Music as Entertainment

Returning home from a week in Nashville where I learned about equalization, compression, recording techniques, eccentric people, and music curriculum, I have been reflecting on the power of the entertainment industry and how that relates to my world as a classically trained musician. Somehow I have resisted the idea that music is solely for the purpose of entertainment, that music has a power and a scope beyond and deeper than providing a good moment of happy feelings, of emotional cathartic release. As I learn and subsequently teach the craft of what music is and encourage the creative expression of music in all its forms, I have to wonder if I have missed something along the way. Maybe music is primarily entertainment.

And Nashville certainly is about entertainment. Music Row is filled with recording studios and publishers adorn various parts of the city. Clearing houses for artist protection are scattered about and many restaurants include a form of live music. The number of garage bands, combos, song writers, singers, and instrumentalists is staggering and the entire city seems to have music coming out of its pores. The guitar is nearly an icon and can be found with the turn of a head or an open ear. Nashville embraced the idea of music as entertainment and has thrived from its musical economy. Rejecting the idea of music as an art form apart from its entertainment value, Nashville has produced an untold number of recordings and live musicians. Maybe they are right.

After all, the great operas were written as entertainment, ways to occupy the royalty, to unify the peasants, to gather all in one room for one artistic event. Broadway musicals, often considered the opera of America, are essentially entertainment, a glorious integration of the arts to tell a story in music. Marching bands entertain the crowd at football games, jazz combos entertain people in night clubs, American Idol and Glee are all about entertainment. The guitar player on the street, the accordion player in the doorway, the singer grabbing a microphone, the whistler in the hallway, all these and more are providing some level of musical entertainment. Is it possible that an aural experience, apart from the visual is entertaining? Is all music entertainment? Maybe.

But what about music for worship? What about a priest chanting in a mode to communicate the parts of a mass? What about the acapella choir in Westminster Abbey or the organist playing the prelude? Are these a form of entertainment? Arguable certainly but nevertheless true in a way. Sure these musicians are worshiping, but they are also entertaining the people who are in turn worshiping. A fine line is drawn between enhancing the experiencing, providing background music, or serving the emotional content of the experience, but in the end, it is still a form of entertainment although difficult to admit!

Let's take a look at a symphony orchestra concert. Is this entertainment? A collective set of musicians who worked together for a common goal of a performance of one person's creative expression reside on a stage to give an audience aural pleasure, emotional release, and personal amusement. The event may not elicit great laughter or wild expressions of joy or extrinisic physical responses, but it does satisfy something within the human spirit that is pleasurable. The concert may not have been a visual mosaic of colors or a smorgasbord of clever verbal quips or include dancing or theatre, but nevertheless the concert was a form of entertainment. Its depth of sound, preparation of the performers, formality of the environment, profound acceptance of great art, or historical acknowledgement of the literature, do not take the concert out of its intent--to entertain the audience.

And entertainment can be delivered to large a populous or to smaller units. Humming to oneself is solitary entertainment, a worthy goal in all respects. Taken on a broader scale, collective music making serves not just the performers but the listeners as well, causing a sense of pleasure in all constituencies involved. No matter what the level or sincerity of the music making, regardless of the setting or the intention, it remains a form of entertainment. We tend to view entertainment as requiring dancing or clowns or comedians or rock bands, but an expansion of the concept takes us down the road to include performance with its array of opportunities.

Musicians, trained or untrained, need to accept their role as delivering entertainment to other people. We trained musicians somehow prefer to think we are providing music at a deeper level than sheer entertainment, that we are delivering something more intentional, purposeful, and life-altering to the human spirit, but in the final analysis, music, regardless of its form, style, genre, quantity, or even quality, is ultimately about entertainment. Once we accept this outcome, we can begin to accept the many kinds of music that make up our culture and our world. An individual may prefer a quieter, contemplative form of music and may prefer music of a particular genre or time period, or may prefer a certain kind of instrumentation or text, or may prefer art music with its ability to reach an emotional depth not always found in other music, but regardless of the preference, music is pleasurable on many levels to millions of people. It may be true, and I subscribe to this conclusion as well, that quality music making begats quality listening experiences, and that greater preparation and greater craft of musicianship result in deeper pleasure for the listener, and trained musicians certainly seek to reach a profound level of expression, but the strategic goal remains that of entertainment.

This does not in any sense abdicate or even subjugate the need for quality musical experiences, and in fact it further demonstrates the value of training musicians to seek out profound forms of entertainment and emotional expression. But it does in a sense remind us in academia to be sensitive to the variety of preferences of music and never to disregard listener response to music. Without an audience, music resides in a vacuum, a vortex with no purpose and guaranteed to disappear into oblivion.