Big question : ILM and technique in music

but what a Freudian slip ... trainspotters, that's us!

First, this has been discussed before.

I think that Bhatology's comment wasn't as ridiculous as Alex made it out to be (forgetting Sting, for the moment). My impression is that in general, posters here tend to be suspicious of virtuosity and professionalism. For example, some of dave q's comments on Ferry's singing in my Roxy Music v. Bryan Ferry covering RM thread. One the other hand, it's certainly not an across the board sort of thing. To take just one counter example, sundar seems to like a lot of music which requires a fair amount of virtuosity (e.g., modern classical, Indian classical, or bands like Rush).

I think the music I listen to the most these days requires a fair amount of traditional musical ability. Latin percussion is generally considered pretty challenging, and the typical Arab ideal of what a good vocal performance is requires a high degree of virtuosity.

Almost every artist and genre is loved by some people here

Yeah, but the genres which are discussed the most tend to be pop/rock/electronic dance music/hip hop. A more amateur, raw, serendipity seeking (?), approach fits better with those genres than it does with classical music or jazz, for example.

We've had a thread about the Psychedelic Furs, but as far as I know we have not had a thread about Max Roach, for example.

I don't see why any of these things are mutually exclusive with precision, competence, technique, etc.

My own personal bias is towards those areas rather than away from them. Maybe because I am a musician, but also I don't think music that is thought of as highly technical/competent/etc. is the domain solely of a small group of musicians. Many non-musicians love classical, jazz, wickedly fast blueglass numbers, etc. One might also question what is meant by highly technical/competent. I guess you are talking about this in a traditional sense, but surely one could say that any given genre (hip-hop, etc.) has its own level of technique/competence to it, no?

I love the expression of odd time signatures in music, myself, though I think appealing to them as a reason for regarding a band/artist more highly (especially Sting) is dubious.

(by "those" I mean technique, virtuosity, competence, etc.)

Same here. I like odd time signatures, anyway, but they certainly aren't enough to make me like any music that uses them. (I was talking to a musician lately who was going on about the unusual time signatures in a couple of the songs his band performs, and how surprised he was that people particularly liked those songs, as if this was ultra-muso. I felt like saying, you know, the sort of thing you are talking about is simply taken for granted in a lot of the middle eastern music I listen to.)

Clearly, some forms of music requiring traditional instrumental/vocal virtuosity have been popular at one time or another.

That's what bahtology is accusing us of, and I think he's right. But I also suspect that we're right to. Technique w/out other qualities just isn't very interesting. (However you define technique, there's certainly technique in hip-hop too.)

I'm interested in Rockist Scientist's idea that the relative weighting to give to these values differs with the *genre* of music, so that ILM values the genres that don't value technique.

This half makes sense to me. I think jazz is a performer's music, and jazz w/out performer technique or at least permormer expressive charisma, is musical-sludge.

OTOH, I can't believe that we're opperating in a little bubble of indifference to technique here at ILM. It seems ILM is big enough to be a representative sampling of listener passion in the world. Many of us love classical music and jazz. So our downgading the value of technique should be representative?

i think the idea that people don't really value musicianship is a bit of a red herring,its not like anyone here would object to a piece of music because it is technically "good",i presume it is more that if any of us were listening to a piece of music and decided it was awful,someone pointing out that the technique,musicianship,etc,was exceptional wouldn't influence our opinion at all...

Easy for me to say, I suppose, since I has always hopeless at practicing (one of the reasons I went for writing over music--no practicing); I have enormous respect for those people who have devoted their lives to mastering an instrument. That said, I think that the old saw about your limits making you stronger, or at least more interesting, is true. I think a lot of virtuosos (at least in a pop/jazz context) are somewhat undone by their facility. If you can do anything you want on your axe, you often end up not knowing what to do, which leads to a lot of very hard-to-play music that sounds way too slick and easy. I dunno exactly why that should be unappealing, but it often is to me, and I suspect, to others here. Not to pick on Gatton, who was undoubtedly an incredible musician, but nothing he ever did ever hit me as hard as Link Wray.

More to the point, vis-a-vis ILM, there IS something sort of wonky about many super-proficient players--the gear obsession, the love of certain music simply because of its difficulty and complexity, the kind of earnestness that often falls flat in a hipster context, for better or worse--and it's a kind of wonkiness that clashes with the kind usually espoused here. I mean, isn't it generally agreed that Lou Reed was much cooler and made much better music before he became such a gearhead/audio obsessive? (I think we have to take "passionate" out of the equasion, to some extent, because guys like Reed are PASSIONATE about pick-ups and amp settings.)

In short, let he or she who never mocked someone who wears their guitar too high cast the first stone.

To say otherwise is to fall into the 'Status School' trap -- the fallacy that some works have inherently 'more instrinsic technique, more objective quality' than others. Many people (usually those with heavy vested interests in one type of music rather than another, and eager to see its legitimacy established) do fall into this trap, even Harvard professors:

'A great work is still great even if fashion or society or the cultural institutions of the time reject it entirely. There are essential qualities in the form, shape, phrasing, ideas and a million other harder-to-isolate elements of the piece that, when combined, will ultimately determine the worth of the art object -- its greatness or lack thereof. '

Joshua Fineberg 'Classical Music: Why Bother?'
Salon magazine, October 2nd 2002

Your a million mile an hour speed metal soloists are probably the bad end of high musicianship in a lot of peoples eyes, (partly because everyone knew some horrible local band or local kid who wailed at the edge of their abilities very fast but not very well. Like I said to a speed metal fan once "A ten tonne shit is hard to do but it's still a ten tonne shit."). These people usually seek nothing more out of playing music than copying their heroes solos note for note. You couldn't put them in the same arguement as Coltrane or Adderly or whoever. The sheer uncreativity of a lot of very technical music is the bad bit. And as a parralel for bad technique lets hear it for your local bands covering In Bloom with a faltering slapstick drummer. Ghastly. Also on the tech side lets include those people who buy thousands of pounds on kit and never use it. On the low side lets have those guys at Acoustic Nights who can't sing for shit and sure as hell don't know it.

Some people have a snobbishness about one, some about the other. For me the issue is how much creativity is being utilised. I love Mark E Smith's constant invention with a limited voice (ditto Albini, ditto Lou Reed, they're all wonderfully expressive singers) but I also love hearing The Beach Boys in full swing, good Gospel and many more people I consider versatile and technically very good singers. The same goes for everything from guitar thru sequencers.

There are, however, some rules here. Simplicity is more catchy. One of the reason Oasis appeal to the Stella swilling blokey massive is their penchant for using melodies that are only 3/4 notes and very simple I / IV type chord progressions, ascending and descending progressions, all the main meat and potatoes of chromatic sound. A 4/4 drumbeat is the most natural to hear and feel. Not many people can take 5/4 at all, save for Take Five as they've had it drilled into their heads by passive listening for years, but that's by the by.

There is something more exhilarating about hearing a young band with a low level of competence - you get the impression of them constantly improving. We demand this from our artists. We need to hear progression from record to record. Think of how many albums have been slated because the artist seems to be stagnating.

One of the attributes of a good piece of music is when you can hear the artist going beyond your and their expectations of what they are. Wether it's the charmingly average Athlete with their "Everyone wants to be part of the rock scene" mega chorus from last year, or Squarepusher fucking with very complex electronica on "Greenways Trajectory" I get the same excitement. A lot of debut singles that blow me are because of "Wow! I never thought something like THAT would come out of the current state of music!". Similarly an artist I'm already familiar with can give me the same shock of the new when they excel themselves.

As for this board - well like Rocket Scientist says most people here are into "pop/rock/electronic dance music/hip hop". All of this Pop, really. All of this is pretty much about 4 minutes of simplistic joy. I would like people to be a bit more opened minded about more technically impressive stuff, but only if it's being creative with it. You can't argue your ten tonne shit speed metal solo is valid because of it's speed, neither can you dismiss the Beta Band for not being able to play Classical Gas. Closing your mind either way is still closing your mind. It's a bad trait.

Having learned to appreciate the singing of, say, Abdel Wahab, or having had my taste for 70's R&B singing reinforced by R&B-influenced soneros, I find that I am less satisfied than I used to be with most rock singers (and maybe most current pop singers). But ultimately, no, I can't say, "Look Abdel Wahab or Ruben Blades have technical abilities lacking in David Byrne; therefore they are better.

Paying attention to technique can be a way of planting roots in a given genre.

"Technique," if incorrectly handled or treated as an end-in-itself, can obscure or erase personal idiom, which is one of the most wonderful things about all kinds of art for me, especially music. I'd much rather hear most musicians play anything, even the simplest rhythm part, in a way that's uniquely their own than with "proper technique."

There are lots of musicians with mountains of technique that I cherish--James Jamerson! Martin Carthy! Stewart Copeland in his Police days!

If that means playing 3 chord Ramones or on the other end Bach, it doesn't really matter - catchy is catchy.

Of course there are other factors -- if something has been done a million times you'll want people to find new means to the same end, and that's innovation.

One problem with this theory is that some musicians clearly state that that is not what they are attempting to do.

Fair enough, but -- as we know here on ILM -- genre itself provokes huge disagreements. Genres are by no means fixed and unproblematical: there are always strident ideological disagreements about what the genre is, what it's for. Immediately after your post, David Allen comes in with:

My personal theory is that all styles of music are just a means to an end; that end being a catchy song.

So he sees all of music being more or less successful examples of pop, and all of pop's function being to give us something to whistle! Before I got to any kind of discussion of technique with David (technique being, for him, presumably, discussion of irresistible hooks and memorable choruses) I'd have to take issue with his astonishing ideology. And I promise you we would never get to the discussion of hooks and how John Cage just couldn't write 'em!

He could though -- there's a spectacularly catchy hook in the middle of the Suite for Toy Piano (you know, "dnk dnk dnk DNK-a-dnk, dnk, dnk-nk-nk-a-dnk").