The Oberlin Review
<< Front page Arts March 11, 2005

Music acquisition for the new generation
Blogs are the best place to discover your next playlist
 
New venue: New Yorker music critic Alex Ross airs his views online.
 

Lately I’ve developed an incredible inability to function in any kind of book or music store. I used to be able to spend hours browsing the aisles and making a pile of CDs or books to whittle my way through slowly and most of the time at random. I drew on clerks’ suggestions, colorful packaging and sheer impulse to start some kind of collection. “Quartet for the End of Time” was a cool sounding title for a classical piece, J.J. Johnson was the first jazz trombonist whose record I could find, and the Clash had sweet clothing. The Borders in my hometown used to have a chronic reshelving disorder, and many of my favorite CDs came from a fateful day when someone decided to stock up a cart of CDs and sell them all for a dollar.

Recently though, I’ve become overwhelmed by the utter magnitude of good (and bad) music to be explored. Now that I’ve heard more and been exposed to a myriad of artistic viewpoints, something in me collapses when I see those endless stacks of books and music. I browse for a bit looking around but quickly become discouraged and despondent, sensing that the shelves contain a lot of wisdom without any fine way to discern it from the duds.

Resigning myself to a blank and stupid gaze, my new method is to work solely on people’s suggestions, magazine articles, and whatever remaining enthusiasm I come across on the internet and overheard conversations.

This is the first real generation in which every musical sound is available to anyone who wants to hear it. One can get exposed to Javanese Gamelan, Puccini, and Public Enemy all in the space of about 30 feet. This is a great thing, yet this tremendous diversity presents a huge problem in how people discover and explore their individual tastes.

The exoticness of foreign and new sounds has at once been compounded and popularized, leaving listeners in the modern age more open-minded than ever before. One area where this jumble of sounds can be found is film music, a veritable mish mash of new compositions, rock songs, jazz, and old classics reorganized and assembled without any sense of disorder, but rather an eclectic joy.

It is this same spirit of a wonderful and structured disorder that allows a website like www.amazon.com to function so well as a music seller. Amazon automatically produces recommendations for its users as a way to find new artists and art. The website’s program compiles all of the books and music that a person has either purchased or browsed online and searches for similar items that may prove fruitful. Each genre feeds itself, and if the occasional friend or magazine has a new tip that you want to investigate, the recommendations start to form a glorious (but potentially awkward) jumble of tastes and interests.

A friend of mine was recommended an unfortunate combination of hydroponics and Richard Wagner, a grouping that undoubtedly was not meant to be. But underlying the jumbled exterior of Amazon’s program is a thoughtful and delving way to expand a person’s bounds of appreciation without jumping off a cliff.

In addition to the recommendation system, there is also a feature called “Listmania” that allows users to compile a group of favorite recordings and explain what makes them special. As someone who regularly asks my friends and family what they have been listening to lately, this is yet another way to find new perspectives and new tastes, albeit from strangers. For instance, if you are looking for tuba albums you can use, Ginzos Super Duper Tuba Album or for some old hip-hop, Know what Hiphop is? Most of the time the recommendations are intelligent and described with love and passion you don’t always find in newspapers, plus you are free to disagree all you want!

A relatively new trend in the music world, especially helpful for classical music, is the birth of an online community of writers, composers, musicians, musicologists, and other enthusiasts using weblogs or “blogs.” These online conversations, stories, and rants are an invaluable resource when it comes to finding and investigating music.

My favorite blog, www.therestisnoise.com, is run by Alex Ross, the classical music critic of The New Yorker, who has a wide musical taste that ranges from Handel and classical opera to eclectic and experimental contemporary music. Not to mention the fact that he is a Bob Dylan expert, a Pavement buff, and an admirer of Bjork. (He wrote a stellar feature about her last year illuminating the Icelandic star’s knowledge of contemporary classical music and the influence of Stockhausen and Messiaen on her musical development.)

As someone who shares the view that all music is good music, Ross regularly writes about a variety of concerts and recordings, and conducts arguments (sometimes with only himself) about classical music’s stuffiness, applause etiquette, and why an E flat chord sounds so terrifically “morbid”. His writing is open-ended and passionate, alternating between short, witty or meaningful observations and longer intellectual discussions of the nature of music in the world today. Ross also has probably the best and widest collection of links to other blogs on the Internet.

Another great online musical resource is www.artsjournal.com, which combines a series of art and culture blogs with a daily selection of arts journalism from newspapers around the country.

The three music blogs on the ArtsJournal website each have a different focus: one by composer/critic Greg Sandow centers on ways to keep classical music fresh and attract new listeners; another by composer-critic/musicologist Kyle Gann speaks about “post-classical” music that seeks to illuminate the forgotten history contemporary music and a blog from music administrator Drew McManus pours through arts management issues of every variety, with a focus on unions and marketing in classical music.

The same personal and enthusiastic approach is common to almost all blogs, and yet each of these is enlightening in its own way. It is a new sort of music criticism that is fresh and inquisitive rather than dry and static.

Each blog starts with the premise that music is a live and developing being, and each writer seeks to shape approaches to music, challenging conventions at every step. How often do you see a concert review or feature in a newspaper that actually deals with music as a breathing, burning life rather than as a revered institution to be parsed through and analyzed judiciously?

The last website I recommend is www.newmusicbox.org, the online magazine of the American Music Center. This is not a blog at all, but a collection of articles and interviews with a focus on the various contemporary music scenes in America. Going on the theory that the best way to find music is to hear what my favorite musicians listen to, the interviews are informative and energetic, ranging from performers like Steven Shick and Meredith Monk (both of whom came to Oberlin this year) to conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and composers like Steve Reich and George Crumb. New Music Box also features two “century lists,” compiling 220 pieces, originally used as suggestions to make classical radio broadcasting more relevant to the modern day. Musical diversity runs amok as the works traverse every sort of landscape you can think of, each presenting a different character and style.

Music is spreading in every direction, and this vibrant eclectism usually isn’t reflected in newspapers or on the radio. Yet music is a huge and inescapable presence in our lives, thriving on the customs of the modern day (perhaps even slightly too much, you might think when you see car commercials using Modest Mouse as their soundtrack).

Still, to find music and music journalism that embodies such diversity and displays all the passions behind it, treating music as a living being rather than a historical relic is uplifting. The best way to discover and explore new music is through people, and a community has started to develop online that is interested, intense, and wise.
 
 

   


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