|
|
Musical Structure, Cyclical Time & Inspiration
an essay in defense of looping
There is some stigma around looping music that I find to be verging on the ridiculous, especially when the criticism comes from certain musical quarters. As if somehow one is a lesser musician for using loops, instead of playing it all live; or for working in cyclic, groove-based music rather than in linear, narrative forms. Ignoring the fact that some things are too complex to be able to execute live. (One might include some of Conlon Nancarrow’s player piano compositions in this context, for example.) Ignoring for the moment the prejudice for flashy, showy, athletic playing over playing with heart and substance—a prejudice which dominates much of solo instrumental performance anymore, especially in popular or mainstream musical genres, such as rock, fusion, progressive rock, jazz, and related genres; and dare I say it, among some Stick players—there are several interesting ways in which loop-based music is prevalent without being stigmatized or labeled as such.
I am listening to Sean Malone’s solo loop improv Grace off his Gordian Knot album Emergent, as I write this. It prompts me to think about the topic. It is also the track that is different from the rest of the album, which is overall a prog rock showcase replete with the usual prog high-energy playing, complex harmonies and metrical changes, and generally fast tempi. It is the meditative core of the CD, though, and I’m grateful it’s on the album, as it provides some grounding and centrality for the rest of the music. It’s also a showcase piece for what can do with the Stick and a looping unit.
Consider this: All cyclic music is looped music. This includes jazz chord changes, which are cycling harmonic structures, short or long, over which players improvise. This is not fundamentally different from musicians who, playing solo or in combo settings, use electronic looping devices to add layers to their performance. Some of the bigger sneers against looping that I’ve run into lately have come from traditional jazz players, who are irrationally ignoring their own utter dependence on the cyclic nature of their own cherished music. The principle difference between looped music and cyclic music, for practical purposes, is simply the length of the repeated musical structure.
Much of minimalist music, or gradual process music, or loop-based music, is perceptually obviously looped, because the archetypal norm is for short musical phrases to repeated numerous times: it is obvious because the repeated musical phrase is short enough to be obvious. Whereas, the harmonic cycles of jazz changes, cyclic chord patterns that make up everything from the 12-bar blues to the Rhythm Changes underlying many jazz tunes, are simply longer-length loops. A longer loop in Western classical music is called a round, a canon, a rondo; but the cycle’s return is nonetheless the underlying structure.
Cyclic music structures are rather more common in the rest of the world’s music traditions than in the West, with its taste for linear, narrative music. (There are similar differences in how these different cultures conceive of time, which may also lie at the root of the cultural assumptions about music.) In musical cultures influenced by Indic traditions, languages, and cultures, musical time is usually cyclic and repetitive; this includes many of the music cultures of South-east Asia, culminating in the colotomic (time marked by rhythmic placement of specific instruments in the time cycle) musical time of Indonesian gamelan ensembles. Time in Vedic India is conceived as cyclical, and cyclical on both microcosmic and macrocosmic levels. There are the inconceivable spans of of the Yugas, the cycles of universal time; there is also the personal, human repeated cycle of the wheel of rebirth and reincarnation. Nothing is new; everything has been done before.
In other musical cultures, from Africa to Japan, music is structured as interlocking layers of repeated phrases of varying lengths. In the matsuri bayashi festival music in Japan, different phrase-lengths played by different instruments mean that the phrases beginnings keep shifting in relation to each other, reflecting the relational chaos of the festival itself, its turbulence and seething tide. In some musical cultures of West Africa (one of the roots of jazz, by the way), phrase lengths are often in 12-beat or 8-beat units, but different members of an ensemble might layer them differently in relationship to one another. This creates a shifting downbeat, a complex structure of layers, over which the lead instrumentalist might improvise or perform stereotypical sound-cues to indicate that changes should happen in the music.
Consider this: Music is never static, even when there are no harmonic chord changes or progressions. Music is an ephemeral art medium, wherein the artistic product is directly tied to the experience of performance and listening. There is no lingering artistic product, as exists in painting, writing, sculpture, photography; no tangible, physical object. (There are recordings and notational scores, to be sure, but these are either post-performance memorial documents or pre-performance instructions to the performers.) In music, there is always change, even in relatively static musical forms. Layers fade in, fade out, new layers are added over the top. The main difference between gradual process music (as Steve Reich wrote decades ago) and music in the Western mainstream is that there is no fast narrative drama of rapid, dramatic change (the holdover of Romantic music idea of emotional expressiveness), but rather a slow gradual change in the music, rather like the tide coming in and going out, even as the waves break on the shore.
Consider this: Music does not function only harmonically—this is an entirely Western bias, since what we in the West think of as harmony and counterpoint are not in fact universal, nor even common elements of music throughout the rest of the world’s musical cultures—it functions in terms of layers. Every loop-based player knows this, whether they articulate it or not. You build a substrate, then you layer over it. Layering music is an additive process. It can be a gradual process, and can be done with multiple live players (as in Steve Reich’s gradual process music) as well as with looping technology. The musical result, and the conceptual structures employed, are not fundamentally different.
Consider this: Gradual process music and cyclic music, such as looping music, are all more conducive to spiritual experience, meditative states of consciousness, and trance. In contrast, narrative music is fundamentally left-brain, narrative, logical, and linear in form—even when on some level it isn’t. There is no special grace given to flashy music that appeals to the head or the hands, but not to the heart. Such music may impress other musicians, and sometimes even impress the general listening public, but it is rarely memorable beyond the moment, and tends to be forgotten as soon as it is over. While the general listening public may develop a taste for this kind of flash playing, note that it also demands novelty within a narrow focus: craving the same sensation, but with each new musical composition. It’s an adrenaline addiction; in sports, this leads to “extreme” sports and risk-taking, while in music it leads to sensationalism without substance, flash without depth. It also leads to every guitar solo sounding almost exactly the same.
If there is a special grace given to a particular music, it is to music played with intensity, depth, emotional honesty, sincerity, and from the heart. This is the music we remember, years later, when all the flash players have gone home. This is the music we remember in solitude, in silence.
It is no accident that most sacred music traditions from the world’s various musical cultures fall into this category of performance. It is also no accident that most sacred music is chantlike (the use of breath in singing leading to altered states of consciousness), repetitive (cyclic, looping back on itself), and structured with layers of activity. All of these elements serve to focus the will and intent, and promote altered states of consciousness ranging from light trance (contemplation in the Christian cathedral and monastery, for example) to selflessness and egolessness (zhikr, the Remembrance of God, in the Sufi tradition, for example; or Zen shomyo chant), to, at the extreme end of things, possession, for example, by the loa in Voudoun rites. Trance types are a range of similar non-ordinary states of consciousness, rather than a difference in kind. The shaman drumming in Zimbabwe has more in common with the monks chanting in a French cathedral, then do either with Top Forty radio, even though superficially the monks and the music industry marketers are from the same cultural roots.
Consider this: The up-tempo, high-energy, showcase playing so prevalent in rock is a product of two expectations, both ultimately rooted in eros. The first, the cliché of the rocker and party animal, is the sex, drugs & rock and roll mythos as an archetype. The second expectation is that of the repeated high, the natural high, the adrenaline rush, to which both audience and player can become addicted. When you let your music become a vehicle for thrill-seeking for the addicted thrill junkie, especially if you sacrifice the music’s heart, there’s a problem.
The core of the problem here is expectations. First, when the player gives in to the crowd’s expectations for flash, they risk compromising their own integrity; this is true of anyone who does an artistic activity to please others, rather than to pursue their own inner vision. (When the inner vision is in alignment with an audience being appreciative of the artistic result, everybody wins.) Second, the commercial expectations of making a living from one’s music can force exactly these sorts of compromises. In many instances, that’s not a problem. It depends on how professional you are, how workmanlike you are, how you approach music as your job as well as your passion. There are many remarkably gifted studio session musicians who are true professionals, and happy at what they are doing, and more power to them. I’ve met a few musicians from this professional clan that remain closet visionaries, which is a wonder and a joy to encounter. Professionalism is a state of mind, a way of being, a way of working. Where commercial expectations become a problem is when a programmed result is expected from the artist, a predictable (profitable) result; this leads to dry, overly-produced artistic product that becomes rapidly fashion-driven rather than sustaining or sustainable. Part of the continuous quest for the Next New Thing is that the current Thing is used up so quickly, because it is so shallow. This is the current state of the music industry in the West, where marketing trumps vision, and the quest for profits overrule artistic experiment and risk-taking every time.
The truth of the balance lies in remembering that the job, whatever it is that you do for the job, serves to support the real work, and not disable it. The real work is inner work; it is what you do for yourself, when no one else is there. The ranks of non-paid, so-called amateur musicians are filled with dedicated, gifted players who support themselves financially with their day gig, so that they are free to follow their inner visions in their creative work. (The difference between an amateur and a professional artist is not excellence, but rather who got paid for their art.) In such folk lie the continual renewal of the music culture, as they are the seeds of the always-breaking wave of exploration and discovery, and when one becomes noticed, can reinvigorate the entire moribund music industry. There are also the ranks of gifted and talented but not famous working musicians, many of whom who are just as gifted as anyone more famous. This is so well-known as to be taken for granted as a cliché. But let’s not forget the impact this clan has on the world, both by inspiring those who hear them play to perhaps pursue music as their own following, and by continually seeding the world with new gifts, new talents, by teaching the next wave of young players, teaching directly or by example. A music teacher will serve to change the world much more than any rock star can; one or two wise, grounded rock stars have even remembered this, and given much to support the teachers in return. This is where renewal begins, whenever the commercial musical world becomes moribund, stale, and stagnant. Look outside the usual commercial circles, and you will uncover thousands of gifted wunderkind.
Consider this: Repeating pattern, cycle, loop, colotomic cycle, circle, spiral—these are all basically the same conceptual structure. The circle, the wheel: what goes around, comes around. Much non-classical music is cyclical and repetitive. In the case of jazz, this comes from the partly West African origin of the music; jazz is a creole music, in the linguistic and anthropological sense of the word, meaning, a merging of disparate traditions to create a new tradition.
Add to this groove-based music, which may or may not be harmonically driven, may or may not be chordal in structure. Much of the world’s music is heterophonic rather than homophonic or polyphonic (contrapuntal). Heterophonic music is often structured as simultaneous variation by the musicians around a shared core concept. Everyone arrives together at some point, but how they get there is unique to each instrument (and its traditional performance practice, and how the individual musician interprets all of the above), and many different roads can be used to arrive at the same place. Groove-based music, from James Brown to Kraftwerk to Enigma, is looping music: simple repetitive forms layered together to create a new kind of music, even an entirely new genre or species.
Consider this: Conceptually, a culture’s musical traditions reflect both the culture’s assumptions about time and its assumptions about human interaction. It is a paradox that Western culture, with its strong emphasis on individualism and originally also demands such conformity among its creative workers. This is a Shadow function, of course: what is rejected emerges elsewhere; what is suppressed arises when no one is looking with conscious awareness at it.
Thus, we have the autocratic musical institution in Western classical music of the symphony orchestra, in which the individual is subsumed completely. We have the mythos of the titanic creative genius of the Romantic composer, exemplified by Beethoven, whose many personality faults are forgivable because of his towering genius. (But there’s something wrong with such an egotistical, driven individual.) We have the archetype also of the starving artist, with its parallel archetypal belief that fame can only come to artists after they’re dead. Which of course leads to that assumed economic equation of everyone trying to discourage you from making your living from your creativity, because how can you, after all? The theology of lack. The mindset of limited resources. So, individualism of many kinds is subsumed.
As for time, the underlying assumption in the West is again that time is linear, non-repeating, narrative, and flows only in one direction. Thus, artistic products have a beginning, a middle, and an end. Cyclic works produced in the West, ranging from Joyce's Finnegan’s Wake to Reich’s Music for Eighteen Musicians to Coltrane's Ascension, are still viewed with either mistrust or misunderstanding. Or just plain dismissed as having been somewhat perniciously influenced by ideas of time from the Orient—from the East—and thus not a native product.
Finally, consider this: Whatever can be conceived, can be made real. It is not impossible to break a culture’s rules, and produce a creative work that stands as a stranger to the norm: a voice from the wilderness, from outside the city’s guarded walls and gates. The stranger will not always be welcomed or even tolerated. But the stranger’s function is to remind us that the world is vaster than we imagine, and more varied than we, in our closed city walls, those blind walls of narrow, familiar conception, perhaps can imagine.
It is an artist’s function to expand our walls. To be the surveyor of the Unknown. To bring back reports of lands not yet explored. You will not always be welcomed or praised for this; quite the opposite. Loren Eiseley: It is frequently the tragedy of the great artist, as it is of the great scientist, that he frightens the ordinary man. A city-dweller may well dismiss all this Other Stuff as irrelevant, just as I have heard some mainstream jazz folk dismiss looping music. The City, after all, is the seat and symbol of civilization. The Desert and the Sea alike, as Auden writes in The Enchaféd Flood, are both Wildernesses, places between Cities. Yet they are also the fertile, fruitful realm, as Goethe and the other early Romantics said, from which new life will forever potentially emerge.
Consider this: Are you an artist, a voice outside the gate, or a city-dweller? An insider, or an outsider? And if you are an outsider, an artist, are you willing to pay the social price you may need to pay, for going within, and following your inner vision?
19 September 2005
|
