What is music—the post-modern accordion joke as metaphor?
First an old joke: A man parks his car in a rough part of town with two accordions on the back seat, forgetting to lock the back door. When he returns, there are three accordions. Which brings me back to our through line question of the institute: what is music? Simple questions always lead to complicated answers—or so I am learning—and the proverbial accordion jokes. And asking the Wonderful Wizard of Google complicates it even more and throws in extra accordions into the backseat.
Music stretches beyond performance, creation and response. We define ourselves by music more than any other art form. Music shapes social movements, as well as social movements shaping music. Like all knowledge, music is socially constructed and not something in a vacuum. Music has tradition and aesthetics.
One of the most heart-warming ideas I remember hearing so far is the relationship between political and social movements. Great and enduring movements have music. But, I suppose I should leave it at that.
As a slow-brained and recovering accordion-player, I’m getting the sense that not only do we look at music through various lenses, but music itself is a lens.
Shake your bellows if you think this riff is close to what this institute is hipping us to.
Jazz as a lens. Motown as a lens. We have the art lens, the commerce lens and the critical lens in this institute. “As Aristotle long ago observed, it is not an easy matter to determine the nature of music or the exact purpose for which music ought to be studied,” says Phillip Alperson in his introduction to What is Music: an Introduction to the Philosophy of Music (1987), “but it is only when the philosophy of music confronts musical practice in all its complexity that it will approach anything like a comprehensive understanding of music as a human practice.”
This strikes me as so post-modern, which I kinda dig. You betcha.
So maybe, music is a post-modern accordion. For example, doing a search of Blue Note Records for “accordion” and receiving “zero results” doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Or, maybe you can imagine an un-named and un-credited Funk Brother sitting way back in Motown’s snake-pit studio, holding an accordion—waiting for his cue—in the recording session for The Supreme’s hit “Stop in the Name of Love.”
-- David Robinson
