BANDS.THE ALL NIGHT PARTY.COM

This week composer Glenn Branca sent up a plaintive wail, mourning the passing of his era in his NYTimes.com Opinionator blogpost, The End of Music.  The piece is incoherent: it’s unclear whether Branca believes there is no novelty in modern music or that he lives in a unipolar, mass-market society.  What’s notable though is how wrong the author is about everything!  What comes through loud and clear is how alienated, angry and confused it’s author has become in this young century.

At the outset, Mr. Branca starts from the assumption that his favored institutional venue, the orchestra, is a necessary, valued and valid medium for the creation of novel sounds and music.  To be sure they are a normative standard, and foundation for many kinds of adaptation and reuse (as bed sound for the Muzak and network TV shows he later mentions derisively), but it’s oxymoronic to consider any classicized, baroque format in a discussion of a future that values fresh ideas and innovation.  As era’s mature, they’re absorbed by their children.  Rock energized musical poles of Jazz, Blues and Folk as they “classicized” with new modes of sound and rhythm.  Punk and New Wave announced that Rock too had become a broad cliche.  Post Modern music has re-embraced all the aforementioned genres as valid, while recontextualized them through production – Today thanks to multichannel delivery (surround) and home recording capabilities,  the sound itself is becoming tangible.  New recordings are made to sound more like performances, taking place in idealized spaces, as compared to 70s Classic Rock recordings that were more purely abstract constructs.  Times necessarily mirror their tools in all technologies.  Music is no exception.

So, when Mr. Branca concludes there have been no advances in the quality of music, one has to ask: which qualities?  Arrangement has certainly been affected by technologies like iPods and home theater.  So have tones/timbres, by way of sounds: we think texturally.  Today’s producer may hire a horn section, play the section’s parts on a synth or a sampler or both, or find the part on a classic record, and scratch it in from a turntable.  Thanks to technology (social and musical), the choice has little to do with budget (it’s easy to find willing players with tools on Facebook or MySpace), but instead, is all about which texture is right for the song.  The very nature of this decision undermines Mr. Branca’s apparent point. Anyone with an internet connection has access to a wider variety of music in every genre, including many we’ve surely never heard!

The tone is cliche.  Glenn Branca’s a grumpy old man, chasing those damn kids off his lawn by complaining that “people don’t want to hear anything new”, while complaining about the commercial gigs that pay working musicians and composers.  His complaint is culturally tone-deaf: today ads for Apple, VW and hip brands break more new artists than radio playlists, usually relying new sounds to sell consumer goods.  Old guys often miss what’s going on around them as their hearing declines – is it just that Glenn Branca doesn’t like younger artists (who haven’t trained at Conservatory) taking work from his generation?

His biggest error is in characterizing music as becoming homogenized.  Where does Mr. Branca live?  In my world there’s been such an explosion in content of all kinds that my time to discover it is the biggest limitation, not money, quality or variety!  Maybe he’s suffering from Alzheimer’s, and thinks this is 1980?  There are far more genres of music, and in my job (designing music products, and connecting fans to bands) the best products are unique, cool and exclusive.  The era of mass marketing and production ended a long time ago.  This is the age of micro-marketing and mass-customization.

With the CEAs still fresh in my mind, let me refute Glenn Branca with hard acts.  Local clean-sweeping heroes, The Seedy Seeds spring immediately to mind, as a genre-busting young band that appeals in new ways, not immediately derivative but clearly attached to an emerging “sound” of this area.  On the Electronic pole of that sound bands like Bad Veins, Eat Sugar, Hungry Lucy, and most recently You, You’re Awesome are turning heads by being a little different than the rest of their now-familiar genre.  On the roots and Americana end of our spectrum we have an embarrassment of riches… From our Sundresses to Jake Speed and the Freddies, from Wonky Tonk to Over the Rhine, there’s a lot of new, unique sounds here.  Midpoint Music Festival annually proves that tens of thousands of fans really want to hear them.

I’ve grown pretty used to music industry execs spewing nonsense like this.  But it’s sad to see a smart, respected, and successful composer blogging mindlessly.  This piece is truly embarrassing to the Times and Mr. Branca: setting aside the rambling, disconnected structure (lacking any thesis, support or summary of points), he’s wrong about pretty much everything.  By the time he asserts that “the new music is just the old music again” (a point that was more true in 1990 than today), his pained confusion has become nothing more than the distracting whine of a sad, angry old man.