How Music is Changing
Welcome. In starting to make these regular postings I’m as interested in what you think as I am in telling you what I think... however I don't wish to end up managing a debating forum… ‘posture, posture, as so and so said in 2013… blah blah’. Been there and done that! So, I’ll keep the posts brief, hope you enjoy reading and please do send any brief(!) thoughts to coldbathstreet7@gmail.com. I’ll maybe share some in the future.
Today’s topic is How Music is Changing and how what I am doing with Cold Bath Street (henceforth referred to as CBS) fits with that. I’ve worked for twenty three years in music education. Certainly the last few years working with undergraduate musicians I’ve at points felt my age, that maybe the approaches and interests that I have in music are becoming old-fashioned? Or maybe they're just as useful as they ever were, or more useful than they’ve ever been? So, what are my approaches, what am I interested in? One of the things I've always tried to do with CBS is to base it around the interaction of people, listening to each other and making music together. Response, communication, interaction, ensemble composition… surely this is the usual stuff? The usual stuff?
When I first started making music as a teenager the usual stuff (what I saw/heard/experienced) was group music-making. People getting together in a room and learning to play and write together. Drummer counts four and off you go… The only alternative felt to be being a (folky?) singer-songwriter and that wasn’t me (of course there was/is/are lots of other ways to approach work - which I wasn’t exposed to until later). More recently, a good deal of the performance practice I’ve witnessed brings together a live element with a fixed backing track (or more flexibly through looping of some description). Though I understand the practicalities of these approaches to performance, there are many aspects in which I think they are not as effective. E.g. with the backing tracks there's only one element of the music that's actually being performed in the space - so everything else has got a stiffness in its being pre-made - the possibilities for interplay are limited. So, broad-brush, in ‘the music I like’ I want to hear the interaction between people and sounds in the moment. However in the music-making I've been seeing in recent years there seem to be less of these skills in evidence. Rather, many musicians seem to have moved towards isolated computer-based approaches - work is regularly shared online but not created by people in a room together - it doesn’t have that chemistry. So, is this approach to practice under threat? Is it a generational change?
I have been asked whether mine is an anti-computer music mission? It isn't about that, it's about being a pro people playing together mission. Certainly In terms of education, that approach is much more difficult to facilitate. Maybe that’s why I seem to see less of it? Sitting students down with a set of headphones and a controller keyboard and working on their own is much easier for the tutor than trying to heard the cats making a racket on six instruments in three rooms simultaneously. However the complications of facilitating the cats I think is musically worth the extra effort. I sit down and begin to play, you join in, that then changes what I'm doing and then we both start to take a new road together which is owned by neither party. That for me is when it gets exciting, whether its improv or writing something that then becomes fixed. Without that as an option, the process/art/craft loses something that ultimately leaves the music much poorer.
So the CBS mission is about championing interaction - bringing people together, making sure it is on the palette of possibles, opening it up so they can use it however works best for them. More next time…
