What is Music?

The Blogspot dictionary defines music as: "The art or science of combining vocal or instrumental sounds (or both) to produce beauty of form, harmony, and expression of emotion."

This week I challenged my 7th grade music appreciation class to create definitions for "music." Most of them have only been exposed to highly commercial tunes, so it's painfully easy to challenge their notions of what qualifies something as music. Even the wrinkle that a song might be good though it's not in their personal taste is a bit of a revelation.

One of the pieces I played for students (and you can view my entire playlist at the end of this entry), is the song "4:33" by John Cage. My own experience with the song, as a freshman taking a history of the blues class, was not dissimilar to what I experience in my classroom when I play the song. See what you think (if you haven't viewed it before) before reading on. This is just one example I pulled from youtube; it's been performed by many.

My peers simultaneously experienced disbelief and annoyance. Was this a joke? It had to be! I was confused too, but I wanted to figure out what was happening, and I thank my high school English teachers for making me reach so hard for subtext. I heard instrumentalists practicing down the hall, a saxophonist repeating the same bits of a song over and over until they got it right, birds singing outside the windows of the classroom, the buzz of the tv monitor, my classmates angry whispers.

"They missed the point. There’s no such thing as silence. What they thought was silence, because they didn’t know how to listen, was full of accidental sounds. You could hear the wind stirring outside during the first movement. During the second, raindrops began pattering the roof, and during the third the people themselves made all kinds of interesting sounds as they talked or walked out."

— John Cage speaking about the premiere of 4′33″.

This is a song that invites the listener to pay attention to the life, the music that is around them. Every time this song is played it is different, unique to each listener. This song has more lives than the Gallifreyan Doctor, and it perplexes and compels, knows something the listener doesn't know.

It would be all too easy to scoff at this "4:33", to ignore the questions it's asking about the very nature of music. Like Cage, I subscribe to the notion that music has always existed-- will continue to exist-- that the rustling of the leaves was the first applause, the rhythm of the heartbeat the first 4/4 time signature. When I play "4:33", I delight in stopping and hearing what I usually miss. And, to be truthful, every time I share this with a new group of students I delight in watching them struggle to comprehend what is happening.

Below is the music of my mini listening lesson. While the purpose is to help students clarify a personal definition of music, it is quite self-indulgent. Because I spend a great deal of time listening to music students love, I use this rare opportunity to play music I love. The first one's a doozy -- and one of my favorite songs of all time!

1. "Greenfield Morning I Pushed an Empty Baby Carriage All Over the City" - Yoko Ono
2. "Search and Destroy" - The Stooges
3. 4'33" - John Cage
4. "Judy is a Punk" - The Ramones
5. "Weeping Wall" - David Bowie
6. "Hong Kong Garden" - Siouxsie and the Banshees

Music is Not for Spectators

For anyone who's ever played in a band, there is no high to be gotten in life that exceeds the moment when all the right notes swell up together, a symphonic wave, and wash over the players. In that moment the feeling of rightness is not abstract, it is absolute; everyone is tuned in, everyone is present, those sound waves are passing through bodies synchronously. It feels like life enhanced, from black-and-white to color, iPod earbud to surround sound.

There are many years of stretching, reaching for the right notes, veering off pitch, squeaking, squawking, banging the wrong drum, scrabbling for the melody like a mountain climber losing their grip. It's ugly and painful, but the satisfaction of the song played well is righteous.

We feel the song in the dark, in our toes, our hips, our heads bopping. The song travels the length of our spines, the strands of our hair, reaching (literally) into our minds. The voice rises up, the heart changes its rhythm; there is nowhere to go but inside the song.

To solely listen is to be alone, but to sing, to dance, is to join oneself to moment.

I am picking up my bass and remembering that each finger being cajoled into position, my right hand learning where the strings sit, my toes tapping a beat my pinky finger might miss, will one day result in that supreme feeling of being part of a song that is so much bigger than I am, a song in which I have a role.

The Distance Between

I just finished reading the "33 1/3" series book Murmur. One of the most intriguing ideas put forth in the book is the idea of the distance between pop music and the listener, that the distance itself is a text we read unconsciously. I found myself pondering this notion in the music appreciation elective class I teach (this year it's titled "World of Music" and aims to expose the students to many types of world music that lie outside the norm of pop radio). The big class project I run is to have each student do a presentation giving the history of a song and why they love it. As a result, I listen to a lot of music I would normally dismiss as pop drivel, but today, as I listened to Chris Brown and Justin Bieber singing "Next to You", I got caught up in the idea of the distance between a pop song and the listener, and why top 40 pop is perpetually the domain of teens (and especially girls).

Pop music has always been about the pin-up of a boy's dreamy face in girl's bedroom (locker, cell phone, facebook profile, etc.). Anyone remember Tiger Beat? I, too, know the twitterpation a good pair of eyes can cause.

Some teen girls spend inordinate amounts of time writing things like "Mrs. Bieber" on their binders, or changing their surname to Bieber on homework assignments. A few of them feel comfortable announcing to the masses that they are already (top secret!) married to Justin Bieber.

A long time ago, some evil genius (probably Shakespeare) realized the fun to be had in tossing the body-chemistry-induced emotions of teen girls to the the lions of lust and longing (though girls emotions regenerate a bit like Prometheus' liver- it's a never ending blood bath). There is no ceiling on the amount of melodrama a heterosexual girl will tolerate in order to have the opportunity to fantasize that a storyline involving a physically/emotionally attractive male could, in fact, happen to her. There is perhaps no better medium for this than a 3-5 minute pop song. Just ask the Beatles.

Check out this video (I know...but it'll help the conversation):

Pop songs like this one have an inherent space in them that capitalizes on fantasy (vague, literal lyrics), and the "Next to You" video does a great job representing this visually. The video is not about the girls in it, but rather the gaze of the males on the females, the actions the guys will take to be near them. Lyrically, it's about the guy's feelings, the way the girl makes him feel, what he wants from her. (There is definitely another post lodged in the subtext here, about how pop songs enforce gender stereotypes. In the interest of staying focused, I'll save that for another post.) There is plenty of space available between the listener and the song, plenty enough to contain the fantasies of millions of teen girls.

Pop songs appeal to the developmental state of late tweens/early teen: their brains are a-whir with focus on their personal needs and desires. Empathy is a long way off yet (college, I'd say). All that space meshes with a closed bedroom door, lights turned off, iPod juiced up, the energy to make those young men ("Well, Rihanna made him mad!" "Bieber is just confident") into exactly the guys they want them to be. They can even imagine that the voice singing is just for them.

And baby, everything that I have is yours
You will never go cold or hungry
I'll be there when you're insecure
Let you know that you're always lovely
Girl, 'cause you are the only thing that I got right now

I generalize, of course, because not every teenage girl is into pop music (and some teenage boys are!). I also recognize that my inner teenage girl remains: she's just a lot smarter about what kind of man she's willing to drool over.