How Music Works

by David Byrne

  As explained in chapter four, the first record players could record as well as play, so for a short while, every amateur had the possibility of becoming a recording artist. The quality of those recordings wasn’t great, so there was a lot of spoken word—a lot of talking into the recorders. Audio letters. Audio postcards. The rough sounds of local singers and parlor players coexisted for a while with the recordings of professionals that the record-player manufacturers were distributing. But fairly soon, the companies realized that more money could be made if the flow of music was one-way, so the recording feature was eliminated. Much technology in contemporary culture, in which creative tinkering by non-professionals has been crippled the efforts of computer and software companies, and by the enforcers and lobbyists behind copyright and intellectual-property laws, displays this same tendency. Amateur music makers have had to take a back seat. So much for the market catering to the will of the people!

  John Philip Sousa felt strongly about the value of amateurs making music. Here is what he wrote in his 1906 essay, “The Menace of Mechanical Music”:

  This wide love for the art springs from the singing school, secular or sacred; from the village band, and from the study of those instruments that are nearest the people. There are more pianos, violins, guitars, mandolins, and banjos among the working classes of America than in all the rest of the world… [but now] the automatic music devices are usurping their places.

  For when music can be heard in the homes without the labor of study and close application, and without the slow process of acquiring a technic, it will be simply a question of time when the amateur disappears entirely….

  The tide of amateurism cannot but recede, until there will be left only the mechanical device and the professional executants.

  Then what of the national throat? Will it not weaken? What of the national chest? Will it not shrink?

  I love those phrases—the national throat, the national chest! They’re kind of Whitmanic.

  The country dance orchestra of violin, guitar, and melodeon had to rest at times, and the resultant interruption afforded the opportunity for general sociability and rest among the entire company. Now a tireless mechanism can keep everlastingly at it, and much of what made the dance a wholesome recreation is eliminated.

  This is an interesting point, and it isn’t made very often. Sousa is saying that the gaps between performances might in some ways be just as important—socially, at least—as the performances themselves. The times when we’re not being entertained are as important as the times when we are. Too much music, or too much continuous music, might not be a good thing. It’s a little counterintuitive, but I’d be inclined to agree. To Sousa, the prospect of recorded music was “a thought as unhappy and incongruous as [eating] canned salmon by a trout brook.”3

  He might have been a bit alarmist and cranky, but he wasn’t entirely wrong about amateur music-making. I myself didn’t start out as a musical professional. For years I only had ambitions to be an amateur who made music with friends for fun. Some of the most satisfying music I’ve made has come about as a result of naïve enthusiasm rather than from professional considerations. Music-making always involved socializing, so in the process I’ve met people I wouldn’t have otherwise. Music was a handy cover for my social awkwardness, and I learned a thing or two about getting along. Those are a lot of useful byproducts that have nothing to do with dexterity or virtuosic skills.

  The “don’t give a shit” attitude of the amateur is another precious commodity. The Spanish film director Fernando Trueba claims that many directors’ best films are the ones they didn’t care all that much about. These films, he says, have more soul than the films those same directors made when they intentionally set out to create their masterpiece. Amateurism, or at least the lack of pretension associated with it, can be liberating.

  According to Mark Katz, many teachers believed that recorded music would encourage children to take up music. When the phonograph was new, and schools were a little leery of adopting it, several prominent pedagogues argued in its favor. J. Lawrence Erb, for one, asserted that “the total effect of mechanical players has been to increase interest in music and stimulate a desire to make music on one’s own account.” But if there was such an increase in the percent age of amateur musicians, it soon subsided.4

  Though what the elite listened to prior to 1900 was certainly different from what the masses enjoyed, there was always some overlap between the two. The catchy tunes that littered popular Italian operas—music that we would consider high art today—were sung by farmers and played by brass bands in town squares. These arias were the pop music of their time. This popularity was not a result of capitulation, of ordinary folks being obliged to like music that was endorsed by their “betters”; it was genuinely popular music. And yet it’s probably true that as long as there has been an aristocracy or an elite, they have promulgated the idea that certain kinds of music and art are somehow better, more refined, more sophisticated, and can only be appreciated by the few.

  Recordings, however tinny or scratchy, made it possible for everyone to hear these sophisticated and accomplished artistes. Music education boomed, and soon the emphasis shifted: it became about learning and understanding musical forms, rather than making them. The new pedagogical goal was to expose students to all kinds of music, in genres that were previously unavailable to them. Not only was the emphasis on listening, the expressed goal was to get the kids to appreciate the superiority of a certain kind of music over what some declared to be coarser, more popular forms.

  WHAT IS MUSIC GOOD FOR?

  Is some music really better than other music? Who decides? What effect does music have on us that might make it good or not-so-good?

  Like Ellen Dissanayake, many believe that music must be useful to humanity, even if you can’t fix a leaky sink with it—if it wasn’t, it wouldn’t have survived to play as prominent a role in our lives as it does. Furthermore, it is presumed that certain kinds of music have more beneficial effects than others. Some music can make you a “better” person, and by extension other kinds of music might even be detrimental (and they don’t mean it will damage your eardrums)—certainly it won’t be as morally uplifting. The assumption is that upon hearing “good” music, you will somehow become a more morally grounded person. How does that work?

  The background of those defining what is good or bad goes a long way toward explaining this attitude. The use of music to make a connection between a love of high art and economic success and status isn’t always subtle. Canadian writer Colin Eatock points out that classical music has been piped into 7-Elevens, the London Underground, and the Toronto subways, and the result has been a decrease in robberies, assaults, and vandalism.5 Wow—powerful stuff. Music can alter behavior after all! This statistic is held up as proof that some music does indeed have magical, morally uplifting properties. What a marketing opportunity! But another view holds that this tactic is a way of making certain people feel unwelcome. They know it’s not “their” music, and they sense that the message is, as Eatock says, “Move along, this is not your cultural space.” Others have referred to this as “musical bug spray.” It’s a way of using music to create and manage social space.6

  The economist John Maynard Keynes even claimed that many kinds of amateur and popular music do in fact reduce one’s moral standing. In general, we are indoctrinated to believe that classical music, and maybe some kinds of jazz, possess a kind of moral medicine—whereas hip-hop, club music, and certainly heavy metal lack anything like a positive moral essence. It all sounds slightly ridiculous when I spell it out like this, but such presumptions continue to inform many decisions regarding the arts and the way they’re supported.

  John Carey, an English literary critic who writes for The Sunday Times, wrote a wonderful book called What Good Are the Arts that illustrates how officially sanctioned art and music gets privileged. Carey cites the philosopher Immanuel Kant: “Now I say the beautiful is the symbol of t
he morally good, and that it is only in this respect that it gives pleasure… The mind is made conscious of a certain ennoblement and elevation above the mere sensibility to pleasure.”7 So, according to Kant, the reason we find a given work of art beautiful is because we sense—but how do we sense this, I wonder?—that some innate, benevolent, moral essence is tucked in there, elevating us, and we like that. In this view, pleasure and moral uplift are linked. Pleasure alone, without this beautiful entanglement, is not a good thing—but packaged with moral uplift, pleasure is, well, excusable. That might sound pretty mystical and a bit silly, especially if you concede that standards of beauty just might be relative. In Kant’s Protestant world, all forms of sensuality inevitably lead to loose morals and eternal damnation. Pleasure needs a moral note to be acceptable.

  When Goethe visited the Dresden Gallery,B he noted the “emotion experienced upon entering a House of God.” He was referring to positive and uplifting emotions, not fear and trembling at the prospect of encountering the Old Testament God. William Hazlitt, the brilliant nineteenth-century essayist, said that going to the National Gallery on Pall Mall was like making a pilgrimage to the “holy of holies… [an] act of devotion performed at the shrine of art.”8 Once again it would appear that this God of Art is a benevolent one who will not strike young William down with a bolt of lightning for an occasional aesthetic sin. If such a punishment sounds like an exaggeration, keep in mind that not too long before Hazlitt’s time, one could indeed be burned at the stake for small blasphemies. And if the appreciation of the finer realms of art and music is akin to praying at a shrine, then one must accept that artistic blasphemy also has its consequences.

  A corollary to the idea that high art is good for you is that it can be prescribed like medicine. Like a kind of inoculation, it can arrest, and possibly even begin to reverse, our baser tendencies. The Romantic poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote that the poor needed art “to purify their tastes and wean them from [their] polluting and debasing habits.” Charles Kingsley, a nineteenth-century English novelist, was even more explicit: “Pictures raise blessed thoughts in me—why not in you, my brother? Believe it, toil-worn worker, in spite of thy foul alley, thy crowded lodging, thy thin, pale wife, believe it, thou too, and thine will some day have your share of beauty.”9 Galleries like Whitechapel in London were opened in working-class neighborhoods so that the downtrodden might have a taste of the finer things in life. Having done a little bit of manual labor myself, I can attest that sometimes beer, music, or TV might be all one is ready for after a long day of physically demanding work.

  Across the ocean, the titans of American industry continued this trend. They founded the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York in 1872, filling it with works drawn from their massive European art collections in the hope that the place would act as a unifying force for an increasingly diverse citizenry—a matter of some urgency, given the massive number of immigrants who were joining the nation. One of the Met’s founders, Joseph Hodges Choate, wrote, “Knowledge of art in its higher forms of beauty would tend directly to humanize, to educate and to refine a practical and laborious people.”10

  The late Thomas Hoving, who ran the Met in the sixties and seventies, and his rival J. Carter Brown, who headed the National Gallery in Washington, DC, both felt that democratizing art meant getting everyone to like the things that they liked. It meant letting everyone know that here, in their museums, was the good stuff, the important stuff, the stuff with that mystical aura. Below, left, is a promotion the Met did in the sixties in LIFE magazine.C The idea was that even reduced to the size of a postcard, reproductions of verified masterpieces could still enlighten the American masses. And so cheap!

  Music was (and is) presented in the same way. Below, right, is an ad that appeared in the New York Times Book Review not too long ago.D This ad isn’t about learning to play for your own enjoyment or self-expression—it’s purely about learning to value the classics more than any music you and your pathetic friends might make. It’s a little more expensive than the $1.25 the Met was asking for back in the day, but times have changed. The effect, however, is the same: to make you feel anxious and insecure about what you know and might already like, and to show you how to fix the situation.

  This line of thinking led Hoving and others to create the now ubiquitous blockbuster museum show. The first one famously brought King Tut to the masses—or, more precisely, it brought the masses to Tut. These shows “reached out,” and made the Met and other like-minded museums into temples where all were welcome. Hard to remember, but the Met was once a fussy, dusty old place, and that show set it on its way to becoming super popular.

  Here are some blockbuster-exhibit attendance figures from the Met:11

  • Treasures of Tutankhamun (1978–79), 1,360,957 visitors

  • The Mona Lisa by Leonardo da Vinci (1963), 1,077,521 visitors

  • The Vatican Collections: The Papacy and Art (1983), 896,743 visitors

  • Painters in Paris: 1895-1950 (2000–01), 883,620 visitors

  • Origins of Impressionism (1994–95), 794,108 visitors

  • The Horses of San Marco (1980), 742,221 visitors

  • Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (2010), 703,256 visitors

  Originally printed in Life magazine

  Originally printed in the New York Times

  Hoving did ride a bike, so he can’t have been all about fancy art.E In fact, his stint as Parks Commissioner, before he joined the Met, was incredibly fruitful, and changed the lives of many ordinary New Yorkers. He had been offered the job with no prior experience, so his success belies the idea that we should only put our trust in experts. It was he who closed Central Park to cars on Sundays, and he who established more than one hundred pocket parks around the city, on vacant lots and in weird, unused parcels of real estate.

  And now add to the list of blockbusters the 2011 Alexander McQueen show, which had folks waiting in line in the sweltering heat for hours.F To be honest, I can understand the McQueen show’s popularity; the others are a bit more of a mystery to me. The presentation of the McQueen frocks involved a slightly more transgressive aura: they were presented as if they were part of a sci-fi opera, or a sexier version of a sword-and-sorcery world like Game of Thrones. The display created a slightly creepy alternative universe; it was much more than a parade of well-designed dresses on mannequins. That freaky otherworld that was hinted at seems genuinely populist, much more so than, say, The Horses of San Marco.

  John Carey pretty much demolishes the idea that appreciating high art— and I am going to assume we can transfer his arguments concerning fine art to music—is inherently good for you. How, he asks, can anyone believe that art (or music) encourages moral behavior? He concluded that assigning moral acuity to those who like high art is generally class-based. “Meanings,” he writes, “are not inherent in objects. They are supplied by those who interpret them. High art is that which appeals to the minority whose social rank places them above the struggle for mere survival.” The fact that such art has no practical use—or none that is acknowledged—heightens its appeal.

  This line of reasoning leads him to the following conclusion about the artbuilds-character attitude:

  One is saying, “What I feel is more valuable than what you feel.” In assuming that high art makes life worth living, there is an inherent arrogance toward the masses of people who don’t partake of such forms… and an assumption that their lives are not worth as much, not as full. The religion of art makes people worse—because it encourages contempt for those considered inartistic.

  Although the idea is continually espoused that art is for all and that all can benefit from it, I wouldn’t say that the presentation of art is entirely democratic. Though seemingly benign, too often it’s a top-down version of culture. We want you all to look at it, and listen to it, and appreciate it, but don’t even think you could ever make it yourselves. Moreover, what has been deemed “real art” has nothing in common with the
reality of your daily life. Twentieth-century British art critic Clive Bell wrote, “To appreciate a work of art we need to bring with us nothing from life, no knowledge of its ideas and affairs, no familiarity with its emotions.”12

  “Quality” works are said to be timeless and universal. People like Bell think that they would be good in almost any context. The Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume insisted that an unvarying standard exists, and that “[it] has been universally found to please in all countries and in all ages.”13 The implication is that great work should, if it is truly great, not be of its time or place. We should not be aware of how, why, or when it was conceived, received, marketed, or sold. It floats free of this mundane world, transcendent and ethereal.

  This is absolute nonsense. Few of the works that we now think of as “timeless” were originally thought of that way. Carey points out that Shakespeare was not universally favored; Voltaire and Tolstoy didn’t care for him much, and Darwin found him “intolerably dull.” For many decades his work was derided as low and popular. The same could be said for a “great” painter like Vermeer, who was “rehabilitated” only recently. As a society, we change what we value all the time. When I was working with the UK trip-hop band Morcheeba, they extolled the virtues of an American seventies band called Manassas. I had dismissed that band when I was growing up—I thought they were great players but not in any way relevant to me—but I could see that a younger generation of musicians, without my prejudices, might see them in a different light. I don’t think that particular band ever got elevated to the “timeless” pedestal, but many others have been. I discovered Miles Davis’s electric jams from the seventies relatively late—for the most part, they were critically frowned upon when they came out—but there might now be a whole generation who looks on those records as founding gospel, hugely inspirational.