Section The Third
"Technology has not only given us a permanent present, but has given it the furniture of eternity. We can cocoon ourselves, if we wish, in a new provincialism more powerful than any of the past empires."
Clive James,
From the Introduction to Cultural Amnesia.
"We shall be able to look beyond our own systems and to assign our own suns and their planets to their places in a larger constellation, in which perhaps only the suns will count."
Edmund Wilson,
A Modest Self-Tribute.
"Excellently observed, but let us cultivate our garden."
Voltaire,
Candide, ou l‘Optimisme.
There is now so much music filling the air that a cat can barely swing to it, let alone one be swung through it. And with still more being produced as we give birth or evidence, measure love and money, no one person can hope to acquaint their selves with the majority of it. Certainly, it is quicker to consume than to produce, but the thousands writing and recording at once will create more music than can be listened to through any individual's mere two ears. And consumption cannot be delegated. It must be done for one's self. The result is that a listener, no matter how dedicated, can never truly be cosmopolitan; the uncurbed expansion of cultural information makes us all provincial, but, if so desired, these provinces can be constructed exactly as we want them.
The purely provincial may be, for many, the most successful approach to take when facing the musically-saturated world. The only-partially-interested may have in their possession more music than their equivalent from decades passed, and their empeethree-players prove it, but this will be acquired through the gentle passage from the known to the familiar to the similar. Their contact points with the foreign or unusual, if they have any at all, will be those that are safely different, for we have, none of us, the same tastes, but some may seem more comparable than others.
However, it is unfair to paint the provincial all the same shades of green and yellow, that is naïve and afraid. Most are simply content with what is; if the world is so big, why not live where one is already? It gives one a head start. And the provincial does not preclude the eccentric nor demand a narrow scope; it requires only that one appreciate how small one is and things are and how small everything is with the exception of everything its self, which may go on for some length. A provincial who is affected can be unpleasant, like the preposterous M. Homais. But an affected provincial may be a delight, like the preposterous Lord Whimsy.
The province of one's taste consists solely of what one knows and what one knows, in this wash of information, will generally only ever build outwards, rarely leaping from the homely to the antipodes. However, the direction and extent of this development is determined by one's curiosity. The listener is, arguably, manumitted from the monolithic institutions of taste-making. Or, at least, there are polylithic institutions, all much smaller and with weaker gravitational pull. The listener's aesthetic environment is under their own control and, as they wish, they may prod and poke its limits and peripheries. Which is, perhaps, familiar. In the motion blur that ran commodity into critic and critic into consumer, the silly archetype of the Musiphilosoph, who has not received a mention for a good many lines, was blurred as well. If the Musiphilosoph is truly any person who conducts experiments in listening, then she who questions what and why and how she listens to music is a Musiphilosoph. The technology that gave amateur musicians recording and distribution opportunities comparable with, if not exactly on par with, those available to professionals also made listening hobbyists and spare-time critics consider music with the sort of scrutiny once employed only by industry-insiders and obsessives, gently recommending that they compile thematic play lists and archive monstrous collections. If there are lone weirdoes in the first category, then there may as well be lone weirdoes in the second.
Perhaps my earlier metaphor of colliding universes was too grandiose and, instead, we all inhabit small plots in a mysterious land, where some of the flora is indigenous and some we have planted our selves. From wherever the seeds came, they are now sown in your earth and are part of your landscape, whether they wither or bloom. Like Brother Mendel, we must wait and see what grows and what hybrids may result. Mr. Wilson suggested that the reader should place her own stars and her own solar systems in the skies, but, perhaps, this is speaking of things in too majestic a tone. Or, perhaps, literature, for it was this of which he was speaking, can muster such talk, while music can not. M. Voltaire's advice, however, is more sublunary: we should cultivate our gardens.
Section The Fourth
Some Criticism Of The Musiphilosoph And The Response
1. Would we not be better served by spelling it Muso-philosoph?
Indeed, no. Muso is an epithet to be avoided, being synonymous with, though not identical to, the music snob. The Muso may well be heard to drone on about subjects in which his table-mates have no interest, such as specific scales and art-sleeve printing errors. The Musiphilosoph is defined as being curious; the Muso is merely boring. The Muso tests the tastes of others, while the Musiphilosoph is interested in only testing her own. As such, the Musiphilosoph's investigations are personal, not solely in the sense that they are conducted in private, although this may be the case, but in the sense that the correlated results will apply only to the experimenter. The Muso, while frequently left alone, considers his taste a necessary part of public record and imagines that there is a discursive element to personal preference. One appreciates the objective, the other the subjective.
2. Aren't we all Musiphilosophs in some manner or another? And what use is there in inventing a term that covers us all and distinguishes not one of us from another?
Do not let me be misunderstood. There was the suggestion, in Mr. Jennings' Net, Blogs & Rock' n' Roll, that the music listener of now may frequently have to make the same sort of choices and ponder similar considerations that music industry professionals did in the 1950s. This is not to say that each listener does or realises that they may have to. For the most of us, it remains that one plays a song because it is pleasing and it is exactly what one wants to hear. However, for the few savants, enthusiasts or how-one-wills, the current cultural climate allows one to explore their own corners of the musical world, making however many or few discoveries along the way. However, Musiphilosophstry requires that the listener do this consciously, amazed by the amount of music available, interested in what small part of it they know and intrigued by the gap between the two. For some, setting an empeethree-player to shuffle, while taking a walk, is a pleasure to be enjoyed passively, while, for the Musiphilosoph, it is an experiment in self-editing that investigates the relationship between the soundtrack and the space.
3. Is the Musiphilosoph liable to appear on beebeecee 4?
Indeed, yes. And he or she is as liable to appear in a documentary about Mr. Wyatt as in a series where Mr. Morley uses his six favourite 45s to examine what it means to be English.
4. Are you not playing somewhat fast and loose with that quotation from Edmund Wilson's A Modest Self-Tribute? Only three sentences before the one you reference, Mr. Wilson wrote:
"I have been working, as a practicing critic, to break down the conventional frames, to get away from the academic canons, that always tend to keep literature provincial."
Does this not stand in opposition to what you wrote and how you used the quotation?
Well, indeed, I agonised for several minutes over how much of that passage to include, but decided that the sentence its self was relevant, even if the paragraph and contextual setting were not. What Mr. Wilson said about literature in the 1950s holds true largely, in that literature is mainly canonical and, if one digests the moral of the essay, provincial - provincial in the sense that Anglo-literate readers will mostly read books written in Anglo-English. If they read any of those foreign books, they will, most likely, be taken from the accepted canon of that country, which is the equivalent of buying a holiday home in Provence. Thus, most readers will not have an understanding of literature in a global context, merely in an English-written one.
This does not necessarily apply to music. Certainly, foreign language pop music can be a little off-putting for some, but, if one is truly curious, it proves much easier to listen passed the unfamiliarity than it is to finding the plot through an impenetrable, alien text. What I understood Mr. Wilson to mean was that there is a tendency amongst readers of a certain language tradition, by which we can all read English without feeling wholly xenophobic, to consider their province of literature to be the world. Naturally, this is detrimental to both the reader and the written word. However, the whole world of recorded music sits before us at the online empeethree retail store or through the person-to-person illegal download application and , while one may be ignorant of its content, one could never be thought ignorant of its magnitude.
The sentence taken from Mr. Wilson's essay presumes such an awareness and recommends that the critic-reader, or, in the case of this essay, the critic-listener, explore her own way through this magnitude, posting their own landmarks and points of reference as she goes. The benefit of his metaphor is the implication that the space one is exploring is much greater than the explorer their self, in fact the universe is expanding. Surely the only one to comprehend it is to chart one's own way through one small corner of it.
5. Is it not more accurate that these wonderful technologies open up the world to us and give us the opportunity to be culturally cosmopolitan?
The internet no more invented the odd and the avant-garde than budget airlines founded the city of Prague. And a weekend in Prague makes one no more worldly than a season in Hull. Technology may place all of culture in our reach, but this is not cultural cosmopolitanism. Nor is having an eclectic collection of empeethrees. Cosmopolitanism implies having a sophisticated overview of the whole and, as this technology allows artworks to be produced at a greater rate than they can be appreciated, the whole gets bigger while the percentage one can understand of it gets smaller. However, being isolated in one's own cultural province, that is one's taste, allows one to explore it how one will, adding to and changing it as one goes along. Such technology does not, then, provide a Hubble telescope through which to see the arts, but offers each of us a magnifying-glass.
6. Isn't this just something else, but described in a different way?
Many things are.
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