Play On! Give Me Excess of it
VICTORIA KINGHAM begins an occasional series of musings on the power and effects of musical creation.
Recently I heard Dame Sheila Hancock talking about music on Stephen Mangan’s radio programme The Confessional. She is passionately fond of classical music and makes no secret of the fact that she thinks she is a musical snob. She thinks this in part because she doesn’t like music that is just ‘on’, (not being listened to), and she doesn’t like the loud thump that passes for music in some people’s cars as they pass in busy streets.
MUSICAL SNOBBERY
Now if this is being a musical snob, then I am one myself, and I was pleased to hear this very intelligent articulate actor voice the same view. The idea of music ‘in the background’ seems to me an oddity, as though it were a kind of auditory wallpaper, the blander the better, put there to cover up the cracks between thoughts or platitudes. But these sounds, this instrumentation, these harmonies, this timing, these lyrics, this combination, have been composed. They have been invented, considered, developed, played, rehearsed, bar by bar. It is, at the very least, politeness to listen to what someone’s mind has produced, to give it attention. I know countless people who, when asked what music is playing at the moment in their home/restaurant/shop/supermarket, will say they don’t know, that they just have it ‘on’ in the background. And I wonder why they think it was written.
MORE THAN THIS
Many celebrities will choose music on, say, Desert Island Discs, not for the music itself but because it was playing on their first date, or because it was an accompanying tune when they won their first Oscar, or it was something their dad used to play. No one could say that these reasons are wrong, and music has the power to augment and solidify a memory, or an event, or a period in your life, and this is a wonderful thing.
It also has many more fundamental and visceral powers.
Consider the myriad scientific studies done on diverse life forms. Fish dance to Tchaikovsky. Digger ants perform the best tunnels to jazz. Cows produce more milk when listening to classical music. Bacteria grow faster to heavy metal. It is possible that music has a ‘soothing’ effect on unborn human babies. Reputedly, it may have the power to boost the human body’s immune system. Even worms, deaf and blind, are proven highly sensitive to different musical vibrations. Music is intrinsic and universal, yet it is one of the highest forms of human creativity.
According to Michael Spitzer, “music has been used to communicate and to coordinate with others for thousands of years, but humans weren’t the first source of song. Birds, whales, and even bats are frequently defined by their use of musical patterns to attract mates, deter rivals, or to define who they are.” Birds and whales improvise, and have ‘vocal learning’. So too do humans. The first bone flutes discovered date from about 40,000 years ago. Somewhere in the murky past, humans abstracted sounds from their immediate environment, made musical sounds for their own sake, and the sounds became Art.
GENRE TROUBLE
So it seems to me that to treat music passively is to insult those members of the human species who created it. “I don’t like jazz,” said a music teacher (who really ought to have known better) to me one day. I stared. “Which jazz don’t you like?” I asked. “I just don’t like it,” she repeated. Apart from the fact that I am quite sure I could have found her a jazz number that she liked, she was unequivocal. “Surely, have you heard …?” I started, but she said she really wasn’t interested. So what is she teaching? If jazz was good enough for Mozart (cadenzas in the Bassoon Concerto, countless improvisations playing his own concerts and concertos – apparently they had to stop him sometimes as he ran over time at his recitals) and Beethoven’s fabulously syncopated passages in his final sonata, (or the unexpectedly off-beat six-eight of the 9th symphony molto vivace). And if Stravinsky and Prokofiev and Debussy and Gershwin and Copeland and Bernstein and Previn and Barenboim (to mention just a few geniuses) all acknowledged the wholly American, wholly original, influence of popular music heard in clubs and speakeasies, why is it not worth the attention of a British school music teacher?
But this is a rant about the appreciation of music in general, not jazz in particular. Look at the converse. While so many jazz musicians are classically trained and many of them record straight versions or jazz versions of classical music (especially Bach), why is classical music still so often ignored by millennials as music only fit for the elderly? Amadeus for instance was five years old when he composed his first piece, and six when he began his punishing concert circuits. (Think of the difficulties that beset a family travelling in the eighteenth century, even a wealthy family, and the hardships of modern bands ‘on the road’ pale into insignificance). Mozart, Gershwin, Schubert, Chopin, all died in their 30s, having composed some of the greatest music of all time.
THE ART OF NOISE OR THE NOISE OF ART?
Having established the remarkableness of musical creation, I want to acknowledge here that there must be enormous differences in the way that individual beings absorb and recognise the same sequence of sounds. There’s a very brilliant banjo player called Bela Fleck, for example, who is able to play absolutely anything, any genre, accurately, joyfully, perfectly. He is one of the more gifted musicians of his generation, born into a strong American bluegrass tradition but without boundaries in his ability both to play and to compose. I listen and I marvel, and sometimes I almost weep. A good friend of mine listened briefly, loathed it, and told me it was a terrible noise. Of course there can be differences of opinion, but this seemed to me something much more profound. I hear something that uplifts my spirit. What does she hear? And can I possibly answer these questions?
Of course not. But over the coming weeks and months, I’d like on these pages occasionally to explore phenomena like these in more detail, and any opinions from readers would be more than welcome. It’s perhaps naive to think that such exploration is possible in these pages, but it would be fascinating. Many academic journals are devoted to musicological study, scientific experiment, experiential differences, cultures, sounds, origins. So I can’t pretend to erudition. But I can read, think, do limited research, and share and discuss the findings.
I’d like to explore the casual dismissal of whole genres without having really heard very much, the universal love of the familiar, how the familiar gets familiar in the first place, what is ‘popular’ and why, why some people’s perception of a song is of the words (I know a quizzer for example who can recite whole verses of – seemingly – every single pop song since about 1980) but mine seems to be of a whole conglomerate of related sounds of which the words are only a small part. And why, indeed, are most people happy if the music stays ‘in the background’?
Critical comments or contradictions to [email protected] very welcome.
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