How Information And Redundancy Theory Could Help Musicians Grow Together

My friend, a great jazz-classical pianist whom I deeply respect, recently alerted me to the meme above, (by Kevin Stafford), about ticket sales for concerts. I laughed until I heard that some people thought this was an anti-classical music meme. Then I stopped laughing. This meme is no more anti-classical than anti-jazz, or any other genre of music. Furthermore, numerical facts over the last century demonstrate that jazz musicians have much more of a right to complain about lack of audiences than classical musicians. No, this meme is not anti-classical; because, even some important classical composers think about the differences of audiences in terms of differences of compositional technique or style, along lines that are similar to this meme.

For example, this meme reminds me of an old 1924 article that was written in Musikblaetter des Anbruch by the great serial composer Alban Berg, entitled “Why Is Schoenberg’s Music So Difficult To Understand”. In discussion of Arnold Schoenberg’s “First Quartet in D minor”, Berg wrote, “Accustomed to a writing style whose most important property was symmetry of phrase construction, and adjusted to a type of thematic construction that used only even-numbered bar-relationships- a mode of construction that has dominated all the music, with a few exceptions, of the last 150 years- an ear so one-sidedly preconditioned will doubt the rightness of the first bars of a melody that consists, contrary to all expectation, of phrases of two and a half bars of length”.

Basically Berg’s meme caption would read: “symmetrical phrased, even-number bar melodic music written in last 150 years”, on one side, and “asymmetrical phrased, odd-number bar melodic music that a genius spent years writing” on the other. And history shows that there would surely be a longer line for the left side (composers in the style of Beethoven, Bach, Mozart, Mahler, Debussy), and a shorter line for the right side (composers in the style of Reger, Stravinsky, Bartok, Cage, Schubert, Schoenberg and Webern) in his meme too.

The fact that this meme is seen as an attack on a certain genre says more about the observer of the meme than the meme itself. The meme caption reads: “repetitive, 3-chord music written in less than 10 mins”, on one side and “extremely complex music that a genius spent years writing” on the other. There is a long line for the former side and a short line for the latter side. The first problem of the observer is to assume that composers and audiences on the left are simple-minded, and part of a mass market business model. The second problem is to assume that this meme is about a particular genre. I don’t get how this meme is about audience attendance at CLASSICAL music concerts at all; those ticket sells could be for jazz (King Curtis vs John Coltrane), pop (Madonna vs Stevie Wonder), electronic (David Guetta vs Carl Craig) and yes, even rock concerts (The Beatles vs Dream Theatre). I would say, to properly understand the meme, we should forget about classical, pop or other genres of music; they are useless distinctions.

Information and redundancy theory could help musicians of different genres and syles to grow together; instead of being jealous about ticket sells, or bashing because of them. Instead of thinking subjectively about how genres and audience attendances make us feel or think, this meme could be about distinguishing between compositional techniques and styles on an objective level. When we learn to measure information with numbers in communication theory, and apply that to music theory, then we find that music that is highly repetitive and where a only few symbols are used more than others conveys less information and is more redundant; this is the left side in the meme. Conversely, music that is not repetitive and where many symbols are used equally conveys more information and is less redundant; this is the right side of the meme. We can measure information and style with numbers, so the difference between these two extreme styles of composition, or the music behind those ticket lines, can be argued on a purely objective basis. I’m taller than you or not; forget how you feel inside about my race, culture, sex, age or political views. When we talk about information and style forget about your pet musical genre, favorite composer or composition.

The difference in information and redundancy between redundant (left) and random (right) music, is like that between a meme and Milton’s literary masterpiece “Paradise Lost“. In “The Human Use Of Human Beings”, Norbert Weiner, (a cofounder of Information Theory along with Charles E Shannon), wrote: “In fact, it is possible to interpret the information carried by a message as essentially the negative of its entropy, and the negative logarithm of its probability. That is, the more probable the message, the less information it gives. Clichés, for example, are less illuminating than great poems”. I guess the cliché line would be on the left or redundant side, and the poetry line would be on the random or right side.

We don’t need more emotional persuasions for mobbing. If there is a difference between the audience attendance in redundant and random styles, then it can be proven scientifically with numbers. The same for the time to make music. Sure, 10 minutes of writing is less than years of writing objectively; but I know that geniuses can belong on either side. In the context of the meme, the word “writing” could mean composing, rearranging, editing or scripting music. But, no matter how it is meant, how long you do a musical job is not a measure of how good you are at it. W A Mozart wrote music in seconds by rolling dice. I know genius jazz improvisers, like Sonny Rollins, who have never spent time writing their most innovative solos. Good musicians choose the right notes in the right order; how long it takes to do that depends on the composer.

There IS an numerical connection between musical complexity and affective value; it’s called style subjectively or redundancy objectively. We can evaluate how liberal or conservative a composition is according to how much freedom of choice is given to the composer, or how much choice is wasted when too many rules restrict her. Compositional liberty or conservatism ARE relative to musical values; but, whether they are seen as good or bad classifications is only dependent on what the composer wants to get out of the composition process. Values could not apply to whether complex music is good or bad in and of itself; it could only apply to how complex music allows the composer to express more, while simple repetitive music can leave the composer with little to no real freedom of choice.

We should come together as a group of artists, where compositional technique and style ranges over a rainbow of beautiful music. Our teachers need to become interested in how to measure information and style in music, and then teach students how to apply that to classifying music by entropy and redundancy. Only then, can a real study of what kind of music draws audiences can be done, on quantitative grounds. I predict that we will find that all kinds of music draws audiences; period. We should stop judging everything musical only on how it “feels” on social platforms; music is as much science as an art. We won’t ever develop any real scientific theory about musical classifications, based on numerical information and redundancy, without applying consistent mathematics to the practical problems of music; problems like composition, script, analysis or stylistic evaluation. Otherwise, we musicians remain stuck in arguing about ticket sells based on superstitions of genre, and institutional dogmas of history and nationality.