We Are All One Tribe

Two weekends ago, I got to see a talk and performance by the very influential Free Improvisational musicial Fred Frith, who was in town as part of an Improvisation Festival organized by a student group at Lawrence Univeristy. In his talk he addressed themes of composition vs. improvisation, which he has been exploring through his work since the 1960's, and he also gave some instruction for how to perform with other people - how to listen, how to contribute, how to end a piece. The audience was comprised of about 20 music students, all male, as it happened, and three of us members of the community, two of whom were the only women in the room. The performance that night was also attended by a select audience, mostly students, mostly male. Many members of the Music faculty did not attend. Free Improvisation is challenging to almost all ears, and requires some repeated exposure and hard thinking to find your way in. Once you've done the work, though, you can't help but regret that more people can't share in the experience. In conversation around the festival, someone made a comment that improvised music tradionally comes from groups that don't have the money - Blues musicians, musicians in Africa. Composed music, like Symphonies, comes from the upper classes in Europe. People traditionally dressed up in their white tie and evening gowns, put on all their jewelry, travelled to ornate concert houses. The instruments, for example Stradivarius violins, are astronomically high in value. The following Wednesday, I attended the gala opening of the 50th anniversary season of the Fox Valley Symphony Orchestra, with special guest Itzhak Perlman, the greatest living violinist. Everyone was dressed up, and there were decorations and cupcakes all in gold in the lobby, for the golden anniversary. While I was watching the orchestra perform, I thought about the traditions of European Symphony orchestra music and free improvisation (sometimes on found or handmade instruments). The fact is, I was able to attend both, and appreciate both. Then a week later I watched again the punk documentary The Decline of Western Civilization. I did not fully embrace the punk lifestyle back in the early 1980's (I spent the time in an elite liberal arts college in a bucolic setting in rural Ohio). But this was the music with which I identified. And because of that, I had to hate hippies, had to turn my back on bloated 1970's album rock, and had to hate Disco. I hated Disco with a burning passion. Thinking about those tribal allegiances at this distance, I'm struck now with the race implications, which I'm sure were at play. Disco emerged out of a number of musical traditions that featured mostly black performers, like soul, like the Philadelphia sound. Punk rock maybe started in the Blues and always had adjacency with Reggae, but in my experience really came from England, and was popular with suburban white kids. Like myself. People bemoan the fragmentation of the music industry in this internet age, when everyone can listen to anything ever recorded and compile their own playlists. We do not all listen to the same records any more, as a culture. And my own listening has lately gone all Local and Artisanal - I think every single CD I've purchased in the past 6 months has been directly from the hands of a performer who I just saw perform. I remember a sentence in a Stephen King short story set in the 1960's, where he's setting the scene of a character in college, tying the action to one particular summer, and finishes his description with, "...and Hey Jude played, everywhere, everywhere." We don't have generational anthems like that any more, but we also don't have radio stations that everyone listens to, or record stores that only stock what's selling. As I sat and watched the Symphony playing, I thought, but the good result of fragmentation is the erosion of tribalism. I can listen to Free Improv and Symphony music, I can listen to punk and Disco, and appreciate it all as music, on a spectrum. Once, going to the Symphony would have been a direct attack on the values of those trying to write new music, it would have been supporting the Bourgeoisie and the power elite, it would be a stab in the heart of the revolution and probably exiled me from that group. That music would be against the music the others were trying to create. The same with Punks and Hippies or Disco fans - even listening to the Saturday Night Fever soundtrack, or a Moody Blues record, would be a demonstration that you were siding with the enemy. As I sat and watched the Symphony playing, I thought, the positive result of the fragmentation of music is the democratization of music. If no one musical form dominates the upper classes or the power elite, everyone is free to listen to and appreciate everything, for what it is, on an equal playing field. Music tribalism becomes music appreciation. European Symphony music can be appreciated as the quaint ethic folk traditional art form that it is, no better than anything else, not trying to say that it's better than anything else. This has got to be a good thing. On the Monday night, instead of watching the first Presidential Debate, the same three community members who had gone to see Fred Frith's talk were in the front row for a performance by Huun Huur Tu, a quartet of Tuvan Throat Singers. The music is deeply rooted in the local history of the Russian province of Tuva. The singing style to us sounds otherwordly. They played instruments made of roots and skins - the leader had to ask for the stage lights to be turned down because their instruments are sensitive to temperature and kept going out of tune. I was astonished at the sounds and the skills of the players. I was reminded of the big world. I was reminded that when you think about loving everybody, equally, it includes people with experiences that are extremely remote from yours, not just the people who live across the street who you've never met.