist contemporaries, Copland decided to devote his efforts to composing for films, and for writing concert pieces that, without sacrificing his artistic integrity, would have actual appeal to someone who doesn’t spend five hours a day composing music or sifting through esoteric selections in a music library.

To accomplish this, Copland reinvented and recontextualized popular music, drawing from accessible folk themes and structures. To some, this amounted to dumbing down the quality of his music, but for him it was an acceptance of the tools that needed to be used to actually engage a wide audience artistically. This is different than understanding a market or branding a musical product and distributing it to the masses; it’s about stepping away from meta-musical commentaries and doing something that, in any practical or measurable sense, matters.

Copland wasn’t the first, and he won’t be the last. There are many artists who specialize in blurring the high and the low (M.I.A., for one, comes to mind). But I can only hope that music continues to embrace the diminishing significance of the pop/art divide, and that we can finally be liberated from self-righteous prog-wanking.

If you like that someone else makes the music for you, e-mail LaRue at alarue@media.ucla.edu.

Leave a comment

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *