Introduction

‘I want to be…a musician’. Those are the first words of a forty-second

television commercial for Prudential pension plans that begins with a
headphoned young man dreaming of his future. It proceeds through a series
of juxtapositions. First his imagined words are answered by his father (‘You
want to be earning your keep, my son’). Then he tells us he wants to cut his
first album (we see him cutting grass at a local park). He wants to be
packing them in at Wembley (we see him packing breakfast cereals at a
supermarket). Now we see his fantasy: he is playing in a jazz/rock band, the
camera zooming in on him at a grand piano. Behind him are two glamorous
vocalists. But suddenly the scene cuts to Whiteley’s shopping centre in
Bayswater. He is still at the piano but the glamorous vocalists have turned
into two middle-aged women, one of whom asks him ‘Do you know “I
want to be Bobby’s girl”?’ ‘Oh no’, he mutters.

We don’t hear any of this music. Instead we hear a slow, singing melody in
a classical style, four balanced phrases that proceed naturally but inevitably
to a conclusion whose final notes coincide with the Prudential logo. (The
commercial is one of a long-running series featuring this music.) Just like
the gulf between fantasy and reality, so the opposition between the band and
classical music expresses the contradictory values the commercial is all
about: youth and freedom on the one hand, as symbolized by the young
man’s aspiration to become a musician, and on the other hand the sensible
but dull world of his father and pension plans. Standing for personal
expression and truth to yourself, the band targets the demographic at which
the commercial is aimed. Meanwhile a reassuringly authoritative voice
superimposed on the classical melody explains how you may go through a
number of jobs, but you can take your Prudential pension plan with you.
Together the voiceover and the melody’s drive towards its conclusion create
the commercial’s message: you need to think about how you are going to
provide for your old age—but don’t worry, Prudential have the solution.
The music proves it.

This commercial goes back to the 1990s, and I used it to kick off the
original version of Music: A Very Short Introduction, which first appeared
in 1998. Its televisual style looks quite old-fashioned now. But some things
don’t change and among them is music’s ability to convey complex cultural
meanings. Music encodes values, our cherished beliefs about the world we
live in. It penetrates deep into our emotions, our feelings, our sense of who
we are and who we want to be. It targets people: the voiceover gives the
facts, but it is music that speaks confidentially, to you alone. It persuades.
And it can do all this without your being aware of it. Music is an
entertainment, one of life’s great pleasures, but it also penetrates deep into
culture and identity.

So this new version of the book shares some of its genes with the old one. It
has the same emphasis on music as culture, as something we make, think
about, and think in. It even has some of the same examples. But many
things have changed since 1998 and so I have completely rewritten it.
Digital technology has changed pretty much everything in the world of
music; there is a chapter about this, but it runs through much of the book.
Again, the world becomes ever more globalized, and the book reflects that.
And there is a lot more emphasis on music as a practice of real-time
performance.

I intended this new edition to be how I would have written the original book
if I had been writing it today. But today has arrived and it is not what I or
anybody else expected. The book is going to press in November 2020, at
the height of the Covid-19 pandemic, when across the world restrictions on
social gatherings have brought live performance—and with it most
musicians’ income streams—to a juddering halt. Performing arts companies
are pleading for governmental support, issuing dire warnings about the
future of live theatre, dance, and music if their calls are not heeded. Choral
singing has been identified as a source of super-spreading. In Britain the
BBC has put on orchestral performances where the players are all two
metres apart and audiences are listening at home; these socially distanced
events create a new kind of orchestral sound, with less emphasis on blend
and more on the contribution of individual players. And across all genres
and traditions, musicians are experimenting as never before with telematic
music (music created in real time by physically separated musicians linked
via the internet). You might expect the big winner to be streaming services,
but even they have suffered through the slashing of advertising budgets.
What effect will all this have in the coming years? Will 2020 come to be
seen as a turning point in the history of music? Or as just a temporary
aberration that in the end didn’t change so much? By the time you read this
book you may have a better idea of the answers to these questions than I do.
Chapter 1
Music in the moment

Growing older together

Google ‘music’, and along with about 9,690,000,000 other hits you might
find Figures 1 and 2. Which of them is the music? Is it an activity,
something people do, or a product, something people make? In the West (a
problematic term by which I roughly mean Europe, the Americas, and the
larger anglophone world) there is a long tradition of thinking of music less
as an activity than as a product. It wasn’t until the late 20th century that the
music educator Christopher Small redressed the balance by coining the verb
‘musicking’ to refer unambiguously to the activity. But the sense that music
exists on two planes, or as two parallel worlds, is implicit in the French
philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre’s observation that if the concert hall burns
down during a performance of Ludwig van Beethoven’s Seventh
Symphony, the symphony does not cease to exist. Music as product is not
tied to time and space, but music as activity happens in the here and now.
1. The Guarneri String Quartet (Arnold Steinhardt is on the left).
2. Opening of Mozart’s String Quartet in G major, K 387, as published by Breitkopf & Härtel
(Leipzig) in 1882. This is one of a series of late 19th-century editions of what by then were seen
as the masterworks of classical music, aiming to represent them in an authoritative and
permanent form.

You might call music an art of time, perhaps of all cultural practices the one
most intimately tied to time. In the collective improvisation of jazz,
musicians are (more or less) making up the music as they go along, and
they do this by constantly listening to one another. But it’s not just jazz. In
any tradition or genre, making music together is an art of split-second
interaction. Arnold Steinhardt, first violinist of the Guarneri Quartet, speaks
of his first experience of playing in a string quartet. He and three fellow
students at the Curtis Instititute of Music in Philadelphia were assigned
Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Quartet K 387 (the K stands for Ludwig von
Köchel, who created the authoritative catalogue of Mozart’s music, and 387
is the number he gave this quartet). Steinhardt’s part looked ridiculously
easy—he already had a virtuoso technique—but after a few minutes he had
changed his mind:

The ensemble was chaotic and we all missed cues…If this was such easy music, why was I
stumbling over notes, making a poor sound, and having such trouble with the simple rhythms?
When performed, the music that on paper was a simple succession of notes
one after another turned out to be an intricate web of cues, demanding close
listening and instant response. In performance, time is dynamic, flexible,
and situational: it seems to flow faster or slower depending on the music.
And more than that, it is social. Through their interactions performers share
musical time with one another, as well as with the audience. In a word, they
negotiate it. You keep in time not by adhering to your own beat and
expecting everyone else to fall in with you, but by listening to everyone else
and adjusting to them as they adjust to you; that’s why in both jazz and
string quartets the worst thing you can say about someone is they don’t
listen. It is this web of relationships that produces musical time.

If you think about time you will almost certainly think about music. Writing
in 1951 about intersubjectivity, the German sociologist Alfred Schutz
contrasted clock time, in which every second is the same and a minute lasts
60 times as long, with the time in which we experience music—the time
that is dynamic, negotiated, and socially produced. As Schutz put it,
anticipating the hippy language of the following decade, ‘performer and
listener are “tuned-in” to one another, are living together through the same
flux, are growing older together while the musical process lasts’.

There is a striking echo of this when two contemporary British sociologists

(Elizabeth Hallam and Tim Ingold) speak of the mutual relationships
‘through which, as they grow older together, [people] continually
participate in each other’s coming-into-being’. We live our lives in this
socially shared time, they say—a time that ‘grows, issuing forth from its
advancing tip rather like a root or creeper probes the earth’. People think of
their lives as a kind of map across which they chart their course, a space in
which you can look back at the past while the future lies over there. But in
reality life is not like this: there is no future just waiting to be revealed, and
we live each moment as it comes. We get through life by constantly going
forward into an unknown future and responding to whatever happens as
best we can, that is, by improvising: ‘improvisation and creativity’, Hallam
and Ingold say, ‘are intrinsic to the very processes of social and cultural
life’. Life cannot be scripted. We may have plans but in the end we make
things up as we go along.
Improvisation is equally a fundamental dimension of music’s existence in
real time. On the printed page music is a series of notes fixed in the same
relationships for all time. But as played and heard, music is (in social
psychologist Kenneth Gergen’s words) a world of ‘endless movement, not
discrete “forms” but continuous “forming”’, a world of lived experience in
which human relationships are played out in their most essential, stripped
down form. Jazz improvisation in particular has often been seen as offering
the vision of an equal society in which there are no leaders, no followers, no
hierarchies, no rules except those of working and playing together in
harmony. And critically in the context of America, where jazz originated, it
was seen as offering the vision of a colour-blind society.

In 1945 the Black poet, folklorist, and Harvard professor Sterling Brown
spoke of the democracy in action of ‘jam sessions, both public and private,
where Negro and white musicians meet as equals to improvise collectively
and create the kind of music they love. Here the performer’s color does not
matter.’ Sometimes this utopian view of jazz improvisation is contrasted
with the bureaucratic paperwork, rules, regulations, and hierarchies of the
Western classical (or ‘art music’) tradition, where composers prescribe what
performers are to play and conductors are there to enforce compliance.
Some people, such as the jazz commentator Ben Sidran, have seen the
opposed cultures of jazz and classical music as expressing the
fundamentally distinct mentalities of ‘oral man’ and ‘literate man’ (and
woman, presumably): a culture of joyous social extemporization in contrast
to one based on the slavish reproduction of authorized texts. For Sidran,
orality is linked to ‘the peculiarly “black” approach to rhythm’, which gives
rise to the suspicion that these binaries—oral versus literary, improvisation
versus reproduction, jazz versus classical—might simply boil down to race.

But music disrupts this kind of black-and-white thinking. It often attracts

idealized interpretations that have little basis in reality, and among them is
the idea that improvisation can be genuinely free in the sense of owing
nothing to past tradition. Coinciding with the civil rights movement of the
1950s and 60s, there developed a genre called ‘free jazz’ (‘free
improvisation’ in Europe). It consciously rejected the basic features of the
then dominant bebop style, such as regular song-based forms, metres,
recognizable harmonic sequences, and even the conventional sonorities of
instruments such as the saxophone. Improvisation was seen as central to its
freedom, but in practice free jazz drew on multiple aspects of earlier, pre-
bebop styles along with others drawn from traditions outside the West. By
reconfiguring these elements in new ways, artists like John Coltrane and
Ornette Coleman stepped outside the norms of contemporary bebop style.
But they did not free themselves from the past.

The point is underlined by another kind of free improvisation that

developed at the same time but on the other side of the Atlantic. This came
out of the classical (or ‘art’ music) tradition, and took the form of
improvisation ensembles determined to eradicate every trace of tradition
from their playing. The post-war modernist composer Pierre Boulez made
fun of the vacuous music this gave rise to: at first there would be some
excitement, he said,

and so everybody just made more activity, more activity, louder, louder, louder. Then they
were tired so for two minutes you had calm, calm, calm, calm, calm. And then somebody was
waking up so they began again, and then they were tired, sooner this time, and so the rest was
longer.

This may not have been entirely fair, but Boulez had a point. If you try to
improvise in the sense of just playing without any preconceptions, you fall
back into engrained mannerisms. You end up imitating yourself. As Charlie
Mingus, the double bassist, pianist, composer, and bandleader, supposedly
told the self-styled guru of psychedelia, Tim Leary, ‘You can’t improvise on
nothin’, man. You gotta improvise on somethin’.’ The ethnomusicologist
Bruno Nettl has expressed the same thought in more academic terms: ‘It
may be stated as an article of faith that improvisers always have a point of
departure, something which they use to improvise.’

This explains the traditional jazz practice of basing performances on

‘standards’, well-known songs from American popular culture. Sometimes
the players incorporate part or all of a tune, sometimes just a sequence of
chord changes, but in either case the result is a framework of shared
expectations that underlies the soloists’ improvisations. The soloists interact
with other band members and with the audience, but they may also
incorporate references to famous improvisations on records, or weave in
any of the multitude of familiar ‘ideas, licks, tricks, pet patterns, crips,
clichés, and, in the most functional language, things you can do’ that
ethnomusicologist Paul Berliner describes as the building blocks of jazz
tradition. And it is not just jazz musicians who do this. Another
ethnomusicologist, Laudan Nooshin, speaks of the internalized store of
ideas and patterns accumulated over a lifetime that forms the basis of
Iranian music, in which improvisation and the performance of pre-existing
music are inextricably intertwined. Examples could be multiplied from
across the world.

In this way improvisation and the performance of pre-existing music are not
as distinct as people think. Consider one of the most famous jazz
improvisers, Louis Armstrong (aka Satchmo). In 1920s America you had to
submit a score in order to claim copyright on your music, so Armstrong
submitted written-out versions of his solos two or three years before he
‘improvised’ them on recordings. The scores and recordings match almost
exactly. And if jazz improvisation turns out not to be simply made up on the
spot—if it is a weaving together of pre-existing tunes, harmonic patterns,
and other formulae—then conversely the performance of pre-existing works
turns out to be closer to improvisation than Sidran’s sharp division between
‘oral’ and ‘literate’ man would suggest. Steinhardt’s and his fellow
students’ problem at that first rehearsal was they didn’t know how to
negotiate time with one another. In that sense—and it is a key sense—they
didn’t know how to improvise.

Nor is it just time that is negotiated in performance. Violins, viola, and

cellos—the instruments of the string quartet—have no frets, and players
continually adjust their intonation to one another to produce the overall
sonority they want. They also adjust their dynamic balance in line with the
music’s changing textures as well as the surging and ebbing of the musical
flow. When you listen to K 387, you are not just hearing Mozart’s notes:
you are hearing a constantly changing web of human relationships (and that
is why people keep on listening even when—as the phrase goes—they
know the music backwards). The performers may be playing the notes as
printed in the score, but at the same time they are playing by ear.
Actually the idea that classical performers play the notes is itself an
oversimplification, and when I say that I am not talking about mistakes. As
an example, music in the 18th century was commonly written down in the
form of a blueprint (in jazz you would call it a lead sheet), with the tune, a
bass line, and sometimes figures to indicate the harmonies. Typically the
tune would be played by a violinist or woodwind player, and the bassline by
a cellist or gamba player. But there would also be a third performer—
probably at a harpsichord but perhaps a small organ or lute—who doubled
the bass line and filled out the harmonies, often adding shadowy inner parts.
There is an obvious parallel between this instrumental grouping and the
saxophone, string bass, and piano of a typical jazz quartet (‘quartet’ because
in jazz there is also a drummer).

And the parallel does not stop there. In the 18th-century trio sonata, as it
was called, the third (or continuo) player had considerable freedom in
realizing the figured bass. By no means was it a simple matter of playing
the notes. And the violinist or woodwind player had still more freedom.
Particularly in slow movements it was expected that solo performers would
extemporize freely on what was written in the score, at the least adding
conventional ornamentation or filling in leaps with scales, but sometimes
improvising quite new melodies that fitted with the chord changes—very
much as jazz soloists do. We know this because composers or performers
occasionally wrote out examples of how the music might be performed as a
guide for beginners.

Only later did the idea develop that performers should play just what they
saw in the score. That is what I was taught to do as an aspiring oboist, and
so when I performed trio sonatas I plodded through the notes one after
another, wondering why anybody would want to play this stuff.

Knowing and playing

Q: What do you call someone who hangs around with musicians?
A: A viola player.
There is a whole genre of viola jokes, but in the Western classical tradition
it is performers in general who have had a bad press—or worse, no press at
all. It is an oddly contradictory story. On the one hand the music industry
and the media have always focused on star performers from Enrico Caruso
and Arturo Toscanini to Luciano Pavarotti and Nicola Benedetti; people go
to hear them because it is them, rather than because of what they are
performing. On the other hand, historians have traditionally approached
music quite differently, focusing on the evolution of style (melodic patterns,
harmonic language, rhythm and metre, the relationship between these
elements, the formal patterns into which they are cast) and the composers
whose ‘masterworks’—note the word—are seen as embodying this stylistic
evolution.

The result is what by the second half of the 20th century had become the
standard format for a one-volume history of music. You began with music’s
primitive beginnings, perhaps illustrated by examples from Africa or
Oceania; then you covered Western music from the medieval period to
1945, focusing on the classical tradition (this was much the longest part). At
that point you made some acknowledgement of jazz and American popular
music before wrapping up with music in today’s increasingly global world.
There are a number of problems with this kind of history. It silently
prioritizes the West, a term I called problematic because it conflates
geography, history, and culture-specific values. Among these values is
progress. In this kind of history, music advances inexorably from the past to
the present and on towards a future that lies over there, waiting to be
revealed: this is a spatialized way of thinking about history that makes
whatever happens appear inevitable. It also gives the impression that the
term ‘Western music’ refers to a clearly defined, continuous tradition, rather
than a loose assemblage of often local practices only to a limited degree
held together by shared instruments, notations, or ideas.

A further problem is that the focus on style turns music into a thing rather
than a human practice. While composers—or at least the ‘great’ composers
—were foregrounded in such histories, performers and listeners were in
general conspicuously absent. And if performers were mentioned, it was
often to be criticized for drawing attention to themselves and so coming
between composer and listener, as if they were obstructing the stately
progress of music history. Some composers thought the same way: Arnold
Schoenberg, one of the pioneers of early 20th-century musical modernism,
once remarked that the performer was ‘totally unnecessary except as his
interpretations make the music understandable to an audience unfortunate
enough not to be able to read it in print’ (the gendered language was normal
at the time). It all added up to a kind of musical class system, an upstairs–
downstairs relationship in which the performer’s place was below the stairs.
Performers were seen as skilled workers whose role was to carry out the
tasks assigned to them by the composers who were the real agents of music
history. And this had a side-effect. In the classical tradition, women
generally played a far greater role in performance than in composition, so
they got more or less written out of the history books (and remember that
term ‘masterworks’).

In Chapter 3 I will talk about the historical background to this

disparagement of classical performers—in reality accomplished artists in a
ferociously competitive profession, and the people responsible for
everything listeners actually hear. There is one issue I want to address here,
however, and it arises from how people learn to perform. Up to the early
19th century, musicians mainly learned their craft by making music with
others, often with the help of a teacher or mentor. It was a kind of
apprenticeship system, and this kind of learning on the spot can still be
found in jazz or popular music (educationalists call it ‘informal learning’).
But as part of the larger processes of modernization linked to
industrialization and urbanization that took place after 1800, learning was
relocated to formal institutions of education such as conservatories and
universities. Learning through social music-making continued, but as just
part of a larger curriculum based on academic knowledge—the kind of
knowledge that is codified, set down in textbooks, and taught in classes. By
2000 higher education in music had become part of an institutionalized
knowledge industry, a context in which academic research in music thrived.

There is an issue here, and it has to do with the nature of knowledge. The
knowledge in terms of which universities operate is based on observation,
systematized into generally applicable principles, documented and archived.
It is knowledge laid down for the future, a kind of cognitive capital (hence
the term ‘knowledge economy’). It is what performance students are taught
under the title of ‘theory’, which suggests you become a musician by first
learning the theory and then how to apply it in practice. But this is only one
kind of knowledge, sometimes called ‘explicit’ in order to contrast it with
the ‘tacit’ knowledge characteristic of complex decision-making in real
time. Think acrobatics, cycling, motor racing, playing videogames, and of
course music. This kind of knowledge tends to be embodied rather than
purely mental. You recognize it when your fingers know something better
than you do.

It is only quite recently that the nature of tacit knowledge and the role it
plays in high-level musicianship has been appreciated. This was one reason
for the upstairs–downstairs relationship I mentioned. You could see it in
musicological conferences, where a theory professor (more often than not
male) would analyse some masterwork and a pianist or flautist, often
younger and female, illustrated the implications for performance. I am
putting this in the past tense because significant progress has been made in
addressing this dysfunctional relationship between theory and practice in
the culture of classical music. One reason for this is that higher education
takes far more notice of other musical traditions than it did just a few
decades ago, but even within classical music there are more and more
conferences on performance-related topics where academics and performers
engage on more equal terms. Serious collaboration between composers and
performers is increasingly common too, not least because academic funding
regimes favour it.

All the same, it’s a bit like gender equality: progress is constantly being
made, but the issue doesn’t go away. And the most conspicuously
successful example of a productive relationship between academic research
and performance—between explicit and tacit knowledge—dates back some
fifty years to the establishment of historically informed performance,
generally abbreviated to HIP. This was the period of the post-war consensus
in classical performance style. There was a musical mainstream—a core
repertory that roughly went from George Frideric Handel or Johann
Sebastian Bach to Claude Debussy or Arnold Schoenberg, depending on
your tastes—and within that mainstream all music was played in broadly
the same way. There were differences in individual musicians’ personal
style, to be sure. But the margin of tolerance was quite narrow. Quite how
narrow becomes obvious if you listen to early recordings, which go back to
around 1900 and document the wildly contrasting and sometimes rapidly
changing performance styles current during the first half of the century. But
until recently few people listened to them.

In saying that in the decades after 1945 all music was played in broadly the
same way I mean several things. For one, 18th-century and earlier music
was played using modern instruments (pianos instead of harpsichords,
modern oboes instead of the very different period instrument). Again, it was
performed by large orchestras under a conductor, rather than small
ensembles directed from the keyboard by a musician acting as the first
among equals; the interpersonal dynamics of performance—the network of
cues I described—were different. And much the same kinds of interpretive
approach, for example predominantly legato (sustained) tone production
and avoidance of excessive speeds, were adopted more or less uniformly
across this very varied repertory. Put crudely, this was how music went.

HIP began as a movement to revive ‘early’—roughly pre-1700—music, but

it was also a reaction against the homogenizing effects of mainstream
performance. It was rather like the British Campaign for Real Ale
(CAMRA), which dates back to 1971 and was a reaction against the big
breweries that had bought up local ones and sold the same tasteless, fizzy
product everywhere; campaigners aimed to revive the variety and
idiosyncrasy of traditional, hand-made beers. And like CAMRA, HIP was
successful. Period-style instruments were reconstructed on the basis of
surviving examples or descriptions. But reconstructing period performance
techniques and more general principles of interpretation was harder. Even if
you played from original notations (rather than the standardized and
sometimes bowdlerized editions produced in the 19th and 20th centuries),
and putting aside the problem of unnotated ornamentation, notation does
not capture the specifics of tone production, dynamics, and articulation
(whether notes are joined smoothly or clipped). Consequently the most
important source of evidence was period treatises written as a guide for
amateur harpsichordists, violinists, flautists, or singers.
But there are problems with these too. Suppose they say that if you see a
steady stream of quavers (American eighth notes) you should swing them,
as jazz musicians say—that is, make them alternately longer and shorter.
But by how much, and does it apply to all genres, instruments, or countries,
and within what historical period? Again, if a treatise speaks out strongly
against a particular practice, that tells you two things: people did it, and the
author didn’t like it. So which do you go with? The most intractable
problem, however, is that, if notations miss out so much of what a
historically informed performer wants to know, words are worse. Say you
want to know how much rubato to introduce in your playing (that is, how
far to inflect a steady beat). The musicologist Robert Philip, who pioneered
the study of early recordings, quotes a co-authored treatise from 1823 that
advises the performer to maintain ‘an equilibrium between the feelings that
hurry him away, and a rigid attention to time’. And Philip comments:

One can imagine musicians from the eighteenth to the late twentieth centuries nodding their
heads in agreement with this carefully worded advice, without having the least idea how much
tempo fluctuation the authors really had in mind.

In other words later musicians would read the same words but imagine
different performances. Words just do not engage music with anything like
the kind of precision that performance—really the musical equivalent of
nanoengineering—involves.

To the extent that the problem was solved, it was by bringing together
different kinds of knowledge. Music historians familiar with the period
literature could collaborate with instrument builders, but performers played
an essential role through testing the results, creating a virtuous circle of
feedback. The same applies to technique and interpretation: historians tried
to make sense of period treatises, struggling with the exasperating
vagueness of words about music, while performers would put the
historians’ interpretations into practice, testing out what worked and what
didn’t. Often it was only when expert performers tried out what the treatises
said that the historians could see what was meant. The contributions of
performers were essential to what the historians were doing, and vice versa.
Explicit and tacit knowledge worked hand in hand.
Sometimes a single individual was able to bring together these different
forms of expertise, but more often it involved collaboration; to this day
musicological ‘consultants’ play a key role in the more research-oriented
early music ensembles. And in this way there was a steady development in
the performance of early music. The serious-minded but sometimes
pedestrian recordings of the 1950s–60s gave way to the panache that David
Munrow brought to early music around 1970. Munrow spent his gap year
touring South America, bringing back ethnic instruments that he used to
perform music going back to the medieval era; he also commissioned
copies of obsolete instruments such as racketts and crumhorns. In 1967 he
formed the Early Music Consort, an ensemble of about the same size as a
typical rock group, and, like a rock group, they toured extensively and made
many recordings. By the time of his early death in 1976 Munrow had done
more than anyone to build audience enthusiasm for early music, turning it
into a movement in the same sense as CAMRA.

And in the following decades HIP gave rise to a new conception of 18th-
century music as lighter, fleeter of foot, and more rhetorical than the
ponderous style of mainstream performance. A combination of flair and
solid professionalism fed into and reflected the development of specialist
HIP training at an increasing number of conservatories, especially in
Europe. By the end of the century HIP had become an integral part of a
broader, more pluralistic mainstream. In orchestral performance there was
increased interaction between the HIP and mainstream communities, with
lessons learned from HIP being applied to performances using modern
instruments; by then the historically informed approach had colonized the
core repertory of the Viennese classics (Joseph Haydn, Mozart, and
Beethoven), and it has subsequently advanced through the 19th century and
into the early 20th. At the same time, a new breed of fortepianists—playing
the fortepiano or early form of the piano, a much lighter instrument than the
steel-framed behemoth the piano became in the 19th century—was
developing a new conception of this repertory that now exists side by side
with performances on the modern piano. In this way HIP created quite new
and at its best highly appealing music out of old scores.

But this was not achieved without a struggle, and what became known as
the ‘authenticity’ debate raged through the 1980s; scholars, HIP performers,
and listeners all took sides. The traditional—or establishment—position
was rarely spelled out, but in effect it was that successive developments in
instrument design and performance training had brought about huge
improvements in standards, and the performance of all music should benefit
from them. In contrast the case for authenticity was promoted loudly: you
should play music as its composer intended it. This sounds obvious but
actually isn’t. There is no way you can know what composers intended
except through what they wrote—which just takes us back to the problem
that notation doesn’t capture everything performers need to know.

But there’s a more basic issue: should we necessarily play music the way its
composer intended? The assumption behind the rhetoric of HIP was that
there are two ways to play music, right and wrong—and the right way is the
historical way. I know of no other performing art in which that is simply
taken for granted. In theatre, you can attempt to reconstruct how
Shakespeare’s plays would have been staged in 1600, but that is just an
option: many producers see it as part of their job—and a dimension of their
creative freedom—to make them relevant to today’s audiences by staging
them in new ways (in a New York penthouse, or with gender roles reversed,
for example). One of HIP’s unfortunate consequences is a historical mindset
that closes off such possibilities, and I’ll come back to that in Chapter 3.

Eventually Daniel Leech-Wilkinson and Richard Taruskin brought the

authenticity debate to a close by arguing that the whole idea of authenticity
as historical correctness didn’t make sense. In reality, they said, ‘historical’
performance embodied many of the characteristic qualities of 20th-century
modernism, for example the streamlined textures and motor drive of
Stravinsky’s compositions: it was not undecidable claims of historical
correctness but the 20th-century sensibility it embodied that gave HIP its
authenticity. At the same time, the undecidability of period style gave
historical performers a new freedom of interpretation. In effect, the largely
unsupported claims of historical authenticity advanced by early music
ideologues operated as a smokescreen behind which newly creative
approaches to performance could emerge. And it’s striking that HIP’s
progressive advance through the repertory stopped in the early 20th century
—just when the existence of period recordings would have blown away the
smoke and enabled the goal of historically correct performance to be
actually realized. You can see why that happened. In the age of recording,
HIP rhetoric would have turned classical performers into the equivalent of
tribute bands and Elvis impersonators.

The key legacy of HIP was to sweep away the basic assumption of the mid-
century mainstream that there can be a one-size-fits-all way of playing
music. It is not just the recognition that different repertories call for
different instruments, techniques, and interpretive styles. It is that whenever
and whatever people perform, they have choices, and in making choices
they also have responsibilities. They have the freedom and even the
obligation to reflect on and interrogate their own practice, and to bring their
specialist performer’s knowledge to bear upon their personal understanding
of the music. And that makes them the co-creators of the music—something
that is taken for granted in most other musical cultures, where the upstairs–
downstairs relationship between classical composers and performers does
not exist.

Music as a political act

Things exist ‘out there’ in the real world, and the job of language is to
represent them—to depict them in the same sense that a painting of a horse
depicts a real horse. That is what the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein,
writing in the 1930s, termed the ‘picture’ theory of language; it is also
called the picture theory of meaning, reflecting the fact that it extends
further than just language. In the West there is a tradition of applying the
same approach to music too. Seen this way, musical works such as
Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony exist ‘out there’ as ideal, timeless entities;
they don’t cease to exist if the concert hall burns down. And a performance
represents or reproduces that ideal entity in real time. In Chapter 3 I shall
ask how people came to think this way. But here my aim is to set out a more
productive way of thinking about performance.

When he set out this picture theory of meaning, Wittgenstein was not
advocating it. On the contrary, he was setting it up as a kind of straw man in
order to put forward a quite different model of language and meaning, and
at this point he spoke of music. You can understand some language use this
way, he said (think of ‘the cat sat on the mat’), but you can’t think of a
musical theme like that. A musical theme is not a sound picture of
something: there is no something, no external reality, for it to be a picture
of. A musical theme is simply what it is. It means what it means. And
Wittgenstein’s claim is that the same can be true of language.

An obvious example is a promise. When you promise something (e.g. when

you say ‘I do’ during the wedding ceremony), you are not reporting on a
state of affairs. Rather you are doing something through the act of saying it.
In a term coined by another philosopher, J. L. Austin, this is a performative
utterance, meaning it does not simply reflect but actually constructs
meaning. And this resonates with another idea that was coming into
prominence around the same time. Anthropologists such as Edward Sapir
and Benjamin Lee Whorf were working on native American languages, and
they found that in some respects they just couldn’t be satisfactorily
translated into English. The conceptual categories didn’t match. Linguistic
categories such as tenses or active and passive voices didn’t align with
English, because in certain fundamental ways native Americans didn’t
experience the world the same way as English speakers.

Sapir and Whorf’s hypothesis was that language determines how people
think and experience the world. As with Austin’s performative utterances,
words do not just reflect how things are but construct meanings. We use
words to change things, to make things the way they are. And this idea can
be applied to art, which in the philosopher Joanna Hodge’s words makes
available new ways of ‘constituting our sense of reality’. Seen this way, she
says, Vincent van Gogh created a new way for us to see sunflowers. It’s not
that we always saw sunflowers like that, but Van Gogh was the first to
capture it in paint. It’s that we see sunflowers differently because of Van
Gogh. And so the significance of painting lies not—or at least not just—in
how it represents an external reality, but in how it constructs new forms of
perception, understanding, and feeling. This ‘constructivist’ view of art
locates aesthetic value not in the external world but in viewers’ experiences.
It places viewers at the heart of the aesthetic process. It democratizes art.
So how might such thinking be applied to music? The answer is: in many
ways, of which I will give some varied examples. Consider Frauenliebe
und -Leben (A Woman’s Love and Life), a song cycle composed by Robert
Schumann in 1840. The texts, by Adelbert von Chamisso, are a narrative of
a woman’s love for a man, from their first meeting through marriage to his
death. Such songs, with piano accompaniment, were often performed in
people’s homes, and the musicologist Ruth Solie invites us to imagine a
young woman performing Frauenliebe ‘in a small and intimate room…
before people who are known to her and some of whom might well be
potential suitors’. In such surroundings the distinction between singer and
song protagonist blurs, while the woman comes to personify womanhood—
and more than that, womanhood as conceived within the patriarchal society
of 19th-century Germany. If the woman’s future husband is there, her
performance may take on the quality of a promise. It will become a
performative utterance. Just as with any other promise, the performance
does not report on something but does something: it creates a changed
relationship between the individuals involved.

Of course words are also involved in this example of musical

performativity, but in other vocal contexts performative meaning emerges
directly from the music. John Potter, a singer whose experience ranges from
early music to backing The Who, describes a passage from Antoine
Brumel’s Missa Victimae Paschali in terms of the intimate negotiations and
conjunctions between the performers, who are singing one part to each line:
‘Throughout, the voices are setting up patterns of tension and relaxation,
acutely conscious of each other, both seeking to accommodate each others’
desires and to satisfy themselves.’ At the end of the first bar, a particular
dissonance ‘is only a passing moment but it creates a moment of acute
pleasure that they may wish to prolong’. As much as a Mozart quartet, the
music consists of audible relationships between the parts, which as in
Frauenliebe blur into the flesh-and-blood individuals performing them. If
the words contribute to what Potter describes, it is more for their sound than
their sense: it is hardly to the point that they celebrate Easter Sunday.
Rather it is Brumel’s score that scripts this potential for relational meaning,
much as a theatrical script does, and it is the performers who transform the
potential into reality.
In other cases—particularly when large choral groups are involved—
singing together creates an experience of the individual merging into the
collective. A middle-aged Swedish woman recounts something that
happened when she was 10:

We had a school choir, and were rehearsing the end of spring-time assembly.…I remember to
this day the bliss I felt when I stood there and sang my part and heard the other voices around
me. I could never have imagined such joy. It was as if you left your own body and merged
totally with the music.

Accounts of such musical out-of-body experiences are not uncommon:

conscious of your own voice but unable to distinguish it from the mass of
sound that swirls around you, the sense of merging with the music is
equally one of immersion in the community. You feel you belong. These are
powerful effects inherent in the very act of collective singing, manifested in
sound, and easily harnessed to larger purposes.

Protest songs and national anthems are obvious cases in point. Think of a
choir of South African schoolchildren singing the South African national
anthem in four-part harmony (Figure 3). It is often referred to as ‘Nkosi
Sikelel’ iAfrica’, though properly speaking that is the hymn from which the
music is taken, and it was sung as an act of defiance under the apartheid
regime. Since the end of apartheid, in 1994, this music has resonated with
the hopes, the aspirations, and the disappointments of the new South Africa
and its sympathizers across the world. But underlying this symbolic and
associative meaning is the same sense of solidarity experienced by the
Swedish 10-year-old. Through its block-like construction and regular
phrasing, the music creates a sense of stability and mutual dependence, with
no one of the parts predominating over the others. (Compare the British
national anthem, really just a tune plus accompaniment, or the
‘Marseillaise’, with its individualistic, irregular construction.) It also lies
audibly at the interface between European traditions of harmony and
African traditions of communal singing, thereby gaining an inclusive
quality. Enlisting music’s ability to shape individual and group identity,
‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica’ actively contributed to the creation of what
Archbishop Desmond Tutu called the rainbow nation. In such a context,
singing is a political act.
3. Cantare Children’s Choir (Gauteng, South Africa), singing the South African national
anthem.

And it isn’t just singing. Again an example from South Africa makes the
point. As the ethnomusicologist Louise Meintjes explains, in the early
1990s studio practices in Johannesburg still bore the impress of apartheid.
The engineers, who manipulated the recording equipment and had the
technical know-how, were normally white, and their priority was to
maximize throughput by avoiding unnecessarily complex technical
processes. The producers, in charge of the studio sessions and nominally
with overall responsibility for the product, were normally Black—but,
being Black, they found it hard to impose their authority on the engineers.
At the same time the record companies depended on the producers’ inside
knowledge of ‘local black music styles, languages, audiences, locations,
practices, and so forth’. Meintjes’s claim is not just that these conflicted
relationships were being played out in studios, but that they left their traces
in the sound of the records that were made. You could see that as a
metaphor for the societal tensions and negotiations through which the new
South Africa was brought into being. But the studio was more than that. It
was a metonym, a little bit of South Africa, in which social and political
transformation was acted out just as it was elsewhere. And in such a context
studio practice, too, becomes a political act.

The same issues arise in orchestral music. The modern orchestra developed
more or less in line with the historical process of industrialization and its
associated organizational structures. In fact we can describe it in similar
terms. It consists of a team of specialists (violinists, oboists, and so on), all
working to a pre-existing blueprint or master plan (the score). Within areas
of specialism there are teams with identifiable hierarchies and management
lines: the leader (lead violinist), first and second violins, first and second
oboes, and so forth. In the modern orchestra—as opposed to the 18th-
century one—there is also the conductor, who fulfils a specialist
management role (he or—sometimes—she does not produce sound as such,
but has oversight and responsibility for the whole operation); this is a
dedicated career path, with a remuneration package to match. In short, the
orchestra embodies organizational structures that characterize modern
industrialized society more broadly, and indeed research into how
orchestras and other musical ensembles work productively together is an
established if peripheral area of management studies.

Note my words. I said the modern orchestra developed in line with

industrialization and its associated organizational structures. I didn’t say the
orchestra—or music more generally—reflects society. That would be like
seeing studio recording as a metaphor for South Africa. But again you can
think of the orchestra as a part of society within which the same processes
are at work, and that way we avoid making an assumption that social
change happens elsewhere and is merely reflected in music. Consider: is the
move towards smaller, conductorless orchestras such as the Britten Sinfonia
a reflection of a broader development towards less hierarchical management
styles in industry? Or is it the other way round—that new structures more
easily emerge in the performing arts than in commercial contexts policed by
the bottom line, and are then taken up elsewhere? If we think of orchestras
—and music more generally—as an integral part of society, then change
may equally well come from anywhere, a possibility that the idea of music
reflecting society rules out of consideration. And that matters, because it
means we can see music as an arena in which things can be done that have
effects beyond music.

As for Meintjes’s idea that the social structures played out in South African
studios are inscribed in the music, I can illustrate that too in a classical
context. If you play the oboe, you will know that there is a watershed in
orchestral writing between Mozart and Beethoven. Mozart’s oboe lines
make sense in themselves and are gratifying to play; his symphonies are
basically scaled up chamber music—music written as much for the players
as for audiences. By contrast, Beethoven designs his orchestration from the
audience perspective, and as an oboist you may find yourself being patched
into first one layer of the orchestral texture and then another, resulting in a
line that makes little sense in itself and is less satisfying to play. It all
sounds fine when heard from the stalls, but rather than belonging to a
musical community the oboist feels like a worker on a musical production
line. It’s a different social situation. And while I’ve been describing this in
musical terms, it could equally be described in social terms; sound and
society are two sides of a single coin. Music does not reflect society but is
society—society made audible.

Few if any anthropologists today believe in the ‘strong’ version of the

Sapir–Whorf hypothesis, according to which language determines how
different cultures experience the world. Rather they believe that language is
one of the things that condition cultural experience. In the same way, I am
not claiming that musical performance should be understood only for what
it does as a social or political act rather than as a representation or
reproduction of something. Singing ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica’ is not just a
political act, it is also a performance of the hymn originally composed in
1897 by the Xhosa clergyman Enoch Sontonga; taken up as a liberation
song during the period of African decolonization, it was adopted as
Zambia’s national anthem and then Namibia’s, before becoming one of
South Africa’s two official anthems in 1994. (The other was South Africa’s
existing national anthem, ‘Die Stem van Suid-Afrika’, but in 1997 the two
anthems were combined into one, with the music coming from ‘Nkosi
Sikelel’ iAfrica’.) Conversely, playing Johannes Brahms’s Intermezzo Op.
119 No. 1 is a performance of the work of that name, dating from that final
period of Brahms’s work in which he retreated into an introspective style
suffused with nostalgia and yet in some ways looking forward to the
musical future—but then, you might be playing it to your aunt to show what
you have achieved in your first term at conservatory and to thank her for
putting up the money. In short, musical performances both represent and do
things.
Chapter 2
Thinking in music

Music as culture
According to the 13th-century Persian poet and mystic Rumi, ‘Love and
falling in love can only be explained through love. Reason is totally
helpless as its interpreter.’ If that is true of love, it is equally true of music.
Elvis Costello is one of many people who have said that writing about
music is like dancing about architecture, and he added, ‘it’s a really stupid
thing to want to do’. The ethnomusicologist Charles Seeger (father of Pete,
the famous folk and protest singer) called this the ‘musicological juncture’:
we want to talk about music, just as we want to share our thoughts and
feelings about everything we care about, but as soon as we do so we find it
has somehow slipped through our fingers. As with love, though, that
doesn’t stop people trying.

There is a chronic human urge to put into words things that can’t be put into
words, but in the case of music it’s not just that. It’s something built into
musical culture itself, something so familiar you take it for granted. Most of
the time you make no apparent effort to understand music. You just listen.
Like love it can just happen to you, carry you away, charm or enchant or
even ravish you. It’s as if it was just natural. But of course music isn’t
natural. It is something we humans make. Music is a cultural product and
musicking is a cultural practice. It is artifice, and yet it passes itself off as
nature. As the ethnomusicologist Henry Kingsbury puts it, ‘the essence of
music as a cultural system is both that it is not [a] phenomenon of the
natural world and also that it is experienced as though it were’.
We make and consume music in the here and now—in the moment—but
there is more to it than that. When I say music is a cultural product and
practice, I mean it exists within a social framework of talking and doing
that has a past and that advances into the future. And so music depends on
our ability to communicate sounds to one another and to communicate
about sounds with one another. Yet sounds in themselves—like the feelings
they elicit—are transient, slippery, hard to pin down or hold on to: they
elude memory, often leaving behind only fleeting impressions, something
like waking from a dream. To transform sounds into culture we have to
somehow fix them as mental images—to make them tangible, repeatable,
communicable. And we do that by turning them into things to make and to
hear.

It’s not just music. You might say the same of wine or perfume. How do
you describe a wine? I pick up a wine catalogue and read at random: an
English wine from Blackbook Winery is ‘bursting with spice, herb, citrus
and grass on the nose with a textured intricate palate’. What sort of a thing
is wine that it can have an intricate texture? And how come it is bursting
with spice, herb, citrus, and grass? Have the makers been adulterating their
product? Of course not! The reference to grass is not a literal description: it
is a metaphor. It is saying the wine has certain hard-to-describe qualities
that it shares with grass (a particular kind of sweetness, perhaps).
Winemakers, critics, and catalogues also talk about wine possessing ‘fine
soft tannins’, which is not a metaphor but a scientific term: according to
Wikipedia tannins are ‘a class of astringent, polyphenolic biomolecules’. In
this way, metaphorical and scientific language combine into a hybrid,
shared discourse that makes it possible to converse meaningfully about
wines. People enjoy talking about wine. There is empirical evidence that the
more wine-lovers talk about wines, the more they love them.

All this applies to perfumes too. Jean-Claude Ellena, who creates perfumes
for the fashion house Hermès, explains how in the course of their training
perfumers acquire a vocabulary of words like soap, aldehyde, jasmine, nail
varnish, rose, leather, wood, and bonbon that ‘describe the odor and not the
object that produces it’. In other words they are metaphorical objects that
create ‘a mental picture of the odor’. They allow professionals to exchange
ideas about how things smell, imagine new combinations of them, and so
collaborate in creating the cultural products we call perfumes. This isn’t just
thinking about scents, it is thinking in scents. And while scents are
evanescent, no sooner smelled than gone, this shared language builds a
community of producers and a culture of production—a culture that, as I
put it, has a past and advances towards the future. As cultural products,
perfumes have histories.

In the same way music is a culture of sounds, and metaphor is the means by
which sound is transformed into the cultural practices of musicking and the
cultural products of music. It is almost impossible to talk about music
without falling into metaphor of some kind. You might think the movement
between one note and another (say an upward leap of a minor sixth) is a real
out-there thing, the musical equivalent of a tannin. But on second thoughts
it’s not so obvious: as the philosopher Roger Scruton asked, ‘how can we
speak of movement, when nothing moves?’ Again, we say this note is
higher than that one, but it’s not as if high notes come from the sky and
deep ones from the earth: it’s that they seem lighter or brighter, you might
imagine them floating off while low notes settle on the ground—and
besides, they are higher on the printed page.

All this falls into the domain of metaphor and hence varies between times
and places: in some cultures you don’t say one note is higher than another,
you say it is bigger. And then there is texture. It’s like that wine’s textured
intricate palate: we readily talk about a piece of music having a particular
texture, but what do we mean by it? Bark, moss, velvet, sacking: these
things have texture, but how can music when you can’t even touch it? If
‘textured intricate palate’ is a metaphorical way of describing mouthfeel,
then does musical texture describe earfeel, and what might that be? And
what did you mean by a ‘piece’ of music? Do you tear strips of music off a
roll, like cloth, or chip them off a block? A block of what?

There aren’t real-world answers to any of these questions. As with the

cultures of wine-making and perfumery, the culture of music involves a
system of established metaphors that culture members share—what may be
loosely called a language. This is the condition of writing, talking, or
thinking about music, but more than that, it is the condition of music’s
existence as cultural practice and product. It is the dimension of music I’m
foregrounding in this chapter, and I’ll do so largely by focusing on
notations, the most obvious and in some ways culturally significant
metaphorical objects within the traditions collectively known—though
misleadingly—as Western music. It’s true that many musical cultures don’t
use notations, and those that do may use them very differently. But in one
sense or another all musical cultures are based on the construction of
sounds as things to make and to hear—whether in terms of physical objects,
verbal narratives, or embodied actions—and so the general point I’m
making is a much broader one.

Ronald Searle’s cartoon summons up a world in which musical sounds

leave physical traces rather than just memories (Figure 4). They don’t, of
course. But in another sense they do. We can stockpile recordings or scores,
whether as physical objects or in flash memory, and in that form they
endure, potentially as long as the world lasts. These are modes of music’s
existence, just as much as sound is. I can go to an HMV store (though for
how much longer?) and buy some music, meaning vinyl or a CD. Or I can
buy it as a download from the iTunes store. If it’s classical music I can buy
it as sheet music. Then again, if the two of us are listening to something and
I say ‘I really like this music’, I am talking about my experience of it. These
things aren’t the same, but they are all forms that the music can take; in
fact, collectively they are the music. And when we write, talk about, or
think about music we may have any one of these things specifically in
mind, but they are all interconnected, and so any one of them can stand in
for the others.
4. Cartoon by Ronald Searle.

Notation, then, stands in for sound, and it does this by transforming time—
the dynamic, situational, and socially produced time I talked about in
Chapter 1—into space. There is a story that Stravinsky once pinned the
pages of the music he was writing onto the walls of his room, so he could
literally walk forwards and backwards through it. You do something similar
when you flick through a score, comparing an earlier passage with a later
one. The basic principle of Western staff notation is that passing time is
represented through a series of marks arranged from left to right on the
page. Within the five lines of the staff (or stave), notes are arrayed from
high to low. So a score is a kind of two-dimensional plot in which the
horizontal axis is time and vertical one is pitch; other than that, just about
everything is a conventional symbol of one kind or another. And because
paper endures, notation is a means of conservation. It archives music
against the failure of individual or social memory. Equally important, it
enables communication. The two of us can discuss a piece while we look at
the score, with me pointing to a particular passage in order to make some
point, and you pointing to some other passage that doesn’t fit with what I’m
saying.

But these functions of conservation and communication come at a cost. The

Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges wrote a one-paragraph story about a
fictitious empire in which, in order to achieve the greatest accuracy, maps
were prepared on a 1:1 scale and overlaid on the empire’s territory: tattered
fragments of them may still be seen in its western deserts, he says. That’s
absurd, of course, and it would be equally absurd to think of a notation that
captured all the detail of musical sounds. Notations work by being highly
selective, discarding as much information as possible and retaining only
what is necessary for their intended use and users. So what they include and
what they miss out depends on the purposes for which they are being used
and the knowledge their users bring to them. And this varies widely both
within and between cultures.

For example, the neumes first used in Europe over a thousand years ago
were aides-mémoires, reinforcing monks’ unreliable memories of
ecclesiastical chant: they originated in a papal initiative to tighten up the
observance of religious ritual. In essence chant is expressively heightened
speech, and each neume represents a vocal gesture, sometimes with one
neume to a syllable, sometimes with several (Figure 5). In contrast, staff
notation—which developed into more or less its modern form by the 17th
century—is much more explicit in the detail it provides. Figure 6 is a
possible transcription of Figure 5, based on later pitched notations of the
chant. It uses noteheads as in conventional staff notation (such as Figure 2),
but unlike staff notation it doesn’t specify the rhythms: that’s because the
neumes in Figure 5 don’t, and similarly they don’t specify particular notes
or intervals, just movements up or down. This means that, while neumes
work well as an aide-mémoire, you can’t sing from them at sight—or at
least if you do, you may well sing something quite different from the next
person. The additional detail in staff notation enables performers to sight-
read music they have never previously seen, so giving rise to quite different
ways of using notation. When in the early 18th century Jesuit missionaries
introduced the Chinese imperial court to music from the West, it was the
ability to play at sight that most impressed the Kangxi emperor.

5. Cantatorium of St Gall (Stiftsbibliothek St Gallen, Cod. Sang. 359), top of p. 150. This
manuscript, written on parchment, dates from between 922 and 926, and contains solo chants
of the Mass. Neumes are written above the text and keyed to syllables.
6. Transcription of Figure 5.

But there is a proviso: you can’t sight-read just anything, and this has as
much to do with you as with the music. Notations omit information on the
basis of what the reader is expected to know or to guess. Even where the
notation represents every note that is played (and as I explained in Chapter
1 this is often not the case), what you need to know or guess includes
practically everything that comes under the heading of performance
practice: how fast to perform the music, when and by how much to slow
down and speed up, how to articulate the notes, and how to shape the
dynamics, along with the countless other decisions that performers make
from one moment to the next. These things have a huge impact on how
music is experienced by listeners; they can make one performance
profoundly moving, another dull or ridiculous or unintelligible, even though
the notes are the same. And conventions of performance style have varied
massively from one time, place, or genre to another.

Among them are things we take so much for granted that we don’t even see
them as choices, like how you sing. Nineteenth-century European travellers
never tired of comparing Chinese singing to the wailing and yowling of
cats, sometimes refusing to accept it as music at all. But you don’t need to
go to another culture to have such an experience. In 1902 the Gaisberg
brothers (Will and Fred, pioneers of the fledgling recording industry)
travelled to Rome, hoping to record Pope Leo XIII. Leo, then in his
nineties, declined, and instead the Gaisbergs recorded Alessandro Moreschi,
who directed the Sistine Choir and is today known as the last castrato.
There had long been an Italian tradition of castrating boys with exceptional
voices to prevent them breaking, and the resulting male sopranos took lead
roles in opera as well as in choirs. The practice came to be seen as
barbarous, however, and it was banned in 1861. Castration usually
happened around the age of 8, so Moreschi (born 1858) slipped through the
net, and is the only castrato on record.

And what do you hear behind the hiss and crackle of these early recordings?
It’s hard to describe, but one of its characteristics is an acute, even painful
focus of sound, almost like a sublimated primal scream. That is perhaps
because he is a castrato (it’s hard to know as there aren’t other castrati to
compare him to), but it isn’t just that. There is what might sound like an
inability to hit the note properly, but is in fact a kind of grace note:
Moreschi attacks notes from an octave or more below the intended pitch,
gliding quickly up to it, and combines this with a version of the stylized sob
used by Italian operatic tenors at this time. People just don’t sing like this
now, and if it wasn’t for these recordings we wouldn’t know they ever did.
But it’s striking how commentators have resisted this conclusion, looking
for one excuse or another not to believe the evidence of their ears: the
technology was primitive (but the Gaisbergs also recorded Caruso in 1902,
and he sounds great); Moreschi was nervous (he made several recordings in
1902, and more in 1904, and only in the very first one are there audible
signs of nervousness); he was too old (he was in his forties); he just wasn’t
good enough (he was known as ‘the angel of Rome’, and you didn’t just
walk into the Sistine Choir).
One reason people resist the evidence of Moreschi’s and other early
recordings may be that they don’t want to believe how much in music isn’t
captured in scores, the foundational documents of classical music, and
consequently how little we actually know about how music sounded before
the invention of recording. If someone sang in such an unimaginable way in
1902, then what about 1802 or 1702? Where does that leave the confident
claims made by those early music ideologues? There is a sense—a profound
sense—in which the history of music up to around 1900 is a history of
instruments and scores and treatises and people’s accounts of what they
heard, but not of music as sound. For that, we have only guesswork—highly
informed guesswork, to be sure, but guesswork all the same.

Notations, then, miss out just about everything except the notes, including
the knowledge and experience you need to make sense of the notes. As an
alternative technology for inscribing music into eternity, recordings (sound
or video) present a quite different picture. What you get depends on where
you point the microphone or camera, of course, and studio-produced
recordings involve other kinds of selection (more on this later). But
recording technology is not inherently selective in the way notation is, and
that is why—as Moreschi illustrates—it is much better for conserving and
transmitting to the future a sense of how music goes. That however is not
the only purpose served by the representation of music. Within the Western
classical tradition notations have served another and in some ways more
vital purpose. They are one of two key ways in which musicians think not
only about music but in music. And in that context selection is everything.

Writing it to hear it
If notation is one of the key ways in which musicians think in music, the
other is instruments. The same principles apply to both, but they are easier
to explain in relation to instruments, so I will start there and come back to
notations. What instrument you play can affect how you think about music
and even how you hear it. If you play the oboe you are led to think of music
as a single, continuously nuanced stream of sound, shaped from
microsecond to microsecond by the intimate physical engagement of lips
and reed, and monitored by ear; for a pianist, by contrast, 88 separate keys
lie ready at hand. The oboist’s single stream of sound means each note is
transformed into the next, whereas the piano’s 88 keys activate 88 separate
sound-producing mechanisms. That means it’s easy for pianists to create
permutational patterns such as broken-chord accompaniments (you keep
your hand still and just move your fingers): what is harder is to create the
effect of a single continuous line, what pianists call making the piano sing.

There is more to it. The piano keyboard is made up of a pattern of white

keys punctuated by two black keys (C#, D#) and then three more (F#, G#,
A#), which is repeated in octaves. So you make the same movements to
play a pattern of notes an octave higher—you just shift your hand to the
right—and likewise what you hear is the same pattern, only an octave
higher. In other words the pattern on the keyboard maps onto the pattern of
the sounds. This means if you internalize the spatial layout of the keyboard,
you have a mental scheme that will accommodate the sounds. To some
extent all this applies to the oboe too: in principle fingerings repeat at the
octave, but the modern instrument has a great deal of metal keywork added
to make it easier to play particular notes or transitions between notes, and
this complicates things. And at the top of the instrument’s register the
fingering patterns become complex and unpredictable, so the mapping
between instrument and sound fizzles out. Because of these complications
and because it can only produce a single stream of sound, the oboe is not
generally as good for thinking with as the piano. Historically most Western
composers have been keyboard players.

People think with instruments in the same sense that Chinese shopkeepers
traditionally did sums with an abacus (some still do), but it’s not just the
instrument that is involved: it’s the relationship between the instrument and
the musician’s body. Fingers and keys operate as a coupled system
grounded in physical engagement. And sound is part of this. David Sudnow,
a sociologist who learned to play jazz piano as an adult and documented his
learning process, writes that in the flow of improvisation

the piano is no longer experienced as an external mass of ivory and wood and steel, but…
seems to dissolve into an inner acquisition of spaces to speak with. Keys are no longer
encountered as places having lower limits that speak back to the hand as physical boundaries,
but as places having sounds throughout their depths.
In other words, sound becomes a dimension of the engagement of body and
instrument. Fingers, keys, and sound form a single networked system.

You can understand this in terms of what philosopher Andy Clark calls the
‘extended mind’. Think of Scrabble: you shuffle the letter tiles on your
rack, looking for words you can form with them (and how to get rid of that
pesky Q). Rearranging the tiles helps you think of the words. It’s the same
as using pencil and paper, or in days long past a slide rule, to work
something out. In each case, you are thinking with physical objects; the
objects are an integral part of your thinking. As Clark says, if ‘a part of the
world functions as a process which, were it done in the head, we would
have no hesitation in recognizing as part of the cognitive process, then that
part of the world is…a part of the cognitive process’. You can see how this
relates to musical instruments. If fingers, keys, and sound form a single
networked system, then for an experienced pianist each of these dimensions
can stand in for the others. Even if there is no instrument and no sound—
even if the pianist is just feeling the music in her fingers—the same
cognitive circuits and processes are activated. That is how instruments
enable you to think in music.

So how might all this translate to notation? We need to begin by drawing a

distinction. There are many different notations for music, and one class of
them is tablatures (guitar tablature is the most common, but tablatures are
found across many cultures). Put simply, tablatures tell you what to do. The
very earliest tablature for the Chinese long zither or qin (Figure 7) consisted
of prose instructions: put your finger on that string, press down here, and
pluck like this. More modern tablatures consist of symbols. Guitar tablature
uses six lines because the standard guitar has six strings, and the tablature is
a schematic picture of the instrument. For each string there are figures that
tell you where to put your finger on the fretboard (0 means an open string, 1
the first fret, and so on). The great advantage of guitar tablature is that it is
easy to learn: do what it says and the right notes will come out. The
disadvantage is that it only works for guitars: because each instrument is
different, every tablature is different. In contrast staff notation works for
any instrument, because instead of being a schematic picture of the
instrument, it is a schematic picture of the sound.
7. Zha Fuxi (1895–1976) playing the qin.

But it is a picture based on particular assumptions about the nature of the

sound. I can make the point in terms of another system of musical
representation: MIDI (Musical Instrument Digital Interface) code, invented
in 1982 so that synthesizers and other gear made by different manufacturers
could talk to one another (up to then manufacturers each used their own,
incompatible codes). Because of its limited purpose—MIDI was designed
with keyboard-based pop in mind—the code basically treats all music as
keyboard music, with a set of separate sound producers that can be
individually switched on or off. Consequently it has a lot of trouble
handling glissandos or other kinds of continuous change between one note
and another. Staff notation works on the same basic assumption as MIDI
code, that all music is made up of discrete entities called notes—the musical
equivalent of atoms, each corresponding to a single key and represented by
a notehead. But in reality not all music is made up of discrete entities of this
kind. The highly ornamented style of South Indian singing, for example, is
continuously shaped and inflected; the voice passes through various pitches
(C, C#, D) in the same sense that a graphline passes through various
numerical values (1.0, 1.5, 2.0), but it’s not a series of separate notes like
beads on a string. And the same applies to a greater or lesser degree to all
singing, as well as to jazz saxophone performance, for example. It’s in that
sense that, unlike atoms, notes have a metaphorical rather than an objective
existence. As I said, they are metaphorical objects.

Notations, then, are tied up with larger musical values, and again the qin
makes the point. In modern qin tablature, customized characters specify
how you should pluck the note, and there is an extraordinarily large number
—conventionally twenty-six—of these. (Whether that really amounts to
twenty-six aurally distinguishable sounds is doubtful, and not entirely
relevant, since qin players value the choreography of hand movements as
well as the sound.) On the other hand, like the neumes of medieval chant,
qin tablature does not show rhythms at all; at most, a little circle may be
inserted between musical phrases. It would hardly be possible to imagine
anything more different from staff notation, with its elaborate specification
of rhythm but almost complete disregard of articulation, timbre, and
vibrato, the dimensions of sound implicated in the twenty-six ways of
plucking the qin.

But of course that doesn’t mean that articulation, timbre, and vibrato don’t
matter in classical performance, or that rhythm is of no concern to qin
players and their listeners. It means each system specifies just what is
necessary for the notation’s intended use. In the Western context that means
performance from notation, often by ensembles, of an extensive and mainly
unmemorized repertory (so playing at sight matters). In the Chinese
context, it means prolonged private study of a small repertory of solo
pieces, memorized and played in an often highly personal manner (so sight-
reading is irrelevant and issues of coordination don’t arise). These are very
different contexts of use, but in either case performers supply the
information that is absent in the notation. And that means it’s wrong to
think of notations as if they captured everything we care about in music. As
neumes illustrate, notations support and supplement, but do not substitute
for, memory and stylistic knowledge. For performers they they are certainly
not a substitute for listening. That is why I said in Chapter 1 that, even
when they have the printed music in front of them, performers are playing
by ear.
And if notation supports and supplements memory and stylistic knowledge
for performers, it can also serve as an environment for what might be called
what-if simulation, in other words for imagining music that does not (yet)
exist. Jeanne Bamberger, a piano prodigy turned psychologist and
educationalist, writes that notations and the terminology that goes with
them give us ‘the power to play with the things named, shifting our
attention at will among them and combining them in novel ways’. For an
illustration, look again at Figure 5. As I said, each neume represents a vocal
gesture. You can substitute one gesture for another, but beyond that the
notation doesn’t help you play with the music. In contrast, look again at
Figure 6. Here the neumes often correspond to several individual noteheads
(look for example at the beginning of the second line). The transcription
fragments each neume into separate atoms of pitch and time that can be
manipulated independently. Each note represents a separate decision point,
a point where you could do something else.

In this way staff notation—which combines noteheads with further symbols

to specify rhythmic and other features—invites play. How would it be if
you changed this note for that one, inverted the melodic profile of these
notes or put them the other way round, extended this note by interpolating
these other notes? What if you exported this rhythmic profile to that series
of pitches, or vice versa? We are moving towards recognized compositional
techniques (the last sentence describes rhythmic and melodic motives). I
could plod on through progressively more complex examples that
increasingly resemble real-world composition. But instead I’ll make a leap:
to Bryn Harrison, a contemporary British composer known for complex
rhythmic notations. Harrison cites Jasper Johns, the godfather of pop art,
who once said ‘Sometimes I see it and then paint it. Other times I paint it
and then see it.’ (It’s the same idea as Joanna Hodge on Van Gogh’s
sunflowers.) And Harrison riffs on this: in his music, he says, ‘I’m writing it
to hear it, as much as I’m hearing it to write it.’ In other words notation
leads him to discover new things to hear. You might compare his scores to
maps that chart hitherto undiscovered territories of sound, revealing things
that nobody knew were there to be heard.

As I said at the beginning of this chapter, music is slippery, no sooner heard

than gone. Instruments and notations are devices through which you can get
a grip on it, retain it in mind, and manipulate it through what-if simulations;
for an experienced musician, imagery derived from instruments and
notations is part of a cognitive network that also includes sound. At one
time—less so today—there was a premium on the ability to ‘hear’ sound in
your head, and so musicians would make exaggerated claims that they
could imagine music just as clearly as hearing it in real life, if not more so.
There was an idea that composers could ‘hear’ sounds in their heads and
then just write them out, as if by dictation. That was one of many 19th-
century myths about classical music I shall talk about in Chapter 3. It
suggests a very passive idea of how you create music, as if all you have to
do is press a ‘Play’ button in your brain. In reality creating music is
something much more active, by which I mean both proactive and
interactive.

One way to put it is that you work with real or imagined sounds and—in
Sudnow’s phrase—let them speak back to you. I can illustrate this through a
piece for solo guitar, Forlorn Hope, on which the British composer David
Gorton collaborated with the guitarist Stefan Östersjö. Östersjö was using
an eleven-string alto instrument, and Gorton had devised a number of
customized tuning systems for it. Gorton and Östersjö worked together over
two days, Östersjö experimenting and improvising, Gorton listening and
sometimes making comments or suggestions. There was one six-minute
episode during which, trying a new tuning, Östersjö almost immediately hit
on an intriguing chordal pattern. He then played with it uninterrupted for
several minutes, ending with a bell-like harmonic plucked above the
fingerboard: Gorton leant forward and asked what that was. Much of the
final piece drew directly from this six-minute episode, developing and
exploring the various things that had happened during it. This, then, is an
example of interacting with the instrument. The guitar did things neither
Gorton nor Östersjö anticipated. It spoke back to them.

And there is the same kind of interaction in the way composers work with
notations. Sometimes they invent private rule-based systems that govern the
notes you can use in some particular context, the order in which they come,
and so forth. David Lang, for example, talks about how at an early stage of
his career he would set up ‘ridiculous rules’ to see what he could do within
them, while song-writing manuals sometimes suggest giving yourself
arbitrary constraints to stimulate your imagination. Some experienced
composers do it too. The Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer Roger
Reynolds spends a lot of time working out complicated mathematical
systems and structures—where numbers translate into notes—before he
starts composing his music in the sense of writing out what the performers
will play.

If notations really captured everything that matters in music, you might be

able to set up notation-based rules to automate musical decision-making.
But that’s not what Reynolds is doing. He isn’t just turning the handle and
churning out the music. Instead, he insists, the point is to create a kind of
musical environment or workspace that will release his moment-to-moment
creativity in the act of composition: he calls it ‘the freeing of local invention
for more intuitional vibrancy’. His apparently over-rationalized procedure
gives concrete form to compositional problems that stimulate him to
improvise solutions, suddenly seeing (hearing) what he wants. And the
result of this process, he says, is an otherwise unachievable spontaneity.
Brian Ferneyhough, the leading ‘New Complexity’ composer, explains his
use of computer software along the same lines.

The music laboratory

How might these various aspects of creative imagination in music work
together in practice? A concrete example is provided by Beethoven, whose
compositional process became central to a whole way of thinking about
classical music that lasted well into the 20th century and even now has not
entirely disappeared. This didn’t happen just because Beethoven was widely
seen as the greatest composer that had ever been. It was also because he
sketched much more than most composers, and—just as important—did not
throw away his sketches. Even better, he used pre-bound sketchbooks,
normally starting each book at the beginning and working through to the
end. In the years after Beethoven died many of the sketchbooks were
divided up and the fragments scattered across the world. But a major post-
war musicological effort tracked down these fragments and reconstructed
the original form of the sketchbooks, and as a result it is possible to follow
in unusual detail how Beethoven composed.
In 1814 he started work on what would have been his Sixth Piano Concerto,
making about seventy pages of sketches for the first movement and starting
on a full score (a score that includes all the instruments of the orchestra)
before abandoning the project. Back in the late 1980s I was involved in the
creation of a performing edition of the score as Beethoven may have
envisaged it, so I will use that as my example. As with the conventional
song structures of pop, there were more or less set patterns into which
classical music fell, and this movement was conceived as the concerto
variant of sonata form. The detail doesn’t matter for now; the point is that
the sections of that form provided the framework for Beethoven’s
sketching. Within each section he worked initially on the thematic materials
(pithy melodic ideas designed to be developed into a kind of musical
argument), and then on the passages connecting them. After that he pulled
together these various materials into a continuous draft, before moving on
to the next section and repeating the process.

This was followed by a phase in which, instead of sticking to the

chronological progression of the movement, Beethoven tried out the themes
in different contexts, figuring out how he would be able to use them in
those parts of the movement he had not yet sketched. After that there was a
phase of trouble-shooting, in which he jumped around to various unclear or
problematic parts of the emerging movement. Only now was he ready to
embark on a series of increasingly lengthy drafts that brought together
everything he had sketched so far. This was the point when he started on the
full score—earlier in the process than usual, and apparently too early, as the
score starts confidently but becomes increasingly sketchy as it continues,
with crossings-out multiplying (and sometimes nothing being written in
their place). Beethoven must have thought he was closer to settling the
music in his mind than he really was, and it’s interesting to see him
miscalculating over this. It could have something to do with why he
abandoned the movement, but more likely the reason was he had intended
to play the solo part, and now realized his increasing deafness made this
unrealistic.

The sketches are generally in one or two staves. Figure 8 shows the earliest
page associated with the concerto; the first line is what turned into the
second main theme, the third a long trilled A that is the piano’s first entry.
Beethoven is writing fast and for his eyes only, so he doesn’t bother with
clefs, key signatures, or sometimes accidentals—which means you can’t
always be completely sure what pitches the noteheads represent. Sometimes
it isn’t even clear which end of the penstroke is meant to be the notehead, so
you have to decide what makes most sense in context. In general, as here,
he focuses on the top line of the texture; most of the time you can deduce
the harmonies he had in mind, though occasionally he would add something
to clarify them. But the most striking thing about the sketches is how
iterative the process is. He sketches the same passages again and again. It is
as if the very act of writing prompted mutations that sometimes enabled
Beethoven to see where he wanted to go—and sometimes not, resulting in a
change of tack.

8. Beethoven’s Mendelssohn 6 sketchbook, p. 114. This sketchbook, which Beethoven used

during 1814, is now located at the Biblioteka Jagiellońska, Kraków.

When I spoke of the ‘act’ of writing I was referring to something more than
marks on paper. As you look at them you become conscious of the
physicality of the process as Beethoven pushes the notes around and—again
in Sudnow’s phrase—they speak back to him. He is thinking in music, but
he is thinking on paper. And the sketches aren’t just a record of his
thinking: in a sense, they are his thinking. It’s like something the American
theoretical physicist Richard Feynman said to historian of science Charles
Wiener, who was interviewing him about his working methods. Wiener
referred to one of Feynman’s working notes as a record of what he had done
in his head, and Feynman picked him up: ‘No, it’s not a record’, he said.
‘It’s working. You have to work on paper and this is the paper. Okay?’ In
the same way Beethoven worked on paper and that is one of the ways he
thought in music. It’s another illustration of Clark’s extended mind.

When you speak of Beethoven’s compositional process everyone thinks of

his sketches, but they are just part of the story—the part that survives. What
doesn’t survive is what Beethoven did at the piano. Another of those 19th-
century myths is that real composers don’t work at the piano (they do
everything in their heads). Luckily nobody told Beethoven. When in 1823
he gave Archduke Rudolph advice on composing, Beethoven recommended
he keep a small table next to his piano so as to move easily from one to the
other, and there are contemporary accounts of how when composing
Beethoven would repeat the same thing over and over again at the piano—
just as he did on paper. When you work through his sketchbooks you
sometimes see gaps where Beethoven’s conception of what he was after
was suddenly transformed—and these most likely mark points where he
moved over to the piano. You also see sketches that look quite well worked
out but oddly truncated, which I take to be things Beethoven had come up
with at the keyboard and jotted down before he forgot them.

If one of Beethoven’s creative techniques was doing things again and again,
another was changing perspective. The most obvious example is the quite
different perspectives of sketchbook and piano, but even within the sketches
you can see him alternating between detailed work and a zoomed-out view
(such as those extended drafts I referred to). Each perspective provides a
partial image of the emerging music, so that the combination of them yields
a more complete conception of it, while the transition between one
perspective and another may spark new ideas. And whereas the sketchbooks
I have been talking about are large-format ‘desk’ ones (the large format
allows you to see as much as possible at once), there are also ‘pocket’
sketchbooks that Beethoven took with him when he went out; he was
known for his walks in the Vienna woods, and there is a contemporary
account of how he frequently ‘stopped, with a sheet of music paper and a
pencil stump in his hands, as if listening, looked up and down and then
scribbled notes on the paper’. That is an example of changing perspective in
the most literal sense—and one that many creative practitioners find helpful
when they have something to work out.

When we put all this together it gives us a picture of what we might call
Beethoven’s compositional ecology. Piano and sketchbook afforded
complementary but interconnected ways of thinking in music, each
prompting new ideas or ways of developing existing ones; at the same time
both confronted these ideas with some kind of empirical reality (sounding
or looking right or wrong). Brian Eno has drawn a contrast between the
empirical nature of studio composition, where you are literally working
with sound, and the abstract nature of score-based composition, where you
are working with symbols only later turned into sound. But that’s not quite
right, and not just because—contrary to the myths—classical composers
worked at the keyboard. Instrument, notation, the playing or writing body,
and sound together made up the multi-modal, networked system through
which they thought in music, and through which the emerging composition
talked back to them. It was at work whether they were at the keyboard, at a
desk, or in the woods. And that explains one of the classic conundrums
about Beethoven. How was he was able to compose some of his most
famous works after he had become stone deaf? Perhaps the answer is
obvious. Even if he could no longer hear physical sound, the network—the
mental structure of which sound was an integral part—remained in place.
He was still composing by ear, even though he heard nothing.

Yet another 19th-century myth was that great composers somehow

conceived their music all at once, in a flash of inspiration, so that they
merely had to write down what was already formed in their heads. Clearly
whoever thought up that never looked at a Beethoven sketchbook. It is not
just that Beethoven wrote down tiny scraps of melody he thought of in the
woods for fear of forgetting them before he got home. It is the way you see
him labouring to make something of initial ideas that could have come to
him in the woods or at the keyboard, or even while doodling on paper,
following his pen to see where it took him. The process is laborious—
convoluted, sometimes full of false turns, though at other times proceeding
swiftly to a conclusion—because Beethoven did not know where it was
going to end up. That, of course, is the point of sketching.

The French philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty once compared writing to

weaving: you work on the wrong side of the fabric, he said, and suddenly
find yourself surrounded by meaning. But it is true of music too, and
Merleau-Ponty’s image embodies two key points I want to make. The first
is that composition is a process through which music emerges in the very
act of composing, of searching for a goal as yet unknown. The second is
that there are two sides to the musical fabric, two fundamental dimensions
of music’s existence. There is music as experienced in the dynamic,
situational, socially produced time of performing and listening—music
heard so easily, so effortlessly, that it seems to be given in nature. That is
what most people mean when they speak of ‘music’. But there is also the
other side of music, where it is laboriously stitched together—a process that
takes place in a quite different (and more extended) time and involves
specialist knowledge and techniques. It is because there are two sides to the
musical fabric that music is the artifice that passes itself off as nature.
Chapter 3
The presence of the past

Express yourself
In this chapter I trace a number of key ideas going back to the 18th century
that still condition music and thinking about it in the West today, though the
values underlying them have often changed. Here I am largely talking about
classical music and a little explanation is in order. The term ‘classical’
(small-C) music refers to the more or less elite Western traditions of notated
music, though there is not a clear distinction between these and more
popular traditions that range from light music and dance music to parlour
songs and hymns. In terms of chronology it is not a very specific term,
whereas ‘Classical’ (big-C) music refers to a particular series of
developments centred on Vienna and the Austro-Hungarian Empire during
the late 18th and early 19th centuries—developments in which the trio of
Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven played a key role. In retrospect this came to
be seen as a golden age, a permanent standard of artistic achievement; the
art and literature of Classical Greece and Rome were seen the same way,
and that is where the term ‘Classical’ comes from. That is the focus of the
main part of the chapter, but in the last part I trace the beginnings of a very
different, you might say post-classical idea of what music is and what it is
for—an idea that came fully to fruition only with the development of digital
technology.

Around 1750, classical music might be divided into three loose categories:
the primarily choral, generally self-contained, and sometimes archaic
musical culture of the church; the instrumental music associated with royal
and aristocratic courts, typically elegant and based on the dances that
played a prominent role in high society; and opera, which took place partly
at the courts but also—particularly in Italy and England—in commercial
opera houses. Music found its most prestigious place in opera, a primarily
theatrical genre which—like the painting of the time—dealt principally with
classical, mythological, or historical subjects. The music set the stage but its
key role was in characterization. Opera of this period combined recitative—
a kind of heightened speech with light musical accompaniment that moved
the plot on—with arias generally sung by just one of the stage characters,
where the action stopped and the dramatic and emotional situation was
explored. Music was central to this, and involved representation in two
different senses. First, the music represented the stage character and his or
her state of mind. Second, it did this according to a kind of lexicon of
emotions, each represented by a more or less conventionalized musical
expression.

Leading musicians of the late 18th century, including Haydn and Mozart,
were often both operatic and instrumental composers, and they brought an
operatic conception to instrumental music—to keyboard music, string
quartets, and orchestral works. Some of Mozart’s keyboard sonatas, written
for the recently invented piano, create a sonic equivalent of operatic stage
sets. Just as there was a musical lexicon of emotions in opera, so there was
a lexicon of so called ‘topics’ in instrumental music: characteristic musical
materials associated with particular real-world contexts such as the church
(represented by archaic counterpoint), the concert hall (represented by
virtuoso figuration), or the hunt (represented by conventional patterns of
horn calls). The result is that what looks in the score like just piano music
could be heard, in Wye Jamison Allanbrook’s words, as ‘a miniature theater
of human gestures and actions’.

I’ll come back to that, but more consequential is the way the operatic
language of character representation was translated into a new style of
instrumental music. Here the best illustration is the string quartet. The
complex interactions between players that Arnold Steinhardt talked about
are also interactions between virtual characters played by the instruments,
and here ‘play’ takes on a sense of role play. An early biography of Haydn
characterizes one of his quartets as consisting of an affable, middle-aged
man (first violin), his friend who is more retiring and tends to agree with
everyone else (second violin), and a solid, well-read citizen (cello). The
viola, in the tradition of viola jokes, is ‘a somewhat loquacious matron’
who really has nothing to say but insists on saying it all the same. This is a
frankly humorous description, and in any case instruments often change
characters every few bars in Haydn’s and Mozart’s quartets, but the basic
idea is on the money. It was something of a cliché to compare the genre of
string quartet to civilized conversation among friends.

The same language of character and emotion was found in the less intimate,
more public, and more formal genre of symphonic music. A common
pattern (the sonata form I referred to in Chapter 2) involved two groups of
thematic materials with contrasted characteristics and in different keys,
worked together in the course of a movement to reach some kind of
agreement or reconciliation. This instrumental drama differs from opera in
being based round abstract musical agents rather than staged individuals,
and that gives it greater fluidity. As in string quartets, instrumental
characters morph into one another or enter into kaleidoscopically changing
relationships, in a way you don’t see on the operatic stage or indeed in real
life. It’s a world in which human qualities and relationships exist in a
condensed and intensified form—in some ways like the role play you find
in virtual worlds such as Second Life, which (as digital anthropologist Tom
Boellstorff says) ‘draw upon many elements of actual-world sociality’ but
reconfigure them in contrafactual ways.

The responses of some contemporary listeners and critics underline this. In

1769 the German critic Gotthold Ephraim Lessing wrote, ‘Now we melt
with sympathy and suddenly we are to rage,’ and asked, ‘Why? How?
Against whom? Against the person for whom our soul just now was all
pity? or someone else?’ Measuring the new instrumental conception against
the norms of opera or everyday life, Lessing was bewildered by the rapid
succession of contradictory, apparently ungrounded feelings. Nevertheless
the urge he expresses to hear the music as representing character persisted,
and by the turn of the 19th century listeners and critics were increasingly
hearing Beethoven’s symphonies as character studies, portraits in sound of
some exceptional individual. This is something that Beethoven himself
encouraged when he named his Third (‘Eroica’) Symphony after Napoleon
Bonaparte. And though he tore up his inscription on realizing that
Bonaparte was just another dictator, he replaced it with a title that elicited
exactly this kind of interpretation: ‘Heroic symphony, composed to
celebrate the memory of a great man’.

We can trace the evolution of this way of hearing Beethoven’s music

through critical responses to his Ninth Symphony. A report of its premiere,
in 1824, picks up on the idea of heroism but applies it to Beethoven
himself: ‘the public received the musical hero with the utmost respect and
sympathy’. Another early review describes the music in terms of a heroic
scenario in which Beethoven is the protagonist: ‘Beethoven’s power of
imagination tears the earth asunder when it tries to check his fiery progress’
(and much more in this vein). The music does not just depict struggle, it is
Beethoven’s struggle. A review from 1828 takes this a stage further: now it
is Beethoven’s struggle with deafness, and the symphony as a whole
represents his path from suffering to joy. The music is not just by but about
Beethoven. And a further review explains the genre-bending introduction of
voices in the final movement as necessary ‘so that he may express himself
adequately. How will he express himself? What shall be his song? What
else but a song of Joy!’

At this point, the story links up with changes in concert culture that had
been taking place throughout this period. As rural populations migrated to
cities and a newly leisured bourgeoisie developed, symphonic music spread
from royal or aristocratic courts to public concerts. And linked to this was a
change in practices of listening. Opera houses were designed for social
listening: the design of boxes reflected this, encouraging people to socialize
as much as watch the stage. In the new symphonic concerts everybody
faced the stage, and a newly serious style of listening developed in which
you aimed to absorb the music into the core of your subjective being.
Figure 9 makes the point. The title tells us that the seven men are at a
concert, though we don’t see the hall. Each seems to be hearing the music
quite differently (though at least one appears to have dozed off); there is no
more contact between them than there is between earbudded travellers in a
subway train. Each is wrapped up in a world of his own, as if Beethoven’s
music is addressing him individually, speaking confidentially to him and to
him alone. It is an experience of vicarious intimacy.
9. Eugène Lami, The Andante from the Symphony in A. This watercolour dates from 1840 and
its present whereabouts are unknown. This title is the artist’s own, visible at the bottom left
and referring to Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony, but the painting is more commonly referred
to as Upon Hearing a Beethoven Symphony.

The trend continued. Six years after Lami’s painting, in 1846, Richard
Wagner—later a hugely influential composer of opera, or in his preferred
term music drama—described the Ninth Symphony as Beethoven’s attempt
to reach out from the solitude of his deafness: ‘When you meet the poor
man, who cries to you so longingly’, he wrote, ‘will you pass him on the
other side if you find you do not understand his speech at once?’
Engagement with Beethoven’s music meant a commitment to Beethoven
himself, or at least to the idealized image of Beethoven purveyed by a flood
of hagiographic biographies and adulatory programme notes. As the
Beethoven cult continued into the 20th century, the French writer Romain
Rolland held up Beethoven as a role model for the modern age, epitomizing
personal sincerity, altruism, and self-denial; he virtually reduced Beethoven
to a single motto, ‘Joy through suffering’—actually a wry comment in one
of Beethoven’s letters about the tribulations of travelling in Croatia, but
transformed by Rolland into a universal ethical principle. And this idea was
extended beyond Beethoven to other composers (including Wagner).
Classical music became a fan culture.

There is nothing to say music has to be heard this way. As the musicologist
and psychologist Robert Gjerdingen puts it, in the 18th century the idea that
music was about its composer’s feelings would have seemed as outlandish
as the idea that a chef’s tart sauce was about his tartness (actually not so far
from the way today’s MasterChef contestants insist their signature dishes
express their personality). And by the beginning of the 20th century, this
kind of composer-based fan culture had largely died down in classical
music. There were superstar classical performers, especially after the
development of recordings: Caruso is an outstanding example. But
increasingly it was popular music, now developing through recording into a
huge international industry, that lay at the centre of fan culture. Think of the
crooners from the decades after 1930, singers such as Bing Crosby and
Frank Sinatra. They were so called because they developed a way of
singing made possible by the invention of the microphone. Whereas
Western classical vocalization had developed to fill increasingly large
venues, the crooners were able to adopt a softer, more lifelike style, singing
close to the microphone: it was as if they were singing directly in your ear,
again addressing you personally and confidentially.

Fan culture became even more intense in the post-war era of Elvis and the
Beatles. But what I want to emphasize is how the originally classical idea of
music as self-expression became associated with a host of solo artists such
as (choosing names more or less at random) Bob Dylan, Neil Young, or
David Bowie. As performers and songwriters, they were working (as Dylan
and Young still are) within a culture in which the classical distinction of
composer and performer was not salient: they were seen as authors, the
primary agents of their music. As with Beethoven, engagement with their
music entailed a personal commitment to them, or at least to the idealized
image of them constructed through magazine articles, liner notes, and
television programmes. And again as with Beethoven, the core of fandom
lay in the sense of vicarious intimacy between artist and listener.
A further link between the classical tradition and 20th-century popular
music follows from this. If music was the composer’s self-expression, then
composers had to be true to themselves. Sincerity was the foundation of
Rolland’s Beethoven cult. The worst crime composers could commit was to
sell out—to betray their personal style and aesthetic values in order to court
popularity, worldly success, money. Even Beethoven was not beyond
suspicion. At the time of the Congress of Vienna (1814–15), when the
European powers came together to negotiate a new world order after the
Napoleonic wars, Beethoven wrote what were later condemned as a series
of pot-boilers; the most successful was Wellingtons Sieg (Wellington’s
Victory), a cine-realistic depiction of the Battle of Vitoria complete with
spatial effects and imitation gunfire. The judgement of Beethoven’s
celebrated biographer Maynard Solomon is typical: ‘the unaccustomed
popular acclaim and financial reward reaped by Wellington’s Victory
tempted him to mine this vein for all it was worth’, and the works of this
time are ‘the nadir of Beethoven’s artistic career’.

In the last decades of the 20th century such thinking still remained
powerful. If Beethoven was not beyond suspicion, neither was Dylan. When
in 1966 Dylan played at the Free Trade Hall, Manchester, an audience
member shouted out ‘Judas!’ Ostensibly it was because Dylan had
abandoned his acoustic guitar for an electric one; symbolically the heckler
was accusing him of betraying the tradition of protest music. (According to
another fan, ‘it was like, as if, everything that we held dear had been
betrayed…We made him and he betrayed the cause’.) Either way, Dylan
had sold out. It is the same issue of personal authenticity we saw in the
Prudential commercial with which I began this book, which turned on how
the protagonist could be true to himself—could be the musician he aspired
to be—but at the same time provide for his old age. And it applied to bands
as much as to individuals. It is part of the definition of rock bands that they
create their own music. Those that do not—or worse, that are artificially put
together by entrepreneurs—are seen as inauthentic; hence the critical
opprobrium heaped on the Monkees. Again, proper rock bands (think Rush)
can cut it on stage. They don’t depend on technological wizardry to cover
up their lack of natural musicianship; hence the criticism of the American
singer Ashlee Simpson in 2004, when a technical glitch revealed that she
was lip-synching to a recorded track during a supposedly live performance.
The idea of authenticity was not just used as a weapon against the
manufactured bands, lip-synching, and other forms of artifice in popular
culture. It could also be used as a stick with which to beat classical music
(ironically, considering that it had come from there in the first place). The
point is made by an episode of the children’s television series The Ghost of
Faffner Hall, a spin-off from Jim Henson’s Muppets that aired in 1989. It
features Piganini, a virtuoso musician of the European tradition, whom the
janitor finds hiding in a broom cupboard (Figure 10). Despite his prodigious
technique, the porcine celebrity has a fatal flaw: he can only play scales,
and even then, only if he has the music in front of him. But as he tells the
janitor, his audiences demand that he plays the little black notes in all sorts
of different sequences, ‘all piggley-higgley’, and this has brought on a crisis
of confidence. Luckily the janitor turns out to be the famous blues, folk, and
country musician Ry Cooder. He pulls out his guitar and gives Piganini a
quick lesson in what it means to improvise, to play from the heart, to play
real music—which, it turns out, sounds remarkably like the blues. Of all the
genres of popular music, this is the one most closely associated with the
heartfelt self-expression of oppressed peoples in the American Deep South.
A complex national and racial dynamic is at work in this brief encounter
between American popular culture and the European classical tradition.
10. Still from The Ghost of Faffner Hall (1989), showing Piganini and Ry Cooder.

Here then the contrast between authenticity and inauthenticity is figured as

the contrast between nature and artifice. It is a way of thinking built on an
idea of music as self-expression that came into place in the early 19th
century and remains part of today’s musical environment. The past lives on
in the present, even when the values informing it change.

Monuments in sound
If the story I told in the previous section started with the operatic
representation of character, then ideas of music as representation also
developed in a quite different way during the 19th century. This is where I
come back to the idea of musical works such as Beethoven’s Seventh
Symphony existing ‘out there’ as ideal, timeless entities represented or
reproduced in performance. How might people have come to think that
way?

Actually there is a long tradition of such thinking. It goes back at least as

far as the ancient Greek philosopher Plato, and was current in the early
medieval period, when people began to think of neumes—introduced, as I
said, as a practical aide-mémoire—as the earthly reflection of a higher order
of being. During the Italian Renaissance the idea developed of artistic
genius, the term implying access to that higher order of being: the artist was
a mediator, a channel through whom supramundane realities and revelations
were translated into human culture. By the 18th century, inspired artists
were widely seen as working at a level that transcended conceptual
understanding, even their own. And all these ideas flowed into the 19th
century, when the idea of genius became firmly associated with the
exceptional individual who could create ex nihilo, out of nothing—whose
work was wholly original. The artist became a kind of god.

This way of thinking was full of binaries. The distinction between genius
and mere talent mapped onto that between art and entertainment. It also
mapped onto the distinction between composers, seen as the epitome of
creativity, and performers, who were merely recreative artists. And more
than that, it mapped onto gender. Nowadays Clara Schumann is known as
the wife of the composer Robert Schumann, but during their lifetimes it was
Robert who was known as the husband of the most celebrated pianist of her
time (Figure 11). Clara composed, too; as she wrote in her diary, ‘I once
believed that I had creative talent.’ But she continued, ‘I have given up this
idea; a woman must not wish to compose—there never was one able to do
it.’ All this amounts to what—borrowing from the title of Beethoven’s
Third Symphony—can be called the heroic or ‘Great Man’ conception,
according to which Great Men are the true agents of history.
11. Adolph von Menzel, Joseph Joachim and Clara Schumann. Pastel drawing from 1854, now
lost. Clara Schumann (1819–96) is shown accompanying the Hungarian violinist Joseph
Joachim (1831–1907), perhaps the most highly regarded violinist of his day.

In music the old idea of the artist as mediator of a higher state of being
survived into the 20th century, as represented in Figure 12, which shows the
composer Hans Pfitzner being inspired by celestial musicians. As I
mentioned, the idea developed that great music—the music of the geniuses
—was conceived in a flash of inspiration in which the whole composition
was given to the artist at once: all that remained was to write it out. Mozart
had said so in a frequently quoted letter:
12. Karl Bauer, painting of Hans Pfitzner (1869–1949), from the cover of the Munich-based
magazine Jugend (1904). The figures in the background are a reference to Pfitzner’s opera
about the 16th-century Italian composer Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina, whose Missa Papae
Marcelli was supposedly inspired by angels.

The whole, though it be long, stands almost complete and finished in my head, so that I can
survey it in my mind like a fine picture or a comely form at a glance…The committing to
paper is done quickly enough, for everything is…already finished; and it rarely differs on
paper from what it was in my imagination.
And Beethoven had confirmed it: the composition ‘rises, grows upward,
and I hear and see the picture as a whole take shape and stand forth before
me in my mind as though cast in a single piece, so that all that is left is the
work of writing it down’.

Of course, as I showed in Chapter 2, this account of Beethoven’s

compositional process is completely at odds with the evidence of
Beethoven’s sketches. The explanation is simple. The quote ascribed to
Beethoven comes from the recollections of the pianist and composer Louis
Schlösser: he said Beethoven had personally told him this in 1823—but it
was not until 57 years later that he revealed it, and it is all too transparently
modelled on the quote ascribed to Mozart. That in turn was concocted in
1815 by Johann Friedrich Rochlitz, who published it in the musical journal
he edited, under the title ‘A Letter by Mozart to the Baron von P’. Neither
Mozart or Beethoven had ever said such things. They represent what 19th-
century musicians and critics thought they ought to have said. They were
part of the mythology around which the retrospective image of big-C
Classical music was constructed. It is entertaining—or sad, depending on
your point of view—to see later composers, such as Max Reger, making out
that they composed in precisely that way, when the evidence of their
sketches is that they did nothing of the sort.

A new conception of the musical work emerged in tandem with this

idealization of the composer, and here there is some more historical
background to put in place. Until around the turn of the 19th century it was
taken for granted that music was like throwaway fashion: it had a short
shelf life. There were a few works that defied the passage of time, such as
Gregorio Allegri’s Miserere and Handel’s Messiah, but they were the
exception. Even Bach’s St Matthew Passion, first performed in 1727, had
hardly been heard since the 1740s, and not at all outside the Leipzig church
for which it was written. So when in 1829 the composer Felix Mendelssohn
organized a performance of it at the Berlin Sing-Akademie, this expressed a
quite new idea: great music is not just for its own time but for all time. And
because musical works were seen as timeless, the idea developed of a
gradually accumulating canon of permanent masterworks (that word again)
—an idea better expressed by Figure 13 than by anything I can put into
words.
13. Thomas Cole, The Architect’s Dream (1840). An American (but English-born) painter, Cole
executed this oil painting for the New Haven architect Ithiel Town. It is an assemblage of what
Cole—who had himself dabbled in architecture—saw as the greatest historical styles:
Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Gothic. Each building looks as if newly completed.

There are two aspects of Cole’s fantasy that are particularly relevant to
music. First, it represents an act of gatekeeping, implicitly asserting that
these are the world’s greatest, most timeless architectural styles. In the same
way, the musical canon set the standards that the production of later times
would have to meet if it too was to enter the canon (and critics and
historians would act as gatekeepers). Second, as the embodiment of
permanent values, musical works became monumentalized as fixed and
unchanging entities, the sonic equivalent of the stone-built monuments to
human achievement that sprouted across Europe’s capital cities in the 19th
century. And here we can make a link between aesthetic or philosophical
thinking about music and the practice of its performance.

This is where I come back to topics, the system of musical representation

through which Mozart’s piano music became ‘a miniature theater of human
gestures and actions’. How would this music have been performed in
Mozart’s time? According to Allanbrook, performers would have sharply
distinguished the various topics—with their evocation of different places,
styles, or emotions—from one another: as she put it, they would have
brought out the ‘flashy collage of gestures’. As usual with performance
there is little direct evidence for this, but there is one suggestive detail: the
use of slurs, the curved lines in scores that link groups of notes together.

In their piano music 18th-century composers such as Mozart used many

short slurs, implying a series of separate gestures. But in the 19th century,
editors cleaned up and regularized their notations, putting these canonic
works into what they saw as an authoritative, permanent form. This
included replacing those many short slurs with a few long ones, often
following the phrase structure. And among all of Mozart’s sonatas the most
famous example of this is the opening of the Sonata in F major, K 332 (the
piece Allanbrook described as a ‘miniature theater’). Nineteenth-century
editions show a single, four-bar slur. This fits with the legato style of what
in Chapter 1 I called the 20th-century performance mainstream: recording
this movement on the modern instrument, pianists from Robert Casadesus
(1940) to Alicia de Larrocha (1989) project these bars as a single
continuous phrase, creating a sustained, singing sound throughout it.
Everything is smoothed out. Rather than being strongly expressive, personal
interpretations, these performances are serene, restrained, you might say
classical.

But are they Classical? The fortepianists I also mentioned in Chapter 1,

playing the much lighter piano of Mozart’s time, have developed a quite
different way of playing this sonata. They bring out Mozart’s short,
repeated slurs in the first four bars, fragmenting the mainstream performers’
single sustained phrase into a series of separate gestures (one of these
performers, Malcolm Bilson, calls them sighs). The Dutch fortepianist Bart
van Oort’s recording, from 2005, characterizes each of the topics in this
movement quite differently—the repeated shifts from one character or
register to another create Allanbrook’s flashy collage of gestures—and
more than that, his tempo is constantly changing. Instead of there being a
steady beat that continues regardless of what is happening, it is as if every
gesture shapes its own tempo. The performance brims with detail. I don’t
say this is how the music was played in Mozart’s day, let alone by Mozart
himself: that’s far too big a claim to base on a few slurs. But if, having got
used to the fortepianists’ conception, you listen again to a mainstream
recording of K 332, it sounds like Cole’s painting looks: it is a
monumentalized music, the sonic equivalent of architecture.
Nineteenth-century ideas of music emanating from some higher plane
accessible only to the geniuses have not entirely dissipated. The idea of
musical works as ideal, timeless entities received by their composers in a
flash of inspiration is echoed by the contemporary composer Antony Pitts,
when he writes of his choral piece ‘Love bade me welcome’ that ‘from the
moment I started working on it, it was clear in my mind that this piece
existed—complete, perfect, and (to me at least) unutterably beautiful and
heart-rending’. But it is in performance that the presence of the past has
been most strongly felt. In Chapter 1 I mentioned the idea—highly
influential throughout much of the 20th century, and by no means defunct in
the 21st—that performers should not interpose between the composer’s
work and the audience, but should rather efface themselves: it was said that
when the late 19th-century pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow played
Beethoven you were not aware of Bülow, only of Beethoven, and this was
intended as high praise. (It was also said that the first of the great piano
virtuosi, Franz Liszt, played best when sight-reading, because after that he
could never restrain himself from improving on what was in the score.)

Again like so many of the classical music myths inherited from the past,
this kind of talk really did not—and does not—reflect reality. I spoke of
classical music fans, and virtuosi like Liszt were feted in much the same
way as pop stars: young women swooned before him just as their
successors screamed at the Beatles. Besides, the vast majority of
compositions were not intended as candidates for the canon. Many were
designed as showcases for virtuosity, usually the composer’s own. There
was a time in the 1830s when piano technique was rapidly advancing and
little else was to be heard, culminating in 1837 with a staged ‘duel’ between
Liszt and his rival Sigismond Thalberg (a practice echoed in the jazz duels
for which saxophonists Dexter Gordon and Wardell Gray, among others,
were famous). The traditional histories of music I mentioned in Chapter 1,
in which performers—and hence women—hardly appear, are sometimes
selective almost to the point of qualifying as fake news. That is the
gatekeeping I spoke of.

And it’s in this light that you have to read such recent statements as ‘the
experience of listening to a live performance solicits attention more for the
performers and the event and far less for the work than is perhaps generally
admitted’, or ‘there is much less work being done by the score and much
more by the performer than is implied by the way we habitually talk about
scores’. What is striking is that academic writers about music—here
Carolyn Abbate and Daniel Leech-Wilkinson—still need to say such
apparently obvious things. And on top of this we have the unwelcome
aspect of HIP’s otherwise positive legacy: the assumption that in music,
unlike in other performing arts, performance must necessarily aim at
historical authenticity. As Leech-Wilkinson says, this taken-for-granted
principle is enforced by further gatekeepers—conservatory examiners,
competition judges, concert promoters, critics—and the effect is to stifle
creativity and undermine students’ readiness to make their own decisions.

And these unhelpful ways of thinking lie behind what is widely seen as the
most pressing problem in classical music culture: the decline of its concert
audiences. Twenty-five years ago the American musicologist Lawrence
Kramer was already sounding the alarm. ‘This music is in trouble’, he said,
‘its audience is shrinking, graying, and overly pale-faced.’ You can see why.
If performers were to efface themselves and let the music speak for itself,
that militated against basic ideas of engaging the audience, projecting the
music to them, entertaining them. The result was a norm of drab
presentation, stiff gestural presence on stage, and colourless, over-formal
clothing; for the influential classical critic Alex Ross, ‘the overarching
problem of classical music is the tuxedo’. On top of that was the
unwelcoming, and for novice listeners alienating, etiquette of classical
concerts: for example it was wrong to clap after individual movements of
multi-movement works, however enthusiastic you were—a prohibition
taken to be timeless but actually dating back to around 1900, and enforced
by humiliating glares from other audience members. Concerts conveyed
middle-class exclusivity, and the diminished social and multimodal
dimensions of live musical experience meant it offered little more than you
could get from a recording. Many classical music lovers concluded it made
more sense to stay at home.

As in Chapter 1 I have been putting all this in the past tense because things
have changed since Kramer wrote. HIP may have left an unhelpful legacy
of historicism but it certainly diversified what you could hear on stage.
Organizers of classical concerts have opened up their programmes: in 2019
the Proms, the UK’s flagship concert series, included an evening of Duke
Ellington’s sacred music, a Nina Simone tribute concert, and an orchestral
work by Radiohead’s lead guitarist Jonny Greenwood. And there is more
attention to stage presence. A few performers, such as the Chicago-based
new music ensemble eighth blackbird, choreograph their performances,
using the whole stage as rock and pop musicians do; it is increasingly
common for classical recitalists to address audiences with the same kind of
relaxed, personal introduction to the next piece you expect from jazz or
rock musicians. Strict dress codes have been relaxed, and in general the
atmosphere of classical concerts is less forbidding than it was.

Yet it’s a far cry from the social experiences of music in the New York of
the early 1960s where Kramer learned to love classical music. ‘Some of my
most vivid memories of the time’, he writes, ‘involve summer nights in a
stadium filled with people from all walks of life, from all over the city. The
acoustics were terrible; the pleasure was overflowing; the ovations were
long and noisy.’ Of course the present is never as good as the past seen in
retrospect. All the same, the social dimension of classical concert-going
remains impoverished by comparison with other musical genres and
traditions, and inherited ways of thinking about music contribute to this. It’s
not just the tuxedos.

Beyond authorship
If you stopped people at random in the streets of Vienna in 1800 and asked
them to name the outstanding musicians of the previous quarter-century
would they have said Haydn, Mozart, or Beethoven? A century later, did
they know they were living through the highpoint of Viennese modernism
(not just Gustav Mahler and Arnold Schoenberg but a galaxy of celebrated
writers and painters)? Probably not. All history—not just fake news—is
built on processes of selection that filter out the vast majority of what
happened and retain just enough to construct an intelligible narrative that is
then taken to stand for the whole. And as we approach our own time it
becomes increasingly hard to tell a story: there are too many facts and you
don’t know which are the important ones. But I think there is more than that
to the ubiquitous sense that today’s musical culture has become drastically
fragmented, that now there are no big, coherent stories to be told. Actually
that is a big story in itself. But there is also another: a move away from
basic aesthetic tenets that until recently conditioned the idea of music in the
West, and towards a quite different conception of what I shall call music as
lifestyle. I am beginning that story here, but it is closely tied up with digital
technology and I will complete it in the next chapter.

At one level, the story of musical modernism—meaning the classical

tradition as it took on principles of modernist aesthetics shared across the
arts in the 20th century—is one of constant and dramatic change. In terms
of composition there was the development of atonality (music without the
traditional organization round a ‘home’ key), of serialism (music built on
strict sequences of pitches), of experimentalism (getting away from
tradition and bringing music back to first principles), of minimalism (based
on repetitive, sometimes mesmerizing patterns and creating crossovers with
the groove-based genres of popular music), and of any number of other
isms. Then there are the many composers who continued working in
established styles—what you might call classical MOR (middle of the road)
—and rarely made it into the history books that focused on stylistic
innovation. The history books also ignored the vast majority of what
actually went on in the 20th-century culture of classical music, which was
performing and listening to earlier music. In performance, as we’ve seen,
there was significant change, while technology brought about drastic
changes in listening practices too.

But despite all this innovation and diversity, the classical-modernist

tradition generally remained committed to more or less the same underlying
aesthetic principles, the same basic conception of what music was and who
it was for. Even if classical fan culture had subsided from its post-
Beethoven peak, the culture as a whole remained strongly oriented towards
composers as authors: they were the focus of aesthetic interest. Innovation
was still a condition of admission into the canon, and in post-war avant-
garde circles (including the improvisation ensembles I mentioned in
Chapter 1) it became an obsession. And values of authenticity remained
strong. For many composers, being true to your artistic principles meant
writing music that was accessible only to a relatively small, if enthusiastic,
public; for some, that was the proof of their authenticity. Challenged over
the inaccessibility of his music after his Panic—composed for the last night
of the 1995 BBC Proms—attracted more complaints than anything else in
British television history, the veteran British composer Harrison Birtwistle
replied testily, ‘I don’t think that creativity is negotiable. It’s for those who
appreciate it. I can’t be responsible for the audience. I’m not running a
restaurant.’

It would be easy to pin the blame for the loss of public interest that came
with musical modernism (so different from what happened in the visual
arts) on composers who set too much store on their own authenticity—on
gaining entry into the canon—and too little on what listeners wanted. After
all, the canonical composers of the 19th century took themselves very
seriously and yet managed to incorporate whistleable tunes and foot-tapping
rhythms into their music. But this narrative of blame isn’t entirely
convincing. For one thing, it was late in the day for Birtwistle to be saying
what he did. In the final decades of the 20th century the old values of
compositional authenticity began to crumble, giving way to a new
eclecticism and pragmatism. Composers were increasingly ready to interact
with other music—old music, popular music, world music, music for
amateurs—and to work across the long-standing divisions between art and
entertainment. In the years after 2000 new music came out of concert halls
and was staged in pubs, clubs, or underground car parks. But these
developments did little to change the pattern of small, committed audiences.

Then again, the declining public interest that came with 20th-century
modernism is just part of the broader decline Kramer spoke of. And the
principal factors behind that came not from within music but from changing
technology, the rise of mass culture, increased international travel, and the
sustained migration that resulted in the establishment of large diasporic
communities. Also key was the development of youth culture after 1950,
within which music—particularly rock ’n’ roll and its innumerable
successor genres—played a key role. Music was both a badge of identity
and a means of exclusion: in those days most parents hated rock ’n’ roll,
and that was part of the point. The same continues to happen through the
constant proliferation and morphing of popular music genres, so
establishing rapidly changing subcultures. For diasporic communities, too,
music serves as a badge of identity: bhangra, for example, has its origins in
the North Indian state of Punjab, but developed rapidly into a hybrid
British–Punjabi genre. Throughout the Western world these factors, with
issues of identity at their heart, have resulted in an explosion of parallel
musical worlds.

As compared to the 19th century—when ‘music’ as defined by the arbiters

of culture meant little more than Bach to Brahms—it was inevitable that
classical audiences would be squeezed. And as the post-1945 generation of
rock and pop musicians aged, former rebels joined successful classical
musicians as establishment figures. Dylan’s foundational role in post-war
popular music, for example, can be largely understood on the classical
model. As with Beethoven, there is the personal commitment to and
identification with the artist: the heckler at the Manchester concert was
saying Dylan had betrayed that commitment. There is the same idea of
inscription in the canon: the New York Times described the release of a
thirty-six-CD set containing Dylan’s complete live recordings from 1966
(including the Manchester concert) as ‘a monumental addition to the
corpus’. And the singer was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
(Cleveland, Ohio) in 1988, while the award of the 2016 Nobel Prize for
Literature extended his canonical status beyond music, prompting debate
about the nature of canonicity.

In many ways the dynamic of popular music is different today, not least in
the changed balance between the predominantly male pioneers of rock and
the increased representation of women among top-ranking artists: think of
Beyoncé, Rihanna, or Ariana Grande. Even when it seems things have not
changed since the generation of pioneers, they often take on new meanings.
Consider Beyoncé. She is not currently eligible for induction into the Rock
and Roll Hall of Fame (you are not considered until twenty-five years after
your first record release), but she is already being monumentalized: as early
as 2014 she had her own dedicated exhibit there, and the curator explained,
‘We felt that [Beyoncé] really needed to take her rightful place alongside
Aretha Franklin and the Supremes and Janis Joplin.’ And the same applies
to authenticity. Beyoncé had her own Ashlee Simpson moment in 2013: she
was accused of cheating because she had lip-synched ‘The Star-Spangled
Banner’ at Barack Obama’s second inauguration in 2013 (she explained she
had not had time to set up properly). Now, however, controversies around
authenticity seem to revolve less around music than around race. In 2008
there was controversy over the apparent whitening of Beyoncé’s skin in
press advertisements for cosmetics company L’Oréal. And more recently
Grande—who is of American Italian descent—has been accused of
darkening her skin and appropriating African American Vernacular English
both on and off stage. At stake in these controversies are issues of cultural
ownership, always a sensitive issue in the tangle of hybrid traditions that
make up popular music.

But gender is no less fundamental to the new dynamic. I said that

foundational figures of rock can be accommodated within a Beethovenian
model of greatness, and the masculinism of 20th-century rock stars finds its
contemporary equivalent in the sometimes overt misogyny of hip hop. I
also linked Beethoven to the idea that history is created by Great Men, and
Figure 14 vividly conveys the fetishization of masculinity that is inherent in
that world view. This aggressive gendering of creativity renders it highly
exclusionary, as reflected in Clara Schumann’s belief that women should
not even wish to compose. Equally it genders the sense of identification
with the composer that was central to the classical star culture. But while
ideas of identification and intimate access to the star remain deeply
embedded in popular music today, they have now taken on a very different
quality that owes much to celebrity culture. The sociologist Jo Littler
describes celebrity as a media construct that purports to provide ‘privileged
access to the alleged “real” person “behind” a distanced, glossy façade of
superstardom’. As Littler’s language and punctuation convey, identity itself
becomes a media construct, something created through the manipulation of
appearances and associations—as illustrated by Beyoncé’s and Grande’s
manipulation of skin colour. And this focus on mobile identity and self-
fashioning is one of the things that flows into the culture of music as
lifestyle.
14. Kaspar Clemens Zumbusch, Beethoven monument in the Beethovenplatz, Vienna (1880).
Set in a leafy square, this bronze figure sits on a lofty pedestal surrounded by classical
statuary, towering above onlookers.

In contrast to the overt gendering of the Beethovenian model of creative

exceptionality, the celebrity model is readily available to women, as also to
people of colour. But the forms of identification and intimacy that it affords
are of a frequently objectifying, sometimes prurient, and ultimately limiting
kind (Figure 15). It perpetuates long-established tendencies to see women
as industry puppets rather than as authorial agents in their own right. This is
not to say that women cannot break out of these limits, but to do so they
have to work consistently against the grain. Beyoncé in particular is
exceptional for the tight authorial control she exercises, as illustrated by her
Lemonade project (2016)—hailed by Billboard as ‘a revolutionary work of
black feminism’—of which she said her aim was ‘to create a body of work
that would give a voice to our pain, our struggles, our darkness and our
history’. ‘Our’ refers to the lived experiences of Black American women,
and Beyoncé referred again to race during her set at the 2018 Coachella
Valley Music and Arts Festival: ‘Coachella, thank you for allowing me to
be the first Black woman to headline’. The report on Beyoncé’s Coachella
set in Harper’s Bazaar reinforced celebrity stereotypes when it told its
readers that ‘every facet of Beyoncé’s personality was explored, as her
costumes ranged from casual sportswear, to flawless, regal robes’. The
issues of identity Beyoncé explores, however, go a bit deeper than that.

15. Article from the online news website Huffington Post, 25 July 2019.
In this way the old idea of intimate access to the star remains, but it is
informed by a changed value system. This is what I meant when I spoke of
the new dynamic of popular music, and it has as much to do with society
and culture in general as with music. The historical role of classical music
as the taken-for-granted high-cultural expression of Western civilization
was built on a network of interlinked ideas that included masculinity,
whiteness, greatness, national destiny, the colonial order, and a future
understood as firmly grounded on the status quo. (These values, too, can be
read into Zumbusch’s Beethoven monument.) All of that is far removed
from the world of fragmentation, cultural pluralism, and an uncertain future
within which music operates today—a world in which all musics, even
Beyoncé’s, Rihanna’s, and Grande’s, occupy niches (some niches are bigger
than others). Apologists for classical music tend to emphasize those rare
occasions when classical artists acquire a mass audience and celebrity
status, for example the success of the Three Tenors following their
appearance at the FIFA World Cup in 1990. But seeking to legitimize
classical music that way only perpetuates unrealizable expectations that the
clock can be turned back. It makes more sense to accept classical music for
what it is today, a niche in a musical world full of niches, and to celebrate
both its impressively high standards in what it does and the enthusiasm it
instils in its devotees. It may be a niche culture, but for all its problems it is
a successful niche culture.

So far I have talked about just one aspect of the idea of music as lifestyle.
But it has specifically musical origins too. The 19th-century musical
tradition most directly linked to it is arguably opera. While opera continued
within the Western classical tradition after 1900, many opera composers
began to work in film music—particularly Jewish composers from German-
speaking Europe who emigrated to the USA in the 1930s. That was just as
the talkies—films that incorporated soundtracks—were beginning and
Hollywood stood poised for world domination in the 20th century’s most
definitive art form. (Bollywood may come a close second, but then look at
its name.) It is not just the pioneering role of people like Erich Wolfgang
Korngold, who had been a successful opera composer in Vienna before
emigrating in 1934. It is that Hollywood composers based their musical
language on opera, in particular the Wagnerian music drama, in which
music works not alone but as integrated with other media to create
narrative.

In film, as well as in later multimedia genres such as television and

videogames, authorship is inherently divided. That is, film and media
composers work with screenwriters, film directors, and videogame
developers, in some cases with creative ideas flowing freely between them.
In such collaborative contexts traditional ideas of the composer’s personal
style, self-expression, or authenticity—of the composer as aesthetic focus—
become increasingly peripheral. Even in the case of figures like Maurice
Jarre, John Williams, or Hans Zimmer, you don’t hear film music as the
composer speaking to you: it is a dimension of a multimodal narrative. And
it’s not just film and media music, or the anonymous library music widely
used in radio or television production, to which this applies. Recent
developments in computer-generated music involving neural networks and
artificial intelligence are rendering questions of authorship not just
irrelevant but unanswerable. Given the extent to which the aesthetic
categories of the classical tradition revolve around authorship and values
based on authorship, I see this as the first of three linked and far-reaching
thrusts away from classical assumptions about what music is and towards
music as lifestyle.

The second of these thrusts is based on a related technology: sound

recording, developed in the late 19th century but commercialized in the
20th. As with film, the 1920s saw an explosion that turned records into a
mass mode of musical consumption; from then on, in simple statistical
terms, recorded music was music for most people. A few conservative
critics insisted that recordings were just an ersatz counterfeit of the real
thing—live performance—and what is odd is that the music industry
seemed to think the same way. Both their production techniques and their
advertising focused on hi-fi (high-fidelity) reproduction, on bringing the
concert experience as faithfully as possible into people’s living rooms.
Figure 16 makes the point, while a famous advertising strapline promised
you ‘the best seat in the concert hall’. All this built on long established
thinking: just as performers reproduced the composer’s work, so records
reproduced performances. In fact, in the early days of recordings, listeners
sometimes seemed to think of them as reproducing works and so bypassing
performers. In either case fidelity was the watchword. The technology was
seen in the traditional terms of authorship.

16. Advertisement for the Aeolian Vocalion gramophone, c.1914; compare the shadowy
figures with the performing angels in Figure 12.
In the recording studios, however, something different was happening. Two
technological innovations were critical: the development by 1950 of
recording onto magnetic tape, which meant that recordings could be
chopped up (literally, using razor blades) and spliced together in any
sequence; and the take-up in the 1960s of multitrack recording, where up to
thirty-two separate tracks could be recorded on a single tape, making it
possible to build a recording track by track rather than recording everything
at once. (You listened to one track—e.g. a drum track—while laying down
the next, and so on.) This made it possible not simply to reproduce the
sound of live music, but to add something extra to it, to go beyond it. A
simple example is the tightness and complexity of the studio recording of
Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, masterminded by Freddie Mercury (the
other musicians laid down their tracks but had no idea what he had in
mind); the band did play ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ in concert—they were after
all a rock band—but they had to simplify it and could never achieve the
same precision.

There are more complex examples too. In opera there are the recordings of
Wagner’s Ring cycle made around 1960 by British producer John Culshaw.
He used stereo to convey the positioning of the characters on stage, but he
also had a bigger idea: rather than reproducing what you might hear in an
opera house, he aimed to recreate by other means the emotions you might
experience there. Another example is Glenn Gould, the first leading pianist
to abandon the stage for the recording studio, who used different
microphone set-ups and placement in the stereo field to express the music’s
structure, giving rise to a new kind of interpretation that combined
performance and recording. Both Culshaw and Gould were using
technology to create new, specifically gramophonic (in America
phonographic) experiences. And both had prophetic ideas about how
technology would in the future enable consumers to customize recorded
music to their own preferences or mood—ideas that prefigured music as
lifestyle but were realized only with the development of digital technology.

But the strongest connection between music and lifestyle was forged by
radical changes in how, and where, people consumed music (and this is the
third of my thrusts). In the 19th century, operas and symphonies were heard
in the public spaces of opera houses and concert halls. In the 20th century
both radio and gramophone brought music into homes. People listened to
them socially, but later in the century high-quality consumer headphones
also turned music into a solitary, immersive experience. At the same time
transistor radios and later ghetto blasters brought musical consumption into
the open air, while the invention in 1979 of the Sony Walkman—which
played cassette tapes and came with earbuds—encouraged listening while
walking, jogging, or cycling, in effect adding a soundtrack to people’s
everyday lives. And new ways of listening stimulated the development of
new genres. Eno gave ambient music its name with his 1978 album Ambient
1: Music for Airports, while the hip hop genre G-funk was created by Dr
Dre (Andre Young) specifically for in-car listening: ‘when I do a mix’, he
said, ‘the first thing I do is go down and see how it sounds in the car’.

In all these ways the separation between music and everyday life,
maximized by the ritual of the concert hall, dissolved as music increasingly
became a dimension of people’s everyday personal environment. But these
developments were just preludes to the transformations that resulted from
digital technology, and so the story continues in Chapter 4.
Chapter 4
Music 2.0

Music, technology, lifestyle

The idea of music being natural has a long history, but we can start with the
18th-century political thinker, writer, and part-time composer Jean-Jacques
Rousseau. By ‘natural’ he meant melodic, vocal in nature, and expressive,
like contemporary Italian music—as opposed to what he saw as the
excessive artifice and over-complication of French music. Rousseau’s belief
that music should be simple and heart-felt fed into emerging ideas of
musical authenticity, as echoed over two centuries later by the broom-
cupboard encounter between Piganini and Ry Cooder. The idea of the
natural also lay behind the heckle at Bob Dylan’s 1966 concert: Dylan had
sold out by abandoning his acoustic—natural—guitar for the electric
instrument.

In the case of instruments the role of technology is overt. The piano enables
its player to do things impossible for the voice, from rapid and unsingable
broken-chord figuration to playing multiple lines and so creating a complete
ensemble under one player’s control. But technology plays a covert role
too. As I said in Chapter 2, the coupling of body and instrument extends the
mind, makes it possible to think and hear through instruments, even if they
are not physically there. The same applies to the technology of notation, at
least if you are a classical musician. Even if you sing alone, it is still
conditioning how you think as you form sounds in your vocal tract. Then
again, consider the operatic voice, which is natural in terms of biology but
highly artificial in terms of culture: a trained voice is one in which a lot of
time and money has been invested. And we saw that when in the 20th
century the crooners pioneered a more naturalistic manner of singing, it was
the new technology of the microphone that made it possible. In this way
artifice, technology, and culture are intertwined, and without culture there is
no music, only sound. That is why I spoke of music as the artifice that
passes itself off as nature.

Technology, in short, is an irreducible dimension of music, and digital

technology is simply its most recent manifestation. But what is the
connection between music and digital technology? The answer lies in how
sound is represented. Physically, sound consists of continuous waves of
pressure that strike the eardrum. As an example of analogue—pre-digital—
recording technology, a vinyl LP represents sound in the form of the hills
and valleys within its half-kilometre-long spiral groove. When it is played
back, the record player’s stylus moves up and down, and these continuous
motions, transmitted through a loudspeaker, recreate the original pressure
waves. Digital sound, by contrast, involves sampling the pressure waves
many times a second (44,100 in the case of a CD), so that a digital sound
file consists of a vast series of numbers corresponding to the intensity of
each sample. This conversion of sound into numbers—and of numbers into
sound when the file is played back—means that sound becomes just another
form of data. Computers can manipulate and store it like any other data.
And because digital sound files are simply a series of numbers, they can be
copied any number of times without loss of quality—unlike analogue
recordings, which are inevitably degraded every time they are copied. The
whole of digital sound technology is built on these simple principles.

Digital audio hit the marketplace in 1982 with the first commercially
released CDs and players, and the format was immediately attractive to
consumers: CDs didn’t easily scratch like LPs did, they didn’t require the
same cleaning rituals, it was much easier to find the track you wanted, and
they didn’t suffer from wow and flutter (variations in the speed of rotation
that made held notes waver up and down). But behind the scenes the
transformation of analogue audio into digital proceeded by stages over
several years. DAT (digital audio tape) recorders still used tape, but stored
digital sound files on it; only later was the tape replaced by hard discs or
solid state storage. Digital multitrack recorders and mixing desks replaced
analogue ones, modelled on their predecessors but offering new features.
Increasingly music production was based on DAWs (digital audio
workstations), that is to say high-end computers with dedicated music
hardware and software—though even today plug-ins for recording software
such as Digidesign’s Pro Tools may emulate earlier, analogue devices
(reverb and delay, distortion, vocoder, and so forth). Bit by bit (literally),
the analogue past has been overwritten by the digital present.

I can now extend the narrative of multitrack recording I began in Chapter 3.

A basic principle of multitrack recording is to record each track ‘clean’,
close-miking the singer or instrument so as to eliminate reverberation and
extraneous sound. These clean tracks can be processed individually, and
digital technology massively expands the possibilities for sound
manipulation. Perceived errors can be fixed through pitch correction or
quantization (snapping notes to the beat or sub-beat), and lipsmacks or
breath sounds removed. This erases the traces of the body and creates the
sonic equivalent of the perfect, Photoshopped skins you see in digital
fashion photography; producer Steve Savage compares it to ‘the
contemporary obsession with depilation, deodorants, and the like’. Sound
can be sculpted through digital filtering, while reverberation and stereo
positioning can make different musical elements stand out from one another
with a vividness unachievable in concert, or create acoustic spaces that
could not exist in the real world. This is the specifically gramophonic
experience that Culshaw and Gould pioneered, now transformed through
digital technology.

I have been talking about studio-processed pop. But the same digital
approaches were taken up, though more discreetly, in recordings of classical
music—even as the industry continued to promise you ‘the best seat in the
concert hall’. In a book published in 2007, musicologist Adam Krims
observed how, in a recent recording of an organ concerto by Carl Philipp
Emanuel Bach (third son of Johann Sebastian), ‘close microphone
placement, spacious stereo imaging, and highly resonant space’ meant that
‘the activity of each instrument jumps out in unprecedented detail’. In
contrast, he said, the highly resonant space of Anonymous 4’s recordings of
medieval music made ‘the voices seem to float ethereally, losing their traces
of corporal production’. Instead of coming from a single source, as in live
performance, the music seems to be coming from everywhere. It exists in
virtual rather than real space.

Krims links all this to the architectural qualities, decor, and other
dimensions of contemporary urban living. In this new world, he says (and
the italics are his), it is ‘the function of classical recordings to characterize
and design an interior space’. He also puts it the other way round: ‘interior
design for urban living now extends to sonic design, cross-marketed with
other commodities more readily identified as central to the “lifestyles”’ (he
is referring, for example, to the ‘loft lifestyle’ associated with New York’s
SoHo area). But in reality such recordings amounted to something more
than the niche fashion as which Krims represented them, based on a handful
of releases from around 2000. By then this approach was becoming
increasingly mainstream in classical music. Still touted for the fidelity of its
reproduction of live music, recording was going beyond realism. It was
creating something more real than the real thing.

But it is in the domain of personal music consumption—the last of the three

thrusts I spoke of in Chapter 3—that digital technology has had its most
drastic transformative effects. The story can be told in product launches.
The analogue Sony Walkman was reinvented in the digital domain as the
Apple iPod, which went on sale in 2001 and gave its users mobile access to
their personal libraries of mp3 files; the introduction of smartphones such as
the iPhone (from 2007) gave you mobile access to the entire musical
resources of the internet. And since then smartphone technology has given
rise to new dimensions of personalized listening. One illustration is music
delivered in the form of apps. An early example was Björk’s Biophilia
(2011), which offered additional materials and game-like ways of
interacting with the music, while a classical equivalent is the Stephen
Hough’s app release of Liszt’s B minor Sonata (2013). But music apps are
not restricted to recordings. For example, the iOS app Augment allows you
to tune your sonic environment to your lifestyle or mood, both literally (you
can autotune people’s voices to the music you are listening to) and
figuratively, for example by filtering out harsh sounds. As the website says,
it ‘harmonizes your listening experience’ and so ‘helps you to be less
distracted and stressed’.
And just as the convergence of mp3 player and smartphone technologies
opened up new possibilities after 2007, so did the evolution from
downloaded mp3s (where there was no physical object but you owned the
data) to streaming. With streaming you don’t own the music. Instead master
tracks are held on cloud-based servers and streamed on demand to
consumers across the web; it’s the music equivalent of Netflix. In the rock
critic Robert Christgau’s words, ‘streaming creates the illusion…that music
is a utility you can turn on and off…It makes music seem disposable,
impermanent.’ (Nothing could be further removed from Figure 13.)
Streaming services provide access to gigantic music libraries and discovery
tools to help you find the music you want, together with playlists of music
for specific contexts or purposes. But they also incorporate or work with
recommendation systems designed to help you find the music you didn’t
know you wanted. These systems had been in development since the early
2000s (Pandora Music and Last.fm were among the first), but the major
change in consumer habits came when they were combined with
comprehensive streaming services such as the current market leader,
Spotify.

Music recommendation is rather like giving everyone their own,

personalized radio station (hence Last.fm’s name and Spotify’s Radio
feature). It’s a bit like traditional programme planning—that is where the
idea of playlists comes from—but the target is no longer a concert audience
or a radio public. It is you. Music recommendation systems model your
individual tastes; some are based on analysis of patterns of listening (the
‘Users like you liked items like this’ approach), while others are based on
coding musical content. Some services push the role of their human
curators (who aim to lead you to your next life-changing discovery), others
trade on the sophistication of their algorithms (created by programmers
whose aim is to put the curators out of a job). Increasingly recommendation
factors in the context of your listening, such as the time of day or where you
are. The latest concept as I write is affective recommendation: in one
version of this, a selfie is analysed to determine your mood, with music
being chosen to resonate with or perhaps counter it.

And this illustrates an increasingly significant aspect of music as lifestyle:

care of self. As long ago as 1948 the World Health Organization defined
‘wellbeing’ as a positive state rather than merely the absence of disease,
while in recent decades a new field has developed around the keywords
music, health, and well-being. Strongly linked to such bottom-up initiatives
as community arts and the natural voice movement, music is valued for its
capacity to bring people together, promote inclusion, foster a sense of
identity, and help in the regulation of mood. In this way Augment’s promise
to help you avoid distraction and stress represents a new take on a familiar
practice, as does a new feature that Spotify introduced in April 2020, during
the early stages of the Covid-19 pandemic: Daily Wellness (‘a mindful mix
of music and podcasts, refreshed for you morning and night’). Similarly
Spotify’s innumerable sad playlists update the long-established use of music
as a tool for emotional self-management. But digital technology adds a
further dimension. By tracking each individual’s listening history, streaming
services make it possible to ‘look back on my past weeks and see what I
was listening to. I can even go back and look at blog posts or coding
sessions and line up the sounds in my head.’ The quote comes from a blog
by Mark Koester, who describes himself as an ‘obsessive self-tracker’, and
tracks his listening alongside his eating, exercise, and so forth. Music
becomes a dimension of the quantified self.

Koester’s blog is called ‘Tracking the soundtrack of your life’, and the
phrase suggests you are starring in your own personal movie, using music
to define who you are and who you want to be. (That takes us back to the
Prudential commercial.) Seen in this light, music becomes just one of many
modalities of consumerist identity construction, along with the car you
drive, the home decor you choose, the clothes you wear, and the food you
eat. This is taking us back to the ideas of mobile identity and self-
fashioning that I spoke of in relation to celebrity culture in Chapter 3. You
construct and communicate—you perform—your identity by selecting from
the plethora of choices that define consumer culture; it’s rather like social
networking sites such as Facebook or Twitter, where the nature and number
of your friends or followers define who you are. And actually the domains
of music and social networking have become more or less inseparable.
Facebook and Twitter play a significant role in the dissemination of music,
and conversely many music-specific sites (including Last.fm and Spotify)
incorporate social networking features.
In this way digital technology starts as an improved way to do existing
things—as with digital multitrack recording—but turns into a way of doing
new, paradigm-busting things. It improves things only to substitute new
things for them. Like its use for self-care and other aspects of lifestyle
management, music’s role as a badge of identity can be traced back before
digital technology (recall what I said about youth culture), but technology
affords its transformation into something existentially different. Music as
lifestyle is music that is conceived or consumed in terms of a value system
constructed not—as in the classical tradition—around musicians’
expressive needs but rather those of listeners and consumers. Like Hodge’s
constructivist view of art, it might be seen as a more democratic conception
of culture. Yet the more elitist, author-based values of self-expression and
authenticity I talked about in Chapter 3 have by no means completely
disappeared from the world of music as lifestyle. Old values rarely do.
Rather they accumulate, so contributing to today’s niche-based culture in
which multiple genres and traditions coexist, all with their own, sometimes
incommensurable value systems.

If these values are incommensurable, that may be because they reflect—and

contribute to—different senses of self. The idea of the genius or Great Man,
as personified by Beethoven, was grounded in ‘the Western conception of
the person as a bounded, unique, more or less integrated motivational and
cognitive universe’. This is how selfhood was seen during the 19th century:
autonomous, consistent, beholden to nobody, true to oneself (and there we
have the link with classical ideas of authenticity). The quote is from the
American anthropologist Clifford Geertz, who describes this conception as
‘a rather peculiar idea within the context of the world’s cultures’. And
certainly it does not fit well with contemporary ideas of selfhood as
something we fashion or perform (including in the musical sense),
something that mutates according to where we are and who we are with,
something that exists in and through our relationships with others. The
result is a fluid sense of self that forms part of what was once called the
postmodern condition (a term no longer fashionable).

In this way, just as ideas of stable, integrated selfhood have given way to
mobile and performative identities, so today’s musical culture—in which
musics from different times, places, social groups, or ethnicities exist side
by side—lacks the sense of fixed identity it had when ‘music’ meant the
notated music of a Western, white, mainly urban bourgeoisie. Traditions
such as rural folk music (unless metropolitanized through notation and
added piano accompaniment) and Celtic music—even the Celtic ‘art’
genres such as pibroch—fell outside that definition of ‘music’. And so of
course did musics from other parts of the world. All these were foreign,
other—and their very alterity reinforced the sense of fixed cultural
selfhood. The world has changed since then, and the story I have told is by
no means just a musical one. In fact there could be hardly be a clearer
demonstration of how music does not dwell in some inaccessible heaven of
Platonic forms but is part and parcel of broader sociocultural change in the
here and now.

Digital participation and musical style

Among the most spectacular aspects of digital technology is its ability to
reconfigure time and space. Time is reshaped in the recent spate of
holographic performances by deceased artists, for example Tupac Shakur
(d. 1996) performing at the 2012 Coachella Festival (Figure 17), or Michael
Jackson (d. 2009) at the 2014 Billboard Music Awards. Space is defied in
telematic music, made together in more or less real time by performers
around the world (more or less because you can never completely eliminate
lag). An early example, from 1998, is Seiji Ozawa conducting Beethoven’s
‘Ode to Joy’ at the opening of the Nagano Winter Olympics (Japan), with
synchronized choruses in Berlin, Cape Town, Beijing, New York, and
Sydney. A more recent one is Avatar Orchestra Metaverse, a group of
musicians based in three continents whose backgrounds range across
contemporary classical and popular genres: their telematic performances
take place in sometimes fantastical venues within Second Life. That means
their audiences, though sharing the same virtual space, may in real life be
situated anywhere in the world.
17. Holographic performance by Tupac Shakur (right) at the 2012 Coachella Music Festival,
with Snoop Dogg on the left.

But if there is a definitive icon of music in digital culture it is Hatsune

Miku, the fantasy Japanese schoolgirl powered by Vocaloid voice synthesis
technology. Her holographic concert tours extend across Asia, Europe, and
North America (Figure 18), but she is most ubiquitous in the form of
anime-style videos made by her fans: there are 170,000 on YouTube, while
as I write 2,312,489 fans follow her on Facebook. Ever since she was
released in 2007 she has been 16 years old, 158 cm tall, and weighing 42
kg. She comes out of the highly commercialized real-world culture of
Japanese ‘idols’, closely controlled teenage performers whose
manufactured cuteness verges on dehumanization. That is why one of her
fans says it is in Miku, rather than the flesh-and-blood idols, that
authenticity is to be found: ‘This is real. This is the real freedom of
expression. Look at the idols, look at the girl groups. All fake.’ Such
conflations of the real and the virtual—of nature and artifice—pervade
music in digital culture.
18. Hatsune Miku, in concert at Le Zénith, Paris, on 16 January 2020.

The fan videos of Miku make her an example of the new forms of
participation afforded by digital technology. Another comes from Eric
Whitacre, the American composer who combines digital savvy with a New
Romantic aesthetic and is best known for his choral music. In 2009 he
created a Virtual Choir, based on thousands of people across the world
uploading videos of themselves singing his music (so reconfiguring both
time and space), and the Choir’s fourth project, ‘Fly to Paradise’, has a
remix dimension. You download the tracks from the Virtual Choir website
and make your own mix before uploading and sharing it. Here it is
Culshaw’s and Gould’s futuristic ideas about listeners customizing
recordings that are being realized through digital technology.

But remixing goes further. The ‘Fly to Paradise’ remix project is a classical-
music equivalent of websites such as Mashstix and Indaba Music, through
which you again work with individual tracks or stems (groups of tracks) so
as to create your own mix. Just as with ‘Fly to Paradise’, you share it with
others, and this sharing is key to understanding what is going on. Mashstix
and Indaba Music are not just technological resources: they are hubs for
communities of like-minded individuals. Mostly amateur, their members
offer mutual support by commenting on one another’s work, and the social
aspect of the participation is as important as the musical. That is the
dimension of digital technology’s impact on music on which I am focusing
in this section, but I begin by considering musical participation more
generally.

In many musical cultures there is no clear division between amateur and

professional music-making. In Western culture, where there is, the vast
majority of musicologists have concentrated on music made by
professionals. Yet an enormous amount of non-professional music-making
has always gone on; in simply statistical terms, the professional music-
making represented in the history books probably amounts to little more
than a rounding error. And as with remixing today, this music-making has
been motivated by purposes that have as much to do with community as
with aesthetics. Tellingly, it took an anthropologist to think of something as
apparently obvious as systematically researching the world of amateur
music-making in a British provincial town, Milton Keynes: Ruth Finnegan
documented it across schools, churches, pubs, and clubs, and across genres
from classical to jazz and rock, and from brass bands to folk and country
music.

Let’s just list a few examples of participatory music-making. There are

high-profile youth orchestras, sometimes associated with projects of
national reconciliation (such as the National Youth Orchestra of Iraq) or
social inclusion (the Simón Bolívar Symphony Orchestra of Venezuela).
There are community choirs with similar aims but at a grass-roots level.
There are small-town indie bands that give teenagers experience of
extracurricular collaboration—sometimes continuing into adult life to
compensate for unfulfilling jobs. (Parents who ferry teenage children and
their gear to and from gigs know that widely voiced concerns about the
decline of participatory music-making are misplaced: that may apply to
classical music, but you have to look at music-making in the round.) Then
there are the do-it-yourself traditions of British popular music, illustrated by
skiffle bands in the 1950s and punk in the 1970s. Brass bands and massed
choral singing still exist in the North of England, but their heyday was early
in the 20th century, when they were a major element of civic social life.
But the most striking demonstration I know of the sheer quantity of
participatory music-making comes from the Hofmeister Monatsberichte, a
series of monthly sheet music catalogues issued by the Leipzig-based music
publisher Friedrich Hofmeister that began in 1829 and continued into the
20th century. (I know about this because I ran a project turning them into an
online database.) No less than 330,000 publications are listed, the vast
majority by composers even musicologists haven’t heard of, and for equally
obscure instruments and ensembles: there is for example a category of
music for combined harmonium, physharmonica, and harmony flute (all
small free-reed organs, now defunct). These are the relics of amateur music-
making, mainly taking place at home in those pre-television days. And they
are almost completely ignored by music historians, for two reasons. First,
this is not where you look for the canonic music that gets into the history
books. Second, there are simply too many of them. Music historians are
primarily interested in the individual qualities of a limited number of works
in a few elite genres; they don’t know what to do with repertories
numbering in the hundreds of thousands.

I ran into exactly this problem with another project, originally based on
Queen’s ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’ video—a leading candidate for the title of
first ever music video—plus a few television commercials derived from it
and the alternative visualization in Wayne’s World. There was a near ten-
year hiatus in the middle of the project (the book my chapter was intended
for was pulled), and by the time I got back to it YouTube had come into
being. I didn’t record how many hits I got when I first searched on
‘Bohemian Rhapsody video’, but I do know that a search on ‘bohemian
rhapsody’ AND ‘puppet’ yielded 304 hits. And apart from the famous
Muppets version and the 303 others, there are versions incorporating
imagery from Star Wars and Star Trek or from vintage videogames such as
Mega Man and Final Fantasy; a host of anime versions, for example based
on the Neon Genesis Evangelion series; versions visualized using Lego
(there is a whole YouTube channel featuring Lego versions of Queen
videos); versions featuring My Little Pony, Mount Rushmore, and obsolete
digital detritus; and much more. Some use one or another of Queen’s
recordings of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’, others use one of the many covers of
the song, or remake it (including the digital detritus version, which uses the
sounds of floppy disc drives). In my chapter I provided an overview of the
different versions, selected a few (on no particular criteria) and discussed
them in more detail, and speculated on the cultural significance of what was
going on. I didn’t know what else to do.

What was actually going on was an unforeseen consequence of the internet,

originally invented for purposes of military and academic communication.
In the 1980s the internet only supported text, but even then virtual
communities developed. The best documented is the WELL (Whole Earth
’Lectronic Link), based in the San Francisco Bay area; members pursued a
range of common interests from chess and cookery to the Grateful Dead
(many Deadheads joined). The early 1990s saw the development of the
World Wide Web, whose familiar architecture of linked websites supported
images and sounds; around 2000 this morphed into so-called Web 2.0,
which enabled the user interaction fundamental to everything from
Mashstix or Indaba Music to social networking and online shopping. There
was a mushrooming of online affinity groups based round shared interests,
and music was one of them. Mashstix and Indaba Music both go back to the
2000s and incorporate some of the community-building features of social
networking sites. General-purpose sites like YouTube were also equipped
with features (such as comments, channels, and messaging) that meant such
communities could form under its umbrella.

Henry Jenkins was the first media scholar to seriously research the culture
of digital participation, including for example fanfiction based on Harry
Potter. Fans of J. K. Rowling’s originals write their own stories based on
Rowling’s characters, post them to dedicated websites, read and comment
on one another’s stories, and so build a virtual community. (Writing in
2006, Jenkins said the largest of these sites contained 30,000 fan-generated
stories; now two of them each have over 80,000.) Jenkins also worked on
fan videos based on Star Wars, which use easily available and cheap (or
pirated) video editing software for similar purposes. He hasn’t worked
specifically on music, but it is the same kind of digital participation that lies
behind the innumerable videos of ‘Bohemian Rhapsody’—and of any
number of other highly successful songs—that you find on YouTube.
Digital technology has made it easy to create such videos, disseminate them
to like-minded viewers, and so build a community around them.
Community members subscribe to one another’s channels and comment on
one another’s videos.

For Jenkins, these digital cultures of participation are a contemporary

recreation of the traditional folk cultures ousted by film, television, and
other mass media—what are sometimes called cultures of vernacular
creativity. At one point Jenkins says his own grandmother was ‘a remix
artist’—by which he means she made patchwork quilts, buying scraps of
remaindered cloth from local mills and sewing them together. ‘She would
have learned these skills informally’, he comments, ‘observing the
community of quilting women as they worked, gradually trying her own
hands at the craft and learning through doing.’ In other words—like
learning music in the days before conservatories—it was a communal
practice, and it is this dimension that Jenkins sees digital technology as
recovering. It is telling that he makes his point by referencing a form of
musical participation: remix originated in Jamaica around 1970 and spread
through deejaying and the development of the digital sampler before
becoming ubiquitous on the internet.

The ethnomusicologist Thomas Turino distinguishes between what he calls

presentational music (made by musicians for an audience) and participatory
music (made by musicians for themselves). The distinction is fuzzy, but
Turino’s point is that it has an impact on musical style. For example, he
says, participatory music is in open form (it can go on as long as people
want it to), it is full of repetition (people who don’t know it can pick it up as
they go along), and dramatic contrasts are avoided (they would require pre-
planning and rehearsal). Presentational music has the opposite
characteristics. In other words participation conditions musical style, and
digital participation is no exception.

Consider that paradigmatic product of digital culture, the internet meme.

Once again this is the digital continuation of a pre-digital practice (think
‘Kilroy was here’)—and once again the speed and reach of digital
technology transforms it into something essentially new. For media theorist
Limor Shifman the key characteristic of an internet meme is that it induces
people to copy, transform, or parody it: if it doesn’t spread—if it doesn’t go
viral—it isn’t a meme. And there are certain features that help with this.
One is simplicity: it shouldn’t be too hard to work with. Another is
repetitiveness, which elicits imitation and enhances memorability. Others
include whimsicality (an invitation for people to fill the gaps) and
playfulness, especially when based on incongruity. Shifman is primarily
talking about text and image memes, but her principles apply to music too.

An example is Nyan Cat (Figure 19). Its 177,189,182 views reflect the
incongruity of the pop-tart cat sailing through the skies for all eternity with
the stars flashing by, leaving behind a rainbow trail, coupled to the
hauntingly whimsical—and maddeningly repetitive—music. (The image of
the cat was posted by American illustrator Chris Torres; the music was
created for Hatsune Miku; and they were put together—arguably the core
creative act—by the anonymous YouTube user saraj00n.) Or consider the
Korean artist Psy’s Gangnam Style (3,603,572,130 views), actually a full-
length music video but one that spread like a meme: for Koreans it is a
satire on crazy rich Asians, for the rest of the world it is whimsically
inscrutable and full of incongruity, with its repetitiveness and
idiosyncratically imitable dance adding to its ‘spreadability’. Both, but
especially Gangnam Style, have spawned innumerable recreations, usually
with some kind of parodistic intent (Mexi Style, Aussie Battler Style, Mitt
Romney Style, and so forth).
19. Nyan Cat.

Incongruity, whimsicality, playfulness: these are basic characteristics of

digital culture, as evident in the media aggregation and discussion website
reddit as in internet memes, or in such other key digital genres as video
mash-up. Mash-up is all about incongruity. Eclectic Method’s mash-up of
Beyoncé’s ‘Single Ladies’ and Lynyrd Skynyrd’s ‘Sweet Home Alabama’
juxtaposes 2000s commercialism with the authenticity of 1970s rock, a
symbol of contemporary Black female empowerment with a white band
from the American South whose stage sets frequently featured a giant
Confederate flag. Again, musicologist John Richardson describes mash-ups
of death metal and Britney Spears as revealing ‘the artifice that has always
existed in constructions of heavy metal rock and the brutal truths that lie
under the sheen of girly pop’. Each song unsettles your experience of the
other, forcing together connotations and emotions that we like to keep in
separate compartments. Unanticipated meanings emerge as the songs grate
against one another. All this adds up to a distinctive digital aesthetic that is
shared across different platforms, genres, and media—something that the
technology affords, but does not determine. Technology makes things
possible, but it takes people to create culture.
Selling sounds
I mentioned the virtual diva Hatsune Miku, and she provides a good
example of the new forms of business based on digital participation. As I
said, she is powered by Vocaloid software, originally developed by
Yamaha: basically you type in your music and lyrics, and Miku sings. She is
just the most famous of several virtual characters marketed by the Japanese
music and media firm Crypton Future Media, and she comes as a package
consisting of the Vocaloid engine, dedicated Miku voicebanks, and a
Creative Commons CC BY-NC licence. A freeware animation program
called MikuMikuDance enables you to make the anime movies through
which Miku is best known, and while Crypton owns the rights to images of
her (which is why I couldn’t use one for Figure 18), the CC BY-NC licence
allows you to post your videos on websites such as YouTube; you are
identified as the author, and the only restriction is you cannot
commercialize them. In this way Crypton’s business model is designed for
digital participation. It is based on an understanding of the values and
motivations of the worldwide Miku fan community.

Henry Jenkins sees such monetization of what in business-speak is called

‘user generated content’ as the core of Web 2.0 businesses (his term).
YouTube and Second Life exemplify this: people go on YouTube to see the
videos uploaded by users, and similarly Second Life residents create the
virtual landscapes, houses, shops, and clothes—not to mention concerts of
live-streamed music in virtual bars—that transform Second Life from a
platform into a virtual world and so attract more residents. YouTube
monetizes user-generated content through advertising, Second Life through
sales of virtual land. But Jenkins observes that, in contrast to Japanese Web
2.0 businesses, many American corporations have been slow to exploit this
business model. Instead of seeing fanfiction as a means of building a
community of fans, he explains, the corporate rights holders of both Harry
Potter and Star Wars used copyright law to close down fan activities. They
did not appreciate the potential of digital participation for both customer
loyalty and sales.

Businesses that do not understand their customers, Jenkins warns, risk

losing control of their own markets. And that is what happened to the music
business at the turn of the 21st century. Digital downloads meant consumers
could access music immediately. But record companies did not sell music
that way. So their customers searched the web and downloaded it for free.
The record industry responded by suing its customers, and the end result
was it lost control of the market. But as in the previous section, I need to go
further back in time, because to understand the impact of digital technology
on the music business, you need to know how it worked in the pre-digital
age.

As so often the story goes back to Beethoven’s lifetime, and was long
ignored by musicologists because of the old belief that music transcended
mundane concerns. The premiere of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony (7 May
1824) was a financial disaster, and Romain Rolland—whom I mentioned in
Chapter 3—wrote that Beethoven ‘found himself poor, ill, alone but a
conqueror: conqueror of the mediocrity of mankind, conqueror of his
destiny, conqueror of his suffering’. For Rolland poverty only underlined
Beethoven’s artistic authenticity: money did not matter. In reality, of course,
it was a vital concern for classical musicians, and Beethoven’s lifetime
spanned the transition from a musical economy in which leading composers
were supported by the aristocracy to one based mainly on selling works to
publishers and income from concerts. The problem with the Ninth
Symphony premiere was unseasonably good weather, meaning people were
out of town.

There was a massive development of the music business in the first half of
the 19th century. That included the creation of commercial concert halls
housing both solo and orchestral performances (this is when the piano
recital came into being); civic orchestras were established, creating regular
employment. But in economic terms what counted for more was the growth
in middle-class domestic music-making. This was like a three-legged stool:
people bought pianos; they bought sheet music to play on them; and they
hired teachers to show them how to do it, so providing many musicians
with their principal source of income. At the same time there was a chronic
over-supply of musicians and teachers that lasted into the 20th century, and
many musicians struggled to make ends meet.
In the first decades of the 20th century the new technologies of recording
and radio opened up new opportunities. But most important was the
development of silent films—in reality not silent at all, because musicians
provided live music ranging from a piano to an entire orchestra in the
largest and plushest cinemas. For a few years musical employment
prospects never looked so good. And then, in the wake of The Jazz Singer
(1927), it all came crashing down. The Jazz Singer was the first talkie, and
cinemas everywhere were rapidly equipped for sound reproduction.
Musicians across the world were suddenly out of work. And the problem
was structural, because all three legs of the music economy were chopped
off at once: new listening habits prompted by records and radio meant fewer
people were making their own music at home, so they didn’t need pianos,
or sheet music, or teachers. The music business continued, but its main
activity rapidly morphed from publishing music to making and selling
records.

From around 1930 to near the century’s end the record industry was highly
profitable, for a number of reasons. Making records involved a significant
one-off investment, but after that they could be pressed at very low cost and
in effectively unlimited numbers: the more records you sold the more profit
you made per record. And the key to selling more records was creating
more demand for them—which is exactly what the growth of 20th-century
popular music did. In addition a series of technological advances
encouraged consumers to repeatedly replace their music collections: first
there were 78s (shellac discs named after their notional speed of rotation),
then vinyl 33s (from about 1950), stereo LPs (offering two separate
channels of sound and so creating a spatial dimension), and finally, in the
1980s, the new digital format of CDs. I say ‘finally’ because for most users
CD sound was quite good enough. It persuaded consumers to rebuy their
collections (again), while record companies monetized their back
catalogues by re-releasing them on CD. There was a boom. It lasted over a
decade, but it couldn’t last for ever. Eventually people finished replacing
their music libraries and the record companies had exhausted the most
saleable items from their back catalogues. By the 1990s sales were tailing
off, and the industry entered a period of retrenchment.
And at this point the digital technology that created the CD moves centre
stage. The decline of the CD-induced boom coincided with rapid expansion
of the internet, the replacement of slow dial-up access by broadband, the
development of cost-effective, large-capacity data storage, and the creation
of compressed file formats that were quite good enough for normal listening
if not for audiophiles. All this meant music could be disseminated in the
form of mp3s downloaded to consumers’ computers or mp3 players for
listening to any time, any place. The trouble was that, as I said, the music
industry did not sell mp3s. So you had to create them by ripping your CDs,
swap them with your friends, or get them off the internet. By the late 1990s
peer-to-peer (P2P) file-sharing websites had evolved, the best known of
which was Napster: registered users remotely copied sound files from other
users’ hard discs, and allowed others to copy their sound files. Napster took
off and at one point had 80 million registered users.

As far as the law and the record industry were concerned, this was piracy,
and industry bosses convinced themselves that it was the source of all their
problems. Following litigation, Napster was closed down in 2001. The
industry also sued individual downloaders. Famous examples from 2003
include a 12-year-old girl and a 66-year-old grandmother whose computer,
it was discovered, was not in fact technologically capable of downloading
mp3s. Four years later the Recording Industry Association of America won
a case against a 30-year-old woman from Minnesota, who was ordered to
pay $222,000 for downloading 24 songs ($9,250 per song). It was in this
context that the academic lawyer and political activist Lawrence Lessig
cuttingly observed that the combined effect of copyright law and music
business practices had been to ‘criminalize a generation of our kids’.

This is a classic example of what Jenkins called media companies’

‘remarkable willingness to antagonize their customers by taking legal
actions against them in the face of all economic rationality’. One way the
record industry’s behaviour was irrational is that, as surveys showed,
customers who shared files actually bought more music legally. And in
putting their energies into lobbying governments and litigating against their
customers, the record companies did not ask themselves basic questions
about what their customers wanted: music that could be downloaded and
listened to any time, any place. Others, however, did, and Apple’s answer
was its iTunes store, which opened in 2003 and allowed users to buy music
legally and download it direct to their computer or mp3 player. Ten years
later iTunes had 575 million active user accounts. There was a market all
right, but the music industry had lost control over it.

During the period of flux after 2000 there was a great deal of speculation,
much of it utopian, about the effects of digital technology on the music
industry. Individual musicians and bands saw an opportunity to free
themselves from the record companies and their notoriously exploitative
contracts. Many experimented with different strategies for cutting out the
middleman and selling their music direct to listeners. Arctic Monkeys, a
band from Sheffield, gave away their music, initially in the form of CD
demos and later via their website; through this they gained notoriety and
radio airplay, which they built on by signing to the Domino label in 2005.
In contrast the well-established group Radiohead used the internet to
disseminate their music independently of their previous label, EMI: they
released their seventh album (In Rainbows) as a download available from
their own website, allowing fans to pay what they wanted for it—with
nothing as an option. That was in 2007, and the following year saw the
establishment of Bandcamp, a music-sharing site with social networking
features that enabled musicians to sell their music online. This time the
musicians set the prices, but fans could pay more if they wished (and 40 per
cent of them did).

While artists were concerned to find new ways of selling their music,
listeners looked forward to a utopian age when all music would be free.
There might still be a place for the music business—but rather than being
based on the music itself, many thought, the money would be in services
provided around it. In particular, they reasoned that the bottleneck would be
finding what you wanted in the vast new wonderland of free music. During
the 2000s the focus was on organizing the music on your mp3 player
through playlists, whether created by you or by others; celebrity playlists
were all the rage, and people wondered whether George W. Bush’s iPod
playlist, leaked in 2005, had been cooked up by his media strategists. (It
had.) Entrepreneurs and start-ups, however, were playing a longer game.
They were hiring programmers and music students in order to develop the
music recommendation systems I talked about earlier in this chapter—and
as I said, it was the combination of these and streaming that transformed the
market.

While there are many streaming services—including YouTube and Apple

Music—the dominant example of a comprehensive music-streaming service
as I write is Spotify, which has around 220 million users worldwide. As
well as searching for individual songs or accessing playlists of music for
particular purposes (Spotify is said to host nearly 2.5 million user-compiled
playlists of music to have sex to), you can choose between a variety of
recommendation systems. And then there are Spotify’s social networking
features, which include integration with Facebook and Twitter. That means
Spotify is not only an environment for finding music and for listening to it,
but also for sharing it with others. In short, it has positioned itself as the go-
to music hub within the universe of social networking.

In some ways Spotify, along with all the other services that digital
technology has opened up, is a hugely positive development for music
lovers. It’s a no-brainer: Spotify gives you free access to an almost limitless
quantity of music across multiple genres, all available any time, any place,
and with sophisticated tools to enable you to discover it. It’s yours for free
if you can put up with advertisements—and if not, you can take out a
Premium subscription, which also provides an enhanced range of services.
In some ways it really is the utopia that digital optimists were dreaming of
in the early 2000s. But there are some other sides to the equation. For one
thing, most musicians make very little money from streaming; the web is
full of their complaints. And there is also a quite different kind of cost to set
against these benefits.

Spotify’s business model is based on income generated through Premium

subscribers; the primary purpose of the free, ad-based service is to bring in
users who will then choose to upgrade. Many Web 2.0 companies work this
way, including YouTube and Second Life, though in neither case is it their
principal revenue stream. Spotify’s problem has been persuading enough
people to take out Premium subscriptions. As I write, less than half its users
have, and when Spotify was floated on the stock market in 2018, for $30
billion, it had still to turn a profit (just like Twitter when it floated five years
earlier). In order to make good this shortfall, Spotify went down the same
route as other social networking services: the sale of data for advertising
purposes.

If you have read Spotify’s Privacy Policy, you will know that it collects
such personal data as what you listen to and when, the playlists you create,
and your interactions with other users. It also says that it may share your
data ‘in a pseudonymised format’ with Spotify’s marketing partners and
advertisers. And while there is nothing unique about this business model,
music-streaming services can claim a unique selling point: that music
provides intimate access to people’s emotions, indeed to their deepest, most
authentic selves. It has been said that Google knows you are pregnant
before you do, but it is Spotify that knows the best music to have sex to—
and when you are playing it. The emotional salience and time-sensitivity of
music explains the pledge Spotify makes to its partners: it can reach its tens
of millions of listeners ‘when they’re most engaged…from morning to
night’.

In the last few years, then, both the technology for selling and
disseminating music and the business model on which it is based have been
transformed in a way nobody could have predicted—though over a quarter
of a century ago the new media commentator Howard Rheingold wrote that
new technology would enable businesses to target their advertising in new
ways. With remarkable prescience, he added that this might result in ‘the
replacement of democracy with a global mercantile state that exerts control
through the media-assisted manipulation of desire’. Nowadays music is in
the front line of such manipulation of desire. Concerns about the
surveillance society have grown exponentially, but to most people the
Faustian bargain offered by Web 2.0 companies is just too tempting. And
anyhow, who reads Spotify’s Privacy Policy?
Chapter 5
Music in a global world

Music and globalization

In 1492 Christopher Columbus set out for India but instead discovered
America. In his wake trading links were created across the globe and
programmes of conversion to Christianity initiated: the ultimate outcome
was European colonization of most of the world and a massive shift of
resources. And as Europeans travelled they took their music with them. It
was indispensable for purposes of conversion; the Portuguese converted
some 100,000 Japanese between 1541 and 1577, when Father Organtino
Gnecchi wrote from Kyoto that ‘if only we had more organs and other
musical instruments Japan would be converted to Christianity in less than a
year’. As colonists settled they created a home from home, and music was
part of that too. Calcutta—present-day Kolkata—became de facto capital of
British India in 1771, and within twenty years Longman and Broderip (of
Cheapside and the Haymarket) had opened a music shop. The harpsichords
and fortepianos they imported were played by the memsahibs and their
daughters; gentlemen joined the Catch Club, whose concerts were followed
by dinners with catches and glees—the popular songs of the day—being
sung into the small hours. For those with more classical tastes the Calcutta
Band put on concerts featuring music by such composers as Arcangelo
Corelli, Handel, and Haydn.

Those three names would be at the top of a list of 18th-century European

music exported around the globe, and when Mozart ribbed his teacher
Haydn about how few languages he knew, Haydn retorted ‘my language is
understood all over the world’. By the 19th century opera was becoming
equally international, especially in the colonies (or former colonies) of
southern European states. In Rio de Janeiro, for example, it was at the heart
of fashionable society, and a newspaper article from 1827 muses on the
contrast between this and a luridly depicted indigenous culture:

While Rossini’s music enchants a brilliant group of spectators at the Théâtre Impérial…some
Indians…a few hundred leagues from the civilized capital of the empire, dismember the limbs
of a lost traveller, to the discordant sound of a cow’s horn that serves as a trumpet.

Another, equally bizarre juxtaposition comes from Gabon, in Western

Africa, where nine years earlier, in 1818, the English naturalist (and pianist)
Sarah Bowdich encountered an albino slave from the reportedly
cannibalistic interior, who ‘burst out with the whole force of his powerful
voice in the notes of the Hallelujah of Handel’ (that is, the ‘Hallelujah
Chorus’ from Messiah). ‘To meet with this chorus in the wilds of Africa,
and from such a being, had an effect I can scarcely describe’, Bowdich
continues, ‘and I was lost in astonishment at the coincidence.’

But there is more to music in a globalizing world than picturesque

encounters or the recreation of home comforts. Underlying both the Rio
reporter’s and Bowdich’s words we can detect a reassuring sense of the
universality of European music. Built into the thought system of
colonization and empire was a belief in the absolute superiority of European
civilization, seen as legitimizing a centuries-long process of economic and
human exploitation. Figure 13 expresses one aspect of this, arrogating to the
West the right to set universal values of architectural greatness (ancient
Egypt qualifies, India and China do not). Another aspect is the inherent
universality of Western art, now acting as an emblem of imperial
hegemony. Music in particular was seen—and not just by Europeans—as
based on scientific principles and having an emotional reach that other
musics could not match. And as the artifice that presents itself as nature, it
naturalized the status quo, projecting empire as just the way the world is. It
is because of its apparent naturalness that music has often been spoken of as
a universal language. But this is a problematic idea. It’s true that all cultures
have something at least partially corresponding to what we call ‘music’, but
it doesn’t necessarily follow that there are universal features shared by all
musics. The very word ‘universal’ should put us on our guard: as the
postcolonial scholar Homi Bhabha says, ‘universalism…masks ethnocentric
norms, values, and interests’.

While music contributed to the legitimizing of empire abroad, at home it

served as a means of representing foreign cultures, portraying them as both
different and inferior. Music provides a textbook example of what the
postcolonial theorist Edward Said called Orientalism, the use of cultural
representation as an instrument of colonial or imperial power. By the 19th
century, a stereotyped lexicon of alterity had come into being that included
twisting, melismatic melodic lines and non-standard scales often featuring
augmented seconds: it faintly echoed some Middle Eastern musics but was
used indiscriminately to signify people outside the West, lumping them
together as simply different. And such symbolization of cultural or ethnic
difference reached an extreme point in the first half of the 20th century with
the Virginia-born composer John Powell, a card-carrying segregationist (in
1916 he founded a Society for the Preservation of Racial Integrity). On the
one hand he composed a Symphony in A based on diatonic (white-note)
folk tunes and embodying a vision of pure, Anglo-Saxon culture; on the
other he wrote a Rhapsodie nègre that builds non-standard scales into a
thoroughly chromatic style (adding all the black notes), and culminates in a
cannibalistic rite. Deployed this way, music becomes a means of
constructing ‘us’ through the opposition to a vilified ‘them’; for musicians
like Powell, musical hybridity—the mixing or fusion of different traditions
—stood for miscegenation and racial mixture. This is just one example of
how music can become entangled with pernicious cultural values and act as
an engine of division, and I will come back to it.

So far I have shown how music can serve the ends of political and
ideological hegemony. But it can equally serve to neutralize, resist, or
interrogate power. Music creates contact zones: in the anti-Semitic Vienna
of 1900, classical concerts enabled Jews and non-Jews to share the same
space and for a few minutes forget about race. I mentioned Sterling
Brown’s invocation of jazz as a kind of contact zone, while musical genres
from gospel and folk to free jazz focused support for the American civil
rights movement of the 1950s–60s. In 1977 the Sex Pistols’ ‘God save the
Queen’ articulated a generation’s contempt for the post-war British
establishment. From 1987 to 1991 music orchestrated the ‘Singing
Revolution’ in Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia: huge crowds turned out to
sing patriotic songs, and all three countries achieved independence from the
collapsing Soviet Union. And in 2012 the part-Maori singer, guitarist, and
producer Tiki Taane embarked on a joint project with the New Zealand
Symphony Orchestra called ‘With strings attached’; it was set up in such a
way that Tiki was seen as inviting the orchestra members onto his own
cultural terrain, so inverting the normal practice whereby official white
groups invited Black artists onto their terrain in an often empty gesture of
inclusion. In the words of Oli Wilson, ‘Tiki asserts authorship over the
colonial experience, and defines the nature of this experience on his own
terms.’ And this illustrates a point I made in Chapter 1: rather than simply
reflecting social or political ideologies, music affords agency—hence
Wilson’s reference to authorship—and in this way can throw light on
undocumented aspects of subaltern experience. It adds light and shade to
otherwise black-and-white colonial histories.

Like other arts, music has served as a means of asserting identity in

contexts of decolonization and nation building. For a moment I move
outside music to make the point. Brasilia was founded in 1960 as the new
capital of Brazil, and designed as a uniquely thoroughgoing example of
architectural modernism—a style that first developed in Europe before
spreading across the developed world. Masterminded by the Brazilian
architect Oscar Niemeyer, Brasilia is not a homage to Europe. It is rather a
claim that international-style architecture is what its name suggests: a
heritage that transcends the national or the regional. Brasilia is a statement
that modernity belongs not to Europe or North America, but to the world.
Yet this is not a distinction that you can read directly from the buildings. It
is a matter of context and interpretation.

All this applies just as much to music. Western musical styles were
introduced to Japan in the late 19th century as part of a comprehensive
programme of modernization provoked by the encounter with Western
economic and military strength. This did not just mean bringing in
European musicians. The school system was reformed to include group
singing in Western style and the teaching of staff notation, while Japanese
musicians were sent abroad to train. China embarked on a similar process of
musical modernization early in the 20th century, again as part of a larger
cultural, scientific, and political programme. And in Shanghai this
dovetailed with the development of Western orchestral music to serve the
large expatriate community; the Shanghai Municipal Orchestra fulfilled the
same role as the Calcutta Band more than a century earlier, but by the late
1920s it had acquired a regular Chinese audience. The focus on Western
music was strengthened when in 1927 the Nationalist government funded
the establishment of a National Conservatory (now Shanghai
Conservatory). The foundations had been laid for the position Western
classical music occupies today as the expression of a distinctively Chinese
modernity.

As important as the introduction of Western styles was the modernization of

traditional Chinese music, particularly after the Communist victory in 1949.
New conservatories were created that embraced both Western and Chinese
music; traditional instruments were modernized on scientific principles—
for example through standardizing tuning and building them in different
sizes to create families of instruments on the model of the Western violin
family. As in other countries, large ensembles were created, modelled on
the Western orchestra but using the newly modernized Chinese instruments
(Figure 20). Folk music was also modernized, and official troupes formed
that brought together the different, and originally unrelated, music and
dance traditions that fell within modern administrative areas: music became
part of the operation of the state. Modernization also included social
practices. Traditional music was relocated from streets and tea houses to
formal concert halls, and performed by state-employed professionals before
seated audiences. It is these modernized musics that are now designated as
‘traditional’, while such genuine folk traditions as survive are likely to be
denigrated as old-fashioned and amateurish.
20. Chinese orchestra. Featuring members of the BC Chinese Orchestra and Edmonton
Chinese Philharmonic Association, this is from a concert entitled ‘Enchanting rhythms of
Chinese music’ which took place in Edmonton, Canada, in August 2015.

But perhaps the most profound transformation resulted from the

introduction of Western notation. In some countries modernization has
involved the adoption of a new script; Turkey exchanged Arabic script for
the Roman alphabet in the 1920s as part of Kemal Atatürk’s programme of
secularization and Westernization. But adopting a new musical notation is
more drastic, because different notations may chop up musical sound in
quite different ways. Western staff notation is based on seven-note scales
with five chromatic notes, adding up to twelve notes in the octave. Musics
outside the West often use very different scales, with more (or fewer) notes
and splitting up the octave into different intervals. Again, staff notation
assumes that there is a regular metre (strong beats fall at equal intervals)
and that note durations are arranged in powers of two (half note, quarter
note, eighth note, and so on); there are ways of representing different
divisions—such as triplets, meaning three notes in the space of two—but
they are clumsy and limited. Transcribing music that does not work this
way into staff notation means shoehorning it into the categories of Western
music, and so imposing a false sameness on it. It echoes the problems Sapir
and Whorf encountered in translating native American languages.
The adoption of Western staff notation for traditional music at the new
Chinese conservatories affected how the music was thought about and how
it was played. In particular it militated against traditional practices of
improvisation. Rather than memorizing individual notes, traditional
performers on the erhu (Chinese fiddle) internalized the melodic and formal
outlines of the pieces they played, together with the principles of how to
elaborate these outlines in performance. Musicians might play the same
piece quite differently on different occasions, or as compared to other
musicians. In the post-1949 conservatories, by contrast, it would be
carefully notated, rehearsed, and performed, much like a Mozart violin
sonata. It became fixed. As far as the conservatory musicians were
concerned, they were playing the same music as before, and their
conscientiously rehearsed performances of transcribed scores meant they
were playing it better—more scientifically, more artistically, more
authentically. Western commentators saw it as a loss of tradition.

So far I have talked about the spread of Western musical styles,

technologies, and ways of thinking across a globalizing world. But it goes
both ways. Just as Europe appropriated the rest of the world’s material
resources, so it appropriated its music. The dynamic, however, is different.
The British empire is generally represented in terms of white colonists
confident of their own superiority and looking down on the natives. But
read some of the literature from the last years of the empire, such as
Somerset Maugham’s short stories, and you will become aware of an under-
narrated aspect of the imperial experience: the sense that subject peoples
retained qualities with which Western civilization had lost touch. On the
one hand there is the Eastern spirituality consciously echoed in the music of
Gustav Holst and later feeding into the Beatles and psychedelic rock; on the
other, a rhythmic, embodied vitality particularly associated with African
and South American musics. And this is not just a European phenomenon.
Western envy of the authenticity and prowess of Black minorities—not
necessarily incompatible with a belief in their racial inferiority—is
replicated, for example, in the attitude of Han Chinese towards China’s
ethnic minorities.

We can trace two-way flows in both literate and oral traditions of music.
Within notated traditions I have spoken of the appropriation of Western
music as an instrument of nation-building, mirrored in Western musicians
turning to other cultures in search of musical renewal. But it gets more
complicated. If learning about other traditions enabled Western musicians to
see their own culture in new ways, the same is true of musicians outside the
West who discovered their own national traditions through their reflection
in Western music (the classic example is Toru Takemitsu, who said it was
through the American composer John Cage that he came to value traditional
Japanese music). At the same time, the meaning of ‘Western’ blurs as
musicians from China, for example, emigrate and become established in the
West (I am thinking of composers such as Tan Dun or Qu Xiaosong), or
when—much less commonly—composers from the West work in cultures
outside the West to the extent of becoming recognized as insiders: a
contemporary example is the American composer Marty Regan, seen in
Japan as a leader in the creation of new music for traditional Japanese
instruments. Music may be an engine of division, yet it can also dissolve
barriers of geography, nationality, and ethnicity.

Meanwhile there has been an extraordinary degree of globalization in the

primarily oral genres of popular music. Behind them is a long history of
hybridity that began with slaves from many, culturally distinct parts of
Africa being transported to the American plantations: there a new culture
came into being that combined different African and Western traditions.
Both in the Deep South and in the northern cities to which many African
Americans later migrated, genres came into being that were characterized
by rhythmic repetition, groove-based textures, distinctive forms of
vocalization, and improvisation, with jazz in particular fostering
developments in harmonic thinking without precedent in the classical
tradition. This amounted to a new musical culture located within the West
but largely based on different principles and practices; it is a major
dimension of how ‘music’ came to mean much more than Western classical
music.

This deeply hybridized tradition of American popular music spread across

the globe, but it was not a simple trajectory from centre to periphery. Britain
was an early adopter of American rock ’n’ roll, but transformed it and
exported it back to America (the ‘British invasion’ of the mid-1960s). More
complex interactions developed when African American genres were taken
up in Africa and re-exported elsewhere. And increasingly, global popular
music was not just consumed but created across the world, with Cantopop,
J-pop, and K-pop, for example, attracting global audiences. What—going
back to its origins—one might call the Africanization of world music
illustrates how ubiquitous cultural practices are products of complex
transnational exchange. It also illustrates how cultural, economic, and
political clout do not always operate in tandem.

Music is a global phenomenon because it is inherently viral. People can’t

help imitating what they hear, and so—like internet memes—music spreads
between cultures at speeds limited only by transport and communications
technology (from the 30 miles per day of horseback or 120 of a sailing ship
to the 100 Mbps of a fast internet connection). The British rock singing
style epitomized by Joe Cocker or Amy Winehouse is an imitation of white
American rock singing style, itself an imitation of African American
singing style. Descended from the tradition of blackface minstrelsy,
arguably the foundation of American popular music, this musical
blackvoice is not only a mode of vocalization and a nexus of cultural
associations but also a form of ethnic role-play. It may seem astonishing
that the Black and White Minstrel Show aired on British television as
recently as 1978, but musicians are still blacking up vocally (and perhaps
literally in the case of Ariana). And imitation gives rise to hybridization. A
dirty word for John Powell, musical hybridity had come by the end of the
20th century to be celebrated as an expression of the creative vitality that
results from the mutually respectful interaction of diverse musical cultures.

A decade or two ago I would have written that last sentence without a
second thought, but now it sounds distressingly old-fashioned. In many
parts of the world ideals of the productive coexistence of different cultural
and ethnic groups have gone sour with the spread of neo-nationalism. And
music is implicated in that too. The stereotyped language of 19th-century
alterity that defined ‘us’ against an undifferentiated ‘them’ has its more
recent equivalents. If in the 20th century white American singers imitated
African American singers, there is a sense in which African American
singers did so too: to be commercially successful they had to sing black—
that is, sing the way American whites thought authentic Black singers
should sing. Again this is mirrored in today’s China: successful minority
musicians have to conform to the expectations of the Han Chinese. In short,
music remains racially stereotyped. And Powell’s white supremacist
compositions find successors in the alt-right and White power music found
across most mainstream genres of popular music, as well as specifically
neo-Nazi genres such as National Socialist black metal. Music can dissolve
barriers of nationality and ethnicity, but it still acts as an engine of division.

One would like to think there is something inherently progressive about

music, with its stylistic fluidity—its ability to adapt and assimilate—
militating against the fossilized categories and invented pasts on which
populism is based. But that is wishful thinking. Music may be a force for
good or for evil. But it is just the force. People are responsible for the good
or evil.

World musics
There is a sense in which the internet has turned all music into world music:
you can hear just about anything from anywhere in the world—as long as
you have a connection (for some people still a big if). It has created a global
jukebox, an inventory of sounds accessible across the world. And offline
many musical traditions have a global reach through diasporic communities
and migrant workers, or through the involvement of musicians and listeners
irrespective of geographical origin or ethnic self-identification. On this
criterion Western classical music, jazz, and rock are all world musics, as are
such traditions originating outside the West as Islamic devotional music,
Bollywood songs, and the various forms of East Asian pop. There are also
some particularly globalized genres within these categories: only a handful
of countries outside central Africa do not have heavy metal bands, for
example, and 2018 saw a 154 per cent increase in metal downloads across
the world, the most in any genre (J-pop came next). And with its low cost of
production—all you need is a smartphone—hip hop is everywhere. But in
this section I am concerned less with the fact of globally distributed
practices of production and consumption than with the idea of ‘world
music’. So I start with three uses of the term—one highly commercial, the
other two more speculative—and then propose a fourth.
The first is what people think of when you say ‘world music’, and it has a
precise time and place of origin. The date was 29 June 1987 and the place
was an upstairs room in a North London pub called The Empress of Russia.
Representatives of a number of London-based record companies met to
discuss how they could more effectively market a developing genre that
lacked a name but combined Western pop style with sounds from outside
the West, both instrumental and vocal. The international success of Paul
Simon’s Graceland, released the previous year and created in collaboration
with South African musicians such as the male choral group Ladysmith
Black Mambazo, had demonstrated the potential of such a combination, but
record stores did not know what bin to put it in and shoppers did not know
where to look for it. Delegates at the meeting voted to call the new genre
‘World music’ (runners-up included World beat, which would have been
more accurate, as well as Tropical and Hot beat). And at a follow-up
meeting they agreed to spend £3,500 on a publicity campaign, one of the
most cost-effective investments ever.

What delegates couldn’t agree on was what World music actually was; all
they could say is what it wasn’t (reggae, jazz, blues, folk). As it developed
under the World music banner, the genre might be described in the same
terms musicologist/ethnomusicologist Kofi Agawu uses to describe the
impact of Western music in Africa: it ‘colonized significant portions of the
African landscape’, he writes, ‘taking over its body and leaving an African
dress, transforming the musical background while allowing a few salient
foreground features to indicate an African presence’. In the same way, the
pop style that had developed in the West but now pervaded the world
provided the body of World music—its harmonic, rhythmic, and textural
infrastructure—while local musics from outside the West added the dress:
new instrumental sounds, playing techniques, or patterns of vocalization.
The pop body ensured ready accessibility across world markets, the local
dress provided novelty and a touch of the exotic. In effect musics from
outside the West—‘non-Western’ musics—were lumped together as an
undifferentiated other and reduced to local colour. There was a distinct
whiff of colonialism by other means. But as a commercial venture the
World music formula could not be faulted.
My next two examples of ‘world music’ were both put forward by
composers and are in a sense mirror images. The first goes under the name
Weltmusik, which is simply German for ‘world music’, and it is an idea that
circulated widely in European avant-garde circles during the 1970s. The
leading German composer of the time, Karlheinz Stockhausen, related it to
his 1966 composition Telemusik—a tape piece he wrote in Tokyo that
incorporates many musical materials from outside the West. In this piece,
Stockhausen declared, his aim was ‘not to write “my” music, but the music
of the whole earth, of all countries and races’; three years later he claimed
that Telemusik ‘achieves a higher unity, a universality of past, present and
future’. And four years after that he published an article entitled Weltmusik
which envisaged the dissolution of the world’s existing musical cultures and
their reassembly into the utopian vision of a ‘unified world culture’.

Stockhausen presents this as a collective project located on a level playing

field, as when he says ‘a European can experience Balinese music, a
Japanese music from Mozambique, and a Mexican music from India’. But
his words betray him. He speaks of how ‘people from other musical
cultures’ must be fascinated by the perfection of ‘the varnished black
Steinway piano’ (I have a lurid vision of savages from the dark continent
bowing down before this new fetish), and a paragraph later he writes ‘we
must get used to the idea that European cultural standards will retain, and
even intensify, their fascination for all other people’. In short his Weltmusik
turns out to be a Eurocentric project after all, less a utopia than a fantasy of
world domination in the tradition of Schoenberg, who fifty years earlier had
claimed his invention of serialism would ‘ensure the supremacy of German
music for the next hundred years’. And actually, Stockhausen’s talk of
universality might have led us to suspect as much all along (remember
Bhabha).

The mirror image comes from Chou Wen-Chung (Zhou Wenjong), a

composer who was born in China but moved at the age of 23 to the United
States and spent most of his career at Columbia University, New York.
Chou’s vision begins in a mythical past: the traditions of Eastern and
Western music share a common origin, he says, and that is why we can still
hear commonalities between them. But as East and West have diverged,
each has lost touch with part of this heritage. Eastern traditions have
retained key aesthetic principles that range from timbral sensitivity and
spiritual cultivation (remember Holst and the Beatles) to the capacity to
productively assimilate foreign influences; Western music has lost these but
is superior to Asian music in technical terms (thematic development,
counterpoint, harmony, tonality). In his own compositions Chou aimed at a
‘re-merger’ that would combine the strengths of both. But he had a bigger
claim: we are witnessing ‘the confluence of all musical cultures towards a
new mainstream of musical tradition’, he wrote, an ‘irresistible rush of
musical tributaries towards a world music that we can witness in our own
lifetime’. Chou died in 2019 at the age of 96.

All of these three visions of world music turn on the idea of a fusion or
synthesis of Western and non-Western music (Stockhausen’s ‘unified world
culture’). Rather than stylistic synthesis, however, world music might be
conceived as a global network of linked music-making that fosters
interaction between cultures that are distinct but interconnected. Seen this
way the (originally) Western classical-modernist tradition becomes a prime
candidate, and indeed both Stockhausen’s and Chou’s visions of world
music came out of it. When I described them as mirror images, however, I
was overlooking a crucial difference between them.

Stockhausen’s musical training was entirely Western. Chou, in contrast, had

acquired experience in both Chinese and Western music before emigrating,
following which he studied with the German-American composer Otto
Luening and the French-American composer and pioneer of electronic
music, Edgard Varèse. While committed to introducing an Asian sensibility
into his compositions, Chou was a composer in the Western classical-
modernist tradition, like Tan Dun (who studied with Chou at Columbia) or
Qu Xiaosong (who also spent time at Columbia but later returned to China).
A consequence of the processes of modernization that took place in so
many countries during the 20th century is that classical-modernist
composers—composers who work with staff notation or electroacoustic
media—are to be found in almost as many countries as metal bands. The
more successful ones travel internationally and sometimes pursue
simultaneous careers on different continents. They may live in New York,
London, or Shanghai, but they do so with knowledge of and a sense of
relationship to what happens elsewhere in the world. They see themselves
as an international community of composers located within different
cultures but with a linked heritage. That is one sense in which classical
music is a world music.

But it’s not just composition. It’s also the performance of existing music—
the bulk of classical music-making and consumption the world over. That
too is a world music, and not simply in terms of the globetrotting of high-
profile conductors and pianists. I spoke of the early development of Western
classical music in China as part of that country’s programme of
modernization; it remained a permanent fixture in Chinese public life—
apart from a period during the Cultural Revolution when political
circumstances drove it into private homes—and after Mao Zedong’s death
in 1976 it became a prominent expression of the new, internationalist, Sino-
capitalist China. In urban centres swollen by migration from the
countryside, 18th- and 19th-century European music became part of an
increasingly affluent middle-class society—much as had happened in 19th-
century Europe—and by the time of the 2008 Beijing Olympics classical
music was a focus of national pride. The National Centre for Performing
Arts (Figure 21), a spectacular titanium and glass structure approached by a
walkway under its surrounding lake and seating a total of 5,452, is located
close to Tiananmen Square and was completed in time for the Olympics. It
has its own resident orchestra, with a programme of international tours.
Meanwhile jet-setting virtuosi such as the pianists Lang Lang, Yundi (Li),
and Yuja Wang are seen as cultural ambassadors for China.
21. National Centre for Performing Arts, Beijing.

If that is another sense in which classical music is a world music, then it is

music in a world that is not just increasingly globalized—economically and
environmentally interdependent—but also cosmopolitan, meaning that
musics originally associated with specific places, ethnicities, and histories
have become links in what might be called a culture of global connectivity.
People sometimes express surprise that Chinese musicians play Mozart so
well, as if the ability to play Mozart was somehow encoded in one’s genes.
But we don’t think about food that way. Nobody is surprised if a French
chef cooks Chinese food, and in fact it has become something of a
professional expectation that chefs master a range of cuisines. The same is
true of music: as the musicologist Derek Scott says, ‘professional musicians
now find themselves interpreting and performing music from a large
number of different cultural traditions’. And what applies to chefs and
performers also applies to their clienteles. We don’t think it odd if French
people eat Chinese food or vice versa. In the same way people decide
whether they are in the mood for French classical music, American 1970s
rock, or J-pop—choices made possible by their permanent availability on
streaming services. They also embrace more lasting affiliations to one style
of music or another: as I said in Chapter 4, this is just one of the modalities
of consumerist identity construction, along with the car you drive, the home
decor you choose, and the clothes you wear. It is what I meant when I said
music has come to embody a value system constructed around listeners and
consumers. This is music as lifestyle, now in a world context.

There are those who think this kind of consumerist cosmopolitanism—and

the celebrity culture that is linked to it—is as ethically bankrupt as it is
ecologically unsustainable, part of a global system built on social and
economic inequity. Ross Daly—with his Irish ancestry, English birth, and
specialism in the Cretan lyra the very model of a world musician—makes a
more focused attack on musical cosmopolitans, sending up the

world music freaks kitted out with all the latest hi-fi gadgetry, surrounded by hundreds of
CDs, records, and DAT recordings, who listen to West African griots one minute, Japanese
Koto music the next and then Bengali music—and when you talk to them about the music,
you realise they don’t understand the first thing about the music, that they haven’t got a clue
about the cultural and human background.

His prescription? Forget records and instead listen to a great deal more live
music. And Daly adds that until we do that—until we put the people back
into the music—it is ‘far too early…to talk about world music’.

Last words
Daly wrote that in 1992 (hence his reference to the now obsolete DAT
format), but even then his vision of world music—the mutual, face-to-face
encounter of musicians and music lovers from diverse cultures—conveyed
a nostalgia for the old days when music was heard only at the time and
place of its making. In reality music is much more frequently heard through
earbuds or in complexly mediated forms such as the Prudential commercial
with which I began this book, and it retains the potential to be humanly
meaningful under all these conditions. And actually, the Prudential
commercial exemplifies many of the dimensions of music’s meaning I have
been talking about in the course of this book. Just to cite a few, it depends
on music’s ability to connote deeply held values, and to communicate them
almost instantaneously. It shows how music is wrapped up with people’s
identity and sense of self, while the voiceover speaks to viewers with the
same quality of confidentiality—of vicarious intimacy and unmediated
access—experienced by fans of Beethoven in the 19th century, Sinatra in
the 20th, and Rihanna in the 21st. It is also the ultimate hidden persuader, as
shown by the purely musical logic that positions Prudential as the solution
to all your pension problems.

And it does this without your being aware of it. As the artifice that presents
itself as nature, music slips under the radar. It has the power over people
against which so many stories warn: the Sirens, whose enchanting song
lured lovesick mariners onto the rocks; the Pied Piper, whose music
persuaded the children of Hamelin to follow him into a cave from which
they never returned; or the voice of Saruman in The Lord of the Rings, ‘low
and melodious, its very sound an enchantment’—the very model of the
populist politicians who are wreaking havoc across today’s world. Music, in
reality a practice that is constantly changing, presents itself as not only
natural but also immutable (remember how people resisted the evidence of
early recordings). Gagaku, the long but discontinuous tradition of Japanese
court music, was reinvented in the late 19th century and instantly became
the audible symbol of Japan’s ancient and unbroken nationhood. Western
music introduced to Europe’s colonies legitimized imperial power by giving
it the appearance of universality. Music also naturalizes hierarchies of
gender and race, so abetting the essentialization that reduces people to
tokens. Race is not a biological given—there is a continuum of physical
features and skin colours that belies cultural constructions of race—but
music perpetuates such divisions through social practice, even as it has the
potential to erase them.

Music, in short, can serve as an instrument of ideology, communicating

values, hierarchies, and political beliefs while disguising its operation.
Rooting out ideology is the business of critical theory, the aim of which the
sociologist Max Horkheimer defined as ‘to liberate human beings from the
circumstances that enslave them’. And through Theodor Adorno (both a
sociologist colleague of Horkheimer’s and a composer who studied with
Schoenberg’s pupil Alban Berg), ideas from critical theory entered
musicology in the 1980s and 1990s. It acquired a political edge that music
history had previously lacked (at least outside Communist countries);
traditional humanities-based approaches were increasingly supplemented by
thinking drawn not only from sociology, anthropology, and semiotics, but
also from gender and postcolonial studies. In a turn towards what is
sometimes called the hermeneutics of suspicion, attention settled on music’s
role in legitimizing power and social injustice, with traditional aesthetic
approaches to music—approaches that see it as concerned solely with
universal values of beauty—being seen (again in Bhabha’s phrase) as
masking ethnocentric norms, values, and interests.

Music is a powerful force in both personal and social life, and

understanding its effects is as important a skill for navigating today’s world
as understanding the potential for deception inherent in photography or
deepfake video. It is part of contemporary media literacy. One might argue
that the slashing of school music provision in the UK that resulted from the
austerity agenda and the rolling back of the state deprives young people of
such skills, as well as helping to transform music into an enclave of
privilege. And we need to remember that for every ‘us’ that music helps to
foster there is also a ‘them’, as illustrated by Powell and the alt-right or by
the flute and drum bands of unionist parades in Northern Ireland. Yet
suspicion can go too far. Against these negative examples we might cite, for
example, the role of ‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica’ as a symbol and facilitator of
the unity of purpose that helped put an end to apartheid in South Africa. We
might think of the many people who say joining a choir has changed their
life (and there are said to be more choirs in Britain today than fish-and-chip
shops). We might think of the entire field of music therapy, in which trained
practitioners employ music as a means of forging relationships with clients
who suffer from a range of communicative or other disorders. Or we might
simply consider the pleasure music gives. As I said, music is not inherently
good or bad. Its powers can be harnessed for better or for worse.

But then, for every academic who is too suspicious of music, there is a
journalist who is too uncritical. ‘Music is a force for change, for good and,
yes, for harmony’, read a leading article from The Guardian in 2006; it
spoke of ‘young people from communities which, though apparently
hopelessly divided, have come together to make music and, in the process,
understand more about each other and each other’s cultures’. It was talking
about the West–Eastern Divan Orchestra, co-founded by Edward Said and
Daniel Barenboim in 1999 as a means of promoting mutual understanding
between Palestinians and Israelis, and made up of Arab, Jewish, and
Spanish students. The utopian principle underlying it is one of mutual
dependence: in Barenboim’s words, ‘an orchestra requires musicians to
listen to each other; none should attempt to play louder than the next, they
must respect and know each other’. For a time the orchestra was the
media’s darling, its achievements much hyped, even as its critics pointed
out that many of the students treated it as a passport out of the Middle East
and that it diverted funding from less high-profile but more sustainable
initiatives on the ground. Barenboim himself, however, was more modest in
his assessment of what the orchestra could achieve. In 2004, after the
orchestra’s famous concert in Ramallah, he said that it ‘did not end the
conflict. Yet, at least for a couple of hours, it managed to reduce the level of
hatred to zero.’

In the same way, we should recognize music’s potential not by making

excessive claims for it but through acknowledging its well-documented
personal and social value. And it’s the same with music’s potential for
cross-cultural communication in a global world that is nevertheless beset
with suspicion and misunderstanding. We saw the Eurocentrism underlying
Stockhausen’s claim, in his article on Weltmusik, that ‘a European can
experience Balinese music, a Japanese music from Mozambique, and a
Mexican music from India’. Without some effort at understanding it on its
own terms, Europeans may experience Balinese music only on theirs, so
appropriating it to their world view rather than accepting and engaging with
its otherness—and so, according to the music philosopher Stephen Davies,
someone who listens to Balinese music but does not anticipate what might
come next, or experience a sense of closure at the end, is interested ‘not in
the music, but in the noise it makes’. The logic is impeccable but there is a
danger of throwing out the baby with the bathwater. For one thing, on
Davies’s criteria, we might have to say a lot of listeners to Western music,
too, are interested not in the music but the noise it makes—but do we really
want to say that? And for another, even if music is not a universal language,
it can afford pleasure and a sense of common humanity that crosses cultural
boundaries in a way that real languages cannot. Listening to a recording of
Balinese music can do that, and it can also stimulate the effort to learn
about it on its own terms and so achieve the kind of informed cross-cultural
understanding Davies has in mind.
But here I must acknowledge that Daly has a point. Humans are social
animals, and music has its greatest potential for meaning when we
experience it with other people. That might mean a massed performance of
‘Nkosi Sikelel’ iAfrica’ in the dying days of the apartheid regime; it might
mean that Swedish choir member hearing the voices around her and feeling
herself merged with the music; it might just mean listening to music with a
significant other. However fleetingly, musical intimacy brings people
together. Ultimately it is not a matter of understanding in Davies’s sense. It
is a matter of musically shared humanity.