Philosophy
There are some principles that are essential to my understanding and experience of music, and which I strive to reflect, to a greater or lesser extent, in everything that I write. Here are a few of them:
Anti-fatalism
History is not just the story of powerful assholes wielding their superior resources and influence to hold their victims (i.e. us and our spiritual forebears) in submission and wring still more resources and influence out of them. Of course, this is a significant part of history, often it’s a dominating and inescapable part of history, and it’s important to acknowledge it, but it’s not the whole story, thankfully. More significantly, it’s not really the interesting part of the story. It’s just pretty much what you would expect, given the amount of power that these shitbags have historically wielded. What’s much more surprising, and much more interesting for me, is the amount of truth and beauty and passion that somehow manages to slip through the cracks, which is truly miraculous!
This is true in all aspects of human history, but there’s no better venue for observing it than the history of music. There are exceptions here and there of course, but for essentially the entire history of music, power has been in the hands of people who were primarily interested in using music as a tool for building more power, whether in the form of control, prestige, influence, or money. Most of these people had little to no interest in music’s potential as a tool for the revelation of truth or beauty. In fact, many of them actively discouraged it, and yet just look at the result! Exploring, highlighting, and celebrating this sort of subversive creativity is one of the major goals of everything I do involving music.
Functional Context
The late musicologist Richard Taruskin (my academic grandpa) wrote in the introduction to his massive Oxford History of Western Music that “the historian’s trick is to shift the question from ‘what does it mean?’ to “what has it meant?’.” Everything that is created is created for a reason, to satisfy certain needs or desires that emerge within a specific historical context, and any act of creation is dependent on an infinitely complex set of circumstances (potentially stretching back to the beginning of the universe, or even further) that are required in order to create tools for its creation, as well as the needs and desires that it serves to satisfy. The meaning of a piece of music or other creation, as I understand it, is derived from the way it exists and functions within and in relation to this context, and a single creation can gain different meanings as it exists and functions within different contexts over time or at the same time. It’s my contention that this stuff matters, that gaining an understanding of the context that allowed for a piece of music’s creation and the ways in which it has functioned to satisfy different needs and desires within different contexts alters and enhances the experience of engaging with it.
Connection
Taruskin also wrote (I’m almost sure I didn’t dream it, but I’m still looking for the quote) that writing about history is always a task of drawing either connections or distinctions. Like him, I tend to gravitate in the direction of drawing connections, but while he, faced with the task of creating the most ambitious piece of writing about music history that has ever existed, felt an obligation to strike a balance between these two agendas, I, not being saddled with any such massive responsibility for the time being, am more at liberty to indulge my impulses in this regard. Any two pieces of music, as I see it, have a tremendous amount in common, simply by virtue of being pieces of music, even if they may come from seemingly opposite musical worlds. In addition, there exists a web of connections linking every creator and consumer of music to every other, and usually the closer you look, the more you realize that the distance between them is less than it seems. To me, highlighting these commonalities and connections feels both more interesting and more in the spirit of what music is all about than focusing on drawing lines to emphasize the distinctions between things. And anyway, it seems to me that there is plenty of that stuff both in the history of music criticism and in the current cultural zeitgeist of this moment, so if that’s what you’re looking for, you shouldn’t have any problem finding it.
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