Define music

Lately I have taken (and given) a little grief over the discovery and appreciation of Lady GaGa. Mostly it is all in good fun. The other day a fellow said what she does doesn’t count as music because she relies mostly on synthesizers. Rock music is drums and guitars, real instruments, he said. That got me thinking a little. I came across the idea that really, anything that makes a noise can be used to make music. Among other things, I have heard old steam whistles used to produce a tune.

It is not the instrument that defines the music. More likely the music defines the instrument. When one sound isn’t right for a piece of music, sometimes it takes invention to produce the sound the artist wants.

Instruments have evolved for centuries. What was the first stringed instrument? Was it a lyre? A Lute? A sitar? Most likely it was the string on a hunter’s bow when he discovered different tensions created different sounds. So, with the synthesizer in the back of your mind, think about when that purist lyre aficionado first encountered the piano. Can you imagine? It’s a stringed instrument, but there is this mechanical connection between the player and the strings. That’s not music. Or, remember the horrified fans who walked out when Bob Dylan went electric in a concert? Do electronically enhanced instruments produce music or something else?

How did that great ram’s horn player react when he saw a horn hammered out of metal? And how did the guy who played that react to the horn that showed up with valves on it? Or, OMG, when someone put a slide on it and came up with the trombone. That’s not music.

Great artists always take the art to greater levels and if there are new techniques or new instruments to try, they need to be tried. Modern rock music is a fusion of electronic sound anyway given the process of mixing in which different tracks and riffs and instruments and vocals are laid down at different times and then melded in the mixing process. Paul McCartney cannot play all those instruments at the same time.

The one instrument that has remained consistent over the years is the voice, and Lady GaGa certainly has one of those, plus she is a trained pianist and often plays that instrument accompanying herself. And that piano playing often is fused with the synthesizer. And, if you listen carefully on some songs, her voice is run through electronic, synthesized alteration as well. Experimenting, failing, more experimenting, success; it is all about expanding the limits to achieve the artistic goal.

Summed up in the words of Paul Simon, “Every generation sends a hero up the pop charts.” Let them climb those charts using whatever sound-making contraption gets them there.