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In part one of this post, I outlined the beginnings of a formalist method for assessing the value of a record. By examining the form of a piece of music music, so my argument went, it is possible to divine an aesthetic judgement of the work. And provided you could strip away all extraneous factors that might otherwise bias your judgement (personal biography, class origins, previous listening experience, the variables of conditions of reception, and so on and so forth) you could perfectly expect this judgement to be both aesthetic and universal. That post ended with the admission that this approach only takes us part of the way on our quest to judge a record, and the reason for this shortcoming is that our newfound aesthetic judgement can only tell us about the quality of the work rather than it’s value as a whole. That is to say, it can only tell us whether or not the piece in question is well crafted, or, alternatively, well formed.

It’s easy to see how this gets us into trouble: Candle in the Wind, Jesus Christ Superstar, the latest James Blunt album, and the collected works of The Dave Matthews Band could all be said to be ‘well formed’ when in fact they are, as I’m sure you’ll agree, (and here I employ some specialist academic language) ‘bloody awful’. By the same token the voice of Bob Dylan, the ‘lo-fi’, the ‘art brut’, and the entire punk catalogue would be dismissed by a strict formalist as nothing more that amateur tomfoolery, and I’m equally sure we can all agree that they are (to again resort to technical terminology) ‘awesome’. The real question here is one of ‘value’. It’s all well and good assessing whether something is ‘well crafted’ or if it displays ‘technical finesse’, but when we say that we actually like something there’s a whole different process going on; we’re not making an aesthetic judgement, we’re making a value judgement.

Now at this point it seems we’re returning to the ‘personal’ factors I tried so hard to dismiss in the first post, as the assigning of value to a work of music is often cited as the result of individual personal taste. Aesthetic theorist Carl Dahlhaus dismisses this idea of individual taste as “not at all individual but rather a reflex of group norms” and insists that instead of rationality appearing as a secondary factor in a judgement it ought to be the foundation of it. Whilst being keen not to cause offence or seem elitist, he turns to the old topic of ‘listener education’ that I’m sure has hounded any music fan trying to win an argument in a pub:

The factual judgements underlying the “group norms” are not equally founded.  A listener capable of doing justice to a Beethoven symphony is generally equipped to cope with the musical issues of a pop tune, but the reverse is not true. Arrogance of the initiated must not be defended, but that nobody has the right to blame musical illiterates for being illiterate does not change the fact that illiteracy provides a weak foundation for aesthetic judgements.

For me personally, this has a ring of truth to it, but the bigger picture is considerably more nuanced. The kind of informed judgement Dahlhaus is championing above is part of but one of the several different approaches to ‘value’: those that can be identified as ‘Functional’, ‘Aesthetic’ and ‘Historical’.

Of these three, Functional Value is perhaps the easiest to comprehend. Prior to the latter half of the eighteenth century and the advent of the concert hall, music had various distinct functions in addition to the common one of providing objects for aesthetic contemplation. For this ‘functional music’, the aim was to be the exemplar of a type; “an exemplar which reaches perfection when it projects the marks of the type clearly and purely” (to quote philosophical musicologist Peter Kivy). If one sees a piece of music as functional, then it is a relatively easy step to place a value on that music according to how well it fulfils its function. Take, for instance, the example of dance music: it can be enjoyed and appreciated not merely in terms of its formal properties but also for how well adapted it is for the dances it is meant to accompany. And this is not a concept that died out in the eighteenth century – some could say it is alive and well today. While I meant for the example of dance music given above to be in reference only to the dances of the eighteenth century, the statement could well be applied to the dance music found in clubs today. In fact, I’d argue that such music can only be judged in functional terms, as in my eyes it holds no aesthetic value whatsoever. In real terms, however, I would say that objective functional value has been relegated to the domain of music for films and advertisements, which really are the last bastions of purely functional music in the modern age.

So what, then, of Aesthetic Value? The nineteenth century was the “epoch of aesthetics,” where the factors that rendered music ‘art’ were exactly the opposite of those concerning functional music; individuality and originality. Dahlhaus tells us that aesthetic judgement is “a pronouncement about the participation or non-participation of a musical work in the idea of the beautiful,” but yet again, however, the situation is confused. In this case there are two conflicting approaches to judging the aesthetics – that is to say, the ‘beauty’ – of a piece of music. On one hand we have the conservative Schenker and his search for an Ursatz, and on the other we have the composer Schumann and the ‘dilettante’ school of musical reviewers.

Schenker, who I mentioned briefly in part one, saw himself as the guardian against the disintegrating tendencies of the twentieth century and his approach was to interlace formalist theory and analysis with aesthetic judgements, much as our initial formalist approach taught us. In his eyes, works admired as ‘masterworks’ must contain an Ursatz, (a kind of musical ‘through-line’) and his application of this theory was sweeping and unilateral; if, as in works by Reger and Stravinsky, no Ursatz was to be found then he was quick to issue an aesthetic verdict. The other approach was one that looked contemptuously on ideas of form and technique – the “mechanics of music” as Schumann called them – and felt they should not be displayed but rather concealed.Writers of the time strived to maintain the appearance of ‘dilettantism’; even composers such as Berlioz, Schumann and Hugo Wolf hid their knowledge of music when writing reviews, as if speaking of one’s métier were tactless.

We’ve already seen the flaws with Schenker’s approach when it’s applied to modern pop music, so what then can we take from the dilettantes? Sadly, very little; divorced from any technical or formalist analyses and rational judgement as they are, we find ourselves returning full-circle to the very ideas of ‘personal taste’ that we were railing against not five paragraphs previously.

But there is yet one more facet of value that we have yet to look at; Historical Value. Prevalent in the musical criticism of the twentieth century, historical judgement sees a composition as a document of a stage in the development of compositional methods and musical thought and in contrast to the dilettantes of the previous epoch, aesthetic judgement changed into a technological one. If formal value can be said to be found in the concept of the ‘appropriate’, and aesthetic value in the ‘beautiful’, then historical value is determined by the concept of the ‘attuned’ or the ‘authentic’. A judgement by historical criteria would be a judgement on how fully a particular work is an expression of “what the hour calls for historically and philosophically,” but to apply these sorts of judgements to modern albums sounds very much like relying on that most amorphous and elusive of concepts in popular music discourse: ‘cool’ (if, admittedly, couched in somewhat more grandiose language).

So here, at the last, we find ourselves ultimately – and, alas, perhaps inevitably – railing vainly into the gulf that separates the worlds of ‘classical’ and ‘pop’ music. In a sphere where the currents of fashion and ‘historical appropriateness’ run so shallow and fast, how can one justifiably stand still and judge a piece of pop music? If this is the kind of value judgement we are reduced to – defined by social factors far more than by formal ones – then we hardly needed to have bothered with any analysis in the first place. All we seem to have shown is that these social judgements have a rational foundation – or, at the very least least, a manifestation – in the formal characteristics of musical works. It can, I’m sure, be useful to attempt to apply some sort of formalist analysis of modern albums, but only as a single facet in an approach that includes, and indeed is ultimately reliant on, personal biases and (partly-)irrational opinions. In short, when I review albums in the future you can almost certainly expect to hear the same baseless judgements as I’ve always relied on, but we can rest easy in the knowledge that that is all anyone can hope to offer.

If only all music criticism could be like this:

They Might be Giants – Critic Intro 

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In the liner notes for the first release of Pet Sounds on CD in 1990, Brian Wilson is quoted as saying that “you design the experience to be a record rather than just a song; it’s the record people listen to.” This statement is guaranteed to hit home with anyone who, like myself, views the album as the ultimate artifact of modern popular music. When Wilson uses the word ‘record’, we music-aficionados (or ‘geeks’, if our friends and family are to be believed) instinctively know what he means: we’re not talking here about any mere document or recording or archive; a ‘record’ in musical spheres is a word and a world unto its own.

On these pages I often attempt to pass judgement on records, and find myself again and again resorting to vague, and above all personal reactions to the music. I imagine that many of you will see no problem with this approach, but to me it always feels like cheating. Cheating the process of analysing the work thoroughly, but also cheating you, the reader, out of an assessment of any value. If all my opinions are based on extraneous factors (such as personal biography, class origins, previous listening experience, the variables of conditions of reception, and so on and so forth) then how can my opinion be of use to anybody but myself? It’s a pressing concern for someone who foists their opinions on others, I’m sure you’ll agree, so now it seems the time has come for me to nail my colours to the mast and explain what it is that I look for in an album (when, of course, I can muster the energy to assess an album properly).

The form of an album

When I describe one record as a masterwork and another as a failure I am basing these judgements on something resembling a formalist reading of the works. The success of an album in social fields – either critical or commercial – should really be of no concern; what the argument ought to hinge on is a ‘pure’ judgement of taste. This kind of judgement – one free from personal preconceptions and biases – is not the antithesis of an aesthetic judgement, but rather an aesthetic judgement freed of all the vagaries and uncertainty surrounding the issue of personal taste. Accepting that different individuals can interpret a record in different ways while at the same time accepting that the record itself imposes definite limits on their room to manoeuvre is a useful way of avoiding the two extremes of, on the one hand, an infinite pluralism which allows for as many possible readings as there are readers, each equally legitimate, and on the other, an essentialism which asserts a single ‘true’ meaning. To find the common ground between these two options one must strip away everything but the form of the work, and in doing so one can then make a judgement both aesthetic and, nevertheless, universal.

The main obstacle for this approach is that no-one is quite sure what should actually be examined. When musicologists talk of a work’s form, the general consensus is that all ‘traditional’ musical features – rhythm, harmony, meter, melody – are fair game for inspection. However, finding a Schenkerian ‘Ursatz‘, for example, (a popular technique designed to discover the ‘deeper structure’ of long-form motivic works) is patently ridiculous within the modern popular arena; the melodic and harmonic forms of pop songs are almost by definition far too simplistic to allow for an analysis of any depth, and more importantly, to only look at the ‘notes’ of a work is to miss the point of a modern album entirely. In a classical-romantic work, almost all the events of note can be divined from the score alone. Certainly one’s perception of a piece would be altered if one were to see it performed live, or even to hear it on record, but in essence – provided you have a sound musical knowledge and a familiarity with the repertoire – it is perfectly possible to pass judgement on the technical finesse and craftsmanship of a composition without ever having heard it played. The same can not be said, however, of ‘pop’ music. For starters, one would struggle to find a complete score for any pop record. You might be able to find a ‘lead sheet’ notating some degree of formal design (words, melody, chord changes, etc.) but that wouldn’t provide anything approaching the full picture. Historically, due to the limitations of diastematic notation, performances could never be recorded accurately enough to preserve the idiolect of a particular performer or the exact sonic qualities of an acoustic space, but with the wonders of modern recording such preservation is now an essential part of music consumption, and any aspirant analyst of a pop or rock album needs to pay just as much attention to the (seemingly) extra-musical features as to the notes themselves.

The ‘track’

A useful approach here is to make the distinction between the ‘song’, the ‘arrangement’, and the ‘track’; with the song being that which can be contained in a lead sheet, the arrangement being a particular musical setting of the song, and with the track being the recording itself.  The song and the arrangement may well retain an ontological independence through lead sheets, scores, and performances, but it is the track that is the ultimate artifact – and ultimate instance – of a pop song. The key to seeing a modern album as a genuine artistic instance lies in the distinction between what the American philosopher Nelson Goodman called the autographic and the allographic. Autographic refers to works such as paintings, where the work is unique and genuine, whereas allographic refers to works such as books and musical scores, where “all accurate copies are equally genuine instances of the work”, and it is but a small step to extend the concept of the allographic to the musical record as well. An album’s identity lies in its actual sound, and while that may change somewhat from one reproduction system to another – like a painting hung in different kinds of light or space – it is essentially a fixed set of relationships.

In these kinds of discussions it’s hard not to mention Walter Benjamin, who’s 1936 essay The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction kick-started the debate over the impact of technology on the essence of art forms. He insisted that mechanical reproductions were not genuine works of art in their own right; claiming that the authenticity of an artwork relies on its “presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be.” He categorised this unique presence as the work’s aura, and argued that it was only the original work itself that could claim to have one. So to take his point and argue that, owing to the work’s allographical qualities, every reproduction of a popular song is a genuine work with its own ‘aura’ sounds somewhat counterintuitive, but if one accepts that the sounds emanating from a loudspeaker constitute the work’s ‘presence in time and space’ and create an “authentic musical moment”, then the notions of presence, aura, and authenticity must be transferred to the record itself. It is not the presence of a ‘unique instance’ that provides an album’s authenticity, but rather its unique arrangement of elements; “All instances of the work are equally original as far as the audience – from the amateur to the connoisseur – is concerned.”

Trouble?

This approach leaves a would-be analyst (or ‘reviewer’, if you prefer) with a fairly comprehensive method for judging whether an album is any good or not. However, it’s not that easy; the thing to bear in mind is that this judgement is only relevant to a very specific definition of ‘good’. What a formal analysis provides is a judgement on the craft and technique on display in the record; it would view the albums of Jeffrey Lewis or the Clash as being considerably worse than the schmaltz of Andrew Lloyd Webber or Elton John. A lot of music fans would say that’s a fair reading, to be sure, but even a cursory look through my past reviews will show that I clearly think differently. It’s clear there’s something missing from this approach; namely the adoption of ‘historiographic’ considerations in our judgements, as well as a proper assessment of what we mean when we talk about a work’s ‘value’, and rest assured I will attempt to unravel these problems is Part II of this post next week [which can be found here].

Broken Records – A Good Reason (demo)

Everything Everything – Final Form

[NB: being as this is merely an idle post on a blog, I've tried not to be too academic in style. I've assimilated the thinking of fair few writers and musicologists in this piece, albeit in my own words wherever possible, and a select bibliography will be attached to the final post in this series.]