Category: Monday Musings
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Monday Musings: My Musical Utopia, What It Is, How We Might Get There, And Why We Won’t
Once when I was making my first, abortive attempt at getting a degree, I was sitting in a seminar discussing H.G. Wells’ The History Of Mr. Polly. It was stated, quite forcefully, by the tutor, that because it didn’t articulate a clear alternative, the book’s critique of Edwardian petit-bourgeois life…
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Monday Musings: Cataclysmic Events In The History Of Music
Every so often in the history of music, something big happens. Beethoven comes along and suddenly everyone views artists (not just in music) in a new, heroic light. Punk explodes like a thermonuclear device, and suddenly popular music is a politicised site of struggle and revolution. Miles Davis releases Kind…
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Monday Musing: Art, Folk, Pop And The Taxonomy Of Musical Culture
There’s a broad classification of musical types that has some common currency, in artistic, marketing and academic circles. I want to briefly consider what it is, where it draws the lines between musics, whether it holds water, and what use it might be to those of us that think about…
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Monday Musings: Music, Politics, Subculture and Resistance
My thinking in various areas has been converging in recent months. For a while this weekly series of essays was alternating between pieces on the music industry, and pieces on music criticism: it’s getting steadily harder for me to maintain that distinction. For one thing, my valuations of music are…
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Monday Musings: The Myth Of Popular Music
Myths are everywhere, wrapped around common currency ideas, giving shape to our cultural narratives, and putting filters on the lenses of our minds. There’s a ‘myth’ about myths: it says that a myth is wrong. The term ‘urban myth’ perpetuates this usage, but that kind of a myth, the erroneous…
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Monday Musings: Technique and Creativity
There are some really skilled musicians around with very little to say: there are also some players with a very rudimentary technique who are able to stretch it into work of huge creative ambition. There are many more whose artistic strategies are too dependent on their technical aptitude to permit…
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Monday Musings: Aesthetics And Meanings, Or How To Value Any Sound
Looking back at the variety of reviews I’ve written in the past few months, variety is the principal thing that strikes me. There are stylistic tendencies, but they have come about through natural enough processes, such as artists who know one another sending me their music to review: as far…
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Monday Musings: What Do Musicians Mean, And Does It Matter?
Music fans very often want to know something about the author of their favourite sounds. It is a widespread assumption that details of an artist’s biography or personality can provide an insight into their art: while this may or may not be the case, it is undeniable that the idea…
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Monday Musings: Canons and Mainstreams
How often does someone say ‘you must listen to/ read/ watch cultural artifact X’? How often is it assumed that you are familiar with a particular album, or does someone express shock that you are unfamiliar with another? This week’s topic concerns the cultural canon, and the idea of a…
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Monday Musings: What’s So Good About Music?
I’ve been thinking back recently to my abortive attempt to train as a secondary school music teacher, and the furious bout of self-examination it induced. The process, which was not a positive one, but from which I learned a great deal, forced me to question, and explicitly articulate the value…
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Monday Musings: Advice For Bands – How To Annoy Me And Lose My Interest
I write this blog; I also write reviews for two excellent websites, the music magazine eBurban and very wonderful independent bands’ resource Live Unsigned. Doing these things requires me to find out about various bands and musicians, listen to their music, get a handle on where they’re coming from, and communicate…
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Monday Musings: What’s The Use Of Critical Theory?
I pay a certain amount of attention to critical theory, which is to say, I think about the ins and outs of what I do, as someone who makes statements in one medium that are responses to someone else’s statements in another. I also mean that I read what some…
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Monday Musings: Information Wants To Be Free, or How Do You Own A Sound?
There’s a lot of thought being given, in all quarters, to how to turn music into money in the unprecedented circumstances in which we find ourselves. What is music worth? What is it about music that is tradeable? What parts of the traditional commercial landscape are worth defending? To what…
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Monday Musings: Is The Meaning In The Lyrics Or The Music? and my weekly news roundup
A few of the recordings I’ve reviewed lately have challenged me to think about the relationship between words and music, and the location of meanings in vocal songs. I’ve never shied away from discussing music with a lyric in a language I don’t understand, but I’m always aware that I’m…
Oliver Arditi 