In the penultimate episode of the most recent season of Severance, Mr. Milchick (aka Milkshake) is reprimanded for his extensive vocabulary, which is largely composed of extreme and obscure verbiage. The entire show is chock full of some incredible word choices.1
My spring break group had just watched this episode, and were constantly reprimanding one another for some of our more obscure word choices. If you’ve read any of my writing before, you could understand that I would be the primary target of this ridicule. Words like ‘proverbial’, ‘esoteric’, and ‘metaphysical’ were scrutinized to ensure proper usage and definition during our often hour long car rides into the city.
One word in particular, though, resulted in the most drama. I called a piece of music ‘inaccessible’. This is a word very familiar to me, of which I know the definition, but I had extreme difficulty explaining precisely what I mean to my friends. Literally, inaccessible means ‘unable to be reached or understood’, or ‘difficult to understand or appreciate’. I typically define a work’s level of accessibility as the amount of prerequisite2 knowledge needed to appreciate that work. This definition was utterly rejected, leading to much discussion both with that group and with some other friends of mine.
Before I continue, though, I would like to make a few short statements to qualify what I’m about to say.
Accessibility, or inaccessibility, is not a value judgement on the work of art. Good art is not inherently inaccessible, and accessible art is not inherently bad.
Accessibility does not indicate popularity, as inaccessibility does not mean obscurity or esotericism3.
Using inaccessible techniques will not make your work of art good or valuable, it has to be good or valuable on its own.
As beauty can be found both in simplicity and complexity, beauty can be found in accessibility and inaccessibility. However, simplicity does not imply accessibility.
Now that that’s out of the way, I’d like to discuss a few examples of accessibility and inaccessibility.
It’s probably a good idea to start a discussion on accessibility on likely the most accessible artist in history, Taylor Swift. Cruel Summer currently stands at 2.8 billion streams and holds the title for the thirty-first most streamed song on Spotify. The track comes in at nearly exactly three minutes, 85 BPM, features a classic Verse-Chorus-Verse-Chorus-Bridge-Chorus structure, uses a 4/4 time signature, and is largely based on a I-ii-vi-IV progression repeated throughout the track4. The lyrics are relatively simple, are sung in a typical cadence, in a clear voice, and the production is very clean, in a pop style.5
Throughout music theory and music psychology, these aspects are a sort of “Home Base”. It never fails. Our brains love this sort of chord progression, this sort of repeated structure, this time signature, and this pace. Combine this with infinitely relatable lyrics, an absolute banger of a bridge, and production which doesn’t require any sort of high quality equipment or volume for perfect understanding of the song, and you get something that anyone can listen to and appreciate6.
This is then our baseline for accessibility.
To go to the complete opposite side, I’ll present Trilogie de la Mort by Eliane Radigue, a three hour long drone album composed entirely on a Moog modular synthesizer. The entire album is three tracks of near equal length, each exploring different aspects of the Tibetan book of the dead. Most of the tracks feature a single tone slowly modulating in timbre and texture, with some quieter noises in the back.7 There is little discernible rhythm, no melody, no time signature, no lyrics, no tonality,8 no real harmonic structure, no real song structure, etc. The album basically requires hi-fidelity audio equipment to listen, three hours of free time for an uninterrupted session, and some serious patience.
This will be my baseline for inaccessibility.9
So which would you rather listen to? Maybe ‘rather’ is a poor word to choose, since I would say that my favorite between the two is easily Radigue. However, it is far easier to listen to Cruel Summer. Why? For all of the reasons I already listed! It fits with what our brain is used to when it comes to music. It requires no prerequisite listening to understand, you could show it to a toddler and they would happily dance along, even sing along.10 This is a good thing. It means we have a universal language through which we can all communicate. That’s what makes music so beautiful!
What then, makes it possible to access something inaccessible? You have to shift your window of accessibility, of course! How do we learn anything new? By trying it out! Learning an instrument or language or calculus is inaccessible, so we need to challenge ourselves, challenge our preconceptions of what our fingers or mouths or brains can do to increase the scope of our knowledge. It’s the same with listening to music or reading books or watching movies.
The second step is to engage with a work of art on its level. We all operate on our own level, based on our knowledge of the medium. If all you’ve heard is Taylor Swift and Ed Sheeran and you try to listen to Miles Davis, of course you’ll reject it! It doesn’t fit into the notions of what you expect when you open Spotify and hit play. So instead, abandon what you think music should sound like when you listen to something new and enter with a blank slate, no expectations whatsoever. This doesn’t mean that you’ll like what you hear, but at least you gave it the time of day instead of dismissing it outright.11
I think I would now instead redefine accessibility as the amount of prerequisite experience needed to appreciate or understand a work of art. How much you have to have listened to or read or watched to gain that level of parity with the work of art.
Accessibility is just a tool we can use to describe music, to ascribe whether someone should give it a listen, or if they should take the time to go and listen to something more accessible first, to learn more about the genre or the history of that work of art.
Take some time this week to listen to something new and engage with it on its level. Take a few minutes to write about what you liked, what you didn’t. What you’d like to hear in other works of art, or what you rejected at first but learned to enjoy as it repeated or came back around. What preconceptions did you have to abandon?
Some suggestions for this depending on what you already listen to (in order from most to least accessible)12:
Happy Listening!
Some of my favorites include chicanery, shambolic, remonstration, and the biting monosyllabically.
Another scrutinized word.
As much as your pretentious 14 year old cousin might like to argue that that’s the case, but more often than not they’re saying that Pink Floyd is so good because they use a 5/4 time signature or progressive harmony every once in a while.
This progression is not as common as a I-IV-V-I structure, but is still very similar and follows fully functional harmony.
Jack Antonoff you bastard.
To go into some more detail: 85 BPM is near perfect walking pace, 4/4 matches the cadence of our walking speed, the flow of Swift’s singing is very similar to walking pace, etc. A lot of music psychology and evolutionary music psychology has found that relating music to walking and running, two rhythms so fundamental to human life, is a great way to get the dopamine flowing. Functional harmony, major/minor modality, and maintaining a consistent tonic also serve to increase this familiarity. The more you throw your listener off balance from their ‘walking’, the more you risk losing them.
One of my favorite moments comes when a sort of “festival” can be heard around the 40 minute mark of the opening track. I believe that this track is a journey around the base of a mountain, and this moment is when the traveler is near a village.
You could consider having a single distinct pitch as a sort of tonality, but I don’t.
I would argue that genres like Electro Acoustic Improvisation (1-3 by Supersilent), harsh noise (Pulse Demon by Merzbow), or Stochastic Music/Serialism (Persepolis by Iannis Xenakis and Le Marteau sans Maitre by Pierre Boulez) are far less accessible, but I am neither as familiar or as fond of these genres. They do serve my argument in a similar way, but due to my unfamiliarity I would have more difficulty forming it.
If you haven’t seen the videos of little kids singing along to APT by Rose and Bruno Mars please do, it’s absolutely adorable.
I especially recommend this method of abandoning expectations when listening to or watching something critically acclaimed. Try to understand why this is loved, why people see that work of art and see it as beautiful. You again don’t need to like it, just try it and engage with that work of art is it is, not as what you want it to be.
Many of my music music friends may already know all of these albums, but they can find new albums for themselves.
Interesting that you write about accessibility in enjoying music since it feels like a lot of the discourse is on the accessibility of creating art right now. Would love to hear your thoughts :)