Is it possible for experimental music to be bad?

So yeah, it's still in the eye of the beholder (just like pop music), but the above criteria is what I use when listening to experimental stuff.

Can you rephrase this please? I don't get what you mean.

your opinion has nothing to do with how good or bad the music is.

baloney.

I love plenty of music that I would consider bad, and I hate plenty of music I would consider good.

please stop lying to yourself.

You can download vast catalogs of drone, minimalism, euro free jazz, electronic music from the web and voila! instant education in weird musics.

Processing sound is cheaper now than ever, what with all the multi-effect processors and DAW plug-ins available.

Every major town and city in Europe and North America has to have at least 20 bands/artists churning out experimental cd-rs.

But a quick glance at the Fusetron, Volcanic Tongue or Forced Exposure mailorder lists will show you that there's plenty of great experimental music being made.

On the other hand, a lot of really great and compelling experimental-type music I find is the one where I don't listen to an awful lot, or not much beyond one attentive, but very 'intense' listen. In that sense it isn't like a normal record.

also xhuxh otm re: quality I can't even fathom the thought process that can equate "bad"(meaning bad) w/ "something I like to listen to". The "best" vs. "my favorite" schism gets me too.

so, to answer the initial question, good experimental music is identified in exactly the same way as good pop music, classical, etc. it pushes that button in your brain that moves you in pleasurable, thrilling, unnvering or otherwise significant and positive way. if it makes you angry, irritated or bored, that's probably a sign that it's not good.

btw, I don't really consider noise music to be experimental per se, at least not any more. it's now so commonplace and has its own set of aesthetic norms that it's become a genre rather than an attitude or approach (which is how I see 'experimental' music).

I'm in the camp that says there must be some purpose to the experiment...

Can you give an example of "purpose" in experimental music?

To see how sound affect people, to get a reaction, to entertain, to evolve your musical references, and the list goes on and on...

That's fine--but that's still a purpose. Woofy said the idea of it having a purpose, made him woozy...

(how do you get quote in italics on this freakin board?)

To see how sound affect people, to get a reaction, to entertain, to evolve your musical references, and the list goes on and on...

yeah the list goes on to include anything & everything that music sets out to do, what's yr point re. experimental music?

Why would we listen to experimental music if it didn't get on our nerves and insult our notions of good and bad taste? Controvertial art hardly ever has pleasure as its goal.

and that makes them different from non-experimental musicians how, exactly?

value judgments on whether an experimental work is good or bad are useless.

unless you happen to be somebody who actually prefers to listen to music you like. (which is to say: useless for who? for the composer who'd prefer not to be criticized, just like everybody else making music out there?)

experimental music can certainly be poorly executed and planned, and thus fail to yield interesting results.

again: just like pop music.

I can. But just because I "appreciate" something (say, appreciate the hard work that went into it or the ambition behind it or the audaciousness of it or the way it aims for extremes) doesn't mean it's any good, if I don't actually like it.

http://youtube.com/watch?v=3Ap0LGlCpR4

Sounds like the old "Nice guy, shitty band" problem.

(Anyway, first para of my prev post ws a bit garbled but I suppose what I meant ws, in a place where "what is new?" is surely so valued by definition, its strange how undiscussed the new is; instead the preference is to discuss it as if its any other record..but er I'm not sure what I'm getting at - good or bad is just oen of the many many questions that should be asked?)

Such as catchy melodies, unique harmonics, or a rhythm that penetrates 9/10 of the listeners at any given time? There's plenty of effective experimental music that doesn't fit these qualifications...

You misunderstand. Obviously experimental music doesn't employ the same devices as pop music. My point was that if one thinks there can be good and bad music in any given genre, I fail to see why the same shouldn't be true in another genre, "experimental" or not.

I maintain that there are types of music that are simply BEYOND an individual's criticism based on that individ's inherent bias. I personally dislike most country music, but I'm not arrogant enough to believe that it's therefore "bad".

I think there are many people who think there are both subjective and objective elements in art. I'm sure there are people here who would find a way to disagree with that, though.

That it's. No more. I have to eat lunch.

That's the third or fourth that has been stated in this thread, and this is the third or fourth time I've acknowledged it and reminded you that it has nothing to do with what I've been saying or what this thread is about. You're making this pretty difficult.

I don't think that's what Ian is saying at all ... the composers "inventions and methods" are more or less part of an academic process, and if the listeners isn't prepared to at least consider that aspect of the music's creation, then he or she can't make a meaningful criticism outside of "I liked it" or "I didn't like it" (i.e. a purely subjective, visceral reaction). Like in that Wikipedia quote, if you don't know what Brownian motion is or how it factored into the creation of the music, then you're not really getting anything out of the music. Sometimes, a fair bit of background information *is* necessary before listening, which does not have to be the case for most pop music (I'm generalizing here).

Uh, yeah, this thread is interesting, but I have little more to say than what I've already said. I think that the more important question is, "How do we form a basis of judgment for experimental music, especially when many composers disregard (or are disdainful of) what the listener thinks of the outcome of a piece?"

I doubt that even Xenakis would agree with this (and I know I really don't). (All that Wiki quote says is that he used these tools to help write the music and that he saw his compositions as being like seeds for families of pieces.) From what I've learned (and I'm willing to be corrected - I haven't done in-depth study on Xenakis specifically), these mathematical systems were just tools he used to create music - and he was interested in the listening experience that resulted. AFAIK, he didn't expect his listeners to come to the music with the same scientific or mathematical bkgd that he did (did he?).

But even if he did, I still think it would be false to say you're not really getting anything out of the listening experience if you haven't studied the systems behind it. Presuming that's what Xenakis wanted, you wouldn't be getting out of it what he might have wanted you to get out of it, but you're surely still getting something out of it. (The importance of the author's intention is a matter of debate among academic critics.) One can respond to and criticize music on many levels and it can go beyond the visceral. Someone may have written a piece using some kind of stochastic system but I could surely analyse it in terms of pitch and timbre without taking any of the background stuff into account. I could still find something useful there. It's a meaningful criticism even if it's not what the composer is interested in.

With most of Young's work too, he's extremely interested in the sensory experience of what the music sounds and feels like for the listener and he talks about it a great deal. It's part of why he's so fussy about releasing recordings and has his music played in special environments with light shows, etc. In fact, the processes behind Theatre of Eternal Music or The Well-Tuned Piano are relatively simple and easy to grasp. They're modal (not in the jazz sense) improvisations in a particular tuning. A lot of thought went into the tuning system but that's because he thought it would sound good and be a good basis for improvisation. You don't need to study the system to appreciate the sound of what results (I hope, anyway).

And if that's true (and I think it is for many experimental musics, although probably not all), isn't "good" and "bad" sort of beyond the point?

I disagree entirely. when it comes to music, there isn't a difference. there's technically skilled, but that doesn't equal good. any good/bad judgements depend upon your instinctive reaction and the criteria you are applying. simple is not better than complex, melodic is not better than amelodic, transient is not better than memorable. and vice versa. and verse vica.

mind you, I'm open to persuasion. can you suggest a piece of music that is 'good' but which you don't like? how is it 'good'?

How do we form a basis of judgment for experimental music, especially when many composers disregard (or are disdainful of) what the listener thinks of the outcome of a piece?

are you trying to suggest there could be a fixed formula for deciding the merits of any piece of art? I find the idea terrifying.

the baisi for judgement is simple. use your ears. anything else is just extraneous waffle. it doesn't matter if the composer based a series of tones on brownian motion or recorded the tones of his own brown motions. it adds a little side interest, certainly, but what's important to the listener is, or at least should be, what it sounds like. to concentrate on the matematics of the method is to miss the point - surely it's what that method achieves which should be the focus? otherwise it's like judging literature by the per-sentence adjective ratio and missing the dynamic interplay.

How is this more true about "experimental music" than any other sort of music? I could make the exact same statement about common practice music, and say that if you don't have a background in tonal harmony you can't make a meaningful criticism outside of "I liked it" or "I didn't like it," and people around here would be lining up to call me an ass hole. (Although this is, per my previous reference, basically what Babbitt argues in Who Cares if You Listen?)

But "good" and "bad" is sort of beyond the point in pop music too - its just as much a subjective process.

Well, I think that's debatable, but what I've been trying to argue here is a point about internal consistency - if you accept that there can be "good" and "bad" in pop music, the same should be true of experimental music.

mind you, I'm open to persuasion. can you suggest a piece of music that is 'good' but which you don't like? how is it 'good'?

Is this really that outlandish an idea? Aren't there kinds of music that you don't particularly care for, and yet you don't attribute that to a lack of quality in the music? I'm not an avid listener of Javanese gamelan, hip hop, country, or even jazz, to name a few, but that doesn't mean I discount those genres or the artists working within them. I think there's lots of amazing jazz, but I don't devote my time to it because it appeals to me less directly than other types of music. That doesn't mean I think jazz is bad.

The purely objective in music is the obvious stuff - playing in time, in tune, articulating, enunciating, etc. There's a lot of stuff after that which I think of as a messy tangle of objective and subjective. Composition, lyrics, etc. The objective framework for these things comes from comparing them to what's come before. It's silly to evaluate every pop song as though it existed in a vacuum - we compare it to other pop songs, and more broadly, to all of the music composed in a similar organizational framework. Isn't this why we expect music critics to be well-listened and knowledgeable about the type of music they're reviewing?

I might like something if I've never heard anything remotely similar, but if I then learned that many people had already done the same thing and done it better, I might still enjoy the piece, but wouldn't think it was as good as I did at first. Saying that your musical experience is completely subjective seems to treat every piece of music as the first one you ever heard.

THERE IS NO AVANT-GARDE; ONLY THOSE WHO HAVE BEEN LEFT BEHIND etc.

Except the whole point was about recognizing a distinction between "that which I do not enjoy" and "that which is bad," where the former is a statement about myself and the latter is a statement about a piece of music.

Squirrel_Police, what does consensus have to do with it? If I want to argue that composer X was better at Y than composer Z, I could reference specific works and compare how they handle the instruments, how they develop the material, how they utilize the form, etc., and come to my conclusion. You might disagree with me, and make a counter-argument along similar lines. Maybe one of us is right, maybe neither of us is; but I don't think that totally invalidates the idea of good and bad music. Certainly to say that there is good and bad music is to admit to many assumptions about music and what it should be, but I tend to think that these are assumptions which most everyone shares at some basic level, even the ones who claim that everything is subjective.

Would you say that novels or films, for example, can't be categorized into good and bad?

i disagree.

>Would you say that novels or films, for example, can't be
>categorized into good and bad?

i disagree.

I shouldn't have used the word "anything" -- more precisely, if the listener doesn't make an effort to understand something about the composer's methods and motivations, then they're cheating themselves somewhat. This is similar to reading, I don't know, "Paradise Lost" and not bothering to learn something about why Milton was writing it.

How is this more true about "experimental music" than any other sort of music? I could make the exact same statement about common practice music, and say that if you don't have a background in tonal harmony you can't make a meaningful criticism outside of "I liked it" or "I didn't like it," and people around here would be lining up to call me an ass hole.

They probably *would* hurl insults at you, but it doesn't mean that their criticism isn't limited by their lack of background on the subject. Naturally, it doesn't mean they can't have an opinion. To give another example, you could see a play and comment on whether or not you liked it, but without a formal background in drama, there's no way you could direct that play or give constructive criticism to the actors performing in it.

To give another example, you could see a play and comment on whether or not you liked it, but without a formal background in drama, there's no way you could direct that play or give constructive criticism to the actors performing in it.

Yeah, I was playing devil's advocate a bit up there and trying to encompass a range of viewpoints, but my own probably aligns pretty well with yours.

sure there's a distinction but it's certainly not for you to know or parse, at least not here and now. technique is technique, the method is the method, the pose is the pose, all ingredients that exist to be 'admired' at will(and ingredients that can butress whatever opinion you have of what you hear and vice versa) but the thing is the thing and your options are yes, no, not sure.
a "statement about yourself" is all you'll ever make at any given time, unless you count plagiarism.

That's not true at all, which is the whole point. A statement about myself as a listener is not the same as, for example, a statement about Miles Davis as a composer, and I'm capable of making both.

urrghhh yes yes but that is the point you can suss out insights about a piece wholly separate from, maybe even antithetical to your raw listening reaction(trying to refrain from metaphysical language but perhaps that would be more appropriate) but the reaction is the reaction and the thoughts are the thoughts. The thoughts can then even inform and transform the reaction in certain cases but there's only ever one reaction, if you follow.

After skimming thread: a pretty big part seems to be about criteria for good or bad -- whether it is purely subjective on the listener's part (as guanoman says) or not. The main potential objective criterion mentioned is concrete technical skills etc, and no-one has taken that pure position, as it is surely a complete strawargument. But isn't a kind of general criterion for good- or badness how well a piece fulfills its purpose?

The thing is: whose purpose? Creator's, listener's, or even that of some other entity*?

Well, the dichotomy of pop vs experimental strikes me as false. "Pop" to me signifies that its artistic success is defined by the listeners; how well a piece fulfills what they want from their pop is its quality, and of course that varies between individuals. If, on the other hand, music is described as "experimental", to me it signifies that we are seeing things from the creator's viewpoint -- since this adjective pertains to creation rather than reception, it follows that when we use this term at all, we accept that s/he is the ahem author of the ahem discourse so to speak.

So:
1) One piece can be both "pop" and "experimental" without conflict -- but it may have to be judged differently depending on label discussed.
2) If you deny the existence of other criteria than "do I enjoy it?", you also deny the whole relevance of the term "experimental", since this has nothing to do with listening**.

*) What is this shady "other entity"? A Nairn's original premise -- "There is definite bad pop music, and deffnite good pop music" -- seems far too extreme to me, but in the case of pop, there may at least be an argument for general (though fallible) criteria for goodness of a piece -- popularity, cultural penetration, people's associating it closely with the time it came out, "our song"itude, who knows. Something similar holds for (old) classical music I think, eg when it is said that Bach totally rules, the way he epitomises and crowns the Baroque style (the elements of which are, as always retroactively fitted). In both of these cases, neither the single listener's "do I like it?" nor the creator's "have I got what I wanted?" is the main or only thing deciding good-or-bad.

**) Babbitt's article is obv the exact opposite of this, ie "the quality of the piece is how well its fulfills its specialized cutting-edge avantgarde/academic purpose as creation, rather than what listeners think". (Just for the record, although I'm sure many of you know this already: its title "Who Cares If You Listen?" was to his dismay introduced by the journal; the original title was "The Composer as Specialist".)

The purely objective in music is the obvious stuff - playing in time, in tune, articulating, enunciating, etc.

is so so wrong. Whose time? Whose tuning? Whose articulation? 12-tone? Serial? Gamelan? Harry Partch's 42-note-to-the-octave? There simply isn't any objective standard, and you're pretending that there is.

Please go read David Toop's Ocean Of Sound and consider the possibility that sound and music are the same.

In answer to the thread question: Of course.

Sibelius all the way!

Oh come on.

seriously, that blows my mind.

http://myspace-304.vo.llnwd.net/00764/40/30/764620304_l.jpg

Well composers only make the work! They don't have any control over the reaction it generates. It doesn't really matter what their opinions and hang-ups on ppl are. If composers think ppl think in only terms of "good" or "bad" they have a pretty reductive view of what ppl are like. Do many composers who think like this even bother to put their music out there?

Nevermind forming a basis on judging experimental but also forming a more concrete definition of the word is enough work. There is the Cage-ian defintion and yet much of the talk has been about music whose outcome is, for a large part, fixed (before playing it) once the processes to make it have been utilized.

This Milton Babbitt bullshit you're advocating is basically saying "You don't get to decide if something is good or not, only the composer does."

Doesn't Milton's rigorous approach means he makes as few a set of decisions as possible, none of which are based on what is 'good' or 'bad' for the piece to be written?

Which feeds into the point made by max:

"... but I'd argue that experimental music is created in part to force the realization of subjectivity on us. It's much easier to fool yourself into thinking that there is "good" and "bad" in pop music (see: original post)."

I came across this article a few weeks ago on Darmstadt (in the 70s/80s) where there is a lot of booing (and throwing paper aeroplanes) when the audience hear and don't happen to like any of the new contemporary pieces given their premieres there. Many of these composers get invited back.

I don't see how the above is really true for pop - Nairn basically gave this thread a shaky wording to get it going. Many ppl will see any piece of music as good or bad; others will choose to have other, potentially more complicated reactions. However an experimental work (if we adopt this Cage-ian def) may require a re-listen to hear a diff outcome in a subsequent performance to get to a stage where you can get a more of a complicated reaction.

On the other hand, seeking more complicated reactions could easily lapse into making apologies for poor work.

You seem to think objective means "true" or something. Pitch and rhythm are, for all intents and purposes, objectively quantifiable. Saying "Whose pitch? Whose rhythm?" and all that is totally confused. It doesn't matter if your octave has 12 steps or 24; one can still objectively measure whether or not something is in tune relative to its particular organizational framework, which the vast majority of music has in some form. It's not a matter of opinion. Obviously if a piece doesn't use any kind of time or tuning system, there's nothing against which to measure. So chill the fuck out.