Subject: Loud music From: Linda Seltzer <lseltzer@xxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 24 Sep 2010 16:02:23 -0700 List-Archive:<http://lists.mcgill.ca/scripts/wa.exe?LIST=AUDITORY>In the early years of rock music, musicians such as Jimi Hendrix and the Jefferson Airplane turned up the volume to arouse political or social rebellion against a repressive and superficial culture. The musicologist Richard Taruskin said in classroom lectures that after the violence of World War II there was a reaction against the unbridled emotions of expressionism. Postwar musical culture emphasized the control of emotion, as emotion was not considered something to be trusted. The evidence of this in classical music was the rise of twelve tone serialism and the aesthetic of mathematical structures. Even a mystical composer like Messiaen turned to serialism and other unemotional structures. The rebellion against this in classical music was postmodernism, with composers such as Glass or Goercki. In popular music, controlled emotion was epitomized by Frank Sinatra and even, in jazz, by Louis Armstrong. The rebellion took the form of the return to emotional expression by Hendrix, Janis Joplin and others. However, rock music today has taken a different direction. With the increasing cutbacks of music education in the schools, music has become more primitive structurally even if this is hidden behind increasingly expensive and complex technology. There are rock performances involving a large degree of spectacle, where the music often consists of the singer repeating the same note, occasionally making a departure to sing another note or two. The audience does not notice that there is no melody present because the attention is directed to the spectacle. Similarly, the rhythm is very repetitive and a 1-2 rhythm with the accent on the second beat is considered as novel by the audience. Aesthetically such music feeds into the increasing forces of conservatism opposing sensitivity in our society. People are accused of being oversensitive if they complain about a slur based on race or gender. Reality TV shows feature authority figures who are granted the power to insult the contestants, who are supposed to be able to take it and even appreciate it without being hurt. Workers are supposed to be like interchangeable parts with no preferences or feelings about their office space or their work environments. Loud, repetitive music stamps out sensitivity or the ability to perceive and react to subtle differences or variations in the social environment. What passes for music actually has the opposite effect of what we normally consider to be the purpose of music. Whereas we have traditionally thought of music as something that stimulates elevated toughts, puts us in touch with our feelings, and increases our sensitivities, this so-called music has the opposite effect of protecting the listener from such feelings, which may impede one's ability to function as an interchangeable part that does not make any demands on the system. Remember that for people without college degrees, work often means having to produce repetitive tasks in small spaces, with the output monitored by computer. Factory workers and mail sorters, for example, have their work monitored and they can't drift into the normal ebb and flow of slower and faster outputs in the course of a day. Retail workers are forced to listen to whatever music or muzak the management chooses to broadcast over the loudspeakers during the entire time they are working, and they never have the right to silence. Silence is the pathway to introspection and analysis, which such freedom of thought being a luxury commodity available to those with access to leisure time and a quiet living environment. For this reason I question whether the current loud rock "music" is actually music at all, or, to put it another way: perhaps the varities of uses of organized sound are so diverse that there is no such thing as music, and several of the different cultural approaches to organized sound and its effect on people are different phenomena. This a question that may be answerable by numerous scientific studies in the future. What can be said at present is that the current forms of loud rock music result from the decrease in quality of our educational systems and the increase in the percentage of students dropping out of high school, in some areas, 20%. For such individuals music is a means of numbing their emotional responses to the alienation and stress they experience on the outskirts of society and of toughening themselves for a society that does not tolerate their humanity.