Modern classical techno

One of my Montclair State students recently did a class presentation on Venetian Snares, the stage name of highbrow electronica producer Aaron Funk.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXRdINUwdqw

The track uses samples from the first movement of Béla Bartók’s fourth string quartet, accompanied by shuffled slices of the Amen break. It sounds to me like an EDM artist trying to deal with “art” music. Eliot Britton wrote an art-musical scholarly response. Britton makes a good-faith effort to engage the track on its own terms, but he’s writing from within the classical academic tradition. That tradition can be a king-sized drag.

The climb from a popular musical style to acceptance as an elevated form of artistic expression is steep. The struggle to include jazz as legitimate art music took many years and the endeavour continues to this day. However, it is no longer acceptable for educated musicians to dismiss jazz as “dance music” because of its association with the dance hall. To dismiss jazz as an artistic musical form would be a rejection of a major element of North American music history.

Oh boy. Let’s unpack! Pop music has to climb up to be accepted, by people in universities, as an elevated form. The universities are up on top of some pretty steep slopes. White people in universities struggled among themselves for many years to include jazz as legitimate art music, and the struggle is not over. In the year 2015. Britton says that “educated” musicians can’t dismiss jazz as “dance music” anymore, which is nice I guess, but also hilarious. When was the last time anyone was dancing to jazz? For academics, it doesn’t matter; the fact that jazz once lived in the filthy dance hall with the common people so many decades ago means that its artistic merit is still questionable.

By the same token, electronic music is disreputable, because people are dancing to it, a lot of people, and enjoying themselves. Britton notes approvingly that electronic music is “maturing” as a genre because Venetian Snares and others are making electronic music that you can’t dance to, “taking this form to new levels of abstraction and sophistication.” Britton also helpfully distinguishes electronic music from electroacoustic music. The former is “pop,” and the latter is “art.” Glad we cleared that up.

Britton is not blind to the irony that classical music has its roots in dance music as well. All those gigues and bourrées were originally party music. These populist roots are a source of some embarrassment, evidently, because Britton opposes “progressive [i.e. sophisticated] tastes” with “functional elements,” namely danceability. He then has to expend some rhetorical effort explaining why abstractions of the Amen break are a valid artistic strategy, in the same way that classical music abstracts away from the forms and chord progressions of European dance music.

Classical music is a score-centric culture, and electronic music is causing some problems in that regard. There is no standard notation for electronica, and most of the works/tracks have never been written down in any form. Britton describes how electroacoustic composers have addressed the situation by inventing elaborate new forms of documentation and “listening guides.” Even so, you can’t recreate a Stockhausen piece from the documentation the way you can recreate a Bach fugue from a score. This causes the electroacoustic world some consternation, to which my reaction is: so what? We have the recordings! And the session files and stems, should the musicians be hip enough to make those available. What do we need written documentation for?

Britten regards electronic music as a kind of oral tradition. But recorded culture is not oral tradition; recordings are persistent, not ephemeral. They’re also usable as raw materials for new music. Big swaths of electronic music consist of nothing but samples of other recordings. Britton repeats the classical culture’s anxiety that electronic music can’t be performed “live” without scores, but again, so what? That’s what the recordings and session files are for.

Anyway, philosophical problems aside, Britton’s actual analysis of the Venetian Snares track is pretty solid:

The composer then gains control of very precise tension release events that are similar to the cadential patterns in tonal music. Just as the harmonic rhythm increases before affirming or eliding a tonic, the rhythmic interest increases before a rhythmic resolution. Events preceding rhythmic resolution are called “builds” in common electronic music terminology.

Britton gives a handy taxonomy of different build types:

• Off Beat Shift – small displacement of the loop’s rhythmic accent pattern.
• Rollup – quick repetition of a small slice or group of slices, creating a sense of motion towards the Point of Rhythmic Resolution via a linear pitch shift or a dynamic envelope.
• Rolldown – same as a rollup but with a downward pitch shift and volume envelope.
• Rollover – a syncopated pattern that spills over the next point of rhythmic resolution.
• Micro Loop – a sub-loop running within the pulse pattern of a larger loop, often using asymmetrical rhythmic groupings that temporarily shift the pulse pattern away from the global pulse.
• Macro Loop – like a Micro Loop, except that the loop is longer than the basic pulse pattern.
• Pause – unexpected silence, also known as a micro-vacuum.

Musicologists and critics: want to make yourselves useful? Instead of wringing your hands over whether or not this or that style of music is “valid” or “sophisticated,” why not direct your attention to the music itself? Give music producers and listeners some names for the things they’re making and hearing. I’m certainly going to be hearing the terms “rollover” and “micro loop” in my head next time I’m making a track.