At what point do disparate sounds become music? Is there a static, objective definition of what can be considered music? Is it necessary to have melody, harmony, and rhythm, or is music simply a combination of sounds that produce an emotional response within the listener?
UVic assistant professor of composition Anthony Tan will explore these questions and more in an upcoming free, two-day symposium, Sound Genres: Exploring Sound as Foundational Practice.
Historically, the academic study of music has revolved around classical music and its axioms, but Tan is looking at electronic music in particular as a vehicle to expand the concept of music, not by abandoning what came before, but by evolving it.
“If you go to a music department at a university, most often it’s classical music,” he says. “You have to know musical notation, you’re often playing orchestral instruments, and so what we’re looking at is how this study of sound from these perspectives can actually inform how we teach music in university, and how we can become more inclusive about these practices as well.”
Tan is exploring the relationship between sound and music, the idea that music isn’t a static concept. At some point, an aggregation of sounds becomes music, and that intersection point is constantly changing.
“I think a lot of people have very diverse definitions of what music is,” he says. “There was a time when people would say that rap isn’t music—like music has to have something with instruments, and it has to have melody and harmony—but music can also be just sounds, as we listen to ambient music, for example. If you listen to the sounds of the environment, it’s also music in a way, and our conference is about questioning that notion about what is music versus what is sound.”
Tan says that the rich tapestry of sound and sound design is a complex web that combines intellectualism with cultural influences, and he wants to create a dialogue that explores these different genres and connects them.
“We just want to be more diverse about what we look at musically,” Tan says. “There are all of these other genres out there that use sounds in very intellectual and complex ways that we often don’t look at, explore, or study, and this is an attempt to look at that. I think what we’re trying to do is just open up that dialogue between all of these different ways that we think about sound culturally, musically, and how we can find the connections between these things.”
Electronic music has grown leaps and bounds beyond the MIDI-rave-techno from the late ’90s and early ’00s, and current tools allow for compositions as rich and complex as an orchestral piece. Tan thinks that these genres of music are just as deserving of academic study.
“It’s just as important to design very complex sounds as it is to hear the sound of a string quartet, and I think they’re the same thing,” he says. “It just depends on how you develop the tools, the language, the conceptual framework to analyze it and understand what’s going on in those different musics.”
He says that while there is current research into new forms of music, it suffers from compartmentalized isolation, and he wants to connect them so everyone can work cooperatively.
“The impetus is really to try to bring all of us together,” Tan says. “Often we exist in these silos, in the sense that we’re in our own lane, focused on our own research and practices, but someone in some other department might also be thinking about electronics-mediated sound in their own way, based on their own kind of paradigm, and we’re trying to find ways to connect the worlds.”
Sound Genres: Exploring Sound as Foundational Practice
Various times, Friday, May 26 to Sunday, May 28
Free, UVic
finearts.uvic.ca/music/calendar/soundgenres