The Three Arts of Music
This piece was prompted by a great article I read in the latest Harper’s about the rise of fake/ghost artists on Spotify. I recommend reading it if you’re not familiar with the phenomenon. I have a lot of thoughts about the state of art in general today, and we’ll see if I can work myself up to that. For now, I want to focus on the history of music as an artform in western culture, and where I think it may be going.
To begin the discussion, I want to lay out a framework that I’ve been brainstorming lately. My thesis is that music is actually three separate forms of art, though the third is a recent development. First, there is the composition of music, where an artist arranges and communicates notes such that a piece can be replicated. Up until the invention of the player piano*, this replication was exclusively the domain of the second art of music, performance. This is what people usually imagine when they think of the word “musician”. The performer replicates a composed piece of music for an audience, or otherwise improvises one. For most of history, these two activities were the complete practice of music. However, in the last century, a third art has emerged — that of the recording or what is today more commonly called the production of music. Initially, this was probably thought more of a technical matter than an art in its own right, but innovations by artists such as Les Paul, Phil Spector, and George Martin show that it is owed significant respect as a craft. Today, we spend much more time listening to recordings of performances than performances themselves, so we cannot talk about music without talking about its recording.**
I made a little Venn diagram to help illustrate the differences between these artforms, and name some of their masters:
Of course, I’m not saying that the Beatles are horrible performers or anything, just that their composition and recording skills were what set them apart as artists.
Some history then. If I were to ask you to name a musician before the advent of sound recording, you would name someone who was most famous for composing. Many of these composers were also acclaimed performers, especially in the case of someone like Liszt. This speaks to the way that music was disseminated in the time period. Not everyone would have the privilege to attend a Liszt performance, but you could certainly purchase a copy of his sheet music and replicate it for yourself (with a LOT of practice, that is). Thus the composer was the superstar of the pre-recording age. The performer was no doubt appreciated and admired, but they were not the ones who were considered to be advancing the artform. When we speak of innovations in music, from the baroque to classical to romantic ages, we are speaking of innovations in composition. These compositions were often even agnostic of the instruments used to replicate them — Bach’s Well-Tempered Clavier does not specify what kind of keyboard it is meant to be played on. Thus timbre took a back seat to harmony.
In the early stages of the recorded age, the composer was still highly significant and separate from the performer (think Rodgers & Hammerstein). Most performers did not compose their own songs. This of course changed with Rock’n’Roll, where an emphasis was made on authenticity and highly personal self expression. The reasoning was this: how could you be an authentic performer if your pieces didn’t come from yourself? Primarily being a composer became more and more untenable as a career (soundtracks notwithstanding), and the role was collapsed into either the performer in the case of rock music, or the producer in the case of pop. This is what accounts for what today seems like two redundant categories in the Grammy awards: Record of the Year and Song of the Year. Song of the Year was originally meant to be awarded to new compositions, while Record of the Year was awarded to high quality recordings or renditions of existing songs. As the composer faded more into the background over time, or was otherwise collapsed into the performer, new recordings of old songs are rarely given much notice now.
One result of the reduced importance of the composer and the increased importance of the producer is a change in how music is appreciated, and in what musicians find interesting to experiment with. The most fundamental change in my mind is a shift from focus on harmony and tonality to a focus on timbre. This is driven by the medium used for distribution. Music in the pre-recorded age was distributed through sheet music, so it was the arrangement of notes themselves that was fixed upon the paper, it was the starting point that every musician had access to. With records, the fixed object instead became the exact way music sounded coming out of a speaker. Techniques such as overdubbing and tape editing became musical. This idea is famously called the “studio as an instrument”, and became the predominant way that innovations in music occurred in the last hundred years. I also consider the electric guitar, the most iconic instrument of this phase of experimentation, a sort of “live studio” where the guitarist can manipulate effects pedals and knobs on the amp to create new sounds***. Anyone who has heard an electric guitar played while unplugged knows that the speaker is what makes the instrument musical. In a sense, any music that is played through a speaker is “electronic music”.
I want to stress that there are still multiple philosophies regarding the recording of music that don’t prioritize the “studio as an instrument”. One famous example would be the late Steve Albini, peace be upon him. Albini was a prolific producer**** of rock music, cutting records for the likes of Nirvana and the Pixies. He was a minimalist in the studio, and considered it his job to simply capture the sounds that the band had honed over practice and touring. Most recordings of jazz and classical music are approached similarly, since those are styles that were originally codified outside of the studio.
The studio became so powerful that even those who can’t play an instrument are now able to make bangers, unless you now count the laptop as an instrument. House music and hip hop are great examples, as producers can simply fine tune their loops to make them immensely satisfying without having to know much at all about traditional music theory. I don’t remember where I read this so don’t quote me, but the UK electronic producer Burial doesn’t even consider himself a “musician”, since his focus is all on manipulating his computer software to design drums that sound to his liking.
Shifting gears, let’s now talk a bit about the business, rather than art, of music. With the dawn of the recorded age, the most reproducible object, thus the scalable commodity that capitalists could make the most money from, was not sheet music but records. The individual performer became significantly more monetarily, and thus culturally, valuable. Because of recording, you no longer needed to attend a performance to hear what Louis Armstrong or Frank Sinatra sounded like. And because celebrity performers like them sold the most records, the record industry had an interest in creating new celebrities or hiring pre-existing ones, since if you’re in the record store deciding which Christmas album to buy, you’re going to go with the one from the guy you’ve heard of.
Business was good for recording musicians through much of the latter half of the 20th century, though of course it was easy for performers to get swindled by greedy label executives. The first major shift was when music ceased to be sold as an object and began to be sold as digital files in the 00’s. This made it incredibly easy to pirate existing music, and I imagine caused the industry as a whole to make a lot less money than it once did. Not only that, but since recorded music was now much easier to access digitally, the relative value of a particular piece of recorded music decreased. Since a teenager had to agonize over which album to buy with their limited money in, say, 1970, that album became much more precious to them than one downloaded for free off limewire.
Streaming was another blow to the art of recorded music. Since musicians weren’t making money off physical (or even digital) sales anymore, they had to resort to the pennies doled out by companies like Spotify. Spotify is a great product for the consumer, since for an insanely low monthly fee you get all the benefits of piracy (unlimited music from everywhere) without any of the hassle of tracking down albums, dodging sketchy websites, and organizing personal libraries. However, Spotify has a tremendous lack of respect for artists. Artists have the option to put their music on “discovery mode”, forfeiting a large chunk of their already meager per-stream pay rate to boost their music in the algorithm. The fact that an algorithm has any say in what music we are exposed to in the first place is shameful.
This finally brings us back to ghost artists. Spotify has lowered the value of recorded music to such a degree that in some cases it no longer needs the artists at all. Noticing that users will put on playlists in the background without checking the artist name at every new track, Spotify realized that they can get away with paying musicians to record algorithm-approved playlist fillers without crediting them. They create fake profiles for non-existent musicians and attach them to the Spotify-funded tracks, known internally as “Perfect Fit Content” or PFC. The aforementioned Harper’s piece includes interviews with musicians who create PFC, and they claim “the goal, for sure, is to be as milquetoast as possible.” It's muzak. For now, this practice is primarily limited to ambient, lo-fi, relaxing classical and jazz playlists, but there’s no telling where they’ll stop. I only need to type the two letters “A” and “I” and you can fill in the blanks as to what may be next.
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So that’s the state of the art in music today. I believe that similar processes are happening in other mediums as well, at least certainly in film, if moving images can even be called that anymore. Although recorded music is at an all-time low in terms of cultural and monetary value, I hesitate to predict the doom of the artform as a whole. Everyone likes music, and we have probably liked it for longer than recorded history. It’s not going anywhere.
For real artists trying to make a living though, what is to be done? If we look at dollar signs, live performances command higher prices for the consumer than ever. That may just be due to the real estate market, though perhaps we will see an increased cultural valuation of live music. The Beyonce Renaissance and Taylor Swift Eras and Charli XCX Brat/Sweat tours come to mind as major cultural events that may not have been as significant in prior years. The Las Vegas Sphere points to a societal investment in innovating live musical entertainment. I can’t say for certain where the art is heading, but I think the era of recorded sound supremacy may be behind us, joining the era of composed sound.
**There is a fourth element that I considered adding to this framework, which is the invention of musical instruments, though I ultimately decided not to. This is probably less of an art and more of a craft. I just want to point out that entire genres exist because of instrument makers. For a simple example, piano sonatas wouldn’t exist if pianos didn’t. In the same sense, hip hop would not exist without the sampler or turntable, and acid techno would not exist without the Roland TB-303 synthesizer.
***The most beautiful exploration of timbre using electric guitar in the studio is My Bloody Valentine’s iconic 1991 album Loveless, which needs no more praise heaped upon it by the likes of myself. If for some reason you’ve never listened to it, make it a top priority.
****While being a talented musician in his own right. The album Atomizer by his band Big Black had groundbreaking and intense guitar sounds due to their use of metal guitar picks. Check out their song "Kerosene"
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