Introduction
In November 2010, the British music magazine The Word published a cover article on ‘the extreme pleasure of Difficult Albums’. Its author, Dorian Lynskey, explained his thinking behind the piece:
There are on my CD shelves two albums that I have owned for about four years without ever managing to listen to them all the way through. One of them is The Marble Index by Nico, the other is Tilt by Scott Walker. They squat there, sullen and intimidating, and the longer they do, the greater their power becomes, because I have made the mistake of being cowed by their reputations as ‘difficult’. (Lynskey Reference Lynskey2010, p. 72)
The article takes the form of a series of experiments in which its author listens for the first time to albums by, among others, Captain Beefheart (Trout Mask Replica), Peter Brötzmann (Machine Gun), Joanna Newsom (Ys), Nico (The Marble Index) and Scott Walker (Tilt and The Drift). Following publication, readers of the magazine began two discussion threads on the magazine's website (entitled ‘Difficult Albums’ and ‘Difficult Albums – That You Actually Own’). This extensive collaborative discourse has much to say about how readers listen to music at the margins of popular music, music that has rarely been considered from the perspective of listeners. An examination of this discourse can show to what extent (if at all) the pleasures and meanings of ‘difficult albums’ resemble those of other forms of popular music, and how readers of The Word listen to ‘difficult albums’.
First, though, we need to identify where ‘difficulty’ resides for Lynskey. With the exception of the free jazz of Machine Gun, his choices have their roots in song structures; what makes them difficult for Lynskey is the extent to which they extend those structures to the point of incomprehensibility (though, as we shall see, the magazine's readers do not uncritically accept his notion of difficulty). These are recordings that are marginal to the magazine's ideological interests. The Word's dominant critical discourse valorises popular music as a song-based craft that is successful to the extent to which it enables affective responses to an aesthetic that foregrounds music as expressive or representative of emotion. Such an affective craft is routinely bound up in arguments about authenticity and sincerity. We might consider the history and aesthetic priorities of this dominant critical discourse at the heart both of popular music criticism and of the academic study of popular music. Toynbee (Reference Toynbee2000) provides one of the rare examples where the avant-garde is considered in the context of the popular, when he considers free improvisation. For The Word and its readership, artists such as the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Bruce Springsteen, Bob Dylan and Elvis Costello provide the models for a more or less coherent body of work which, while capable of renewal, never strays so far beyond critical expectations as to be incomprehensible. There are, however, rare examples within the canon that do exceed critical expectations, to the extent that listening seems to need to go beyond the competences developed through the genres of popular music, such as the Beatles' ‘Revolution 9’ and the Beach Boys' unreleased Smile album.
In the aesthetic experience of popular music promoted by The Word, difficult music could be anything that does not conform to these critical expectations. This would be to suggest a rather weak notion of difficulty. The continual redrawing of the ‘horizon of expectations and “rules of the game” familiar … from earlier texts’ (Jauss Reference Jauss and Bahti1982, p. 79) is key to all forms of popular music; the play of variation against repetition is what drives generic development. Generic repetition without variation leads to musical stagnation. The Word's examples, on the other hand, suggest music that breaks with generic conventions in far more extreme ways. When Simon Frith asks, ‘what does a listener to music actually do?’ (Frith Reference Frith1996, p. 259, original emphasis), his question becomes more acute when listeners approach music where their evaluative repertoire seems inadequate, where (as one of The Word's readers puts it) we ‘have no reference points’.
Difficult music: between the popular and the avant-garde
Difficulty is most often associated, not with popular music, but with the avant-garde. For McClary (Reference McClary1989), difficulty becomes part of the ideological position of avant-garde composers, where the prestige of a composition or a composer proceeds from the challenges the music presents, and where popularity might be considered as an index of failure. The ideological challenges of the avant-garde may be traced back to Adorno, as Paddison reminds us. Adorno (in his Philosophie der neuen Musik of 1949) considered avant-garde compositions as ‘flaschenpost’, ‘like messages in bottles thrown into the sea, such is the extremity of their alienation … which nevertheless resist interpretation and retain something of a riddle-character’ (Paddison Reference Paddison1993, p. 1). Under these conditions the interpretative difficulty of the avant-garde lies in the latter's association with a continual striving for originality – what Hal Foster refers to as ‘ideology of progress, the presumption of originality, the elitist hermeticism, the historical exclusivity’ (Foster Reference Foster1996, p. 5). Rather than consider the avant-garde as positioned within an ideology of separatism and prestige, however, it is possible to consider an avant-garde which embraces aesthetic and social practices that are more mobile, capable of a broader cultural contextualisation and that consequently afford broader possibilities for the acquisition and deployment of cultural capital.
Gendron (Reference Gendron2002) shows how the aesthetics of cultural capital may be regarded as lying not simply in high-culture associations. Rather than consider the avant-garde and the popular as irreconcilably antagonistic, he draws attention to correspondences and ‘friendly encounters’ (Gendron Reference Gendron2002, p. 19) between avant-gardes of visual art and mass cultures of popular music. Such a rapprochement, Gendron argues, can be located in the coincidence of the rise of the avant-garde in the early 20th century with that of mass culture, and their similarity in terms of the economics of symbolic value: ‘the restricted market of the avant-garde, driven by fashion and constant turnover in symbolic value, mirrored the mass market better than any other restricted market’ (Gendron Reference Gendron2002, p. 16). This argument resembles Mann's summary of Adorno's assessment of the avant-garde as a condition of modernism that ‘is first of all a break with tradition, but [that] also employed mechanisms of novelty endemic to capitalism’ (Mann Reference Mann1991, p. 69). As Mann puts it: ‘the avant-garde engaged in warfare with bourgeois values and institutions while simultaneously employed in the bourgeois cultural factory’ (Mann Reference Mann1991, p. 46).
Gendron also finds evidence of the convergence of musical practices from the avant-garde and popular music: the ‘musique concrete of the Beatles …, the surrealist lyrics of Dylan, the ironic detachment of Zappa, the sonic breakthroughs of Hendrix, bridged the gap between modernist avant-garde art and a large-scale popular base’ (Gendron Reference Gendron2002, p. 322). Paradoxically, these examples do not consistently support Gendron's own claim that ‘the avant-garde [was] the colonizer’ of popular music (Gendron Reference Gendron2002, p. 7), for it can also be argued that the habitus of those doing the ‘colonising’ has on occasion been more heterogeneous. A noteworthy case is that of the Velvet Underground. Despite the presence of Andy Warhol (who brought the group into the modernism of the Factory), it was John Cale and Lou Reed who brought ‘sophisticated avant-garde strategies into the more widely distributed cultural context of rock music’ and ‘meaningfully established the relationship between avant-garde art and rock music’ (Molon Reference Molon2007, p. 13).
The avant-garde is at once the vanguard of the ‘main cultural body’ and its opposition – a dialectic that engenders ‘a productive conflict which it has been crucial not to settle’ (Mann Reference Mann1991, p. 45). It is a dialectic that is not without its contradictions, however: ‘the avant-garde is the vanguard of the army it attacks. It is bound to a circular track, caught in a strange ideological crossfire’ (Mann Reference Mann1991, p. 46). Mann's twin metaphor of circle and crossfire suggests a terrain which is always-already occupied, but which is continually contested by opposing forces. Yet the circular track of the avant-garde binds it to a continual shifting of position: it may be part of a mass culture, separate from it, antagonistic towards it or a necessary part of its development. It may be integral to it or marginal to it, creatively embraced or despised.
Listening strategies and difficult music
A dialectic approach to the avant-garde, such as that suggested by Gendron and Mann, opens up the possibility of a discourse of aesthetic pleasure that is not restricted to ‘high culture's monopoly over cultural capital’ (Gendron Reference Gendron2002, p. 11), nor is it about becoming part of that high culture. Instead, it makes available a discourse of affect, of the corporeal and of social meaning that might otherwise be missed by a culture of listening that, argues McClary (Reference McClary1989), is uninterested in social context. According to McClary, theorists of the avant-garde would claim that ‘only the ignorant … could have responded to [difficult] music as though it had anything to do with desire, with the experience of the body, with social meaning’ (McClary Reference McClary1989, p. 70). The argument that the audience for popular music listens differentially and in a culturally impoverished manner can be traced back to Adorno, for whom listening to popular music disables the concentrated listening practice that is necessary for the appreciation of the ‘higher’ music of the modernist avant-garde. In its place occurs a regression of listening, a deconcentrated listening that
makes the perception of the whole impossible. All that is realised is what the spotlight falls on – striking melodic intervals, unsettling modulations, intentional or unintentional mistakes, or whatever condenses itself into a formula by an especially intimate merging of melody and text. Here, too, listeners and products fit together; they are not even offered the structure which they cannot follow. If atomised listening means progressive decomposition for the higher music, there is nothing more to decompose in the lower music. (Adorno Reference Adorno and Bernstein1938/1991, p. 43)
Adorno's critique has a surprising longevity. Almost 40 years later, R. Murray Schafer counterposes the superficial (‘immersive’) listening of popular music audiences with the concentrated listening required to appreciate ‘the most intellectual music ever created’ (Schafer Reference Schafer1977, p. 117). According to Schafer, such listening is superficial for two reasons: first, it fragments the music, directing attention only to isolated elements within the performance; second, it listens to the totality in an unfocused way that equally refuses to recognise the structural complexity of the work. Both Adorno and Schafer locate these two types of listening within institutional settings: concentrated listening to higher music necessarily takes place during unamplified live performances in the concert hall, ‘a container of silence to make detailed investigation possible’ (Schafer Reference Schafer1977, p. 117). Regressive or immersive listening is distinguished by electronic mediation through the radio or the gramophone (to which Schafer adds the amplified rock concert), where distracted (deconcentrated) listening takes place, whether in public or domestic settings.
This myth of the unmediated concert experience as a privileged site for concentrated listening may be challenged in two ways. First, there is no recognition of the role that recorded music plays in developing listening strategies. The interviewees in Eisenberg (Reference Eisenberg1988), who include listeners to classical and popular music, easily demonstrate that listening to recorded music in private enables concentrated listening: ‘“I am still hearing things in ‘Yo Mama’” – a Zappa guitar solo – “which I bought five years ago”’ (Nina, cited in Eisenberg Reference Eisenberg1988, p. 142). Repetitive listening, whether for comprehension or appreciation, is commonplace among audiences for recorded music. It might be particularly appropriate for music that goes beyond the listeners' expectations or that does not exhibit any recognisable structuring devices, such as free improvisation, Noise and minimal music.
Second, concentrated listening need not be the preserve of ‘higher’ music of the concert hall. Studies of contemporary listening practices in Japan have shown how listeners to popular music participate in rituals of silent listening. In the 1960s, the scarcity of jazz records imported from the US saw the rise of kissaten, small clubs where audiences would sit in silence to hear the latest albums (Novak Reference Novak2008). In the 1990s, the emergence of a minimal form of improvisation known as onkyo similarly required audiences to sit in silence in the tiny Off Site music club in Tokyo where its leading practitioners performed. Performers and audience members attest to the disciplined listening required and how such listening might have a pedagogic value, informing listening practices in everyday life (Plourde Reference Plourde2008).
Such forms of attentive listening as those found in Japan do not preclude other strategies of listening. Unlike the arguments of Adorno and Schafer, there is neither a normative necessity nor an objective measure to judge what constitutes ‘correct’ or ‘appropriate’ listening. Joanna Demers (Reference Demers2010) offers an ameliorative interpretation of distracted listening that she terms ‘aesthetic listening’ (Demers Reference Demers2010, p. 15). Aesthetic listening comprises a situated practice of listening to popular music that takes into account a social context where distraction might well prevent concentrated listening, and where responses to music might well entail physical stimulation, such as dancing or singing: ‘we may choose to attend to development, or else we may pay only intermittent attention to sound while also attending to other sensory phenomena’ (Demers Reference Demers2010, p. 16). Rather than consider such listening as regressive, Demers argues that it can be an appropriate strategy for experimental electronic music (which can be seen as lying at the intersection between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture), particularly where performances and compositions can be lengthy and repetitious, or at least where form and structure might not be apparent. Aesthetic listening can thus be counterposed with what Demers calls ‘musical listening’, where the latter closely follows the compositional detail of a performance, its structure and trajectory.
Like McClary, Demers is suggesting that avant-garde music can be approached through evaluative strategies more familiar to us from popular music (affectively, corporeally) within specific social contexts. Contemporary avant-garde music, such as the work of the ‘New Complexity’ composer Brian Ferneyhough, might encourage a type of listening that privileges the score, requiring the listener to ‘participate in the composer's work (or at least simulate it by a form of “shadow” composition)’ (Couldry Reference Couldry1995, p. 26). Under these conditions the listening experience is reduced to a process of technical mirroring, where the potential for creative listening is diminished by an emphasis on structural analysis. On the other hand, as Couldry himself has found, this leaves little room for listening as interpretative attention: ‘I and a number of colleagues have gained great enjoyment from Ferneyhough's sonatas without any analysis or even the attempt at it’ (Couldry Reference Couldry1995). Similarly, Hesmondhalgh's (Reference Hesmondhalgh2007) ‘ordinary listeners’ to popular music hardly ever engage in musicological analyses. When they do, it is as if they are ‘struck … by the difficulties of talking about how and why music works’ (Hesmondhalgh Reference Hesmondhalgh2007, p. 517). This does not prevent them from providing detailed accounts about the significance of the music; instead, they emphasise qualities such as the expressiveness of a voice and the importance of lyrics to their own lives. Rather than relying on an understanding of the compositional process, they demonstrate a concentrated listening that draws on extra-musical considerations such as location, emotional, lived experiences and memories of other listening experiences.
Listening to difficult music in popular contexts
The preceding discussion suggests that the listening strategies of audiences can productively cut across demarcations such as higher and lower, art and popular, intellectual and affective. Such strategies might be especially relevant to the ‘difficult music’ presented in The Word, considered at the intersection between the avant-garde and the popular. This position is reinforced by the magazine's readers, who recount their experiences with a far broader range of artists and genres than Lynskey's original examples, and in so doing argue for definitions of difficulty beyond that offered by Lynskey. More subtly, therefore, we can see how a popular avant-garde lies at the intersection of a number of genres from popular music and the avant-garde such as rock, pop, free jazz, folk, electronic dance music, free improvisation, industrial, Noise, minimalism and progressive rock.
I am not suggesting that listening to difficult music requires the erasure of difference between classical and popular music, or between genres, but that approaches to listening might enable flows across musical worlds at the intersections of styles and genres. As Allan Moore (Reference Moore2001) points out, the close identification of the general terms ‘intensional’ and ‘extensional’ with popular and classical forms of music can be untenable. Intensional musical practices are associated with popular forms such as the blues, where the performer has the freedom to extemporise, revise and recreate a given rhythmic, melodic or harmonic structure. Extensional form is typically associated with what are considered the rigid formal requirements and limited interpretative possibilities of classical music. But, as Moore shows, there is evidence to suggest that both musics employ both forms. The following example shows how a more fluid approach to genre and form is deployed in the evaluative discourse of difficult music. Here is Ian MacDonald writing about the Beatles' ‘Revolution 9’:
By far the Beatles' most extreme venture into ‘random’, this eight-minute exercise in aural free association is the world's most widely-distributed avant-garde artefact. Around a million households owned copies of it within days of its release and, a quarter of a century later, its hearers number in the hundreds of millions. One of the most striking instances of the communicative power of pop, REVOLUTION 9 achieved a global exposure never imagined by the artists who pioneered its techniques. While the cut-ups of Burroughs, the collages of Hamilton, and the musique concrète experiments of Cage and Stockhausen … have remained the preserve of the modernist intelligentsia, Lennon's sortie into sonic chance was packaged for a mainstream audience which had never heard of its progenitors, let alone been confronted by their work. (MacDonald Reference MacDonald2008, p. 287)
For MacDonald, the avant-garde approach of ‘Revolution 9’ renders the piece beyond comparison with the rest of the Beatles' oeuvre, instead forcing comparison with other avant-garde compositions of musique concrète (MacDonald compares it with a sound collage by Luigi Nono, Non consumiamo Marx). And yet, ‘Revolution 9’ (generally understood as a composition by John Lennon) is the more successful for reasons that reflect a critical approach that favours the affective over the cognitive: ‘Nono's piece entirely lacks the pop-bred sense of texture and proportion in REVOLUTION 9. … Nono's art is an expression of the detached analytic mind – of “the head”’ (MacDonald Reference MacDonald2008, p. 291). Whatever its avant-garde antecedents, ‘Revolution 9’ is, for MacDonald, a music born of intuition rooted in a ‘pop sensibility’ that is itself rooted in everyday experience; it is not a cerebral music that is inevitably separated from social and cultural meanings. MacDonald is evaluating the compositional practices of the avant-garde according to an experience of listening to popular music, and finding the ‘higher’ composition of Nono inferior to Lennon's. In contrast to the exclusionary ideology of McClary's avant-garde composer, who judges popularity as a cheapening of a modernist project, Lennon's composition succeeds because of its ability to reach a very large audience; in this case the musical content is less important than the communicative event itself, enabled by its location within the popular music industry. Nor does it seem necessary for that audience to be aware of Lennon's influences in order to understand the piece – MacDonald even seems to be suggesting that ‘Revolution 9’ is a piece of pop music, despite its avant-garde form.Footnote 1
Mike Barnes' (Reference Barnes2000) evaluation of ‘Frownland’, the opening song on Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica, works in a similar way. He too acknowledges that the song can be interpreted as an avant-garde composition, but is ultimately convinced (and seeks to convince his readers) of its status as rock music:
The standard role of the two guitars, bass and drums rock line-up is subverted to the point where nothing ever settles or is repeated to any extent. Stuttering drums vie for space with an angular bass and atonal guitar motif in a different metre, and soon a keening lead guitar rips its way out of the tangled undergrowth. Less than fifteen seconds in, it dissolves into a torrent, the instruments thrashing around each other in complex contrapuntal patterns. But the music carries an inexorable forward motion – it rocks, in other words. […] On first listening it comes across as an avant-garde statement with few precedents and sharing little or no overlap with other styles or genres. But within its unique structures are found a multiplicity of lyrical and musical ideas which tie in with other strands of American culture and music, especially the blues. (Barnes Reference Barnes2000, pp. 90–91)
Barnes presents a narrative of listening that follows the song as it unfolds in real time to produce a parallel narrative of evaluation that moves from incomprehension to understanding. Incomprehension begins from a listening position that is baffled by apparently anti-generic characteristics – on first hearing, the song seems to have no antecedents and no reference points. The anti-genre thesis seems prevalent among practitioners and proponents of Noise and free improvisation (as in Bailey Reference Bailey1980 and Brassier Reference Brassier and Iles2009), and one reminiscent of the ‘terminal prestige’ of the avant-garde found by McClary. For Barnes, though, ‘Frownland’'s avant-garde status is only a way-station on the journey that has generic understanding as its destination. While the song defamiliarises rock's conventional instrumentation and normative song arrangements (‘complex contrapuntal patterns’), it is this very defamiliarisation that seems necessary for listening. Barnes finds ‘rock’ in the song (just as MacDonald finds pop in ‘Revolution 9’), which provides a basis not for a reductive assessment but for an aesthetic experience that offers multiple directionality for the listener, where the song becomes populated with myriad ‘styles and genres’. Barnes offers a broad approach to listening that does not depend on any prior knowledge of Beefheart and his music, instead preferring to locate an experience of the music in a much broader cultural history, not dissimilar to how Greil Marcus (Reference Marcus2000) contextualises more popular American music. We are not told in any detail what styles and genres the listener might find in the music, nor how they might be made to mean by the listener, although Barnes' reference to the blues suggests a listening strategy that relies on competences of listening developed through listening not to avant-garde, but to popular music.
Following Gracyk (Reference Gracyk2007), who himself bases his approach on Robert Hatten's study of meaning and interpretation in the music of Beethoven (Hatten Reference Hatten1994), we can usefully identify two types of listening competence – stylistic and strategic. Stylistic competences are developed through a familiarity with categories of music (what for a musicologist are styles, for sociologists of music are genres; Moore Reference Moore2001). Familiarity can mean the ability to distinguish between genres and to identify specific features of a genre (broadly, in terms of its conventions and repetitive components), as well as the capacity to identify sub-categories or cross-generic characteristics. But the significance of genre is hardly exhausted by treating it merely as a system of identification and classification (Fabbri Reference Fabbri, Horn and Tagg1981). To listen generically is also to engage in ideological arguments, social life and cultural history, as MacDonald and Barnes show. Listening entails far more than an exercise in correspondence (and its corollary of incomprehension when correspondence fails). This is where the significance of strategic competence lies, in attending to the ‘rich particularity of specific pieces of music’ (Gracyk Reference Gracyk2007, p. 77). It is at this point that stylistic competence is brought to bear on a particular musical experience, not for the purpose of classification, but to articulate listening as a set of possibilities, rather than as a normative task. At a mundane level, the conspicuous characteristics of a piece of music emerge against a multiply-directed background of expectations derived from listening that is ideologically and socially informed. Far from the process being inevitable or its outcome predictable, what we might term ‘listening through possibilities’ becomes contingent, with the music becoming available for repositioning and reinterpretation as our listening competences and experiences increase.
Gracyk acknowledges this in his own analysis of another song from Trout Mask Replica, ‘Dachau Blues’. Like Barnes, he hears the blues in Beefheart's work, but admits the possibility that ‘some listeners will recognise that Captain Beefheart's music overlaps with the musical categories of free jazz and the poetic tradition of the beats’ (Gracyk Reference Gracyk2007, p. 97). Consequently, the multiplication of perspectives from which the song might be evaluated aesthetically works against any narrow determination of either the process or the outcome of listening.
We might consider the social practice of ‘listening through possibilities’ as a system of affordance. As Eric Clarke (Reference Clarke2005) has shown in his application of Gibson's concept to musical listening, the affordance of any music resides at once within the ‘objective properties’ of the musical material and the material of ‘cultures, social practices, emotional states, and ideological allegiances’ that inform a listener's engagement with the music (Clarke Reference Clarke2005, pp. 37, 190). Interpretations, pleasures and uses are afforded by a complex of historical, social and cultural encounters between the listener and the music, at the heart of which, as Robert Walser (Reference Walser and Moore2003) argues, will always lie the music, for without it ‘any cultural analysis of popular music … is at least fundamentally incomplete’ (Walser Reference Walser and Moore2003, pp. 21–2). This seems to be a particularly appropriate strategy for music whose reception is ‘based on displacement, opening, expanding, connecting’ (Székely Reference Székely2008, n.p.). While listeners might be able to apply their histories of listening to new musical situations that are extremely dynamic and contingent, there is no inevitably stable or reliable approach: ‘listeners … must improvise a response’ (Székely Reference Székely2008, n.p.). Székely calls this progressive listening, but he does not wish to impute any political project to such a strategy of listening (this is not, in other words, Adorno's counterpart to regressive listening). Neither does this argue for any separation between musical forms and ideologies, between ‘high’ and ‘low’, but for practices of listening that draw on stylistic and strategic possibilities for evaluating the avant-garde in popular music (as Demers and Székely show in different ways). Rather than seek the elusive purity of a popular avant-garde, we can identify a more hybrid approach to evaluation that nevertheless remains rooted in specific experiences of popular music.
Difficult music and everyday listening
I now want to return to where this paper began, The Word magazine and its website (http://www.wordmagazine.co.uk), and to focus on the online collaborative discourse set up by the magazine's readers in response to Dorian Lynskey's article. The discussions began with this post:
While agreeing with the concept of the piece it doesn't refer to context. I find no Beefheart, Zappa, [John] Cale or [Lou] Reed albums hard, just prefer some to others. I think this might be due to being the right age to have listened to them in context to the music they & others were making at the time. Whereas as records by the Fall or Be Bop Jazz for example I struggle with as I have no reference points. (‘pedr0’, posted 13 October 2010)
Here ‘pedr0’ argues for the significance of social and cultural context in making evaluative claims about popular music – claims that have as much to do with habitus, identity and community (all of which might be read out of ‘being the right age’) as they do with questions of how our listening experiences are employed in our evaluative discourse (stylistic and strategic competences). It is not possible to say whether the reference to ‘others’ refers to musicians considered similar to Beefheart, Zappa, Cale or Reed, or whether ‘pedr0’ is arguing for a listening competence developed from a wider experience of more ‘mainstream’ popular music. What is likely is that the listening competence derives from a sustained comparative and contextual experience (perhaps of many years). By contrast, the context provided in Dorian Lynskey's article is more prescribed in terms of comparative musical examples (he cites Pet Sounds, What's Going On? and the ‘sweet relief’ of Motown Gold) and in terms of duration – he spends very little time with the music (two days), apparently listening to each album only once. The time necessary to experience difficult albums is for many readers a function of age, time (and opportunity) being more easily available when they were younger:
I devoted days to [Radiohead's] Kid A when it was released ten years ago, and eventually grew to love it. But these days, with Kid A and Kid B in tow, a place of my own with its own roof to mend, a proper job, well there just isn't the time to loaf about in my headphones taking it all in. (‘Prestonia’, 13 October 2010)
difficult, but in a good way, is late jazz, either free-form improv or fusion, that I listened to in my twenties but now find difficult to fit into my life … I rarely have the time to seriously listen to something of that density [Miles Davis's Live/Evil] for over 100 minutes. (‘pessoa’, 6 November 2010)
The prominence of such sentiments reflects the demographic profile of The Word's readership, which is aged between 30 and 55 (and overwhelmingly male): ‘Now that he is over 30 with a partner and possibly even a family, he is as passionate about music as ever […] He has a limited amount of time to devote to entertainment …’ (The Word 2011). Time can also be seen as an index of the intensity of the listening experience. While Lynskey acknowledges that the amount of time to listen to an album once – however difficult – will always be less than that required for a novel, for readers even this can be too daunting an experience. Trout Mask Replica is frequently invoked as an album ‘impossible to listen to … in one sitting’ (‘mojoworking’, 13 October 2010). Listeners who describe more positive experiences suggest that difficult albums require sustained and focused listening, perhaps of the kind proposed by Schafer or Plourde. There is no place in these comments for Adorno's atomised listening:
Trout Mask Replica requires ‘full undivided attention’, otherwise ‘it just dissolved into an annoying racket’. (‘mojoworking’, 13 October 2010)
This [Nurse With Wound] is the best form of ‘difficult music’ – on one level it sounds like god-awful noodling, but after some concentrated listening you are very pleasantly surprised to find some intelligence and intelligibility at work. (‘douglas_green’, 7 November 2010)
These examples suggest a form of ‘concentrated or ‘undivided’ listening in which it is important to consider the whole work and not to fragment it. For ‘douglas_green’ the pleasure lies in the discovery of organisation and deliberateness behind what might otherwise appear as chaos. On occasion, this might involve listening in an ‘unpopular’ way, where there is little likelihood of applying criteria from popular music:
The only way to listen to [AMM's double album The Crypt: 12th June 1968] is to concentrate on the changing texture. (‘pessoa’, 6 November 2010)
Some readers prefer to experience their difficult albums in fragmented form, song by song (where there are songs), an approach that many find pleasurable:
I played it once through and found it almost unlistenable by the end. Funnily enough though I did put it on the iPod and whenever it comes up on shuffle I find it oddly endearing. Never did listen to it all the way through again though. (Chris Young, 5 November 2010)
I can't listen to it in-a-row but on shuffle it occasionally throws up a wee gem. (goatboyuk69, 5 November 2010)
I definitely couldn't listen to it all the way through, but on shuffle a quick blast of, say, ‘Pena’, has me smiling. (‘BigJimBob’, 6 November 2010)
In these cases, songs from Trout Mask Replica are placed in a more familiar context. Listeners are able to appreciate the strangeness of the music in relation to other contrasting musical experiences. These other experiences must be proximate in time, it seems. It is not enough to recall them and compare them with the experience of Trout Mask Replica. The evaluation of Beefheart's album seems to take place in baffled or frustrated isolation when considered as a single work (whether a double album or a single CD). When placed in a more recent technological context (the iPod), the album can be fragmented and listened to between the cracks, as it were, of more conventional popular music. Of course, a similar facility of fragmentation, selection and shuffling has been available in earlier technologies (albums and CDs are divided into tracks, after all), but the key to the ‘shuffle argument’ lies not so much in the automated ease of the process but in the unexpectedness of the process: ‘the use of the Shuffle enables users to break with their traditional listening habits and preferences’ (Bull Reference Bull2007, p. 151). The unexpected, the challenging – when there is not too much of it and when it is located in a more predictable or familiar musical environment – can clearly be the source of pleasure. In this case, the salience of the individual Beefheart song derives not from the application of stylistic competence gained from earlier listening experiences, but from the contemporaneous collocation of the song with other songs. To listen ‘on shuffle’ is to renew such a mode of listening over time, where the listener's encounter with the music is continually reframed. Encounters such as these can also have a functional value that enables a renewal of listening to music that has become overfamiliar:
Sometimes I get a bit bored of music, and Trout Mask Replica kind of reboots my hard-drive. It's akin to when it's really muggy and a good thunderstorm clears the air. (‘Lucifer Sam’, 5 November 2010)
Not for everyday obviously but definitely cleanses the palette. (‘Steven C’, 7 November 2010)
In these examples listening works in reverse: instead of a multiply-directed listening strategy that brings a complex history of listening experiences to bear on unfamiliar music, the experience of the popular avant-garde defamiliarises that history. Stepping back from the avant-garde in the popular is to return to the familiar ‘with different ears’ (as one reader puts it) with the possibility of a more experimental or improvisatory listening strategy. While this practical value of the avant-garde might not be employed for the structuring of daily life that DeNora (Reference DeNora2000) finds in her respondents, it does at least suggest it is important in the organisation of the aesthetic life of the listener.
Defamiliarised listening recalls Schafer's notion of clairaudient listening, a process that requires training in the appreciation of silence. For The Word's readers, however, the familiar is revitalised through exposure to a music that, far from inducing calm or detachment, is ‘almost unlistenable’. Even here, though, the functional value of listening is considered from the perspective of the generic norms of popular music, from which the difficult albums are culturally located and ‘used’. When difficult albums themselves are evaluated against some of the most salient of popular music norms – conventional song structures and identifiable melodies – readers tend to find them wanting:
I can appreciate this sort of stuff [Ornette Coleman] on an intellectual level but after a bit I just want some melody and a chorus. (‘Steerpike’, 5 November 2010)
… simplicity is infinitely more effective than complexity, most of the time. Give me a sweet tune, a stripped-bare arrangement, and lyrics with wit and intelligence and maybe even a bit of depth, and I'm sold. (‘idiotbear’, 6 November 2010)
The expectation that music will engage affectively is strong here. Intellectual appreciation might be possible as an exercise in comprehension, but ultimately this is an inadequate and unsatisfying experience; affective engagement is only made possible through song structures that are easily apprehended. These listeners do not find it possible to evaluate the avant-garde in popular music by approaching it as a site for expressiveness or for making meaning of their own lives (unlike DeNora's respondents). Instead, there emerges a homological argument that equates simplicity of form with the directness and sincerity of expression, an ideal that is contrasted with the complex and ‘artificial’ constructs of difficult music. The creators of difficult music, many readers argue, are ‘trying too hard’; they are ‘wilfully obtuse’ and ‘wilfully impenetrable’. Musicians of the popular avant-garde are depicted as solipsistic and immature (‘It's all so sixth form’), their self-indulgence preventing them from communicating to an audience. Listeners are often suspicious of the musicians' motives. Perhaps the lack of pleasure many readers report encourages them to divert their personal disappointment towards an explanation that addresses the musician, rather than themselves as listeners. This is not to say that accounts of pleasure are absent from more positive experiences of difficult albums, but they tend to be brief and emerge with little preparation or self-analysis: ‘quite pleasant’ (referring to Lou Reed's Metal Machine Music); ‘it's the best thing he's ever done’; ‘Diamanda Galas albums I love and play often’; ‘AMM for me …’; and ‘I have around 60 John Zorn CDs. Define “difficult”’.
As the author of the ‘define difficult’ post implies, and as we have already noted, the meaning of difficulty can reside in different places. For some readers Lynskey's list of difficult albums appears as a superficial starting point – respondents lay claim to far broader and varied listening experiences than the original article suggests. With these experiences comes a similarly richer range of listening approaches, from the structural to the textural, from the focused to the distracted, from the intellectual to the affective. Considered generally, we might understand these listening strategies as complementary rather than competitive. It is with the affective, however – with the consideration of pleasure in readers' emotional lives – that there appears some dispute between those who find the avant-garde as quite beyond pleasure and those who proclaim their pleasures through a similar discourse to that found in more typical affective responses to more conventional popular music.Footnote 2
The question of where listeners find pleasure in the avant-garde has significance beyond the present study to the extent that it raises questions about pleasure, expectation and sincerity. To describe Metal Machine Music as ‘quite pleasant’ and to proclaim ‘love’ for the work of Diamanda Galas is to suggest one of two contradictory aesthetic positions. The first places such music as amenable to pleasures that are similar to those gained from other forms of (‘non-difficult’) popular music. The second suggests a relativism so extreme as to make assessments such as ‘pleasant’ mean little more than an anodyne statement such as ‘I enjoy this music’. Both positions break with normative statements about such music (even a critic such as Lester Bangs attests to the difficulty of liking Metal Machine Music). What are we to make of such responses? Perhaps we are witnessing a struggle over cultural capital, where the avant-garde provides an easily occupied territory, to which the specialist music fan might lay claim in order to celebrate cultural difference. Those readers who find the musicians of the popular avant-garde ‘all so sixth form’ would perhaps include fans of such music in their assessment. On the other hand, such fans might be proposing an equality of aesthetic experience that derives more from John Cage's aesthetic of ‘sounds being themselves’ (that is not to say that this too might not be bound up in questions of status, of course, the location of pleasure remaining moot). There is, however, a third position adopted by some readers, a further form of relativism that challenges the argument that difficulty only resides within the avant-garde. This position is presented by those who argue that the absence of pleasure in any listening experience might be an index of difficulty:
Wouldn't it be boring if we were only allowed to select ‘difficult’ LPs from a pre-approved list of ‘established’ difficult LPs? Pharaoh Sanders, Throbbing Gristle, the Fall, Edgar Broughton Band, Whitehouse, Nurse With Wound, various prog acts … how boring would that be? … Just because something is polite and shiny, it doesn't make it inoffensive or difficult [sic] for some people. (‘BigE’, 9 November 2010)
Is there any music more ‘difficult’ than Madonna or Michael Jackson? (‘ranger’, 7 November 2010)
For these readers, difficulty resides in the social situation and popular cultural experiences of the listener. This is to propose a more contingent notion of difficulty that can be much more inclusive of a wider readership's listening experiences. Rather than consider the establishment of a canon of difficult music, rather than attribute intent to the musicians, we can instead consider an alternative view of difficult music, one that does not point towards genre as a repository for a particular notion of difficulty. Difficulty becomes an aesthetic dimension of listening as a process that is located within particular histories of popular music where the social histories of audiences and their listening experiences over time intersect with the cultural experiments of the musicians:
I was listening to the mono Dylan stuff at the weekend, and it occurred to me that I'm old enough to remember when he was considered very ‘difficult’ in the early 60s. Familiarity and the sheer genius of the material gradually got people beyond the voice and we listened with different ears. It got me thinking because I was amazed at the negativity being heaped on Trout Mask Replica here, and I was trying to work out why I feel differently! I can only think it is because I actually worked my way to this LP through Safe As Milk and Strictly Personal, which prepared the ears for the more outrageous experimentation on the 3rd album. Other differences from then to now that occur to me are that it was a much more experimental time anyway – rock music was moving so fast that you expected to be challenged … (‘NigelT’, 9 November 2010)
Implicit in the above is an application of Gracyk's ideas that draws on the formal rules of genre and relies primarily on a phenomenology of recognition derived from competences. As Moore (Reference Moore2001) reminds us, however, recognition is only part of the listening process and operates at a general level. What Moore terms ‘explanation’ (Moore Reference Moore2001, p. 196) operates at a particular level, where the listener places the musical event in contexts (such as experiences of similar or dissimilar music, or specific social contexts of those experiences) that are able to generate meaning. There can be an experimental dimension to such a listening experience for which any ‘generic rehearsal’ will never be sufficient to account. ‘NigelT’ describes a process of aesthetic reception that listeners might bring to music that brings together recognisable elements with those less easily comprehensible. There is a flavour of Székely's improvisationality in what he writes – a provisional and contingent strategy of listening that seems well suited to music that is interpenetrative and destabilising in terms of generic expectations, yet where fluidity remains anchored in a social history of listening.
Conclusion
We have seen how readers have populated the category of difficult music generically, and have often assessed it negatively against the criteria of song-based popular music. For these readers, the characteristics of difficult music include: the absence of melody, instrumental complexity and the absence of structure, or the presence of an opaque structure. Considered semiotically, the communicative capacity of the music is also opaque to these readers, for whom any musical purpose or meaning is a private matter for the musicians themselves. From this perspective, the musicians and music of a popular avant-garde are ideologically identical to McClary's characterisation of avant-garde composers as uninterested in audiences and suspicious of popular acclaim.
For other readers of The Word, the experience of listening to difficult albums is more positive and typically takes one of two forms. First, there is a concentrated listening that requires dedication and time. This form resembles the disciplined listening presented by Plourde and Novak, but its social and cultural location is quite different. It is presented as a private experience, not a shared one, and is most often recounted as a historical experience, where youth, free time and the absence of adult responsibilities make the experience possible. The second form is presented as a current experience, one that requires less focused listening on the difficult music itself. We might consider this strategy as similar to that observed by Demers, where listeners listen distractedly or intermittently to the avant-garde, often to direct their aesthetic attention towards the more unproblematic popular. For example, by listening ‘on shuffle’, listeners place the ‘difficult song’ in a dominant aesthetic context of popular music. Difficult music thus works against its conventional counterpart, having a functional value of renewal for the familiar conventions of popular music.
The ideological boundary between ‘higher’ and ‘lower’ forms of listening is, if not entirely erased, at least blurred by such approaches (which is not inappropriate for a popular avant-garde, as Demers suggests). Any experimental dimension to listening is tempered by its popular cultural location. Székely's notion of progressive listening is useful here, though the listening strategies found among The Word's readers have a less improvisatory quality to them. Instead, they speak of a preparation for listening, whether through attending to a particular musician's work over a period of time or immersing themselves in a range of works which, while not necessarily comprising a canon, offer points of comparison within a notion of ‘difficulty’. To engage with difficulty is not necessarily to find pleasure in it – what is striking is how and where listeners locate difficulty, and what strategies they employ when presented with it. These strategies often display a richness that we also find in the professional critiques of MacDonald and Barnes. While The Word's journalism might suggest that ‘difficult albums’ are sui generis, dislocated from the norms of popular music, the aesthetic discourse of its readers shows that to engage with difficult albums is to explore how they might be connected with a range of musical histories and practices, as well as to multiple personal experiences of popular music.
