Music and oral traditions

I’ve started to get more interested in the thought of Jaron Lanier. What My Musical Instruments Have Taught Me is a short look at some of the points he originally wrote about in You Are Not a Gadget.

Music operates on a plane separate from literature, and a lot of information about it isn’t written down. Most of the world’s compositions were never notated, and what was written down is often minimal; although scores do exist for very old Chinese music—some of the oldest are for the noble guqin, a kind of zither—they amount to mnemonic devices, lists of strokes and playing positions. The earliest European scores are similar, with lists of notes. What we now call “early music” is largely a modern stylistic invention.

Western historiography excels at things that fit into the modern Western paradigm of writing, data, and computation. Music is a prime example of something that doesn’t fit into that mold. Meditation, spirituality, and religious practice are even harder nuts to crack.

What frustrates me is not that we don’t know many things and likely can’t know many things, it’s the lack of humility to assume that there’s nothing to be known if it doesn’t fit within the framework of Western knowledge.

The exquisite skills involved in making instruments can seem to hover just beyond the edge of scientific understanding, and can easily be lost when war, plague, and famine break the chains linking masters and apprentices. And yet the traditions of a lost musical culture can sometimes be revived.

And these oral traditions are exceedingly fragile and easy to lose forever. What I think is also often overlooked is that reconstructions based on written fragments are still fundamentally different than the original thing.

Changing course slightly, there’s a beautiful commentary on how true luxury comes from the from the physical over the digital:

The deeper difference is that computer models are made of abstractions—letters, pixels, files—while acoustic instruments are made of material. The wood in an oud or a violin reflects an old forest, the bodies who played it, and many other things, but in an intrinsic, organic way, transcending abstractions. Physicality got a bad rap in the past. It used to be that the physical was contrasted with the spiritual. But now that we have information technologies, we can see that materiality is mystical. A digital object can be described, while an acoustic one always remains a step beyond us.

And it’s the imperfections of the physical world that make it so much more beautiful than the cold sameness of the digital world:

Much of the music we enjoy today makes use of audio loops, by means of which a note can be repeated with absolute precision. Because of my work with computers, I had early access to looping tools, and I was able to play around with loops earlier than most musicians. At first, the techniques didn’t speak to me; music is about change, I thought, while loops are about artificially preventing change. When so-called minimalist composers—Philip Glass, Terry Riley—ask musicians to play the same phrases repeatedly, what emerges from this technique isn’t repetition but an exquisite awareness of change: using a traditional, physical instrument, each repetition reflects your breath, your pulse, the weather, the audience, the light, bringing subtlety into consciousness.