Note to readers: If you’ve been reading my musical memoir, “Blues, Preludes & Feuds” this is not that. BPF is a single extended story; these are random thoughts about music, culture, etc. And not just my thoughts. In the coming weeks, I’ll be introducing other writers, each with a unique take on the musical world.
In these deeply troubling times (I know, all times probably feel that way when you’re living through them, but still…) it is not unreasonable to wonder about the purpose of music. I mean from the standpoint of one who has been making for several decades now.
Is it to entertain? Enlighten and Ennoble? Energize, Embolden, empower, enrich? Employ? Enervate? (I hope not!) Maybe all of those and more. And those are just a few of the En and Em words.
But I don’t think any of those capture the underlying point of music, the thing music can actually do in the world.
Beethoven said this:
“Music is the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which comprehends mankind, but which mankind cannot comprehend.”
Try to unpack that sentence. I’ve been trying for years. It’s actually radical in its implications. The higher world of knowledge understands us, but we don’t understand it? What does that mean? Incorporeal entrance? So music is a disembodied way to dwell in a world beyond our comprehension, literally feel its vibrations for a while before returning to our mundane corporeal existence?
Well, that’s my current understanding of the sentence. I don’t think it can or is even meant to be completely understood—in the same way that music itself can’t be completely understood. It will always remain somewhat elusive, just beyond our grasp.
I don’t mean (and I know Beethoven didn’t mean) that we as practitioners of the art can’t or shouldn’t understand how it works. Or that understanding the mechanics of music somehow diminishes one’s enjoyment of the art. That’s absurd, akin to saying your enjoyment of a great novel will be diminished by understanding sentence structure.
Beethoven’s 10th
But the deeper meaning of great music—and possibly mediocre music—can’t be put into words or an algorithm. The recent minor phenomenon over an AI “completing” Beethoven’s 10th from a few little scraps of the composer’s sketches proves that point all too well. You can read Jan Swansons’ excellent and reluctant review for details, but I’ll sum up my own impressions: not only does it not sound like Beethoven, it really doesn't sound like a piece of music at all. Rather, it’s a simulacrum of music. There is no narrative cohesion—just perfectly sensible notes strung together in a quasi-Bethovian style pretending to be music. It’s a joke.
But now that I think about it, that is exactly what mediocre music sounds like—strung together moments of somebody else’s actual musical ideas. Long before the Beethoven’s 10th project, AI had already found its role in the music-making business—making adequately mediocre music at a fraction of the cost of hiring adequately mediocre musicians. Somebody at a major label is undoubtedly thinking about the cost-saving possibilities.
And, by the way, Band-In-A-Box and other similar AI-driven music software applications have been doing this kind of thing for years. (B-I-B simulates background accompaniments and even full “improvised” solos based on chord changes the user inputs. It is primarily meant as a practice tool for budding musicians when they don’t have a band available. So it does have the virtue of having practical value, even if the end result is still just the imitation of music.)
Music Analysis
You can certainly analyze a Bach fugue or Paul Simon song and marvel at its almost perfect sonic and/or lyrical logic. But in the end, the analysis can’t tell you much about what that sound and words do to you, the ineffable realm they allow you to dwell in for a few minutes. That’s what Beethoven meant. And unless machines come to obtain real emotions, e.g. love, fear, awareness of one’s own eventual demise, they’ll never do anything close to ineffable. They’ll always be increasingly clever imitators.
And that is the point. That is why music needn’t have any purpose whatsoever. Music, as the novelist Richard Powers remarks in his novel Orpheo, is a thing. It has no purpose other than being music.
Extra-Musical
This doesn’t mean that music can’t or shouldn’t have overt or covert extra-musical meanings attached to it. Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony was composed as a kind of sonic biography of Napolean (until it wasn’t.) Gil Scott-Heron's song Johannesburg was obviously a protest against apartheid. There are innumerable examples of instrumental or vocal music being attached to other non-musical things—the underscoring of films, the stories in musicals and operas, workout mixes.
In all of these cases and more, music is playing some kind of role that is not purely musical. But the point is, none of it matters in terms of the underlying musicality of the music, the thing that the notes tell us that can’t be reduced to an algorithm or even common sense description. We don’t, in other words, need to know anything about Beethoven’s underlying program for the Eroica (which, at any rate, he kept to himself) to get that music. We don’t even have to know anything about Napolean, whose life, in the end, was just some sort of theme-generator for Beethoven’s masterful composition. On the other hand, it doesn’t really hurt to know about these things as we listen to the music; it just doesn’t change anything about the music itself, which either works or doesn’t work on the basis of how all those notes, rhythms, harmonies interact in musical time.
Disappearing Contexts
Context matters in music, as in everything else. But the original, intended context of any given piece of music, or any work of art, dissipates over time until it disappears altogether. When Beethoven was writing the Eroica, Bonaparte was rampaging his way through Europe. Vienna itself, where Beethoven lived during his adult years, was a police state. All of this was very real, and no doubt lent poignancy to the first performances of the symphony. Beethoven’s music almost always had some political overtones or undertones.
All of which is to say that this series, whether my own words or those of others, will be words about music for its own sake, what it does in the world, in our lives. We make and experience music in the context of our own times, which are every bit as charged as Beethoven’s, if not more so existentially speaking.
But while the context in which we hear Beethoven’s music has indeed shifted, the notes, the sonic glory remain the very notes he put down in the early 18th century. The music is its own thing, ultimately dwelling in the realm of music alone.
It seemed appropriate, after going on about Beethoven’s Eroica to mess around with it. Here’s an improvisation on the main theme of the opening movement
:
The challenge in doing something like this, where the original is firmly embedded in my mind (along with all of the aforementioned historty attached to it) is to not let the “perfection” of Beethoven’s statement get in the way of my creativity.