more a quality of a few genres than a genre. long post because this is crack to me.
thing is, i could hand you a piece, and often people are like "well i feel expression in this, what's happening?" thing is that we just attribute a lot of expression to music, so it's hard to detach what music materially
is from the expression that's experienced.
so let's take a step back, and go through this:
in a sense, all human activity can be seen as expressive, art included. but antiexpressive or nonexpressive material is stuff that tries to:
- be just material, without human interference (even if a person is a vehicle of it happening; a piano player plays the music, but plays it as close to sound as possible)
- not be an imprint of what the artist is feeling
- in extension, not convey the artist's emotions to the recipient
- (sometimes) not convey
any emotions whatsoever; (sometimes) still evoking an emotional response in the recipient
how this is "solved" depends on the antiexpressive genre. so, ok. if two exact same sounds exist in two different genres, they are experienced differently because of the genre
framing. art is socially understood (being socially understood is valid). so different antiexpressive genres can sound completely different, as the framing of the material changes our understanding of the material. this does not mean antiexpressive art is just intellectual embellishment, by the way. what we understand as expression is just as socially understood. in the end, the material is still just the material. soundwaves, dead trees with splodges on them, plasters of paint.
like, whether we even read expression into a note or not depends on genre framing. infact, reading expression into a material requires a presupposition that always ignores an innumerable count of qualities that other genres would have seen as the expressive element. my go-to examples are britney spears and beethoven. britney has had very little control of the composition of the material, and is the performer, yet we still (primarily) listen to "her". beethoven is a skeleton somewhere, other people play his music, yet we still (primarily) listen to "him". as such, whose expression we listen to depends on the genre framing, pop (performer) and classical (composer). this is a very gross simplification as both pop and classical are complex things, but i'm talking a distinction of the expression that's the most important, the expression that's peripheral, and the expression that's ignored. in britney's case, nobody cares about the stage drummer. they're just a vehicle for the material process. again, this smells of what antiexpressive genres are trying to experiment with. we can all play as if we're that drummer, and the music can still be good.
expression is only experienced because of genre framing.
anyways, so what can antiexpressive music
concretely sound like? for the easiest example of this, the american minimalist movement. mostly because it's so nice to listen to for most people. so i'll talk about minimalism.
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minimalism was originally a deragoratory exonym which has since been picked up internally to reflect the concrete practices and techniques the minimalists did. it's just a short summary of a bunch of different ideas, some of which can be quite complicated.
minimalism here does not mean simple per se, like our vernacular idea of minimalism does. stuff like "minimalist internal decoration" as we use it not only conveys simplicity of shapes, but also kind of using as little as possible in volume. so a room with a simple chair and a simple table is minimalist.
this stuff is what people often think about minimalism, which is
not what minimalist art is, lol. minimalist music can actually often be quite complicated (and loud!), with a lot of elements interweaving. so it's not just about keeping the elements as few as possible (although some works work like this). it's about reducing expression.
minimalist music was largely a response to contemporary composition. at the time, western composition was very tonally complicated, each piece internally varied largely in tempo and structure. it was a continuation of a lot of the practices in expressionism and late romanticism. western composition was all about trying to explore different ways that the composer could express themselves.
even outside high composition, there's expression we understand in a lot of musical practices (ideas that still reign today).
very shortly put, musical expression is the difference between what the notes say and what you do. there's an idea of the musical piece as an object, an ideal, and then there's the personal touch that differs from that ideal. when expression is done right, you can hear the human difference (the human's feelings "coloring" the musical piece), but it's not so different as to be "wrong", whether in mistakes or differing too much from the idea of the musical piece as an object. jazz standards generally follow this principle, being a core melody, and then the interpretation of the melody is the expressive quality and foundational to the genre.
so the minimalists did the following:
- make the tonality as nonexpressive as possible: keep melodies and harmonies consonant and simple. this removed the possibility of using tonality to express emotion.
- make the structure as nonexpressive as possible: no need to do departures and variations of what's happening, keep the musical piece repetetive. this removed the larger narrative of a piece.
- make the performance as nonexpressive as possible: notes should be played strictly, as if the human playing was a machine. this removed the element of expression felt in the difference from musical sheet to the material sound.
they did this while still trying to have it sound interesting and beautiful. so they removed all of these elements that made music interesting, but still needed variance. how did they accomplish this?
- instead of exploring tonality, explore how the material flows. a note's material sound, even if played "like a machine" has a lot of color to it. volume, airiness. at a micro level, they did a lot of work with rhythm, looking at how notes interacted as a sequence of beats rather thant trying to tell the listener where the emotions were going. steady rhythm, simple stuff, but interlocking in ways that kept your attention.
- instead of going through a bunch of different sections, explore the same section over and over again, varying slowly without doing a fundamental detour. how this is accomplished is complicated, but the most important work the minimalists did in my opinion was to use a lot of repetition, but with rules that change the repeated element each time.
- instead of expressively varying from the material, look into what materials you're using. minimalists often used instruments that were the least possible to differ when playing. they really,
really liked pitched percussion instruments, such as the marimba. choir happened too, but they generally weren't given lyrics, only syllables, sounding more like instruments than song if that makes sense.
minimalism is important not just because the music is good, but because it's secretly infiltrated
a lot of modern music. the ways minimalists compose is stunningly similar to most composing done on the computer (digital audio workstations use grids, not musical notation; the minimalists used grids!; and it has naturally lead to a lot of pop, hip hop, etc using a lot of the same techniques). minimalism is everywhere in electronic music. it's also present in a lot of big hollywood music scores - the Interstellar soundtrack is basically minimalism. although a lot of those current practices are done for the sake of expression; and then again, i'd return the point about genre framing.
anyhow, rant over. now to share some minimalism. i like these, they're easy to listen to for most people. notice how much they repeat while still being complicated.
(yes it's long. just put it on.)
i have long notes on how all of them interlock with minimalism and nonexpression, but i've gone waaay to long here.
