PLEASE DON’T STOP THE MUSIC

A Critical Essay​ By Felix Arthur Dioso (STS-29, 2018-06175)

Every art form fights the noose of verbal description. Writing about dance is like
singing about architecture; writing about music is like making buildings about ballet. There
is a foggy border past which language cannot go. The literary critic can copy out a few lines
from timeless songs—but when you try to spell out the meaning of those lines, when you
try to voice their silent music, another hopeless dance begins.
In the words of Callalily guitarist Sir Nathan, there is something peculiarly
inexpressible about music. He outlined history, way back to the mid-eighteenth century
where audiences routinely adopted it as a sort of secular religion, investing it with
messages as urgent as they are vague. Beethoven’s symphonies promise political and
personal freedom; Mozart’s operas inflame the imaginations of poets and demagogues.
Music was originally composed for an orchestra or other combination instruments. But now,
music spans an entire history from the Baroque, Renaissance, Romantic, Rock and Roll, and
Pop eras—a collection of vastly different pieces similar only in their distance from the
ever-changing present.
People today whine about bringing back “​the good old days​” of music, contrasting it
with today’s “​identical processed trash.​” Yet music cannot easily bear such burdens,
because music is just as shaped by its composer as it is by our inordinate demands. ​Music
is bound by our past expectation, genre, and technology as it is re-shaped by our
present needs, trends, and digital advancements​. For even as we worship our musical
idols, we also force them to produce particular emotions on cue. Students blasting lo-fi
study playlists on Spotify or young adults reminiscing past lovers with some classic OPM
(​cue—​ ​Yakap)​ are, in fact, not so different from the olden Parisian courts sponsoring
concerts for the blessings of the divine.
Both music and musicians find themselves, in a strange way, enshrined and
enslaved; inspired and encumbered by the technology that we possess. Hence, in great
perhaps, the explanation to the boundless complexity that music breathes to human life lies
not only in the art piece, but also in its composers, listeners, and its chosen mediums.
Unfortunately, music in the recent century has been captive to a cult of mediocre
elitism. Consider other names in circulation: classical music as “art” music; rock hits from
the Beatles as “serious and great” music; yet unorthodox genres such as EDM are criticized
as “cancer” music. Yes, the music can be great and serious, but greatness and seriousness
are not its defining characteristics. It can also be stupid, vulgar, and insane; terminology
seeves only to trap tenacious music in a theme park of the past. It cancels out the spirit of
music as one of the few living arts​. Music, say from the time of Beethoven, continues to
exist by being constantly created and recreated, live, before an audience. Muse, one of my
all time favorite bands (coincidentally, sir Nathan’s favorite as well), brims with classical
ideology married to pop-rock and house music. My favorite song, ​Bliss​, is ​perhaps one of
the catchiest songs ever written about wanting to electronically download someone else’s
happiness into your own brain. It brings together some excellent classical piano, mixes it
with traditional 70s equalizer distortion and guitar, and tops it off with 2000s electronic
beats.
Ultimately, ​music envelops you in real time​; unlike theater, it can be understood
equally by speakers of any language or no language at all; unlike dance, its energy rises
beyond physical form. It comes from a place of pure enjoyment, solace, melodrama or even
transcendence. So how can a brief sequence of notes or chords take on the recognizable
quirks of a person close at hand? How can a powerful personality can imprint itself on an
inherently abstract medium? Why can’t robots make true music?
The answer? ​Because music is a specific variant of the sound made by
people​. And concurrently, the one trait that these musically possessed creators have in
common is that they are unlike anyone else. The difficult thing about musical art
expression, in the end, is not to describe a sound but to describe human beings. It’s tricky
work, presumptuous in the case of the living, speculative in the case of the dead, and
subjective in the case of the audience. For despite the logical, moral rigor music may
appear to display, it belongs to a world of spirits, for whose absolute reliability in matters of
human reason is akin to a hand placed in the heart. Music is one of those contradictions
which, for better or worse, is inseparable from human nature. If anything, the best music is
the music that persuades us that there is no other music and no better art in the world. In
simplest words, ​rak on mga pare!