Oh God, I keep hearing this. People I know at work, who had a few lessons and were playing music at school or who memorize Bach and tell me my music isn’t music at all. I think this is the problem with the world. Music is a series of notes, whether good or bad. To say that elevator music lacks soul and creativity is absurd. The score of a movie, the notes on a toy piano, someone playing a kazoo, I would argue is about time and mood. Our reaction to it, its orchestration, how it fits together, my playing the iPhone piano at America’s Got Talent and colleagues saying I was better than the person playing a regular piano or how a friend said that he had never heard that type of music before: “It’s like you were a medium for an alien.” It reminds me of the absurdity of the LSAT or any standardized test that kept me out of law school, although I didn’t really try. I scored 300 and 310 on the SAT, for math and English respectively, but I won a school service award, was a member of the leadership committee, and was a Quill and Scroll International Honor Society member. And now my colleagues laugh when I tell them I am playing the piano. Except, that while in the locker room, one said I was cheating: “It sounds like Claude Debussy’s Clair de Lune.”
The problem, I don’t know how to play Clair de Lune. And the piece I was making up on the fly was really nothing like Clair de Lune, but I was highly complimented.
Elevator music is just music using a different instrument and maybe not. I play keys, just like you would on a piano, but really I play by ear. The tool, as I mentioned with regard to the camera as a tool, is not the person using it. I have composed and recorded over 325 compositions since I picked up the iPhone in August. I could play constantly and come up with a new composition every time and record them. I am sure I could do this with any instrument/tool. And I think as you alluded with special effects, they don’t really deal with the strength of the story, the size of a TV, how big or expensive the camera is. I can watch a movie on my iPhone and be just as affected emotionally if the words are well-written, the acting sublime. I think, thanks to Trump and the Trump era, we aren’t as tolerant of spin. We want the truth. How notes fall. How something really sounds if you isolate it to one instrument. I don’t know, maybe I am delusional, but my friend’s dog stops his insane barking and lays down when I play. My friend says it calms her. The bartender at Small Wonder after 20 minutes hired me to play lunches. I tell you it isn’t elevator music. It is something beautiful. Rite of Spring. Jazz. Hip Hop. A Tonal. Slam. Impressionism. Dada. Cubism. Like Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, “Kuhn argued for an episodic model in which periods of such conceptual continuity in normal science were interrupted by periods of revolutionary science. The discovery of ‘anomalies’ during revolutions in science leads to new paradigms.”
“Anomalies” vs. memorization or arguing about instrumentation, I think this is the problem. We are being controlled by those who can only copy and paste. They have no imaginations of their own. They can’t tell us metaphorically what’s profound. An artist gets to the meat, he plays by ear what he hears in his head.
