Music

I'm not a musician, but I'm playing at being one.

I'm trying to record music for my fake band, Owl. It's about as hard a I thought it would be, even though the songs are covers and are being selected for their relative ease of performance. I've always been musically inclined, even if I haven't really performed music since I was in middle school, and it's been a long time desire of mine to make something of it.

I had a grad school critique yesterday and I presented a clip I had recorded yesterday in front of my professors and fellow grad students. A professor told me the music was terrible, that it sounded like experimental art music, and was therefore bad. And this excited me.

Not because he's right or because he's wrong, but because music is far more resistant to evaluative ambiguity. You like a song or you don't. It's not like visual art, where criticism tend to involve complicated discussions that skirt the simple but important thumbs up- thumbs down evaluation.

Art is also less distinctly connected to its audience. Most people don't look at art the way they listen to music. Most people don't look at art.

And the fact that I'm a novice at music adds to all of the above. It didn't hurt my pride to hear the music was bad the way it would if that judgment had been applied to my art. It has spurred me to reevaluate my music process, and I think it will help me grow.