Jacques Ellul on the prevalence of theory in technocratic society as applies to music

One of the things that has stuck with me after reading The Classical Revolution a number of times is that in some important ways Borstlap's polemic merely recapitulates things that were written decades earlier about total serialism by, of all people, Theodore Adorno.  We'll get to that topic in time.

But if I set aside the lack of definition of what music even is in Borstlap's book, I've been struck by the fact that the best elements of his criticisms of high modernism of a 20th century variety were said more forcefully by Jacques Ellul in his book The Empire of Non-Sense back in the 1980s.  Ellul even made a point of name-dropping a number of the composers who Borstlap regards as perpetrators of inhuman sonic art.

THE EMPIRE OF NON-SENSE: ART IN THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY
Jacques Ellul
Copyright (c) 2014 by Papadakis Publisher
translated by Michael Johnson and David Lovekin
ISBN 978-1-906506-40-7


page 112
Now, the decisive importance of theory is found in all the arts.  In music, we have serial music, which at first glance is simply theoretical, especially since its extension, beginning with Arnold Schoenberg and Milton Babbitt, among others, to the domain of measure and dynamics. It becomes a type of mathematical composition. But, from another point of view, the systematic search for analogies between visual symbols and sonorous symbols is also theoretical. The same can be said when one undertakes to reintroduce freedom into musical play: here again this is the result of taking a theoretical stance (John Cage). At any rate, we now have a non-figurative music without reference to either history or to the existing body of sounds.  The influence of theory is, one could say, greater in music because it is nonrepresentational and better reflects the forms of thought. A perceptible order of pure theory emerges from the random improvisations of Andrei Markov or in the use of statistical law in certain works of Iannis Xenakis. It becomes a matter of assembling sonorous objects according to a rule or a group of rules that one has set down. Types of experimental music are also formed on a theoretical basis because the composers create their experiment on the basis of precise ideas. This experimental music is also divided into schools as a function of theoretical differences: concrete music, electronic music, music for tape (Vladimir Ussachevsky). In all cases, it is a matter of creating new sonorous objects, of not taking account of natural sounds or of customary compositions. Music becomes a procedure for organizing new sounds that are totally abstract. Ultimately one could say that theoretical validity is what makes music.  It goes without saying that architecture, like music, lends itself particularly well to this triumph of theory. ... 

The overall verdict Ellul provides about the hermetic technocratic approach to the arts was

page 118
... We stand in the presence of art of elites for elites. A moderately competent intellectual who does not have the "key" is left out in the cold.  ...

Ellul even got around to Boulez, too. But first he had to note that there was an irony in technocratic artists denouncing the bourgeois, namely that without this class the art simply continued the ideals of the class whose sensibilities the daring artist was supposed to transgress.


page 127
... Art has been reduced to being only a game by an efficient utilitarian ordering of technical society. But one must also realize that, by affirming this audacious and revolutionary claim, our theoreticians are exactly adopting the bourgeois attitude toward art, which, as we have already noted, formed a part of the pleasures and amusements of that class. By denouncing the spiritualization and idealization of art by the bourgeoisie, they are merely condemning, unknowingly, their own reverence for theory. Indeed, the only value recognized for art by the bourgeoisie was that of play and entertainment.  ...

The hermetic, technocratic art that Ellul described was, he declared, ultimately the equivalent of a crossword puzzle for the sorts of people who need advanced degrees in order to solve them.

pages 128-129

... After having constructed a very complicated theory with the utmost scholarship, and after having written the deepest reflections of writing on writing or on language, one is finally left with nothing more than ridiculous mouse talk. It is clear why these same critics ardently challenge the very idea of a work of art. Clearly, nothing of all this grandstanding has duration or permanence just as crossword puzzles done on a train are not worth saving any more than episodes of a television game show hosted by Guy Lux. Now, this is the level of our descent. These are crossword puzzles for highly qualified intellectuals or Guy Lux programming for dyed-in-the-wool aesthetes. But since we are considering a game, there must be interest and amusement. If one plays, it is to escape the grey, dull boredome of the everyday. But what is proposed is not at all playful. One is invited to agonize over incomprehensible material. This is not play for me.  I will even claim that I am more bored and frustrated when I read Robert Pinget or Claude Simon, and when I hear Boulez or Victor Barbeau, and when I look at Vera Molnar or Mondrian, than when I am in the metro.

This is not an issue of intellectual difficulty. I can read rather difficult texts, more difficult than Roussel; it's really a question of boring exhaustion and emptiness after an initial moment of curiosity. ...

page 129

... When one sees the results of theoretical art-play--and there are always results--one is bored to tears by an explanation of how they are obtained, and one is faced with the famous questions: do they paint that way because they are incapable of painting? Do they poetize in that way because they are impotent? Sadly, yes. And the gravitas, the depth of the theory is there only to hide these incapacities and impotence. Technical society renders the creator of art impotent. He can only be an entertainer.   ...

While at one level I disagree with Borstlap about several things to do with music, if his aim is to criticize esoteric technocratic art that only appeals to specialists of the 20th century high theory variety then I can appreciate that.  It's just that, having said that, Jacques Ellul far more directly explained what was at issue with this sort of high modernist 20th century art, that it was all technocratic formalism for its own sake to shut out the "uneducated" and that the arts in question were paradoxcially antihumanistic to the extent they forsook symbolism, communicative/affective goals, and insisted that art had to be liberated from traditional/bourgeois values by way of daring modernism.  But there was an additional step Ellul took, which was to discuss how critical, journalistic and educational establishments were necessary for technocratic art cultures to survive and that is properly the topic of another post.

I think that where there is a core idea in The Classical Revolution that could be promising it is in a criticism of technocracy as applied to the arts.  The trouble is Ellul was far more direct in making that case back in the 1980s.  Now that there's an English language translation of Ellul's book I would suggest it as a sturdier alternative to a case that I am not convinced Borstlap has managed to make against technocratic art.  Borstlap's book might be useful as a lay person's version of the argument that art should not be dominated by technocracy and technique as a self-perpetuating solipsism ... but Ellul's book, though ore difficult to read, does a more compelling job diagnosing the problem under the problems that Borstlap hears in the sonic art, getting at the ideological patterns that lead to the creation of sonic art, if you will.

But then both Adorno and Ellul ended up writing about the paradox that artists who embraced avant garde techniques to supposedly defy the cliche sentimentality of the romantic era ended up creating inhuman techniques that are their own justifications, a paradoxically antihumanist embrace of technique perpetuated by men and women who convinced themselves that by so doing they were continuing humanist traditions.

Jacques Ellul on Adorno's Aesthetic Theory and its connection to art in technocracy in The Empire of Non-Sense

... The absolute artwork converges with the absolute commodity. ...
Theodore Adorno, Aesthetic Theory (page 21)

THE EMPIRE OF NON-SENSE: ART IN THE TECHNOLOGICAL SOCIETY
Jacques Ellul
Copyright (c) 2014 by Papadakis Publisher
translated by Michael Johnson and David Lovekin
ISBN 978-1-906506-40-7

page 45 ... Our project is to show that modern art reflects and reveals technical society and is, thereby, fundamentally torn apart in all of its tendencies, which is a characteristic of the society itself. Even in its opposition to society, for example in its refusal to be technical, in its longing for the unrefined, for the material, for the spontaneous, for the unelaborated, for anti-art, etc., art exactly reflects this society. This art of refusal does not escape the process of reification; in its efforts for integrity it mimics those characteristics of the society it claims to oppose. 

...

page 58

... Adorno has summed up the situation especially well in his Aesthetisch Theorie by showing that modern art is placed between two contradictory orientations without being able to choose either one. Every work that seeks to change is revolutionary, but it is, as such, immediately vitiated. If one protests complicity one is reduced to silence, which is another form of complicity. We have already encountered the double-edged impossibility. Indeed, art that is truly innovative would be disorder and perturbation. To the degree that society is totalizing, the perturbation must also be total. Art becomes simply chaos, as we have seen. Authentic art must undermine and then be challenged and rejected; it cannot be understood, at least by the sadomasochists who are the post bourgeois, and, in this case, it no longer has any value as art any more than the mirrors and ornaments of "brothels." The continuity of art serves this society and its suppression would serve it even more, but f this I am not certain.

Art is in permanent complicity with this society, which is totalitarian and absolute because it is technical.  And, it is all the more in complicity to the degree that it mocks and to the degree it embraces the extreme. Mockery is the means of making acceptable what one would otherwise fundamentally challenge. The bourgeoisie is charmed by Endgame or Godot, because, by all evidence, what is presented does not affect them. Mockery allows the side stepping of the tragic dimension of calling reality into question. Thus, when art intends to expose everything with mockery, then it is reduced to a circus, a theater, or to, "... taking someone for a ride." Painting, for example, stops saying anything without knowing it; mockery and outrage--showing a pile of cagerette butts as a work of art--cease to shock. It is nothing more than the artist's wink, unconsciously directed toward the spectator, saying, "Don't take me seriously." Thus, modern art, which reaches the heights of tragedy, is trivialized by the very form it adopts. Here, Adorno's two extremes come together: an "uncompromising" art meets a "conciliatory" art. "Uncompromising music recognizes that, despite everything, society has a right to music, even if it is an inauthentic society, because society also reproduces its in-authenticity, and thus, by its survival, creates the objective elements of its own truth." Such is the true dilemma, the insoluble contradiction that Adorno perfectly brings to light, and which is only resolved by the absence of a serious element in art that has been pushed to the extreme limit of seriousness. Thus, the environment of the technical society reduces art to a more desperate situation than it has ever experienced at the very moment when the means of this society have multiplied, with the result that art is led to pursuing divergent chimeras. Francastel is right to emphasize that modern architecture produces, simultaneously, the "cellular style" and the "open style," with the elimination of walls. We are witnessing contradictory applications of comparable means.

...

What both Adorno and Ellul wrote about at some length was the extent to which modern technocratic cultures dehumanize the humans who live within these cultures. The paradox of the arts was that the realm of the humanities that, in earlier pre-technocratic epochs would have been thought of as having a humanizing effect has had the opposite effect.  Adorno regarded the culture industry as that which ensured people were fully assimilated into and participating in societies he regarded as brutal, totalitarian and dehumanizing.  Popular music was one of any number of ways this came about.  Adorno had little affection for either American mass culture or the not-even-art of Soviet cultures.  What was left was, well, that's another topic for another time.

What Jacques Ellul observed was that Adorno had identified a problem inherent in the arts in the modern age.  Either art was going to be overtly and unabashedly working at the level of propaganda or it was going to move into such a hermetically sealed off domain of technocratic exploration for its own sake that communication and symbolism stopped being goals.  Ellul went on to explicate this in his own way, which is quite a bit more readable than Adorno's way as far as I'm concerned.  For the moment some relatively short excerpts will get Ellul's comments across:

page 98

Art with a message is still, when all is said and done, propaganda. 

page 111

The other major direction of modern art, opposed to what we have already described while still dependent on the technical system, is characterized by formalism and theory. This art without content, without message, without meaning sometimes mimics technique either directly or indirectly to produce a hermetic and academic type of art that plays at play but is merely a play for specialists. It is no longer play for the people or for children drawing on walls or setting off fireworks. It is like a game of Go or chess. It is an art that is more and more refined, following the technical model; more and more difficult and strange to the unschooled populace, but it is thrust upon the people who only understand it superficially without appreciating its amazing subtlety. Only the specialist can interpret it correctly. This presentation to the public is of least interest to the artist, only the process itself is of importance, where one can admire the artist's mastery of the most outlandish means of expression. ... 

I know that for people who bring up Adorno and his advocacy of twelve-tone music there's an eagerness to hold him responsible for advocating twelve-tone which led to integral serialism and so on.  This isn't entirely a canard but it has become a kind of trope.  If you actually read Adorno you find out, at length, he had pretty damning things to say about total serialism and aleatoric music but that's worth an entirely new post to get into that stuff.

What Ellul said Adorno correctly diagnosed was, in essence, the conundrum of art in technocratic societies.  Either art became so hermetic and alienating only elites could perceive it to be art or art geared specifically to mass audiences was more or less propaganda and product; the very autonomy to which art would supposedly aspire in the hands of artists would paradoxically converge with consumption.  In Adorno's phrasing, the absolute artwork converged with the absolute commodity.  Art for the sake of art had nowhere else to go in a technocracy, whether that technocracy was formally capitalist or communist.  

The trouble is that simply correctly identifying the nature of a problem is not the same as coming up with an actual solution.  Adorno advocated for twelve-tone music because, for want of a clearer way to put this, art that resisted commodification was the art to be championed and art that resisted late Romantic conventions of beauty was the art to champion. 

Guardian "Pop 2.0" piece on how Anglo-American pop may stop being the dominant pop paradigm

https://www.theguardian.com/music/2019/feb/06/pop-2-0-how-globalised-music-created-a-new-kind-of-star

In a recent episode of the New York Times Popcast, the paper’s critic, Jon Caramanica, recalled the week in August where K-pop seven-piece BTS and Puerto Rican star Ozuna’s respective albums debuted inside the US Top 10. “I remember looking at that and being, like, oh, this is it – this is the new pop order. This is not seven sub-genres ascending: this is pop.”

Here were two acts who had vaulted western pop’s language barrier: BTS are currently the world’s biggest boyband; Ozuna sings and raps, tackles reggaeton, bachata, Latin trap and plain old pop with equal ease, and was YouTube’s most streamed artist in the world in 2018. Numbers two and three in YouTube’s list were J Balvin and Bad Bunny, two more singer-rappers who primarily perform in Spanish. And, incidentally, eight of the 10 most viewed songs of 2018 were by Spanish-speaking acts.

What Caramanica noticed was a fundamental change to the idea that English is pop’s lingua franca. This development has been accompanied by a remarkable shift in the pop-star system itself. While bilingual artists surge into charts and playlists, joining the American rappers who have profoundly reshaped popular music in the last 20 years (the five most listened-to tracks on Spotify in 2018 were by US hip-hop acts), it’s a different story for the stars who emerged during the era we might call Pop 1.0. “The massive pop stars of yesteryear – Katy Perry, Justin Timberlake – are fading from the public consciousness,” wrote New Yorker critic Amanda Petrusich in a review of a Taylor Swift concert film, premiered by Netflix on New Year’s Eve. [emphasis added]

Though the review is broadly sympathetic toward Swift, Petrusich suggests that despite the singer’s continuing immense popularity as a live act, she’s pushing an aesthetic that is outdated. Moreover, Petrusich seems to imply, so are the other superstars – Perry, Justin Bieber,Britney Spears, Madonna – who stage similarly alpha tours.

These “massive pop stars of yesteryear” adhere to a model established in the early 80s. The industry infrastructure – radio, MTV, record shops, press, awards ceremonies – created an unprecedented level of fame for the top artists, especially the trinity of Madonna, Prince andMichael Jackson. They were the unassailable pantechnicons around whom the idea of pop stardom revolved, establishing the template for Mariah Carey, Timberlake, Spears and Jennifer Lopez – right up to today’s Perry, Swift, Bieber and Lady Gaga. The latter might be the final Pop 1.0 star to have owned the zeitgeist while at her peak, and it says much about her prescience today that she has dissociated from the aloof figure she cut in her imperial phase.

The music was vocally driven, melody prevailing over beats, verses almost always leading to choruses. It could be pensive or euphoric; it might toy with exotica or exhibit social awareness; it was open to advances in technology (Carey’s wholly traditional-sounding All I Want for Christmas Is You, for instance, was made entirely with computers – sleigh bells and all). The main thing, whether it was a frothy Madonna bop, an oily Prince sex romp or Gaga making like a shard of Auto-Tuned ice, was that the artist’s presence was all over it. You knew who you were listening to: the song was in the service of the singer – not, as is often the case today with fluid genres such as trap, the other way around.

As we approach the end of the decade, streaming, which skews heavily toward hip-hop, is the most popular way of hearing music. The average 12-year-old has never known genre boundaries and is likely to be listening to everyone from Cardi B to BTS to platinum-selling American singer Becky G, who has only returned to singing in English after three years of exclusively Spanish releases. Against that, the once omnipresent 1.0 acts represent a mindset that feels outmoded. A bit hubristic and mainly white, that mentality is battling the fluidity of the new guard. Led by rappers and global acts, the 2.0 cohort are oblivious to genre rules [emphasis added]: they pop up on each other’s records, singing in Spanish or Korean or French, and they speak directly to fans via social media. Balvin, Drake, BTS and fellow K-pop hunks Monsta X, Cardi B, the currently ubiquitous Post Malone, Bad Bunny – all have their own styles, yet are adaptable; they’re enormously popular, but by the rules of the old music business, ungovernable. The old riot grrrl slogan, “This is happening without your permission”, feels apt.

While they’re as ambitious as any old-guard star (“we want everybody to love the album, even though they don’t understand what I’m saying,” Balvin said (in English) last year), they’re achieving their aims by being relatable. To audiences whose entry-level pop star was Cardi B or Drake, artists are supposed to be relatable, and to meet them halfway by exposing their lives on Instagram and putting out new music as it’s ready rather than sticking to rigid release schedules. The artificial star/fan distinctions that made Madonna and Jackson feel unreachable no longer exist.
...

"Oblivious to the rules" would mean more if I never, ever heard I-V-vi-IV chord progressions in any of these newer songs. If the songs were about fiscal policies or patent law or something, anything, besides generally being love songs, then maybe I'd believe Pop. 2.0 is really casting off conventions of Pop 1.0.  It's not even clear to me that there's no trace of any Millenial Whoop in the newer songs, either.  12 year olds listening to Cardi B ... okay.

Polylinguistic song goes back centuries in the Western traditions so if pop music has belatedly caught up to a trend that permeated choral music in the Renaissance and Baroque practices then, okay.

The idea that Timberlake could be pop 1.0 seems like a journalistic absurdity.  But these things are probably unavoidable.  It's probably also easier to say Pop 1.0 and Pop 2.0 than to say Pop 20.1 and Pop 21.5.

Not that I have any problems with non-anglophone pop thriving in the new ecosystem.  The K-pop I've heard is livelier than many of the four-chord power ballads I'm hearing from guitar-slinging dudes the last few years.  Taylor Swift may be easy for some journalists to declare a Nazi Barbie ... until this last year, perhaps, but Swift doesn't seem any more annoying to me than the Eagles and, frankly, is probably less annoying than the Eagles.

But ... If genre has been transcended then what does "genre" mean?  Genres within what is broadly known as popular song?  I've contended among my social circles that a great deal of what passes for "genre" distinctives in popular music have little to do with the music as music and a great deal more to do with the cultures that musical styles are associated with.  If someone were to say in days gone by that you should only play country on a Fender Telecaster those days have passed.  The extra-musical cues and associations of various genres of popular song have been breaking down and I don't see that as being bad at all.

But in some respects there's less variety in radio playlists.  I can hear five songs in a row on the radio that are built around I-V-vi-IV.  I can hear song after song that is built around statistical accumulation of detail as a kind of sonic ramp-up song.  I intend to write about this crescendo tendency in pop because it goes beyond what some music journalists resentfully call crescendo rock.  The roots of this crescendo/statistical accumulation approach to musical form goes back to the 19th century and I'll try to get around to the Leonard B. Meyer writing on that topic some other time.  Yes, timbrel effects and signal processing is diversifying and it's nice that many a song is out there that's not the same old Brit rocker or coastal Americana stuff of whatever genre.  But in other ways the changes seem minimal.  If Spears and even Swift can be referred to as in some sense "has been" in pop star terms perhaps pop stardom isn't really worth the trouble?

This might be where some sour invective from Adorno about the culture industry's capacity to endlessly repackage what is ever the same as if it were actually new might remain relevant.  Adorno's contention was that all popular music (and that ranged from popular song to some light classics) predigested the emotional content of the music.  It was music that felt for the listener.  People who listened to popular songs and actually enjoyed them were in some sense lesser people, lesser in the sense of being subjects capable of making free decisions.  In that sense a Justin E H Smith taking a comparison to Adorno as a good thing may have misunderstood that such a comparison in 2018-2019 would not be a song of praise.

There are some genres that are going to be absent from any variants of Pop, whether Pop 1.0 or Pop 128 and two thirds.  The genres include jazz and classical but can also include traditional musical styles from all over the world.  Nobody is likely to start demanding constant radio airplay of Nootka traditional songs, for instance.   The string quartets of Haba aren't going to be getting a lot of play on the pop stations for lots of reasons.

A post-genre pop that is so simply because stereotyped extra-musical associations between timbre and style are breaking down is not really a sign that contemporary popular music is "post-genre".  That the stars of Pop 2.0 can jump back and forth signals a basic cohesion to the style that signals the genre boundaries may shift but certain fundamentals such as structuring processes and musical elements are not changing that much.  

A counterstudy may be the failures of various forms of "crossover" classical music over the last twenty-five years to gain any traction.  Is the failure because popular music and what is colloquially thought of as classical have no potential points of overlap and correspondence?  That seems improbable.  First of all, the majority of popular and classical music we can download or order relies on instruments built around the equal-tempered tuning system.  Maybe you groove to microtonal Turkish guitar duets and want to break beyond the twelve-tones of the piano.  That's cool, but point is that if we wanted to invoke old lefty type polemics from Dwight Macdonald or Adorno, the new pop is oblivious to genre because the pop song genres have boiled everything down more and more to the point where everyone can recognize that changing the timbre isn't changing the fundamental nature of what the song is as a product of a culture industry.  

In a sense it's good if people begin to recognize that there's less distance between a traditional pop song from a musical and something from our century.  It's good in the sense that there are ultimately so many ways songs are songs.  That opens pathways to fusions and syntheses that I think are worth exploring.  But at another level, the idea that pop is post-genre ignores a number of styles that are defined out.  The irony of this is that jazz and classical get defined out of pop in a way that excludes them from consideration.  It's the kind of "meta" irony about music and music pedagogy I was riffing on a bit when I wrote "hegemony may be in the eye of the complainer." I also wrote a postlude to that inspired by watching the film Crazy Rich Asians.  Some memorable complaints about that movie was that it was about the one percent in some place that's not full of white people at the upper crust levels.  Well, exactly.  That presents the conundrum of a Pop 2.0 compared to a Pop 1.0.  This is still going to be the one percent in terms of what some call a winner-take-all paradigm in global popular music as mediated by Anglo-American industry and associated journalism.  

But to partisans of pop the musical one percent isn't going to be seen as Beyonce or Michael Jackson or Taylor Swift or Drake or Kendrick Lamar or other successful popular music artists.  The one percent tends to be thought of in terms of prestige and educational regimes so ... the one percent is thought of as being genres like classical music and jazz.  There's a paradox at play there because jazz and classical music can be thought of as the music of the "one percent" or the "two percent" in terms of actual sales ratios compared to hip hop, pop, country, rock and other styles of popular song.  Were the wares of corporate backed music made into the pedagogical mainstream jazz and classical would be the outliers and the genres that would be outside the mainstream, pop. 

why are jazz and classical at the bottom of the sales charts compared to whichever version of pop, whether Pop 2.0 or Pop 20.14, is on the charts?

Timbre is probably still a sacred element defining pop music.  I've mentioned writing by Kyle Gann in the past and Ian Pace and I won't do more than allude to that writing I've done in this post, which is already getting long enough.  I just don't think people on the pop and classical divides are as post-genre as a contributor to The Guardian may say merely because today's pop stars have a different set of checklists for personae compared to pop stars from really just ten or twenty years ago.  That the controversies around America's first explosion of popular song and instrumental music, ragtime, paralleled debates about the textual and musical merits of rap wouldn't come up in contemporary pop music journalism in Anglo-American contexts.  

There are so many genres and subgenres of popular song that ragtime is forgotten or even treated as a rarified niche of classical music.  It ... has become that in a lot of ways.   There may be people on either side of the pop/classical divide who really want the boundaries zealously guarded.  A pop song can be full of multiple languages but if it's still amplified instruments and electronic signals grooving over something like I-V-vi-IV or i, VI, III, VII, or longer and shorter variations of those chord changes then Pop 2.0 isn't different from Pop 1.0 when it comes to the music so much as it differs on issues of branding.  If I'm hearing song in which "J. Lo" is rhymed with "halo" I'm not feeling like I'm hearing things changing as much in popular song as a Guardian contributor.  T

here may be some real changes but in terms of the ways songs are structured and presented they are  cosmetic changes.  I don't think we need to improve songform as such.  We've had almost a century in which song has reclaimed a central role in Western musical art.  I think theory and practice in music education could do more to catch up with that century of shift.  But, ,at the same time, pop music as an industry seems too eager to congratulate itself on what are generally cosmetic shifts in taste.  Just because I personally find Taylor Swift songs less annoying than songs by Don Henley doesn't mean the craft of songwriting has changed that much. John Dowland played the lute and wrote emo goth songs centuries before emo or goth were things in Anglo-American popular music.  If you want to take a listen and read to the sixth book of madrigals by Gesualdo there were other ways to be kind of goth and emo back in the day.  Songs are still about the hopes and fears people have, about their joys and sources of anger.  

My concern as a composer who has written instrumental music and a few songs over the years is that song and instrumental idioms have balkanized in the last century, partly due to technological and cultural changes and partly due, I think, to some ideological shifts that I simply disagree with. Instrumental idioms are not necessarily going to have a "comeback".  I don't foresee the symphony regaining its place of prestige in Western music from two centuries ago. Why should it?  There's movie soundtracks for the orchestra and it's not that I don't like orchestral works.  i went and hears Samuel Jones' Tuba Concerto twice the year it came out.  I'm more, I'm trying to express this idea that as each generation of popular song gets covered by journalists who don't seem to know or care how far back this tradition of popular song really goes, there's a countervailing insularity in the realm of instrumental and chamber music.  I'm neither an academic nor a professional musician so it may be my hobby time gives me a chance to skate back and forth between journalism about pop music and journalism about classical music.  My feeling is that the problem is both tracks have gotten into trenches, both pop and classical have separated in ways that I think are to the detriment of both traditions.  I love music in both these traditions and would like them to interact more.  Pop 2.0 is still pop as it has been in the last twenty years.  The "Song Machine" is still more or less what it is.  The kleinmeister factories are ... also still what they are!   

My thinking and feeling is that the foundation for a kleinmeister mentality on either side of the pop/classical divide stems from a mentality that is first and foremost concerned with purity codes about what is legitimately "pop" or "classical" and doing so in a way that often doesn't emerge until someone transgresses a purity code, often not just a purity code regarding music.  While I can appreciate there are historical reasons behind concerns about cultural appropriation, the reflex is still something that attempts to enforce a purity code, not altogether unlike the purity of "real" art that gets enforced by kleinmeisters on the other side of the pop/classical divide.  I'm going to go out on a limb and suggest that the actual masters of pop or classical could and did shift over to the other genre from time to time.  Don't we recall that Aretha Franklin sang something when a certain famous tenor couldn't make it?  Didn't Bela Bartok write something for Benny Goodman to play?  Didn't Schoenberg and Gershwin at some point play tennis?  

A person could hope that after a century of these kinds of case studies that people who insist upon hard and impermeable boundaries between "high" and "low", art and pop, and so on could immerse themselves more carefully in the musical histories and legacies they purport to defend.  One way of putting this is to say that corporate interests scrambled to pigeonhole and then market music as quickly as possible in ways that segregated musical styles in ways that reflected other forms of segregation.  Another way of putting it is to say that academics and journalists, even those who regarded themselves as thoroughly enlightened and liberal and with an eye toward promoting the best and greatest that humanity could be, were often the most virulent enforcers of these sorts of kleinmeister orthodoxies. The boundaries between classical and pop as they tend to be called, these boundaries get enforced for all kinds of reasons, some good, some bad, but I think the boundaries need to be detonated.  

I suppose the theme of the kleinmeister gets me back to thinking about something I used to hear, that you can't "really" teach composition or that you can't "really" teach jazz or this or that style of music that is too pure or raw or real to be mediated by formal education.  At one level I regard that entire line of thought as idiotic because it presupposes that something that can be learned can, somehow, by some alchemy, never be taught, as if nobody apprenticed with established musicians over thousands of years, as if nobody wrote things down to pass along knowledge and, still more obviously, music by way of chord charts and head melodies and counterpoint treatises.  My own convictions at the moment are that the kinds of musicians and music teachers who would say for some rhetorical purpose that this or that music can't be taught even though they somehow learned it have probably given you a tell that they are kleinmeisters. 

But maybe there's a way to reformulate these bromides so many bros like to hand down to say what they may be trying to say in a less patently idiotic way.  

The art of composition involves thousands of big and small decisions and there is no music teacher in the world who can make those decisions for you. 

What a capable music teacher can teach you is what kinds of decisions you can make and what the historically informed cases are in existing music that can help you understand the range of possible decisions you can make for any given piece of music you are composing or performing. 

Another way to put this is that there are teachers who will tell you what the rules for a given style of music are who may seek to enforce them; there are other teachers who may tell you what the rules of a given style are with a proviso that you can break any or all of them if you want but you should know that a number of these rules are informed by generations of practical experience and if a choral teacher tells you to avoid perfect parallel fifths in descending lines the reason for that is how fast the pitch of the chorus is likely to nosedive--what you thought was going to end up being a luminous C major chord might be a muddy, throaty A flat because the tenors and altos chunked those perfect parallel intervals that sounded so amazing to you when you were testing them out on a keyboard.   Or you could write the passage and just hope that The Sixteen or maybe the chamber choir for a music academy in Lithuania are just magically already on your contacts list already ... but you've probably inferred the dry humor there.  

One of my music teachers said that it's fine to break "the rules" as long as you show you know what they are to begin with.  

Which ever side of the pop/classical divide it is ... my understanding of music history in the last century is that there have always been musicians interested in melting down, detonating and ignoring what are often extra-musical proprietary codes about what music represents in what context, and there have been musicians and academics and journalists interested in vigorously and vehemently enforcing whatever those codes are that are felt to be in danger of being breached by the musically impure.  We all have these ideals.  I can't stand country music written by people born after about 1960, for instance.  So I can love songs by Johnny Cash and Hank Williams Sr. or maybe some Merle Haggard and I can appreciate Patsy Cline but Garth Brooks annoys me and I cannot stand Toby Keith.  New country is just old rockabilly that broke a knee to me!  Roy Rogers?  Oh, sure.  :)

But then I'm also not an academic so I'm not in a position in an institution in which I could wield my authority to tell people what is or isn't "legit" country.  I'm sure the world is better off for that.  But then here I am writing thousands of words about music at a blog on a weekend ... so maybe that's a pretty academic thing to do on a Friday night ... .  a paradox maybe? 

survey done by Deezer found average person stops seeking out new genres by age 28 and a predictable range of musician responses

There's a bit of ... let's just call it clickbait of a sort ... that, on average, people tend to stop seeking out new music by the age of 28

https://www.ctvnews.ca/lifestyle/average-person-stops-seeking-out-new-music-by-age-28-survey-1.4025955

AFP
Published Tuesday, July 24, 2018 1:03PM EDT 

Listening to the same songs over and over rather than seeking out new tunes? You have plenty of company -- if you're 28 or over.

A survey by streaming service Deezer found that the average person reaches "musical paralysis" -- when she or he primarily listens to familiar tracks and does not seek out new genres -- at the age of 27 years and 11 months.

...

Not too surprisingly an early comment from John Borstlap opened with the declaration that classical music is not average.  A response that invokes the not-average-ness of a genre can be said by fans of rock or reggae or jazz or country or whatever the genre may be.  I mean, sure, if we were to go by sales figures compared to other genres of music that sells then classical music is the music of the proverbial one to two percent that buy music, and depending on the year that means classical music sells better than jazz, which is at least or more elitist if we simply want to invoke an elite nature that is a reflection of how few people buy the music compared to the overall market of music purchased.

Although ... childrens' music might be the elite of the elite then.  The They Might Be Giant's Here Come The ABCs album might top Mahler's Fifth if it's a matter of esoteric niche ... 

It would be hard to find a sturdier case study of gebrauchmusik in the last fifteen years and I don't mean that in a bad way. I'm a Hindemith fan, after all. 

The reactions I've seen from musicians and composers tend to range from the "my preferred genre is not average" to "I'm more adventurous than average".  I get it, I think.  There's a desire to believe that the music that "I" like is not average music but that's not even the substance of the news peg.  The substance of the news peg is that by the age of 28 people stop seeking out new genres of music.  This is hardly a surprise.  Since I've been on an Adorno binge in the last few years Adorno pointed out that, we could translate his idiom a bit to say that he proposed that people would tend to cement their stylistic interests in their youth and that popular music would tend to predominantly appeal to youth and that popular styles would be embraced by youth and retained from youth.  I.e. you think rock and roll stopped being a vital and compelling musical style somewhere around the age you decided you "grew up" or began to assume enough adult responsibilities that the prospect of seeking out new genres of music stopped being of interest to you.

Now I could invoke my own musical life and say that, well, I started getting into microtonal composers only in my forties and that that's a sign that I'm continuing to explore new musical genres but ... no ... by the time I was 28 I had established that I was open to a variety of avant garde classical music styles while also adoring music from the Renaissance, music from throughout the Baroque era, the high Classic era and particularly Haydn's work, a plethora of 20th century classical music, rock, blues, jazz, slivers of country and ... not nearly as much 19th century classical music.  That didn't really change all that much past the age of 28 for me.  I'm not going to say that my listening trajectory is somehow above average.  The observation from the Deezer survey is not necessarily about or against the self-perceived exceptionalism of people who, so to speak, will imagine that they would always be the dissenters who did not do what they were told to do in the musicological statistical equivalent of some kind of Milgram experiment. 

Now I realize that there are some folks who sincerely believe that what music they listen to can, in some mystical kind of way, make them better people.

https://slippedisc.com/2019/02/at-27-you-give-up-on-new-music/#comments/522793

John Borstlap

February 5, 2019

Music does not construct an identity. Sharing comparable tastes may help constructing a group identity but that is only a surface matter. Classical music helps clarifying one’s identity by resonating here and there in the emotional realm, thereby making things conscious. But it is all a subliminal process, not a rational one.

Classical music is supposed to make us more human, more ourselves, and ‘better people’, by appealing to the better sides of human nature. Which does not mean that it works with everyone, of course. But if the process is meaningful, it stimulates a stronger experience of Self and that may be considered a reinforcing of identity.

Classical music does not make us more human and isn't "supposed to make us more human". But if it were, the same could be said about rap, blues, country, jazz, punk, Tin Pan Alley, showtunes, and all sorts of other musical styles ... if, that is, we grant the not so easily proven assertion that music in general is supposed to make us more human, more ourselves and better people by appealing to the better sides of human nature.  If that were the case it would potentially be on the basis of someone reaching such a conclusion about the nature of musical art and ... I suppose I can't resist making a joke here, having come to something like that conclusion somewhere before the age of 28.

But we can let a composer address a practical question, whether there are an infinite variety of ways of combining tones.  Why would that matter?  It may be apparent to a composer already but I want to quote something from one of my favorite composers about the relationship between what composers create and a listener's capacity for what someone called the ability to make an "active coconstruction" of a piece of music being heard.  If you didn't immediately think of Paul Hindemith I can't blame you.  He's not exactly a favorite composer of many people these days.

Paul Hindemith wrote a few things in the book A Composer's World that we'll just quote here:

from pages 19-20

... we recognize as a requisite for the listener's active coconstruction the essential possibility of foreseeing and anticipating the musical structure as it arises in the performance, or at least, if the composition is utterly new to the recipient, his being given a chance to conjecture with a high degree of probability its presumable course. A musical structure which due to its extreme novelty does not in the listener's mind summon up any recollections of former experiences, or which incessantly disappoints his constructive expectations, will prevent his creative cooperation. He cannot adjust his sense of proportion to the unfolding structure, he loses the feeling for his position in the sounding terrain, he does not recognize the significance of the single structural members in reference to the entity, he even loses the feeling for the coherence of these members. For him music goes astray, disappears in chaos; it deteriorates into the mere amorphous assembly of sound it was before it entered the zone of active cooperation in the listener's mind.

In view of all this, we may conclude that there is strange as it may sound in the face of countless attempts at modernization of the musical means of expression in principle never anything new in the general order, shape, and mutual relationship of musical successions. We may even go so far as to say that basically nothing new can ever be introduced into such successions, if we do not want to see the participant in music degraded to a dull, apathetic receptacle, an absorbent sponge reaching the point of saturation without showing any sign of reaction.

IV

Once we agree to this statement, our opinion in respect to musical facts will undergo significant changes. What then remains of the importance which we customarily ascribe to all questions of a composer's style? We prefer to think of his tone-combining craft as possessing an infinite variability, even power of eternal regeneration; but it merely permits a limited number of variations within the given limitations of its sounding ingredients. The building material cannot be removed very far away from certain structural, harmonic-tonal, and melodic prototypes, so that the listener can assume an active part in the process of musical realization. 

Furthermore, the continual accumulation of experiences in a listener's mind should not be overrated. Once he reaches a certain point of versatility in his power of musical coconstruction, no further progress seems to be possible. Thus his experience, rising from primordial feelings of comparative motion to a climax of lateral cocreation, can be likened to an arc which surges up as part of a tremendous circle and thenslows down and flattens into a parabolic curve. From now on, all musical structures that stand entirely without his previous experience will have to exert their impact many times on his physical and mental receptivity if they are to be added to his stock of accumulated knowledge. 

There are, in the end, only so many schematic ways of organizing sound into melodic and harmonic idioms in the realm of music, regardless of style or systems of pitch organization or rhythm.  This isn't really a bad thing.  The best we can hope for, Hindemith said, was to make sure we were not endlessly going in circles within a narrowly confined conception of what music was.  

But note that he wrote that the sheer accumulation of musical experience should not be taken as a sign that the listener's mind had advanced when it came to the matter of what a listener could establish by "coconstruction".  A listener can imagine and anticipate where and what may happen in a musical work with sufficient education but past a hard-to-define point that varies with individuals, no new capacity to forecast and imagine the formal possibilities of a musical work get created.  A blunter way of putting this is Hindemith was pointing out a rather obvious thing, that there is a law of diminishing returns with music consumption as a way to confer musical cognition. A way to translate this point is to say that you could listen to every single symphony of Mozart and it would not really prepare you to understand what goes on in a Wagner opera or a Mahler symphony.  Listening to all of Mozart's symphonies will not give you the cognitive tools to understand what's going on in a fugue by J. S. Bach, and by that I mean you won't understand how fugues work if you've been immersing yourself in sonata forms, rondos, variation movements or even fugues from the later 18th century rather than the later Baroque or early Baroque period.  19th century salon music will not help you start to understand what goes on in a mass by Palestrina or Josquin.  

In a similar way, once you understand the ins and outs of how to listen to country or blues or jazz or a popular style these modes of musical cognition do not necessarily overlap. People who don't understand how modes of reification as a cognitive process in listening to music (as distinct from Marxist definitions of reification) are not going to get jazz, and perhaps find jazz terrible.  If you don't know the paradigms by which variation guides jazz you won't appreciate a lot of what goes on in a lot of jazz.  You will still be able to appreciate a lot of early jazz in which the key structural elements of the songs are front and center.  Ellington and Armstrong wrote a lot of music in which the macrostructural units are easy to pick up.  The farther along jazz went the more abstract and esoteric the modes of musical cognition became that were necessary precursors to appreciate what was going on. That's awfully sweeping, I know, but I'm trying to make a point about how if you pick up all these modes of musical listening and thinking "in" and "about" music you can go a long way toward appreciating and seeking out new musical experiences.

Rather than see the Deezer associated headline as an opportunity to talk about how "my" musical evolution hasn't stopped and "I" am not like those average people ,the headline (clickbaity as it seems) could be a moment to reflect on whether you had any really revolutionary moments of musical epiphany, a moment where something you'd never before taken seriously as music suddenly became something you could understand and appreciate on the musical terms the music gives you.  I found myself unable to enjoy rap and 1990s era R&B for a long time.  Eventually one of my relatives played some Cee Lo Green and for whatever reason something clicked.  I felt like I "got" what Green was aiming for.  He's still not my favorite singer or performer but I don't mind if his work is on the radio, for instance.  When I was in my teens I hated country music but some time in my early twenties I somehow got to a point where I felt like I could "get" Hank Williams Sr. and Johnny Cash.  I had a similar lack of appreciate for reggae because I just couldn't get into Bob Marley's songs and Bob Marley was the cliche reggae artist my peer group in high school was listening to.  One of my siblings brought home some albums by Judy Mowatt and Linton Kwesi Johnson and then, like some kind of lightning bolt, I heard Black Woman and thought "Wow, these songs are amazing!"  Dred Beat and Blood was really weird for me ... but it was weird in a way that stuck with me.  I managed to add reggae to the catalog of musical styles I could have some appreciation for.  This was, I might note, still well before the age of 28.

The string quartets of Bartok and Shostakovich were another ear-opening experience for me.  The guitar music of Toru Takemitsu was still another musical lightning bolt.  Of course I was also blown away by the string quartets of Haydn.  As a choral singer I was completely won over to the works of William Byrd, Maurice Durufle (yes, I know he's not very trendy but he was a very skilled contrapuntist!), and Messiaen.  This was all, still, before I turned 28.  Now I can have a somewhat limited appreciation of metal.  It's not really my thing but I can respect the musicianship that metal musicians can have and I'm told that it's crucial to make a distinction between metalheads and metal nerds.  The former listens only to metal, exclusively metal, metal all the time. The latter might also have affection for the string quartets of Bartok or play saxophone in a wind ensemble.  

Hindemith's observation seems to hold true, there is some admittedly nebulous point past which a listener listens to a sea of music but with this listening there is simply no corresponding expansion of how that listener thinks about and appreciates music. Hindemith didn't have many nice things to say about a lot of the atonal composers and nascent serialists of his day.  Hindemith was convinced that music had to in some way, however indirectly, derive from the overtone series.  Even as a Hindemith fan I don't think he was all that successful in how he tried to make that point.

But he made a point about music and emotional expression that I'll quote from:

pages 34-35

Other analysts, in explaining the effects of music on the listener, see in music a kind of language which by its peculiar means of expression conveys some meaning, whatever this meaning may be. But the difference is, that in a spoken or written language each verbal expression used has unchangeable connotations, while in music each component of an audible form can be understood and interpreted emotionally in many different ways. The word "river" always means a stream of flowing water, but a certain phrase in C minor may cause one listener to experience some feeling of sadness, while to another listener the same phrase means something entirely different, This discrepancy in interpretation will be particularly obvious in the case of music that is unfamiliar to the recipient Those who have had some experience with oriental people and their music will confirm this observation. In hearing oriental music for the first time, the Western listener usually cannot detect any musical significance in it which it would have, if music was an  internationally recognized and understandable .language. The strangeness of its sounds will strike him as funny, even ridiculous, and the only emotional urge he will feel will be a desire to laugh heartily. But this same piece may induce  the initiated to feel sad, pathetic, heroic, or whatnot We do not even need to go so far away into foreign regions; sometimes in southern countries church music can be heard which for the visitor from the North has the most exhilarating effect, although it may be intended as funeral music and will have the proper effect of such on the native listener. [emphasis added] ... 

... 

The most generally accepted explanation of the effect music has upon a listener is: it expresses feelings. Whose are the feelings it expresses? Those of the composer, the performer, the individual listener, or the audience? Or does it express feelings of a general character, the specification of which is left to the members of any of these groups? Music cannot express the composer's feelings. ...

pages 38-39

The reactions music evokes are not feelings, but they are the images, memories of feelings. We can compare these memories of feelings to the memories we have of a country in which we have traveled. The original journey may have taken several weeks or months, but in conjuring up in our memory the events of it, we may go through the entire adventure in a few seconds and still have the sensation of a very complete mental reconstruction of its course. [emphasis added] It is the same trick dreams play on us. They, too, compress the reproductions of events that in reality would need long intervals of time for their development into fractions of a second, and yet they seem to the dreamer as real as adventures he has when he is wide awake. In some cases these dream-events may even be the "real" life of the individual, while the facts they reflect, distort, or rearrange are nothing but an inconsequential and sober succession of trifles.

Dreams, memories, musical reactions all three are made of the same stuff. We cannot have musical reactions of any considerable intensity if we do not have dreams of some intensity, for musical reactions build up, like dreams, a phantasmagoric structure of feelings that hits us with the full impact of real feeling. Furthermore we cannot have any musical reactions of emotional significance, unless we have once had real feelings the memory of which is revived by the musical impression. (The importance of recollection in respect to musical perception has been mentioned in the second chapter.) Reactions of a grievous nature can be aroused by music only if a former experience of real grief was stored up in our memory and is now again portrayed in a dreamlike fashion. "Musical" gaiety can be felt only if a feeling of real gaiety is already known to us; "musical" complacency arises in our memory only if complacency felt before without musical prompting was already part of our experience. It is only with the memory of feelings in our mind that we can have any feelinglike reaction caused by music. [emphases added]...

An emotional response to music is only possible under special circumstances.  First of all you have to have felt the emotion that a musical moment could be intended to evoke. Second of all the music must through its various means of depiction, in some way replicate, in however distilled and/or telegraphed an idiom, the emotional content that you have already felt so as to evoke it once more. If you have never felt X and a musical work successfully evokes X for those who have felt X in a given cultural and social context then the music isn't going to evoke X emotion in you. The easiest example of how this doesn't work is to say that those who have never been in love may not really appreciate what it is about love songs that evokes memories of love in those who have been in love or currently are in love.  For the person who has not felt that there is no "our" to the phrase "our song" that is the case for lovers and beloveds.  

What Borstlap has written does not necessarily disagree, at any point, with any of the Hindemith I've just quoted.  Music can resonate with emotions we have already felt.  I agree. But ... the caveat I think is necessary is to point otu that Hindemith was right to say that music cannot replicate within you the memory of a feeling you have never had.  

What is the pratical significance of this?  Well ... someone once said those who have will be given more and those who do not have, even what they have will be taken from them.  if art can be construed in some kind of religious terms this can play out in a kind of winner-take-all emotional lottery ... but perhaps only as perceived by those who feel by dint of their cultural consumption they have in some sense "won" the cultural lottery of accumulated feeling-through-music.  This may not have to happen through listening to classical music.  It might be possible for this to happen to someone by listening to country songs, or hip hop, or jazz, or bluegrass or blues or traditional music from Thailand or folk songs from Moravia or Iranian epic ballads.  

I know for people who think of themselves as above the benighted masses that their musical literacy is above average but I'm not so sure that's the practical "take away" people should have about the Deezer survey results.  Think of it another way, that the nature of how we consume music as a culture so permeates our musical culturation processes that our openness to music is mediated by that consumer aspect.  

That this dynamic would not apply in the same way to composers and musicians is obvious ... to a musician ... but it doesn't mean we should underestimate the obvious with respect to people who consume music in a culture that, as Sousa warned more than a century ago, would balkanize into the consumer classes and the producer classes.

Hindemith's observation about the connection between what people hear in music and the emotions they already have to have to bring a moment of correspondence to listening can explain why it is that so many people, by the age of 28, prefer to listen to the same songs over and over again.  Those songs, for all kinds of reasons, powerfully summon and re-summon feelings they have had, feelings they associate with those stand-by songs and those songs are often the medium through which those feelings are re-summoned.  Adorno called these sorts of people emotional listeners and likened their use of music to the use of mood-altering or mood stabilizing drugs.  If you listen to music so as to evoke a feeling of the sublime then Adorno's claim would be that you're using music as a drug to feel a certain way and that what this says about you is ... pretty bad.  

Adorno, for those who don't already know this, regarded Hindemith as a reactionary musician ... although by the 1940s through 1960s Adorno would grant that compared to the likes of total serialists or aleatoric composers that however reactionary Hindemith was in his musical temperament he was a competent reactionary, rather than one of the incompetent would-be radicals Adorno found so tedious in the later decades of his life. Adorno wrote that Hindemith had, at least, mastered all the traditional techniques and modes of expression before he cast them off to explore new possibilities in his early expressionist works.  The same could not be said of those Adorno regarded as musical incompetents, those who could not successfully rebel against the centuries of tradition going back to Palestrina the way Hindemith once did because these newbies had never mastered the basic competencies of traditional European musicianship.  

Which thematically gets me to what I like about Hindemith and what I have enjoyed about his music since I discovered it back in my early twenties.  There is a feeling composers and musicians have with some kinds of music that may be hard to share with non-musicians, a sense of excitement and discovery, discovering a new way to make music as an individual musician or composer or a new way to make music with the people you love to make music with  Hindemith's music was exciting for me to discover.  There were things going on his music that touched on things I wanted to do, juxtapositions of ancient chants and old folk songs with esoteric dissonant forms of counterpoint that were still counterpoint, still anchored to a larger harmonic sensibility and to a guiding rhythmic pulse.  Even cranky old Adorno could grant that the young Hindemith was, in his way, charting an actually new path forward before he became reactionary in his musical sensibilities.  Well, okay, if even Adorno granted the point ... I draw inspiration from Hindemith's efforts to explore what were, for him, new paths forward.  

A non-musician may be unable to appreciate a range of feelings that music can evoke in those musicians who can be excited by where this new direction could go ... but I don't even believe that.  It's difficult, perhaps, for non-musicians to fully feel the feeling of excitement that this music is going somewhere we haven't tried before but in a sense anyone can feel that in a given cultural context.  Contra Adorno, musical fads don't always have to be at the behest of the capitalist masters of the culture industry.  Sometimes music catches on because it actually is inspiring, because it inspires by introducing what relaly are new ways of thinking in music, thinking about music, and using music to express ideas (and not just feelings).  

I remember a kind of crazy interview Quincy Jones gave not so long ago and something he said in that interview resonates with me.  He complained, yes, complained, that too many songwriters and musicians these days feel like music is all about feeling and the expression of feeling.  It is that, Jones said, but too few musicians and people who listen to music these days appreciate that music is something that should involve the left hemisphere as well as the right.  Jones' idea was, in a phrase, that great music doesn't just engage your feelings and incite an emotional response in you or from you, it also engages your mind. For people who only listen to music so as to feel something, and feel it strongly, this whole ethos of music making and music listening may be completely opaque. For those who listen to music to feel a certain way it may make all the sense in the world, paradoxically, that they have scoped out and heard all of the songs that make them feel the feelings they have already felt by the time they turn 28.  

Mere Orthodoxy has a review up of Roger Scruton's book Music as an Art

https://mereorthodoxy.com/book-review-music-art-roger-scruton/

It's on the long side but not necessarily even as long as some of the pieces that occasionally go up on Mere Orthodoxy.

Jascha Nemtsov plays excerpts from Zaderatsky's 24 preludes (as distinct from Z's 24 preludes and fugues)

just because ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=H47JSX14pD0

a study in what I call Millenial Whooping Cough in songwriting, the American Authors' "The Best Day of My life"

I should probably just start by saying I hate American Authors.  Really, I hate their music.  Although journalists and writers on the topic of music have singled out Katy Perry as an annoying purveyor of what has been called the Millenial Whoop there's a more awful exponent of the trope, that relentless shifting between the fifth and third degrees of a tonic triad in a major key song.

One of the songs by American Authors has some form of the Millenial Whoop show up no less than 47 times.  If we don't forget that "woo, woo-hoo-ooh-ooh" that permeates "The Best Day of My Life" starts with the whoop ... you'll hear the 5-3 chord factor descent or alternation happen dozens of times in just a single song.  They are, thus, one of the more beset victims of a songwriting disease I call Millenial Whooping Cough.  Watch and listen if ye dare.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y66j_BUCBMY
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjFOdtOyg3c

For a time I confused this band with The Lumineers, another band I find aggravating and which over-uses the Millenial Whoop. 

Part of what makes the 5-3 intervallic gesture annoying is the songwriters who use it don't seem to think of not using it so much as they try to offset it by adding a plethora of other riffs around it.  This song is a case in point.  The singers don't stop whooping it up as they add more riffs to the texture as the song moves along.  Now, I'm not going to say the riffs themselves are that bad.  The band gets a decent grovoe going ... which would be easier to appreacite if they weren't woo-hoo-ing through it. 

But ... you know ... it's not like there weren't predecessors to the Millenial Whoop, when I stop and think about it a bit.  No, I don't mean the journalistically lazy go-to of "Tarzan Boy", because oscillating that rapidly between intervals a perfect fourth apart is harder, significantly harder, than a minor third within a triad. 

Nah, there's other examples of "woo woo!" that go back earlier.

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

Of course Mick and the gang start on the fifth and sit on it for measures at a time before jumping up to the leading tone and then back down to the fifth.  It also doesn't kick in until 2:00 into the song. 

There's a pre-Millenial Whoop that's in the song by R. E. M. called "The One I Love".
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j7oQEPfe-O8

It shows up at 1:33 and it's a REMish sort of vocal tic that I've always found annoying.  It's not really better than the Millenial Whoop at all because, in terms of intervallic descents it's the descending minor third.  What makes it college indie rock is that the would-be whoop is from the fourth to the second scale degrees rather than the fifth to the third. 

So, as annoying as I find the Millenial Whoop in contemporary popular songwriting it's not like it just came out of nowhere.  The thing is, there's a case to be made that the songwriters who use and abuse the Millenial Whoop didn't pluck it out of thin air, there were seeds of it, not in the usual pop song suspects music journalists have tended to list already, but in what's regarded as the classic rock from the 1960s and 1980s from "accredited" bands.  There's no reason to blame Baltimora for a seminal form of the Whoop for using a perfect fourth.  That's not even the whoop.  There's also not a strong case even for the Stones if the Whoop has to be a descending minor third vocal line.  No, there's a much, much strong case to be made that R. E. M. got the ball rolling for what eventually became the Millenial Whoop with "The One I Love". 

And since I never liked R. E. M., either, I don't have any problem making this argument, realizing, of course ,that fans of the band will probably never concede that R. E. M. could bear any blame for even indirectly causing the Millenial Whoop.  But it's right there, once you hear the vocal gesture as something that can be transposed down a whole step.