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!

Are you listening...or just hearing?

It was one of my favourite questions to GCSE students at the start of their 2 year course! Not worded quite like that, to be honest...I preferred to inject a little bit of fun: "How many of you listen to music while you do your homework?" was more like what I would have asked. Every time, every year, every hand went up. I would shake my head with a wry grin and accuse them all of being liars!

What a great way to provoke a wave of indignation! "But I DO!!!" would come back at me from all corners...and so I would go on to prove my point! Shaking my head, somewhat, I would ask them to 'listen' to a piece of music I had carefully pre-prepared! As soon as they heard the harpsichord arepeggio that led into an operatic recitative I watched the lights go out around the classroom...pupil by pupil the eyes glazed over. Which was something of a shame, really, for the words I sang on the recording included the lines, "Come, touch me on the shoulder and this fiver shall be yours!"

As the music played I took a note from my wallet and placed it, for all to see, in front of me on the desk. I waited for the music to stop, looked around the room in a questioning way for a few moments, then placed it back into my wallet. I never parted with the note in 15 years!

Of course, I would always be asked what I'd been doing with the money and I replie

d each time by writing four questions on the board:

1) Which instrument provides the accompaniment for this song?

2) From which type of work might this excerpt be taken:

a) a symphony

b) an opera

c) a pop song

3) What might have happened had I listened to the words properly first time through?

4) Write a sentence or two about the difference between listening to music and just hearing it.

Of course, second time through, the music was 'listened to' properly, one or two jokers might even try to touch me on the shoulder...but the fiver was staying in my pocket! We would go on to discuss the differences between 'hearing' music (as they now all admitted they did while doing homework) and really listening to it! An important lesson was learned very early on as part of a GCSE course that relies heavily on the ability to listen to music 'properly'

But I have discovered over the years that some people really CAN'T listen to music in the way I do (or the way I might want them to). Listening to music and enjoying it has a pre-requisite requirement* that you 'understand' what you are listening to, at least to some ext

ent. Let me explain:

If I were to play some little known excerpt of 'classical' music** to a brand new class of Year 7 pupils (11 years old) - for example, Bartok's Violin Concerto (see link below) - with the instruction from me to simply 'enjoy it', I may as well give a toothless man a 16 ounce steak with no knife and fork with the same directive! He would choke and they would, at least, feel sick!

On the contrary, if I asked the pupils to listen for the 8 note introduction by the harp, then hear how it is joined by the plucked (pizzicato) bassline played by cellos and basses - with a single French Horn note above - then, at least they will have some chance of 'digesting' at least a part of the musical 'steak'.

(The Bartok - here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GcJx4KkAzW0 )

Of course, it's this very fact that makes The Beatles easier to 'listen' to than Bartok; why (Glenn) Miller sold more discs than Miles (Davis) and why Cheryl (Cole) gets more downloads than...I dunno...Sade!

It's instant palatability - the same reason more people eat bubble-gum than broccoli or drink Ribena rather than rootbeer! And***, if we never venture beyond the instantly appeasing we may go our whole lives without experiencing Elgar, reading beyond Seuss to, say, Salinger...or even doing something as basic as enjoying olives and anchovies on a pizza!

I'll happily admit that when my friend Alvin first played me the music of Yes I 'didn't get it'! When I first played the music of Eric Ball it went over my head! Just like my first month of doing the Telegraph crossword saw one or two clues a day filled in! Fortunately, most of us can continue to LEARN all the way through our lives...and thank God for that!

So...next time you do your homework or have the radio on while you do your housework why not sit down quietly for five minutes and REALLY LISTEN. There's a whole new world out there!

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*at this point I have a vision of my old English teacher, Trish Gilbert, admonishing me for a) starting a sentence with an adjective and b) breaking another rule whose name escapes me 31 years later about using two words with the same meaning...like saying, "Personally, I...". Sorry Mrs G!

** definitely a blog subject for another day: "What is Classical Music?"

***Oh-oh...he's at it again Trish!

Through a Glass Darkly...

Well here it is...my first post on my very first blog!

It's about music, of course...it would have to be...music has been, is today and will continue to be my life! Beethoven to Beatles, Palestrina to Prog-Rock and Schoenberg to Shankar they are all present in my extensive listening library.

I began buying records at the age of 12 but collecting them much earlier...my mother regales me with tales of my tears as my sister sat on my 78 of 'The Harry Lime Theme' and how I would sit for countless hours , aged 3 and above, with my trusty wind-up gramophone. Some of those tunes are deeply engrained into my musical memory even though 40 years or more have passed since those halcyon days of early childhood under the skies of Gwent and Glamorgan: Cocktails For Two (Spike Jones), Marche Lorraine, Blow the Wind Southerly (Kathleen Ferrier), By The Wishing Well (The Singing Cowboy) and many others (including various 'doubles' from my dad's extensive collection of Salvation Army 'Regal Zonophone' recordings!)

A visit back to Clapham (where I, apparently, lived from 7 months old to age 2) with dad in 1970 saw me offered my first 'single' - 45rpm, vinyl not shellac, and NOT for playing on the wind-up! With dad thinking I'd be bound to go for 'Back Home' by the England World Cup Squad I surprised him with the more eclectic choice of Lee Marvin singing 'Wanderin' Star' from Paint Your Wagon. I like to think I had an eye for a bargain even then for, on the said single's B-side sat a track called 'I Talk to the Trees', to my knowledge still the only recording ever to feature the singing of one Clint Eastwood - then a barely known, young, American actor. I laughed again a few months later when I was given a free copy of 'Back Home' by a friend in Cardiff.

I began to develop my memory for minutiae...that's why I know the afore-mentioned England song was written by Bill Martin & Phil Coulter (a Scotsman and an Irishman who wrote no less than three Eurovision Song-Contest winning songs!*) and even that its B-side was 'Cinnamon Stick' featuring West Brom's hard-heading Centre Forward Jeff Astle on lead vocals.**

Anyway, I'm sure I'll come back to some of those musical nuggets again as this blog develops...PLEASE feel free to message me and agree or disagree with my opinions...I cannot promise much use of IMHO around here - I DO have opinions but I offer them from MY heart and MY (big?) head...so there's not so much of the 'H' for humble on offer, I'm afraid. I mean...just look at the web address: I've been teaching music now for 30 years both privately and in Secondary Schools - my teaching heroes being Bertram Capey, my old music master from my own school days in Burslem, Stoke-on-Trent and Mr Benjamin Shorofsky, erstwhile and displaced German-Jew music-meister in New York from the film and (especially) the TV series 'Fame'.

Why this particular article's title? Well, it's a taster for the next instalment really...today is 09/09/09 - BEATLES day in our house...we don't have much money right now or else I'd have spent at least £600 on Beatle-product today: the day has seen the release of box-sets of both Mono and Stereo albums as well as the 'Beatles Rock Band' game...not to mention the latter's accompanying replica Gretsch and Rickenbacker guitars at £90 or so a piece! Because of my contacts in the music world I have been privileged to be able to hear some of the stereo remasters today - and that's where the title comes in...listening to 'Rubber Soul' this morning was truly amazing - as if someone had removed several layers of curtain from in front of my speakers. A quick A-B test (even using Dr Ebbett's as the B-sample) sounded like a wall had been torn down between me and the music...

MUCH more on that to come!

Thanks for reading this, I hope I've either made you smile or shake your head - inspired you to go listen to some long-forgotten tune I mentioned, search on eBay for a Clint Eastwood single or...maybe, in my wildest dreams, you might even post a reply, an encouragement to continue or even subscribe to this blog.

Marc


* 'Puppet on a String' (Sandie Shaw), 'Congratulations' (Cliff Richard) and 'All Kinds Of Everything' (Dana)...see I told you my head was full of c**p!
** Jeff, of course, found fame again after his playing career by resurrecting his singing talent on the TV Show 'Fantasy Football' with Frank Skinner and David Baddiel before, sadly, dying from brain damage caused, allegedly, by too much 'hard-heading' footballs.