Beyond Music and Instruments

In 2015 I wrote an essay, Beyond Music, that posed the hypothetical that since the 17th century to the present, the sound of an instrument and the instrument itself started to be separated. So a violin in the 17th century sounded like a violin and composers wrote for the sound of the violin. The advent of electricity allowed us to electronically manipulate sound: we can mic a violin but that's not the same as an acoustic violin. You can take that signal and do all kinds of things with it, which separates the violin from its sound.

I was also thinking about an extension of this idea, i.e. the separation between a composition itself and a performance that's good enough. It creates a midway point between something just being okay as a composition and a performance and a sound that makes up for the composition itself. As a writer, I always focus on composition. Once it gets to the production phase and mixing and mastering, that's a separation as well.

Throughout the last 300-400 years there's been a compromise in music and it will continue as musicians create both new instruments and sounds that will either be integral (as in an acoustic instrument) or are separated, as controllers or interfaces are.

Guitars started to become controllers once amps and effects produced the sound. If you just heard people playing them acoustically it doesn't sound like much compositionally.  It's not composition per se. So using instruments as sound controllers is one of the compromises we make in music

From a riff dated 10/30/2021, and published in Some October.

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[10/30/2024: AI-generated music is another compromise because it makes music that is good enough and disincentivizes the exploration of it. We are no longer explorers of knowledge for its own sake, and over time become inured to new ways of being. This is why we can’t fully understand ancient civilizations: even in their own time they forgot how they used to do things, and consequently things were allowed to wither, and they adapted to whatever was new. Where do all the things we forgot go?]