I hadn’t read books specifically on music before, maybe one or two loosely-knit ones. Lately I got interested in and affected by music. One day I found myself searching for music books with an introduction-level history. I thought of listening to an audiobook so that I can daydream while walking outside and listening to it. This eliminated many primary books which didn’t have an audiobook version. In the Audible search, I encountered this book with an intriguing title: Music: A Subversive History by Ted Gioia. Can I understand the subversiveness without knowing the mainstream theory and history about it? At least, a subversive history might refer to the dominant one.
The following quote is from the Epilogue of the book, almost all of it. Gioia starts with how he doesn’t like the manifestoes and attempts to write one. The bullet points by themselves may not be that interesting but I wanted to copy them here to recall the sections of the book that elaborate on these hypotheses. I wasn’t that interested in his claims while listening to the book, but the events, the waves, the disruptors were the interesting parts for me since I never thought about the history of music as a separate topic or a focus. It was the first time that I read a scholar criticising Bourdieu’s taste concept from the depths of the cultural analysis, I liked that part. I also read some heavy criticisms about the book on Goodreads but I couldn’t understand them because they were depending on an existing body of knowledge. Nevertheless, I’ll copy one of the most upvoted (also by me) ones, by Kendra: “Gioia notes early in this book that he’s been writing it for 25 years. That shows: his conception of how music history is taught and written about and discussed is about 25 years out-of-date, and his work in this book suffers badly from it. The book would have been a powerful call to action and change two decades ago, but today, with hundreds of fantastic, progressive, new, and radically different approaches to music historiography in practice, both for “art” and “pop” musics, Gioia’s work is out of touch, and the book’s claims come far too late for it to be relevant or useful”.
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1. Music is a change agent in human life, a force of transformation and enchantment.
2. Music is universal to the same extent that people have comparable needs, aspirations, biological imperatives, and evolutionary demands on their behavior. Refusing to acknowledge the universal qualities in a community’s music is akin to denying it membership in the broader human community.
3. Songs served as the origin for what we now call psychology—in other words, as a way of celebrating personal emotions and attitudes long before the inner life was deemed worthy of respect in other spheres of society.
4. Over the centuries, freedom of song has been just as important as freedom of speech, and often far more controversial—feared because of music’s inherent power of persuasion. Songs frequently embody dangerous new ideas long before any politician is willing to speak them.
5. Charts of best-selling songs can be read as an index of leading social indicators. What happens in society tomorrow can be heard on the radio today.
6. For communities that don’t have semiconductors and spaceships, music is their technology. For example, songs served as the ‘cloud storage’ for all early cultures, preserving communal history, traditions, and survival skills. Songs can also function as weapons, medicine, tools, or in other capacities that channel their inherent potency.
7. Each major shift in technology changes the way people sing.
8. Musical innovations almost always come from outsiders—slaves, bohemians, rebels, and others excluded from positions of power—because they have the least allegiance to the prevailing manners and attitudes of the societies in which they live. This inevitably results in new modes of musical expression.
9. Diversity contributes to musical innovation because it brings the outsider into the music ecosystem. Consider how port cities and multicultural communities, from Lesbos to Liverpool, have played such a key role in the history of song.
10. Musical innovation spreads like a virus, and usually by the same means—through close contact between groups from different places. The concept of a song going viral is more than just a poetic metaphor. New approaches to music often arise in unhealthy cities (Deir el-Medina, New Orleans, etc.).
11. If authorities do not intervene, music tends to expand personal autonomy and human freedom.
12. Authorities usually intervene.
13. Over the short term, rulers and institutions are more powerful than musicians. In the long term, songs tend to prevail over even the most authoritarian leaders.
14. Kings and other members of the ruling class are rarely responsible for breakthroughs in music. When such innovations are attributed to a powerful leader—as with the Song of Songs, the Shijing, Gregorian chant, troubadour lyrics, and so on—this is usually a sign that something important has been hidden from our view.
15. We still need to study these powerful figures in music history, not for what they did, but for what they hid.
16. The unwritten (or erased or distorted) history is a measure of their successful intervention. Gaps in the documented history are often demonstrations of power. This is why stray and isolated facts that run counter to the sanctioned narrative deserve our closest attention.
17. Whenever possible, try to go back to original or early sources. If someone insists that you can safely ignore a primary source or traditional lore, that’s probably a sign you should take it seriously.
18. Nothing is more unstable in music history than a period of stability. The signal for new disruption in performance styles is usually that things are going smoothly.
19. Around the time of Pythagoras and Confucius, an epistemological rupture took place that attempted to remove magic and trance from the sphere of acceptable music practices. This agenda is always doomed to failure—you can’t reduce music to purely rational rules (or algorithms, as they are usually called nowadays)—but its advocates never give up trying. We are still living with the after-effects of the Pythagorean rupture today.
20. The battle continues to rage over two incompatible views: whether music is constructed from notes or from sounds. The arguments over analog versus digital music are just the latest manifestation of this conflict. It can also be described as an opposition between European and African traditions, and in many other ways. To some degree, this is the fundamental tension in all musicology.
21. Music is always more than notes. It is made out of sounds. Confusing these two is not a small matter.
22. Musical sounds existed in the natural world as creative or destructive forces (sometimes latent, other times already actualized) long before human societies put their power to use. As such, the pentatonic scale, circle of fifths, functional harmony, etc. were not invented by musicians, but discovered by them—much like calculus was discovered.
23. The recurring structures and patterns in compositions invite analysis, yet music cannot be reduced to a pure science or a type of applied mathematics. Powerful aspects of emotion, personality, and deliberate subversion resist this kind of codification. Even in the most restrictive and controlling environments, these elements persist—and, if given the chance, will dominate.
24. We can learn about music from neuroscience, but music does not happen in the brain. Music takes place in the world.
25. Historical accounts often tell us more about the process of legitimization and mainstreaming than about the actual sources and origins of musical innovation.
26. Insiders try to rewrite history to obscure the importance of outsiders—or to redefine the outsider as an insider.
27. The very process of legitimization requires distortion— obscuring origins and repurposing music to meet the needs of those in positions of power.
28. Legitimization is ongoing and cumulative. In other words, music history is no different from other types of history: each generation rewrites it to match its own priorities, of which truth-telling often ranks low on the list.
29. The process of legitimization typically transpires over a period of between twenty-five and fifty years—or what we might call a generation. Attempts to accelerate the mainstreaming of radical music at a faster pace (e.g., in order to make money from it) will bring irresolvable tensions to the surface. Sometimes people will die as a result.
30. Music has always been linked to sex and violence. The first instruments were dripping in blood. The first songs promoted fertility, hunting, warfare, and the like. Most of music history serves to obscure these connections and to suppress elements judged shameful or undignified by posterity.
31. The ‘shameful’ elements in music history—sex, superstition, bloody conflicts, altered mind states, etc.—are usually closely linked to the process of innovation itself. When we cleanse them from the historical record, we guarantee our ignorance of how new ways of music-making arise.
32. Even love songs are political songs, because new ways of singing about love tend to threaten the status quo. All authority figures, from parents to monarchs, grasp this threat implicitly, even if they can’t express it clearly in words.
33. Institutions and businesses do not create musical innovations; they just recognize them after the fact.
34. They usually strive to hide this—with the goal of exaggerating their own importance—and sometimes succeed.
35. If you really want to understand music in the present day, turn away from the stage and study the audience.
36. Music was once embedded in a person’s life; now it projects a person’s lifestyle. That may seem like a small difference, but the distance between the two can be as large as the gap between reality and fantasy.
37. Music entertains, but it can never be reduced to mere entertainment.
38. The audience is never passive, and it always puts music to use.
39. Songs still possess magic, even for those who have forgotten how to tap into it.
40. Those who devote themselves to music as a vocation—whether as performer, teacher, scholar, or in some other capacity—can ignore this magic, or they can play a part in restoring its potency. In other words: with music, we can all be wizards.
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Gioia, T. (2019). Music: a subversive history (First edition). Basic Books.
