Rewilding Music

~whiskeyding

Apologies for the long-windedness, Pub-goers. This does feel a bit like a two-beers-too-many undergraduate rant, but it's been on my mind. Many things have been, lately.

I have been thinking about the role of music in the lives of both non-civilized peoples and in our own pre-industrial past.

My mind's idea of the shape of music is mostly that of industrially-produced 'professional' music. Singers are supposed to sound like -this-, rhythms are -that-, acceptable melodies and structures span -this- particular area, carefully mapped out by musical theorists, tastemakers, record labels, and most recently streaming service algorithms. Certain genres are allowed to stretch those boundaries, but it doesn't change the fact that _making_ music is largely the province of an army of specialists, and simply not a thing the majority of modern humanity does...Ours is but to purchase and consume.

Any ethnomusicologists here are welcome to call me out on my spitballing nonsense, but I suspect that the idea of a 'professional' music-maker would have been ridiculous to a hunter-gatherer or early subsistence farmer. Music was made for oneself or a small circle of family, fellow workers, or tribe members. There was certainly ceremonial music and storytelling, and some people were doubtless better at it than others...but it was not a job, it was just a human thing you did to pass the time, mark the rhythms of work, or perform some necessary magic. And it probably did not sound at all like the modern western ideal of music. Some of the earliest field recordings I've heard of old weavers or sailors singing songs from their youth hint at a very different soundscape prior to the advent of recorded music, and that was practically yesterday in historical terms.

This shift in the social context of music is noticeable every time I pick up an instrument and my mind insists it's to "practice". Why is that? Why not pick up an instrument and make noise for the pure fucking joy or sorrow of it? My friends have told me that music-making that's not done with an eye toward future monetization is a waste. That anyone would hold such an opinion fills me with a deep and bitter sadness, and I cannot find words to explain it to them. Something has been lost.

I've played music and sung amateurishly for more than two decades, and yet I feel I'm missing something, some fundamental relationship with the weird sounds we make for communicating things that have no names.

I am going to try something strange and baffling and probably pointless. I'll forsake recorded music for...let's say six months? Enough time to form new mental habits. No CDs, no mp3s, no radio, no streaming. I will also put away my guitar, leaving me with a frame drum and a one-string diddly bow. If I desire music, I must sing it or play it myself, with instruments that cannot easily replicate the sound-map of the music I grew up with. I will of course carry a mental freight of music that I have learned in the past...but my hope is that I can at least begin to free myself of expectations about what music is 'supposed' to sound like, and what it is for.

Silence is also fine. One of the benefits of getting older seems to be a comfort with silence that I didn't have as a younger man. The ambient sounds of the world are often--usually!--enough. I needn't be compelled to add my voice to it unless it would somehow improve the situation.

Sometime in the next few weeks I'll bore the Pub about getting back into practice handwriting after almost 40 years of typing. SPOILER: It's no fun at all.

-w