We the People
May. 11th, 2004 09:26 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
rinueStudy music history for a while, and you automatically divide music into two basic groups: cultivated and vernacular. It's not a division based on value, like "good and bad"; it's not based on the subject matter or the instruments. Basically, it's about access - who was writing the music and who was listening to it?
Cultivated music was the music of the courts and the church. It represents almost everything we know about the music that existed before recording technology, because it was the music that got written down. Vernacular music was the music of the people - or rather, music by the people. It's not that they didn't hear cultivated music, because most of them went to church and the best court music trickled down to vaudeville-esque theatres; they just didn't write cultivated music. The instruments they played tended to be those they could teach themselves, instruments that didn't require the delicate maintenance of a lot of mechanical valves or stops. Guitars, violins, drums, recorders. Songs were written to be easy to sing - unlike opera, they didn't require intense training or a knowlege of several languages. They didn't even require much of a vocal range. What we know of these songs has been passed down as drinking songs, children's songs, sea shanties, and folk music from the past couple hundred years that happened to get written down by enterprising scholars.
This doesn't really do vernacular music justice. Obviously, it varied a lot between cultures, but a lot of it is pretty much a cross between jam bands and slam poetry. Its strength came from its weakness; since the music wasn't written down, it was intensely flexible. It could be played on whatever instruments you had on hand, in whatever key you wanted. If you wanted to lambast a certain political figure, you could write a new verse off the cuff. (Incidentally, this is why you often run into several songs that use the same tune.) Moreover, imitation wasn't really a problem. Nobody worried about copyright law, because vernacular music wasn't commissioned and wasn't recorded. Money came from crowd donations after a good performance, and if you wanted a song to survive, you convinced as many musicians as you could to add it to their repetoire. Besides, chances were that you were a travelling musician, unlikely to pass through the same town twice, or you were a local boy who didn't make his living off music.
Anyway, ever since Rock'n'Roll's invention, it's been classed firmly in the vernacular camp. It rose out of jazz and African spirituals, both of which are characterized by improvisation, self-trained musicians, and no written record. More than that, Rock speaks to the same audience. It's always styled itself as working class and anti-establishment. It works hard to be accessible; although bands will always experiment with new sounds, and although some bands' image is founded on obscurity or sheer lack of listenability, bands mostly try not to challenge the listener too much. Songs tend to have verses, refrains, hooks, clear melodies - things you can latch onto, sing along with, and get stuck in your head. Sometimes a band will talk about "stretching the listener's mind," but most of the time, they're just trying to produce something catchy. A perfectly noble goal, and one that has helped millions of listeners get through rough days, or get down on the dance floor. Where you'll hear people come out of symponies saying, "it was an interesting concept, but I wouldn't want to hear it again," Rock audiences have it easier - either you like the band, or you don't. Either you like the song, or you don't. There's none of the same intellectualizing, nor the same restricted access.
Or at least, there didn't used to be. Within the past thirty years or so, that's changed. Rock music has become cultivated.
Funny word, "cultivated." It means "tended," like you'd tend a garden. "Farmed," you could say. I said before that it's the music of the courts and the church, but that description breaks down in an era without a noble class, an era when religion is no longer the center of most people's lives. Cultivated music is trained music, organized music, controlled music. Cultivated music is owned. Cultivated music is limited access.
Rock'n'Roll has become all of these things. Jazz, too, and hip-hop - even rap. Music in general has become dominated by the music industry. Not by individuals - by an industry. Groups are auditioned and assembled from young people who've never met; records are powerfully influenced by producers. Songs are copyrighted; pyrotechnics displays are carefully planned.
None of this is a bad thing for music, per se. I'm not trashing the Brittany Timberlakes of the world - if they're entertaining, they're entertaining. Why not give huge elaborate concerts if you can? I'm not dissing art bands either, saying they've sold out and shouldn't need managers. Copyright law is a good thing, in that it allows musicians to make a living on what they do without having to constantly be on tour. As for managers and producers, they streamline things and let musicians be musicians instead of forcing them to worry about business, hotels, or the latest advances in studio microphones.
Overall, music is more accessible now than it ever has been. Anybody can walk into a store and pick up a CD - used CDs are rarely more than $5. Anybody can listen to the radio, or call in and request a song. With the advent of the internet, you can download almost any song you want and place it in a list of other songs you like. If you want to play it on your guitar, you can even download the tablature. You can even fiddle around with the sound balance if you'd like to hear the song with a little more bass. Clearly, cultivated music is as good for the consumer as it is the musician.
But wait - I said that cultivated music was characterized by limited access. It is. It's not a limit for the consumer - cultivated music is designed for the consumer. It's not a limit for the professional musician. The problem is - and here's where it's tricky - you have to be at one extreme or the other. The consumer does not participate in the creation of the music, and the musician is by no means allowed to dabble. It's not enough to write one good song; singles barely exist anymore. To get your one good song relased, you have to write at least eight more. Once you've done that, you can't just go down to the town square, play it for your friends, and let it become popular by word of mouth; you have to pay for studio time, record a demo, send it to a record label, and hope that somebody there likes it enough to ask you to rerecord it, and then likes the rerecording enough to get it into record stores. As for that town square playing . . . do you have a permit? Otherwise, you're a disturber of the peace.
Is this bad? Is the songwriter put upon? Maybe, maybe not. Because we have access to so much music, we need filters. Record companies act as those filters. Are they flawed filters? Almost without question, but they're better than nothing. There are media consolidation problems, certainly; there are fewer record labels and radio conglomerates then there are symphony orchestras, so it's actually tougher to get a rock song on a local radio station than it is to get a violin concerto premiered. These are problems that have been discussed at length, along with the restrictive contracts most musicians face. It's all very irritating, but there will always be barriers to creation, and there will always be a few people who manage to succeed from outside the loop - who self publish online, who play in coffeehouses, and who persuade (fast disappearing) independent record stores to carry their self-printed CDs.
What concerns me is the barrier between musician and audience. As traditionally vernacular music has become more cultivated, it's gotten more complicated. It tends to require more tracks, more instruments, more effects - more technology. The difference between what I play at home and what I hear on the radio gets wider every day. It's not the melodies; it's the synth violins, the sound samples, and the overlapping vocals (all done by the same person). Don't get me wrong - I can do that stuff on my computer; however, when I do, it's not really me playing it, just like playing a flight simulator isn't really flying a plane. That kind of constructed music, while impressive and useful, isn't live, and nobody can play it with me. By the same token, I enjoy listening to things I could never play myself, just like I enjoy listening to opera. I also sing along with most of my CDs.
But I just sing along. I just imitate what is already recorded. I don't influence it; it doesn't respond to me. I don't change the notes to suit my voice and I don't change the words to suit my life. I'm a consumer of music, a musical voyeur. That's what has happened to all of us, all except maybe a few thousand people who are making the music. Great stuff is happening; some phenomenal albums are being released. But at what price? If we're not helping create the music; if we're not tailoring it to our special, personal circumstances; if we seek passive catharsis from someone else's processed emotion: can it really be considered a music of the people?
Cultivation has done some great things for Rock, but we need a new vernacular.
Cultivated music was the music of the courts and the church. It represents almost everything we know about the music that existed before recording technology, because it was the music that got written down. Vernacular music was the music of the people - or rather, music by the people. It's not that they didn't hear cultivated music, because most of them went to church and the best court music trickled down to vaudeville-esque theatres; they just didn't write cultivated music. The instruments they played tended to be those they could teach themselves, instruments that didn't require the delicate maintenance of a lot of mechanical valves or stops. Guitars, violins, drums, recorders. Songs were written to be easy to sing - unlike opera, they didn't require intense training or a knowlege of several languages. They didn't even require much of a vocal range. What we know of these songs has been passed down as drinking songs, children's songs, sea shanties, and folk music from the past couple hundred years that happened to get written down by enterprising scholars.
This doesn't really do vernacular music justice. Obviously, it varied a lot between cultures, but a lot of it is pretty much a cross between jam bands and slam poetry. Its strength came from its weakness; since the music wasn't written down, it was intensely flexible. It could be played on whatever instruments you had on hand, in whatever key you wanted. If you wanted to lambast a certain political figure, you could write a new verse off the cuff. (Incidentally, this is why you often run into several songs that use the same tune.) Moreover, imitation wasn't really a problem. Nobody worried about copyright law, because vernacular music wasn't commissioned and wasn't recorded. Money came from crowd donations after a good performance, and if you wanted a song to survive, you convinced as many musicians as you could to add it to their repetoire. Besides, chances were that you were a travelling musician, unlikely to pass through the same town twice, or you were a local boy who didn't make his living off music.
Anyway, ever since Rock'n'Roll's invention, it's been classed firmly in the vernacular camp. It rose out of jazz and African spirituals, both of which are characterized by improvisation, self-trained musicians, and no written record. More than that, Rock speaks to the same audience. It's always styled itself as working class and anti-establishment. It works hard to be accessible; although bands will always experiment with new sounds, and although some bands' image is founded on obscurity or sheer lack of listenability, bands mostly try not to challenge the listener too much. Songs tend to have verses, refrains, hooks, clear melodies - things you can latch onto, sing along with, and get stuck in your head. Sometimes a band will talk about "stretching the listener's mind," but most of the time, they're just trying to produce something catchy. A perfectly noble goal, and one that has helped millions of listeners get through rough days, or get down on the dance floor. Where you'll hear people come out of symponies saying, "it was an interesting concept, but I wouldn't want to hear it again," Rock audiences have it easier - either you like the band, or you don't. Either you like the song, or you don't. There's none of the same intellectualizing, nor the same restricted access.
Or at least, there didn't used to be. Within the past thirty years or so, that's changed. Rock music has become cultivated.
Funny word, "cultivated." It means "tended," like you'd tend a garden. "Farmed," you could say. I said before that it's the music of the courts and the church, but that description breaks down in an era without a noble class, an era when religion is no longer the center of most people's lives. Cultivated music is trained music, organized music, controlled music. Cultivated music is owned. Cultivated music is limited access.
Rock'n'Roll has become all of these things. Jazz, too, and hip-hop - even rap. Music in general has become dominated by the music industry. Not by individuals - by an industry. Groups are auditioned and assembled from young people who've never met; records are powerfully influenced by producers. Songs are copyrighted; pyrotechnics displays are carefully planned.
None of this is a bad thing for music, per se. I'm not trashing the Brittany Timberlakes of the world - if they're entertaining, they're entertaining. Why not give huge elaborate concerts if you can? I'm not dissing art bands either, saying they've sold out and shouldn't need managers. Copyright law is a good thing, in that it allows musicians to make a living on what they do without having to constantly be on tour. As for managers and producers, they streamline things and let musicians be musicians instead of forcing them to worry about business, hotels, or the latest advances in studio microphones.
Overall, music is more accessible now than it ever has been. Anybody can walk into a store and pick up a CD - used CDs are rarely more than $5. Anybody can listen to the radio, or call in and request a song. With the advent of the internet, you can download almost any song you want and place it in a list of other songs you like. If you want to play it on your guitar, you can even download the tablature. You can even fiddle around with the sound balance if you'd like to hear the song with a little more bass. Clearly, cultivated music is as good for the consumer as it is the musician.
But wait - I said that cultivated music was characterized by limited access. It is. It's not a limit for the consumer - cultivated music is designed for the consumer. It's not a limit for the professional musician. The problem is - and here's where it's tricky - you have to be at one extreme or the other. The consumer does not participate in the creation of the music, and the musician is by no means allowed to dabble. It's not enough to write one good song; singles barely exist anymore. To get your one good song relased, you have to write at least eight more. Once you've done that, you can't just go down to the town square, play it for your friends, and let it become popular by word of mouth; you have to pay for studio time, record a demo, send it to a record label, and hope that somebody there likes it enough to ask you to rerecord it, and then likes the rerecording enough to get it into record stores. As for that town square playing . . . do you have a permit? Otherwise, you're a disturber of the peace.
Is this bad? Is the songwriter put upon? Maybe, maybe not. Because we have access to so much music, we need filters. Record companies act as those filters. Are they flawed filters? Almost without question, but they're better than nothing. There are media consolidation problems, certainly; there are fewer record labels and radio conglomerates then there are symphony orchestras, so it's actually tougher to get a rock song on a local radio station than it is to get a violin concerto premiered. These are problems that have been discussed at length, along with the restrictive contracts most musicians face. It's all very irritating, but there will always be barriers to creation, and there will always be a few people who manage to succeed from outside the loop - who self publish online, who play in coffeehouses, and who persuade (fast disappearing) independent record stores to carry their self-printed CDs.
What concerns me is the barrier between musician and audience. As traditionally vernacular music has become more cultivated, it's gotten more complicated. It tends to require more tracks, more instruments, more effects - more technology. The difference between what I play at home and what I hear on the radio gets wider every day. It's not the melodies; it's the synth violins, the sound samples, and the overlapping vocals (all done by the same person). Don't get me wrong - I can do that stuff on my computer; however, when I do, it's not really me playing it, just like playing a flight simulator isn't really flying a plane. That kind of constructed music, while impressive and useful, isn't live, and nobody can play it with me. By the same token, I enjoy listening to things I could never play myself, just like I enjoy listening to opera. I also sing along with most of my CDs.
But I just sing along. I just imitate what is already recorded. I don't influence it; it doesn't respond to me. I don't change the notes to suit my voice and I don't change the words to suit my life. I'm a consumer of music, a musical voyeur. That's what has happened to all of us, all except maybe a few thousand people who are making the music. Great stuff is happening; some phenomenal albums are being released. But at what price? If we're not helping create the music; if we're not tailoring it to our special, personal circumstances; if we seek passive catharsis from someone else's processed emotion: can it really be considered a music of the people?
Cultivation has done some great things for Rock, but we need a new vernacular.
