Note Bloat- Why Music Needs a Holiday
March 21 2010

Too much music. In too many places. By too many bands. With too few pauses for silence.

The Pianobabbler ekes out his living as a musician. Yet he cannot help but lament the always on, always there ubiquity of music today. The past few decades have brought about the exponential bloat of the note.

Note bloat overtook us incrementally. We hardly notice it now. 10 years ago it would have smacked us as unusual. 20 years ago- unimaginable.

On the streets, in a store, over meals, over coffee, in an office, in a gym, at a friend's. Foreground, background, sideways, always: the music plays. On and on, it plays.

How did it come to this?

From the first moment it ever rang out, music was the exception to Nature's default rule of silence. The world had its soundscape of birds, the elements, voices and whatnot. Music, the synthesis of human activity and imagination, irrupted by exception. Someone had to expend effort to make music.

The advent of recordings altered this natural state. Radio did so even more. Music no longer required immediate human action. One could drop a needle or turn a dial and, presto, human-free music magic.

Over the years, the capacity of media increased, from LP to CD to iPod to beyond. The quality and availability of hardware did too. Anyone today can buy and offer, in an iPod dock with good speakers, more audio quality and power than wealthy princes and patrons could have for most of music's history. They can mount ersatz concerts in their smokeshop doorways. They can paint the air with all the sound they wish, for hours on end.

At the same time, planet earth has never seen so many musicians, so much skill, so much commitment to music-making. For centuries, one could identify the leading musicians of the day. Bach, Handel, Scarlatti. Beatles, Joni, Stevie.

Try and do that now. Leaving out the legacy musicians, like Stevie and Joni, most of the names that shine brightest belong to the McMusicians McMaking nutrition-free McMusic, processed by high-financed studios and labels. The best music, the deep and interesting stuff, lies unlit in clubs and on self-produced CDs we will likely never hear, even when it has been harnessed to the power of the Net. This music struggles to get out. It risks suffocation within the overpopulated mass.

Ought we to celebrate or lament note bloat?

I had two meetings in a popular restaurant the other day. Two hours each. For the entire time, music flooded down from the ceiling speakers. Music of all styles. Music, music, music. Four hours of Aretha, Mozart, Charlie Parker. Non-stop. Muddle, more than music. I could hardly hear it. The restaurant has a live acoustic. It remained packed with people throughout. The chatter swallowed up the music.

The music. It had no effect on me, the music. It didn't move me. It didn't seduce me. It didn't embrace me. Like the oxygen around us, I inhaled it refelxively. It passed right through, unnoticed. There was no music to the music.

Why does music exist? Why do humans make it? Why do we listen to it? Because it sweeps us into an elevated state, melancholic or joyous. The omnipresence of music defeats this function. If we are always being elevated, we can't be elevated further. Music loses its effect. It loses its purpose.

Let's bring back a balance between silence and sound. Let's give music a holiday. The less music there is, the more music there will be.

The Pianobabbler has babbled.

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