Scrutiny and envelopment

What does one’s increasing involvement in composing music do to one's perception of music? A change that I have noticed in myself is that I have more often understood music in an imaginatively physical sense. My relationship is now not so much with disembodied sound -- self-sufficient manifestations -- but with sonic ideas given form, results of compositional effort. In a sense, the music has become more comprehensible. For example: when I hear a chord, I don’t hear “just the music” – I also visualize the chord as a “form.” Another noticeable change, and one acknowledged with some regret, is that I may put myself in competition with the music. In effect, the mental question is “Could I do that?” This is perhaps good from the perspective of prompting oneself to be better . . . yet I feel that this perspective is at an imbalance with a creative confidence approaching egotism. My problem with this intrusion of the ego is not so much that it lends itself to an unwieldy projection of the self; it is that it takes one out of the musical experience by making the critical element of personal taste vs. subject matter (which is always there) a frontal concern that replaces personal taste with personal creative capacity. Perhaps this is an impossible thing for composers to overcome, and is a matter of degrees, but I have had to struggle with repressing the egotistical pattern to more enjoyably engage music in general. This is why I have begun to really value music that instills some kind of humility. More and more I see my ideal musical experience as one that negates my self and introduces a period of absorption. I need to enter a mental space that is . . . not ignorance, but unselfish attention.

This brings up two relatable subjects: one is Greg Kelley’s album, “Trumpet.” The other is Allan Holdsworth. After speaking to people and reflecting, I think I’ve narrowed down my biggest problem with “Trumpet”, and it is that the music seems to have no interest in the absorption I spoke of. I’m willing to grant the possibility that this is the result of the CD format. Even with this allowance, I feel that there is a problem . . . perhaps one of appropriate translation, or maybe a disagreement with the idea that the successful expression of good music can be exclusive to the performance of it. Presentation trumping content isn’t a valuable aesthetic model for me. Whatever the case, my critique is of the CD – from what I have heard. Michael Fried’s essay, Art and Objecthood, seems relevant. In it, Fried attempts to explain his negative opinion of “conceptual art” and encapsulates it with a novel definition of “theatricality.” To Fried, theatricality connotes art that engenders a self-conscious separation between participant and art. An example could be a person walking into a room with a cubic sculpture and having their dominant thought be “I am myself in a room with a cube.” If this sounds literal, it should, and Fried does disparage “conceptual art” as literalist. His definition of theatricality works well for how I feel about “Trumpet.” Though this treads into risky territory by making guesses about intent, having a knowledge of “experimental/conceptual music” of the twentieth century, I can see the album as including itself in an ocular/sonic history of art aiming to be anti-experience and striving for the clinical, “this is the sound of such-and-such and I am in myself listening to it” attention of the listener. So I’m inclined to designate the CD as objectified music. As I wrote somewhere else, the music that I enjoy is a product of generative manipulation, but “Trumpet” is still caught on the manipulation, or the object of the idea, itself.

Allan Holdsworth comes up because many of the songs of his that I’ve heard invoke humbleness through their musical inventiveness. I may have reached a point in my relationship to music where, in all likelihood, I will never again experience a paradigmatic upheaval as I did when, say, I first heard Rei Harakami’s music, but the songs of Holdsworth’s that really get to me are wild and strange enough that I think I might have enjoyed such an upheaval had I heard them so many years ago. Sometimes I'll have dreams where I’m hearing music whose excellence is beyond description. It's as though the music of the world is shown to be two-dimensional, while this music unveils new notes to tonal reality. Saying that Holdsworth’s music approaches this state is sort of ridiculous, because the dream music is beyond belief, mastery, reproduction, though something about “Mr. Berwell” or "The Dominant Plague" or etc. reminds me of dream-music. My opinion might change, but right now I’m by far least interested in the improvisational, scalar virtuosity of Holdsworth’s songs, even though that seems to be a big investment for him and his fans. The information is simply too rapid and dense – and similarly relayed in speed and intervals -- to do a lot for me except have me think, “You’d need a fast mind and fast fingers to do that.” Before I end, I also want to point out how some of Holdsworth’s albums feature singing, even though the respective albums still hold true to his music’s frequently shifting tonal centers. This means that the singing feels . . . wrong. A switch in musical acceptance seems to happen when a voice assumes the dynamism of an instrument. Maybe it is the clash between the explicit understanding of words and the relative abstraction of an unexpected note.