Postby take5_d_shorterer » 30 May 2009, 19:19
An "incompleat" answer. Will try to fill in some of the details later when I edit this post. Additions for questions 4 and 5
1. Which do you prefer: a) hearing music from records, b) hearing music live? Why?
2. Which do you prefer: a) hearing music played by others, b) making music yourself? Why?
3. American folkies in 1960s were often suspicious of electric instruments (e.g., Dylan at Newport, 1965). Do you think their suspicions are valid? If so, why? If not, why not?
I didn't grow up in the American folk music movement in the 1960s so a lot of what that movement proclaimed is very foreign to me. My understanding is that many folkies then hated certain electric devices, like electric guitars, for ideological or political reasons. (Interestingly, I have never heard of a folky expressed a similar hatred for P.A.s and electric amplification without which the Newport Folk Festival couldn't have happened, at least not in the same way.)
Some of these ideological reasons were that electric guitars are the instruments used in commercial, popular music, and so they aren't part of some centuries-long musical tradition passed down orally.
Okay. Most of these objections evaporate for me when I listen to Muddy Waters' "I Can't Be Satisfied" (1948?), which is on electric guitar, and compare that with his earlier acoustic stuff recorded at the Stovall Plantation in 1941. It's just no contest for me. Electric slide guitar is his instrument. The acoustic stuff is pleasant enough, but the electric stuff sounds as if he's coming after you with a butcher knife. The aesthetic, musical argument ultimately trumps the ideological one...because ultimately we're talking about music.
Having said this, I think there are valid reasons to be suspicious of electric instruments and electric guitars in particular, but these reasons are very tricky and they require a lot of time to figure out, in my case years and years. There are ways in which electric instruments warp how musicians deal with each other and how much or how little they listen to other people on stage. None of these things are inevitable, but there are definitely trends one can spot.
The odd thing is that these disadvantages are actually somewhat related to the relatively simple (I would say simplistic) objections folkies raised 40 or 50 years ago, but I think they are much more subtle.
Maybe more on this later.
4. How important do you think money and the profit motive was to rock and roll (e.g., Chuck Berry)?
Very important. Making money from music and being a full-time professional musician were also important for performers like Charley Patton, Robert Johnson, and Blind Willie McTell and for entrepreneurs like H.C. Speir who recorded these performers in the 1920s and 1930s. Speir wasn't doing this for the hell of it. He expected to be able to turn a profit.
5. Which choice would you prefer: a) growing up with only folk music and learning to play an instrument in a context in which friends and family could play instruments or b) growing up with popular music in a context in which your family did not play instruments and your friends hardly ever played?
The choices I've presented seem unnecessarily artificial--they don't need to be mutually exclusive--but I would argue that what has often happened is something of this sort. Before record players and radio stations became commonplace in the 1930s, people had to make their own music in real time. This meant that people had to play instruments.
About the mid 1930s, all of this changed, and two things became possible: 1) people could entertain themselves at home listening to music that other people not in the room with them had made, 2) those "other people" could make a ton of money selling millions of copies of records and broadcasting to millions. Without the technological capability to do this, there wouldn't be popular music as we know it.
It's interesting to see that so many here would prefer the first choice over the second. We'd prefer that music be more integral part of how we grew up, and we'd be willing to sacrifice the access to a larger selection of musics, including the main one--popular music--that we like and that we talk about here.
6. What do you think musical notation contributes to music?
Musical notation allows the dead to communicate with you directly without the intervening fingerprints of other people getting their hands all over everything. (Of course, records allow this as well, but prior to the 20th century, musical notation was the only way to do this.)
Notation also allows for authorship.
These answers don't really address what happens when you don't use musical notation.
7. How would you define what "folk music" is?
Some of the impetus for this thread comes about from a claim that Hatz made that the last question is verboten at folk music conferences. Perhaps we can prod him into supplying some anecdotes about what these conferences are like.
