Who Listens If You Care

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The traditional boundaries of genre, intended audience, "culture," have been so thoroughly crossed that even when you try it's impossible to take a cohesive stance toward any particular piece of music. One can only applaud when Public Enemy's Chuck D. says that his group's goal is to be a "musician's nightmare," but how is one to respond to David Byrne's use of Cuban rhythms and musicians to sing a song about rent control? Is it exploitative and neo­colonial? Who the hell knows-the beat is good, the words are compelling, and you can dance to it. These are important things. It's catchy, it seems to have vision and imagination. But how does that feeling come about? How much of the power of the music is derived from evocations of other things, from Eddie Palmieri to Ricky Ricardo? (Again, these confusions cut across cultural borders: in 1988 Indonesia's biggest pop star was named Ricki Ricardo, and the biggest hit single was a rock song using traditional gamelan instruments called "Bring Back the Old Bali"). Even if we wanted to, how could we determine what taboos are left to break, what boundaries left to cross?

This situation has had a number of extremely positive effects. Even fifteen years ago, the lack of respect accorded non-Western music (and other "others") seemed somehow unjust. The availability of every form of music to anyone with a record player or a college radio station in the vicinity was an accom­plished fact, and yet most college music departments continued to pretend that you could teach "music" as if the term meant something that had existed only in Europe, subsisting until the birth of Bach, flowering until the beginning of this century, and currently experiencing ongoing and agonizing death throes. It seemed important to argue for opening things up, recognizing other vital traditions; talking about musical hybridization, etc.

Now fortunately everything has been turned on its head: cultural critics crawl all over themselves to explain the influence of talking drums on hip-hop; Greg Sandow, composer and critic, once an ardent defender of David Del Tredici and Charles Wuorinen (two ideological enemies currently to be found side by side in the same rubbish heap of history, the "New Music" bin at Tower Records), can now boldly state that "most [!] heavy metal guitarists are influ­enced by Bach solo violin suites"; Peter Gabriel, a platinum-selling rock star, releases a hit album of "source material" sampled for use in his own work. And even within the academy, the College Music Society issues urgent calls to teach non-Western music, and-luckily-conservative academic trendsetters like Allan Bloom and E. D. Hirsch either don't know enough about music or care enough to target it.

In other words, I'm not complaining: how can I in an era when Boulez' neofascist post-war pronouncements seem like medieval schisms, or oracles from another planet? Non-western music doesn't have to fight for respect anymore, and that's an amazing tum of events.

It is also of course true that, here and around the globe, there are still lots of traditional musical uses and users, not just your average Balinese villager (who may have a Michael Jackson poster on his wall), but the classical music lover (for whom Schoenberg is noise), or the academic computer musician (for whom all 19th-century music sounds alike), etc. I am merely asserting that there now exists a large number of us for whom musical boundaries have lost their former meanings. I am talking about people for whom an average day's listening might include the Monroe Brothers, Japanese muzak, Bugandan horns, Sibelius symphonies, and any and everything else, a list more resembling a Borgesian encyclopedia than a radio playlist or concert program. We are the rootless cosmopolitans of music, endlessly wandering in search of a community, an aesthetic, a musical life.

It is difficult for us, faced with this onslaught, to know how to proceed, either pragmatically or philosophically. If we are composers, what instruments to write for? If we teach, what subjects? What set of musical values, technical and aesthetic, are we to subscribe to? Why are we doing it anyway? Even attention and money aren't sufficient motivators, for as Robert Moore puts it, "You can now do whatever you want, because no one will care in any case." What then are we to do?

The answer, I believe, can be found by re-examining the troublesome anal­ogy between music and language. Is music a language at all? Is it a "universal" one? For people who are still able to divide music into traditions, genres, etc., music is like language in that humans do it for other humans (presumably) to hear it, and they do it following spoken or unspoken structural rules that are shared and make sense to various groups of people. Particular musics are asso­ciated with particular cultures-your average Balinese, for example, can distinguish between "Balinese music" and everything else in the world. As long as music is defined in this way, as a cultural byproduct or sign system, it's easy to keep our bearings. Music is a code, by definition comprehensible to people within a cultural group. Unfortunately, this also means that any particular music is by definition misunderstood by everyone else in the world, no matter how carefully they listen. In other words, any Ghanaian's subjective hearing of Ghanaian drumming is automatically valid, "authentic"; any non-Ghanaian's invalid, albeit useful, enjoyable, etc. When things are couched in these terms, it becomes clear how inappropriate such distinctions have become, how ridicu­lous it is to assert the relative validity of anybody's response to any music.

One solution to this is to redefine music as "organized sound," as any collec­tion of noise that is deemed "music" by anybody. Viewed in this light, music is still a sign system, a language, but it's one in which any ordering of "phonemes" is automatically intelligible. (A "musical phoneme" can be defined as any sub­jectively discerned unit of sound, or as the equivalent of a "syllable" in lan­guage.) "Organized sound" might as well mean "sound," since the listener does the organizing-this means everything we hear and don't hear, any combina­tion of sound and silence, and ... my God! What does sound have to do with music!!

Phonemically transferable music (music as organized sound) is thus both inherently "universal" and inherently incomprehensible, a sign system in which everyone in the world has their own code book, a language in which