Author: Curt Doolittle

GOOD MUSIC? DEFINE GOOD?

(worth repeading)

Good music is judged like all good art: (a)craftsmanship(materials and processes), (b)design (aesthetic appeal), (c) symbolism.

The more capital in each a,b,c, the better. The more durable the capital the better (the longer it remains in the vernacular)

After all, that is what beauty means to mankind: the presence of resources.

And especially if we add additional ‘resources’ by way of innovation (invention).

Some works are well crafted, well designed, and symbolically immoral.

Craftsmanship refers to dept and complexity.

Aesthetics to the emotional associations it evokes through the use of properties of sound.

Symbolism (meaning, content) refers to the narrative in correspondence with the other two.

So deeply crafted, emotionally experiential, poetically deep.

And in all three dimensions: inventive.

I could compare a series of reasonably well known songs that use very simple techniques reliant upon just the voice, in increasing complexity. I would consider all of these songs objectively good, despite their range.

Greensleves – Anon.

Scarborough Fair – simon and garfunkle

Hallelujia – jeff buckley

Cursum Perficio – Enya

Fiddle and Drum (a capella) – Perfect Circle

O Fortuna (Carmina Burana) – Carl Orf.

Hallelujia Corus – Handel

We refer to these as hymns (ballads to god-nature) or ballads (hymns to love).

In the pop genre we know how to create the ‘perfect song’, of which my favorite: “smells like teen spirit” is I think the current place holder. The staying power of Knickelback is that they have systematized if not industrialized the process of producing this category of songs.

Lets take another series and explore the border between hymn and anthem:

Canon in D minor – Pachelbel.

Kashmir by Led Zeppelin.

Sober by Tool.

Passive by Perfect Circle.

( could go on forever here )

Most of the history of rock consists of Coming of Age Music (Celebration Music) – the joy of opportunity.

Strangely it’s hard to find a lot of great stuff in there.

I mean, we can go thru every movement in music and do the same. And yes, I like chick pop also. I just understand that it’s novelty, not art.

It’s hard to Beat bach, but Mozart and Beethoven are still more popular. Why? Applied to joy and celebration rather than to … you know. That churchy stuff.

It is hard sometimes to separate a great VOICE or a great RECORDING, from great music. The usual example is one of my favorite recordings: Gimme’ Shelter, which is really a great recording but you can’t really repeat the experience again. And any number of female vocalists can sing anything, and its beautiful because they have a great voice, but it is not the music that matters so much as their production of it.

I have a thing for the voice, key, harmony, tempo, volume changes, and the use of silence. Possibly because I was in Chorus through I think 6th grade or so. And because of singing in church. But my taste dissipates rapidly without them, so a lot of dance/house rap music is uninteresting tom me while interesting to some other aficionados. I consider their work a technical investigation, but like the philosophy of language, a dead end.

Most advancement in music over over the past 40 years has been happening in sound for film and video games. Not in popular music.

I think that in retrospect we evolved new distribution models: phonograph/club, am radio/car, fm radio/stadium, videos/television, portable digital and spectacular film.

And that as the quality of the recording and playback increased, so did the richness of the material. ie: 50s/60’s sounded good on shit equipment. 70’s/80’s a little better. We got to late seventies and they started to mix loud. WE got to punk and they started to vary volume, we got to nineties and they started to combine everything. And since then the movement has been in the great movies and gaming, not so much the consumer space – which has produced a set of race-class-driven formulas for the satisfation of identities. And it’s not really collectively innovative any longer.

I suggest, operationally speaking, the era of ‘unity’ that we saw under the advent of the universalist movements made possible by mass media, will break into mini-markets and stay that way.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev, Ukriane