Appreciation of Music, Essay Example

Description of Concrete Experiences

Subtopic 1: History and Development of the Art Form

In my experience as a DJ (shortened from the nearly-obsolete term “Disc Jockey”), I picked up a fair amount of information along the way concerning the history of the art form. Though there are endless permutations of the story, the form as it currently exists has its roots in the block parties, clubs, and other gatherings in African-American communities in the 60s and 70s. This type of DJ performing is largely separate and distinct from radio-DJs, the on-air “personalities” who play music, speak with the listening audience, insert advertising and promotion between songs, and the like. The type of DJ profession I do is an extension of the aforementioned “live” DJ performing, and involves entertaining a crowd, usually for the purposes of encouraging and maintaining dancing in a nightclub, party, or other similar environment.

Subtopic 2: Vocabulary and Principles of the Art Form

By the time I was in middle school, I managed to arrange to DJ at kids’ parties; usually these get-togethers would take place at my house, but I would occasionally prevail upon my parents to drive me, all of my gear (including some rather large and ugly speakers) to the home of one or another classmate, usually with a birthday or some other event as an excuse.

Subtopic 3: Materials, Processes, and Communication Medium involved in the Art Form

Over time, I acquired a more “legitimate” set of DJ equipment, based on the gear that set the standard in the field for several decades: a pair of direct-drive turntables and a mixer. The direct-drive (as opposed to belt-drive) turntables meant that the “platters” (the spinning disc upon which the record sits) would get up to speed almost immediately, allowing for more flexibility and options when “mixing” (more on that in a moment). The mixer is a device that allows various sound sources, such as turntables, CD players, tape decks, and microphones to be blended together seamlessly. The ability to blend the various sound sources offers the possibility of having one song start playing before another song finishes, thus allowing the music to keep playing with no breaks between songs.

My own experience with the new, computer-based technologies is somewhat reflective of the larger impact these technologies have had. In addition to the aforementioned capabilities of the new hardware and software comes a less immediately obvious, but just as significant change: the ability to collect music for free. In the “good old days,” DJ was a fairly expensive proposition. High-quality turntables cost upwards of $800 each, and the rest of the accessories, such as CD decks, mixers, and carrying cases for all the gear, could add hundreds or even thousands of dollars to the price tag of being a DJ –and all that was before the purchase of a single piece of music!

Subtopic 4: The Role of the Artist in Creating and Executing the Art Form

In practical terms, the digital revolution has completely changed my relationship to music. Where I once was a fan, and mostly concerned myself with acquiring songs that others had created, I can now create music of my own and include it in my DJ performances. Today’s digital electronic age has allowed music to have a vaster ranger, and this also comes with a wider range of tastes. Creating and executing the art form is not something which is easy, as I have learned, because it involves understanding different people and different audiences. Just because one type of music pleases a certain crowd, it does not mean that all types of people will enjoy it as well.

Subtopic 5: The Impact of the Culture on the Art Form

When I complete a song, I can upload it to any number of music-sharing sites, making it available to millions of people instantly. I can tape my DJ performances and pot the videos on YouTube for the world to see. The digital revolution has irrevocably altered the landscape of the professional music industry; now, anyone can make music, and anyone can be a “star,” without the need for a multi-million-dollar recording studio or the services of a big-budget record label. Culture has become such an electronic thing in today’s day and age, everything can be streamed and downloaded, the world has gotten smaller because of technology. This can be greatly applied to how much music has changed because of this new culture.

Subtopic 6: The Impact of the Art form on the Culture

I have equipment for my job which was specifically made for making music, and this has changed technology because of the need for it. The need for making music, as well as the demand for easier, more efficient ways of getting music, producing it and storing it.

I have found that many of these outlets overlap in terms of usefulness: I can use my computer to make music, use YouTube to make the music available, and then use Facebook to announce to the world the availability of my latest masterpiece. In between bouts of musical creativity, I can blog about the process for anyone who might be interested, as well as read accounts from other artists about how and why they crated their latest song or produced their newest film.

Reflections

Subtopic 1: History and Development of the Art Form

The longer I remain engaged in this art form, the more I have developed a sense of this history, this lineage to the predecessors of the craft. Of course, harkening back a few decades barely acknowledges the true history of the form, as the idea of providing music for social gatherings and rituals is as old as man himself. Though I am utilizing the latest technologies in performing my craft, I often feel that sense of immense history as I do so, and feel somehow obligated to treat the position with respect, and even reverence.

There are countless different musical styles from which a DJ can choose his or her musical selections, as well as endless variations of the environments in which he or she can perform, but the basic ideas remain the same: keep the crowd dancing, and keep them happy, whether it’s a Bar Mitvah, or the hippest nightclub in town.

Subtopic 2: Vocabulary and Principles of the Art Form

DJs who regularly play in nightclubs may face the equally daunting task of having to routinely find and acquire new music in order to keep the audience, and his employer, happy.

I learned through experience the importance of staying up on musical trends, as nightclub audiences are quite fickle; the moment they are bored, they will find a new club to patronize. I found myself using my downtime to frequent as many different clubs as I could, and to scour the record stores for new and exciting music whenever possible. These are often time-consuming and expensive tasks, but are necessary components of success in the field.

Subtopic 3: Materials, Processes, and Communication Medium involved in the Art Form

It is this “mixing” capability that has come to define the medium of DJing. From the earliest days of the art form, DJs would “mix” songs together in endlessly creative ways. A DJ might, for example, have a record with a long drum beat that he or she plays along with a different song in the same tempo, thus creating a “remix” of the song that now sounds different because of the added drum beat. This propensity to mix songs together has spawned an entire industry of remixing, with artists such as Sean “P. Diddy” Combs building an entire career on blending old songs in new ways.

Subtopic 4: The Role of the Artist in Creating and Executing the Art Form

I can make music whenever the mood strikes, simply by carrying my laptop and a set of headphones with me. Now, more than ever, artists are driving the momentum of the art, with little need for the patronage of others to assure success. It is, for many, an incredibly rewarding period in the history of popular music.

Subtopic 5: The Impact of the Culture on the Art Form

With the new CD decks, beatmatching could now be done with CDs; in addition to this beatmatching capability, CDs could now be “scratched” just as could be done with their vinyl counterparts. Among the many advantages of this new technology was the simplest, yet most significant: CDs are much smaller than records, and CD decks are smaller than turntables, thus it immediately became much easier to amass and transport a large collection of music. Along with the advantage of using a more easily-transported medium was the fact that CDs were more durable and hardy than records, and less prone to warping and breaking.

CDs would go on to become the new standard for years, and that was the approach that I took for most of my DJ career. I collected hundreds and hundreds of commercially-produced CDs, as well as copying many of my old vinyl records to CD, thereby allowing me to cart around much more music in a much smaller space. What used to require a pickup truck to transport (between the turntable gar and the crates full of records) could now fit into the back seat of a small car (a pair of CD decks and a few boxes of CDs). As significant as the move from records to CDs was, it still retained the familiarity of an already-defined approach; it was just like DJ with records, only on a smaller scale. Though the impact of the transition from records to CDs should not be underestimated, the real paradigm shift was yet to come.

Subtopic 6: The Impact of the Art form on the Culture

Beyond the fields of music and images are other ways in which culture and art are colliding. Websites like Facebook and Twitter give anyone who wants to a platform to express themselves to the world; so called “bloggers” (short for “webloggers”) have created an entire industry out of opining on any and every conceivable subject. Just as with music, journalism and editorializing are no longer reserved for the privileged few, but are within reach of anyone with a computer and an opinion.

Music has moved through generations and you can see this with the different types of genres and cultures which are reproduced by music. Music has defined time and has given eras and decades labels, which are categorized by the music of that age. It is amazing how music can divide generations and bring people together at the same time.

Generalizations / Principles / Theories

Subtopic 1: History and Development of the Art Form

I’ve been doing this for years, beginning with entertaining friends and classmates and eventually performing in nightclubs, and have found that, though different audiences have different tastes, and want to hear different types of music, the bottom line remains that what’s important is to keep people dancing. This electronic type of music throughout history has brought people together and is something which is shared among cultures. No matter where you are from, there is always a sense of music uniting people. Music can make people feel good in a way no one can fully explain.

Subtopic 2: Vocabulary and Principles of the Art Form

The general principles of DJ performing are fairly well-established and relatively simple. With the goal in mind of keeping the music playing constantly, it is necessary to have a means of laying one song after another with little to no time in between. Along with that comes the need for an appropriate collection of music; a DJ who plays weddings and parties may need to have a diverse collection of everything from the latest hits to “oldies” that will please every generation in the audience.

Being a DJ, one must understand also the basic principles of music and the various moods it can give out to people. This way, you should look at it in a backwards perspective, studying music from the basics such as – beat, tone, pitch, melody. There is also an importance in knowing how all these go together and how certain music must be arranged to create a flow in which the entire piece of music will work. Being a DJ does not just mean you have to know the new or hip types of music, you have to understand the relationship between music, history and culture; this way you would know what type of music to apply to a certain audience, and how to set moods in the music you select.

Subtopic 3: Materials, Processes, and Communication Medium involved in the Art Form

On a more elemental level, the ability to have the music keep playing was a boon to the DJ (and his employers, who were often engaged in the sale of alcohol and thus were appreciative of active, thirsty patrons), and another DJ skill was born: beatmatching. Beat-matching is also elemental in remixing, and the name basically describes exactly what it is: utilizing the variable-speed controls on turntables, two songs of a similar tempo can be fine-tuned until they are playing at exactly the same speed. This allows a DJ to seamlessly move from one song to the next by “overlapping” the end of one song onto the beginning of another, often blurring the distinction between the two songs so greatly that it becomes practically impossible to determine when one ends and the next begins. Beat-matching on turntables is a skill that takes time to develop, though there are newer technologies that take the hard work out of it (more on that shortly).

This area is perhaps the broadest and most interesting part of being a DJ. For anyone who is fascinated with technology and music, a lifetime could be spent exploring the various possibilities and options available to the DJs of the 21^st Century. I began my DJ career playing around in my room, using cast-off and discarded equipment my parents handed down to me as they acquired new stereo equipment over the years. My first set-up consisted of a single turntable and a cassette player, along with a microphone and a set of headphones. I would spend hours in my room, pretending I was putting on a radio show (I had not yet been exposed to the world of “live” DJing). I figured out how to wire everything together so that I could hear the record player, the turntable, and the microphone in the headphones all at the same time, and thus a DJ was born. I would gather whatever records and tapes I could borrow from my parents (this became easier as they began to collect CDs), and as I got older I would use my allowance to buy used tapes and records at flea markets. Eventually I acquired a CD player, and that too was added to the mix.

Another skill that was unique to “turntable-ism” (as it became known) was a technique called “scratching,” wherein a DJ would slide a record back and forth underneath the stylus (or “needle”), generating an almost percussive burst of noise that would typically be done I time to the music. Depending on where in the song the stylus happened to be –a saxophone part, for example, or a drum beat, or a vocal line- the ensuing “scratching” would sound completely different. Some DJs have cultivated their skills to the point where they can “play” a sound like an instrument, adjusting the speed of their scratching to vary the pitch of the sound, and thereby creating actual notes that ca fit into a song both melodically and rhythmically. Along with beat-matching, scratching became one of the requisite skills of the successful DJ.

For several decades, this approach –turntable-ism- was the standard method employed by nearly all DJs. There were several common variations, such as the addition of a tape deck, and later, a CD player. But the basic model of using two turntables and a mixer was a DJs stock in trade until fairly recently. As CDs began to supplant vinyl records, and then digital music files began to supplant CDs, the supremacy of the turntable in DJ performing would soon come to an end.

The next big step in the evolution of DJing was the introduction of variable-speed CD players, or “decks.” These CD decks were oriented horizontally, with a jog-wheel on the top surface that visually approximated the platter on a turntable, only smaller. With this jog-wheel, a DJ could now control CDs in a manner very similar to that which could be done with records on a turntable. Turntable beat-matching required that a DJ slide the record back and forth to find exactly the right point in the song from which to begin playing; starting the record at the correct point would ensure that it lined up perfectly with the corresponding song on the other turntable.

Subtopic 4: The Role of the Artist in Creating and Executing the Art Form

Clearly, this new world of digital music represents a paradigm shift in the field of popular music. As such, it means this new approach to music is uniquely artist-driven. In some ways, the artists are shaping the course and development of the form. A painter, for example, is by definition following in the footsteps of those who came before. No matter how unique and interesting a finished painting may be, the notion of picking up a brush and putting it to canvas is a well-worn idea.

Subtopic 5: The Impact of the Culture on the Art Form

As we have seen, the explosive growth of the digital age is inextricably intertwined with the advances and changes in the music industry. In the 1970s, artist Andy Warhol famously asserted that “in the future, everyone will be famous for fifteen minutes.” Warhol’s tongue-in-cheek prediction has almost literally come true; with the birth of websites like YouTube, anyone can post self-made videos and, in some cases, fin instant stardom.

Subtopic 6: The Impact of the Art form on the Culture

As we just discussed, the interconnectivity between digital art and culture is becoming ever more blurred. It is not just with music that these changes are happening; digital media of all kinds are becoming more affordable every day, and as they reach the hands of more and more people, those using them are constantly finding new ways to exploit them.

Testing and Application

Subtopic 1: History and Development of the Art Form

Whether it’s a wedding, where one has to consider the tastes of everyone from the happy couple to the elderly grandparents, or at a trendy nightspot where it’s important to play the latest and greatest music, if the crowd is dancing, the crowd is happy. Music is a dynamic thing, and it really varies from culture to culture. You also have to consider the audience of who you are catering to. Since music has changed throughout history, and there are different types of music, you need to look well into who you will be performing for.

Subtopic 2: Vocabulary and Principles of the Art Form

All of the successful DJs I’ve encountered follow those basic models; they don’t just concern themselves with their own interests and tastes,  but rather they keep their ears to the ground at all times, so as to keep up with the latest trends and shifting tastes.

As I developed my own career as a DJ, I found that the more time I spent engaged in the “extracurricular” side of things –visiting other clubs, networking with other DJs, hobnobbing with record store owners and record-label representatives, the broader my appeal became, and the more opportunities opened up for me to play in larger venues and to earn more money. I have learned the range of different music which caters to different types of people. Taste is dynamic, and just because something is a trend does not mean everyone will enjoy it. I have applied this to my DJ career in my selection of playlists which are created for certain types of people.

Subtopic 3: Materials, Processes, and Communication Medium involved in the Art Form

With the emergence of digital music files, hundreds of thousands of songs can be -and are- traded, swapped, passed along, and otherwise acquired for free. The software to mix and scratch and remix these songs is getting cheaper and more available by the day; now, anyone with a laptop computer and $100 for software can start DJ. Many of the tasks that used to require a certain skill, such as beat-matching, can now be programmed into the software and done with a push of a button. There are some professional DJs who program entire sets of music –hours and hours of mixed and beat-matched songs- before they even arrive at a club; they simply press “play” and spend the rest of the evening watching over their computer.

In addition to the DJ capabilities of the new generation of software comes the ability to actually create music on the computer. I use a program called Ableton Live for DJ (having long since retired my collection of records and CDs), which allows me to do all the things I used to so with records, as well as to write my own songs and mix them together with the songs in my collection. Further, I can collaborate with other DJs and musicians through the internet, creating new songs, or remixes of other songs, without ever even meeting my collaborators in “3D.”

With the emergence of digital music media, DJ would change in innumerable ways, irrevocably blurring the established lines between DJ and musician, and between musician and audience. With today’s technology, DJ is both more accessible and more layered and complex than ever before. To understand the “new model” of DJ, we must first briefly examine the new ways in which music is stored and transported.

No longer do music collectors need to rely on traditional, tangible media, such s records, tapes, and CDs. Music –or any other information- can be stored and transported as digital files, such as FLACs and mp3s. The details of these various files are beyond the scope of this assignment; suffice it to say that these song-files can be stored on any number of different media types, from computer hard drives to dedicated mp3 players to cell phones, and so on. These files take up very little room in terms of computer memory, meaning that hundreds or even thousands of songs can be stored on devices the size of a cigarette lighter and smaller. Further, these files can be easily down- and up-loaded from one device to another, or transmitted via the internet or a phone line from one location to another, instantly.

Along with these new means of storing songs quickly arose new means for DJs to play them back. In much the same way that DJ-friendly CD decks emulated turntables, so too did much of the new digital gear aimed at the DJ market. Small devices with familiar-looking jog wheels were produced with the intent to connect them to laptop computers or PCs; this allowed DJs to manipulate their stored song files in the same way s they could manipulate their CDs and records. Beyond the familiar, though, awaited a whole new set of capabilities made possible by the digital revolution, and these capabilities would profoundly affect not just DJs, but the entire music industry.

Subtopic 4: The Role of the Artist in Creating and Executing the Art Form

While digital musicians aren’t reinventing music theory, they are, in many cases, reinventing the way in which music is created. With the new technologies comes the capacity to create new, never-before-heard sounds, and to combine them in, never-before-heard ways. Beyond that, musicians no longer have to count on record companies to get their music heard by a large audience, and record companies are less responsible than ever for driving and influencing popular tastes and trends.

Subtopic 5: The Impact of the Culture on the Art Form

This relationship between people and technology is symbiotic; the advances in technology provide platforms for artists who might otherwise have none, while the artists are constantly finding new and interesting ways to exploit the technology, pushing both the message and the messenger to ever-higher levels of creativity.

Subtopic 6: The Impact of the Art form on the Culture

As with the example of YouTube, digital video recorders offer the possibility for budding filmmakers to create movies on a shoestring budget and make them available to the world. The impact of this was seen on a large scale with the “viral marketing” campaign of the film The Blair Witch Project, where the filmmakers used inexpensive digital cameras to make a movie, and then circumvented the typical Hollywood marketing campaign, choosing instead to promote the film using “staged” websites professing to offer “facts” about the story told in the film, as well as self-produced vignettes posted on various websites that purported to bolster the film’s assertions, thus leaving many in the public to think that the story was a real account of something that actually happened. In much the same way that Orson Welles’ radio broadcast of The War of the Worlds convinced many listeners that the Earth was rally being invaded by Martians, so too did thousands of moviegoers that a group of kids really disappeared on a camping trip in the woods.

Conclusion

I have only begun to scratch the surface in describing the impact the technological revolution has had on me personally, let alone on society as a whole. Though music has always been an important part of my life, its significance has increased exponentially thanks to the opportunities technology provides. For one thing, I now have access to an entire world of music simply by logging on to the internet. Any conceivable style of music, from Classical to Disco, from Rock to Rap, and from cutting-edge modern music to that of the world’s most primitive peoples, is all there for the taking. This doesn’t just mean that I can listen to these different styles of music, but I can incorporate their influences into the music I create, blending and mixing genres and styles in a way that would not just have been difficult, but rather would have been literally impossible just a generation ago.

With every new synthesizer or drum machine or digital camcorder or networking site, the divide between artist and audience grows a bit smaller. Technology has democratized art in a manner no one could have dreamed in the loftiest of science fiction stories. As Warhol said, in the future we will all be famous; it appears that future is now.