This writing begins a series of investigations by musicians and writers Jack Langdon and eli namay on the ways in which improvised musical communities are constituted through social myths, economic circumstances, desires, and various forms of kinship. We begin by investigating the way in which the affirmation of music as an inherently social form helps participate in the creation of different types of social dynamics—some which help build healthy community bonds and some which produce alienation and inequality.
Introduction
It is often the case that the truisms which affirm the virtues of a community also act as a cudgel against outsiders. They can discourage self-reflection beneath the shallow appearance of a community, obscuring material and psychosocial forces that produce in-group and out-group dynamics. A truism general and agreeable enough can legitimize nearly any kind of personal agenda and can be instrumentalized for these purposes, often doing so unconsciously. They help build consent for the ambitions that suit the one who affirms the phrase, acting as a projection of one’s personal desire onto the contested realm of the community. While no community is ever truly composed as a homogenous whole, certain truisms act as the discursive ground upon which power and collective identity are struggled over. If enough consent is built for the legitimacy of a certain truism, these underlying assumptions can create structures which make the truism real. Investigating and questioning our desires to identify with certain principles and narratives, and what their material implications are, is an important part of ensuring the communities we belong to are not wrought with hypocrisy, and that we have processes in place to recognize, include, and support each other.
Jack’s Encounter With the Truism “Music is Inherently Social”
Jack Langdon:
In the ten years that I have been a part of various improvised music communities, there is a certain truism that I encounter that, on the surface, I do not disagree with, but I find almost universally serves an individualistic and often bourgeois function: “Music is inherently social.”
The relationship I have with this phrase is complicated. From a personal standpoint, the most important years of my development as a musician were formed outside of the social bonds that musicians are often assumed to be a part of. I grew up in a rural area of southern Wisconsin in a non-musical, working class family. With the support of my public school system, I gained access to a musical education which planted a love of music in me early on. Quickly, I found that I was proficient in musical studies, but in a manner that did not suit standard tracks of musical study: my attention span was poor—it still is—and I was always more interested in devising my own musical structures than adhering to notated music. This tendency of mine would eventually lead me away from a supportive musical community. After a failed series of classical guitar lessons with my Aunt, I took my guitar into my bedroom and found myself amidst an improvisational practice which would have no social context until my academic studies a decade later. I did not perform for anyone and entirely maintained this practice in private as an escapist ritual. A vague sense that this work could communicate things which I was unable to speak was the only social bond which held through this—one which remained entirely in my imagination. This was the period where I began recognizing sounds which I was drawn to, discovering the early building blocks of an improvisational language. As the years went by, I would join concert band, start singing in choir, playing in jazz band, and eventually attending college for music. Yet through all of these social experiences, it was the time spent alone, finding sounds which pleased me and expressed something internal, which most fundamentally molded who I would become as a musician. When I later found a musical community to belong to, it was only through this period of isolation where I had come to understand my own relationship to my practice as a musician.
Through the guidance and mentorship of my teachers in college, I discovered the improvised and free music scene—a community which immediately embraced my divergent path and desires as a musician. In the ten years since I have been improvising as a freelance musician, I have been a part of several musical communities—each of which is unlike the other in subtle ways. Yet, each of these communities contend with fundamental issues and limitations of our time and share certain community conflicts as a result. The market for music has contracted precipitously since I began performing publicly in 2010, coinciding with the rise of streaming and the fall of physical media sales. The avenues through which musicians capitalize on their labor or the sale of commodities has increasingly been hollowed out, devalued, and replaced by rent-seeking schemes of large corporations and institutions. This has increased competition at all levels of the economic sector, save for the absolute highest earning musicians. This follows from the consolidation of the majority of economic activity within the hands of a few large corporations which earn rental income through the managing of access to marketplaces like Spotify, Bandcamp, Apple Music, YouTube, Ticketmaster, and Live Nation. This increased economic competitiveness is present and felt even within the more marginal musical communities, of which improvised music is a part.
Broader Social Ecologies of Improvised Music
Throughout the history of improvised music, free jazz, and other intertwined creative musical cultures, the economic and social circumstances that practitioners find themselves in enabled the growth or diminishing of their musical cultures and communities. The types of social forms and relations that characterize a musical scene—the sociality of a musical community—are always intertwined with the material circumstances that make it viable or inviable. Currently, we are living during a time where the economic foundations that have been historically expected for this type of music—which has never had a sizable market for its consumption—are being eroded by the increases in the cost of living and cost of space in metropolitan areas. The freedom afforded by cheap rent, accessible community spaces, and adequate free time aside from paid work have been the backbone of many improvised music scenes of the middle to late 20th-Century—scenes that we look to and valorize today. The combination of various economic and social factors were the soil in which these musics had the time, space, and community to grow and flourish. Because these economic conditions are increasingly difficult to find for working and lower-middle class individuals, the constitution of improvised music communities is changing as a result of these circumstances, just as previous generations of improvised music communities similarly changed over time. As a result, social characteristics of this type of music are changing with the times.
When we hear someone say that “music is inherently social,” we often hear one of two things. Both are affirmations of the interconnectedness that music of all types finds itself in. The first thing we hear—the rare hopeful and utopian desire expressed in the statement—is that the “inherent sociality” of making music necessitates a communal sense of belonging and kinship. Under the right circumstances—with healthy self-reflection, good facilitation, the maintenance of aesthetic openness, and other pro-social orientations—the stylistic mutability of improvised music can provide a foundation upon which musicians can co-create something where individuals do not need to conform in the same manner that other types of musics demand. Genre sensibilities, formal designs, and other abstractions all become loose and pliable, allowing for connections to be made in the musical domain that help affirm desires for kinship, belonging, and solidarity to occur across different cultures and forms of musical expression. Leaving behind the pretensions of merit, rigor, authenticity, and tradition allows for the innate joy, connection, and adventure of making music with other people to become the foreground. This is largely why we both found ourselves gravitating towards the practice of improvisation and the communities of its practitioners. It allows for a space where our playing can remain multifaceted and mutable, without succumbing to the types of value judgments that exist in other types of musical cultures to restrain and restrict forms of expression. It also allows for us to connect with more people from across a wide array of cultural and musical communities. This mutability allows for boundary pushing, experimentation, and letting go of commonly held musical assumptions. In the best of moments, this type of playing and this type of community most immediately remind us of why we love making music. It gives us the space and opportunity to explore new processes in sound with a wide variety of other people.
In this case, the sociality that is invoked in saying that “music is inherently social” is a true affirmation of the interconnectedness of all people and the resulting responsibilities and roles that we must take up as members of elective communities. In its most radical form, this becomes inseparable from other parts of one’s social life—where the act of making music together becomes part of a deeper community that provides other types of care and support through friendship, provisioning food and employment opportunities, mentorship, and other fundamental aspects of being together. The musical act becomes an expression of equanimity, openness, and collective determination rather than hierarchy, domination, and exclusiveness.
This sensibility is rare to find as the incentive structures that organize our economic, social, and political life are contrary to everything this sociality stands for. Often, a tension arises between desires which stem from the innate joy and communalism of improvising together, and the desires to succeed and survive within the individualizing and hierarchical economic order we live under. In our discussions with other improvisers about the working conditions of being a freelance musician, it is clear that both desires are often operant in the social spheres of improvised music, but the imperative to survive and thrive within the scene is often the stronger force.
When we hear someone say “music is inherently social,” more often than not what we hear is the tacit demand to accept and perform the social duties of bourgeois market pragmatism in our community. This kind of bourgeois sociality appears as elective, free, and consensual; however in reality, it is the sociality of investment, profit-seeking, hype, and extraction done by one party at another party’s expense. It is the kind of sociality that creates games of hierarchy and positioning, making resources and opportunities artificially scarce, unequal, and guarded. It is the kind of sociality that creates guilds of superficially similar musicians who cartel access to space and advocate for ingroup members’ work, but compete with other groups in resentful, jealous, and non-cooperative manners. It is the logic of that which you expect a stock-broker or a businessperson to engage in—not a practitioner of free music, in both its formal and social sense.
Why does this bourgeois social form exist in our community and what should be done about it? A myriad of apologia and reductionism surround these questions—ranging from accepting the current state as natural and inherent, claiming individuals have no agency outside of their circumstances, claiming that the current state of things is entirely the result of individuals’ actions, or that things have always been this way regardless of place or time. These are all incorrect and indefensible, but are common narratives to help cope with the problems of bourgeois sociality in the improvised music community. These narratives are often employed as a means for careerist artists, corporate philanthropists, elite academic institutions and non-profits, and other bourgeois elements in the scene to individualize and naturalize the systemic alienation which this sociality can produce, abdicating themselves of complicity in this type of social orientation.
All of the issues pertaining to bourgeois sociality are not just problems with improvised music communities, but exist in some form as the social structuring of survival mechanisms in capitalist market societies. This can take the form of desire to gain accolades, respect, and social status, which often promise to ensure material security and emotional validation for one’s artistic expression. The economic structures that produce the desires of bourgeois market pragmatism are intentionally obscured by hegemonic power, so that the borders they create often remain outside of our conscious awareness. Because material security and the emotional health which comes from recognition and belonging are universal needs, and market societies always attempt to maintain a monopoly on their provisioning, it can be difficult to think of any other communal form which could provide these universal needs beyond the requirements of bourgeois market pragmatism.
Through investigating and critiquing the bourgeois elements within improvised music communities, we are working to imagine and undertake the creation of improvised music communities which are formed to serve the collective social, emotional, and material needs of those who participate in it. As the institutions which fund and propagandize the individualist myths of improvised music continue to wither and disinvest from our communities, we can grasp opportunities for forms of alternative community organizing which challenge the antisocial desires and narratives given to us by bourgeois institutions. Making these social forms manifest in our communities and building broader support for the communal social forms that already exist and are part of the history of our scenes is a difficult task in light of the world we live in. We hope that these writings participate in some small way in the building of a more resilient, communal, cooperative, and equal community of improvising musicians. For us, working on these writings is a means of finding new paths as cultural organizers and musicians.
This series of writings will begin by investigating the current social nature of improvised music communities, how freelance musicians access their means of subsistence, and the options of social forms and relations that exist at their intersection. The second writing will discuss and critique common ways in which social relations are formed in light of the professionalization and commodification of musical labor and will build a normative case for why it is good for musicians to not solely rely on music for income. Another writing will offer a list of tips, recommendations, and organizing tools for building resilient organizations, cooperatives, and spaces inside of our improvised music communities that serve the needs of the members and the music rather than the needs of capital and the desire for hierarchy. This series of writings will be a space of ruthless criticism of all that exists within what we see in our improvised music communities, an unabashed defense of the communalistic aspects of improvisation, and an optimistic imagining of how we can bring the political, social, and economic infrastructure of our work in line with the social nature of our practice.
This series is dedicated to those who keep us grounded in the ecstatic joy of musicking and reveal the possibilities of music as a radical and egalitarian social form.
