Long ago I
came to the conclusion that music is indefinable. Everybody knows what music is, but when you
ask them to define it they either offer you their emotional response (“music is
beautiful”), define the kind of music they like (“harmonious sounds”), or use
such a wide-ranging and generalistic description that, while it encompasses
what most people regard as music, goes on to describe things which most people
do not consider to be music (“music is organised sound”). I have my own sense
of what music is, which I occasionally attempt to contain within words, but
since I can identify innumerable flaws in my definition, I certainly do not
wish to share it with anyone.
One thing
we can all agree on is that music, at the very least, is communicated by means
of sound. Which is not to say that music
can exist without sound – following the beliefs of the ancient civilizations in
Greece and China, I subscribe to the notion that music exists without sound and
that the desire to contain music within sound places considerable limitations
on the scope and range of music.
Proof of
this comes in the music of Bach. Nothing
annoys me more (well, actually, an awful lot of things do, but let’s put that
to one side for the moment!) than people who describe Bach’s music as “beautiful”. To reduce some of the highest artistic achievements
of human civilization to the level of bikini-clad females parading on a
cat-walk, or the visual appeal of plate of pork sausages and mashed potatoes,
is, in itself, little short of outrageous.
But we must know that, were we to be transported – Dr Who and
Tardis-like – to 1730s Leipzig, we would be absolutely appalled by what we
heard. Shambolic music making,
grotesquely out of tune, ill-balanced and largely swallowed up in an acoustic
haze and obscured by the noise of people both in and outside the church, (and
let’s not forget the distractions of the dreadful stench of unwashed people and
unsanitary conditions, and the innumerable open sores and disfigurations of a
people yet to be subjected to systematic health care), it would strike us as
anything but beautiful. In our time, carefully
tended and respectful performances of Bach’s music put it on a high pedestal
and wrap it up in highly-manicured sound so that to our 21st century
ears its beauty is so arresting as to be its dominant feature. Yet even if 18th century ears had
a wholly different perception of beauty, I remain unconvinced that Bach ever
intended his music to be beautiful. Indeed,
I am absolutely certain that he would be horrified to feel that the sound of
his music was regarded as so beautiful as to obscure (even annihilate) the fundamental
message of Christian faith he was trying to promulgate. We like our beauty in the 21st
century; I tend to feel that for most people in earlier ages, beauty was a
luxury so rare that many never thought to appreciate or even identify it. But, of course, that’s open to debate. What
intrigues me is the relationship between music and sound.
Attending a
programme presented recently by student composers, I was very conscious that
what these students were doing was not writing music so much as experimenting
with sound. And since sound is the means
by which a composer communicates musical ideas, it is absolutely right and
proper that they should be encouraged to experiment and explore the
possibilities of sound without necessarily attempting to harness it in the
service of music. Each student stood up
and outlined their intentions.
(Unfortunately, while they had all been taught to use an amazing panoply
of actual and computerized sounds, nobody had told them how to utter words down
a microphone so that they were discernible amongst the audience in the body of
the hall.) From the often garbled
collation of indistinct vowel sounds (Singaporeans avoid consonants with the same
steely determination that left-wing British politicians avoid sounding the
letter T) I was able to make out that these students had very different
objectives in their various sound explorations.
That being the case, as a colleague confided in me afterwards, it was astonishing
that they all sounded more-or-less the same.
But the fact remains that here were some intelligent and fascinating experiments
in sound which, if applied to a musical composition, would certainly open the
way for a more wide-ranging channel of communication.
It is usual
for those with little musical understanding to dismiss any music they do not like
as “noise”, and we can point to innumerable examples through history where
great musical works have been so disparaged (Pravda describing Shostakovich’s Lady Macbeth of the Mtsensk District as “Muddle instead of Music”, Hanslick
describing Tchaikovsky’s Violin Concerto as “giving off a bad smell” and “does anybody for a moment doubt that Debussy
would not write such chaotic, meaningless, cacophonous, ungrammatical stuff, if
he could invent a melody?" from an American review of La mer). But to describe any
music as “noise” is to reveal a fundamental ignorance as to what music is; and
since nobody is quite sure what music is, perhaps we are all guilty of such ignorance.
However, I
am delighted that in our conservatory, at least, we are inculcating an
understanding that sound and music may be related but are by no means
synonymous. Budding composers need to
work with sound, but if they can appreciate that sound is a tool, not an end in
itself, we are breeding a better crop of composers than many of those who came
through the 1960s and 1970s where experimentation in sound became the very
raison d’etre of a musical composition.
Many back then agreed with Beecham’s famous quote about Stockhausen (“I’ve
never heard any but I think I may have trod in some”), seeing in his flippant
words a deeper awareness that sound in itself does not create a lasting or
valuable work of art.
Perhaps the
most intriguing consequence of this attitude comes in the figure of a recent
alumnus from the conservatory, a young man by the name of Mervin Wong, whose fascination
with the properties and uses of sound have led to him carving a special niche for
himself in the outside world as a self-proclaimed “Sound Alchemist”. Overlooking
the awful pretentiousness of the title, Wong has it right. You can play around with sound and use it to
create golden effects without ever quite crossing that invisible and debatable
border between sound and music. That
indefinable thing called music is by no means the same thing as that definable
thing called sound.
No comments:
Post a Comment