On Music and Architecture
7/9/2024
I’ve always been an architecture enthusiast, and I frequently find myself using it as a metaphor in music. So when I was reading the article The Next New Thing, I started thinking about it. I primarily approach music with frameworks, so I’m first thinking about the engineering before the decoration, although I think they can be done together. Music that is all decoration (sounds, production) can also stand as well as a work that was scored. The latter is what we would call “traditional” but traditions don’t have as deep of a foundation as we would think. “Traditional” moves as the cultural geology evolves. “Classical” is, of course, a major distinction. The definition in music never changes. If you go to a concert of symphonic music from different periods, you’re still at a concert of classical music. But if that concert includes a piece by Stewart Copeland, with him drumming on it, how does it affect the “arena” of classical music? It’s an interesting question. The corollary in architecture is the use of modernism in the context of classical and traditional forms, as I.M. Pei did very effectively, in my opinion. Essentially, it was a postmodern (not the art term) treatment of classical architecture by remixing different styles. I’ve always liked the process, not unlike using scored works in the context of pop or electronic music, as a way of drilling down to the foundations of music. We can call is “metamodern”, but not really because we’ve been doing it all along. Postmodernism in architecture is not “anything goes” but rather “everything comes back”. Postmodernism in music is that if you use something from the past, it’s not in reverence to it, but as a way to make it cool, whether you know anything about it or not. It makes traditions easy to access without having any exposure to actually working with them hands-on.
Take synthesizers for example: since around 2004, synths have become busy-boxes with canned sounds and beats — but they are, of course, preceded by sampling itself, in which any recording can be easily assigned to keys. Modernism says we should know what the piano keys really are: they represent Equal Temperament, the operating system for scales and chords, and can be played like a percussion instrument, which is essentially what a piano or synth keyboard is, regardless of whether it is a hammer hitting a string. Postmodernism tells us we can easily use these tools to do whatever we want, but in the process, limits what we can do. Everything we do with certain tools makes the content automatically and brings with it the current cultural essences whether we want them or not. It’s not unlike consuming highly processed food as a convenience. Perhaps a way to move away from postmodernism is to avoid convenience. In music, it’s getting harder and harder to get a unique sound, and most don’t try. It’s still amazing that certain General MIDI sounds are considered cool — which is a postmodern thing. In a way, those sounds are “traditional” now, in the same way an architect will parody tradition, as Philip Johnson did in his postmodern (art term) works in the 1980s. I still love that period because it was so cunning and clever, which is what is lacking in most postmodernist work in any genre. Think Roy Lichtenstein’s send-ups of comics and advertisements. He knew exactly what he was doing, whereas most current postmodern work is just pushing the buttons, including AI-generated art. So if you study Lichtenstein or emulate his work, it is a reverence for “tradition” because traditionally we have used art materials. A way to do that with AI is to generate the ideas (like a preexisting comic or advertisement), then painting it. That’s hugely more interesting than “microwaved” AI art.
It’s always interesting to place domains side-by-side and see what we can takeaway from them. For me, looking at visuals (architecture, for example) is a way to think differently about the music. What’s the sonic equivalent of placing a glass pyramid next to traditional, classical forms?
