On August 25, 2002, NPR’s Weekend Edition Sunday generously broadcast portions of a letter I had written in response to a segment they had aired the week before. Here is the complete letter, with the broadcast portions in bold. I have thanked them for assisting in a little bit of advocacy for the cause of new music.
I enjoyed the August 18 piece on Techno music in Berlin, but I object to the assertion repeated multiple times in the piece that this music is “without rules”. Techno depends on a rhythmic framework that is highly standardized (duple meter, narrow range of tempos, common drum sound vocabulary with heavy bass emphasis) for the purpose of dancing and facilitating seamless changes from one song to the next by DJs. Given the functionality of this primary musical layer, virtually anything may be superimposed upon it without altering its dance-ability. Nonetheless, techno uses a recognizable style of synthesizer sounds and vocal samples with a great deal of consistency.Fans of many wonderful, often countercultural kinds of music, from rock, to punk to free jazz and now techno, have claimed their music has “no rules”. Such a claim invigorates the feeling of countercultural subversion (real or not), but doesn’t bear musical scrutiny in any of these cases. Such musics often have a high degree of stylistic consistency, and therefore “rules”, but make an explicit effort not to be bound by the rules of some other kind of music.It is ironic that so many relish the notion of music free from rules, but that experimental musicians who endeavor not to be constrained by prior rules, in contemporary concert music, free improvised music or even “powerbook” techno and electronic music, are among the least popular or recognized. I am, therefore, grateful that this Weekend Edition piece included a mention of this cutting-edge side of electronic music, even if only briefly.