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IN PRAISE
OF
UNREMARKABLE
MUSIC:
PART 1

IN PRAISE OF
UNREMARKABLE MUSIC:
PART 1
BY JOSEPH SOWA
ON FEBRUARY 19, 2020
Why did you start writing music? Now, what do you
hope to accomplish? This year? This decade? By the
end of your life?

In response to these questions, you might envision

your music’s success according to a variety of
measures:

• The awards, press, and publicity it receives.

• The size of audiences it attracts.

• The money it makes.

• The joy you had in creating it.

• The degree to which it meets a performer’s

need or fits their skill level.

• The experience shared by those in the room

when it is performed.

• The appraisal of your colleagues and other

connoisseurs.

• The social impact it has.

Given your creativity, I’m sure you can come up with

dozens of other metrics (and I’d be curious to hear
them).

But it should be obvious that rarely, if ever, does a

piece of music succeed across all these dimensions.
Whenever we create music—whatever kind of music
we write—we create something that is, at least in a
few dimensions, unremarkable. Because individuals
and groups value these various dimensions
differently, no piece of music can be universal in its
appeal or usefulness. Even Bach can be considered
an also-ran by many people in many contexts. Thus,
it is not intellectually or socially honest to ask, “Is
Piece A better than Piece B?” without being able to
identify the terms of comparison and explain why
those terms matter.

It may seem sacrilegious to suggest that our prized WHENEVER

WE CREATE
repertoire is not inherently more worthy than other MUSIC—
music. It may further seem counterintuitive to
WHATEVER
KIND OF
consider that the uninteresting and mediocre, or MUSIC WE
WRITE—WE
even the lackluster and substandard, may help us CREATE
achieve our goals better than our lodestars—not just SOMETHING
THAT IS, AT
as cautionary tales but as exemplars themselves. LEAST IN A
FEW
DIMENSIONS,
What does unremarkable music have to teach us UNREMARKABLE.
about achieving our goals?

On a social level, we all share a fundamental need

for validation and belonging. Though some
composers may be content to write for themselves,
most of us write music because we want to connect
with those around us. Regardless of whether we get
paid, a large part of what we do constitutes a gift to
our collaborators and communities. We hope our
music may inspire, challenge, stimulate, touch, or
delight those who hear it. When that gift is poorly
received or rejected, it stings.

This sting can be all the worse because many of us MOST OF US

WRITE MUSIC
hold ideals of meritocracy and social justice. We BECAUSE WE
believe that the good and the marginalized should
WANT TO
CONNECT
have at least an equal seat at the table as the WITH THOSE
AROUND US.
powerful and the privileged. Further, we want to
believe that our music has merit. When that merit is
ignored—particularly because of structural
discrimination—we feel a righteous sense of
injustice.

But from what table does that injustice exclude you?

And from what power? Indeed, to whose aesthetic
values are you trying to appeal? Or whose opinions
are you trying to influence?

Often, our success as composers is only loosely

based on how good our music is. And as inarguable
as the benefits of power and privilege may be, they
hardly constitute the only way to create and sustain
communities. Further, the powerful and the praised
are not the only communities worth serving or
creating. (On these points, see also Elliot Cole’s
article “Questions I Ask Myself.”)

This, then, is what unremarkable music can teach us

socially: our success as composers, however you
want to measure it, reflects most strongly the quality
of the relationships that our music fosters. As
humanity’s most ephemeral artifact, music may
catalyze these relationships, but it cannot constitute
their substance. Inasmuch as your music enables
you to make others feel seen, treasured, cared for,
and empowered, it can be said to be doing its job.

We are not fundamentally composers: we are

human beings who use music to love others.

Likewise, other people are not fundamentally our

audience: they are human beings with a rich
capacity to receive and reciprocate that love.

Whenever we connect with other people through our

music, it constitutes only a part of the whole
relationship. Even our ties to the so-called “great
composers” have just as much, if not more, to do
with the myths and institutions built around them as
they do with their music. Why, then, do we insist that
our professional status must stand or fall primarily
on our scores and recordings? You would never
communicate with your mother only via sheet music.
So, too, we can only fully cultivate our professional
impact through the stories we tell, the meals we
share, the conversations we have, the memories we
make, and so on.

YOU WOULD
 NEVER
It should be obvious that you don’t have to be COMMUNICATE
WITH YOUR
stereotypically successful to do this. Anyone—the MOTHER
17-year-old YouTuber, the part-time production ONLY VIA
SHEET MUSIC.
music composer, the obscure grad student, the
band teacher from Montana—can make an impact
through these means.

Still, when that impact goes viral, it can leave some

observers bemused, jealous, or defensive—an
honest reaction, inasmuch as its roots go deeper
than common pettiness. These roots tap into the
implicit messages behind certain measures of
success, messages about which relationships
matter more than others. For many of us, it requires
a great struggle to uproot our uncritical embrace of
these values. Does the New York Philharmonic and
its milieu truly matter more than the seventh graders
of the Springfield Middle School Band and their
families? Is the only route to financial security truly
through becoming an A-list Hollywood composer?

Yes, attaining such stereotypical success through

“remarkable” music will constitute impact and bring
influence, and these are not unworthy goals. Yet
unremarkable music can be subversive and
transformative in ways that music of “merit” cannot
achieve. Think of punk rock. Think, too, of
educational and film music. Despite all the flack
that these genres receive in some quarters, many of
“
us became composers because we loved John
Williams’s Star Wars scores or Eric Whitacre’s choral
works. That these examples are wildly successful in
some spheres but disparaged in others serves only
to underscore my point: whose opinion matters?

This disconnect between impact and merit brings to

mind the common aphorism, “One person’s trash is
another’s treasure.” It, in turn, resonates with a
“philosophical conundrum” in ethics that Agnes
Callard explains in a recent essay:

Morality requires we maintain a safety

net at the bottom that catches everyone—the
alternative is simply inhumane—but we also
need an aspirational target at the top, so as
to inspire us to excellence, creativity, and
accomplishment. In other words, we need
worth to come for free, and we also need it to

”
be acquirable. And no philosopher—not
Kant, not Aristotle, not Nietzsche, not I—has
yet figured out how to construct a moral
theory that allows us to say both of those
things.

To this conundrum in music, I propose an answer

akin to Captain Kirk’s solution to the Kobayashi
Maru: Sidestep the issue. Rig the test. Embrace
what is unremarkable about your music. Cherish it.
Prize it. Stop trying to be all things to all people.
Stop trying to convince the haters.

This isn’t to say we should stop fighting for a more EMBRACE

WHAT IS
perfect world (never!). Still, in this present, imperfect UNREMARKABLE
world on a Tuesday afternoon, to quote Obi-Wan ABOUT YOUR
MUSIC.
Kenobi, “there are alternatives to fighting.”

Part 2 of this article will show how some of those

alternatives emerge from identifying why
unremarkable music bothers us personally.

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Joseph Sowa grew up playing violin and listening to

orchestral broadcasts on NPR. Surrounded by these
 sounds, he wanted to make more
of them. Often taking its
inspiration from nature
imagery, his concert works have
been played by Ensemble Dal
Niente, the PRISM Quartet, Collage New Music, the
Lydian String Quartet, Quartetto Indaco, the BYU
Philharmonic and Chamber Orchestras, the Awea
Duo, the Tower Duo, Jaren Hinckley, Daniel Stepner,
and Charity Tillemann-Dick, among others.  He has
been commissioned by performers including the
Genesis Chamber Singers, the Farallon Quintet,
Carolyn Hove, and Neil Thornock as... Read more »

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▶ 3 THOUGHTS ON “IN PRAISE OF UNREMARKABLE MUSIC: PART 1”

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