A Solid Call 2.0

What is Music? : I just heard on the March 10th Breezeblock with MaryAnne Hobbes that the avant-garge electronic artist Squarepusher believes that human artists can no longer claim any "sovereignty" over the machines they use to create the music.

This got me rather agitated and almost angry, as I believe that SP's belief is absolutely correct.. for him his and his "peers" like Aphex Twin. Of course the machinery is in control... when you make noise in the fashion of randomly applying filters and inserting loops without following any sort of musical conventions.

Music = rules. Now I don't mean rules like "you can't swear," "everything has to be in 4-4 time" or "you need a good looking singer". Those are conventions that some pop music uses. No, to say that music = rules means that to call a sequence of noise "music" you need to have some sort of structure and control over the sounds that are produced. I could break a truckload of really dry sticks, and the sound might be sort of interesting, but nobody could call that music -- unless you're John Cage... or Squarepusher, apparently. To introduce randomness can be inspired or even considered visionary in certain quantities. But, how much is too much?

The concept of entropy, generally stated, says that the universe tends to move towards less ordered states. The example used in the physics book I am reading is to take War and Peace and throw the pages up in the air and look at the results. What is order? For our intelligences, there is something that lends a very particular importance to a particular sequence of pages, namely 1-740, in order. Now, perhaps reading War and Peace in the order of 645, 5, 328, 98, 94, 222.. etc. could be considered brilliant, but there is no objective difference between that sequence and 6, 65, 321, 733, 254, 76 etc. I see the work of Squarepusher and Aphex Twin in the exact same way. The sequence "blip blip, bleeeep, [static] [sample] [bell]" might be this genius piece of compisition, but really there's no objective between that configuration of noise and another group of random settings on the same equipment.

What sets great melodies and great music apart from the rest is that if you change things around, omit words, invert melodies, etc then the difference in the composition is instantly noticed. These truly creations are the result of skill and control and talent working within -- and occasionally challenging -- the framework of rules that is music.

Squarepusher may be a genius, but maybe he's just a random twiddler of knobs who has a small following of wackos.