Do musicians have an obligation to know music?

Musicians who "don't listen to music": C or D?

Hmmm, one reaction is an enthusiastic state of wonder and the other is a cold deconstruction. In terms of music, I know which reaction I prefer (and which one begets more good music). Ignorance is bliss, in some cases...

It's true. Any casual mention of Avril automatically derails a non-Avril thread.

No, it isn't. Ignorance is never bliss. Bliss is not fooling people into thinking you're cleverer than you actually are by screwing around with enharmonics in your sheet music so that your song looks more complicated than I-IV-V-I. Bliss is actually creating something clever. Bliss is also creating something simple and easy that a lot of people like.

Uh, aren't these states two mutually exclusive (in this case)? How can something be clever - clever enough not to be so easily deconstructed by someone with your music theory knowledge - AND simple and easy enough for a lot of people to like? I don't get your point here. On the one hand you're criticising a song for being TOO obvious ("why, that chord progression is completely obvious!") and on the other you're rallying behind the "simple and easy"? Buh?

Do they have a responsibility to have an awareness of pop culture trends going on around them? No. *Critics* have that responsibility, but I don't think musicians do. The only responsibility musicians have is to their own art.

A responsibility to know music, in terms of technically? Fuck yes. I have a friend who has a totally completely different non-musical (but creative) occupation who decided one day, that because he listens to a lot of electronic music, that he could create it. This person just lacks even the most basic knowledge of the principles of music. I think he has an obligation to know more about music before creating it. But I'm just a muso me...

My original example is flawed because I'm criticizing the listener more than I'm criticizing the musician. The criticism gets extended to the musician when starts writing out a tune that goes A, G, G-flat, A-double-flat, A, G-double-sharp, B-double-flat and tries to convince people that it isn't the beginning of "Mary Had A Little Lamb".

Also, I set up a completely false dichotemy; writing something clever does not automatically mean that a lot of people won't like it. And, at any rate, there are tons of examples in the classical realm of simple songs that are really clever ("The Lamb" by John Tavener or "Cantus" by Arvo Paert are two great examples).

Do with that what you will.

Do musicians have a responsibility to know pop culture? NO.

" " musicology? Depends what you mean by musician, surely. Presumably all classical musicians know that musicological stuff. Many pop musicians, presumably, don't. I don't, nowadays (I forgot it all), which is one reason why I don't call myself a musician.

I suppose that last line may explain why I don't understand why Perry's letters don't look like 'Mary / Lamb' to me. But I really can't see what he's getting at on this occasion.

I should have written "A, G, G-double-flat, A-double-flat, A, G-double-sharp, B-double-flat", which is a painfully wanky way of abusing the concept of enharmonics to obscure that the tune you wrote was "A, G, F, G, A, A, A", which is "Mary had a little lamb,..."

The tune I had in my had was in fact 'Twinkle Twinkle Little Star'. That would be A-A-E-E-F#-F#-E - right??

i've come across quite a few people over the years who've trotted off to the music store and bought themselves electric guitar and amp thinking it will make them a rock star, and often explaining chords, basslines, conventional rock music to them has been difficult, and so on a worldwide scale i imagine 100,000s of guitars and amps languishing in cupboards and attics

if electronic music making software for computers takes off in the same way then hopefully the price of useful computer equipment will make it cheaper for people who do understand music to do it that way; i think the musically literate will always have a considerable edge over someone who buys the software but doesn't happily and intuitively play a musical instrument already

I don't think there's any question that this is happening - especially with the proliferation of programs that sell themselves as "techno-music-in-three-easy-steps!" packages. I know tons of people - friends of mine even - with no grasp of other instruments or even the most basic music theory who have picked these up and made hours of "beats" or whatever. Usually these people are DJs (or just computer nerds), but DJing only gives you a certain kind of musical vocabulary: beat matching, song structure, etc.

Which critics and in what context?

i think music free of elements that identify it with the dominant culure is sometimes more interesting .. so much pop music sounds the same in that it's designed to sound a certain way, the whole production process, it's such a big part of what some people call music that they like, a little subset of all the music out there, but do you need a critical mass of listeners for music to live independently of its creators ?

it's easier today than ever for music that just comes out of people's guts or souls to get recorded, get it on a computer, cd etc.
but how do you let other people hear it ? if it's not part of genre x and so pursued by enthusiasts of that, there's what's emerged as outsider music, w/out genre .. how do you get this music that's not easy to tag to current culture easily into the hands of people who'll like it ? how do you describe or communicate the essence of it to respective listeners when there's so much of this other music for this smaller sector of the population who'll give it any of their time anyway ? who'll bother ?
these days "yesterdays papers" = "cut-out cds" -- a deluge of music that's inside the process to the extent that it turns up on cd, maybe in a sale bin, maybe in a small mail order catalogue, thousands and thousands of limited run pressings
where can this music live if it's not rooted in some way in the "conventional wisdom" of existing culture ? i want to know how music made w/out deliberate cultural positioning gets any room in the music process.

I don't think he needs to, although I'd say that people like Plaid (especially on Not For Threes), or Aphex Twin definitely do, and if not then they have an amazing knack for stumbling across some lush harmonies. Also there's just something about the chord changes in a lot of French house that sends shivers down my spine. I always thought that a house or breakbeat act who could really 'do' harmony would have been glorious. I think the chord changes are part of what I like about Love Story, for example.

Anyway, I think what Mark is talking about is... should hip-hop acts these days have a detailed knowledge of 80s old-skool... should today's rock bands know all about obscure new wave acts... does it matter whether or not Avril Lavinge knows who John Lydon or David Bowie are? I'd say almost certainly not.

Other posters have since interpreted the word to mean an overall understanding of musical theory (ie. chord structure, etc), which I'm honestly a little less interested in.

If an artist wants to have a lasting impact on their art [ANY art], they absolutely need to know what has come before. There is no question about it. There are a few exceptions of musicians who don't know shit lasting, but they are very rare.

Who knows their music? Dylan, surely... Kurt Cobain knew shitloads about music... Dave Grohl is seriously interested in music... Jeff Tweedy listed Aphodite's Child in his "tour bus tunes" thing in Spin... [btw, it's really easy to tell who sucks by looking at those "what are you listening to?" kind of sidebars.]... Beck's IPod is totally sick... the Neptunes and Timbaland, they REALLY know what has come before... and on and on. Bowie is a huge music fan [his music festival, i forget the name, was incredible]. And remember who was on that Tribute to Skip Spence? Robert Plant, Tom Waits, Jay Ferrar, hell, STEVEN TYLER was interviewed about JANDEK because he knew something about it...

Hip hop is another thing altogether, when many times you need to know music in order to SAMPLE music... i'm always blown away when i see compilations like "VA Sampled"... how did these producers find this stuff? And DJ Shadow? Are you kidding me? He clearly knows his tunes. The Wu-Tang? have you listened to 36 chambers lately? peep those credits.

It's always upsetting to hear journalists [like that fool in Slate] talk about other artists "ripping off" other artists. Who Cares? That is what art has done since the DAWN OF MANKIND. i'm reminded of the phrase "standing on the shoulders of giants"

The answer to "Do musicians have an obligation to know music to be succesful?" is clearly no, but "Do musicians have an obligation to know music to be remembered?" is clearly yes. If they want to truly last on the artform [again, any artist on ary artform], a musician ABSOLUTELY, POSITIVELY, needs to know their music.

and boo-eee !! scary.., how outrageously unseemly and unsycophantic of this "young punk" !! jesus, who cares ?

rather, on the preamble to "Mothership Connection" George Clinton drones on about hearing some whitey funk on the radio .. "the doo-bee brothers, bavid boo-eee,.. it was ok .." before claiming the mo/ship w/starchild delivered "uncut funk, the bomb", a pretty cool way of laying down Afro-american ownership of real funk, given this wanna-be funk cynically "gifted" to young americans from wanna-be invaders, this time everyones' fame-mouse-lite martian

yes, so these musicians adopt and expand on musical stuff like chord sequences that are emotive, beat speeds that fit with the other music surrounding, a production approach that admits the song into the other music it's positioned to belong with

this is all cynical stuff, some of it drawing on the 'understand chords' / 'know chord structures' which you may wish to label as technical musical knowledge, but when do these considerations stop being part of the overall marketing approach ? successful music videos are built like complex tv advertisements, and i'm sure there are lots of technical dos and don'ts that go into getting them syncopated (ie in both technical and cultural ways)

whether you're re-running punk, rolling stones rock or garage rock, these genres all have both musically technical and culturally specific overlaps, so i don't believe a musicians awareness of what's come before or is now stops or starts somewhere between the playing of the music and a knowledge of the culture that the musicians wish to project their music into

to use garage rock, well a musician has to have a look of naivety or freshness or back-to-the-basics "rock attitude" which is going to be something to do with how the music works with chords and beats, something to do with how well produced it's produced to sound and something to do with how the musicians look and project their "attitude" -- they have to get all of this right, to make the music just marginal enough to fit right in

this is marketing, pop/rock music and youth culture, and it's pretty obvious, but it's also obvious that to succeed in manufactured pop/rock music musicians do have to be these all-round public relations song, dance, clothes and talk acts

the above quote from Winslow art [ANY art] : pop/rock music might occasionaly pull off a real art effect, but mostly it's just going to be slightly artful use of these industry tricks -- if it was too artistically successful then it probably wouldn't sell

i think a distinction has to be made between
industrial music the idea as originally perpetrated by Throbbing Gristle, ie art music providing commentary on the indutry whilst purporting to have broader artistic aims whilst ironically claiming to belong (a marketing campaign as "performance art")
and
music coming out of the industry, music which over forty years of youthful "philisophical" movements associated with music still boils however "principled" to music designed for catharsis, group bonding, rites of passage music, rites of spring music

you need musical and cultural awareness for both sorts of art but you can only get chord charts and "songwriting for dummies" books for the second sort of music

(mumbled semi-audibly/subliminally underneath Throbbing Gristles' carefully choreographed 'live in the studio' album)