Uses the word ‘eclectic’ to describe musical tastes.

Miriam defines eclectic as:

1: selecting what appears to be best in various doctrines, methods, or styles

2: composed of elements drawn from various sources; also : heterogeneous

There is an inherit arrogance in the word, which is hinted at in its definition. When someone uses this word to describe their music collection, they are transmitting to you, consciously or not, that they have selected the best music to listen to. They want you to know they are not shackled by the constraints of genre and are a more educated and worldly listener because of it. Don’t be fooled by this. The plain and simple fact is that listening to a variety of musical styles does not make you smart, nor is it a necessary characteristic of intelligence. To proudly declare their tastes as eclectic, and expecting that to be enough to demonstrate their ascendant place in the cultured elite, is to build one’s castle on a foundation of sand.

Disdains ‘popular’ and ‘simple’ music.

This attitude stems from the snob’s need to distinguish their self from those they deem as less intelligent and educated. As the music snob has chosen music, and its appreciation, as the barometer of one’s worth it would do them no good to their ego if they were just as intelligent as everyone else. To claim their place rightfully on the upper side of the standard distribution curve they must enjoy things that 90% of us wouldn’t. Unfortunately they don’t realise that you can enjoy the esoteric and the popular without sacrificing your place as an edge-case. If you were to be comparing musical tastes with someone and there was significant overlap how would they know that really you’re ‘smart’ enough to enjoy inaccessible music as well? They probably wouldn’t unless you made a point to announce it. So to make it clear, snobs adopt the strategy of denying that they would ever like anything popular, thus removing all doubt as to where they stand.

Holds John Cage’s 4’33” to be “so true”.

A piece’s inaccessibility acts as a filter, to allow only the elite who have trained in the art of analysis to interject themselves between artist and audience to be the sentries of integrity and the gatekeepers of good. It is not enough that an emotion is invoked directly in the audience by the artist through music. To truly appreciate song you must understand why those emotions were invoked, what are the proper emotions to feel, and what the songwriter is really trying to say, otherwise you are not truly appreciating the work. None of this is possible without a specialised middleman.

Songs that are so inaccessible that they need to be explained in order to be understood are the highest form of elitist alienation. What happens to these pieces when separated from their liner notes or a convenient expert standing by? They fail to stand on their own and are doomed to be judged by superficial means such as: musicality, emotive response, and social standards of ‘goodness’.

To show off their skills at the endeavor of music analysis, a snob will claim not only to understand, but to enjoy a song that is so off the map that most of us would write it off as drivel. It is a big billboard for them which claims: “I’m smart enough to understand this, and obviously, you are not.” Unfortunately for the snob, that sort of PR never wins the hearts of others, and they are destined never to be invited to parties.

Insists that vinyl is a superior recording medium.

My sister once told me of a guy she knew who insisted that music recorded on a CD was not real music. His reasoning was that because the sound wave is sampled at discrete intervals and not infinitely grained like an analog recording the sound wave is not a true representation of what was played, and therefore not true music. What a load of horseshit. Following this reasoning would lead you to believe that a play is a story while a film is not.

The love of vinyl comes not from its fidelity but rather from its lack of fidelity. Let us be certain, no recording is going to fully capture what is heard live. There will always be limitations of the recording media. Many factors come into play such as the range of frequencies the media can be made, or is made to capture, the signal to noise ratio that is obtainable by the recording equipment, the resolution of the signal that may be captured, etc. Then there’s accompanying problems with the reproduction of the recording and eventual playback, both of which introduce more degradation of the original recorded signal. In short anything that is recorded is also filtered and distorted by the process. The truth of the matter is that vinyl recordings filter and distort much more than CDs. What a snob is really saying when stating their preference for vinyl is that they like the manner in which it records and plays back. This is all fine and good, many guitarists prefer the sound of vacuum tubes to transistors. We must keep in mind though that this is only a personal preference, an opinion if you will on what types of distortions are better than others. To hold up an opinion as the immutable truth is a sure hallmark of snobbery.

Discussing music is a game that must be won.

When in discourse with music snobs, remember that you are viewed as an opponent. You are not sharing, or building bonds together. You are not forging a friendship. You are not expressing, or receiving interest. You are in a power struggle, in which the snob must dominate. Often they are ruthless in distributing scorn and vitriol, all for the sake of proving themselves a superior class of people. This is what makes music snobs truly unpleasant. They really have no interest in sharing their knowledge, but rather using it as a weapon to bludgeon opponents in the social arena, and everyone is an opponent.

The surefire way to avoid entering into such competition is to insist on talking about cats. If the snob tries to bring the conversation around to music again mention that you think the Persian longhair is just about the sweetest thing ever, especially when they are kittens. No bully likes to see he has no effect on his victim; talking about cats is sure to confound and deflate the most hardcore of music snobs.

What I was expecting, based on the title, would be songs from albums that didn’t have great sales despite the great music they contained. Or early, obscure music from artists that became well established later on in their careers. Or even gems on big albums that weren’t picked as singles, so remaining undiscovered by new generations who don’t own or planning on owning that album. There is a plethora of recorded music lost in the album collections of the general public. Songs that would only be familiar to the completists.

Considering the amount of music that is produced as a ratio to the number of different songs broadcast, we have heard so very little. While, in part, the current function of a radio station is to expose you to new music, the other function is to expose you to it ad infitum, ad nauseum. So even if they do venture to play older songs, it’s older songs we’ve heard countless times before. To that end the modern radio format is not geared towards enriching our collective experience, but then we knew that already.

Not that any of this is to suggest that radio should re-invent itself to bring you ‘all novelty, all the time’. There are many sources to listen to which are esoteric or eclectic. Even more now than were available before the advent of internet, satellite and cable radio. It is naive to expect that the business relationship between recording companies and commercial radio stations will change anytime soon, or even that it should. I would just like to see that when they do try to expand the listeners musical catalogue that it be an honest effort.

And this is just covering the modern recording era. If we venture further back in time there are countless songs recorded on vinyl, wax, paper, clay, etc that never see the light of day again. As a society it is impractical to store every datum that is produced. It is even more impractical to search and review the enormous storehouse of data. At the very least we may make modest attempts to gather a large cross-section of transient works. If for nothing else than to give us a fine-grained picture of the past. This is why I like sites such as Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project or Open Source Audio that dedicate themselves to archiving and distributing ephemeral music. We get to hear what else was going on at a specific time other than much repeated ‘classics’, giving us a fuller view of the landscape.

I had no real desire to play the piano at that age. I started piano lessons quite young after a mercifully brief stint with the violin; a mercy more likely bestowed on my parents than on me. For me guitar was where it was at. I dreamed of a shiny red axe. I would rock out all amped up just like that hair bands of the day. It wasn’t until three years after the conception of this desire that my mother trotted me down to the basement music school of the local instrument shop. I was presented with a guitar that she bought (a nylon-string classical) and sent in for my first lesson. Like all first music lessons the half-hour was spent showing me where a few of the notes were on the neck, and a discussion of what I wanted to learn. Visions of rock stardom still danced in my 12 year old mind and I answered that I want to play Rock and Roll sir. “Well then,” replied the teacher, “we must first teach you the Blues.” This is when I learned of pentatonic scales.

Scales are one of those things we can’t run away from when learning to play an instrument. They are the basis for the flavour of a song. They tell you what notes are allowed and what notes are not. Remarkably no one ever mentioned to me where they come from, how they are formed, and are there alternatives? We have thousands of years of musical experimentation and growth that has been documented. In learning to play I was deposited on a single outer branch of a complex tree and have been crawling my way back to the trunk ever since in order to explore and understand other types of musical traditions.

Much of the popular music that one hears today is known as “tonal music”. Tonality is built upon the major and minor diatonic scales, and includes triadic harmony. The songs that currently dominate the aural landscape are written from this one system of musical production. If you want to play an instrument to reproduce what songs you hear on the radio, then tonal music is the place to start. This makes it the natural thing to teach little green musicians who are eager to hear a recognisable song emanate from their chosen instrument. Consequently when budding songwriters take up the craft, they tend to go on writing music in this vein. Only those who are pedantic, experimental, or untrained in musical theory may go on to discover the many other branches of musical systems.

Although so much music is written using these scales the major and minor scales are just one facet of the diatonic scale, which itself is a subset of the chromatic scale, which itself is only one of many other scales developed in the world. If you really want to play something immediately upon picking up and instrument then 12-tone music is the way to go, you will be guaranteed not to play a wrong note. To bad it’s not radio-friendly.

In trying to expand the variety of musical experience I wonder what the next big thing could be. Would the discovery of Church Modes by a talented and saleable new artist give rise to a new style of music that uses these un-tempered ratios? Gregorian chanting had a brief heyday some years back and has now incorporated itself into several genres, the folk music resurgence of the mid-twentieth century brought modal music back into the popular arena, progressive-rock borrowed structure from the common practice period to shake up the repetitive verse-chorus layout which so dominates song structure today, all of which shows that there is a place in modern music for older ideas and systems. In addition it shows that new forms can emerge through blending of musical systems. What would happen if we matched the Prometheus scale with the guidelines of counterpoint and the tempos of Speedcore? It boggles the mind.

Furthermore, with computers augmenting, and in some cases replacing, physical instruments the restraint of playing the prescribed frequencies of the system which that instrument is geared towards vanishes. The piano is unfettered from its tuning, allowing us to easily experiment with alternatives to what we are accustomed. Scales with completely hitherto unused interval patterns can emerge because the cost of experimentation (building and tuning an instrument) is eliminated.

I’d like to see the question of what music is, what constitutes a song, taught alongside the mechanics of whichever current musical system happens to be dominate. I don’t think that run-of-the-mill music teachers ever really tackle that question with their students, but rather teach them to play in the constraints of a system which defines the style of music favoured by the student, or the teacher, or the parent that pays for the lessons as the case may be. While one may teach within a framework, it is important to teach how that framework was derived and that there are alternatives that one might like to explore.

When I teach my children music, in addition to tonality, I want to give them a solid grounding in the foundations of music. If we strip a song of all the techniques and flourishes that add complexity, layers, and beauty to the craft of song-writing, we get music in its simplest form. We all start out that way; a child hammering out ‘Twinkle,Twinkle Little Star’ one laborious note at a time on the piano, the screech of ‘Polly-Wolly Doodle’ on the recorder, the hesitant plunk-plunk of ‘Red River Valley’ on the guitar. At the heart of it all is one frequency held for a time, followed by another one held for a time, followed by another and so on until the song is finished. Sometimes there’s a pause between the frequencies, sometimes there is not. I realise this all sounds very reductionist; I fail to mention that what frequencies are allowable is a very important component that separates a song from noise. Of the infinite set of frequencies that you could choose from, only a tiny fraction are heard by humans. A smaller fraction still may be produced by your instrument. Of the range that is producible only a fraction of these frequencies will be distinguishable from each other. Further still only certain ratios of one frequency to another will sound pleasant to us.

This amazing amount of unusable frequencies for a piece of music is what all musical systems intend to proscribe. Not only do these systems lay out rules of permissible notes but they include guidelines as to their use. For instance: Schoenberg’s 12-tone method suggests that each note in the chromatic scale is represented an equal amount of times in a piece. In math terms the distribution curve of notes in the piece is flat.

A scale is just an arbitrary way to divide the continuous gradient of frequencies between the tonic and the octave. The ratios that are chosen for the notes of a scale lend that scale a certain flavour. This flavour can be further restricted or modified by choosing arbitrary starting points in the scale for a tonic centre (modes) or introducing accidentals or augments, or altering the pattern of intervals that make up a scale.

Beyond restricting our choice of notes we may devise many other sorts of rules and guidelines regarding harmony, meter, rhythm, movement, etc. These rules are a way of directing how the selected frequencies are to be combined to make music. For example triadic harmony is the norm in the tonal system, but another system may favour quartal harmony while keeping the same scales. The possibilities quickly become endless considering the combinatorial nature of elements that make up a system.

This post is not meant to bemoan the primacy of teaching or producing tonal music. It is important that a musician learn it, for it is the system of music production that currently rules the roost, but will this always be so? Public tastes change, fashions change, tonal music may be something old fuddy-duddies listen to while the youth favour something we older folk would find quite bewildering. Considering the amount of people taking up an instrument today is by sheer numbers much greater than those in the past who had the ability to play, and given that we have the means to inexpensively record the music produced and broadcast it to nearly anyone, nearly anywhere, why should we not cover the gamut of musical experience? As listeners, we have a greater choice in musical styles to consume than ever before, and as musicians we have greater ability to produce novel forms than ever before. Teachers owe it to their students to at least mention from the onset of instruction that what the student is learning is just one of many ways to produce music and encourage them to explore others.