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What is Music Worth?
"A Music Party"
This 1864 painting by Arthur Hughes illustrates an idealized family enjoying music together in an age before recording.
In 2008, I posted an article at Acceity entitled Music Everywhere. In it, I asked whether the ubiquitous nature of recorded music in the digital age enhanced or cheapened the role of of music in our lives. Those who read the post replied that today's abundant music is a good thing. Although music may no longer be as highly valued as it was in the past, there are now unparalleled opportunities for everyone to enjoy it.
I've been prompted to consider the value of music again after reading the results of a study released two weeks ago by Wharton marketing professor Raghuram Iyengar. The study, which aimed to determine the optimal market price for digital music downloads, is summarized at the Knowledge@Wharton web site, which also provides a link to the complete paper. Iyengar's main finding: music today is too expensive.
Online music retailers like Apple iTunes and Amazon.com currently charge customers about 99¢ per song for most downloads. Iyengar's study showed that this price may actually be inhibiting demand. He based his research on conjoint analysis, which involves offering consumers a variety of theoretical purchasing options and prompting them to choose which, if any, they find attractive. Judging by consumer's choices, Iyengar predicts that if record companies would cut the retail price of their music to about 60¢ per song, the accompanying rise in demand and sales would actually lead to an increase in their profits.
Music and Meaning
"Music," wrote nineteenth century poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, "is the universal language of mankind." This is a striking statement—and I fear the claims of poets are always best served cum grano salis to allow for gentle seasoning and healthy skepticism. Music is not language. Nor is music universal. It may be made by people everywhere, but the styles, contexts, interpretations and meanings can vary tremendously between cultures. Throughout this diversity, however, music remains an intensely communicative medium. It stirs our emotions, colors our stories, and even defines our identities. It isn't language, but still, it does speak to us in its way. How does music communicate? Why is music different from language? By examining one against the other, we might learn a little about each.
It's easy to demonstrate what separates the language and music. To start, music is not language, because children don't grow up learning music to tell their parents "I'm hungry" or to ask "Are we their yet?" Music is not language, because although one could write a score for The Tempest, no musical arrangement alone could reveal the story. A composer might write a piece inspired by Shakespeare's words, but no listener would ever hear it and think, "We are such stuff as dreams are made on; and our little life is rounded with a sleep." Fundamentally, music is not language because it lacks language's precise symbolism: its words. In English, for instance, if someone wants to talk about a dog, he can simply say the word "dog," and be done with it—even though there is no real connection between word and beast but for the symbolic association people have created. It's true in any language: dog, canis, chien, perro, hund, собака, كلب, कुत्ता, 狗, 犬; ten different languages, ten different words, none of them anything like the animal we call a dog, but all of them carrying exactly that meaning. There is no word, however—no note, chord, rhythm, or melody—that means dog in music. Music is not a language.
Music relies on different mechanisms to carry meaning. Instead of communicating by abstract symbolism, music evokes meaning through emotion and resemblance. The latter of these, meaning through resemblance, might also be called meaning by mimicry. So it is that although there is no specific musical symbol to denote "dog," a skillful composer could still use music to imitate a dog's barking, growling, scratching, and howling, and thereby convey meaning by reminding listeners of the things they associate with the animal. Antonio Vivaldi famously employed this method in The Four Seasons, imitating birdsongs, raindrops, and thunderstorms to indicate different times of year. Of course, meaning by mimicry is more complex than simply imitating the sounds a thing makes. Bon Iver's For Emma, Forever Ago, as an example, reminds listeners by its sparse instrumentation that it was recorded in the isolation of a northern Wisconsin cabin during winter. Inventive composers can communicate myriad ideas by trying to find a way to employ pitch, rhythm, and instrumentation to evoke our thoughts on a particular subject.
Music From “The Chairs”
Tonight we have a musical treat at Acceity courtesy of my friend Alex Schaaf, a music major at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. Those who know me have undoubtedly heard me comment on Schaaf's previous work with the band Escalator Dance Party. That group's spring 2008 album, God Save the Crane, is still available—you can download it from Amazon.com. Now, though, Schaaf has shifted his focus to a new band with a refreshingly different sound. They're calling themselves The Chairs, and they've already produced an EP entitled November. Here's the first track, for your enjoyment:
The rest of the EP, which includes a cover of Neutral Milk Hotel's "In the Aeroplane Over the Sea", is available for listening at thechairsband.com.
Music Everywhere
I am wearing headphones. Music is playing in my ears. The track is "Far East Sweet" by The Bruces, but that isn't important. After all, there are a few thousand tracks on my mp3 player. Whenever I'm in the mood for some music, I can just scroll through the choices. It doesn't matter who I want to listen to: Bob Wills, Queen, Devotchka, the Packway Handle Band—wherever I go, they're all ready and waiting in my coat pocket.
My situation is hardly unusual. It seems there is a wealth of music waiting at everyone's fingertips today. This isn't just because of mp3 players. There are also televisions, computers, car stereos, cell phones, and the ubiquitous speakers in malls, restaurants, and department stores. Music is so common now as to be nearly inescapable. From the moment we wake up to the melody of an alarm clock until the moment we turn off the TV or stereo before bed, we find ourselves working, studying, playing, driving, dining, shopping, and even exercising to a soundtrack that almost never completely fades.
This hyper-abundance of music is a remarkably new phenomenon. Most of the music formats people are familiar with today didn't exist a few decades ago. The ability to record and replay music itself wasn't realized until 1877, when Thomas Edison invented the first practical phonograph. Before this invention, it was impossible to duplicate a musical performance. Every musical rendition was unique, and the availability of a particular performance was limited to those people who inhabited the same time and place as the performers.
The advent of recording technology changed this by enabling people to duplicate individual performances as often as they wanted, so long as they had a copy of a recording and the equipment needed to play it. In other words, musical performances were no longer limited to a unique time and place, but were instead limited to technological availability. As technology has improved over the last century, both sound recordings and the devices that play them have become inexpensive and highly portable. This has allowed sound recording technology to proliferate widely, ensuring that recorded music music is are now available to virtually everyone, anywhere and anytime.
Our age of unprecedented musical abundance has led to many changes in the way people use, appreciate, and value music.
Photographs
We are all haunted. Ghosts line the edges of our rooms, staring at us from the walls, emerging from old drawers and rising from the pages of our books. But we take our ghosts for granted now. Indeed, we see them every day. They are our images of moments gone by, moments that have morphed to memories, memories which are ever tossed and turned in our minds, until, like a stone in a river, what was once sharp is worn smooth and dull. Then it is impossible to be sure whether something once undeniably real and alive was ever really there, or whether it was merely a flash of imagination. Yet the ghosts linger, vivid as ever. The ghosts remind us. What is a ghost, but a photograph?
A photograph is not a moment returned from the dead. A photograph is just a sign, a shadow, a window onto a time and place that once was, but is no more. You can see the scene, the place, the person, and the moment. The memories come rushing back. Still, you can't go back, you can only peer, hopelessly, through the window. You can touch the picture, but you cannot feel it. The ghost is ethereal. There is no cool wind rushing through your hair as once there was, no dirt squishing beneath your toes. You cannot hear the birds; you cannot smell the flowers; you cannot look around, side to side, up, down, behind. A photograph is only a ghost.
They ought to seem like something from another world. Hold the button, wait for the flash, and watch as the scene is spirited into view on Polaroid. Then seal it in an album, show it to a friend, transfer a memory from one mind to another. A scene that passed before my eyes last week is now visible to you, though you had never been there to see it. Now my ghosts haunt your mind, and even after I am gone, these ghosts may linger, to become the subjects of stories that endure. You never felt this wind, this dirt, never heard these birds or smelled these flowers yourself. So you imagine. You imagine the scene beyond the frame, and legends are born.
(You can also access the galleries via the "Photos" link on the left sidebar).