17/04/2025 Matins for Holy Thursday Beloved twitter mutual Calla says: "engaging with music students regularly reminds me that to many of them music is an elite trade rather than an art, and this is exactly why I exist in diy music and contemporary art spaces rather than music academia!!".

I have quickly and sloppily typed out my thoughts:

In his book “the end of early music” (highly recommend) bruce haynes outlines the development of how we have perceived the nature of music throughout the course of western music history. he talks about how the idea of music as an “art” rather than a craft or a trade really only dates to the early romantics and how before that it was universally seen as a craft that you learned through an apprenticeship with a trained master craftsman, like carpentry or glassblowing or any other craft. earlier than that even in the mediaeval era you had music grouped as part of the quadrivium of scientific arts, along with arithmetic, geometry, and astronomy — it wouldn’t have been seen as an expressive, aesthetic art, or even a craft, but rather a scientific discipline. So basically the way we think about the nature of music has changed a bunch over the years. big fucking whoop.

But it gets interesting because Bruce Haynes advocates for moving beyond the romantic-era conception of music as expressive art, a vehicle for a subjective interiority and expression, towards something more like the craftsmanship model of pre-romantic times. And personally, having taken precisely this approach to my own musicking over the last couple of years, I have now become its biggest glazer. Because one huge problem with the “music-as-art” model is that it has created a massive cultural chip on our shoulder around every single act of music making, which leads to this horrific anxiety of influence where we’re constantly way way way too self aware of our position in history, leading to creative paralysis. By viewing music instead as a craft or a trade I’ve been able to finally engage with real music-making again, by doing it in a more playful, utilitarian light (i.e. “i want to do this act of music-making because i think it’s cool and so i’m going to do it” rather than “what is my interiority that i feel the need to communicate to the outside world and what are the means by which i can do that, and how can i make sure i’m doing it justice and also what role does that fill in the bigger picture of the canon”). For example, I love kurtag’s 4 hands/6 hands piano transcriptions of Machaut, Lasso, Frescobaldi, Schutz, Purcell, and Bach. I wanted to do more of them. So I went to an edition of the codex reina, pulled a ballade I liked the look of, and transcribed it for 6 hands. I didn’t think too hard about what the artistic implications were, what this piece is expressing, I didn’t obsess for ages and ages making sure every single note was justified and perfect; I just Did It. And paradoxically, by intentionally not conceiving of this kind of music-making as “art”, the end result has turned out to be far more artistically viable than anything I created as a composition student when I was obsessed with the art-creation concept. By viewing the pre-existing mediaeval material that I transcribed as an object created by a craftsman rather than a lofty abstract object of art that must be preserved in its intact form, a sacred object belonging to the reliquary of the canon, of which any utilisation is inherently desecration, I was able to stimulate a new, intertextual, commentatorial, and most importantly playful act of musical creation.

So basically, I have totally drunk the kool-aid on music-making as craft or trade rather than art, and to address the other concern, having truly engaged with this approach I do not think that it is any more inherently progressive or reactionary than the art concept. the post-modern super anti-canon musician may even see the idea of music as craft as more progressive than the music-as-art model, given that it directly refutes romantic presumptions about the nature of music that have governed our music making over the past 200 years and have been the direct precipitating factor in the creation of the canon. ultimately, i dont personally think that one is any more progressive than the other, but the music-as-craft model has the benefit of encouraging more playful, more rewarding interactions with the act of musicking that transcend the abject misery of the tortured solitary composer-artist of romantic-era provenance.

-A