BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Radio & Music >

Might music fans like music more than musicians do?

  
 
All Acting Regiment
17:13 / 23.01.07
So Ed Orno says this:

Is this what Lester Bangs meant?

'Perhaps what inhibits music lovers from playing music for a living is the dread of sacrificing the breadth of their identification with all the music they love. Conversely perhaps people who become professional musicians don't love music enough to relate to how constraining identifying themselves to one style/band/performance persona would be to the typical music aficionado.'

Of course the two needn't be mutually exclusive, but I wonder if the rareness of the confluence between love and proficiency might explain how much artists attacking critics is a symptom of the artists' realization that what they accuse the critics of--not REALLY liking music--in fact is their own problem.

I won't link to the discussion there just yet, as I guess it might be interesting to see what we all think before reading it, or something. I certainly think it's an interesting question, given that I've had the experience of living with self-identifying "musicians" who appeared to spend their days in an entirely hateful relationship with music, and I know several people who love music but have no desire or inclination to create it.

What do you all think?
 
 
RichT's boring old name
09:49 / 24.01.07
Certainly a question I have asked myself many times as I've trained and aspired to be a professional musician myself, however I feel that as soon as my livelihood starts to depend on something I love, playing becomes a necessity. The choice of what I play, when and with whom is taken out of my hands (especially in early stages of a career, you have to take what you can get). As a professional musician it is almost without exception that you have to be a "sell-out" at least some of the time just to earn a living.

Also most of the time you are doing the same "tricks" for the audience night in, night out. To be a professional means it's a job, and not many people come home from their job every night saying how much they love it.

I used to have a housemate who was an opera singer, and although she loved singing the actual process of going to rehearsals/performances etc did bring about a *groan...got to go to work* type attitude. I think a lot of why this is brought about is just through doing something you love almost all the time, rather than when you want to.

I'm involved in a couple of very close-knit music scenes and go to quite a lot of gigs/concerts, and it's actually quite rare that I see performers as audience members, especially at the more 'classical' end of the scale. I suppose that if they've been playing music all day they just need to switch off and do something different. However I see loads of composers there (mainly for networking) who have maybe been writing or at least thinking about music all day- maybe the networking aspect is more crucial for them, or perhaps there's still enthusiasm left?

Why do musicians often get so cynical? I often find my views on certain musics get more polarised, the more I know about them- I find the more I discover, the more innovative, inspiring, emotionally charged etc. a piece has to be to have an impact on me- I suppose it's a 'junkie' effect, you need a bigger hit each time and you find that some music just doesn't cut it. If you're exposed to too much music, you'll find most of it doesn't afect you at all and somethign really special has to happen for you to take notice. Whilst you're a professional there's essentially 'no escape' from music most of the time so all but the very best won't make any difference at all to you.

Somthing this can lead to is a mindset of "all music's shit and I'm going to do something about it", which as far as music's concerned this can be a good thing, but as far as listening pleasure and being able to learn from the past it's bad (and can lead to creation of bad music).

This is pretty much the reasoning why I don't want to be a professional musician (i.e. have my livelihood depend upon music). I'd like to be able to play what I want and not play when I don't want to- hopefully this will keep the spark of enthusiasm for music alive in me, and maybe lead to creating great music- but if you want to pay me for it, it's money on the side
 
 
Mike Phillips
11:09 / 24.01.07
I lived with a music major in college. He was a great guy but was completely jaded on popular music because he said it seemed to simple to him. Some of my favorites like Radiohead and Pink Floyd were boring to him. He NEEDED more complex to listen to.

I diagnosed him as someone who knows TOO much about music; too many music-related doors were opened in his mind. He saw behind the music curtain, so to speak, so the wonder that music can create, the mystery of a good song, was lost to him. Thus his snobbery.

I LOVE complex music, but I can love "simpler" music too. I pitied him (probably wrong of me -- but I did).
 
 
RichT's boring old name
12:39 / 24.01.07
Last weekend I went to a performance of Stockhausen's Stimmung, incidentally by some very good amateurs and went to the pub afterwards with other members of the audience, mostly composition lecturers and postgrad music students:

At the pub it happened to be drum and bass night (which was dj and mc playing in the corner with everyone else trying to shout over them and carry on conversations as far away as possible). To be honest it wasn't great drum and bass- but a large part of the conversation consisted of an almost instant dismissal of the form by some of the older members of the group (mainly composition lecturers), with comments like

"I heard an electronic piece similar lines to this [drum and bass] but 10 times more complex and after a few bars 1000 times more interesting".

Are they missing the point? I'm hardly a leading muscologist in the field of drum and bass but I can jump round like a loon to it and appreciate huge, squelchy, bowel-clearing basslines.

I felt it worked as almost an antidote put in context with the highly meditative Stockhausen piece, and certainly cleared my head up.

As far as my background's concerned I've got a masters in music performance (specialising in contemporary classical) and can still enjoy a bit of Britney...
On the other hand I still don't get Bob Dylan
 
 
Jack Fear
13:45 / 24.01.07
Having been a working musician in various capacities for more than twenty years, I will tell you this; there is nothing I love more than playing and singing music—but a relatively small percentage of a working musician's life is actually spent doing so.

This is the root of a certain frustration; and I wonder if that's not what we're really talking about here.
 
 
grant
14:25 / 24.01.07
Wait -- you're saying people get bored by what they do for a living? That sometimes it seems like a job???

Stop the presses, man!
 
 
grant
17:03 / 24.01.07
("you" being the plural for all the people before Jack Fear, and not Jack Fear his own self.)
 
 
RichT's boring old name
17:44 / 24.01.07
Wait -- you're saying people get bored by what they do for a living? That sometimes it seems like a job???

Yes, but the problem I find is that when it concerns something I'm so passionate about I feel that it shouldn't.

Maybe I'm being too much of an idealist, or just plain scared of taking the joy out of something I hold dear to me.

there is nothing I love more than playing and singing music—but a relatively small percentage of a working musician's life is actually spent doing so.

That's something I can certainly relate to having a full time job.

Something my teacher passed on to me was his answer to the question:
"When do you find the time to practice?"
"Mostly in my late teens/early twenties"

Another thought concerning the whole enjoyment of music is when listening, no matter how much I'm enjoying it there's always somthing in the back of my mind analysing it and thinking of what I'd do. That or wanting to be up on stage too.
 
 
Hydra vs Leviathan
14:09 / 25.01.07
Perhaps what inhibits music lovers from playing music for a living is the dread of sacrificing the breadth of their identification with all the music they love.

I think that's definitely true of me. My relationship with music is obsessive to the point of religiously devotional, but i have never more than briefly and idly toyed with the idea of ever actually playing an instrument (i have slightly more seriously considered getting into using computers to make music, but the possibility of that's an extremely long way off in terms of either knowing enough about computers or being able to afford the necessary hardware/software).

Many people don't seem to understand this (nearly all the friends i have who care about music anywhere near as much as me do actually play music), but i have a vague feeling that if i actually was to learn an instrument, it would somehow change or limit my appreciation of music in a way that might be distressing to me - i have so much emotionally invested in the music that i listen to, and have achieved enough of an "understanding" of it, from a listener/reviewer point of view, that for that to be changed would take me into mentally unchartered territory in a way that i would very likely not find at all pleasant...

is this sensible or stupid? i have no idea...

i do know that i think the whole "critics are hypocrites because they couldn't do any better than the artists they criticise" argument is a load of crap... because i definitely think that doing art and analysing (or understanding, or writing about, or appreciating) art are two different and not-necessarily-connected things... i dunno how i'd feel if i actually was a musician tho...
 
 
Jack Fear
20:40 / 25.01.07
That's actually pretty relatable, Natty. It's the same principle as the thought that if I knew how the magician did his tricks, it wouldn't be magic any more.

You hear variations of this amongst musicians, too, usually used as an excuse for their own shortcomings in technique or theoretical knowledge; If I learn to read music, or to play my instrument "properly," the argument goes, then I will lose the spark that makes my playing special.

It's fundamentally bullshit, of course. Music is not a magic trick; both music and magic are learned skillsets, but the performance of music is all about the display of that skill, rather than (as in stage magic) its concealment. The mechanism and the effect are one and the same—and the better you understand the mechanism, the better equipped you are to create the effect—and perhaps to appreciate it.

Listen: I spent most of the Nineties awed by the effects created by guitarists like Chris Whitley and Nick Drake, who played in a variety of altered tunings. I couldn't replicate the effect—in part because I couldn't reverse-engineer the tunings. With the advent of the Web, I found myself with access to the tunings and fingerings that Whitley and Drake used; but I lost none of my awe—because even with these keys laid out before me, I still couldn't replicate the effect.

And when I did manage a few of their tricks, I remained (and remain) awed by the sheer invention. I can play "One Of These Things First" pretty well, these days; it's in an open D tuning, and the fingerings are actually quite simple. But man, I've fucked around in open D for hours and hours and I have never come up with anything as crisp and beautiful as that riff. It gives me shivers every time I play it.

That's where the magic of the music is; in the wonder that someone came up with this in the first place.
 
 
Saveloy
10:22 / 26.01.07
Well, that's *one kind* of wonder, or magic.

I've never been as inspired or impressed by skill as I have by sounds. As a nipper, before I knew that such a thing as an effects pedal existed, the squashy sound of a wah-wah, or the swoosh of a flange or phase effect would cause my brain to explode. And because I didn't associate it with a concrete, common-or-garden box of electronics that could be bought off the shelf of any high street music shop, the noise went straight to the"wibbly wobbly fantasy" centres of my brain, instead of the Cold Hard Facts in Alphabetical Order area. No distractions, nothing to get in the way. I got a psychedelic light show in my head instead of a grubby hippy fiddling around with cables (I was a nipper in the early 70s and my brother was into prog).

Knowing that the technology behind the sound was actually from space, or that the artist who used it was a genius would make no difference - I want to experience the sound neat, unpolluted by facts. (I'm exaggerating my actual position slightly, in order to make the point) This is why I can never remember the names of bass players.
 
 
Tuna Ghost: Pratt knot hero
19:19 / 26.01.07
Jack Fear: That's actually pretty relatable, Natty. It's the same principle as the thought that if I knew how the magician did his tricks, it wouldn't be magic any more.

You hear variations of this amongst musicians, too, usually used as an excuse for their own shortcomings in technique or theoretical knowledge; If I learn to read music, or to play my instrument "properly," the argument goes, then I will lose the spark that makes my playing special.

It's fundamentally bullshit, of course... ...The mechanism and the effect are one and the same—and the better you understand the mechanism, the better equipped you are to create the effect—and perhaps to appreciate it.

I don't think you can deny that there would be a definate change in his appreciation, though, which is what nataraja is concerned about. I don't know if it would be hampered--Saveloy appears to think his enjoyment might be--but there would definately be a change.

I used to argue that musicians naturally appreciate music to a greater degree than non-musicians, a sort of "well if you loved it more you would want to take part in it's creation" thinking. I've come to realize that's probably not true. Some people apparently see the creation of music as a sort of wonderful mystery, which takes a back seat to the effect it has on them.

And if they're afraid that learning how it's done will alter the effect music has on them, what can I say to that? It might. I would argue that it would change for the better, and apparently so would Jack Fear, but I started playing music when I was young and can't really remember what music was to me before I started making it. So I really can't make that call.
 
 
Jack Fear
20:15 / 26.01.07
And if they're afraid that learning how it's done will alter the effect music has on them, what can I say to that? It might. I would argue that it would change for the better, and apparently so would Jack Fear...

Not necessarily "for the better." Just in a different way, an in undiminished quantity.
 
  
Add Your Reply