Disposable Spaces, Plastic Music
I’ll be honest: I think that the burgeoning consumerism of the 18th century, and the resulting commodification of music into tangible, affordable circulating objects, was one of the main contributing factors behind the contemporary culture of musical canonization we all (myself included) love to critique. It was only a matter of time before the tangible accrued historical, mystical significance, and earned its own reliquaries in the form of “collected works” editions, the awe-inspiring concert halls of the 19th century, and, in the 20th century, “authoritative” recordings.
Which brings me to an environment for listening I have so far ignored. I suspect that many of the places we most often listen to music have little to do with any of the places I’ve mentioned in these posts; we hear mostly recorded music, and we likely hear it alone—in a car, through headphones, maybe through a set of speakers at home.
This kind of listening space is simultaneously ephemeral—in that it is fundamentally malleable—and monumental—in that its infinite repeatability aspires to cultural permanence. I can listen to the latest ICE album on any type of speakers while doing almost anything, and I can also listen to it repeatedly such that I have it memorized.
In fact, it is here, in the realm of recorded sound, that we can truly observe the difficulty (I won’t say impossibility) of ephemerality today. Live musical events of all kinds are usually recorded. Sometimes, those recordings become collectibles, like any Live at the Village Vanguard album. Ironically, this happens among some of the most self-consciously progressive communities of listeners as well, including Phish or Grateful Dead fans who trade (often bootlegged) recordings of particular concerts. Moreover, live events have long been forums for the promotion of recorded music. (I know better than to say CD sales…)
So, it’s fair to say that the ephemeral experience can far more easily be pushed into the monumental than the other way around, not merely by force of recordings and the like, but also by its very commoditization. Is it possible for music to be genuinely ephemeral when it is traded for money? The difficulty of answering this question should explain why Fluxus folks (have) had to be anti-commercial in order to fully embrace event-driven sound-art.
In the end, composers who want to hear more than one group’s interpretation of a piece, performers who want to perfect pieces until they are reliably repeatable under the stress of audience attention, promoters who want to put on events that will sell—we have collectively decided for understandable reasons that yes, disposable music is nice, but we’d really prefer to strive towards something more permanent. We’re afraid that, packaged disposably, music, like other comestible arts, might just be destined to turn to trash the next day—and with it, our opinions of ourselves, our abilities, our cultural heritage.
While I admire the investment in recycling, I don’t think it’s necessary to treat music the way we (hope to) treat our plastics. Performers and composers might feel stuck in a double bind here: They’d like to keep moving, always producing fresh works and events, offering their communities a stream of events on the edge of what’s new. (I don’t mean merely newly composed; I mean new to the landscape, which easily includes older, underperformed repertoire.) And yet it’s frustrating to get only one shot at a performance.
There are certainly those out there committed to experimental music and live manipulation of unrepeatable phenomena, but this is a minority aesthetic and remains unintegrated into the standard concert experience. One can find it in the new sounds of folks like Tim Feeney and Annie Lewandowsi, as well as in the fresh interpretation of ostensible “classics” by Tom Beghin or the resuscitation of no-longer-popular works by Marc André Hamelin. (In a poor, academic-speak imitation of Mike Myers’s “Coffee Talk,” I could throw out a remark here about the ways in which music education writ large reinforces only the most traditional skills of concert production, typically omitting any kind of improvisatory skill. Discuss.) I’ll leave with this thought: Because live presentation so often aspires to the perfection of recorded sound, a renewed commitment to the ephemeral requires a turn away from perfection itself. Does that mean lowering our standards? No, it just means changing them.