The Musicians Manifesto

This column isn t about you, or me, or about any one particular group/genre/race/endlessly famous-and-wealthy celebrity musician/about the music scene in the city of El Paso, Texas/or about people that have often in the past been defined in the realm of music. No. Instead, this column is about bringing light to a new evolution- a new era- to organized chaos. My patience has grown weary of the typical; of the nonchalant naivety and ignorance that maintains itself amongst our local self-proclaimed subculture of musicians and artists. The music industry produces artists with similar sound than their predecessors while selling sex alongside, if not above, the music. The time has come to educate our viewers, our listeners, and take them into unimaginable landscapes. Life exists outside of the box, even the box which one perceives to live outside of. Indeed, there is in existence much more beyond that other box. Of course, the exterior is only understandable when one is fully aware of what resides within the actual box. For the wander lusting nature, this is the right place for you.

Down to its elementary core, one must ask himself, what IS music? For those of us with a more rational sense of the world (and even for those of us without it -outside the box!), science and mathematics serve as mechanisms to help explain its origin: a sound is produced by an object which can be expressed in the form of a wave and its counterparts: amplitude, height, and width. Sound waves are carried across space from the producing object, bounce, and eventually reach our ear where it travels through a series of tubes interconnected with the brain. Our brain then somehow deciphers this encrypted code and makes sense of it. Luigi Rossolo argues in his 1913 L'arte dei

Rumori (The Art of Noises) that the earliest form of music was incredibly simplistic and was created with simple instruments perhaps first derived as noise by industrial machines of the 19th century. But is simple sound or noise alone music? If sound and noise are a chaotic stream of waves carried across space-time which are then synthesized within the complexity of our brain, an appropriate definition for music would be: an elevated form of sound, as in an organized chaos, experienced through repetition. In essence, a ritual. Why ritual? Because music is an experience - it is not a physical object. We own data containing sound files that are played back by an ipod or a computer. We own physical objects such as CD s that will repeat the ritual for us whenever we desire, but the music itself only comes into existence upon playback. Furthermore, why is it that not all music is created equal once rationalized within our brain? Why are some sounds tense, hollow, dark, and terrifying while others are generally euphonic, pleasant, and easy on the ear? This particular power of music is universal: people all over the world feel it and hear it in similar yet differing ways. These sounds also produce emotional responses - happiness, sadness, nostalgia, joy, anger, etc. What makes a particular frequency or combination of pitches produce such phenomena? To this day, it is still not known why this occurs. As we are beginning to see, sound, noise, and music are three differing terms. Rossolo also argues that music has reached a point that no longer excites or inspires due to its familiarity of old sounds leaving an audience waiting for the extraordinary sensation that never comes. This is on par with the initial argument: senseless and typical music that has grown common, boring, and unappealing. The general public in our corner of the world (and possibly in most fast-paced, dense industrial cities) lacks a refined ear; a strategic approach, and enough time to develop a skeptical nature towards similar texture. Often, people like their box - the box is safe. They abide by their mold and in the words of a classic alternative rock-anthem I am here in my mold. I can t change. No No No. The task is to uncover texture (via its counterpart-ethnomusicology), timbre (sound and noise), and musical science while simultaneously exploring the vast lands of the world and beyond. Ultimately through this evolution, we can become well-rounded individuals who can potentially have a more temperate and better understanding of the arts, the world, and each other. The Earth stirs relentlessly with its sound. Do you hear it?