MUSIC COMMENTARY
BY
WALLY SHOUP
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If we think about the primordial sources of music, long before the Church, the Publishing Houses, or the Music Industry commandeered its myriad powers, we must assume that sounds were not always put into forms that could be recognized as what we call music. Were these primitive urges to use sound as a form of communication so different from today's urges? And if so, in what way? What was music used for back then: what activities did it accompany, which ones did it induce? Have thousands of years of progress made music any more necessary?
Killing us softly
Jacques Attali, in his profoundly enlightening book, The Politics of Noise, surmises that music initially was used to accompany ritual killings, which, in turn, had been used to take the place of widespread, mass killings. The sacrifices became a ritual to "civilize" societies and, eventually, the accompanying sounds became a substitute ( a simulacrum, to be more precise) for the sacrifices themselves. From this theory, it is apparent that music has a long and extremely important function for humans- to channel violent urges in a way that simulates, and thus obviates, the violence itself. Music's power to soothe, seduce, stimulate and create fantasy surely must have developed from these simple, but crucial, origins.
Another useful theory is that music, from its very inception, has been a means to both imitate and understand nature. From bird call imitations to the simulation of wind through the bulrushes, humans have attempted to reproduce and refine the sounds of nature. And, beyond that, humans have attempted, through the mathematics of sound, to understand what laws nature operates from: the interval relationships between the major scale and planets, the correspondence between forms in nature and the beginnings of geometry as in the Pythagorean ratios of sound, for instance.
As humans learned to shape and conquer nature, music followed accordingly. Architectural shapes, derived from mathematical formulae of pleasingness (the Golden Rectangle, the Circle) led to the formulating of pleasing music intervals (the major 3rd, the 5th) and later to chords: those replicas of "harmony," wherein dissonance is reduced to consonance, reflecting an ideal world with man buffered against the undifferentiated forces of the universe.
So, over time, music seems to have developed along parallel paths- (1) the arrangement of sounds which construct/reflect a human environment and (2) the arrangement of sounds that mirror the world "outside" the human.
The familiar and the strange
Fast forwarding to the late 20th Century, we find that music, which is now an omnipresent, background to everything, still has the power to reflect the familiar and the strange. Every conceivable human endeavor by now, though, has been "put to music" (analyzed, formalized, and commodified) and only has to be marketed in a form "new" to each succeeding generation of adolescents in order to seem familiar, but nature remains a mystery, particularly at the sub-atomic level, and has yet to exhaust the sounds and new forms it suggests. Chance Music, 20th Century Aleatory and, particularly, non-idiomatic free improvisation have been developed to mirror and investigate the world of quantum reality- a world where causal laws are turned on their heads, and form follows rules that defy normal human logic or the heretofore accepted laws of nature.
To be immersed in these sonic worlds reflecting other realities may at first seem bewildering and threatening in the sense that the music doesn't sound comforting or pleasing (much less familiar), causing listeners to question the motives of the players- are they trying to assault, to alienate, to consciously confound? And, even more distancing, perhaps, is the ambiguity of the emotions being expressed- are these sounds capable of stirring an emotional connection between musician and listener? And, should it appear that others are getting something meaningful from this noise, where does this put me? Am I clinging to something outdated? Are these folks just being duped by some new nonsense? Am I hopelessly nostalgic for standards- songs which have always been there to make me feel good?
The entertainer and the artist
Though there is no shortage of opportunists entering the expanses of new music with self-seeking motives, I believe music to be larger than any one person's grasp or imagination and the put-on artists (often revealed by their ironic armor), more than any, will suffer from their limited vision. Music is an infinite game: it reflects both the human world of understanding (and all the subtleties contained therein) and the non-human world of what remains to be understood. To use music as an imaginative means to understand the new and unfamiliar is what separates the artist from the entertainer. The need to feel comforted by music reflects a need to feel at peace with existence; the aversion to "uncomfortable" music would, therefore, reflect a sense of unease with the unfamiliar.
Music which requires attention to the unfamiliar doesn't necessarily command instant likeability. It requires a desire to go outside our comfort zones, risking alienation from our selves, which have, in this century of recorded music, been partially constructed out of what we've heard and identified with- music as life-style accouterment. Above all, it requires an active ear and imagination, engaging and interacting with the sound, willing to give it time to cohere and reveal its form.
But, it seems to me, that Music is the least threatening guide to unfamiliar realities. All it asks is that we open our ears to the adventure of sound- we are in no physical danger, and what precious time we squander in a less than satisfactory adventure can always be compensated for by replaying old favorites. From the familiar to the unfamiliar, from sound as mirror to sound as guide, from the campfire to the mountainside, imaginative and evolved music has the power to transport us beyond ourselves to realms bounded only by our limited imaginations.
Wally Shoup is a saxophonist for Project W and presenter of new music at the Other Sounds music series, held bi-weekly at the Speakeasy Cafe.
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