After a long concert-going hiatus, I saw something last night and was less than pleased.

Posted January 15th, 2007.

Most of it was due to simply being tired and not in the mood to dance while being crushed to death by big-earringed women and beer-gripping men on all sides, but I still feel justified in complaining about the crappy sound quality. Which I shouldn't, for a six-dollar show in a tiny venue, one which the majority of people really enjoyed. I'm probably just premenstrual. But I've been thinking a variety of thoughts on the topic of music production and consumption, most derived from this book I'm reading called Noise. I'll simply share one of the better quotes from the first chapter, and apologize if it seems out of context (as well as impossibly dull to read). Attali basically hypothesizes four uses of music, the last one of which is totally narcissistic and personal. He hasn't yet elevated this fourth use over the other ones (as product for consumption, as ritual, and as spectacle) as more important or respectable, but attributes it with being "ahead of its time" — and I wonder if it really is (or was, since he was writing in '77).

"... [W]hat is heard by others would be a by-product of what the composer or interpreter wrote or performed for the sake of hearing it, just as a book is never more than a by-product of what the writer wrote for the sake of writing it. At the extreme, music would no longer even be made to be heard, but to be seen, in order to prevent the composition from being limited by the interpretation — like Beethoven, brimming with every possible interpretation, reading the music he wrote but could no longer hear. Thus composition proposes a radical social model, one in which the body is treated as capable not only of production and consumption, and even of entering into relations with others, but also of autonomous pleasure.... [A]ll that is left for the musician is self-communication."
- Jacques Attali, Noise

If what Attali says is conceivable, and that compositions could be endlessly reinterpreted, never recorded, and only experienced alone (at best purely in the theoretical form), I wonder if that somehow debases the pleasure felt by a jam-packed room of people grinding away to a performance they can only experience sub-par....

Pfft, as if I need an academic justification for not enjoying myself. I'd do that regardless.

Jessie Skinner was kind enough to grace us with his suggestions for the upcoming months in music, thus helping me stave off our normal critical content for one more week. Maybe next week I'll just publish a bunch of pictures of rainbows and unicorns. Yes?

Allana Mayer
Music Editor

all content is copyright of the authors, 2007 — email us! editor [at] mondomagazine.net
hurrah!