Go Ahead, Second Guess Me

Quick thought exercise: Name a piece that sounds bad but is good.

I’m about to say something that will drive many of you to throw up your hands in exasperation, and rightly so: I used to aspire to write pieces that sounded bad but were good, but I succeeded only in writing pieces that both sounded and were bad. However, when I started trying to write pieces that sounded good, I found that my pieces were better than they used to be. Eureka, right? For someone with two master’s degrees in composition, I can be pretty dense about this stuff.

When I say “sounds good,” of course, I’m making a lot of assumptions about what that means: Good players, forgiving room acoustic, instruments of reasonable quality. And I’m leaving out recordings—a skillful producer and some solid engineers can make almost anything sound good on disc; miked just so, the most inert musique concrète instrumental scrapes can take on a startling immediacy. But the conviction—one under which I labored for some years—that the resistance to commodification inherent in ugly, bleak sounds was an imperative, that the only way to raise one’s voice against the totalizing, alienating press of the market was to shrivel and wither that voice so completely that nobody would ever want to hear it, blinded me to the possibility that good music, ethical music of high integrity, can sound good too.

Of course it can sound good. And because the sensual gratification of good-sounding music is the currency of the system I want to thrash against, it’s a particularly apt means of subversion. It’s taken me a few years to articulate this as concisely as I hope to have done here, but several pieces I’ve been working on lately have helped me to a succinct formulation: Rather than write music that sounds bad and is good, I want to write music that sounds good and, perversely, makes you feel bad—music that can’t be taken at face value and demands to be second-guessed.