David McSherry

The Tail Wagging The Dog

Industry Studies

A lively debate around copyright and (in my opinion) how overzealous copyright laws obstruct the development of new music and culture. If you’ve not heard it before, Nate Harrison’s Can I Get An Amen? (2004) is an excellent investigation of these issues using the iconic Amen break as a case study.

Analysis

The following is a series of notes taken from reading and discussion around Kasdan and Appleton’s rather paranoid text on the influence of technology on the composition process Tradition and Change: The Case For Music (1970).

In traditional Western music there is a division of labour between the composer, the performer and the audience. In the West, the score narrowly defines how piece should be performed.

Systems of the East, however (India, Indonesia, Japan), are much looser allowing for variation on the part of the performer. In ‘World Music’, for example, the audience can be much more a part of the composition itself.

The rise of the virtuoso performer saddles the composer with a burden. The virtuoso tended to neglect the score and in an attempt to reach the audience with an accurate recreation of their work, composers would clutter their scores with instructions to the musician. This would result in complex demands on their performance and musicians would gravitate to earlier, simpler works. Commercial considerations, such as the cost of a symphony orchestra, would also impinge on the compositional process.

This separation of roles of the composer, performer and audience have been changed with technological innovation. Technology allows the composer to communicate directly with their audience without an intermediary. In electronic music the composer is also responsible for the performance, every beat, texture or fragment of sound is intended, or at least edited, to sculpt the composition and performance to the desired shape.

As an electronic music composer, how much do your tools of choice inform your music making? Who (or what) is in control, you, or the technology?

By processes of continual sonic metamorphosis on the single ‘clink’ of two wineglasses, Trevor Wishart’s Imago (2002), constructed with self-designed software, is an attempt to answer this challenge in sonic art.

Published in 1970, the Kasdan and Appleton text amusingly and perceptively predicts an “instantaneous realization” available to the composer of the near-future in a “semicomputerized studio”:

“A small keyboard, similar to that of a typewriter, would be used to specify the original, electronically generated material. Once specified, the sound would be played and the composer could make any changes desired. This material could then be stored on a computer memory and could be instantly recalled should the composer want to hear it again or develop the idea further. Once completed the work would be transferred from the computer memory to recording tape and made available to various ‘performance’ media: radio, record companies etc. The composer could carry out this process in his own home using a data-phone connection. The significance of electronic music, in which the composer deals direct with sound, lies not in the use of new material but in the fact that the composer is communicating directly with his audience without an intermediary.”

It’ll never happen

Talking About Music Is Like Dancing About Architecture

John Shepherd’s chapter ‘Text’ in Key Terms In Popular Music And Culture had my brain swinging like a pendulum this week. One page would have me fascinated by the notion of music being thought of as a text; firstly as an element of culture, subject to the various forms of cultural theory (Barthes etc.), secondly as the literal, musical form itself, subject to sonic musical analysis in terms of pitch, dynamics, timbre etc. A turn of the page, however, sent the bullshit alarms ringing in my head. For example, Shepherd argues that analysis of the early rock ‘n’ roll favoured by the motorbike gangs of the 1950s could provide social meanings such as; “three chords, the tonic, the dominant and the subdominant, together with either three or four beats to a measure….could be viewed as a basic code for the hierarchical structure of industrial capitalism.” Quite.

The quote ‘talking about music is like dancing about architecture’ kept ringing around my head. Having said that, the morning’s discussion around musical syntax, the signifiers and ‘musical punctuation’ that help us to decode music and its meanings had me completely hooked and involved.

I like talking about music and engaging in debate. Musical discourse is, after all, what this course is about. I’m also pretty sure that I’ve cut a rug to some funky architecture in the distant past too.

Signs And Symbols

In Week One we are introduced to the reading of cultural artefacts. How differing approaches and schools of thought (Structuralism, Post Structuralism) try to unravel layers of myth and meaning using semiotics and context. I am obviously steeped in social and cultural references points but I have had no formal education in the world of critical theory, I’ve never heard of Barthes and Saussure, never mind read any of their work. So, it’ll be interesting!

We are also introduced to the role of the score in musical analysis. The limitations of a traditional, western style notated score, the attempts to interpret a musical piece using a graphical score (see Ligeti’s Artikulation below) and to a piece of French analysis software called the Acousmographe.