The music of
Facing the dictatorship of the melody
- As I write what follows, I am reminded of Iron Maiden and our mother. For me, music – which is also very good – is just noise. So why do I deny the musical character to certain sounds that are just noise to my ears? I mean, what is music?
Ed Jared
Have you ever had one of these tests to find out if your hearing is correct? Try to imagine – it would sound more accurate – one of those whistling sounds that make you hear to measure the health of your eardrums, but much louder. Then the noise, the buzz, the giant hand making a ball with aluminum foil... It's like you're in a factory, but it's totally unpleasant. So ten minutes. A guitarist then appeared on stage. The verb “Jo”, in this case, has a full meaning. The musician, let’s say so for the moment, has beaten the instrument, dragged it from the ground, kicked it, used countless techniques except those taught in the conservatory... and made his own make sounds that we have never heard on a guitar.
On May 28th, Bilbao’s Zarukafest music festival began. I'm sure it's weird. The music? The music? If you take a survey, it’s likely that 100% would say no. Because we all know very well what music is, what happens is that we wouldn’t know – if we needed it – how to properly define it.
Our ignorance is understandable. Xabi Erkizia, a lesbian musician who overstepped the bounds of conventionalism a long time ago, says that music itself cannot be defined. He did a bit of an essay, however, at our request: “Music is orderly sound. This is the most neutral, fair definition.” It’s also the widest, and that’s why it’s the fairest.
Is the number of melodies infinite or will it ever end?, has more than one wondered. The simple fact of asking questions is a trap in itself, because it presents us with music as if it were a closed thing, which is done with certain elements. According to this, the music would be a combinatorics of these elements, something that ends in the score. So many notes, so many combinations. It's pure mathematics. But there is fraud there, because the same combination can have very different results.
To understand music, we must take into account many things, Erkizia reminds us: the state of the listener, the touch that the performer gives him... and most importantly, the space. “It’s not the same to listen to music on the street, in the church, in the ballroom or in the auditorium. What if, even when a melody is closed, a space extracts more harmonics from that melody? Is it the same melody or another? We should add the combination of spaces to the combination of notes and see if the harmonics that each space adds do not create a new melody. I don’t think the melody ends in the score, on the contrary, that’s where it starts.”
But it can also go beyond the score. Western culture uses a certain scale and has a strict system for transcribing music: a dodeca-canonical scale of twelve tones – a succession of seven notes starting with Do, Re, Mi plus half tones – but go somewhere else in the world and you’ll find another. The problem is that the omnipotent West wants to rule in everything, and so on. “This is one of the biggest mistakes ethnomusicology has made,” says Erkizia, “Westerners who traveled to Arabia or India and wanted to transcribe their music with the molds here, because they only knew our dodecaphonic scale.” But why not use the 15-tone scale? Or why not just play without scale? Concrete music, which is made with recorded sounds and noises, broke the rules in the 20th century. On what scale can a car make a sound? Our pentagram does not accept microtones, but if they exist: how many notes are there between Do and the sustained Do? As many as you want. The only limits are those of our hearing.
“When concrete music started it was a scandal, but decades have passed and it’s been overcome,” says Erkizia. However, he adds, for most of us this is strange music, like any style that moves too far away from the canon. When we say strange, let’s understand that most of us don’t like it. But do we have the right to deny that it is music? Erkizia has shown us that this question has to do with power: “The criteria that have been used to define music denounce the need for a classification, which is related to power.” There is a dictatorship of what we should understand as music, and this dictatorship has established that those shown in the photos on the previous page are not making music, but noise. Against this, a minority proclaims freedom, the freedom provided by the indefinability of music. Was it the music we heard or not? Let someone decide.
On May 28th, Bilbao’s Zarukafest music festival began. I'm sure it's weird. The music? The music? If you take a survey, it’s likely that 100% would say no. Because we all know very well what music is, what happens is that we wouldn’t know – if we needed it – how to properly define it.
Our ignorance is understandable. Xabi Erkizia, a lesbian musician who overstepped the bounds of conventionalism a long time ago, says that music itself cannot be defined. He did a bit of an essay, however, at our request: “Music is orderly sound. This is the most neutral, fair definition.” It’s also the widest, and that’s why it’s the fairest.
The infinite music
Is the number of melodies infinite or will it ever end?, has more than one wondered. The simple fact of asking questions is a trap in itself, because it presents us with music as if it were a closed thing, which is done with certain elements. According to this, the music would be a combinatorics of these elements, something that ends in the score. So many notes, so many combinations. It's pure mathematics. But there is fraud there, because the same combination can have very different results.
To understand music, we must take into account many things, Erkizia reminds us: the state of the listener, the touch that the performer gives him... and most importantly, the space. “It’s not the same to listen to music on the street, in the church, in the ballroom or in the auditorium. What if, even when a melody is closed, a space extracts more harmonics from that melody? Is it the same melody or another? We should add the combination of spaces to the combination of notes and see if the harmonics that each space adds do not create a new melody. I don’t think the melody ends in the score, on the contrary, that’s where it starts.”
Prisoner on the scale
But it can also go beyond the score. Western culture uses a certain scale and has a strict system for transcribing music: a dodeca-canonical scale of twelve tones – a succession of seven notes starting with Do, Re, Mi plus half tones – but go somewhere else in the world and you’ll find another. The problem is that the omnipotent West wants to rule in everything, and so on. “This is one of the biggest mistakes ethnomusicology has made,” says Erkizia, “Westerners who traveled to Arabia or India and wanted to transcribe their music with the molds here, because they only knew our dodecaphonic scale.” But why not use the 15-tone scale? Or why not just play without scale? Concrete music, which is made with recorded sounds and noises, broke the rules in the 20th century. On what scale can a car make a sound? Our pentagram does not accept microtones, but if they exist: how many notes are there between Do and the sustained Do? As many as you want. The only limits are those of our hearing.
“When concrete music started it was a scandal, but decades have passed and it’s been overcome,” says Erkizia. However, he adds, for most of us this is strange music, like any style that moves too far away from the canon. When we say strange, let’s understand that most of us don’t like it. But do we have the right to deny that it is music? Erkizia has shown us that this question has to do with power: “The criteria that have been used to define music denounce the need for a classification, which is related to power.” There is a dictatorship of what we should understand as music, and this dictatorship has established that those shown in the photos on the previous page are not making music, but noise. Against this, a minority proclaims freedom, the freedom provided by the indefinability of music. Was it the music we heard or not? Let someone decide.