This is an issue I’ve been think­ing about for a long time. Can we actu­ally jus­tify say­ing one kind of music is bet­ter than any other, or that one piece is bet­ter than another? I wrote a paper related to this issue recently for my degree… per­haps I’ll post it on my web­site even­tu­ally. But I thought I’d sum­ma­rize some of the con­clu­sions, as I think this has been a dri­ving force in the way I write recently.

I guess basi­cally, I don’t believe music holds any value what­so­ever. It’s just orga­nized sound. Peo­ple imbue it with value, how­ever, when they use it. At times in his­tory (e.g. the indus­trial rev­o­lu­tion, the Cold War), cer­tain uses of music have been so, well… use­ful, that peo­ple have devel­oped musi­cal canons around them. These peo­ple couldn’t see how some­thing as use­ful as the appre­ci­a­tion of, say, Beethoven or the Bea­t­les could be arbi­trary, so they took the music to have fun­da­men­tal value and can­on­ized it. To make things worse, peo­ple with polit­i­cal agen­das have always fought to have their music included in the canon as well, and when they had power, they often suc­ceeded. This leads us to the con­vo­luted thing we call the musi­cal tradition.

But I think peo­ple are wis­ing up to the sit­u­a­tion. That’s why the record com­pa­nies’ prof­itabil­ity has been in free fall over the past few years. I think part of the rea­son for the change is sites like MySpace: there’s just more access to more music, and when faced with an end­less sup­ply of musi­cal var­ie­ga­tion, it becomes harder to argue for inher­ent value. So peo­ple are more will­ing to cre­ate their own value, or at least adopt value from some­one (person/media source/corporation) they con­sider an author­ity on the sub­ject. And there are way more some­ones claim­ing to be author­i­ties now than in the past.

So why should I write the kind of music that I write when I can get just as much value from lis­ten­ing to Justin Tim­ber­lake? After all, my dis­like for Timberlake’s music obvi­ously shows that my fac­ul­ties of musi­cal appre­ci­a­tion are infe­rior in some sense to many other people’s–they like him and I haven’t fig­ured out how to like his music yet. Maybe if I prac­tice lis­ten­ing to Tim­ber­lake I’ll learn to love it, as I had to prac­tice lis­ten­ing to Beethoven and Mozart to learn to love that music. Then maybe I’ll finally reach true musi­cal fulfillment.

The rea­son, I guess, is that most peo­ple don’t think of music as val­ue­less, although in my mind it most cer­tainly is. I cre­ate the music that I do because I want to hear it, plain and sim­ple. How­ever, the other peo­ple who hear it will find value in it for any num­ber of rea­sons and often tell me about that value. That is fas­ci­nat­ing to me, to learn about how other peo­ple imbue value. And what bet­ter way to do it than through some­thing that I have a strong value rela­tion with, such as my own music? Def­i­nitely not art for art’s sake. More like art as unde­fined, if art even exists… I sim­ply like to see what comes out of the lack of meaningfulness.

Oh, and there’s also the prob­lem that I write the music I want to hear and nobody else does. If you think you can write the music I want to hear, please do! Then I could be a lawyer or do some­thing else that pays well and just enjoy the fruits of your labour instead. Sigh… the fan­tasies of the com­poser.