Technology has radically changed the way we experience music. For those of us in the field, there is a feeling that we no longer know what we once knew. But times of great change are certainly not new in history; in fact, they cause us to ask old questions with a renewed intensity. In our case: what is the purpose of music? Is music here to make us better human beings? Entertain us? Move us? Make us feel deeply? Relax us? Make us think? Make us forget? Does music reveal history and culture? Tell us about biology—certain sounds affect our brain in certain ways? Can music be used to corrupt us? Influence us to reject society? Encourage us to be loyal servants of the government? Is music something that is supposed to unite us?
While the questions above get at some of music’s purposes, none captures the whole elephant since it is, well, impossible. And thus, a course insisting there is only one, absolute definition of music is not a very good idea. So just what should we study in a music history course?
We may not be able to comprehend the whole of music, but we can learn much by assembling some of its parts or perspectives—whether they are drawn from questions (above), a genre (music of the 1920s) or a cultural angle (feminism). And these perspectives define our class as it becomes its own ‘world’ made up of our listenings, research, compositions, images, conversations, and even our jokes—not to mention all of the cultural and historical associations with the music we bring to class. But I’m not doing this alone: as the class unfolds, you will increasingly shape this ‘world’ as you bring your own experience and discoveries.
I am now going to make a linguistic leap: instead of calling this class our musical ‘world’, let’s use the word DISCOURSE. Okay, what the hell is that? Think of a discourse as a system of continually shifting terms, sounds, images, concepts, etc—all linked by an overarching thing or, if we may use the grown-up term, discourse. A discourse can be anything: Iraq, pasta, Death Metal, and gerbils are all game—and if you think about each, sounds, terms, images, conversations easily come to mind for each. This class will be our discourse.
Here’s another significant question about music and learning: is music supposed to be experienced in a classroom? The answer is arguably no. Yet here we are. But my concern is not so much about the space as the attitudes that often accompany a classroom: professor lectures; students absorb; students reproduce; professor grades; students forget. More than any other discipline, this paradigm fails in the arts. Should music be listened to for a grade? I don’t think so, yet grading is part of college. My response has been to forge a middle ground that likes to hover around three ideas: 1) yes, I have a lot knowledge about music, but students have something quite valuable to contribute (and from which I can learn); 2) grades have a place, but feedback is far more important and should always be in the foreground; and lastly, 3) we need to create an experience where both you and I can take intellectual risks.
For your part, I recommend an open mind and willingness to play around with ‘ear stretching’ (great image) which is a worthy habit of mind for all of us. Charles Ives coined ear stretching from his father, George. Here’s Charles’s description some family ear stretching:
... my father had a weakness for quarter-tones -- in fact he didn't stop even with them. He rigged up a contrivance to stretch 24 or more violin strings and tuned them up to suit the dictates of his own curiosity. He would pick out quarter-tone tunes and try to get the family to sing them, but I remember he gave that up except as a means of punishment -- though we got to like some of the tunes which kept to the usual scale and had quarter-tone notes thrown in.
(http://artofthestates.org/cgi-bin/piece.pl?pid=255)
Ear stretching is accomplished by suspending judgment (I like; I don’t like) and allowing the piece time to make itself known to you. After all, we can only judge those things we know well anyway. If you are an avid Tool fan, you are no doubt familiar with their sound, development, and where they fit within their genre—your “I don’t like this particular Tool song” has weight. But if I’ve never really heard, say, Merzbow, and know next to nothing about noise art, am I really in a position to judge? In this case, my I don’t like is probably better rendered, I don’t understand. And the way towards understanding is through patience, a willingness to tolerate the strange (or even weird), and a desire to play around with ideas that might challenge your assumptions about what music is.
I would like to close with a quotation from Nietzsche that deals with the value of patience and receptivity to the new:
One must learn to love. - This is what happens to us in music: First one has to learn to hear a figure and melody at all, to detect and distinguish it, to isolate it and delimit it as a separate life. Then it requires some exertion and good will to tolerate it in spite of its strangeness, to be patient with its appearance and expression, and kindhearted about its oddity: - finally there comes a moment when we are used to it, when we wait for it, when we sense that we should miss it if it were missing: and now it continues to compel and enchant us relentlessly until we have become its humble and enraptured lovers who desire nothing better from the world than it and only it. - But that is what happens to us not only in music. that is how we have learned to love all things that we now love. In the end we are always rewarded for our good will, our patience, fairmindedness, and gentleness with what is strange; gradually, it sheds its veil and turns out to be a new and indescribable beauty. That is its thanks for our hospitality. Even those who love themselves will have learned it in this way; for there is no other way. Love, too, has to be learned. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science (1882)
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