In reading Lewis' analysis of the 'few' and the 'many' in regards to appreciating various art forms, I think I have found some further insight into popular music. I find myself quite incapable of understanding how so many people can like this stuff....all this popular stuff from about the 1950's untill today. As quoted in my earlier post, he mentions that what the many want in music is a tune they can hum, a beat they can dance to, and a starting point for their immagination or feelings.
While for myself I have rarely found it difficult to remmeber and hum the tunes from symphonies and other things that weren't written specifically to be sung, I suppose it would follow that songs written primarily for voice would be more easily hummed by other people.
I also noted in his discussion of how the 'many' read, that he mentioned them liking books which have just the right ammount of words. They do not pay much attention to the words, but they also need enough of them so as to not tax their immagination with coming up with all the details on its own. He described their approach to wording as reading hieroglyphs. They look for certain phrases, often clichés, which put them in mind of specific bits of....stock immaginings, I suppose you may call them. They want the wording to be familiar, short, quickly interpreted into immages and emotions, and tend to prefer overstatement because anything less doesn't capture their attention.
These ideas suddenly translated themselves into the context of music in my mind and suddenly all the popular rock music (and hundreds of subgenres thereof) made more sense to me. The idea behind readers liking overstatement has a striking resemblance to my experience of music with a strong beat. I find drumbs beating out the rhythm to feel like extreem overstatement of somthing that is entirely obvious - it feels like being talked down to, or like over-enunciated words. It feels as though these bands have never gotten past the need for a metronome. In addition to that aspect of overstating the beat, there is of course the dance aspect mentioned by Lewis. For whatever reason (and this I still don't entirely get) people seem much more compelled to move their bodies with a beat than with a melody. So they need a strong beat to first grab their attention, and to secondly to induce them to dance - to engage in the music through bodily movement.
The almost constant presence of words in popular music also plays into the need for overstatement, as well as the desire to use music as a starting point for the mind's activities. If the sounds of the music communicate some emotion or 'story' the addition of words (on top of what is already stated) clearly spelling out what the music wants to evoke in you is a most extreem form of overstatement. The words also provide a much more specific, concrete direction for the mind so that it doesn't have to come up with it's own immages and events to go with the sounds of the music.
The note that the 'many' want familiar hieroglyphic type phrases and not too many words makes me wonder if this desire for the easily recognizable might explain the frequently small number of instruments usually employed in popular music, both in actual number and in type. It might also explain my impression that it all sounds alike - because a certain form (with plenty of repetition built in) is generally used, as well as the same basic beat drummed out over and over across songs, bands, and subgenres.
I will grant of course that while having been subjected to a great deal of this popular music in my lifetime, I have not made much of a conscious effort to really 'get into it' and thus my observtions cannot be said to be in depth. I am certain that the 'many' would accuse the music I like of 'all sounding the same' as well. My guess at why they would think this is that 1) they have trouble connecting with any music that doesn't have words because they simply do not know what it wants them to think about without being told by the words - so it has no affect on them, 2) without a strong beat to grab them and force their feet to tap they do not feel like they are a part of it and thus find their minds easily wandering away from the music, 3) without specific recognizable instruments playing designated parts and a simple familiar form they do not, in a sense, understand the words or phrases spoken by the sounds of the music, and thus find themselves unable to engage and follow along with it.
The need for repetition in music, I think must be partly because of the desire to be able to hum the tune, and repetition makes it all the more memorable. You can listen to the first verse and then when it comes around again you can whistle along, and after the first time you can actually sing the chorus each time it comes up after. But another possible reason presents itself in Lewis' idea that the 'many' use any art form as a spring board for the immagination or emotion, focusing not so much on the art itself, but what they do with the basic idea it presents in their own minds. If their attention is only periferally taking in the artwork while their minds focus on their own reactions to it's ideas, then a listener who catches the begining of the song and then is lost in their inner impressions for a few moments, if he turns his attention back to the music and doesn't find what he first heard becomes confused and nolonger knows where he is. Is this the same song? What happened to it? He wants to hear the part that got him thinking again in order to maintain the particular reverie he was enjoying, but instead finds himself being thrown into a different set of thoughts entirely. Furthermore, this can explain the overall similarity between the general sound of all the songs on a particular album or by a particular band, or indeed on a particular radio station. The overall similarity allows one to tune in and out as much as one likes without becoming disoriented in what the music is directing you to experience.
The drastic changes in tune, emotion, intruments, and style even within one classical piece, one symphony, concert, or classical radio station could, I immagine, seem to the marginally attentive to be like trying to understand a TV program where every 3 minutes the dialogue switches to a different language. Of course people listen casually to classical music as well, but those who are well aquainted with it and often do pay it full attention will find themselves more at home, more able to recognize a particular section of a piece, or more able to predict how an unknown piece will proceed. Others who listen to it casually do so precicely because they do not know how to fully engage it and thus use it as background noise when they do not want to be tempted to dance or sing along. It is my impression that one need not ever attend closely to popular music or have many songs stored away in memory in order to feel in familiar territory when turning on the radio and being plunged into the middle of a song at random. The basic beat is almost always exactly the same (and even if not it's being hammered into your ear so it's hard to miss), so you can immediately begin tapping with it, and the singer is there telling you what it is about. The tune is probably short and catchy and you'll probably hear it at least once more before the song is over.
It seems to me that while there are indeed patterns in classical music, they tend to span a much longer time frame than is normal in popular music, and therefore demand a longer attention span to understand what is going on and grasp the pattern. Often, especially in soundtrack music which is less structured by rules, being guided rather by the actions occuring in a film, the main theme may only be stated in it's simple form once, and after that one hears only snatches of it, or variations upon it. Such a structure could hardly be understood if one was not attending to the whole of it.
A hypothetical illustration of how the forms of popular vs. classical music require different levels of attention.
Immagine, if you will, an art gallery and people walking through it. In one room they encounter a series of 6 paintings, the same two alternating. Both of them depict the same subject in two different poses, and both use nearly the same color palate. When they leave the room the people are asked to describe the paintings they saw. Having seen each of them 3 times, they will probably be able to recall them with relative ease, or if they saw the first and last while breezing by the rest, they will still have taken in all there was to see.
Now they walk into the next room and encounter a series of 4 paintings. Each of them is different, though in some ways similar. The first and last are particularly similar to eachother, but not quite exact copies. While the subject of the last is the same as the first, the colours are slightly different, the lighting is brighter, the background is more busy, and many of the details have been changed. The second is a contrast to the first, and the third seems to be a contrast to the seccond. When the people leave this room they are again asked to describe each of the paintings they saw. Having seen each of them only once they are less likely to remember them as well, and they may only be able to recall the first and last as a combined immage. The middle two may even be almost completely forgotten.
I Think I should note that, while I do not personally experience much in the way of depth while listening to popular music, there are people who do insist that it does have depth and variation, and being more avid listeners I will believe them. I think, however, that the overall rock/pop genre of music is more designed with the 'many' in mind, designed with what that type of listener looks for as the center or formost criteria. It is created first for the 'many' and anything extra that might please the 'few' in it is an extra bonus. I think that, on the other hand, classical/symphonic music is designed to be listened to and understood by the 'few' and if the 'many' find something in it they can connect with that is simply a bonus.
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