[NewMusic] art vs commerce - AKA craft

[olorin at lmi.net]

interesting discussion and lots of excellent points brought up on both sides.

basic premise - can video game music be considered art?  well, in my  
opinion, only if you believe the soundtracks from excellent high  
quality commercials at the superbowl are art. or perhaps howard  
shore's excellent 'Lord Of The Rings' score - would that be considered  
art?

to me, these are examples of high quality craft, not quite pure art  
but not pablum of the cookie cutter techno or rap/RNB variety either.

video games lie on that continuum somewhere, but i'd say they tend  
towards craft, not art. you might even say 'innovative craft'. the  
quality is certainly improving. i've never played Myst myself, but i  
cracked open an older game called Obsidian with music by thomas  
dolby/headspace and it was definitely a notch up on the music quality  
scale. i've certainly heard things by amon tobin in his videogame  
soundtrack that are far more artistic sounding than that.

i've no doubt that those who write music or design sounds for these  
games are generally passionately devoted to them - it's a shitload of  
work for sure, and the newness of the medium can make it certainly  
seem as if one is treading on new ground. but this is illusion, for  
while the structure is more non-linear in nature than a simple movie  
its content is fairly similar and must adhere to rules that would  
attract its target audience.

since the early 19th century when beethoven (probably among others - i  
believe you might ask mr goodheart for further details) finally made  
the distinction between music made for purely artistic purposes and  
music made as a 'work for hire' we have had these two distinctions  
with us.

there have been composers who created output as artists, not concerned  
about the audiences or money that the art would make, supporting  
themselves by teaching, or conducting, or working in post offices. and  
there have been composers writing for money, writing from their heart  
and with passion, but doing it for money nonetheless, subjecting  
themselves to restrictions but figuring out creative ways around them.

when businesses were numerous and the music jobs and needs varied and  
plentiful, there was a lot of healthy cross fertilization going on.  
composers often flitted back and forth between purely artistic music  
and music for commercial needs and requirements. film music especially  
deepened and broadened the range of what could be considered 'just  
entertainment'vs art. prokofiev composed music for film for example  
and bernard hermann (psycho, cape fear) brought atonality into horror  
movies.

yet as the music and entertainment industry began its rise and  
capitalism created fewer and fewer conglomerate corporations what was  
created had less diversity - more quantity, absolutely (we're  
currently drowning in it) but far less diversity and quality year by  
year, decade by decade. more importantly, the gap between art and  
commerce widened further as artistic expression itself became more  
modern, more conceptually abstract, and less representational.  
composers like ligeti, stockhausen, berio and xenakis wrote music that  
would be simply alien to lovers of beethoven and bach's music, however  
efficiently one can clearly trace the lineage and development. we  
still got excellent crossovers from time to time - miles davis agartha  
and pangea for example - but fewer and far between, the distance  
becoming greater. late john coltrane, sun ra, the AACM, these all were  
trying to express a world where pleasant triads and tonic dominant  
relationships were not enough - textural expression really blossomed  
within these musics with the use of extended techniques as well as  
early synthesizers and electronics setups.

now in the 21st century, new media and technology have created some of  
the most fertile crossovers yet, and we have a huge variety of  
textural and orchestrational colors to be sure, but structurally,  
formally, we are still largely enslaved to simple musical structures  
and forms in the world of commerce. cyclical beats are king in the  
video game world - IDM, techno, house, goa, trance, the list goes on.  
minimal music such as reich/glass/riley fits in well with these  
aesthetics, and basic orchestrational language ala 1920s prokofiev,  
but the boundary between this groove based mentality and say the  
rhythmic complexity and textural organization of xenakis, or the  
microtonal world of phil niblock or harry partch is huge at this point.

nobody making music in the new music fields of non-idiomatic free  
improvisation, or music inspired by new music like penderecki, ligeti,  
stockhausen, braxton, the AACM, the FMP records scene, etc should be  
under the slightest belief that they will have an audience or to able  
to support themselves doing that kind of music. because of this, we  
can call ourselves artists, and what we do is called 'pure' art -  
which means art with NO compromises - art made at the highest  
conceptual expressive level. those who make this kind of art may  
rightly feel that theirs is the true artistic expression, and perhaps  
that time will show that theirs was the true voice of the future.

on the other hand those who are passionate about art made for  
commercial gain can come to believe that their work has artistic value  
even though they had to make it with compromises, and believe that  
their work will be remembered for generations to come. there is  
nothing wrong with composing works for hire - its extremely common.  
but no one making this uber popular stuff should be under the delusion  
that such work will be considered a valuable work of art 2 or 3  
decades in the future. again, that is not to say it won't be - jerry  
goldsmith's score for 'chinatown' or ennio morricone's scores for  
sergio leone movies are music that crosses heavily over into artistic  
territory - but can they really be compared to something like mahler's  
9th symphony, in the end?

as far as i can see the video game world has a LONG way to go to  
approach that depth of expression and artistic excellence, much less  
to start touching on structural and formal complexities covered in new  
music and improvisation - but by that point companies would have to be  
willing to lose tens of millions of game development money on a purely  
artistic score for a purely artistic game that would make essentially  
NO money.

welcome to the world of pure art.

scott