things music isn't good at
instrumental music is uniquely ill-suited to specific political protest. the brilliant max roach freedom now we insist is at it's most pointed with Abbey Lincolns lyrics; shosty 7 speaks most earnestly when someone has explained it's geopolitical context and the players involved; messiaen's nearly infinitely giving 'quartet for the end of time' assumes its full height only when studied, mingus’ ‘fables of faubus’ get’s it’s teeth only when you know about orville faubus and the little rock nine. asking an audience to do homework is pretty presumptuous, and we cannot simply resort to aggression as in penderecki's 'threnody to the victims of hiroshima.' ‘threnody’ was not conceived with it's current title, but rather as a series of experiments in extended string techniques, softening its ostensible message. to be clear, aggression is a perfectly reasonable impetus to make art, but expecting it to meaningfully address a specific problem is a mistake. the center of this feature of music is its inherently abstract nature: no sound or combination of sounds means the same in all places at all times, and there can never be a rosetta stone. instead, we must set up these spaces to wonder, where the listener writes the piece. asking instrumental music to address a specific political problem downplays the problem and is a disservice to the music.
instrumental music is ill-suited to irony, because it would require music to be understood by it’s audience to be and mean its own opposite. even in the case of film or opera where the score is deliberately ill-suited to the scene, the music is in contrast to the thing it is opposite, and could not be perceived that way without the use of the other pictures or story. irony often requires such a specific bank of cultural knowledge that it tends to age very poorly, and tends to be most effective in the part of the world where it was created (except Jimmy Carr's astute and painful joke: "what do healthcare and irony have in common? americans don't get them"). remember the song 'heart of glass' by blondie? it became a disco anthem, and the drummer refused to play it live for a time because he felt like it meant the band had sold out, rather than poke fun at the genre. color-field painter Marc Rothko, incensed that a ritzy hotel wanted to hang his art in their very expensive restaurant, tried to paint the works with such anger and vinegar that diners would be queasy and unable to eat. this of course failed, so he took back his Seagrams murals and returned the commission fee.
music isn’t good at nihilism. it is the highest art in part because the sense by which we percieve it is the first sense we develop in the womb, and yet music is always 100% abstract; it offers glimpses of physical, cultural, and emotional wisdom. this makes any act of music an act which celebrates life and human-ness. attaching ill intent or pessimism to the composing or performing of a thing only muddies that water. to my admittedly unfocused eye there is a lot of meme-fueled nihilism in music at the moment, and a lot of making fun of the problems in jazz from within jazz, including on the bandstand. the rifts within jazz—coupled with the knowledge that all jazz and classical music comprise ~2% of us record sales (less on streaming)—can make it difficult to present ones work with confidence, to suspect that something we know is valuable in a deep and human way will be met with derision from our peers or well-meaning inducements to water down and entrepreneurial-ize the work, or in some cases to make it more off-putting in some sort of punk-rock/avant garde use of the 'no-true-scotsman' fallacy. it can make the whole process feel pretty pointless. by trying to beat people to the jokes about jazz, classical, and improvised music, we risk giving people permission to devalue what we do. in the great music of any genre, we are celebrating.
music has almost nothing to do with ‘self-expression.’ the elements which make up one’s ‘self’ are so variable that even a note-for-note, microtone-for-microtone, articulation-for-articulation attempt to play the works of another will still sound like the person playing it at that moment. having some combination of life experiences means you already have a unique way of expressing yourself. while it is an attractive road to what, from a distance, sure looks like self-confidence and validation, focusing on your own voice within a piece can be a sign of forcing art to happen rather that letting it happen; of putting the ego between the art-maker and the art. Jaco Pastorious said it to Peter Erskine this way: 'don’t think so much, man, concentrate' and a paraphrase of Agnes Martin similarly says ‘i’m trying to get my brain to zero. you should never think when you’re making work’. this requires that we as artists have logged enough hours at the craft to trust our instincts will let the art come through. there is a way in which the artist is the least interesting (if not the most problematic) part of their artwork. the example which comes to mind is symphonie fantastique which was written during and after a week-long opium bender berlioz embraked on because a shakespearean actress rebuffed his advances, yet it gets programmed hundreds of times a year. it’s also melodramatic schlock. acknowledging and accepting ones emotions is different than being swallowed by them.
finally, more simply than not being good at it, here's something music straight up is not: music is not a universal language. leonard bernstein covered this in the first page of his first lecture at harvard titled 'the unanswered question' where he rhetorically asks how many of his audience could listen with comprehension and understanding to a piece of north indian classical music; could understand what was being done not merely on a musical level (the form, the tuning, the dense rhythmical patterns and devices, all developed over hundreds of years), but on an anthropological level (on what occasions, time of day, or year, or life would that piece be played; what does its performance entail or require of its performers or audience, etc). beautiful though his example is, there is a clearer one which i first heard from my friend brendan carn: using music and only music, give me directions from here back to my house. we could agree that some combination of sounds mean left, or right, or straight, and that some other but related combinations are units of distance, but then we're simply overlaying a language onto music, which has been done since pythagoras. this is a good thing, because it means the many ways to play a single note or pair of notes can never be taken for granted in a way that the word 'the' is taken for granted, or the word 'i,' or the oxford comma is taken for granted. we must re-relate to these sounds freshly every time they are presented to us. none of these issues cripple our ability as listeners to engage deeply with a piece of music even if we are unfamiliar with it's native context, thought of course that does help. the analogy to language is an invaluable tool in music education, and there's no need to distance ourselves from it. it would be enough to stop calling music a universal language, if for no other reason than that it's just not true.