BLOG 28/05/2021
The Jan Diaries — Music Theory Is Still Cool
The title is an anagram — rearrange Cecil Moho silly tourists and you get Music Theory is still cool — and the column behind it is the most argumentative entry in the series. Jan Kinčl’s claim is that theory does not fence in an electronic producer; it is a set of rules, best practices and tools that let an intention be materialised precisely. Not schooling, in other words. Working knowledge.
What the piece covers
Music, the argument runs, is melody, harmony and rhythm, and the most instructive counter-example is the movement that set out to break all three. Musique concrète in the 1940s replaced conventional instruments with electronic sources — theremins, tape manipulation, techniques nobody had written into a manual — but its practitioners were classically trained composers who knew exactly what they were abandoning. That is the point Kinčl keeps returning to: informed experiment, not accidental experiment. Karlheinz Stockhausen’s Gesang der Jünglinge, from 1962, still sounds fresh six decades on for precisely that reason.
Set against that is the state of contemporary production. Pre-recorded rhythms, melodies, chords and phrases engineered to sound good instantly; sound banks built to imitate whichever artist is popular; software that will assemble a track for you from the interface. None of this is a problem in itself — it is fun and it teaches — but Kinčl puts the figure at ninety per cent of professionally released electronic music leaning on templates, and at that concentration it produces uniformity rather than music. He supports it with an anecdote from a three-hour conversation with Dimitri Hegemann of Tresor at Garden Festival roughly a decade earlier: technology has advanced enormously, the music has not advanced with it, and the two development curves have simply stopped matching.
The part that stayed
The strongest passage is the language analogy. Theory is vocabulary and grammar; without the alphabet you cannot articulate a thought precisely, and even with solid literacy precision takes effort. Without it, a producer is left combining things at random or reaching for something pre-written, and generic results follow. If ninety per cent of written text worked that way, Kinčl notes drily, it would be classified as a genre. Music is a capsule that carries an emotion from author to listener, and a track works when that transfer lands. His own foundation came from working with Regis, from teaching himself and from trial and error, and the discipline came from listening to interviews with musicians he admires — time spent understanding the mechanism, he writes, shows up in the finished record and in the sales.
Read the full piece
The full column, in Croatian, is on Red Bull Croatia. Six minutes.