What may have been

I have to admit that I'm sort of disappointed in Allan Holdsworth's music. And that's annoying, because I've found in it a vibrating, revelatory, unique character. After rolling some ideas around in my head, I've started to think of Holdsworth's compositions in a permutational sense; i.e., their main goal seems to be the scalar exploration of a harmonic framework. With many a Holdsworth piece, it appears possible to divide the composition into a threefold structure: an establishment of the chordal bases, a subsequent melodic dissection of those bases (the longest part), and a re-establishment of the introductory chordal bases as the conclusion. I think this is comparable, in certain respects, to Bach's historicized role as an explorer of counterpoint. Of course, there is already a discrepancy in the comparison, since Bach's aim, let's say within BWV 1080, was to weave melodic voices together using a musical mode that produced an interdependent whole, while Holdsworth is giving us a fairly one-voiced result, via his guitar/guitar-like instrument, that is bolstered by the rest of his ensemble. But I don't want to be exact; for me, then, the comparison works when it identifies either composer's primary interest generally and understands the music as explicit explorations of melodic suggestions.

Perhaps, however, we can bury this comparison by simply linking Holdsworth's aims to that of jazz. I'm not sure. After all, Holdsworth treats the main meat of his compositions -- the melodic dissection -- as open to continual dissection itself, which is why many of Holdsworth's listeners may identify a note-by-note recreation of a guitar solo by another listener on their own guitar as a point-missing exercise. The most consistent part of Holdsworth's songs (putting studio recordings next to live performances) is their fundamental harmonic framework; and this framework is what propels the players into and what gives the general guiding baseline for the ensuing improvisation. One might be compelled to say that a good artist or band will present reinventions every time they perform a preexisting piece of theirs. Holdsworth meets this expectation at a high level by radically evolving the syntax each time.

My problem with Holdsworth is that I'm more interested in that framework, that baseline. This is sort of funny, because what's pushing me away is what's motivating Holdsworth and attracting the bulk of his listeners. To be sure, I can emotionally follow Holdsworth's improvisations to varying lengths. It is when the barrage of notes hits that I remember why (in part) a lot of jazz has little effect on me: my mind, my disposition, my intuitive approach -- whatever you want to call it -- can't interpret the scalar flood as anything more than what it literally is. My experience of the music becomes mere observation. Let me return to Bach and say that what interests me about his music is that it retains memorability within its complexity (despite my last article, let's temporarily use "complexity" in the popular musical sense). And, at first, I may assume that memorability is what Holdsworth's virtuosic solos lack. A double-take, however, seems to show that memorability isn't such a sustainable condition for qualitative assessment. After all, we sometimes characterize things that we really don't like as memorable in spite of that distaste ("I hate [X], but it's stuck in my head/so catchy!"), so can memorability be necessarily attached to standards of success? Furthermore, memorability is not always immediate, even though it's often linked to immediacy. We can make something be (relatively) memorable by repeated exposure. One might try to divide the word into a less substantive, short-term form and a more substantive, long-term form and thus make it qualitatively usable. I'm not sure about that division, though.

Even with the above points, perhaps we can use memorability if we're defining it as the degree of the impression of an experience we have with a given song, as opposed to our ability to mentally recall the specific components of said song (as it were, my ability to mentally "hum" or "drum" or whatever) -- so, value-wise, if we see it as experiential profundity and not as a sort of proof of discrete retention. On these grounds, sure, Holdsworth's scalar barrages (for me) retard memorability. But there's something else here. I'm tempted to use the phrase "Technical for the sake of being technical," although my current ideal of music is "Music for the sake of music," so I don't know how self-reference within self-reference is wrong. Finally (not to say that I've exhausted all routes -- only the ones that I've so far thought of), I'm drawn to the notion that I am, indeed, thinking of these scalar improvisations as "melodies," and that they are not fitting into a vague, personal contextual idea of what a melody variously embodies when I enjoy it. Maybe I need to reorient my what words I'm attaching to these songs' parts. Seeing as how my main approach to music is sensual, however, I doubt that shaking up the lexicon would be deeply affective. It seems that melodies most easily engage me when they have a quality for which I have no other word than "lyricism." Note that I am not using "lyricism/lyrical" in the cheap and common way of indicating [X]'s being "beautiful", "fine", or "elegant", like when a subject is described as "poetic." Instead, I mean that the melody imparts upon me a linguistic intelligibility -- as if the melody is speaking or singing in the place of no actual lyrics. It is common to refer to music as a separate language, and I think this is true, but in the cases I am talking about, that characterization assumes a realer form. Sad to say, this is as far as I can take this line of thought right now.