About Music – The Fretful Porcupine

Asking us what we call our music is a little like asking a chef “what kind of food is this?” We imagine that most chefs are highly tempted to respond with something like, “the kind that is delicious.” We understand their quandary.

Categories matter, even if they are at times stifling and fragmenting. The question for us since we began has been, “how do we best invite people into the space our music occupies while retaining some the freshness and distinctiveness of our sound?”

When you don’t have a easily identifiable genre, you might just be up a creek with paddle full of holes.

Thus far we’ve called it roots chamber music. (Though we’ll clue you into a little secret. We’re probably changing our made-up-genre designation.)

Roots Chamber Music, like any descriptor of music, hardly communicates the fullness of the experience of the music itself. But, by looking at the component parts of the term, perhaps something can be gleaned from these limited words after all.

Roots: Strictly speaking, “roots” music is music that has it’s origins in the bygone era of sounds particularity American. In other words, the sounds you hear have their “roots” here. Perhaps the phrase “going back to my roots” is a helpful calibrator. For us, Roots includes bluegrass and jazz. Two forms distinctly American.

Chamber Music: According to Chamber Music America (the national service organization for the chamber music profession), Chamber Music for two or more players performed without a conductor. So, we certainly qualify. But there’s more to be learned from the connotation of the term. Chamber Music is intimate. It is dynamic. It is flexible. It is serious. It is enjoyable.

Together we’ve been playing music for a total of 50 years. Well, not together, but cumulatively. Both of us have lived and breathed it since we were children. Both of our fathers were musicians. I, Professor Specs, have studied music academically for nearly 20 years earning undergraduate and graduate degrees in the subject. Yet, when I lay awake in bed at night and think about that thing to which I have dedicated most of my efforts in this life, I cannot define it.

Granted, definitions for “music” do exist. But those categories rarely can hold in all that we experience, feel, and think of when we think of “music.” Intuitively, we all know what music is, but at the same time we don’t.

Why does this matter?

Well, it matters a great deal right now because the turmoil which surrounds the artform is not simply manifesting as the result of technological advancement – though there is that. The confusion arises, first and foremost, because we don’t know what music IS. And not knowing what it IS makes it hard to know what to do with it.

It was at a conference that I spearheaded in 2011 that some direction to wresting with this problem was brought forth. In his plenary lecture, painter Bruce Herman quoted the poet William Carlos Williams.

No ideas but in things.

That’s where the notion occurred to us to stop treating music as an “idea” but as a “thing.” Much of what FP has done since then is a way to begin to work through that process. The goal is to ask important questions about music at the dawn of the 21st century to hopefully develop a more meaningful understanding of this meaningful art form, in order to know how to talk about it better, how to advocate for it better, and ultimately how to make it better.