Participatory music vs presentational music

In this post, I’ll be doing some public-facing note-taking on Music As Social Life: The Politics Of Participation by Thomas Turino. I’m especially interested in chapter two: Participatory and Presentational Performance. We in America tend to place a high value on presentational music created by professionals, and a low value on participatory music made by amateurs. It’s useful to know that there are people in the world who take a different view.

Turino divides music into four big categories:

1. Participatory music. Everyone present is actively doing something: playing an instrument, singing or chanting, and/or dancing. For example: a bluegrass jam, campfire singing, a hip-hop cypher.
2. Presentational music. There’s a clear divide between the performers and the audience. Audience members might dance or sing along, but they are not the focus. For example: a classical, rock or jazz concert.
3. High-fidelity recording. A document of a live performance (or a convincing illusion of such.) For example: a classical or jazz album.
4. Studio sound art. A recording that was constructed in the studio using techniques other than (or in addition to) people performing in real time. For example: a late Beatles album, or any pop song since 1980.

Turino devotes a lot of his attention to three examples of participatory music cultures:

• Aymara musicians in Peru
• Shona music in Zimbabwe
• Contra dancers in America

This last group might strike you as the odd one out. Turino sees more commonalities between the musical experience of American contra dancers and participants in Shona rituals than he does between the contra dancers and audiences at, say, a jazz concert.

Qualities of presentational music:

• It’s made by professionals (or would-be professionals) — “real” musicians, as Americans call them.
• The musical form tends to be “closed” — it’s known to the performers in advance. There are a few exceptions, like free jazz, but those are outliers.
• Closed forms make it possible for the music to have great formal complexity and less predictability. Though presentational music does not have to be complex or unpredictable, audiences tend to demand a certain amount of variety.
• Textures and timbres are transparent, meaning that you can hear the individual sounds clearly. Tuning and timing are usually precise, though there are exceptions, like punk and indie rock.
• Presentational music is usually scripted, rehearsed and tight. Even jazz improvisation mostly takes place within mutually understood constraints.

Qualities of participatory music:

• It’s made by musicians of widely varying skill. Most participants are “amateurs,” not “real” musicians by American standards. There’s a low floor for core participation, like shaking a shaker steadily, and a high ceiling for elaboration, like virtuoso lead percussion.
• The audience/artist distinction is blurry or nonexistent.
• The form of the music is open, cyclical and very repetitive.
• There might be a lot of improvisation and looseness, but it all takes place within predictable structures.
• Textures and timbres are dense, with loose (“wide”) tuning and timing.
• Beginnings and endings are “feathered” — unscripted, loose, and sometimes disorderly.
• The music is game-like, though usually without “winners” and “losers.”

In participatory music cultures like Zimbabwe and Peru, the ability to make  music is as basic a social skill as making small talk is in North America. Music is part of “real life,” not separate from it or above it somehow. One of my favorite documents of participatory music is this delightful recording of workers canceling stamps in the University of Ghana post office. Anyone in the room could jump in with a rhythm or a whistled tune.

Speaking of documentation: for Aymara people, recorded music has the same relationship to actual music as a photo of a person does to the person: the document is no substitute for the real thing.

The values of participatory music are profoundly different from those of presentational music. Turino quotes his Zimbabwean mbira teacher:

[T]he best mbira players could offer their best performance at a ceremony but if no one joined in singing, clapping and dancing, the performance would be considered a failure… Although the drummers or mbira players perform the most specialized core musical roles in ceremonies, they are not considered the stars of the event with other contributions being secondary. Rather, they, along with hosho (shaker) players, are more like workmen with the special responsibility to provide a firm musical foundation that allows and in fact inspires others to participate.

This is as far from the current western academic art music value system as it’s possible to get.

People in participatory cultures do prefer skillful musicians over inept ones. But the social aspect of the music is the most important one, and usually people keep critical judgment of the performance to themselves. It’s sort of like the way Americans judge their kids’ musical performances, with loving tolerance for its flaws.

America suffers from its lack of participatory music

I have a hypothesis that the lack of participatory music in daily American life is a major obstacle to our well-being. Most humans in world history regard social music as a basic emotional vitamin, and our lack of it shows in our collective unhappiness, as clearly as malnutrition shows in stunted bone growth. Children have participatory music opportunities, at home, on the playground, at school, in church and at camp. But as an adult, you really have to make an effort to seek out music-making opportunities. One of the biggest pleasures of having a young kid is all the participatory music-making you do with them.

Few people have the time or energy to make presentational music of professional quality, and it takes a dedicated hobbyist indeed to overcome the stigma we place on amateurism. It’s interesting to me, then, to look at all the ways that Americans and other westerners try to cope, mostly by trying to make presentational and recorded music more participatory. Entire subcultures have sprung up devoted to trying to bridge the gap, intentionally or not.

Blurring the lines between presentational and participatory

The secret of the Grateful Dead’s rabid following mostly lies in the way they made presentational music feel participatory. The sloppiness that Dead detractors find so irritating becomes a positive virtue if you imagine the band leading a very big singalong. It’s easy to sneer at the Deadheads, but there was something undeniably real going on at the concerts, a lot of very enthusiastic dancing and singing along.

In high school, I saw the Dead close a show with “Not Fade Away” by Buddy Holly, as they often did. The audience sang along to the chorus and clapped along in a son clave beat. The band gradually got quieter and quieter until all you could hear was the crowd’s clapping and singing. Then the band waved goodnight and walked offstage as the crowd continued. We kept the chant and clap going all the way down the ramps and across the parking lot. It was such a pleasurable participatory music experience that I’m still writing about it decades later. The best big rock bands do something similar — think of Paul McCartney’s audience singing along with the “na na na na” part of “Hey Jude.”

Electronic dance music is an interesting new wrinkle. Remember that dance counts as participation in music. Even though EDM is the very definition of studio sound art, its reason for being is much the same as Zimbabwean mbira music: to get people moving. Some people do listen to EDM at their desks or in their cars or wherever, but even there, the point is usually to create a virtual dance club of the mind, to turn the boredom of working or commuting into a party activity.

This morning I was reading a blog post on OutKast’s recent reunion show at Coachella. Even though OutKast is one of the greatest hip-hop groups of all time, they failed to make much of an impression on the Coachella crowd. The blogger says that since the Coachella audience is mostly there for EDM, they’re expecting a participatory experience, with the focus on themselves. Daft Punk and Deadmau5 are very smart to  mask their faces, so you don’t focus too much on them as performers.

Like Deadheads, EDM enthusiasts are the object of much derision — the OutKast post above fairly drips with contempt — but really it’s just a matter of conflicting musical value systems. OutKast has some great hooks and singalong choruses, but their music is mostly verbally dense and intricate. It’s as good as presentational music gets, but it’s performer-focused, and it’s the wrong fit for the participation-focused Coachella crowd. It’s ironic that hip-hop has become such a presentational form; it started as a totally participatory one (as it still is in places, like the cyphers referenced above.)

Karaoke represents an uneasy truce between presentation and participation. Murino points out that most karaoke singers have to overcome considerable shame, and must brave the judgment of their friends. It’s no accident that people usually combine karaoke with heavy drinking.

College a capella groups represent another awkward compromise. The performances are presentational, but not usually up to professional standards. The audience needs to be “in on it” for the music to work, but there’s usually little singing along, and no dancing. Here’s a fascinating exception: I saw a college a capella group in Central Park singing “Like A Prayer” by Madonna. When they got to the groovy part at the end, a teenaged girl in the crowd jumped up next to them and started improvising gospel melismas. The group was startled but delighted. Presumably, this girl was from the highly participatory culture of black church, and her reaction was a perfectly logical one in that context. I’ve never seen such a thing happen on a college campus.

The Disquiet Junto is an unusual blend of studio sound art and participatory practice. Junto members get a weekly assignment by email, and create a piece of music or sound art in response. The Junto has the same inviting low floor and high ceiling that you see in participatory music, but the participants are creating polished recordings in isolation. The Junto SoundCloud group is a presentational environment on its face, but the lively discussion among community members makes it somewhat more participatory. There have been some Junto performances, which have been highly presentational. On the other hand, some Junto projects call for remixing of other participants’ work, and the line between artist and listener there is thoroughly confused. It’s a good confusion, though, one that feels rich with possibility for the future.

Constructivist music teachers strive to make participants out of their students — NYU’s IMPACT program is an example. In our presentational culture, constructivists have our work cut out for us, since would-be participants are always judging themselves against the impossible standards of top-flight professionals. Electronic music has some potential to bridge the gap. Well-designed music production software can give amateurs access to the kind of polished sounds previously only attainable by professionals. My NYU thesis project is designed to make it easy for beginners to make sound-art-quality rhythms. However, to make that possible, the software severely restricts the users. Is there an unavoidable tradeoff between expressive freedom and accessibility? That’s the big question.