Background Music, to the Foreground
By Laureano Ralon*

Last week I saw an ad on the 135 bus to SFU that read as follows:

“Where are you going?”
“Wherever the music takes me”

The ad was produced by a well-renown cell phone company to promote its new line of MP3 phones, a new media hybrid whose self-proclaimed purpose is to enable music to “take you places”. The ironical ad constitutes what is often referred to as “parody” – a work that imitates another work in order to ridicule, ironically comment on, or poke some affectionate fun at the work itself, the subject of the work, the author or fictional voice of the parody, or another subject. According to Wikipedia, parody exists in all art media, including literature, music and cinema. Cultural movements and communities can also be parodied. Light, playful parodies are sometimes colloquially referred to as “spoofs”. The act of such a parody is often called “lampooning”. Now, the reason this particular cell phone ad constitutes a parody is because, as we shall see further ahead, MP3 phones/players have the opposite consequences in terms of their effect on music, musicality and the listener.

There was a time when music itself was considered a medium of communication just like the phone; a carrier that could literally transport the listener to a different state of mind and a different dimension; a herald of times to come. In the words of highly-reputed music historian Jaques Attalí: “Music is prophecy...it makes audible the new world that will gradually become visible, that will impose itself and regulate the order of things; it is not only the image of things, but the transcending of the everyday, the herald of the future.” In his book Noise, Attalí explains that in the civilizations of antiquity, the musician was often a slave, sometimes an untouchable. Shaman, doctor, musician were inseparable roles. Attalí notes that even as late as the twentieth century, Islam prohibited believers from seating at the same table as a musician. In Persia, music was for a long time an activity restricted to prostitutes or, at least, considered shameful. But at the same time, the ancient religions produced a caste of musician-priests attached to the service of the temple, and mythology endowed musicians with supernatural and civilizing powers. Furthermore, the medicinal powers of music made musicians into therapists: Pythagoras and Empedocles cured the possessed, and Ismenias cured sciatica. David cured Saul's madness by playing the harp.

Throughout the Middle Ages, the jongleur remained outside society; the Church condemned him, accusing him of paganism and magical practices. His itinerant life-style made him a highly unrespectable figure, akin to the vagabond or the highway-man. The jongleur had no fixed employment; he moved from place to place offering his services in private residences. This leads Attalí to conclude that the jongleur was music, because he alone created it, carried it with him, and completely organized its circulation within society. As a result, we can argue that music did take the jongleur places. With its magic, music took also the listener somewhere, perhaps over time, into a different state of mind.

Once fetishized as a commodity, however, music is both deritualized and decontextualized: it sells as a spectacle, and it is consumed for entertainment purposes, until it loses its meaning. Once commodified, music loses its aura and its magical ability to “take you places”. Decontextualized, music is now portable; it becomes passive, harmless, and domesticated; it no longer “takes you places” nor helps you reach a different psychological dimension. Instead, you take music with you, over space. Music is now encapsulated in your MP3 player as it moves slowly from the foreground to the background dimension of experience. Paradoxically, music is now both everywhere, and nowhere.

As I finish writing this last sentence, and reflect once again upon the new MP3 phone I'm now debating whether or not to buy, I can't avoid thinking about Salsa – about the role of music in it; specifically, about what music really means for the salsa dancer, especially today, that new technology has made DJs out of mere mortals. As music in general is increasingly decontextualized and segregated from its ritualistic functions, it becomes a commodity – an object – not unlike my new Capezio shoes or my coffee mug. Relegated to the background of my daily experience (and music seems to be and come from everywhere now: there's ring tone music, elevator music, shopping music, on-hold-while-I-transfer-your-call-music, you name it!) it becomes distant, almost unreachable; it becomes part of my surroundings, thus competing for attention with other objects in my symbolic and physical environments: my Capezio shoes, the moves and combinations I just learned in my salsa class, the girl sitting across the room I'm about to ask for a dance. I guess this philosophical quest started a Tuesday night when I suddenly stood in amazement watching people doing the salsa steps to Salsa, to Reggeaton, to Cumbia, to Merengue, you name it. It seems to be a kind of behavior that goes quite unnoticed: even I myself am guilty of dancing West Coast Swing to Merengue and Bachata – that is, guilty of disregarding the music. So the question is, What's with this aesthetical promiscuity? Is it all about the music or is it all about my shoes, and the girl in front of me? Perhaps a combination of all of the above, although maybe I should work on my musicality and my body isolations before I buy yet another pair of shoes.

A wise Canadian man I know once said that the artist is the only one who can look at society in the eye and see environments as they really are. I believe advance dancers are artists or at least artistic inasmuch as they understand the true meaning of music and can retrieve it from the background to relocate it in the front stage where it belongs. As for the rest of us, we should perhaps start by letting go of the counting, which is hard to do in a culture where counting is everything (I have 3000 MP3 songs in my computer, 200 on my MP3 player). I believe the more one counts, the more constrained one becomes. When I was a teenager, I attended music school and remember a Tango teacher who used to say that counting is to rhythm what the so called Western tempered scale – a system of tuning, in which an interval, usually the octave, is divided into a series of equal steps (equal frequency ratios) – is to the melody. He further explained that these should be but guidelines; that those equal steps were arbitrary; that in reality there were other sounds between a C and a C sharp. I believe the same happens with counting: there is movement between the 1 and the 2, the 2 and the 3, the 5 and the 6, the 6 and the 7. As I moved from a beginner to an intermediate level of salsa, I realized just that: that the 1-2-3, 5-6-7 pattern is more flexible than is commonly assumed. Suddenly, 1-2-3, 5-6-7 became 1-&-2-&-3, 5-&-6-&-7, opening a whole new world of possibilities. I became even more intellectually aware of this watching mambo dancers in New York City, whose musicality tends to respond to inherent variations in the music. My awareness and conception of rhythm also shifted 90 degrees when I started learning a little bit of West Coast Swing, which, unlike salsa, is not a “mirror dance” and as a result lends itself to totally different but complementary interpretations of the same song by the leader and the follower. How long it will take for me to translate this intellectual awareness into concrete action on the dance floor remains to be seen. “Understanding stops action,” said Friedrich Nietzsche – which is another way of saying “you're thinking (counting) too bloody much!”

I believe the importance of counting is closely related to a visual conception of dance. The sharpness of L.A. Style, On1 salsa, for example, which is arguably a very visual style, derives from hitting the one with precision. Some argue that in so doing, L.A. Style dancers fail to interpret the music correctly. Someone in NY city told me that while L.A. Style dancers dance “to” the music, NY dancers dance in the music. It rings true. What remains to be seen, is whether L.A. Style is the only way to dance On1. I shall address this question in a future article. For now all I will add is that perhaps the On1/On2 concepts are exactly that – concepts – not to be taken literally. Much like how the initial lead in West Coast Swing doesn't happen exactly on the one the way I was initially told (but on the “...and-a-one”), neither does Salsa’s occur exactly on one number. Now, as I slowly begin to realize that music has nothing to do with numbers, I wonder whether it wouldn't be a good idea for salsa instructors to reverse the above-mentioned historical tendency of neglect towards music by literally bringing it from the background to the foreground, thus replacing counting with musicality... Would someone explain to me how to interpret the music?