Not-so-clever children: the reputation of experimental electronic music*
As a way of inaugurating this blog, I thought it'd be good to explore one of the issues that prompted me to set up a blog in the first place: prevailing attitudes towards experimental electronic music (EEM).
One interesting thing about these attitudes is they actually provide a useful way of linking together various disparate genres and styles (which has the handy bonus effect of giving this blog some coherence!). From the glitchy degraded techno of Autechre to the calm drones of Chihei Hatakeyama, from the field recording-based work of Francisco Lopez to the funky IDM-dubstep of Ital Tek, maybe we should be surprised at the consistency of attitudes to different forms of electronic music (though of course reactions aren't homogeneous, and certain attitudes are more prevalent with some styles rather than others).
By 'prevailing attitudes' I don't necessarily mean common instinctive reactions of listeners to such music. So for instance, I'm not going to discuss reactions to EEM which conclude the music is “harsh on the ears” and so on, that is, empirical cases related to common experience of EEM. What I'm interested in are those attitudes that seem to have gained dominant cultural currency – they are the attitudes most often considered reasonable or justified, that seems to have been legitimised as a discourse by their dissemination. This discourse might not be the same as instinctive reactions by a first-time listener; I think it is, however, a discourse that such a listener will be aware of and consider worth answering, whatever their own feelings about the music may be. If you like, call it the reputation of EEM.
What's this reputation then? I think we can distinguish three strands: that the music is in some sense immature or uncreative; that the music is 'new-agey'; and that the music's trivial or irrelevant and therefore not worth listening to. EEM is not alone in holding these reputational elements. Different musical genres overlap with EEM – contemporary rock music might be seen as uncreative, pop might be considered trivial, and some jazz ends up with the new age label hanging around its neck. EEM does, however, hold the infamous position of having all three elements hanging from it.
The immaturity and lack of creativity of EEM relates both to how the music appears and how it's composed. Most EEM doesn't follow the sort of musical structures set down by classical, pop or jazz music. There's often either a lot of rhythmic and/or melodic repetition or a lack of rhythmic/melodic progression (the former applying to beat-based works, the latter beatless), with rhythm and melody understood and promoted, I think, in a very particular way. There's an issue here of why repetition and lack of progression should be considered negatives, something I hope to return to in a later post. For the moment I'm interested in the way EEM is being compared here or is forced to measure up to a restrictive conception of music. Music here is assumed to be a construction of specific quantifiable phenomena, things like pitch, duration, rhythmic organisation; this makes music what Seth Kim-Cohen calls a numerical sign system (39-40), a valuation and consequent evaluation of certain possible elements of a musical piece over others.
What's the consequence of this for EEM? A good way of illustrating this is to ask that you imagine a piece of electronic dance music, say, or an ambient drone work, written out on a score: it wouldn't look like much was happening. Indeed, it wouldn't look like there had been much effort on the part of the composer to do anything interesting or innovative. This isn't always the case – especially in rhythmic terms, some EEM would actually appearing interesting or original when laid out this way. Some of the works of artists like Autechre and Clark, with their dense unsettled rhythmic aesthetic, would fall into this category. When this is the case, however, creativity and maturity are still out of reach – for while it might seem that the music does not suffer from repetition, the music is often still not considered to contain authentic musical progression. This authenticity revolves around the notion of the musical work needing a conventional narrative arc, a sort of 'beginning-middle-end' progression a la eighteenth century Western musical works. The issue is no longer “Why is the melody and rhythm just repeating?”; now it's “Where is the melody? Where's the rhythm going?”
On the restricted musical terms outlined above, EEM for the most part is considered a failure. For this reason, the music is seen as immature or childish, as if the lack of melodic or rhythmic progression in its musical structure represents a lack of its own development or maturity as music. The relationship between music and metaphor is a growing field in aesthetics, and while I want to hold off on going into it in-depth for a later post, I think it's significant that EEM is often personified with reference to human actions such as stuttering or even personality disorders (glitch music as schizophrenic and so on). Added to this are the frequent associations of many kinds of EEM with Orientalist conceptions of musics of 'traditional peoples' – from notions of inducing trance-like states to ritualistic or functional uses of music to the simple but inherently problematic associating of EEM with 'tribal' music (a labelling strategy used both by EEM's adherents and its detractors). The sociological and political reasons for this association are too complex to do justice here but its consequence for EEM can be stated simply: EEM is frequently seen as a regressive or underdeveloped musical genre, analogous to countries of the Global South being viewed as such. EEM, then, is likened both to personal degradation (“This is insane!”) and societal degradation (think of the popular discourse that arose in reaction to Acid House raves in the late '80s and early '90s). Add to all of this the lack of a clear significant historical canon, and the excessively-stated 'fact' that EEM musicians “don't play real instruments” and “do it all with the help of a computer”, and you have a robust discourse on whose terms EEM is uncreative and immature.
Next up in EEM's reputation is its association with 'new age music'. Ryan Hibbett recently wrote a great article on this very topic. As he points out, musicians and fans of more beatless styles of EEM (Ambient is an obvious example) have been forced to distance themselves from the typical understanding of 'new age' as functional background music designed to induce certain states of calm or meditation. Hibbett also notes the synonymous use of 'new age' and 'Muzak', suggesting the association of such music with rampant consumerism and manipulative marketing strategies. Under this conception, the music mutates from artistic object to material object, the listener from critic to consumer. New age, then, demeans the supposedly-autonomous artistic realm (296-7).
Crucially, this discourse of EEM as vulnerable to consumerism is self-reinforcing, eroding EEM's claim to authenticity. Legitimised notions of EEM as new-agey has led to further consumerist use: think of the complementing of BMW TV ads with Boards of Canada, or the frequent deployment of '90s and 2000s ambient music in BBC nature documentaries. I'm not making the usual Adornoist argument/rant about the commercialisation of the aesthetic content of music; indeed, quite the opposite of Adorno, I think a lot of 'commercialised' music does have aesthetic value (otherwise I wouldn't be writing this blog!). What I am saying is that the commercialisation of EEM helps to disseminate the narrative that such music is new-agey in the worst possible sense.
Paradoxically, then, we have a situation where music which hardly anybody listens to is viewed as especially vulnerable to commercialisation, a vulnerability that leads to that music being considered weak and inauthentic. Sure, rock and pop music may be played in the background of adverts – but at least they're composed for purposes other than such use. The kind of EEM that's also played in ads seems ideally suited for such use precisely because of its composition; why else would someone write that kind of music? “You don't expect me to listen to it for its own sake do you?”
The final element of the discourse is that EEM is trivial or irrelevant. This shares some ground with the previous two strands of EEM's reputation while also independently concerns the idea that music can and should (in order to be considered 'good art') have some cognitive value. The first two strands of EEM's reputation effectively amount to the claim that EEM is lacking in what we might call intrinsic aesthetic value (aesthetic understood in a narrow sense): the music neither succeeds aesthetically nor holds value in and of itself independent of extrinsic uses. In music, when intrinsic aesthetic value is lacking often the next thing people look for to make up for this is cognitive value, usually also of an intrinsic nature. The cognitive-value view of art, as outlined by Matthew Kieran, is one that sees the very practice of art as involving an attempt to engage our imaginations, through artistic means, in order to convey insight. There are different ways in which this 'conveying insight' can be interpreted, broadly either as conveying propositional knowledge or, for want of a better phrase, something less tangible! What matters for EEM is whether it is considered to convey insight of any kind. Simply put, the listener asks of EEM, “What is it trying to say to me?”.
The legitimised answer is “Nothing really”. Sure, listeners might try to use EEM to gain some insight, maybe into the inner workings of their soul or state of mind (we're back in new age territory here); but the music itself, on its own terms, isn't trying to convey any sort of insight through artistic means. Dubstep, techno, ambient, electroacoustic works – they just aren't up to the task of doing something like that. It's not that there's often no intellectually-minded lyricist fronting the musical act or that artists avoid making statements with their work via titles or concept albums (since, especially in the realm of electroacoustic and 'sound art' work, artists do sometimes attempt this). It's that the musical language of EEM is particularly unsuited – in some way often left unsaid – to containing and conveying significant cognitive content.
So there we are: an outline of what I think constitutes the popular discourse on experimental electronic music. It's a discourse that listeners engage with and consequently further legitimise even if they disagree with it, and one that EEM artists themselves often feel compelled to react against (one possible result of which, I think, can be a move towards a more academic, high-art treatment of their own music). The reason I've given this outline is it provides me with something to react against myself. I want to show that experimental electronic music in all shapes and sizes dispels this reputation. It is most certainly mature and creative, it opposes tendencies towards muzak, and the significance of its aesthetic ideas can't easily be overstated.
EEM should in fact be seen, both by ordinary listeners and by people interested in the philosophy of art, as one of the most exciting musical genres around, not least (as I'll try to show in the future) because it encourages a different conception and practice of listening. Hopefully this blog will contribute in some small way to making that case.
* The title is a reference to the well-known exchange published in the Wire between Stockhausen and various electronic musicians titled 'Advice To Clever Children'. Suffice to say neither party was satisfied with the other's music.
Seth Kim-Cohen, In the blink of an ear: toward a non-cochlear sonic art (Continuum, 2009)
Ryan Hibbett, “The New Age Taboo” Journal of Popular Music Studies 22(3), 2010: 283-308
Matthew Kieran, “Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)moral Character of Art Works and Inter-Relations to Artistic Value” Philosophy Compass 1(2), February 2006: 129–43
One interesting thing about these attitudes is they actually provide a useful way of linking together various disparate genres and styles (which has the handy bonus effect of giving this blog some coherence!). From the glitchy degraded techno of Autechre to the calm drones of Chihei Hatakeyama, from the field recording-based work of Francisco Lopez to the funky IDM-dubstep of Ital Tek, maybe we should be surprised at the consistency of attitudes to different forms of electronic music (though of course reactions aren't homogeneous, and certain attitudes are more prevalent with some styles rather than others).
By 'prevailing attitudes' I don't necessarily mean common instinctive reactions of listeners to such music. So for instance, I'm not going to discuss reactions to EEM which conclude the music is “harsh on the ears” and so on, that is, empirical cases related to common experience of EEM. What I'm interested in are those attitudes that seem to have gained dominant cultural currency – they are the attitudes most often considered reasonable or justified, that seems to have been legitimised as a discourse by their dissemination. This discourse might not be the same as instinctive reactions by a first-time listener; I think it is, however, a discourse that such a listener will be aware of and consider worth answering, whatever their own feelings about the music may be. If you like, call it the reputation of EEM.
What's this reputation then? I think we can distinguish three strands: that the music is in some sense immature or uncreative; that the music is 'new-agey'; and that the music's trivial or irrelevant and therefore not worth listening to. EEM is not alone in holding these reputational elements. Different musical genres overlap with EEM – contemporary rock music might be seen as uncreative, pop might be considered trivial, and some jazz ends up with the new age label hanging around its neck. EEM does, however, hold the infamous position of having all three elements hanging from it.
The immaturity and lack of creativity of EEM relates both to how the music appears and how it's composed. Most EEM doesn't follow the sort of musical structures set down by classical, pop or jazz music. There's often either a lot of rhythmic and/or melodic repetition or a lack of rhythmic/melodic progression (the former applying to beat-based works, the latter beatless), with rhythm and melody understood and promoted, I think, in a very particular way. There's an issue here of why repetition and lack of progression should be considered negatives, something I hope to return to in a later post. For the moment I'm interested in the way EEM is being compared here or is forced to measure up to a restrictive conception of music. Music here is assumed to be a construction of specific quantifiable phenomena, things like pitch, duration, rhythmic organisation; this makes music what Seth Kim-Cohen calls a numerical sign system (39-40), a valuation and consequent evaluation of certain possible elements of a musical piece over others.
What's the consequence of this for EEM? A good way of illustrating this is to ask that you imagine a piece of electronic dance music, say, or an ambient drone work, written out on a score: it wouldn't look like much was happening. Indeed, it wouldn't look like there had been much effort on the part of the composer to do anything interesting or innovative. This isn't always the case – especially in rhythmic terms, some EEM would actually appearing interesting or original when laid out this way. Some of the works of artists like Autechre and Clark, with their dense unsettled rhythmic aesthetic, would fall into this category. When this is the case, however, creativity and maturity are still out of reach – for while it might seem that the music does not suffer from repetition, the music is often still not considered to contain authentic musical progression. This authenticity revolves around the notion of the musical work needing a conventional narrative arc, a sort of 'beginning-middle-end' progression a la eighteenth century Western musical works. The issue is no longer “Why is the melody and rhythm just repeating?”; now it's “Where is the melody? Where's the rhythm going?”
On the restricted musical terms outlined above, EEM for the most part is considered a failure. For this reason, the music is seen as immature or childish, as if the lack of melodic or rhythmic progression in its musical structure represents a lack of its own development or maturity as music. The relationship between music and metaphor is a growing field in aesthetics, and while I want to hold off on going into it in-depth for a later post, I think it's significant that EEM is often personified with reference to human actions such as stuttering or even personality disorders (glitch music as schizophrenic and so on). Added to this are the frequent associations of many kinds of EEM with Orientalist conceptions of musics of 'traditional peoples' – from notions of inducing trance-like states to ritualistic or functional uses of music to the simple but inherently problematic associating of EEM with 'tribal' music (a labelling strategy used both by EEM's adherents and its detractors). The sociological and political reasons for this association are too complex to do justice here but its consequence for EEM can be stated simply: EEM is frequently seen as a regressive or underdeveloped musical genre, analogous to countries of the Global South being viewed as such. EEM, then, is likened both to personal degradation (“This is insane!”) and societal degradation (think of the popular discourse that arose in reaction to Acid House raves in the late '80s and early '90s). Add to all of this the lack of a clear significant historical canon, and the excessively-stated 'fact' that EEM musicians “don't play real instruments” and “do it all with the help of a computer”, and you have a robust discourse on whose terms EEM is uncreative and immature.
Next up in EEM's reputation is its association with 'new age music'. Ryan Hibbett recently wrote a great article on this very topic. As he points out, musicians and fans of more beatless styles of EEM (Ambient is an obvious example) have been forced to distance themselves from the typical understanding of 'new age' as functional background music designed to induce certain states of calm or meditation. Hibbett also notes the synonymous use of 'new age' and 'Muzak', suggesting the association of such music with rampant consumerism and manipulative marketing strategies. Under this conception, the music mutates from artistic object to material object, the listener from critic to consumer. New age, then, demeans the supposedly-autonomous artistic realm (296-7).
Crucially, this discourse of EEM as vulnerable to consumerism is self-reinforcing, eroding EEM's claim to authenticity. Legitimised notions of EEM as new-agey has led to further consumerist use: think of the complementing of BMW TV ads with Boards of Canada, or the frequent deployment of '90s and 2000s ambient music in BBC nature documentaries. I'm not making the usual Adornoist argument/rant about the commercialisation of the aesthetic content of music; indeed, quite the opposite of Adorno, I think a lot of 'commercialised' music does have aesthetic value (otherwise I wouldn't be writing this blog!). What I am saying is that the commercialisation of EEM helps to disseminate the narrative that such music is new-agey in the worst possible sense.
Paradoxically, then, we have a situation where music which hardly anybody listens to is viewed as especially vulnerable to commercialisation, a vulnerability that leads to that music being considered weak and inauthentic. Sure, rock and pop music may be played in the background of adverts – but at least they're composed for purposes other than such use. The kind of EEM that's also played in ads seems ideally suited for such use precisely because of its composition; why else would someone write that kind of music? “You don't expect me to listen to it for its own sake do you?”
The final element of the discourse is that EEM is trivial or irrelevant. This shares some ground with the previous two strands of EEM's reputation while also independently concerns the idea that music can and should (in order to be considered 'good art') have some cognitive value. The first two strands of EEM's reputation effectively amount to the claim that EEM is lacking in what we might call intrinsic aesthetic value (aesthetic understood in a narrow sense): the music neither succeeds aesthetically nor holds value in and of itself independent of extrinsic uses. In music, when intrinsic aesthetic value is lacking often the next thing people look for to make up for this is cognitive value, usually also of an intrinsic nature. The cognitive-value view of art, as outlined by Matthew Kieran, is one that sees the very practice of art as involving an attempt to engage our imaginations, through artistic means, in order to convey insight. There are different ways in which this 'conveying insight' can be interpreted, broadly either as conveying propositional knowledge or, for want of a better phrase, something less tangible! What matters for EEM is whether it is considered to convey insight of any kind. Simply put, the listener asks of EEM, “What is it trying to say to me?”.
The legitimised answer is “Nothing really”. Sure, listeners might try to use EEM to gain some insight, maybe into the inner workings of their soul or state of mind (we're back in new age territory here); but the music itself, on its own terms, isn't trying to convey any sort of insight through artistic means. Dubstep, techno, ambient, electroacoustic works – they just aren't up to the task of doing something like that. It's not that there's often no intellectually-minded lyricist fronting the musical act or that artists avoid making statements with their work via titles or concept albums (since, especially in the realm of electroacoustic and 'sound art' work, artists do sometimes attempt this). It's that the musical language of EEM is particularly unsuited – in some way often left unsaid – to containing and conveying significant cognitive content.
So there we are: an outline of what I think constitutes the popular discourse on experimental electronic music. It's a discourse that listeners engage with and consequently further legitimise even if they disagree with it, and one that EEM artists themselves often feel compelled to react against (one possible result of which, I think, can be a move towards a more academic, high-art treatment of their own music). The reason I've given this outline is it provides me with something to react against myself. I want to show that experimental electronic music in all shapes and sizes dispels this reputation. It is most certainly mature and creative, it opposes tendencies towards muzak, and the significance of its aesthetic ideas can't easily be overstated.
EEM should in fact be seen, both by ordinary listeners and by people interested in the philosophy of art, as one of the most exciting musical genres around, not least (as I'll try to show in the future) because it encourages a different conception and practice of listening. Hopefully this blog will contribute in some small way to making that case.
* The title is a reference to the well-known exchange published in the Wire between Stockhausen and various electronic musicians titled 'Advice To Clever Children'. Suffice to say neither party was satisfied with the other's music.
Seth Kim-Cohen, In the blink of an ear: toward a non-cochlear sonic art (Continuum, 2009)
Ryan Hibbett, “The New Age Taboo” Journal of Popular Music Studies 22(3), 2010: 283-308
Matthew Kieran, “Art, Morality and Ethics: On the (Im)moral Character of Art Works and Inter-Relations to Artistic Value” Philosophy Compass 1(2), February 2006: 129–43
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