Week 51
A musician will sink or swim with his or her musicianship.
Date: 14 Dec 2020
Motion: THR pop musicians’ penchant for childishness, as their work reminds one of child’s play
Role: Chair or 1st speaker (opp.)
Why isn’t pop-musicianship easy? On the one hand, it is a musician’s duty to play his or her instrument, in the moment and without a care, but also to tie those instances of play into ever growing, longer chains and sequences of austere seriousness. I will demonstrate with a train of thought, exactly how long this chain or train of obligations grows.
- A musician can not play only the catchiest, funniest or nicest part of the song (s)he has in his or her working memory, but (s)he has to play the whole song from beginning to end, with intros and codas and the whole ABCDABCDABCBCDADCBDABA structure of the song.
- A musician can not play only one hit song as the repertoire for his or her gig, but the gig needs to consist of 10 – 20 tunes that are atmospherically, rhythmically and stylistically different from each other, with the exception of some monotonous styles of genre music.
- A musician can not make a salable record with one song only but (s)he has to compile and compose the record of many new songs, of which only 1 or 2 may be cover songs attributed to other artists. Even then the arrangement needs to be new and unique. A full-length CD’s standard length is at least 10 but preferably 12 or 13 songs.
- Moreover, the praxis of the recording industry is that all of the material created in certain recording sessions is NOT to be released all together as the 1st and only edition. Sessions should ideally produce between 20 and 25 songs or tunes, so that the remaining ones could be later released as so-called B-sides to singles (even though singles no longer have B-sides) or as further, complementing material for so-called Deluxe or Remastered editions of hot CDs, typically released as an anniversary reprise of the original release (10, 15, 20, 25 or 30 years later).
- A musician is expected to tour the country or the continent or the world in conjunction with every released studio album, excluding other kinds of albums, such as acoustic retrospectives, compilations, EPs, live concert releases, remixed retrospectives and symphonic retrospectives. For this purpose, (s)he needs to put together a band, if we are talking about a solo performer, or if a band, to rehearse as such for an upcoming tour.
- On tours, gigs need to be played as planned from start to finish, so that people may get an experience of a lifetime. If some announced/promised gig must be cancelled for any reason, it should be compensated for in playing in the same place or town later on during the tour or further down the road.
- If a musician is called and invited to spontaneous (as opposed to personally contractual) appearances, such as the media’s broadcast music programmes or parties held in the immediate personal circle of the musician, (s)he is supposed to be able to play other music than his or her own normal repertoire and demonstrate a capacity for transformability, solo performance and spontaneous improvisation. In other words, on demand, (s)he is supposed to be able to step on to his or her discomfort zone.
Besides, traditionally a musician has been under pressure to juggle these concerns with three additional concerns of a private nature. (S)he has been presumed to handle “career demands” in addition to “common demands”. These other demands are:
- Family problems arising from multiple partners consecutively or simultaneously, or multiple children with different partners complete with alimony demands
- Financial issues arising from bad money management, lavish spending, unpaid taxes, untrustworthy managers or
- Intoxicant abuse of either alcohol in superstandard quantities or ingestible, inhalable or injectable drugs and the health issues that ensue from out-of-control substance abuse.
Luckily, in recent years these extracurricular demands have decreased on a given musician, and today a pop musician can dodge this extra stress in living his or her life as close to a normal wage-earner as possible. Not doing it in the “old-school way” is not frowned upon anymore.
All of this accumulated pressure directed towards a single musician, in particular when we are talking about a key member in a band or a solo performer under one’s own name, adds up to be a mindlessly long legato note, stretching those legato arches from seven to ten times from bar to bar, so that the final note of duty or responsibility is very, very long. This implies that a good musician is a far cry from an ADD or ADHD case, or, as the motion’s wording suggests, a child. Rather, his or her best quality is an out-of-sight maturity, patience and superhuman sustainability, an ability to “sustain” a “note” (i.e. his or her whole career). It exceeds and transcends what is expected from a normal employee, grunt or officeholder within the scope of work.
Perustelu(t)/puolustelu(t): Puheenjohtajana minun pitää näyttää puolelleni mallia siitä, mille sotajalalle lähdetään. Puolustamme kohdettamme niillä välineillä, joita meillä on käytössämme. Käytämme mielikuvitustamme ja tietojamme kulttuurielämästä, joista ei ole puutetta. Jäljessäni tulevat voivat puhua vaikkapa järjestysmiesten ja valomiesten työllistämisestä tai siitä, miten popmuusikot ovat teini-iässä nuorelle ‘tärkeämpiä’ kuin omat vanhemmat.
Polar Ice Standpoints Society 