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What actually was experimental music?
…and what comes after?
I’m on summer holiday in Gibraltar pondering my own musical direction. Most of it is better than I thought, but whilst I’ve always assumed I’m an experimental musician turned pop star, that probably isn’t accurate after all.
For one thing, what actually is experimental music. For most of my life my working definition of it is a person who creates sonic art (possibly ‘music’?) but is either ignorant of, hasn’t learned, or is actively ignoring or opposing, music theory. Is that experimental music? Really? Why is it called experimental music then? Why the ‘music’ bit in the name?
Anyway, the wikipedia page for experimental music is, like about 80% of wikipedia, about the worst wikipedia page I’ve ever encountered. It really is shit. I think we could do better.
What actually is experimental music, or if like myself we assume experimental music is a past form, or at least must die someday, what comes after it?
I’d prefer it if it was defined as something like “making novel or never-before-heard sounds, or motifs, or constructions” (which would then be heard before soon after, and thus pass into the stuff that isn’t experimental music, which is probably just music). However, if that were the case, you’d hardly need to call it experimental music, it could have a more respectable well-formed name. A non-loser name.
Comments
I am proud to be that loser.
I understand music to be sounds which are organised to an underlying principal or intent, a conscious orchestration of sonic effects rhythms and pitches to evoke a mood or emotional response in the listener. If these fall within standard constructions and forms, whether that be verse and chorus structures, or motifs and movements, I agree then they are not experimental. ‘Experimental’ by contrast is defined as that which is ‘… based on untested ideas or techniques and not yet established or finalized.’
As I have no conventional musical theoretical knowledge, and no interest in defined forms, yet desire to create moods through the orchestration of sounds in ways which are unpredictable, unknown to me, and revealed only to me as I create them through the practice of creating them, and by definition are unrepeatable by me afterward, I can only conclude the accurate description, both necessary and sufficient, to describe what I am doing is ‘experimental music.’
Interesting!
My two cents:
Music:
is a genre of art consisting of organized sound events within the range audible to humans.
An** experiment**:
in the sense of science is a methodically designed investigation for the empirical acquisition of information. In contrast to mere observation or the demonstration of an effect, in an experiment influencing variables are changed.
An experiment:
According to the Latin meaning of experimentum, namely trial, test, proof, the experiment is an investigation in which a specific assumption or conjecture is specifically tested and either proven or disproven.
For me, any music I compose is experimental (as long as I don't copy existing compositions/constructions).
And: does it work? (for me?)
May be, the experiment starts when it comes to: „Does it work for different ears (humans)?“
What comes after it?
The next experiment!
What if you experimentally reproduce something that is already known to other musicians? Is it still worth calling experimental?
Trust me, @Wrlds2ndBstGeoshredr, even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. The tools set certain boundaries of course - tempi, scales, keys, genres, the Western harmonic expectation… and, yes, a trained musician or sound designer could perhaps reverse engineer what I made and render it into a reproducible form ( like to see them try, actually!), thus making it music , but for me the experiment is in each creation, the attempting to make something new each time, using different apps, settings, presets, methodologies, from a position of functional ignorance and technical ineptitude. Each piece is therefore necessarily an experiment in attempting to produce coherence from chaos.
So I stand by the claim. I do make music. (In my opinion, anyway
) I make it by experimental approaches, because I have no others to rely upon. It is therefore experimental music. Some think it's noise. I think it's pretty.
I've never understood the categorization of music, or music genres, especially the sub-genres of electronic music. (Electric guitars use electronics, don't they? So can heavy metal music be classified as electronic music?)
Experimental to me is music that uses a new (or novel) technique, for example a new form of audio synthesis or a new mechanism for generating sounds (or even just notes).
Then there's academic music. And algorithmic composition. And the noise genre. Do those fall under experimental?
Experimenting with different rocks and logs in order to observe their tonal properties.
Update as needed.
Is Log Rock a new subgenre of Math Rock?
I took the Wikipedia article to be a description of the historical context and development of the use of the term. Seems to me the context has changed various times. It can always change again. Or, you could make up a new term like experiential sound organization art.
I'd call punk a form of experimental music. But then many of the people doing punk start to learn and use more of the norms and it changes. I think in general that anything termed experimental art can't be a static concept, so its meaning is going to be fluid.
For me, it's music that is not mainstream, in search of new approach, etc. Certainly what was experimental would later not be so, And I think it's important to separate the "experimental" spirit from the aesthetic or the beautiful and ugly. Once the music is experimental it's impossible to judge it with the existing aesthetic rule. Here are two examples of very interesting approaches to the physics of sound, simple yet effective. It's almost like, you don't have to like it to realize that it's something, at the time of the premiere:
https://youtube.com/watch?v=bhtO4DsSazc
https://youtube.com/watch?v=oUqEU87pLL0
Edit: I guess you might need to find the piece's description a bit for these to be effective.👍
https://www.theculturium.com/john-cage-silence/
Frank Zappa said this:
“A composer is a guy who goes around forcing his will on unsuspecting air molecules, often with the assistance of unsuspecting musicians.”
We iOS folk can add unsuspecting apps, devices, etc, to the musicians part. But we are as much composers as experimenters 😇
Thanks. Now I have the Ren and Stimpy log song as an earworm....
Thanks…
My pleasure, except that now I do too and I'll probably have to go find a clip of it and make it even worse.
John Cage was one of the first composers to use the term "experimental music". It's a shame people tend to associate him only with 4:33, as his work was so much more than just that. Cage was interested in music generated by chance, so to him that was the "experiment". However he did not seem to approve of free-improvised music.
"Experimental music" seems to be used today as a catch-all for any music people can't categorize easily.
There will never be an "after" for experimental music, because there will always be someone, somewhere experimenting, trying to find something unexpected.
I see somebody on Wikipedia insists avant-garde music be categorized separately from experimental music. I get where they're coming from, as it's possible to experiment musically, yet produce results that are not innovate. OTOH, I'm not a fan of over-categorization of music. I'm not an innovator, but some people have called some of my stuff avant-garde, so there you go.
Words are to music as flies are to excrement.
The music and the excrement exist fully without the contribution of the words or the flies.
Now when the music is called excrement that's an analogy made from words. All music has an audience... find yours.
I seriously hope someone gets some courage from this rant to give fewer fucks and
experiment more. 99% of experiments fail but that 1% opens new avenues to art no one saw coming. Go for the 1% event every time and after 100 attempts you'll have a gem statistically but who's to judge? Your audience.
I agree with @Artj in that experimental music is music that isn't "safe", "radio friendly", "mainstream", etc. Anything that's underground really. It took me a while to figure out what experimental music is.
Ambient music is for instant, is what I would call Experimental. From Brian Eno's "Music for Airports" to BT's "This Binary Universe" (goddamn it BT release that album to Spotify already!) including Jean-Michel Jarre's "Waiting for Cousteau" (the titular track, not the whole album with the weird Calypso tracks
), these tracks are meant to blend in with the background rather than take center stage.
Minimalism is another form of experimental music, and it's something I've fallen in love with producing in Korg Gadget. Minimalism is a great way to tell a sonic story without it becoming clogged and bogged down. I'm unhealthily obsessed with Ritchie Hawtin's discography (no matter what alias was used on any given album).
Another form of experimental music is Musique Concrete, Found Sound, etc. Think Schaeffer, Stockhausen, etc. Basically taking recordings and arranging them in a meaningful sonic patchwork of sorts. Freesound.org and Cubasis 3 are perfect for Musique Concrete.
Then of course you get @iOSTRAKON 's Noise/Industrial music. That's experimental as well and also very well done.
Experimental music may not get me the riches, but I find it more pleasing to the soul to make and listen to.
The term "experimental music" is mostly used as an excuse - for being different, unusual, novel, etc. Or sometimes just plain crap. Like most excuses, it isn't needed. Simply "music" is fine.
@ervin : well, except that such a label offers a precise indication of methodology, intent, category, which is useful if for nothing else as a signpost to a potential listener, indicating that it is unlikely to also be a pop choon, or a classical oratorio or whatever.
Categories (even categories which seek to escape category) I believe are useful, given the infinity of listening choices versus the finite time available to listen. It is why I try to exert a discipline of category - experimental, dark ambient - on my own stuff, it gives me a target to aim at, a dialogue to have with myself about whether any particular practice I am engaging in at a specific time meets my evolving definition such that I would want to publish it as a ‘dark ambient’ piece.
Of course none of this says anything about the aesthetic quality or competence of the execution, or how it might be received by the listener, or how it might sit alongside other expressions within or beyond the same self chosen category, but is indicative of the intention of the creator, which is one argument offered up to the equation of whether it has ‘succeeded’ on it’s own terms. As to whether it is just plain crap? - well, that is for the listener to decide, obviously.
@Artj : you make a good point, that experimental doesn’t have to be aesthetic to succeed. But neither does experimental preclude the possibility of aesthetic pleasure. ‘I am sitting in a room’ ends up in a very beautiful place, I think, at the actual level of the sound as well as the beautiful idea behind the sound.
Crap becomes “good music” after kids listen to it enough times.
@jolico :
If I’m using a new app, instrument, or tool, or one that I may not be totally familiar or comfortable with, then I feel like any music that may come out of it is experimental.
Also, if I’m trying new (to me) musical ideas, whether it’s just a newly discovered chunk of theory, a chord progression, or even just a particular sound, then it’s experimental.
ALL music was experimental at one point. Even the hit songs on the radio started as an experiment right? I mean, that’s what you’re doing when you’re trying out different chords or scales, trying to come up with something that sounds good, right? Zero songs ever went straight from someone’s head to a radio station… there was plenty of experimenting going on in there between!
With that, I always try to place a “[EXP]” at the beginning of my YouTube videos that I feel are experimental in nature. This tells you that there may be musical mistakes and mishaps included.
As a parallel:
When I was at art college in the early 80s I studied product design (also called industrial design, seemed more disciplined than graphic design) and we (all of us, graphics, product, fashion, textile, theatre, etc) used to constantly argue and refine over our hot chocolates what the difference between art and design actually is. This went on for years. It probably still does in similar art college scenarios to this day.
Well anyway, some years ago I found the answer, and it’s nothing to do with the end product, it’s all in the workflow.
If you’re a designer, you’ll face no end of other people telling you you’ve designed it incorrectly.
If you’re an artist, that can never happen – whatever you make, that’s precisely how it was supposed to be.
Today I fondly cradle the idea of telling another artist that they’d done it incorrectly. They may indeed well have done it incorrectly as far as they’re personally concerned, but they’ll never admit that, for all their art is exactly as intended down to the last brush stroke or scrape of clay. No mistakes – all intentional. That’s art.
Now, I think that’s the kind of situation with experimental music. It’s all jumbled up with the unplanned, the itching (that thing where you throw sticks on the floor and a conclusion appears), the indeterminate, and also, jumbled up with just being crap and unskilled. Who is to know you did it incorrectly – it is, after all, experimental music. Any old shit you come up with you can claim was precisely intended. So, it’s art, you see.
@u0421793 : hey, works for me!
(#crap #unskilled #true artiste)
To me experimental means new in some way... unusual use of tools, theories or anything. Imo it’s down to listeners to decide, not the creator. Just because you got there now doesn’t mean you found something new... just because you’re unaware of some rules doesn’t mean you’re pushing boundaries.
Actual learning process most of the time based on repetition, copying... the opposite of experimental...
Actual ‘new’ most of the time comes from creators who mastered their fields first and then were willing to step out of their comfort zone.
Someone wrote it changes over time what’s considered experimental. I agree to some degree, but looking back to some older music I consider experimental, I can still recognise the ‘it was groundbreaking‘, while all the crap I made and thought it’s somehow ‘new’, is still the same old crap.
I like to see it this way : a way to make or listen to music out of your comfort zone or without any biases.
👍 I agree completely. "Experimental" in this way is simply a description to help listeners understand a bit about what they should expect. It could be beautiful and good, ugly or boring but successful at being challenging to listeners, or not at all, etc.
Right? It's such a simple idea that turns out to be very poetic. He's not what many would call a typical composer, but to me, Lucier is a genius in a totally different way. Very unique!
😆 Yes, there's that too. Edit: Hey! you're describing my music! 😆
I both agree and disagree. For an artist, there are no rules other than those that they choose to obey. They cannot do something incorrectly, as that implies they didn’t follow a rule that they had no freedom to ignore, but they can do something badly. Art is a compromise (or a collaboration) between the artist’s intent and their inability to realise that intent. If inability plays too big a part in the creative process, you’re likely to end up with bad art.
Since I touched on rules in art, I would suggest that experimental music is music where a significant number of the rules applied by the composer in creating the work are original to that composer at the time.
@TheOriginalPaulB said:
I accept both of these statements as true to me. I admit I am butting up against my own lack of formal knowledge and musical skill which limits what I can do, and increases the risk of making ‘bad art’ by my own and by objective standards as I try to expand upon a small kernel of something that feels it works.
Equally though, the things I am most happy with are those that have been achieved wholly within my own experimental ‘method’ and deliberate rule set regarding randomness, iteration, alteration… The tension between ‘freedom’ and ‘rules’ is where the sweet spot lives.