In my paper about whiteness in music education, I tried to make a point about sampling classical music that my professor was (rightly) confused about. So I’m going to use this post to unpack the idea some more. I was arguing that, while we should definitely decanonize the curriculum, that doesn’t mean we need to stop teaching Western classical music. We just need to teach it differently. Rather than seeing the canonical masterpieces as being carved in marble, we should use them as raw material for the creation of new music.
When I think about a happy future for classical music, I think of the orchestra hit in “Planet Rock” by Afrika Bambaataa and the Soulsonic Force, a sample that came packaged with the Fairlight CMI.
The orchestra hit is a sample of “The Firebird”by Igor Stravinsky.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wbkKWrUD-A
This sample is the subject of an amazing musicology paper by Robert Fink: The story of ORCH5, or, the classical ghost in the hip-hop machine. If you don’t feel like reading the paper, there’s also this delightful video on the subject.
Why would Afrika Bambaataa (or any other hip-hop musician) want to appropriate the sound of the symphony orchestra? Maybe producers use it just because it sounds cool, but Fink doesn’t think so. He sees a deeper meaning to the orchestra hit, that it’s an expression of Afrofuturism.
A key aspect of the Afro-futurist imagination lies in a complex identification with the science-fiction Other, with alienness, on the part of an Afro-diasporic culture still dominated by the dark legacy of subjugation to more technologically advanced colonialism… [I]n the sound-world of electro-funk, it is European art music that is cast, consciously or not, in the role of ancient, alien power source (351-352).
Ancient alien power sources are a recurring science fiction trope. Think of the vibranium meteor in Black Panther, bugger technology in the Ender’s Game series, Spice in Dune, Endurium and the Crystal Planet in Starflight, and the fifth element in The Fifth Element (a movie that makes zero sense, but that does creatively combine classical music and techno.) The world that gave rise to the classical canon no longer exists, outside of music schools and similar institutions. But its remnants are everywhere. Why not repurpose the remnants for the making of future music?
Jazz musicians have done plenty of creative repurposing of classical music. My favorite examples are Django Reinhardt’s take on a Bach concerto and the Ellington Nutcracker. Classical music’s biggest influence on jazz is mostly behind the scenes, in the training that many musicians received before jazz was taught formally, in Charlie Parker’s love of Stravinsky and Miles Davis’ admiration for Stockhausen, and in John Coltrane’s study of Nicolas Slonimsky. For creators of hip-hop and electronic dance music, the notes and the concepts aren’t as useful as the recordings. The lush and varied timbres of classical music have the most to offer the world now.
“Planet Rock” was only the first of many hip-hop songs to sample classical music. “Blue Flowers” by Dr Octagon samples Bartok’s Violin Concerto #2.
I also love Kelis’ sample of The Magic Flute, and The Streets’ sample of the New World Symphony. Here’s a Spotify playlist with many more examples.
There are also a few performance ensembles attempting to bridge the rap-classical divide. For example, the daKAH Hip Hop Orchestra performs rap classics live.
The idea of reproducing sampled recordings with instruments would seem to me to miss the point of sampling–that sitar riff in “Bonita Applebaum” isn’t just a sequence of pitches, it’s a specific timbre from a specific recording. But I appreciate the spirit.
A much better idea is to bring the alien power source of the orchestra to bear on the creation of new works. The producer Max Wheeler wrote Grown: a Grime Opera, which combines emcees and DJs with a large orchestral ensemble. I think it’s a fantastic idea, and it’s well executed. (Though I’m not totally objective here, I’ve met Max personally and like him.)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z8PFIFyWTTw
My own interest lies mostly in the possibilities of sampling and remixing. Joseph Schloss, in his must-read book Making Beats, says that producers listen to records “as if potential breaks have been unlooped and hidden randomly throughout the world’s music. It is the producer’s job to find them.” We have barely scratched the surface of the classical canon’s unlooped breaks and hooks. Vassily Kalinnikov’s Symphony number one includes a gorgeous four-chord progression that could well be the saddest chord progression ever. But it’s buried among a ton of other material, and Kalinnikov only repeats it once. This, to me, is a tragic waste. I want to hear that progression repeated many more times than that. Fortunately, thanks to the magic of Ableton Live, I can!
https://soundcloud.com/ethanhein/the-saddest-chord-progression-ever/
The Music Experience Design Lab has been creating called Variation Playgrounds, which let you playfully remix classical works in the browser.
The Variation Playgrounds are visually beautiful and cool, but sonically they’re unsatisfying, because they use fake-sounding MIDI versions of the music. Like I said above, the real creative potential for classical remixing isn’t in the notes, it’s in the timbres and textures, all the sonic nuance that you can only get from humans playing instruments.
It would be nice if classical music institutions took a liberal attitude toward sampling. (Most of the canonical works are in the public domain, but the recordings are owned by the record label or organization that made them.) Even better, music organizations could start creating sample libraries. There’s an existing model to follow, the New World Symphony remix contest run by the Deutsches Symphonie-Orchester Berlin. The DSO posted a bunch of pristinely recorded excerpts on SoundCloud and encouraged the internet to go wild with them. That is the world I want to live in.
So here’s my fantasy scenario: Classical institutions create sample libraries for every canonical work. They categorize the samples by instrument, key, and tempo, along with scores, MIDI files, background information, video of the performances, and whatever other context might be of interest. They use a licensing scheme that automatically grants sample clearances in exchange for some reasonable fee or revenue-sharing scheme. They encourage transparency of sources: “Hey trap producers! Here are some bleak orchestral sounds. Please sample them, but if you do, be sure to link back to us from your SoundCloud page.” Classical music might not appeal to most casual music listeners, but producers listen to a lot of unusual things, and we listen closely. We would eagerly comb through classical recordings, if we were properly invited.
I recognize that this idea is a tough sell. Classical music institutions aren’t particularly interested in fostering the production of more beat-driven electronic music–they want people to learn to appreciate the canon as it is. But my goal as a progressive music educator is to help young people find their own musical truths, through discovery or invention. The canon has deep untapped potential for that purpose.
Traditional music educators usually see the preservation of the canon as their goal, and are either indifferent or actively hostile toward the music that the kids like. But even those educators should be invested in maintaining the canon’s cultural relevance, rather than treating it as “musical spinach” that you eat because it’s “good for you.” If preserving the canon is your goal, then sampling producers could be powerful allies.
Quite late, but speaking as a classical musician: just wanted to comment that this & your paper on whiteness in music education are both great analyses. I’m not completely up to date on what’s going on in the States since it’s been a while since I was there, but certainly this accords with my experiences both there and in the UK (professors who took a weird sort of pride in not referring to popular music genres by their proper names, or pretending not to know the names of famous artists….)
The whole field of music education and music criticism, and the classical music world in general, is literally awash in racism though. Claims that rap or hip-hop isn’t music, or can never equal the complexity and emotional power of classical music, etc, could honestly just be paraphrases of Wagner’s infamous anti-semitic tirade “Jewishness in Music”:
The Jew speaks the language of the nation in whose midst he dwells from generation to generation, but he speaks it always as an alien. […] Just as words and constructions are hurled together in this jargon with wondrous inexpressiveness, so does the Jew musician hurl together the diverse forms and styles of every age and every master. Packed side by side, we find the formal idiosyncrasies of all the schools, in motleyest chaos […] and in the history of Modern Music we can but class the Judaic period as that of final unproductivity, of stability gone to ruin.
[Felix Mendelssohn] was obliged quite openly to snatch at every formal detail that had served as characteristic token of the individuality of this or that forerunner whom he chose out for his model. […] From a closer survey of the instances adduced above—which we have learnt to grasp by getting to the bottom of our indomitable objection to the Jewish nature—there more especially results for us a proof of the ineptitude of the present musical epoch. […] So long as the separate art of Music had a real organic life-need in it, down to the epochs of Mozart and Beethoven, there was nowhere to be found a Jew composer: it was impossible for an element entirely foreign to that living organism to take part in the formative stages of that life. Only when a body’s inner death is manifest, do outside elements win the power of lodgment in it—yet merely to destroy it.
substitute “black” for “jew”, & similar, and you have basically every criticism of hip-hop and modern musical culture by Scruton et al. As far as racism goes, it’s incredibly transparent to anyone who has studied the history of classical music in detail—and the reason so many classical music fans pretend not to see the racism is because, on some level, they agree with it. It’s the whole “I’m not racist, I just think Western Civilisation™ is superior” argument.
I’m not going to even touch on the incredibly widespread beliefs about Asian classical musicians (another resurrection of “Jewishness in Music” with claims that they can play technically perfectly but their true nature is alien to the music somehow), or the sexism (women composers? N/A. women performers who aren’t physically flawless? should be banned), or… anyway yes. i’m sure you get the idea
Ok sorry for the long posts and being very extra but here are some additional thoughts:
On the idea of classical music signifying aristocratic (bourgeois) values and popular music signifying working-class (proletarian) values from Johnson: I do take the dismissal of race at face value because the main argument is in favour of reactionary class politics, i.e. that the existence of an aristocracy and a proletariat are both necessary and that the former should dominate the latter. The fact that this system happens to also be inherently racist due to the way class has been racialised (aristocracy, middle class, working class, slave…) is obviously not something he considers bc the academic music world either entirely rejects Crenshaw or misreads her work as a game of Privilege Jenga. (again Susan McClary is an honourable exception)
On Scruton: “life-affirming” for jazz is also kind of a dog whistle. Any music of the blacks/jews/eastern europeans/asians/First Nations people that can be construed as folk-like and limited to that particular racial community is granted descriptions such as “naïve”, “fresh”, “hearty”, “life-affirming”, “spirited” and so on—as done so by the otherwise well-intentioned Antonín Dvořák when he visited the US and was exposed to black & indigenous music that was rarely heard by white audiences. It’s “ethnomusicology” in action. What does not need to be said, although I’m sure Scruton has said it anyway, is that of course this music can never aspire to the complexity, awe, splendour, spiritual transcendence, etc—basically, sublimity—of white western classical music. And as soon as white audiences, who also want to hear the beautiful and not just the sublime because they are human beings and enjoy pleasure, adopt some kind of “ethnic” music as their own, it becomes commercial trash, superficial, with no depth or feeling, etc. In the 18th century it was Spanish guitar music, first imitated and “elevated” by composers like Scarlatti, and then popularised and decried as lascivious and trashy. In the 19th century it was the traditional music of the Roma, with classical composers first enamoured with the style and writing their own Zigeunertanze etc and then it becoming popular and critics decrying the “g*psy influence” that has perverted modern music etc. In the 20th century, obviously, African-Americans.
On the supposed deficits of hip-hop music: if we try to look at the music without the veil of centuries of racism, the idea that hip-hop is some degenerated form of music for simpletons seems hard to sustain. We might find that it is basically a form of electronic music, produced in studios, but that it is still totally compatible with live performance (if you have the backing tracks and any necessary live musicians). We might remember that techniques of looping, sampling, and most of the standard electroacoustic effects (pedals, vocoders, etc) originated in avant-garde electronic music, and find that hip-hop uses them with just as high a level of sophistication. We might analyse the lyrics in their musical and semantic context, rather than as words on a page. (Also, we might remember that “sex, violence and materialism” or whatever is basically the plot of 95% of operas. But your average opera fan would be scandalised by a three-minute hip-hop version of Carmen.)
Also, though I’m not an expert by any means and do not listen to hip-hop for fun, many of the rap & hip-hop tracks about violence and such are genuinely distressing to listen to, incorporating e.g. sounds of gunshots, beats that are an aural assault, field recordings of 911 calls or voice acting of the rapper’s simulated suicide or wife murder, etc.
Anyway, the good thing (imo) in the classical music world is that there is hope. Most of the music students of my generation & younger (I’m 26), many of whom excel in classical performance, then go home to listen to Nicki Minaj or Kanye or Young Thug or Janelle Monáe, and talk about that with just as much interest, and follow all the beefs they have with one another, etc. And due to the collapse of the middle class post-2008, many of these people are economically situated within the working class, so their listening habits are an authentic reflection of their social position rather than an ethnomusicology exercise from bougie assholes like myself. >_> So it’s totally possible that once this generation reaches the age of having to find jobs & the older generation of music educators reaches the age of getting tenure at a university, there will be more people willing to abandon the traditional models and have the empathy to educate young people in an affirming way.
OK I’m definitely done now
Your long posts are great! Keep them coming.
Classical music had its roots in the aristocracy, but it has always had a large working and middle class following. Maybe all those blue-collar Italian-American Caruso fans were being aspirational, but they were still blue-collar. My dad was a classical music buff from a Midwestern working-class background, and he was initially drawn to it as a way to rebel against the lowbrow tastes of his parents. It was acting as a kind of mirror image of the way that rich kids use rap to annoy their parents. But I don’t take Johnson’s dismissal of race at face value, because it’s insane to try to generalize about popular music of the last hundred years without looking at it through a racial lens.
On the Slipped Disc thread, John Borstlap goes on at length about how jazz improvisation is “pure instinct” – he’s like Scruton’s id. Borstlap also literally uses the words “primitive” and “jungle” to describe more current black music, which, okay. I forgot about the parallels between black music and past fetishes for Spanish and Roma music, that is a really valuable perspective.
It’s always a good idea to separate “hip-hop” from “hip-hop on the radio.” The marketplace favors the most violent and transgressive content–and that marketplace consists mostly of white listeners. Outside of the top 40, there’s a much broader diversity of subject matter and style. You’re right to be appalled by a lot of commercial rap, but that’s no reason to deprive yourself of the entire art form. It would be like saying “I don’t like film” because you find Hollywood blockbusters objectionable (as you should). Over the weekend, I was at an event where high school kids were performing original rap songs about the luminosity of celestial objects, neurotransmitters, and the structure of the cell. And they were banging! As with all art media, rap is a container that you can fill however you want.
Most of the hip young composers I know are enthusiastic about rap. There had to be a generational shift before the music academy could start to embrace jazz, and I’m sure the same thing will happen with rap too.
Oh no, I didn’t mean to imply I was appalled! I was pointing to that as a positive feature, actually—opera and classical music in general tend to cloak all the stabbings and rape and so on in beautiful music, to make them palatable. Rap is in many ways a lot more psychologically healthy, presenting things that are bad in a way that sounds genuinely unpleasant. Again I’m not a fan, I haven’t studied rap in detail; I’m thinking of songs I was introduced to by friends which included Eminem’s Kim, Biggie’s Suicidal Thoughts, some others on similar topics. (Also some left-wing punk rock, Against Me! etc, which also touches on unpleasant topics for activism purposes.) There are a tiny handful of similar examples in classical music—e.g. Trevor Wishart’s Red Bird, Krzysztof Penderecki’s Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima, and I love both pieces and listen to them very very rarely. That’s what I meant by “distressing” lol.
It is insane to generalise about popular music like that but I think there is a sort of collective insanity in a lot of the classical music world. Of course Johnson is a racist on some level, most high level classical music people are; but I don’t think he consciously considered the existence of race at all. I mean places like Oberlin and Eastman and New England Conservatory (etc) are situated in neighbourhoods that are about 95% white, and most of the people in those neighbourhoods who listen to hip-hop or rap are likely to be white, and when the academics look up from their desks once in a while and remember black people exist their reference for what black people actually are is likely to be Myron Magnet.
Also yes, Slipped Disc is simultaneously a horrifying cesspit and also an extremely instructive perspective on what classical music fans are actually like. I imagine in forty years, when it’s no longer popular, they will be fetishising the “primitive jungle energy” or whatever of rap and hip-hop, and decrying whatever the top music genre of 2058 is.
Also will add—the aspirationalist aspect of classical music is probably the biggest reason I hold onto it and try to reproduce it as a career. When I was young it was my only way into a space separate from the world and worldly concerns (and also separate from like… my family, my dysfunctional school system, etc). The thing about aristocratic culture is that a lot of the things they take for themselves are actually really nice: life sucks, champagne and truffles are delicious, and make life suck a little less for a while. Beethoven string quartets? Also nice, and much cheaper to redistribute to all of us non-aristocrats, at least in .wav file form. Making samples & full recordings freely available for anyone to use and remix is also…. honestly pretty similar to the historical practice of composers writing variations and concert paraphrases on other people’s music, which has a respectable history in the works of e.g. Liszt, Rachmaninov, etc. I don’t see much difference between them and Dr. Octagon in that respect.
Didn’t mean to imply that you were appalled, that was more of a collective “you.” There is plenty of bleak and antisocial art that I love, but sometimes I find it depressing. This is true of rap songs, movies, prestige cable dramas, and so on. The moralist in me disapproves of all the misogyny and violence and such, but there’s also a part of me that understands the psychological need for it. I was playing around with a friend’s DJ controller, scratching “A Milli” by Lil Wayne. I found myself hypnotically repeating the words “bitch” and “motherfucker.” It was funny and gratifying, and it really sounded good. I couldn’t stop myself, even though I was kind of horrified. Emotions are complicated.
I’ve struggled really hard with the contradiction of this issue of racism without racists. None of the classical music people at the institutions where I work are racist, but the curriculum at both schools is absurdly Eurocentric. Finally, this past semester, I took a seminar on the sociology of education, and the readings finally gave me the theoretical vocabulary I was looking for. If institutions were set up following racist ideology, as music schools certainly were historically, then it isn’t necessary for individuals within those institutions to have personally racist attitudes in order for the institutions to continue to function in racist ways. Simply doing your job and tacitly accepting the traditions of the institution becomes a racist act even if you harbor personal racial animus at all. Same thing with classism, sexism, and so on. So while I don’t believe that Johnson is a racist person necessarily, his argument has racist effects simply by his passively declining to engage the issues.
Ok so sorry for what’s going to be a long post, but this brought up a few responses.
I’m not just trying to be difficult questioning your knowledge of classical music but I hope you understand I feel like it’s as if I to were to start addressing hip hop fans and go, “I listen to Wu-Tang frequently, I also listened to Illmatic yesterday, and few days ago I was listening to Wale. I took some courses on hip hop in college, so let me tell you about hip hop as a whole.” Anyone who seriously loves and knows their hip hop wouldn’t give me the time of day and they’d be right not to, because any generalizations I made would be severely lacking based on my knowledge and if I can’t show I’ve really made the effort to really try and engage and explore the genre why would/should they listen to me?
I guess it’s a matter of who you want to hear your message, if you want to convince people who are already basically on your side that’s fine, but if you really want to convince someone who’s spent a lifetime immersed in that scene you can’t expect to do so without really knowing your stuff.
Additionally (but also related) I’d like to emphatically disagree with your point about early music as well. Sure if plainchant and madrigals are your sole considerations, but seriously the music in Europe from about 1350-1520 or so has so much more in common (rhythmically, harmonically, melodically) with pop music today than Beethoven it’s not even a contest and that’s definitely the reaction I’ve gotten from students I’ve taught. I encourage you to explore the music between Perotin and Josquin.
I don’t understand your point about post-minimalism, why is it either/or? It’s not like something like Duckworth’s Time Curve Preludes is trying to be a pale imitation of music from the African diaspora. There of course is some influence because that music tends to have more influence from American/British pop, but much of the apparent similarities also come from that same period of early music in Europe I mentioned before. Machaut and Ockeghem tend to be particularly important. If there’s a non-western music composers in that style tend to really take a lot of ideas from, it’s unquestionably gamelan.
Lastly I want to ask, have you really gone out and gathered data about what’s being taught in schools across the country? In my case I went to public schools in DC elementary through high school, the first song I remember learning to sing in class was “Lift Every Voice and Sing,” which we sang a lot. I remember learning a ton about jazz especially Ellington, Scott Joplin was also big, and other than that we would also sing kind of generic “world” stuff. I can count the the exposure I had to classical music via school on one hand: going to an NSO concert at the Kennedy Center once, watching some random docudrama about Beethoven about a kid who lives with him while he’s deaf and angry, watching Amadeus, and watching Carmen the hip-hopera. Now I would absolutely believe my experience is not what most kids got, but I also imagine things might not be quite as one-sided as you’re picturing and from my own anecdotal evidence of what my colleagues are doing I know Jazz at least tends to get quite a bit of attention. Still not hip-hop but also not 19th century classical music.
If you listened to and studied hip-hop as much as I’ve listened to and studied classical music, I’d be very interested in your opinions on it.
To try to understand contemporary pop in terms of the notatable aspects of it is to miss the point of it completely. It’s a recorded art form, where groove is the first consideration and timbre is the second. Pop music started to be as much about sound as it was about “music” during the jazz era, and it split off from performance once and for all with the Beatles. A story for you: a friend of mine teaches piano, and she wants to be a “cool” piano teacher, so she encourages kids to choose the songs they want to work on. She had a kid bring in a Rihanna song, so she transcribed it and started teaching it. The kid said, “No, this is wrong.” My friend said, no, the chords and melody are right there. The kid nevertheless insisted that it sounded wrong. The kid was correct! A Rihanna song is about the production. You can’t meaningfully play her music on the piano any more than you can meaningfully play Beethoven on a drum kit. Even if fourteenth century music were identical rhythmically and harmonically to music now, it still sounds completely different, and that matters.
It would be great to teach the kids about gamelan music, and the contemporary composition that derives from it. But I bet they’d be more open to it if they knew that we valued their music for its own sake, and if we were interested in hearing them express themselves. I certainly found myself to be more open to jazz and classical when I found out how much they would improve my rock playing.
The curriculum standards for music call for multiculturalism, songwriting, music tech, improvisation, and all kinds of wonderful things. That’s great! But music teachers are not being taught that stuff, so their ability to do it effectively it is seriously limited. What passes for “pop music pedagogy” in most schools is thirty kids strumming a Beatles song in unison. In the UK, where they’ve been doing pop music pedagogy for many years, they’re struggling with the fact that teachers still deliver it as if it were more classical music. So now you have all these British kids who think the Beatles are “classical” music. Meanwhile, Lucy Green demonstrated that it’s perfectly possible to teach Beethoven the way that the Beatles themselves learned their music: by ear, informally, in small peer groups, with the teacher available as a resource for when the kids got stuck – the kids tend to be a lot more enthusiastic about Beethoven when they encounter him that way.
You have to have experience making and learning music the way pop musicians do before you’ll be comfortable and competent to run a classroom that way. I meet all these music education grads who have never written a song, never programmed a beat, never set foot in a recording studio, basically have no idea how the music on the radio is being created. I lead PD sessions on music tech, and I’ve met plenty of teachers with progressive attitudes and all the will in the world. But you can’t pick up Afrodiasporic production practices in a two day workshop. You need to spend substantial time at it.
Then I meet teachers who have developed enough classical music chops to get into a music ed program, while also leading parallel lives as DJs or singer-songwriters or producers. Those folks are doing amazing work. But it is totally unreasonable to expect every music teacher to be such a manic overachiever.
BTW, thanks for your comments here. It’s really helpful to have thoughtful and well-informed commenters who don’t agree with me.
I’ll drop that point because I don’t think we’ll see eye to eye, for me I’m just uncomfortable making claims about music if it’s not a style I’m seriously making music in.
I don’t see what your story has to do with my point about early music which was brought up in response to you suggesting a kid who couldn’t connect to Beethoven wouldn’t be able to connect to earlier music. Nowhere did I make any claims about pop music or that those elements are more important than production, but in comparing Beethoven to say Dufay, Dufay is undoubtedly closer. Even you were to look at sound and timbre though, that period of music tends to be much more similar to pop music for a number of reasons largely boiling down to the lack of very specific performance instructions which makes each performance/recording something of a re-composition. Early musicians generally feel much more free to improvise, the ensembles are less standardized, and while there’s a great variety of vocal types across different recordings and ensembles, the voice that is most common is much more “natural” to someone used to US/UK pop. The sound you get from a lot of mixed instrumental early music ensembles would really not sound out of place on any kind of even slightly experimental folk pop like Joanna Newsom, or Sung Tongs era Animal Collective. Still I find your description of pop way too over simplified and narrow and just excludes/diminishes so much great music. In regards to the story, I’ve actually had that same experience teaching students before, but I’ve also taught kids who couldn’t care less what the sound is as long as the melody’s there. How we perceive music is very complicated and there’s no simple answer as to what’s most important because that will always vary with individuals. Some kids can isolate timbres and get at the overall sound of a recording really well, others pick up on melodies right away, some kids intuitively grasp really subtle things in rhythm, and for all of these some struggle. These are all things you just develop sensitivity to and I don’t find any value in deciding as a blanket rule to privilege one aspect of music over another.
Anyways while I feel there you could check what I see as harmful generalizations that crop up in your writing from time to time, overall I’m sympathetic to your project and goals. I think you’re right on with a lot of the problems you’ve pointed out in music education and even if we have some differences in concerns/approcahes, It’s good to know there are more people out there working to build a more inclusive and interesting musical community.
I have to agree with Marcela. So much of this blog is based on over simplifications. How can one just outright declare production/timbre to be primary in popular music? Primary to whom? The same goes for dogmatic assertions like: “A Rihanna song is about the production. You can’t meaningfully play her music on the piano…” Again, I ask, what gives you the authority to make a statement like that? Who are you to decide what is or is not meaningful?
I can link you to plenty of sources to support the assertion that pop music is primarily about production/timbre – start with The Poetics of Rock by Albin Zak, which argues that sound became primary back in the sixties and seventies, with the Beatles’ Revolver as a major turning point.
But don’t take my word for it, or Zak’s. Go into a recording studio and see how everyone spends their time. In rock, at least half the time is spent mixing, and a fair amount of the tracking time goes to dialing in guitar tones and such. In more contemporary pop styles, like EDM and hip-hop, mixing consumes 90% of the time. Every club track uses the same four on the floor kick drum pattern, backbeat, and modal harmony, but they all differ in their timbre and production.
Songwriting has been largely subsumed by production as well. The usual method for writing a current top 40 song is to do it in the studio, having melodic and rhythmic choices follow from the choices of synths and drum sounds. Most parts are written by aurally-guided improvisation, followed by aurally-guided editing. The Song Machine by Jon Seabrook is a good place to read about this, it’s not very scholarly, but it gives an accurate picture. You can also read any of Brian Eno’s many interviews, he’s more open and articulate about his process than most producers. Eno says that sound is his first and last consideration, and that he often walks into the studio without any planned material at all. He was an outlier when he started working this way, but now he’s solidly in the mainstream. If you’re interested in reading more about producers and how they work, I’m happy to make recommendations. But the best way to learn about pop production is to sit down in front of the computer and try it.
Finally, my statement about the Rihanna song is a quote of my friend’s piano student, though it’s a statement that I agree with, as do most students who I work with. But so prove me wrong! Find some counterexamples. I’d be interested to read them, as I’m sure would other readers of the blog.
It feels like you’re not really hearing what I’m saying which is maybe my fault, but it also seems like you’re pretty much set in how you think about things so it doesn’t really feel fruitful to keep posting.
I would like to clarify a few things though. First of all my comment about the narrowness of your pop music definition had to do more with you saying all pop music is groove based. As far as the production element im in complete agreement about the fact that production is the primary concern of pop music, I just think you went too far in creating a false distinction between production and “musical” elements. I love Brian eno and he’s a great example of someone using the studio as an instrument, but let’s say he’s not downplaying his work as artists like to do and really goes into the studio with nothing more than a notion of the sound he wants. Even then, the melodies, harmonies, rhythms, forms, etc he eventually gets are not chosen at random, even if it’s not super conscious those materials are still meaningful to him as well. If they weren’t then any old material would do which if you look at the musical cohesiveness of his albums or his output as a whole you see that’s not likely to be the case. In short, you don’t get an album like Here Comes the Warm Jets if the musical materials are meaningless. Furthermore, I took issue with what seemed to be a general blanket statement that only production matters for all pop musicians. I just find that glosses over meaningful distinctions. I will absolutely grant that the sound of an album is ultimately what pop musicians are more concerned with but clearly the balance between the importance of different elements is going to be different between an artist like Kanye West and Fleet Foxes, and it just seems like you prefer to make more sweeping generalizations that treat styles as uniform masses.
Lastly, my counterexample to the story I feel like I was clear about, but it’s simply my experience teaching hundreds of individuals for over 10 years, and I know if I talk to a student about the sound/feel of a track ( or melody or whatever ) some will get it right away, but some people just aren’t sensitive to it and can’t hear it until they learn how to. It’s just not as predictable as you make it seem.
My question is why are you so obsessed with classical music? You don’t seem to like or know much about the tradition, judging from your posts on Mozart or Bach for example you seem to have a very superficial acquaintance with the music. Aside from simple confusions like what it meant to compose a chaconne by the 1730s, it seems like you have little if any exposure to the pre-1500 styles (or even 1600s?), or post-minimalism, or other veins that specifically counter many of your assumptions. This is all to say, why not just focus your efforts on a positive account for hip-hop instead of anything else? Thats the music you know and love so why not advocate for it rather than disparage a tradition you’re not very familiar with?
I understand you’re trying to work against what you feel is the unjust cultural cache of classical music and I’m somewhat sympathetic to that, but presenting arguments against such a deeply rooted and expansive tradition if you can’t demonstrate a comparably expansive knowledge just ring hollow. Unless you actually want to dig deeper it just seems to me that your best approach is to concentrate on what’s great about the music you have an affinity for.
I’m obsessed with classical music because I believe that its hegemonic dominance over music education is holding back the field, and stifling our amateur music culture. Music educators who are trained only in such a narrow and esoteric tradition are poorly equipped to engage students in the music that matters to them, and are even more poorly equipped to foster those students’ musical creativity. Classical ensembles, marching bands and choirs are only appealing to a small minority of kids, and they serve even those kids poorly by failing to prepare them for a musical life outside of institutional settings. People should be free to study and pursue classical music if they want, and it’s fine if there are specialist educators, but music educators serving the entire student population need to have a broader skill set.
It’s true, classical music is mostly not my cup of tea, though you might be surprised to learn that I am pretty familiar with it, and I do listen to a lot of it. I keep Bach in frequent rotation, especially the cello suites, and the preludes and fugues. Yesterday I listened to Beethoven’s late string quartets. A couple of days ago I was listening to Toru Takemitsu. I make sure my kids hear a lot of it too. In grad school I had to pass the same classical music history, theory and aural skills requirements as the performance and composition majors. I’m sure I don’t have as much in-depth knowledge of plainchant or madrigals as a specialist or aficionado would, but I can also say with confidence that if a kid isn’t connecting to Beethoven, plainchant or madrigals are probably not going to do the job either. As for post-minimalism, well, there’s definitely a closer connection there to the dance music of the African diaspora, but I would prefer the kids go straight to the dance music of the African diaspora.
This blog is mostly devoted to explicating what’s great about the music I have an affinity for. But music education failed me as a kid, as it fails most kids, and it will continue to fail them unless some structural changes happen. I believe that I’m doing both future teachers and their students a service by advocating for those changes.