May 9, 2006 Tradition vs. Innovation
As a musician who’s always wanted to do it all, I’ve kept my feet moving through a lot of musical territory. For the last couple of years, though, a rock band has been my primary creative outlet because of exactly the sorts of problems my student is talking about. People in the classical world and the jazz world can so easily become elitist and snobbish, and it often seems that their primary goal is finding something wrong with the music everyone else is making. If you don’t play Bach exactly the way that the current trends say you should, then you’re obviously not worthy of respect or serious consideration; or, if you don’t listen to the right jazz masters and learn to play the tunes just like they did, then you have no right to play jazz.
I’ve always been a musical outsider. I am rarely listening to the same things that my peers are, whether it’s my bandmates in a rock group or my colleagues at the university. My goal has always been to put passion and meaning into my music, regardless of the style or context. I listen to the music I like to hear, and I make the music I like to make. Research has its place, and so does music history; but those should never be the focus of music-making.
The essence of music is that it’s transitory, and the profundity of music depends on it being experienced now, as it’s happening. Every hearing is new because the listener is new, and because the moment is new. You can no more hear the same piece of music twice than you can breathe the same lungful of air twice – it just doesn’t exist anymore.
The goal is different, of course, when you’re trying to produce a historical recreation – but the fact of music’s ethereal nature doesn’t change. Trying to recreate historical music as it originally sounded is interesting, edifying, and quite possibly profoundly moving; but it isn’t the only way to approach the music. And yet performers often feel that they’re not allowed to do anything new with classical and jazz material – or, due to years of hammer-over-the-head musical training, they actually don’t KNOW how to do anything new. There’s an overwhelming atmosphere of ancestor-worship that causes the community to look down on anyone who dares dishonor the memory of the greats by actually having any fun with their creations.
So, my student doesn’t feel welcome in the jazz and classical world, and I often feel the same way. Luckily, it doesn’t have to be this way, and I think the tide is turning. There seem to be more and more people like me, and like some of my colleagues, and like many of my students, who don’t care what the establishment thinks they should do with their art. I say, let’s respect the masters of the past by learning about them, and by listening to and studying and loving what they created. But let’s respect them more, and in a much deeper way, by making living, breathing music that honors our own moment. After all, that’s what they were doing – and that’s why we remember them.
photo: Jeff Tobin
