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Musical performance is not limited to the reading of sheet music Sometimes people get confused when I list to them all of the musical instruments which I can play. For some reason they think that I mean I can perform music pre-composed by others on theinstruments I name, when in reality I simply mean that I can produce on sounds on those instruments which I find pleasing to myself. Why is it that when people say things like "I can play the guitar", they most often mean "I have learned how to read guitar sheetmusic and can perform the compositions of others"? Then, when you ask them to play a selection of their own composition, they say that they can't compose music. I believe that this goes far beyond a mere individual preference for performance versus composition; I think it is the result of highly ingrained attitudes towards composition, performance, and music in general. Let us set aside for a moment the bias which musical education has for performance at the expense of composition (which I discuss in this article). Instead, let us focus on the idea that a "musical composition" has to actually be "composed", i.e. written down in standard notation on lined score paper. This concept of composition is restricted to the western European musical tradition -- most cultures do not write down their music at all, yet despite this they are able to produce vastly complex musical compositions (in the case of north indian classical music, these compositions far exceed western music in terms of complexity). The reason for this is that in almost all cultures except for that of western Europe, the emphasis is on spontaneous musical creation and improvisation. The form is sometimes predetermined, but the content (the melodies, rhythms, and timbres) is usually left quite open to the descretion of the performer. This is true of several "fringe groups" of musical expression which are not widely held in esteem by most members of the western European tradition -- musics such as jazz-rock fusion, industrial metal, or ambient / drone music, to name a few. Yet the performers of these types of music take just as much pleasure in thier own musical expression as do the preformers of music in the western tradition. The emphasis, in these fringe musics, on impovisation, group interplay, and spontaniety take the place of the emphasis on harmony and vast formal structures which is predominant in western music. That is not to say that these fringe musics are devoid of harmony or structure; merely that these elements are subservient elements. There is also very little emphasis on preservation of the music thus grenerated, and usually the only form of preservation is a live recording, which cannot serve as an aid to duplication of the music any more than a photograph of a cloud can enable someone to recreate the same cloud. This de-emphasis on preservation is also found in most folk musics, where the musical compositions are quite structured and are repeatedly played in almost exactly the same manner, yet are not often written down and are usually only preserved in the minds of the permormers. What does this de-emphasis, in western European music, of spontaniety, improvisation, and original expression mean to us? As western culture continues to expand around the world, its ideas regarding music become more and more accepted as the "normal". Most folk cultures, when confronted with these musical ideas, abandon their own ideas of music due to a combination of "global peer pressure" and a desire to not appear weird. Unfortunately, this reduces the amount of originality in the global music sphere. Back |