experimentalism in music

carpentron

june 6, 2008 (syndicated from carpenblog)

parte one

When you hear the term "experimental music", what comes to mind? For most people, though they often won't admit it if they are trying to impress their pseudo-intellectual acquaintances, it has negative connotations. Perhaps it is listening to tuneless twelve-tone rows or hearing noisy avant garde rock, or maybe it is something like one of John Cage's sonic thought experiments. Generally, it does not involve listening to music for pleasure.

I have a specific event that I associate with experimental music. It came in my first year of college, while I was taking my first music class. We were required to attend a certain number of concerts put on at the school and write something about each one. Two friends and I attended a show featuring recent compositions, either by faculty or graduate students (I don't recall now).

The concert was attended by well-mannered upper-middle-class academic types, with a smattering of music students like us sitting as far back as possible so that we could take notes. It was a rather packed house, if I recall, the audience consisting primarily of relatives and friends of performers and composers.

What we were subjected to changed my view of music in some ways. The sounds that came from the stage were mostly unpleasant noises that did nothing to stir any emotion besides boredom or restlessness. It was cacophonous and, more importantly, pointless.

The evening came to a head when a graduate student stepped out onto the stage with a trombone and a plunger. There was total silence from the audience as light music began. She then brought the instrument to her lips and applied the plunger to it and...

...treated us with fart noises for a good three or four minutes. I mean really, it sounded like someone had eaten too many beans, stepped out on the stage, and let it rip. My two friends and I couldn't take it. The laughter was too much to hold in. The other people around us glared disapprovingly at our purple faces. One of us let out a loud snort. It was too much.

Immediately after the performance, the three of us dashed out, indignant stares be damned, and, when we made it to the lobby, nearly fell over from the release of riotous laughter. It was difficult for us to understand how seemingly everyone else could just sit there and listen to farts for four minutes without doing the same.

But academic music is a stuffy affair. It is not meant to be laughed at. If you laugh, you're probably not getting it. So they say. I say: it's all a joke, and if you're not laughing, the joke is on you (as I say about life in general). These poor Laputans were sitting there seriously, tricked into thinking fart noises had some deeper meaning.

I was a teenager when this happened. I've matured a lot since then. I understand a lot more about experimentalism in music and the workings of academia. However, I still have that underlying feeling that, for one, you cannot take this stuff too seriously, and for another, people will assume that something is good and they don't understand it rather than that it is terrible if they are told as much by others, especially those with authority. And this happens a lot with music and art in general.

I have nothing against experimentalism. Not at all. I love it. I experiment musically quite a bit myself. But I don't like trying to pass off something that everyone knows doesn't sound good and that has no actual deeper value or meaning as something more than it is. And that is much of what I experienced in the world of academic music.

part two

Nietzsche once said (or wrote, anyway, in German), "What good is a book that does not even carry us beyond all books?" To borrow from him, then, what good is a song that does not even carry us beyond all songs? When we create a song, our usual goal is to take the listener somewhere else. The best songs are those that transcend their songness and truly do bring one to a new place.

And what better way to explore new places than through experimentation?

Dictionary.com defines an experiment as "a test, trial, or tentative procedure; an act or operation for the purpose of discovering something unknown or of testing a principle, supposition, etc." I want to contrast this with the common perception of what is experimental music. As I mentioned in Experimentalism in music, Part 1, most people think of experimental music as the stuff that gets categorized as "experimental" - noisy music that doesn't stick to the standard rules in some way.

To call this music experimental, however, is not quite right. It is certainly unconventional music, but lack of convention is not sufficient for something to actually be experimental. Rules can and have been broken for a long time. An experiment requires that they be broken in a new way.

The way I see it, there are two kinds of experimentation in which a songwriter can engage. I call them artistic experimentation and personal experimentation, although I'm open to better names if anyone would care to suggest them.

Artistic experimentation

Artistic experimentation is what we normally think of when we consider experimental music. It is experimentation with the art form. That is, it is attempting to do with a song what others have not done. It may be something relatively subtle, such as a song like the Beach Boys' "Good Vibrations", which featured a novel combination of instruments. Or it may be quite obvious, such as Queen's "Bohemian Rhapsody", which was unusual and new in a variety of ways. The main point of an artistic experiment is that it tries something new with the art form, or at least something so rarely done that it is still novel.

What is not artistic experimentation is freestyle or formless playing. Avant-garde jazz, for instance, is not experimental music, though many would call it that. It is just unconventional music. Progressive rock after the mid-1970s or so is not particularly experimental, either. In general, if a song is well within the bounds of an established genre (whatever else I might think of genre being moot here), it is not experimental. The term "experimental" has been greatly misapplied to various songs and styles over the years. As I said, lack of convention

Personal experimentation

Personal experimentation is quite different and much more subjective. It is experimentation with one's personal craft. That is, it is attempting to do with a song that which you have not done before. For instance, if I were to try writing a straight blues song, it would be a personal experiment, since I have never written a straight blues song. If Madonna were to create a death metal song, that, too would be a personal experiment. Whether a song is a personal experimentation is entirely dependent upon the one creating the song, so just about any song can be an experimental song in this way.

Most experimentation, for obvious reasons, is personal experimentation rather than artistic experimentation, but it is artistic experimentation that we are talking about most of the time when we discuss experimental music.

The benefits of experimentation

Just as science experiments advance science, so experiments with songwriting advance the songwriting craft. When one encounters a composition that is a novel take on how to put a song together, it enters the cabinet of possible ways of writing a song. All the various conventions that exist in songwriting today are one-time experiments, from the verse-chorus setup to the I-IV-V-I (and various other) chord progressions to the 4/4 meter and so on.

Artistic experimentation in songwriting is actually pretty rare in mainstream music. We hear experimentations with recording techniques quite a bit, but the fundamental song beneath those recording tricks is usually somewhere well within the standard range. Once in a while, you get something truly novel, such as the pairing of Run-DMC and Aerosmith for "Walk This Way" back in the 80s (an experiment in combining that new "rap" thing with good old fashioned rock), but even many songs that sound sonically new are not new on the level of songwriting.

So how do we differentiate a songwriting experiment from a recording experiment? Well, there's plenty of gray area. We've defined a song as the basic essential elements of a piece. If you have a rock song played primarily on kazoos, it would be considered a songwriting experiment only if the playing of the song on kazoos is an essential element of the song. Instrumentation is often in the gray area. When part of what we think of as a song uses techniques particular to a specific instrument, we should certainly consider the instrumentation to be part of the song. Thus, if you have a guitar solo that uses finger tapping and tremolo bar techniques, the use of the guitar is part of the song. Or so I would say.

Can you think of some good examples of artistic experimentation in songwriting?