Top 5 things I stopped believing about music
- amoghdwivedi
- Oct 11, 2024
- 10 min read
Updated: Feb 16
It is easy to be opinionated about music, like with most other things in life. But I guess it is much harder to confront ourselves, and to examine and challenge our opinions- we risk feeling foolish and may even feel disoriented if we change our beliefs too drastically. Many musicians have probably been through phases where they had strong beliefs about their musical tastes and preferences, but later, through maturity and reflection, refined, revised, or altogether discarded those opinions. Here are 5 things I stopped believing about music. As always, these opinions are subject to change.
MUSIC MUST BE BEAUTIFUL
I actually don’t even conceptualize beauty clearly in the first place, but I see it mentioned as a source of inspiration often enough that I am skeptical towards the idea that music is about beauty. Beauty seems to be completely subjective. I see it this way: is there any debate about how much mass a kilogram represents? How much distance a kilometer represents? What is the unit of measurement for beauty? Hypothetically speaking, if all humans disappeared from the planet tomorrow, would the mass of a 5lbs dumbbell change? Nope. But in the same hypothetical situation, who would remain to conceptualize the ‘beauty’ of a Beethoven symphony? I don’t know! I guess in order for a concept like ‘beauty’ to exist, a subjective and delicate opinion has to exist, which is much, much more heavily dependent of the existence of a human mind. Things like mass and distance, although conceived by humans, are much less subjective to human minds, I think it is much more possible to envison their objectivity.
In my view, the definition of beauty is more of an unanswerable question and an invitation for healthy discussion, rather than a universal answer that everyone converges to. It is deeply contingent on temporal, cultural, and personal contexts. When most people use the term ‘beauty’, I can’t help but feel like they are using a word they think is universally understood to mean the same thing. I think this just creates an aesthetic echo chamber of sorts which discourages alternative feelings towards the same musical ideas. Indeed, if you standardize beauty to mean one exact thing, then the world will begin to seem like the dullest place imaginable.
There is more to music than ‘beauty’ anyway. Although most people likely experience some kind of emotional reaction to most music, there are other factors that might interest them about music, such as the abstract, historical, social, psychological, and even the economic aspects behind music. Music is, like most things, a multi-faceted thing which can draw people for different reasons. Beauty can be one of those reasons, but it is not the only one.
MUSIC MUST BE COMPLEX
I love complex music!!! 🤙🤙🤙
When I was in high school, I wrote a long essay analyzing and comparing the music of Animals as Leaders (AAL) to the music of Taylor Swift. My principal argument was that the djent metal band was making more complex music and was therefore better. It is quite true that music that is more complex is potentially more engaging to listen to, just because of how many different layers you can choose to pay attention to. You could listen to the music several times and find something new with each listening, and thus feel rewarded for investing your time and energy into listening to it.
If you are, or claim to be intellectually oriented, then complex music can be especially fascinating as you begin to analyze and comprehend the abundance of details and structures you find within the music, because that can be engaging in its own way. Once you taste how rewarding it can be to analyze and comprehend intricately-made music, a lot of other musical experiences can begin to pale in comparison and may lead you to believe that complexity is a musical virtue.
When I went to music school, I encountered many different styles of music that were complex- contemporary classical, jazz with a time signature switch every 5 seconds, etc. Despite being able to understand the musicians’ intentions and technique, I asked myself just how much I cared about complexity, because I felt like I had begun to hear sounds that was no longer interesting, for my taste. I proposed a hypothetical to myself in order to test my loyalty to complexity as the defining trait in music - if complexity is really the answer, then would the most absurdly complex audio file be the epitome of musical expression?
Sound masses are complex sounds. Think of the sounds you hear on a busy street- that’s a sound mass. Or imagine an orchestra- maybe even 5 orchestras- improvising random sounds all at once. That is truly complex music. But to what extent will you, as the listener, even be able appreciate the complexity? A lot of those musical ideas may be impossible to transcribe accurately, may seem incomprehensible to most listeners, but to less impressionable trained musicians, it may feel underwhelming. Absurdly complex music can sometimes seem unintentional, and you begin to wonder whether the music was meant for listeners to hear and experience, or for the musician to make and feel satisfied with themselves. Neither is the right answer, I guess.
Complexity is fun for sure, but it is worth thinking about what kind of complexity you would like to listen to and attain in your work. There is surface level complexity, where the music really just sounds like it was meant to be complex and not much else, but then then there are more subtle ways to be complex. I personally prefer the latter or may even prefer simplicity at times. Although it is worth being patient and trying to understand music you don’t get at first, you can definitely withdraw your interest from music you don’t find interesting and redirect your attention to things you find more rewarding, even if they are less sophisticated.
YOU MUST INNOVATE
leave rap music alone.
Aspiring to be innovative is exciting, because you can try to make new technological, aesthetic, and musical discoveries and being a part of the zeitgeist is uniquely inspiring. If you successfully personally innovate, your sense of individuality can be affirmed and can set you apart from the rest, if you care about that sort of thing. Innovations can be either awesome (“I love computers!”) or dejecting (“the damn computer took my job!”), but they are definitely inevitable and inform both our present decisions and future trajectories.
But is it imperative to innovate? What if you commit to something that’s already been done, but do it better? I recently learnt about the concept of explore/exploit. Whether you should explore new options, or savor (exploit) things that are already known to you, is not a question with a straightforward answer.
Even an undisputed innovator like Arnold Schoenberg famously said that there are many great pieces left to be composed in the key of C. When I took a contemporary composition course, our professor remarked that the best application of 12-tone technique may still be yet to be heard, despite it being a century old. Aaron Parks (whose one piano performance I recently blogged about) once reflected in an interview that he wanted to make music that was truly fresh and unique in his youth, but eventually felt like he was missing some kind of a musical backbone because he ignored tradition too much. So maybe novelty is not always the answer.
When you aim for innovation, it is also worth asking just how innovative you want to be, and consequently, how much history and context you are willing to divorce from your experience, for the sake of being innovative. A big part of what may make your work meaningful to others is how easily they can connect to it- shared knowledge systems can inform and impact people’s appreciation of your music.
YOU MUST WORK HARD TO MAKE MUSIC
hmmmmmmmmmmm
Hard work is cool, and being hard-working is a fine way to be. I too have been described as hard-working, and I guess it’s true. It can be inspiring to see someone working very seriously towards their goals and makes the whole life thing seem a little more engaging and colorful at times.
But I think the desire to be hard-working is extramusical. It is probably some kind of a moral value as opposed to something deeply relevant to music-making. What is ‘morally right’ may not be related to your own preferences or desires as a musician whatsoever. Sometimes, really believing that all you must do is work hard can result in you becoming oblivious to what you actually want to pursue. It can create a slightly toxic “just work hard bro” mentality which isn’t relevant to any kind of musical task or goal but rather serves as a way to boost your ego.
When musicians think of hard work, they probably just think of working for very long on technical tasks. For instance, pianists may be considered to be hard-working because they play a lot of scales and exercises, or composers if they scribble endlessly on sheet music, for pages on end. Hard work is often associated with some kind of mindless drudgery, and if you uncritically believe hard work is a virtue then you may never choose to zoom out and see the bigger picture, and become totally unreflective and lose self-awareness.
The bigger picture includes many things about music like aesthetics, recognizing your own personal background, understanding other people’s music, understanding history, and even asking yourself what you truly want to achieve in your musical life. The even bigger picture has to do with your life outside of music. Music can be very all-consuming at times, but there is so much more to life than sounds.
You can also pointlessly work hard on things that may not even interest you. This is an extreme example but here it is anyway: it is possible for a composer to ask a pianist to count precisely a fraction of a second- are you willing to work that hard? If you uncritically believe in hard work, then you may want to say yes even without considering if that kind of musical precision is meaningful to you. But the way I feel is this: I am willing to grind, but it must be in something I believe in. The actual musical task and my interest in it has to come first, and if it demands hard work then I guess I’ll do it. It shouldn’t be the other way around.
Any kind of pursuit requires some amount of work. But how hard should you work, and how much rest will you need? All of this worth thinking about. I guess it all really depends on what you want to do, who you want to be, where you are, where you want to go, how far you must travel to get there, what you are willing to give up, etc. Everyone draws that line differently for themselves- some will work way less than you, some way more. There is no right answer.
MUSIC MUST HAVE FORM AND STRUCTURE
really bro?
All music, by virtue of existing in time, has some kind of form and structure, and it is always possible to try and describe something about the temporal aspects of music. But when I say ‘MUSIC MUST HAVE FORM AND STRUCTURE”, I am thinking of those people who use those terms when they hear something that doesn’t fit into a standard form. These slightly opinionated people may perceive anything that doesn’t fit into a standard classical form (like a rondo or sonata), popular song forms (AB, ABA), etc., as being formless or structureless.
If you have felt stifled with being chained to these forms yourself then you will no doubt appreciate the sentiment which forces people to seek something new, something different. Those trite forms in music can often inhibit your musical imagination. People are probably mostly used to them because of passive conditioning and or inheriting tradition, and both of these attitudes are worth investigating. Additionally, there are some potential weird undertones to the idea that all music must be organized in the way the continental musicians did it. I won’t use any buzzwords, but you know what I mean.
The video above shows my favorite classical pianist Glenn Gould speaking about Chopin, where he criticized him for not having too much structure in his music, for being too subservient to the mechanics of the piano as opposed to the mechanics of music, even if he was, “as a setter of moods, unparalleled”. But Gould’s preference for “structure” over “mood” is just his own individual opinion and preference for what he seeks in music. You may want to seek something altogether!
In the defense of seeking good form and structure though, one neat thing about them is how they contribute to the interplay between music and memory. Some forms in music may be way more conducive to memory encoding and retrieval than others. In that sense, maybe cognitive psychologists can help musicians converge on a formula for form and structure which lets them optimize how memorable a piece of music may be.
Not to sound like too much of a smartass- it is too late now I guess- but the assumption with maximizing the memorability of a piece is that memorability itself matters most. It is probably just a preference, just one part of the puzzle. A lot of music can be far from memorable in that you don’t really remember what you heard, but the experience of that experience can still be thrilling and meaningful. Think of how exciting it may feel to hear a saxophonist improvise- how many of those phrases will you remember in detail? Probably not many, maybe even none. But being in that space, feeling the energy or the spontaneity of the musician can still leave you impacted.
You can actually ask these kinds of questions for many other things in music- does music need motivic development? Does it need a melody? Harmony? A time signature? Does "melody" mean only melodies in the style of Schubert? Does harmony mean only that which can be conceived on a piano? All these things suggest conforming to propriety, and if you are not interested in that, then you too will no doubt be slightly frustrated when you are forced to accept these limiting conceptions.
Thanks for reading
So am I going to avoid pursuing music that is 'beautiful' to me, avoid complexity, disregard musical innovation, stop working hard, and abandon all sense of form and structure in my music? Of course not. In fact, I may pursue all of these things. The whole point of this post was to try and critically think about what these values mean. It is nice to be critical of one's own self so that you can refine your opinions.
I hope to confront more of my own opinions which I have not tried to challenge so far: to what extent is music is about personal expression? Does intentionality matter? Should musicians be authentic? I wonder how many opinions I have about music which I am completely unaware of?
Music can mean different to different people, we have different brains, come from different cultures, grow up in differing environments, and get educated in varying ways. Like with most kinds of opinions, I am no longer tempted to declare my own so that I can convince myself I have stumbled upon the absolute truth. I would much rather create a web of ideas and opinions, and see who believes what, what seems more convincing, and keep searching for ways to think better, and with more clarity.
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