Music Styles

Tyler and I had a discussion about music a few days ago, that I want to share here. Oftentimes, people dislike music because it doesn't sway the way they know it best, it doesn't mold their moods and requires too much thinking, they might say. I want to point out that too much technicality does not override the emotional aspect, and in fact adds to it. I don't think technically simple pieces are bad, I just think the highly technical pieces are not well understood, so would like to shed some light on it here.

Take the classical guitar. Fast, technical finger-picking can be rife with emotion, as much as or, in my case, more so than a cacophany of chords meant to elicit sorrowful emotions. There is an added emotional element to the former style: the technical difficulty. There is an elegance about proper technique, and in the difficulty of producing a beautiful sound when applying these techniques. A classical guitarist who plays a continuous sequence of notes like rain pellets on your roof needs to spend hours and hours and hours working on 1) the agility of his fingers to hit the notes, 2) creating the most beautiful, untarnished sound possible for each note, difficult when the tempo is very fast, 3) finding an over-arching dynamic sequence so the sequence is coherent and fits in with its context - that is, fluid or sticky, loud or soft, and at which places?, 4) finding an emotional context - should this sequence sound scary, soft, shy, excited, bittersweet? All such emotional nuances are considered in this process.

Essentially, what is happening in this process is that the musician has taken pains to channel all of her emotional energy into the form of a highly structured set of notes, and is telling you, the listener, a story, note by note, sequence by sequence. It is not one focused rant or praise, charged with nervous energy and manifested by incessant chord strumming. Instead, it is delicate, nervous, shy, elated, anxious. And the ability of the musician to show her delicacy and care through a technically difficult piece gives me more of a euphoric high than most chord strumming elations.

I also don't believe a simple piece of music needs to be embellished to be stylistic. I like the clean sound of a simple note, a sweet deep sound that is not embellished with a constant frenzy of dynamic and tempo changes. If the musician transfers all her care into creating the deepest, richest, sweetest sound possible for every note, that's all that really matters. I'm referring here mostly to the Bach Partitas and Sonatas for solo violin (or cello). I don't enjoy how many of my musician friends find it necessary to define their own style so specifically. There is much to be interpreted in Bach's pieces yes, but there is also much to be appreciated for what has already been written. That is my style.

I like classical and electronic music for the reason that there are different voices that fit together - they are omnipresent and independent, and you can focus on different voices when you listen to these pieces. So what's happening in a classical or electronic piece? It's up to you to find out. Pick out an over-arching melody, one voice that's playing an accompaniment to the melody, or another voice that's giving the piece a bass boost for added depth, or one that's playing a variation on the melody. There are so many things happening!

That isn't to say I have no love for non-classical or non-electronic music, or that I think classical or electronic is far superior (sometimes, but I might love MGMT more). These two genres are generally excluded in the mainstream, so I like to put a little focus on them.