A (treasure) hunt for craftsmanship

I originally wanted to continue the I Heart Aesthetics saga and discuss "good" and "bad" music as objectively as the last two entries. I may still do that, but in the meantime, I want to discuss craftsmanship and my own potential limitations as a music critic in hearing any sign of it in the music of the band Treasure Hunt. Have a listen to a song in which I can appreciate the craftsmanship, and then listen to some Treasure Hunt:





There’s something to be said for craftsmanship. The Think About Life tune, for example, is actually a very subtle composition despite being based on a fairly simple musical idea (the bass line and clavichord combo). Multiple layers are slowly added to enhance the build; there is a clear climax and a satisfying denouement; there is an interesting non-repeating section (“Ah, in the summer sun, dancing in the gay clubs”) in which the bass line does a little dance, and the vocal style is unique and interesting. It shows some serious skill to be able to push a simple bass line for 3 minutes 45 seconds. I could say more about it, but I’ll let you discover its subtleties. Let’s move on to Treasure Hunt and to the real subject of this entry.

It’s hard to see craftsmanship in something like the music Treasure Hunt plays, which seems to be based on the belief that being loud has artistic merit. It’s kind of like how certain artists get away with bad art because they make it two stories tall. Their music rejects continuity in favour of abrupt juxtapositions, rejects the full spectrum from sound to silence in favour of the extremes, and it attempts coherence through repetition. With two drummers, it is also clearly more about rhythm than anything else. While these are worthy musical ideas, when I encountered them in Treasure Hunt’s set at the POP Montreal festival in October, I really really did hate it. The problem was that nothings stuck; the music just bounced right off of me so that when the set was done, I couldn’t tell how many songs had been played or in what ways one piece (there was no singing) was different than the next. I felt completely disoriented, with absolutely no musical landmarks, no way to establish expectations and feel surprised, and no real change in mood throughout.

I find it difficult, in general, to appreciate art in which I can’t find subtlety, which is problematic because the only way to appreciate subtlety is to understand genre, form, and a whole slew of other musical elements. No single critic, therefore, can be expected to accurately critique every type of music. My evaluation of Treasure Hunt obviously has “flaws”, because a lot of people seemed to appreciate it.* And the bands from which the members originally came (Wintersleep, Hot Hot Heat and Wolf Parade) are all fairly decent, well-established bands, so these musicians aren’t amateurs and this is all obviously quite intentional. But it’s actually baffling. Why would a competent musician put out music like this? Is this, perhaps, a genre which I know nothing about and is it therefore a fault of my own that I find no subtlety in this? As someone who strives to know something about music, should I be educating myself until I can?

Thoughts encouraged.


*The band that played after Treasure Hunt was Oh No Forest Fires, the lead singer of which said “Did you all see Treasure Hunt? You know that nasty old stripper that comes on at the strip club after the young sexy ones do their thing? Yeah, I feel like that stripper right now.” Which I am fairly certain he meant as a compliment to them.

Doubletalk?

While I'm all for using outside references to describe music (an inherently difficult thing to do), I might draw the line when your description of a band tells your average music lover absolutely nothing.

This is taken from Sergio Elmir's article in Exclaim! on Global Propaganda. I know I don't know anything about reggae or world music, but shouldn't I at least be able to get the picture?

"Caballo's third album is an extension of a uniquely global drum & bass sound that Caballo's been developing over time."

Okay, you think..."global"...cool adjective. I thinkI get it. \frown

"His ragga-heavy, politically charged rhymes travel across borders on the back of dubby bass lines while bouncing along to Balkan beats and cumbia riddims."

... So... ?

"The album ranges from glitch-y Balkan dub to dark dub-step to old school drum & bass flavour."

Now, if I want to know anything about this music, I have to go look up all of these terms, which completely defeats the purpose of reading an article. How about shortening the whole thing to "Do you like political world music you've never heard of? Check this band out!"

I get a very pretentious vibe from this write-up. Unless "Balkan beats" are a sound everyone knows about I just don't...

The Future of Music

There is an interesting article in this month's Exclaim! about the 2009 Transmission music conference. This is apparently a North American (maybe just Canadian - a bit unclear from their website) organization that puts together conferences about the entertainment industry. This is not the interesting part. Writer Allison Outhit aims a provocative suggestion at music industry folk: Is music more about music or about making money off of music?

"One fundamental question that never gets posed," she says, "not even at Transmission, is whether it's right that we continue to base all discussions on the future of music on the premise that only through its commodification can we truly 'value' music."

As I try to start up my own band, the inevitable question "why" has been easy to answer for me: because I love making it, and because other people like consuming it and perhaps there's a chance we might scratch each other's back. Even if I never get paid a dime, I'll still play/write. I think Radiohead has got it right: the future of music is free. Call me naive, but I still believe that if at some point, people want me to drop everything else I'm doing and just make music, then they'll come out to shows and buy merch and give what they can give for tracks. Until then, I'll continue to work and make music on the side.

I hope the industry never manages to resurrect the cash cow that music once was. But I'd be interested to hear an economist's opinion.

Self-Storage Abhorrence

I've noticed a new phenomenon. Growing up, I never saw a single one of these places, and now Self-Storage and other such businesses have been cropping up all over the place. There is one in Cambridge, and I saw at least four on the way up to Bancroft last week. I can only think of one practical use for these places: If you are moving and you need a place to store your stuff whilst you find a new place (or in the case of students, if your parents live far from your university/college and you don't want to pay rent in the summer), this is a very smart solution. However, it is simply impossible that enough people are in this situation to justify the number of Self-Storage places around. So what's the deal?

My immediate thought is that people have so much junk that they don't own a place big enough to house it all. It's like putting an extension on your garage when your garage gets filled up with all your crap. But at least there would be the illusion that the stuff in your garage is somewhat useful - it's at least close at hand. If you are putting things in an off-site storage facility, it means not only that you have stuff, but you have stuff that you hardly ever use! Because, even without hard evidence, I can pretty much guarantee that the space left by the stuff being moved from the garage into these storage places is being used by something else. If you had the room, why would you choose to pay someone to house it for you?

If I think hard, I can think of seasonal sporting equipment and...nothing else that it would make sense to put in those things.

If anyone has a rational explanation for the explosion of Self-Storage, I would love to hear it.

I Heart Aesthetics - Part II

Welcome back. Before I continue, I must issue a(nother) disclaimer: I have not thought this discussion of Aesthetics through to completion and thus, by the end of it, I may end up changing my mind about a few things. You should therefore consider this more of an open exploration rather than a lecture entitled "Common Misunderstandings About Aesthetics and Their Solutions" by David Lacalamita. I expect to be wrong at some point, but I will do my best to make this readable and thorough; I have not chosen to write on Aesthetics arbitrarily. These posts are the culmination of many hours of conversation and thought.

We continue where we left off, with the subjectivity of interpretations of a work of art. We arrived at this issue, you'll remember, through our discussion of artistic intent and we concluded that this is largely irrelevant because of the subjectivity of interpretations.

In true philosophical form, let's start with a statement: "All interpretations of works of art are subjective" All in favour? Opposed? Abstentions? Noted. Motion passed. Great. So now all interpretations of works of art are subjective. This means that if I say Beethoven's Fifth is great and you think it sucks, there are no problems. I think Picasso is a genius and his art makes you nauseous so you hate it - great! You like the band Coldplay and my friend Dan Martin thinks they're offensively inoffensive - you get the picture.

These differences of opinion are common. We all like different types of music, different types of art, different styles of theatre, different narrative styles, etc. And it's all fine and dandy until consider the question: What is good art?

This is the point where voices get raised and temperatures rise. The age-old question of quality in art. Is there such a thing? Can we evaluate art? This question is important. It has particular relevance for arts educators because how can you mark someone's art? And it has relevance for the people who pay for art to be made - are they getting their money's worth? What if you had paid John Cage to produce 4:33? Or commissioned Marcel Duchamp and all you got was a urinal?

In order to answer the question, "Can we evaluate art?" we might do well to first define "art". I will go about this by using four examples: our friend Malevich's Black Square, John Cage's 4'33", Marcel Duchamp's Fountain and Iannis Xenakis' Metastasis.

John Cage wrote many pieces incorporating variable elements and elements of chance. One of his more famous works is 4'33", which is a three-movement piece for unspecified instrument(s) (that I had the pleasure of performing last year) comprised entirely of "silence".

*SPOILER ALERT* It turns out that even "silence" is not quite as soundless as you might suppose: an audience makes quite a bit of noise on its own. Thus, the audience becomes the performer and the performer becomes the audience since he or she is to remain truly silent.

The score is a set of instructions. Is this music? Is it art?

Marcel Duchamp's famous stunt at a New York art exhibit where he signed a urinal and placed it on display was just one example of a "Readymade" - an everyday object that is appropriated as a piece of art. Is this art?

Have a listen to this.



Is this music? If you ask my friend Aaron James, (to dangerously put words in his mouth) he will tell you that it most certainly is. One user posted this comment about the video on YouTube: "The difference between noise and music is structure and purpose". We've already discussed purpose but reconsider a few things.

What this user likely meant by "purpose" is "concept". Does the concept matter? Going way back to our friend Malevich and his Black Square I noted that context and intent make a significant impact on an individual's impression of a piece. I also concluded that despite this fact, Malevich's intent is relatively unimportant since interpretations are necessarily subjective. However, without knowledge of Malevich's intent, is the work still art? Considered independent of its intent, a black square might make us sink deep into our souls and ponder our darkest secrets, confront our most basic fears and come to terms with our utter isolation as a human, as a species as a planet. But it might not. More likely, it is perceived as a black square. Thus, its aesthetic value seems to be somewhat in question if we define "aesthetic" as pertaining to the bodily sensations elicited, and one might be inclined to say that it is strictly through its historical or conceptual significance that any value can be derived from Black Square. (I will return to this a bit later)

With the John Cage piece, it is really only because Cage was the first to think of writing a piece for an unspecified instrument in which not a single note is played that anyone cares about this piece at all. Anyone at all could have written a "silent" piece. This is another example where the concept of the piece seems very important. How could a piece in which not a single note is heard be considered music? If we accept that the audience becomes the performer, then are coughs and candy wrappers musical sounds?

A similar question applies to Duchamp's piece. If a toilet can be art, can everything be art? If someone put another urinal in an exhibit, would it be considered art?

And with Xenakis: The score is a graph of pitch over time. Compared with 4'33", it is easy to at least call this music (since there are pitches) but this piece blurs line between "noise" or "sound" and music.

(EDIT 11:15 pm: Aaron informs me that the score is not, in fact, a graph of pitch over time. I knew using Xenakis was risky. The point of this example is to illustrate the blurred boundary between noise and sound. There are likely an infinite number of better examples, but I hope my point is still made.)

All this threatens my previous conclusion about intent: The above examples force people to question the artist's intent and have little value outside of this speculative process. However, I don't the two conclusions are mutually exclusive. The concept behind a work of art may lend a work historical significance, and consequently, it may increase the depth of a work's significance to those who are aware of this concept. But I’m stuck on the subjectivity of individual reactions. No matter how obvious the intent or concept a work and no matter how integral this is to the piece, individual speculations about the artist's intent will always be different depending on our individual experiences - and depending on the expectations that these experiences have established. Psychologically speaking, "learning" takes place when our expectations are exceeded or not met at all (A point I may elaborate on in subsequent posts) and thus, while the "true" intent of an artist remains irrelevant, the process of guessing what his or her intent might be is not.

So then what is art? Where is the line in the sand between art and non-art? I am inclined to suggest that art is any object of aesthetic consideration. The colour black (or, shade if you're being picky), "silence", Readymades, "noise" are all things we experience every day. Art makes us reevaluate what these terms mean and question the nature of the things we experience every day. Essentially, it makes life more exciting.

The question that remains is the nature of “good” art. But I will leave this question for the next post.

I Heart Aesthetics

Based on the response from my "What is Art?" post, I have come to terms with my own insecurity and have decided to blog seriously on the topic. Friends that have spent more than five hours with me will no doubt be bored by the discussion since it rehashes many of the discussions I have had over the past year about Art stemming from Philosophy and Psychology of Music Education courses and, more influentially, the History of Theory and Criticism course that I audited with my good friend Kristen (who is a guy). He and I also collaborated on a seminar on creativity, from which material for this entry draws upon.

DISCLAIMER: People far more eloquent than I have commented on the subject (aesthetics) but to those who do not follow such blogs, I offer a point of view which draws heavily on the influence of this individual. For those who like primary sources, waste not thine time here.

The form that this will take is this: I will pose some questions about art and attempt to answer them. In the end, we will hopefully have an answer to the larger question I posed last time, which was "What is art?"

Let's start with this one: "What is good art?"

The question of good art versus bad art is exemplified nicely by using two examples: this


and this


Now, in order to not affect your bias, I will hold off with the source of these paintings, and I'll ask you a question (I am apparently all about questions and colons): Which would you say qualifies as art?

You may have seen variations on the second one in museums that you visited. They may have made you angry. I could have done this you say. Indeed. You could.

Some of you may have sensed a trap. Indeed that is what this was. The second painting is by Kazimir Malevich, a renowned painter. This work, entitled Black Square, is an example of Geometric Abstraction which was a movement that came about as a statement in response to the impressionist and prior artistic movements, asserting the limitations of the form (i.e. that an artwork is nothing more than a 2-Dimensional object).

The first painting is by an elephant.

This throws some obvious wrenches into our conceptions of "art" and forces some further questions. First, can animals be artists? Second, can the macaroni picture I made when I was 4 be considered art?

The argument has many sides. However, before we embark on this (no doubt) lengthy discussion, I think it's worth establishing what kinds of art exist. Specifically, I would like to define the difference between "Representational Art" and "Non-representational Art". The difference is simple but it makes for some interesting distinctions later on. Representational Art is that which has a direct correlation to real life, i.e. Fiction or Literature, which tells a specific story about (some character's) life; the type of Visual Art which depicts real life events or landscapes; most types of Theatre. Even if the fictitious work is Fantasy or Sci-Fi, it still deals with physical interactions.

The difference becomes clearer in contrast to Non-representational works of art. These are things like Instrumental Music, Abstract Visual Art, Dance (without the narrative elements). All music can technically be considered non-representational, since a single note does not correspond to any physical object or emotion, but some consider Programmatic Music (like the Debussy Preludes or Peter and the Wolf by Prokofiev) to be representational.

NOW, let's tackle this sticky issue. First, Which takes precedence: the artist's intention or the audience/appreciator's interpretation? There are several theories, the names of which I would appreciate assistance with. However, it seems to me that the artist's intention means relatively little in the grand scheme of things. It is certainly interesting, but the obsession with an artist's intention seems to betray a fundamental misunderstanding about art, especially non-representational forms like music. Once a work is completed and premiered, it leaves the grasp of the artist and goes out into the world, taking on infinite forms, eliciting infinite emotions and responses in the people with whom it comes in contact. Therefore, an artist like Stravinsky, who believed that there was a "right" way to perform his piece, is sort of missing the point. Certainly, the modern tendency to perform things uptempo (paging Leonard Bernstein*) changes things, but Stravinsky is fighting a losing battle if he thinks that by getting everyone to perform his pieces the exact same way he will ensure audiences respond the way he intended. Discussion on this point encouraged.

The point is that an artist cannot possibly FedEx his emotions to you via a work of art (to steal a quotation from Aaron James). The classic example is of Beethoven being appropriated by the Nazis during the Second World War as symbol of their power (and the superiority of the German blood line). The fact that these things can be so readily misinterpreted suggests that the intent of the composer is rather irrelevant to how a piece is interpreted. The same is true for representative works of art and if you've ever sat through an English class and wondered whether Shakespeare was really making all these political statements or whether your professor was making things up to keep his job, then you know what I'm talking about. Sure, it's interesting to speculate and it sometimes gives people a point of reference, but at the end of the day even the artist herself cannot tell you accurately what the work is "communicating" since it is entirely subjective.

This issue of subjectivity brings up our second question: is there such a thing as "good" art but I will pull a Star Trek and leave you hanging...

*Compare Bernstein's version of Shostakovich Symphony No. 5 with this version conducted by Paavo Jarvi (Hong Kong).

All-you-can-stuff-in-your-face Buffet

Sometimes I get these moments of clarity. Today I had one while I was walking between the aisles of an all-you-can-eat buffet watching all these people heaping food onto their plates (people who looked exactly like I looked five minutes before, on my second round). A pile of dismembered crabs, a mountain of rice, a sugar-plum feast straight out of Hansel and Gretel. Half a cow in riblets, an ocean of wonton soup.

How this usually seems normal to me is confounding. The old "eat your vegetables" guilt trip "Children are starving in Africa" rang clear in my head. And yet it wasn't a feeling of guilt. It was more a feeling of awe. Plentiful doesn't even begin to describe...

This gets me thinking, though. What's the use in comparing two completely different situations? It's an obvious inequality that there are heaps of food on our plates and scarcely a grain of rice on the plates of some. And so Tolstoy's great question returns: What, then, must we do?

Two things I learned recently come to mind. I just finished Debt and the Shadow Side of Wealth by Margaret Atwood, who comments on the awful enslavement that debt causes, especially when what you take from someone is their means of survival. Second, a radio interview with someone whose name I (sadly) cannot recall, who suggested that foreign aid in the form of cash was detrimental rather than helpful. The old proverb "Give a man a fish and you feed him for a day. Teach a man to fish, and you feed him for a lifetime" seems apt. For how long have we loaned foreign governments money without any signs of this leading to progress? And for how long will we continue to do so?

And then, do I feel strongly enough to do anything about it? I could make a lot of excuses about how I'm not qualified and how I couldn't possibly affect this outcome as a lowly Bachelor of Music. And how Politicians and CEOs seem to have this ethereal quality in my imagination; they don't seem real since they operate on a completely different set of rules than everyone else. Their world might as well be Narnia. Or Mordor.

I came up with a cool guitar lick today.