Yesterday, an interesting article with the headline “Music Criticism Has Degenerated Into Lifestyle Reporting” appeared on the Daily Beast. When I say “interesting” I mean inflammatory, frustrating, and rife with the kind of blanket statements that I had no good reason to engage with and yet found too tantalizingly wrong-headed to ignore.
The article, written by jazz critic Ted Gioia, described a series of tendencies Gioia thought were ruining the way music is covered today, most of which boiled down to the idea that music writing had lost focus on the structure and technicalities of music. “When Harry Connick, Jr. recently used the word ‘pentatonic’ on 'American Idol',” he wrote, “his fellow judge Jennifer Lopez turned it into a joke. And, indeed, what could be more humorous than a musician of Connick’s stature trying to talk about musical scales on a TV reality show?”
This refocused my attention on a question I’ve had in the back of my mind for years: What role, if any, does knowing the language of music play into writing about it?
Let me introduce myself: My name is Mike. When I was nine years old I came home from public school and with no prompting told my mom I wanted to play the violin. I spent every Saturday from 1998 to 2000 riding the Metro-North from Connecticut to New York to take classes in theory, counterpoint, sight-singing, composition, and all the other tenets that qualify me to call myself “classically trained.” Basically, I know what Gioia means when he says “pentatonic.”
Does it matter? In my experience, not really. I’m impressed by the way Brian Wilson used alternate chord voicings in “God Only Knows” in order to create the anchor of a descending bassline, but it doesn’t make me like “God Only Knows” more or less than I would otherwise. Like any specialized vocabulary, the language of music gives names to things that exist whether we name them or not. And when I watch the "American Idol" exchange Gioia cites, what strikes me is that Connick uses his explanation of pentatonic scales to dismiss a particular singer’s performance, not illuminate it. His expertise is wielded like a weapon. In the end he comes off like a salty pro who can’t appreciate the magic because he already knows the trick.
I recently got into a conversation with a musician friend in which I used the word “rubato,” an term that literally means “stolen time” but refers to the way a soloist might slow down or speed up according to how the performer feels. An example off the dome is something like the way Animal Collective, on their album Campfire Songs, speeds up from “Queen In My Pictures” into “Doggy”. Or Frankie Cosmos' recent "Birthday Song". My friend was into it—it gelled with certain things he was considering doing in his own music, which up to this point had been rhythmically strait-laced. It gave legitimacy and history to an idea that was otherwise intuitive. Had I not introduced him to the term, he probably would’ve gone rubato anyway.
When I interviewed the producer Ariel Rechtshaid this past November, we spent a little time talking about a process called formant shifting, which has nothing to do with how an instrument is played but everything to do with how it’s processed. (My favorite example of it is on Ezra Koenig’s vocal break in Vampire Weekend’s “Diane Young”, which Rechtshaid co-produced.) I did my best journalistic effort to try and talk not only about the acoustical definition of formants, but how software could be used to manipulate them to give us sounds we’ve never heard before.
I mention it because as a reader, I’m less liable to be interested in a dissection of the way an artist uses an age-old language like harmony than they way they use technology. “I hear artists who can sing like birds,” Gioia writes, and “others who would need to retire if Auto-Tune disappeared.” This is... well, let’s just say that it’s a cloistered, frightened, technophobic comment insinuating that all music made with software is somehow trying to compensate for a lack of ingenuity or skill. But Auto-Tune is its own kind of musical manipulation, as viable as a so-called wrong note in a Thelonious Monk performance or the way the right hand of a Bach piano piece can change chords in unusual ways over an ostinato bassline. These are intuitive distortions, not academic ones, and any musicological term I can apply to them would only serve to give some retroactive legitimacy. What might've been a discussion about harmony in the transition from orchestral music to jazz would probably now look like a discussion of software, math, or any of the myriad ways technology changes how we're presented with an experience of sound.
Later, Gioia writes that “football announcers not only talk about ‘stunts’ or the ‘triple option’ but are expected to explain these technical aspects of the game to the unenlightened.” True enough. But football is a game where you score by moving a ball to a certain part of a field and music is not. The field is time and the ball is sound. There are no teams and no “winners” and no such thing as a musical “touchdown” (though I think Funkadelic’s “Can You Get to That” comes as close as humanly possible.) It’s true that music has “rules.” But unlike football you can break them and nobody will throw down a little flag and tell you to go home.
Ultimately the way we talk about music doesn't come down to prescribed terms, but associations, poetics, and the way language has the potential to open music up rather than shut it down. I remember a friend once telling me that a song sounded like braids to her, as in hair. This wasn’t just an unusual thing to say about music, but an observation that tapped into this particular song’s dense, overlapping rhythmic structure without deferring to words like “syncopation” or “staccato.” A few more riffs on the braid metaphor and you’d have what I’d call an insight: A statement that takes something you thought you already understood and makes you see it in a new way. And she didn’t need my education or anything.