What Should Believers Do With Secular Art?

January 28th, 2010

In the past I’ve heard people say that we Christians should eliminate any sources of entertainment in our lives that are not of a profound spiritual nature.  That somehow all of the art we consume has to be holy and set apart to glorify God and all other art should simply be dismissed.  Also, in the dark past of recent Christian history even certain sounds themselves were considered unfit for worship in the church.  The drum set has been (and rare cases still is) an instrument of the devil and having the beat on two and four causes a raging desire for unholy pleasures (if you know what I mean).  This detail in particular offends me deeply since playing drum set is one of the primary ways in which I worship my Savior.

Since I’m dealing with extremes, I should probably shed light on the opposite end of the spectrum:  Since the earth and everything in it is the Lord’s, he has the ability to redeem anything.  This must include art.  So people take that to mean that if they are believers, they can consume any art they want and so long as they are using the experience to learn about God.

Both of these extremes are equally dangerous.  The former because to consider any human art as incapable of being corrupted is itself a clear demonstration of pride (the most satanic and destructive sin of all).  Similarly, it is shameful for a man to think he has the authority to label anything or anyone unfit for the kingdom of God.  It’s God’s call, not ours.  It is also dangerous because this view makes accusations based on a lack of cultural familiarity and not the word of God.  The drum set and the guitar are intimate parts of our culture, and to condemn the objects themselves without clear biblical grounds means that we (not God) condemn the culture we do life in.  Not to mention that this is a sick and twisted materialistic view of holiness.  Holiness comes from our hearts, minds, and lives, not the tools we use to show admiration to God.

The other extreme is dangerous because Satan uses very subtle ways of getting us to stray from our faith, and one tool he’s very fond of is beauty out of its proper context.  Dance is a wonderful artistic tool, but it can be used in a pornographic way very easily and subtly (I define pornography as anything meant to awaken sexual desire outside of it’s proper context).  It can be very easy for a man (or woman really) to justify consuming such art by saying that they are admiring a well crafted and beautiful presentation that has no obvious sexual reference.  Yet they know that watching is encouraging them to fall into lust.  The principal in this example applies to everything.  If you’re reaction to a work of art is sin, or the art has the intent of tempting us rebel against God then don’t consume it.  At the same time, don’t instinctively condemn art because you’re reaction to it is sin because it may be you that is the problem and not the art.

So then, there is no clear line of right and wrong when it comes to entertainment.  There are some things that can be labeled as a clear attack on the moral principals that guide us in our daily lives, but most secular art is not that simple.  Use the good judgement that God gave you.  Don’t listen to things that make you stumble in your walk with Christ, meditate on the things that draw you closer to Him, and don’t consume art you’ve approved for yourself around you weaker brothers and sisters (who you are commanded to love) that can’t handle it.

I would like to end this by justifying and recommending a work of art that is clearly secular.  In 1997, The Five Sacred Trees, by John Williams, was released and added to the neglected genre of “Bassoon Concerto”.  If you don’t know what a bassoon is, I strongly urge you to purchase this recording and consume it until you are well informed about the beauty of the sound which a bassoon can produce.  This work is a beautiful depiction of a very specific component of nature, and it is very easy to use this work to help you marvel at the wonderful creation around you.  Ever since I consumed this work, I have not been able to look at a tree without marveling at God’s awesome workmanship.  However, it is very possible that some believers have struggled with tree worship and witchcraft in their past.  I highly doubt I’ll ever come into contact with someone like this since tree worship has not been common for quite some time, but if a rare exception stumbles upon this work I would strongly recommend that they carefully consider what their reaction might be before they listen to this.  I mean this very sincerely, but I also mean it as an example of what I’ve just discussed.  Just because one person stumbles into sin because of a work of art doesn’t make the work unholy.  It simply means that the person should not be listening to it.

Do purchase and enjoy this work.  It is $4.95 on iTunes, and worth every penny.  Feel free to give it a rating and write a review as it needs much more attention than it has gotten these 13 years. John Williams, Judith LeClair & London Symphony Orchestra - Hovhaness: Mysterious Mountain - The Five Sacred Trees (Concerto for Bassoon and Orchestra): I. Eó Mugna

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Meaningful Memories Take Effort

January 21st, 2010

I can’t stop listening to Yoshimatsu’s 3rd symphony.  It’s one of the most beautiful and well crafted works I’ve ever heard.  It’s a shame that so few people know about it when I know that every single person that reads this would be better for the experience.  I suspect that so few are interested because a massive amount of effort is require to enjoy a work like this.  We can’t just listen to a symphony, we have to consume it by listening to it, reading the text to discover its intent, listening to it again, inviting our friends to listen to it with us, discussing it with our friends to get something deep and rich out of the experience, and in the end consume it to the point of it becoming a component of our long-term memory.  “But Caleb, I’m too busy to do all that.” We do it with popular music all the time, why wouldn’t we want to do it with something that we know to be of a higher level of artistic expression?

Do we not have the time to make rich, meaningful, and enduring long-term memories? Aren’t some things valuable enough to put effort into enjoying? If we’re not willing to do what it takes to make meaningful memories, then we’re just contributing to the apathy of this declining culture.

Be part of the solution and make meaningful memories. I promise you that Yoshimatsu’s 3rd symphony is worth your time and effort. Buy it and consume it.  BBC Philharmonic Orchestra & Sachio Fujioka - Yoshimatsu: Saxophone Concerto, "Cyber-bird" & Symphony No. 3 - Symphony No. 3, Op. 75: I. Allegro: Adagio Grave - Allegro Molto

Please note, popular music is worth your time too. It simply demands a lot less effort. It’s like a great hamburger, but if it’s all you consume you’ll get fat. Take the time and effort to eat some salad and not just taste the dressing. Then invite other people to do the same, because things that go unnoticed will be quickly forgotten.

There’s a very serious spiritual application here too.  God’s word takes much more effort to enjoy then a symphony, because it is so much deeper and more rewarding.  Not only that, but you can spend a whole lifetime enjoying it and still make meaningful insights into the text.  Even a symphony can go stale eventually assuming you’ve consumed it.  But God’s word is limitless in its potential to give you rich memories because you are making lasting memories about your relationship with the King of the universe.  This, my friends, is worth a lifetime of study.

Make rich memories, because it will make you better no matter what you believe.

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Where Is New Classical Music On-line?

June 8th, 2009

A major problem that I am encountering as I am attempting to get into the music industry is that the more obscure composers are extremely difficult to discover.  It’s so bad that it is nearly impossible to discover a new composer without having already heard the name outside of the internet.  And when a composer’s website is found, there are no links going to more composers that the composer is associated with.  In order for our ancient and ever developing craft to not be completely overrun by popular music, it has to be easier for consumers to find us.

Allow me to demonstrate the classical community’s deficiency in on-line promotion with an experiment I did that you all can conduct yourselves.  Since I am also interested in rock bands, I decided to type “rock bands” into google.  Instantly, a site came up that had all of the more popular rock bands listed by genre and country.  I looked through the 64 genres, and quickly clicked on hard core since I am intensely interested in Underoath.  I then clicked on a random band (Every Time I Die), liked it, and plan to check them out further once I have a significant source of income.  I was connected with a new group of artists within minutes and didn’t need more than a basic knowledge of what I was looking for.

I then typed in “Classical composers” and quickly became frustrated with finding the type of classical music I was looking for.  First of all, the classical music I enjoy the most is what is being written right now.  The first link that I clicked on seemed more like a museum celebrating birthdays, dying days, historic musical events, and the occasional announcement of the performances of pieces that were written over 100 years ago.  But I came to the site looking for new music to sample, buy, and listen to, not to become more educated about Prokofiev.  I quickly revised my google search to “contemporary classical composers” knowing that it was the only way that I was going to find what I was looking for (keep in mind, the average music consumer would not know that the word contemporary is significant).  Knowing that wikipedia didn’t have what I was looking for, I clicked the third link and found more dead people.  I clicked the fourth link and had no idea how to go about looking through the site (did I mention that all of these sites are the most boring and flat looking things I have ever seen?).  I clicked the next link and found a site for reviewing a few things I may have been looking for, but didn’t find any new music to sample or buy.  No matter how many links I clicked, I either came to dead people, random samples of music I hated, or unattractive pages that were in complete disarray and ignorant of my generation’s needs for categorized music.

The same problem occurs in iTunes.  When you type “contemporary classical” all that you encounter is a couple of popular classical-lite artists such as Josh Groban, followed almost immediately by pop singers accompanied by orchestras. If you only type “classical” your search results in dead composers.  There are a few exceptions such as Yoshimatsu, who is under “classical,” but his name must be searched for and recognized amidst the dead that come up with him.  The average consumer will not have the knowledge to click his name and will never experience the joy that I do when listening to the second movement of his saxophone concerto.

It is unacceptable that the first sites to come up in a search for modern or living composers are sites dedicated to the continuance of 250, 100, or even 25 year old work.  Because of this, classical music has been driven underground so far that even interested people like myself can’t find new music in this important genre that they enjoy listening to without spending hours looking for it.  Since our music is completely underground (at least to the perspective of this educated composer) and has been for some time, the music industry is continuing to evolve without us and drive us deeper into the ground.  Our dead will not sustain the classical discipline for much longer and if we continue to only promote work that is far removed from our time, our way of creating new music will die.  If we don’t do something soon then the only thing that will keep our educational programs (Collegiate and public) and our disciplined way of creating music going will be government programs that exist only to keep great art from extinction.  Our way to creating music will be confined to a museum.  

What is our solution then?  Perhaps we need to keep music education programs going in our schools or be sure that community performances are being promoted in their areas. This was fine marketing for the 1950’s, but today people look for music on the internet and become confused when some other search pattern is suggested (including myself).  Our solution lies on-line.  It is to find our living composers, unite them, categorize them and their music making it easy for their audience for connect with them.  This is the exact reason that popular music (in the broader sense) is evolving and classical music has become obscure.  I propose an attractive on-line presence that has all living and educated composers and performers in one place categorized by genera, subgenera, location, instrumentation, etc.  This would not take the place of on-line retailers or publishers, but rather make them more effective.  It would be thousands of names and compositions that a consumer could click on and be directed to the best place for them to go sample that music and purchase it. 

The goal:  If a composer has 4,000 people who buy cd’s and scores every time they become available, then that composer will make a living of around $60,000 a year give or take.  If this could take place on a massive worldwide level, there would be a lot more experienced composers writing music and appealing to more people and thousands of fantastic projects would be generated each year.  Then the truly remarkable work would surface and become popular as the lesser composers (4,000 fans to one composer) would be doing their job and promoting the best of us by means of earned appreciation.  This promotion of truly great work would happen due to the nature of google and its favor of sites with multiple links going to it.  Each composer would have to support the work of their favorite living composers by reviewing their work and linking to their sites.  This would not only promote great art effortlessly, but would also educate vast audiences.  This is the ultimate goal that all composers should be seeking in their professions.

(If you’re curious, by my estimate America alone could have up to 75,000 people making livings with nothing but composition.  And that’s assuming everyone only likes one composer and that these composers only write music without doing anything else.)

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The Definition of Intention

May 18th, 2009

We have established that the decision of what we listen to should not only be based on what we enjoy listening to, but also how intentional the music is.  While we may agree on this, what is still unclear is what exactly intention is and how to find it.  As always, when we are looking for a clear definition of a word it is always a good idea to start with a good dictionary definition whether you think you know what the word means or not.  (Taken from dictionary.com): Intention – “An act or instance of determining mentally upon some action or result.”  Let us first focus on the words “determining mentally”.

Music is clearly a sort of presentation that is meant to be perceived by an audience.  Therefore, determining an action mentally is only part of the process since a musician must also accurately execute his intention in his selected medium.  The composer must correctly transcribe the sound in mind, the performer must place his events in exactly the place desired, etc.  So it seems then that proficiency and intention are separate.  However, since music is a presentation, intention and accurate execution are perceived as a unit.  When an unintended result comes out of good intention the result is perceived all the same; all that results is less intention.  So when mental determination is used in the context of music, we cannot say that the resulting action was intentional unless the action matches the intention.  Thus, we may as well include the resulting action in our definition of intention:

Musical intention – an act or instance of determining mentally a musical event which is supported by a result that reflects the predetermination.

Now we are left with a more difficult and more controversial question.  I will be as unbiased as possible, however some categories of music are going to be subject to harsh criticism when these ideas are applied.  The question is “How do we find intention?”  A more blunt way of putting this is “How do we determine the quality of our music?” 

An intention has to have reason behind it, because without reason intention itself has no intention.  The stronger reason the intention has, the better the intention will be.  If an entire work is written purely without reason, the intention will be considerably low.  Conversely, a work of high intention will have a wealth of reasoning for each musical event that is placed.  A trained composer will give extensive reasoning that proves intention in orchestration based on physics, melodies and harmonies based on theory, rhythm based on human nature, and aesthetic based on science, philosophy, and/or theology.  Trained performers, sound engineers, synthesizer programers, and many other types of musicians also will give the reasoning behind their desicions.  Unless there is a possibility of giving reasoning for every decision made, the musical work lacks intention.

Some may object to this statement because many outstanding musical decisions are made every day without conscious premeditation.  But this subconscious ability does not develop without an extraordinary amount of study and training.  The ability to make good subconscious decisions is only in musicians who are also able to make guided conscious decisions about everything that they do as well.  The best musicians have the ability to analyze their intuitive decisions and give them analytical reasoning, resulting in even seemingly unexplainable intention being explained.

All that now remains to be addressed is whether or not simplicity is a way to work around intention.  Obviously when something is simple it takes less intention to raise its quality to an acceptable level.  But when you have less intention, you have less reasoning.  Less reasoning means you have less to say and should take as little time to say it as possible.  (But now that I’ve attacked something, let me articulate what I am not attacking:  Simple does not necessarily mean less musical events, but rather less complexity.  For example, performing a string quartet with synthesizers reduces the work’s complexity simply because the string family’s sound is much richer than a synthesizer’s.  The music is now simpler.  So by simple music I mean music that lacks complexity in the elements of rhythm, harmony/melody, orchestration/timbre, or aesthetic.  I will expand on this in future posts.)

Quality comes from intention, intention from reasoning, and reasoning from training and study.  If a work is not capable of being defended by reason, the work is poor.  I mentioned four things that a composer must defend in order to argue a work’s quality:  Orchestration, melody/harmony, rhythm, and aesthetic.  These elements make the foundation of determining the quality of music.

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Determining Quality by the Level of Intention

May 5th, 2009

A person’s definition of good is largely based on past experience and knowledge. Therefore our minds tend to prefer art that is familiar to them. If the music is not familiar in any way, then it will not be perceived as music because our minds will not recognize it due to a lack of exposure to that category of sound. So our evaluation of music is determined by the amount of familiarity that we have with the sound. However, there is another device with which we should evaluate the art we perceive. This component is sadly not used by many people, but is the only universal gage that we have to decide what is worthwhile for us to take into our minds.

The amount of intention in art should be our primary method of evaluation. Without intention there is no art, but only the seemingly random pallet of sounds that was originally provided for the artist to create with. Music is a particularly intriguing form of art when taking the amount of intention into consideration, because it is impossible to intend every aspect of the sound that is being planned in the case of the composer, or created in the case of the performer. An element of chance is always going to be present and complete control over a performance is unfeasible. But despite this, in order for music to be of quality an acceptable level of intention must be attained.

In polyphonic music chance is particularly frustrating for a composer because no matter how much intention is used to craft the work, the end result depends upon the performance. It is also frustrating for the performer because the result depends on the tools at his disposal (this includes his skill and intellect). So it is the composer’s duty to make sure that his compositions are well within the realm of possibility and that the potential intention is maximized. It is the performer’s duty to make the plan for the work be brought fourth into reality and then also to polish the details of the sound that cannot be fully planned by the composer (timbre, specific placement of sonic events, etc). Therefore the quality of this music is dependent upon the combined amount of intention from both the composer and the performer.

In the case of electronic music, the performer is for all practical purposes eliminated and replaced by a computer. Since computers are not capable of intention outside of what they were programed to do, every aspect of planning the performance is left up to the composer. So not only does the composer have to make decisions on aesthetic, what pitches happen when, orchestration, volume, etc., but he must also determine the specifics that are usually up to the performer. This is a potential explanation for why so much electronic music is not well done. It takes a highly trained musician to draw the plans for a performance, program synthesizers that create a highly intentional timbre, and place every event with purpose. Massive amounts of thought from primarily one person is needed to bring electronic music to an acceptable level of intention. Creators of electronic music must also take into account that the performance is to be produced with a speaker system, and the sound must be planned well enough to be intentional while being played by a speaker system that is not designed to have much potential.

Recorded music lies somewhere in between a live performance and electronic music. While it was performed in real time by a performer, it has been transcribed for a computer or an analog device to be read and reproduced. What results is an electronic representation of what actually existed. The amount of intention in the recording does not only reflect the amount of intention from the performer and the composer, but also the sound engineer, the quality of the recording equipment, and the quality of the sound system reproducing the performance. Because of all of the people involved in making this music, I find that this method may have the most potential.

Recording introduces a whole new element to sound organization because it is now possible to choose which sounds are used and then replace sounds that have unacceptable levels of intention. This is why recording is completely different from performing: The performer now has the ability to show the audience what is theoretically possible rather than simply showing a random example of what he or she is capable of. Some performers believe that altering a recording is dishonest, but this stance completely defeats the purpose of recording. Our goal is to make a sound with as much intention as possible, and this cannot be done in real time. If a recording is to be made, the result should be as good as possible; to not alter a recording is to withhold from your audience the best sound available. If more intention is possible, it should be applied.

Bear with me as we ponder the exception to our rule intention creating quality. Unintentional events can be artistic, but the amount of randomness must be intentional. For example, a high quality synthesizer will give the programmer the option of randomness. As a programmer, I find this feature to give the timbre an organic nature causing it to be far more pleasing to most ears. Random as that part of the sound may be, it is still intentional. But a degree of randomness adds beauty to a sound, which gives us the ability of say that a sound does not have to be fully intentional to be perfect. On the contrary, a fully intentional sound is bland and unchallenging because it is so predictable. A degree of unpredictability is part of what makes music so beautiful.

We must take these ideas into account as we choose the music we pay for and listen to. If most of the sound we are recognizing as art needs little to no preparation to create, then we have to ask ourselves why it interests us. I think we will find that we listen to some music simply because is does not ask us to interact with it due to the fact that so little is generally being done. Simple music has its place, but to listen to it constantly weakens your mind. Listen to music with massive amounts of intention in the sound. Don’t settle for any less simply because that is what you enjoy listening to. Challenge yourself to understand greater art. When your mind grows weary then listen to simple music, but don’t linger for long.

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