Reciprocity

So, I heard "Wagon Wheel" again today. Man, that song gives me fits. The thing is, it's fantastic. Just right. And everyone knows this. It's from this album packed with fun songs, but everyone knows that it's the best one--including the band themselves, who put it right at the end, almost as if to say, "wait 'til you hear this one."

It's just I-V-vi-IV. That's all it is. And that's all the rest of the songs on the record are too. So why is it better? We cannot hope to isolate this music's quality within its objective, quantifiable traits. The formalistic aspects that academics love to use to justify their instincts are just not sufficient in this case; there isn't enough there, objectively, to make analysis profitable. So what remains?

I was struck by a possible answer to this question a few months ago when I was sitting in a coffee shop in Austin reading David Abram's Spell of the Sensuous, and Radiohead's "No Surprises" comes on the speakers. And let me tell you, I felt a physical response. This music and I have memories together. It runs deep into my personal experience. I looked back down at the book I was reading and realized the answer was right there.

See, music is not a passive object. It's not inanimate. It's another entity with which we participate, like the people in our lives, like the places and possessions that become important to us. Our experience of music, like all perception for Abram, is not a one-way street. It's flowing, dynamic, open reciprocity. "No Surprises" spoke to me, and I spoke back. It spoke to me of my past and I told it of my present. We give to one another, and each time we meet, we are both different--although, as Abram points out with respect to a clay bowl, the rhythm of change in a supposedly static, "inanimate" object, or a musical recording, differs greatly from my own. But like anything you look upon regularly and to which you ascribe personal significance, animate or not, you and that entity have a relationship, and it develops each time you give one another your attention.

The same with "Wagon Wheel." It's so excellent in part because it reminds everyone of that great spring break trip or that summer they spent working in x state with mountains. The quality is not solely a property of the music; it's also an attribute that the listener brings to the experience and receives in turn from the song. What other explanation could there be for such disparate evaluations of artistic worth?

Every time you move toward subjective conceptions of value, you run the risk of throwing the objective traits out the window entirely, of ending up in a postmodern abyss where there can be no positive statements about art. But it isn't all subjective, of course. Abram's clay bowl is in his house because he, assumedly, saw it in an artisan's shop and picked it out based primarily on its perceptible aesthetic characteristics. The music we let in, we do initially let in because of objective qualities like melodic catchiness, or whatever. But the experience is more complex than that, especially once you develop a history with a piece of art. It's relationship with you, as an entity in your life, becomes a much more potent testament to its worth than any attribute that can be drawn in a matrix or explained through roman numerals.