Cold Dread Time

A short but ever-expanding list of music nuances we have to hope will survive the digital apocalypse

Doesn’t matter where you look: Just about every corner of human endeavor, from culture to science to higher education, is experiencing a dread moment. Tariff dread is apparently not enough. Authoritarian dread is here too; maybe it’s a causal tipping point, maybe it’s just another symptom of the undifferentiated direness around us.

Several historians and thinkers, among them the brilliant Timothy Synder, have advised people to start paying attention to erosions of norms and other troubling indicators they witness, and then to loudly spread the word. The practice of noticing can be non-political, non-violent, non-partisan; there are journalists here and around the world who are making a contribution in precisely this way. Example: I was rattled by New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat’s long Sunday piece about digital culture precipitating an “Age of Extinction:”

Every great technological change has a destructive shadow, whose depths swallow ways of life the new order renders obsolete. But the age of digital revolution — the time of the internet and the smartphone and the incipient era of artificial intelligence — threatens an especially comprehensive cull.

Of course music people had a headstart on this particular dread: Though under-discussed, it’s been part of the equation from the early days of digital recording technology. Through listening, many many of us have observed the impacts, positive and negative, of powerful editing technology, the kind that allows a producer to cover up the wayward intonation of a celebrity singer. Many more of us have complained about the tilted, anti-creativity metrics of streaming. The list goes on….

Writing in this space, I’ve noted some of the artistic “sacrifices” musicians and producers have made in the name of convenience. (Here’s one, a lament about the art of the crescendo…). To be clear: I’m not a luddite. I believe that some of these tools are great, creativity-enhancing innovations. Some, though, reduce the agency of musicians in the studio, and to a lesser degree, on stage. And could, over time, marginalize (or obliterate) some of the sound-shaping control that a musician spends decades developing. Not talking about technique here — instead, talking about the sensibility and sensitivity that a musician brings to each note. To the interconnected disciplines of vibrating a note, sustaining a note and ending a note, alone or as a member of an ensemble.

Some items on the below list may seem so fundamental and integral to the experience of music, the reader may laugh at their inclusion and dismiss the dread as overblown. Let’s hope that. But it doesn’t mean we shouldn’t pay attention to all the changes, even tiny ones, that impact the making and recording of music. Because hey, it was just a few weeks ago that Due Process was an inviolate tenent of American democracy, as people like Synder were raising the alarm…..

A modest (and sure-to-expand) list of human-controlled attributes and nuances that enhance music and should be preserved and celebrated for all time:

Control of Crescendo and Dimenuendo (solo and in ensemble).

Sustained performance at pianissmo (not for brief dynamic contrast).

Sustained performance at forte (not for brief dynamic contrasts).

Allowing for natural decay at the end of a note.

Understatement. Concision.

Playing legato.

Control of nuances at extreme tempos, fast or slow.

Executing a clear downbeat. Related: Shared understanding of tempo; respect for the execution considerations of the stoptime break.

Respect for the peaks and valleys and pauses that are (or can become) part of the structure of a piece.

Control of subtle tempo changes, like rallentando, especially when executed by a group.

Respect for the open canvas; the art of leaving space.

Respect for the original signal when using digital effects (even when that signal is largely obliterated).

Allowing breath, laughter, humanity into a track.

Listening.

Taking agency for what happens in a performance.

Understanding when to end a solo or a section of a piece, and knowing how to do it in real time with cues, eye contact, etc.

Respect for the slow gestural art of the pitch bend, especially when using brass, wind, stringed, analog instruments.

Singing off-key for expressive purposes.

Fine-tuning the volume levels of instruments in a group (ie., self balancing, not relying on an engineer to mix).

Respecting the alchemy of a simmering groove (whether played live or looped).

Sensitivity to information overload; attending to sonic clutter, density, harmonic complexity.

Accompaniment that allows room for the melody to bloom.

Executing cleanly at loud volume/high intensity.

Mixing to welcome the listener in, by attending to foreground, background, the dimension and depth of the sound field.

Respecting the power of silence.

What’s missing here? Please add to this by commenting.