Musicology February 6
At the end of last year, one of the Slate music critics, Jody Rosen, had a chat on the Washington Post’s website. In that chat Jody was asked, “is there a way for music criticism to return to looking at musical elements?” Which I think is an excellent question. Jody responded:
“You make a great point. I do think lyrics and, as you say, ’social context’ are overemphasized in popular music criticism at the expense of the music itself. Most critics, yours truly included, could stand to bone up on their musicology, or at least get conversant with basic music theory.”
Which is an answer that I find absolutely infuriating. First, I want to make it clear that I don’t think that everyone should have a knowledge of music theory. Hell, I don’t think you need to know music theory to appreciate music, in fact I hope that you don’t. I do believe is that you need to at least be “conversant in basic music theory” if you are going to make your living writing about music. It doesn’t take a lot of effort to learn music theory, and any professional critic that doesn’t is just lazy.
As a counterpoint, let me offer this delightful article from Guardian. In it, conductor Charles Hazelwood offers a few sentences on some recent popular songs. He presents nothing too intensive, or hard to follow, just illuminating little tidbits. For example, he writes the following about the Arctic Monkey’s “I Bet You Look Good on the Dancefloor”:
“What’s so clever is it starts with an absolute deluge of F sharp minor. Then finally when Alex Turner comes in it’s actually on a C sharp major chord, which is what’s known as the dominant chord in music theory. Then you’re made to wait to get that big deluge of that tonic chord again until the chorus which is a brilliant way of building your expectation, holding you back like an elastic band and then letting you ping.”
I don’t think it is unreasonable to ask that a professional critic have the same level of music theory knowledge demonstrated above. For those interested, here is a good place to good to learn a little about music.
Photo by Flickr user Rustybuckets.