What Counts As Music Today

SPEAKER_05 0:45

So if we take a freeze frame of time, like right now, as you're listening to this, take all the people that are on stages in the whole world, and all the people occupying all the vocal recording booths in the whole world, and all the people whose images are appearing on the music streaming apps and on event posters, etc., and all the music coming out of speakers in general in the whole world. And now let's ask the question In how many of these cases would a prehistoric tribe or village, A, been able to recognize this as music, and B, have been able to derive any musical benefit, like any of the benefits that anthropologists and musicologists are likely to cite as reasons for music's original appearance. In other words, out of all the music happening right now in the world, how much of it can we consider music thanks to its own intrinsic properties, versus how many of those cases only qualify as music because it's on a stage, or because it appears on music streaming platforms, or because there's a drumbeat happening behind it, and if you take away the drums, it's just somebody making a political rant. So before this opening of the Pandora's box, with music being a somewhat concise range of activities, there would have been relatively little need for these non-musical contributions to establish something as music. In particular, you wouldn't need nearly as much language and speaking behavior to influence the music behaviors. You wouldn't need language as much to plan out upcoming music, and you wouldn't need language so much to catalog past music, and to negotiate the ownership and sales of past music. You would have no need to explain that it is music or art. You just start playing and other people can join in, and it's just a self-evident enjoyable activity. Do chimpanzees need planning sessions and debriefs before and after they slap the ground and jump around during rainstorms? In this way, it's even kinda easy to see how music might have been able to flourish before we had language.

Evidence Music Predates Speech

SPEAKER_05 2:48

And this actually checks out with some recent work by Daniel Leviton. Here's a clip of Leviton talking with Neil Degrassi Tyson and Chuck Knight on Star Talk.

SPEAKER_01 2:58

The available evidence is that the neural structures that encode music are phylogenetically older than those that encode speech.

SPEAKER_02 3:07

Wow. So evolutionarily, we were musicians before we were talking to one another? That's what it seems.

SPEAKER_01 3:15

From a from a brain development standpoint, yes. And Stephen Mython has written a wonderful book called The Singing Neanderthals, where he posits that some sort of proto-language was music.

SPEAKER_05 3:27

I'd like to take some time to just imagine this prehistoric world where music had not yet spawned language, and imagine what it might have been like to have this unbridled music, this prehistoric music standing on its own two feet without the support and intervention of a completely separate communication system. The way modern music is supported and intervened in by modern language. Here's a clip of Stephen Mython himself.

SPEAKER_00 3:54

So what sort of communication system do they have? Now I came to the conclusion that it was one really which would must have been based on higher degrees of musicality. Because we can see traces of that in our nearest living relatives.

How Language Controls Modern Music

SPEAKER_05 4:20

This vision of a prehistoric freestanding music contrasts heavily against all the language-centric systems we have today in our music culture and our music industry. Where language either dominates music from the inside as lyrics, or where language is dominating music from the outside. With language-mediated systems establishing when it's time to start playing, when it's time to stop playing, how the music will be scripted, how it'll be arranged, who gets to be involved, who doesn't get to be involved, what those involvements will look like from one player to the next, how it'll be branded, how it'll be marketed, who gets to have their name or their company name on various materials involved in the music. And none of these systems or sets of language would have much relevance or importance or use without the music that it's all revolving around. Conversely, without the language and the language-mediated systems, I think music would be perfectly fine. As apparently it was before we even had language, according to Mythen and Leviton and others. Music might be completely different in such a world, it might be less wildly vary, it might be less intentional or less intelligently designed. There'd be a sense of naturalness or accidentalness to it. Or music might have a sense of functionality in such a world and be all integrated and tied up in people's everyday lives. In contrast to today's world, where a lot of us think of music as a performance or a spectacle or something distinct and perhaps optional. And of course you have to ask how would society as a whole be different without language and language-based systems? And that's a bigger question than I'm prepared to tackle on this episode, but I am challenging notions that music depends on talk, such that you have to plan, script, rehearse, argue, have meetings, have products, have a whole company structure, have a whole promotional outlet, have a complete catalog of songwriting, have a big brand and a big stage name, a press kit, and a presence on every single social media platform, including the new ones that come out every week, it seems, etc. etc. etc. etc. In order to be serious about making music with people.

The Sudden Jam That Changes Everything

SPEAKER_05 8:08

And then suddenly, without warning, a jam erupts, seemingly out of nowhere. Maybe someone's been fidgeting with something and it creates a groove, and then a bunch of people are able to contribute various found sounds, combinations of intentional instruments and improvised instruments, maybe hitting cutlery together, and suddenly all the crankiness melts away. And there we are finally making the actual thing that all the talk has been about. And it's a beautiful, fleeting artistic moment, a community moment, moment that's never happened before and is also never gonna happen again. And that's okay because music is not a finite resource. And I just want to indicate as loudly and clearly as I possibly can, we are happy in this moment. We are free in this moment. We have unity in this moment. And then as soon as we go back to talking and trying to capture the music and and trying to script it out for some future occasion and bash it and beat it into some form that will fit on the shelves for commercial distribution, there's no more happiness or freedom or unity. And there's actually no more music anymore either. Because all the planning and arranging and and grooming, scripting and marketing behaviors involved in these endeavors tend to take over and multiply until the actual musical moments are few and far in between.

Trading Planning For Present Music

SPEAKER_05 9:31

I would like to think that in theory, you could replace all these non-musical music industry behaviors with just making music in the present moment. The whole time through. As our ancestors must have done, according to these experts. All these non-musical communications involved in the processing and mediation of past and future musical moments would ultimately be unnecessary if we could accept the music in the present, and if we could accept that all musical moments are going to be a little bit unique, a little bit different, not necessarily be replicatable, marketable copies of each other the way market commodities are. And if we could just worry about today's music, and forget about selling and marketing yesterday's music, and forget about scripting and planning and preparing for tomorrow's music, then I think we would see an increase in the overall amount of music being made, and a decrease in the overall amount of references to the music and representations of the music, and all the other derivative and peripheral stuff that I've been complaining about through the series.

How Words Divide Music From Life

SPEAKER_05 10:41

Ferdinand de Saussure and other linguists have identified language as an instrument of division and differentiation. Saussure called language a system of differences, so it stands to reason that if music preceded language, then music was already at least partially formed by the time language came along and started encouraging us to differentiate between things. Now with language, we can differentiate between the past, present, and future, we can differentiate between categories or genres of musical activity, we can differentiate between people's contributions to music, as in the case of authorship and credit. And we can even differentiate between music as a whole and the entirety of a non-musical realm. And it's conceivable that there was a time before language when we weren't able to do this. Anything that can be grouped all together under one word is thereby differentiated and segmented away from the rest of experience. And of course, this has consequences on how people are going to be likely to approach the activity in question. If we're viewing music as this separate, distinct thing that lives up on a stage and not down on the ground in our real lives, we're going to miss these opportunities to have improvised, sporadic musical connections and interactions with each

Final Challenge To Music Culture

SPEAKER_05 12:00

other. If we're constantly preoccupied with guarding and selling the music of the past and preparing for the music of the future, what seems to happen is that the present fills up with any and every musical industry behavior other than actually just making.