What is Music?

GCSE Listening Paper 1992:

(Musical extract played on the tape - short excerpt from Mendelssohn's 'Fingal's Cave')

Q. Make one comment about the music you hear

My pupil's actual written answer on the exam paper: "It does my head in"

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I had tried - for five years at that point - to persuade the young lady concerned that there was more music worth listening to than just Kylie and New Kids on the Block. In some cases, I learned eventually, you just have to give up!

Sometimes, it's hard even to convince the uneducated teenager that what they are being asked to listen to is describable AS music!

Take Steve Reich's famous 'Clapping Music'. No pitched notes, no instruments (save hands) - two performers clapping an identical rhythm pattern, with one of them getting progressively more and more 'out of phase' with the other until, eventually, enough patterns have been repeated to once again bring the two together in unison. A simple idea...but music? Or is it more like a (rhythm) game?

Skip 18 years into the future and I have just had a very interesting Facebook conversation with a talented young friend. He is a professional military musician, percussionist with several notable brass bands and also works in the rock/pop field - so it's not someone unacquainted with different genres and styles of music I am talking about.

It seems Glen flicked over to tonight's Prom concert part-way through the London Première of Julian Anderson's 'Fantasias'. His comment?

"Just flicked on the Proms, what a load of rubbish! When are they ever going to play a nice melody and not just tune up!"

You might imagine - a bit like a red rag to an old bull like me! I may not have been over-impressed by Mr Anderson's latest opus myself - but I'll defend its right to exist and be described as music to the death!

So...to go back to my title...what IS music?

In the afore-mentioned teaching career I would ask that question of my Year 7 classes and write the responses on my whiteboard:

tunes

instruments

rhythm

sounds

beats

Same answers, every class - every year.

None of the responses are the answer to the question! Music might contain some or all of these but none (except one) are a prerequisite of 'music'! 'Sounds' being that response, of course.*

My next question to the class, therefore, is obvious! Does that mean that all sounds are music?

Discussions ensued! The majority would say "no" but some would say, "Yes, all sounds are music". I ask every person in the room to 'make a single, short noise'. Thirty children enjoy the chance to do so: shy girls tap the desk, Johnny and his five brash mates make fart noises or belch - they think it's original, of course!

I ask if that was music and most agree it wasn't - it was just 'random'. So, I invite Johnny to the front of the class and ask him to point at members of the class in turn and, when he does, for each to make his/her noise. More often than not Johnny returns to the same few friends, in turn, hence introducing repeated, identifiable patterns into the 'performance'. Most of the class now think that Johnny's piece WAS music...sort of!

I open the classroom door and ask everyone to listen to the sounds they can hear outside and we then make another list:

trees rustling

traffic

footsteps

fire alarm/police siren

plane

voices

birds

We agree that wasn't music either - just random noises again - so I play a CD I prepared earlier that places each of the sounds we had just heard and discussed into a defined 'soundscape'.

Same sounds as the random ones but, now, quite a lot think my piece could be described as music...so what had changed?

Here is the crux or aim of the whole lesson - the introduction (never by ME, by the way) of the word ORGANISED. If random sounds are somehow organised we turn them into music - and once that bridge is crossed most of my pupils were ready for more.

Leonard Bernstein once described music as "Sounds that change*** and move along in time." It is the placing of sounds into a context of time that turns them into music - organising them, if you like!

Glen followed up his first comment with:

"come off it - really did sound like they where just tuning up at one point! That's not Music!"

Really? Over two centuries ago Haydn used 'tuning up' as part of his Symphony Number 60 - 'Il Distratto' (The Absent-Minded Man). So did Britten in 'Young Person's Guide'. When The Beatles asked their assembled musical forces to 'make any sounds, getting gradually higher and higher' they created the famous, apocolyptic crescendo you can hear twice in 'A Day In The Life' - not far from 'tuning up', really, is it?

I'm quite sure Julian Anderson's instructions to the National Youth Orchestra this evening were quite clear in their intent - certainly I'd guess, clearer than some of the more outlandish Graphic Scores produced during the last century!

Whether 'Fantasias' is 'good' music or not remains to be debated. The answer will depend on many factors and will always be an individual one - some will love it and many more, surely, will not! Whether it goes on to become part of the popular orchestral repertoire yet to be seen!

But music it most certainly is! ****

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* There might even be some who would argue against even THIS, however. I have seen 'silent' choirs of deaf children 'singing' using signing - together, in time...'performing' a song. Music?

Further, most people who have been music students are aware of John Cage's famous 4'33" - a piece of 'music' in which a pianist sits at a piano silently for the duration of the 'piece'! The argument is always, "Well, OF COURSE, it's not (proper) music!"**

** Oy!!!...read the rest of the blog...THEN read this you impatient person! ****

*** The word 'change' is also important in this description - or else one might be able to describe a resting heartbeat as 'music'. If it is resting (i.e. virtually constant) then the sounds won't usually change, so failing Bernstein's criteria. If one goes for a short run then rests again the sound of the heart will find its tempo increased, then decreased again - in this scenario you have made a conscious decision to run, knowing this will cause the tempo change = arranged/organised the sound...and I'd, therefore, defend it as music!

**** My interpretation of 4'33" is that Cage has been an absolute genius on this occasion, manipulating the audience into becoming the performance! The pianist sits in silence listening tothe discomfort of an audience not knowing how to react to the situation. Uneasy shuffling, embarrassed coughs, hushed whispers ("has he started yet?" "what's going on?"), maybe even unwrapping of boiled sweets! And the pianist/audience, being 'in the know' hears the sounds created from the composer's stimulus - the 'organised sound' of my final definition!

I Got You Covered....

I wanted to write today...but didn't know what about...so I went for as nice, relaxing bath - putting my BlackBerry on 'shuffle tracks' and settling back.

The bath lasted five tracks...and all five were cover versions! I had members of Yes, The Doors and Styx covering Pink Floyd's 'Don't Leave Me Now', John Wetton covering Genesis's 'Your Own Special Way, Harry Nilsson singing Jimmy Webb's 'Campo De Encino', The Beatles paying their tribute to Chuck Berry and 'Memphis Tennessee' and then a surprise!

I knew the song 'Vine Street' and have done for decades - it is the opening song on Harry Nilsson's 'Nilsson Sings Newman' album (a whole album of cover versions, of course). But this was certainly not the dulcet tones of a young Nilsson's tenor...and it wasn't Randy's unmistakeable tuneful croak either!

So, I had to get out of the bath! Turned out (as many of you more astute readers will have noticed) to be Van Dyke Parks and a CD I'd only recently purchased (but long wanted) and not yet listened to - 'Song Cycle' - on which every song is a VDP original...except for that one which, like Nilsson, opens the album! After that I had to rifle through my archive to see if I actually had a Randy Newman version...and I did, albeit a demo, as part of the 4CD retrospective set 'Guilty'.

I'd already been thinking, during the bath, about the concept of 'covers'. Prior to The Beatles the accepted 'norm' was for professional songwriters to write the songs, a record producer to find them and suggest them to a group or artist and 'away you go'. We all know how George Martin wanted The Beatles to record and release 'How Do You Do It' and managed to prise an unenthusiastic and reluctant studio version from them only for John to successfully argue that 'Please Please Me' was better and even suggest the 'surefire number one' be given to another of Brian Epstein's groups, Gerry & the Pacemakers. (It followed Please Please Me to Number one in the UK charts two months later, by the way!)

The Beatles and many other 1960s artists certainly blurred the lines between songwriter and artist to such an extent that, a decade later, almost all artists and groups wrote the majority of their own material - and that became the new 'norm' and, to some extent, still is today. There were (and are still) professional songwriters - but Tin Pan Alley was never quite the same again.

Cover versions and Nilsson have always made an interesting subject for debate. Harry was, undoubtedly, a marvellous songwriter, yet his career will forever be marked by the fact that his biggest hits were cover versions - most notably Badfinger's Without You and Fred Neil's Everybody's Talkin'. Harry wrote plenty of songs that became hits for other artists including The Monkees, Three Dog Night and David Cassidy - but the irony remained!

Such is the enormity of the number of cover versions associated with the music of Harry Nilsson that my friend Tom Westendorf has managed to put three 'packages ' of songs numbering 580 songs together for a yearly series of internet radio specials called 'Harry All Day'. (Artists featured are as diverse as actors George Segal, Robin Williams and Curtis 'Booger' Armstrong, The Muppets, The Turtles, Brian Wilson and Keith Moon...and even a couple of efforts by yours truly (happy indeed to share such exalted company!)

They say Paul McCartney's Yesterday is the most covered song of all with many thousands of official record and CD releases (goodness only knows how many millions of times it has been sung in bars and clubs and concert halls around the world in the last 45 years!)

Next week Brian Wilson himself releases a whole album of Gershwin 'interpretations' - said to be so much more than mere 'covers' - like Nilsson, I expect Brian to prove he has the genius to 'make other people's songs his own!

The funny thing is, if you'd asked me (before the bath) how many 'cover versions' I had on my BlackBerry I'd have probably guessed at less than ten. For my 'shuffle' function to find five consecutively out of a total of just under 2,000 songs I'm guessing there's a fair few more than that!

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PS - I can't help but think this post makes for a fine game of '6 Degrees of Separation'. Many of the artists mentioned are barely a degree of one away but I find I can even get from Styx to Brian Wilson in one...so I doubt 6 degrees would be needed anywhere!

Imagine...all the people...

I was reminded this week of an old pastime I used to enjoy!

Back in the early 80s. when the Sony Walkman was still a pipe dream for most of us and the CD still being shown on Tomorrow's World (still playing after being smeared with raspberry jam I seem to recall) I was a young music student in Colchester, Essex doing my BA (hons) in Music composition and performance.

There was plenty of music at college of course and plenty back at my digs (as my grant became ever more swallowed up by the cash registers of Parrot Records)! The problem was getting to and from the 'Institute' - usually on my trusty bicycle. These days, of course, my sons rarely leave the house without iPod headphones and I have a 16GB microSD card in my BlackBerry that holds nearly 200 CDs...

...And thereby hangs the reason for my 'lost pastime' - the Imaginary Gig!

For I would cycle up and down the chestnut-lined 'Avenue of Remembrance' enjoying the most sublime 'one-off' music concerts in which the (already-late) John Lennon shared a stage with Brian Wilson, the whole series of live gigs by Harry Nilsson (who famously never played live concerts) - one gig per album! I put together my own 'supergroups' with eclectic mixtures of musicians like Phil Collins, Rick Wakeman, Greg Lake and Ritchie Blackmore...and, probably most often, joined Paul, George and Ringo on-stage in John's place for many, many Beatles reunions! (I even had the temerity to Imagine them adding some of my own songs to the set-list...but, I guess, that what dreams are for!)

The reminder came about because of the impending re-release of a novel called 'Glimpses' by American author Lewis Shiner. Without giving too much away a (usually) drunk sound engineer discovers he can not only 'internalise' gigs and sessions in the same way I did...but he could actually record them on tape! And, thus, the world got to hear several 'long-lost masterpieces' and the readers got to 'meet' some long-dead rock stars...a rather bizarre but very enjoyable read, especially for any who, like me, are big fans of The Beatles and Brian Wilson.

As a musician I gradually became aware that not everyone was able to share my pastime - I believe it to be linked to the same part of the psyche that enables me to play any tune I've heard without music, yet others simply cannot. One of my close friends has played with Salvation Army bands for well over 50 years; I dare not even try to imagine the number of times he has played a tune like 'Away In A Manger'? A typical carolling session (of which there are still a dozen or so each year but, in years gone by there might have easily been 30 a year) would yield at least six playings (3x2 verses). Yet Alex assures me he still could not play the tune without the music in front of him - and he is no mean musician, let me assure you!

So I was joyed somewhat when the skill of 'internalising music' became part of the National Curriculum orders for Music during my teaching career - and it was something I always tried to encourage my pupils to do - on whatever level they were able. I never discovered anyone else who could (or at least openly admitted) internalising to the extent I did until I met a friend on the Internet about 12 years ago. Jim Painton (see http://sho-sho-sho-show-offsky.blogspot.com/2009_09_01_archive.html ) could...and we spent some time exchanging emails - sending each other lists of musicians to 'imagine' playing together - so it was no surprise that Jim (who wrote the liner notes for my Christmas CD and allowed me to reciprocate for his 'Painton Place') was to the one to send me my copy of 'Glimpses' (not JUST any old copy, of course, it was a signed 1st edition).

I think I might do a bit more 'daydream gigging'...see you when I get back...