Locked and unlocked music
A thought experiment on musical form and freedom.
There are many ways to think about the forms and structures of music from a philosophical perspective. These methods can be academically-minded, sure, especially for cultural historians; but I think there’s a creative power in framing that can help us see things in a new light.
I’ve been thinking about closed and open forms of music a lot lately. As much as I love improvised music, I’m also deeply into great songwriting and steady rhythms. But with so much pop music today focused on the familiar tried-true song formulae (verse-chorus-bridge), and so many chord progressions repeating themselves, and so much production effort going to making everything sound maximally similar, I’ve almost come to think there’s a tyranny of song now. Everyone’s saying ‘it’s all about the song’. AI databases reiterate the same song formats forever. Publishing companies are re-selling the same old song.
That said, there’s always been a degree of (formal) conservatism in music. The drive to stick to the formula and maximise the thing that works. Or do whatever else is working (disco, grunge, crunk) and horn in on the sales. But let’s open up our framing to be more in line with freedom, exploration and newness. With unconservative music that opposes ‘the formula’ and is freer with the norms.
Locked/unlocked
I think a helpful way to do this is to think of locked and unlocked elements of music.
Genre is locked; genre hybrids are temporarily unlocked. When you play to a specific genre, you’re locked in to a style.
An orchestra is locked. A score is mostly locked, with narrow scope for interpretation. A symphony is a big-ass lock. Bach is in lockdown and he’s baroquely beautiful because of it.
Jazz improvisation is powerfully unlocked. 70s jazz fusion was unlocked. Trad jazz is mostly locked but with a strong improv factor. Free Jazz is too unlocked.
A covers band is locked; it’s always judged by the originals.
Ambient music is unlocked because it’s dispensed with so many lock elements. [There’s so little to lock onto.]
Electronic, sequencer-based music is locked to its own loops or MIDI clock.
Hip Hop music is locked but its rhymes veer to unlocked.
Beefheart is unlocked and wild.
The Grateful Dead are searchingly unlocked. Their songs evolve through improv and variation.
And but here’s the real conundrum: when is a song locked, when is it unlocked? I’ll come to that.
It’s a fairly loose distinction, locked/unlocked. Where do you draw line, the form or the sound or the choice of approach? A bit of all three.
Maybe this is a way to frame surprise as a virtue in music. Joy in surprise.
Two examples
I saw Wilco live in Brisbane. Good gig, everyone played well (especially Nels), I was familiar with all the songs. A bit of mock-grumpy Tweedy banter. But there wasn’t a single surprise all night. All the songs were played in the form and spirit of their recordings. No soloist deviated from their part. The songs ended about where you’d expect them to. I walked away with a two-fold sensation: that everyone played to serve Tweedy’s vision-shape for the band so the songs were performed exact; and gee I wanted a much stronger Dead-like vibe where the songs are allowed to stretch and reshape themselves. Where they play with the form.
Wilco are a locked band.
Another example. I saw Pat Metheny live (with the great Chris Potter) just after the release of his Orchestrion album. Pat’s live setup included a scaled-down version of the Orchestrion and they played a handful of tunes ‘with’ it. [To clarify: Orchestrion is a MIDI-driven mechanical ensemble of instruments which essentially plays a ‘score’. It only plays the exact MIDI cues; so a living guitarist has to play along with its set score, rhythm time etc]. Pat played some amazing improvisations and freeform solos with the band, but with the Orchestrion he has to be in lock step, synchronised. He improvises with it, but in the spaces where he’s scored to play so many bars of improvisation. Pat and the band play along with the help of three coloured lights on stage that mark the time/beats of the score. And so there’s a subtle tension between a rigorously locked machine, and the allocated but unlocked solos of the players doing their thing around it. It works, and there’s a degree of novelty every night, but it’s also unsurprising in its broad formality*.
This kind of tension exists in many other musics where there’s formal and improvised elements. Think of Indian ragas, built on a locked tanpura drone and a locked rhythm tala meter. With rules around performance times and stylistic and melodic choices. This music is also profoundly, amazingly improvisational – or unlocked – for the soloists.
When there’s that dual tension, the music can be completely novel, surprising, while also being solidly structured and familiar. You can have both, and make great music.
What about the song
When it comes to songs, it’s becoming harder and harder to surprise anyone. Or to sound like you’re taking risks or exploring new territory.
It’s hard to experiment with the song format; hard to make unique and interesting formal choices. As a singer or lyricist you can make it performatively unique, but you have to be very determined to make it structurally novel.
So what is an unlocked song? Maybe it’s a song that while it’s new, also sounds like you’ve known it forever. Locked and unlocked in memory.
An unlocked song is one that can be chopped and rearranged on the performative fly, and still be distinctly itself. Think of jazz standards. Loose but adaptable.
An unlocked song plays and experiments with form. One artist who does this regularly and well is Bill Callahan. Especially lyrically, Bill plays with repetition and the unexpected perspective. He’ll even throw in a perfectly apposite Leonard Cohen lyric or a reference to Letterman or literal dream-logic gibberish. Unexpectedly. And in ways where you feel the usual boundary norms of songcraft being pushed wider.
Maybe, also, interestingly, his later song lyrics deal with a peculiarly American idea of freedom, but that’ll have to wait for another post.
If you know of other songwriters making great strides with the song format, let me know in a comment below. Field Music also come to mind, as re-working the familiar and making new.
Parting thought for musos
Popular music leans to familiarity, sameness, safety. Risk-takers are rewarded, ultimately, but it’s hard to be unique and interesting by choice and design – past geniuses worked by instinct and nerve, in the accidentally-right place and time. It’s simply very hard to do something new. But maybe:
When you’re locked, suggest or imply the sense of being open, spacious, unconstrained.
When you’re unlocked, call back to form and order. And play with that tension.
* I’ve wanted to ask Pat: So, does it play the same way every night?