Serving the music

It’s a strange phrase, that people are fond of repeating: serving the music. Me, I like to serve the music, I’m different that way. It sounds good, very pious.

And unnecessary. Most people are already trying to play well, and effectively, and make good musical choices, while saying what they want to say. Constrained by their present abilities, and the immediate demands of the situation. That stuff is in fact the whole task. When someone comes in with, well, make sure you’re serving the music now, it makes it sound like they want something else. And there is no something else.

You get the feeling some people want to be playing your gig for you, or to make themselves your employer. They don’t want anyone exceeding their abilities, or otherwise making choices they would not make. They’re not pleased by the lack of distance between you and “the music”, and want you to live with their monkey on your back.

Let’s be clear, the actual job is to make music. Everything you play is the music, in fact. By definition. That’s what the drum sticks are for. It’s a 1:1 thing, there’s no daylight, no “something else” that music is, that you did not provide for. You’re already doing it.

There are a lot of ways to make good music, using a lot of notes, or not very many notes, or loud notes or soft notes. What you played is the music, and it is left to the listener to enjoy it, or whatever they want to do with it.

Even when I see a drummer seemingly making non-music serving choices— meaning, the music could have sounded better as a pure listening experience— they may be serving another purpose, a performance purpose— energizing a room full of people. Or something else. A playing purpose, playing for its own sake. It is up to listeners to think about in what ways it may have been an effective performance, despite not fulfilling our desires and expectations. It didn’t do what you would have liked, what did it do?

Most often, a player is just inexperienced, and doesn’t have a lot of options for how to handle a performance. They’re figuring it out, and an interloping serve the music instruction doesn’t help. That’s a very bad thing to put on inexperienced players. They don’t need to be more afraid of making the wrong decision, they need to be less inhibited about that. As a teacher, the advice I would give if there were some egregious errors of taste happening, is to listen more.

Looking at what we do as service is not bad, but we are serving people, the other players. It’s a good thing to try to help make their job easier, and give them room to do their stuff, as they are giving you room to do yours. We’re all cooperating to play a job, and make good music, and hopefully bring an audience along for the ride.

I can see some possible tactical utility for the phrase, to get someone to think differently. And there is a similar othering phrase about what the music “wants”— really we are saying, this is what my ear wants— which is fine.

Look: it’s a platitude, and not even worth this much thought. I get it. But the longer the conversation of it as a broad philosophy, the more misguided it gets. The first thing is to understand that you’re the person creating the musical event, you’re not service staff for this other entity that is “the music”, you’re not a tourist.

Oh, get my new book Rants vol. 1 for more of this, this kind of thing.