Posts Tagged ‘Musician’

 

The term 'new' has been applied to music for so long now, it's really lost its meaning. Of course music has been called 'new' since day one. It can, of course mean a new work of music from an existing source, more like a 'new music release.'

In this day and age we seem to have become particularly obsessed with labels and 'isms.' Pedagogs look back at the centuries of western music and break it into Baroque, Classical, Romantic and Modern. Modern is given as all the music that starts in around 1900.

So all this music that starts around 1900 is supposed to be the 'new' music. Embarrassingly, the 'new' music is now a hundred years old.  So now we have had to resort to new, even more confusing labels such as 'post modern' (love that one!) 'new age,' 'new wave,' 'minimalism,' the list of dangerous isms just keeps growing.

So we wish to postulate a definition of a 'new music artist,' as one who is 'self actualized,' or 'freedom actualized.' This new music artist does not bend to authority easily but uses as their guide their own musical tastes cultivated from an intimate self knowledge.

By authority is meant all the 'experts' that are born of 'isms,' and things like 'popular opinion.' Whereas a 'new music artist' may have tastes that are in line with 'popular opinion,' these will be derived naturally and organically and not because they are being held there by societal memes. 'Popular opinion' has become increasingly antithetic to creativity in that, in this day and age, it has become more manufactured than ever.

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When I was a kid, my next door neighbor, Billy, and I had a running competition. We were good friends but it seemed integral to our friendship that we compete about most things. If he liked Chevies, well, I liked Fords. It had nothing to do with the merits of the automobiles but, rather that we had to be on opposite sides of the fence on most issues.

He liked the Beatles, therefore I liked Beethoven. Actually I did like Beethoven and, actually, I was a bit fascinated by the Beatles but it would never do to let Billy know.

I remember once, on my birthday, Billy thought he would play a prank on me and he bought me a recording of a Brahms symphony only he put it in a Beatles sleeve, just to see the expression on my face. Actually, when I saw it I thought "well, that's cool, now I have a pop album." I think it would have been like the end of the world, at that point if I had said, Hey, that's cool, I can dig the Beatles too." Billy and his whole family had already built up this whole profile of me being a boring 'classical' musician.

I put up with this steriotype, not just from Billy, but from practically everyone, and then I went to a music school that only recognized the existence of 'classical' music, in fact this school had a professor there who was famous for saying that jazz would never last. Not a particularly original thing to say nor accurate seeing as how the school was in a town where a jazz club could be found almost on every corner.

Then the time came when I took my first trip. To my credit, I didn't say 'I know what it's like to be dead,' (I was thinking it.) What did happen however was that I walked into my friend Big Nose's dorm room and they had the White Album on.

Suddenly I understood the lyrics. I started making comments to the effect that the Beatles were comperable as songwriters to Schubert and my friends just smiled at me and said 'That's nice Brian,' even though they thought it was the controlled substance in me talking.

But I had taken the first steps there in divesting myself of the burden and limitation of artificial musical genre boundries which is one of the most benificial things a new music artist can do for themself.

Afterall, there are only seven different chords possible in any key and like the primary colors, three of them are in fairly constant use accross the board. The new music artist who allows himself to be boxed into a specific musical genre is like Linus in that Peanuts cartoon where Lucy allows him to color by himself but takes away all of his crayons except black.

Musical genre and labels are just about demographics when you get right down to it. Demographics are handy for business but they have proven to be the death of the new music artist.

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