How do we relate to music? How can we study this relationship?

Asking a question like, ‘How do we relate to music?’ warrants an answer that takes the form of a lengthy book, maybe something like ‘Musicophilia’ by Oliver Sacks or ‘This is Your Brain on Music by Daniel Levintin,’ or at least a graduate philosophy dissertation on the ontology of music. But here I’m only just beginning to lay out some very foundational and broad ways to think about the different ways people in Lima, and humans in general, relate to music and how I can go about conceptualizing this relationship. The more I live here and expose myself to different forms of making music, I realize just how complex of a psychological and cultural activity it is.

This essay treats two useful categories of interaction that I think describe a majority of the ways in which we interact with music: interaction with music in a raw musical experience, and interaction with music as a non-musical cultural symbol.

Raw Musical Experience

The first category I am going to call for the time being “raw musical experience.” These are the moments in which we are actually listening, playing, dancing, communicating, vibrating, singing, composing or somehow actively interacting with music in real time. In these moments music might completely consume us, our discursive and emotional minds, and carry us away into itself, into fantasies worlds, into our bodies and out again. In these moments we might be connecting with each other, with ourselves, with a larger sense of the universe, or just with the music itself. And although these moments might be all-consuming, they might also be more intermittent and peripheral, for example when we are listening to Debussy while washing the dishes and thinking of the day ahead or listening to Portishead while having a romantic evening with our partner. The key again to the raw musical experience is that it is the production and/or consumption of music in real time; it’s what happens when we are actually in the moment of listening to music.

In an interview last week with Banana Lazuli, a experimental/electronic music vocalist and keyboardist originially from Canada, we spoke of her reasons for making music. Banana has a variety of musical projects under her belt and a project here in Lima called ‘Mono y Banana,” a duo with Leo Cam, the instructor of my Max/msp taller, beat artist for Menores de Edad, and solo artista under the name Monolítico (hence the name Mono y Banana). Banana says that she makes music to connect, to vibrate with the universe, to feel an expanded sense of herself. And today in an rehearsal with Laura Robles, the director of Parió Paula (the all women percussion group I recently joined) and a locally aclaimed drummer and bassist in a number of Lima bands, including Calavera Rumbera and Push It To the Limit, I was instructed as a new member of Parió Paula to forget myself in the music, to remember that a “comparsa” (in this case a collective of percussionists) functions as one person, as one unified texture of rhythms.

In these two examples from my study, the raw musical experience involves playing and listening to music as a way to transcend oneself and connect, especially in these cases, with other people, but also just with the universe as something greater than oneself. For others, the raw musical experience is more academic, the process of listening and following a piece of music as sheer play of harmonic and melodic relationships, thematic developments, timbral contrasts. For others still it’s purely an emotional ride, and like I said already, for many of us a raw musical experience happens while we’re doing other activities, cooking or riding the bus.

There are many approaches to studying music that look almost exclusively at the raw musical experience. There are cognitive psychology and neuroscience studies that look at what happens to specific areas of our brains when we are listening to music (Daniel Levitin’s This Is Your Brain on Music is a prime pop psychology example of this), developmental psychology and cross-cultural anthropology studies that look at how children develop the ability or inability to process and understand music, and many music reviews that describe the emotional state a particular song or album evokes in a listening. We can also look back historically and see treatment of musical works that spoke of their divinity or sublimity, how the piece carried the listener to a different spiritual or emotional plane; and again the underlying concept of studying our relationship to music here was to get at the raw musical experience, what happens in the moment of listening.

And in Lima, there are many raw music experiences being had at any one moment, trust me.

Music as Non-Musical Symbols

But then there are those many times when we talk about music in the absence of actually making or listening to it, what I will call for now ‘the experience of music as an idea represented by a non-musical symbol.’ This is music as it is referred to as a raw experience by a symbol in the absence of actually having that musical experience. For example, a few weeks ago I was riding home in a taxi from my MAX/msp taller with Irazema Vera, a new musician friend, and we were talking about some of our favorite music and music artists. And in one case, I spoke of the group Radiohead, along with the names of their songs and albums, and the name ‘Radiohead’ functioned as a word object, a non-musical cultural symbol, that represented a musical object (a recording, a performance, a form) but was not the itself music.

Irazema and I still connected with each other over the music in this case, but not through the raw experience of actually listening to or making music, but rather through the non-musical symbol that reminded both of us of a memory of listening to and enjoying Radiohead’s music in the past. Sometimes interacting with music as a non-musical symbol in the absence of listening to music can actually bleed into having a raw music experience, which happened a few weeks ago with Banana as we were both referring to Tori Amos’ song ‘Me and A Gun,’ connecting over our shared memory of the raw experience of the song. But soon we both started singing the song out loud together and it turned into a raw music experience in which we were connecting through music itself and not just through a non-musical symbol and the corresponding memory that symbol evokes.

And there are cases in which the non-musical symbols become completely detached from even the memory of a raw musical experience and in instead fucntion alone in a non-musical cultural discourse with it’s own logic and force. For example, I can think back to high school when sharing band names like Radiohead and Modest Mouse was an authentic way to relate emotionally and intellectually about music through non-musical symbols, but in other cases in which sharing those names was simply a means of inserting oneself into a particular subculture. Being a fan of Radiohead didn’t necessarily mean that you liked Radiohead or even listened to Radiohead, but rather functioned as a taste preference as cultural capital in the small social universes in which Radiohead was an acceptable band to listen to.

Thinking of our relationship to non-musical symbolic representations of music in the absence of raw musical experience opens up a whole new layer of studying and understanding how we relate to music. It is in this layer of understanding that I wrote my last article (forthcoming in Music and the Arts in Action), an ethnography of women musicians in Tampa, FL, which spoke of musical abilities and special knowledge as cultural capital that enables some people to play in particular musical settings and disables others (particularly along gender lines). In short I argued that women often lack the special musical knowledge, both of popular music history, improvisation, and playing by ear, necessary for playing in popular music groups, and that even when they do have this knowledge they experience certain forms of discrimination as women, for having a female gendered body serves as an indicator for lacking special knowledge. And furthermore being a woman in many cases also provokes a number of other negative stereotypes, like that women are supposed be especially sexually provocative as performers, visually appealing but musically peripheral.

In my article I showed how musical skills and musical knowledge hold symbolic significance above and beyond their direct relationship to the raw experience of creating and listening to music insofar as having or lacking that knowledge can determine a person’s life chances when it comes to playing music in a group or not playing music in a group. Thinking of how a set of skills functions on the plane of symbolic representation of music is a little trickier than thinking through the example of ‘Radiohead.’ But think of this illustration: I have skills as a popular music piano player, which means mostly playing by ear and being able to read chord changes, that enables me to play in groups like Ser Música’ and to have raw musical experiences of playing and performing and connecting with those women. But in the absence of actually playing, it is those skills that enabled me to be in that social situation in the first place. Having particular musical skills can function as a kind of extra-musical cultural capital that implies raw musical experience but does not operate within the realm of raw musical experience. In this case, the skills I have to play music in a raw musical experience get transformed into a non-musical symbol (cultural capital) that functions in the absence of actually playing music, much like ‘Radiohead’ is a symbol that functions in the absence of singing Karma Police.

And there are many others discussions about non-musical symbolic representations of music, especially when it comes to thinking of music as a commodity that is produced, bought and sold on a capitalist market. Here is where studies that look into people’s music listening and buying trends according to a variety of social factors, like age, class, gender, sexual orientation and geographic location come into play. Books like ‘Popular Music in Theory’ by Keith Negus, which is full of theories on how the music industry creates musical products and how the popular song structure and genres were first crafted by radio stations, understand our relationship to music on this level of music as a non-musical cultural symbol and not a raw musical experience.

The music industry, which turns both music and the musicians that make the music into commodities that can be replicated and distributed, either in the form of recordings and videos or traveling live shows, is always, at least peripherally, part of the consciousness of the artist I have been interviewing here in Lima. Some explicitly want to ‘make it’ in the music industry, having their music and their non-musical symbols (name, images) reach an amply wide audience, and others explicitly define themselves in contrast to wanting this, saying instead that they aren’t seeking fame or fortune but rather the opportunity to just keep playing music for as long as possible. For some the desire to ‘make it’ is actually seen as a negative thing, getting in the way of the more genuine raw musical experience and placing the emphasis too heavily on self-centered capitalist desires.

Indeed, this essay is yet another example of a non-musical symbolic relating to music in the absence of the raw musical experience (though I am halfway listening to Bill Evans play piano over my speakers). So perhaps this is the simultaneous raw and symbolic relating to music, which certainly happens often.

There is much more to be said about these two ways of relating to music and about understanding these relationships, but I will leave that for another time. Right now I just wanted to set forth what I was starting to see as a strong polarity in the way I heard people talking about and interact with music. In some cases music is just music, an experience and a way of connecting and just being, whereas in others it is very much a symbol that can be used for relating or for economic or personal gain.

Communication through music vs. communication around music

I spoke already of how music can come to be related to through non-musical symbols, mostly through spoken language or as a set of skills as cultural capital. However, it can be argued that music already is a language. Many experienced musicians speak of communicating with each other and very accurately expressing themselves through music, I am thinking in particular of jazz artists who tell us how they are feeling and what they are thinking through their solos, and also of composers who really say something through their compositions that cannot be translated accurately into a non-musical language.

And in thinking of music as a language, I have a question about when raw musical experience stops being just a venue for emotional and social bonding and self-expansion in a kind of ‘music makes me feel good and high’ kind of way, and starts being a language through which musicians express more developed thoughts and feelings.

In my experience with Ser Música, there were times when I felt like we were communicating through the music, but in most cases the communicating and connecting happened outside the music, in the talking and explaining that happened in English or Spanish (depending on the speaker) in the absence of actually playing. The prime example of communicating through the music was during our vocal improv, in which we were just listening to each other, responding, playing, literally in dialogue. The rest of the time, however, we would communicate our desires about the song and thoughts for parts in a verbal language, and then work it out and more or less memorize the structure and how we were going to play it.

I think that communicating through music vs. communicating around music points to a fundamental difference between two ways of understanding music: understanding the underlying building blocks of music–structure, harmony, melody, dynamics (the grammar and syntax of music)–and using this knowledge to communicate at will through this language vs. understanding a particular musical piece by memorizing and executing that piece without thinking of it in terms of more abstract or fundamental components.

In the first instance, the understanding of the fundamental components might be as complex as knowing a particular form of music theory, jazz theory for example, and being able to communicate through that language, or it might be as simple as understanding how your voice works, the different sounds you can make with it, and understanding basic concepts of dynamics and direction to participate in a vocal jam. Basically, the understanding of music it takes to improvise.

I think that the second kind of understanding can be likened to memorizing a poem in a language you don’t actually speak. You understand the phrasing, the sequence, the repetitions of that particular poem, and you might be able to execute it perfectly without anyone detecting your accent, but you still don’t actually speak that language. You just understand how that particular poem works, but if it came to speaking the language independently of the poem you would be lost. This was my understanding of music when I first started learning piano through the Suzuki method, which emphasizes memorizing a musical canon, note for note, before there is any kind of real instruction in music theory. I could play very complex pieces from rote, but beyond those pieces I was completely dumb, being unable to improve anything on the piano beyond the most simple musical ideas.

This is also the kind of musical understanding we are working with in Parió Paula, at least on the surface. We memorize particular rhythmic patterns that are three-part representations of traditional beats–salsa, samba-reggae, techno etc.–and then memorize transitions in between these beats, and then execute a series of different beats with prescribed transitions connecting them.

But at the same time Parió Paula is also creating it’s own autochthonous musical language. While we are performing, Laura will change up the order of the beats, and we have to follow by recognizing which call and response transition she is playing on her snare drum and remember which beat follows it. Although this isn’t the same as understanding jazz theory, insofar as we are not actually communicating on our own through the language, it is more like the stage in learning a new language in which you have memorized what to say in particular social instances and can execute those lines when given the right cue by a conversation partner. Ultimately, I think that the communicating in Parió Paula happens more around the music than through the music, and the raw musical experience is more about feeling the energy and connecting to each other emotionally and physically.

Last week I also went to a rehearsal for a local Indie band called Moldes, in which Katia and Marta from Ser Música play keyboards and drums respectively. The four members of Moldes, the two women plus Effren on guitar and Chicha on bass, have also developed an autochthonous musical language. In the first case, they communicate just by listening and playing and doing what sounds right to them during their jam sessions. Then when they go to organize a song out the material from the jam, they talk about it in terms of the sections outlined by the different riffs. Effren will say something like, ‘let’s do the part with the [play riff] four times, and then we’ll switch to where Marta does the [imitates fast drumming] and then switch back again.’ Or Katia will speak more metaphorically, saying something like ‘Chicha, will you play something that sounds like a big church during the intro?’ and he’ll noodle around until he finds something she likes (in this case playing a low tonic on the downbeat of every other measure).

As they speak there is little reference to anything outside the music other than the riffs, parts, melodies, and chords of a particular song. Every once in a while they will evoke solfege, saying that a particular note is ‘do,’ ‘re,’ ‘fa,’ etc. (and keep in mind that everyone I have met here who uses solfege uses a fixed do, middle c, which is a total nightmare for me). But other than that there is no speaking of chords, note names, meters, rhythms, or even ABABCA structures–any imported way of understanding music that would come from outside the practice studio. Each song is it’s own world of musical particularities which then become the basis for communicating about that particular song. Everything is about creating, forming, and then memorizing the particular song and not how the song might be a manifestation of some more fundamental principles of music.

So with Moldes, there is a kind of raw musical experience communication that occurs through the music when they improv during their jams. They are communicating by understanding how to play their particular instruments and according to what they think sounds good, what they’ve played and listened to before (I haven’t had the opportunity to ask them yet what they think about what they jam but I hope to soon). And then they have this autochthonous musical language for communicating about the music when they are trying to collaboratively write a song.

At this point I am not yet sure how these thoughts on how we relate to music and how to study this relationship pertain to the question of gender in music, but they are a useful tool for thinking more about why women would want to play music, what they need to know to get involved, how women’s bodies can become cultural objects that relate to music as a non-musical symbolic object/commodity, and how different groups have different methodologies for creating music that can be more or less accessible to people without technical musical background. Keep in mind that I’m looking at a city with hundreds of independent musical groups, but where women constitute only 6% of the musicians who play in them. Any kind of theorizing about why we make music and how we relate to music will be useful tools in giving a meaningful explanation to this gender imparity that goes above and beyond a simple observation that women have been historically oppressed and marginalized.

Thoughts?