Criteria for Music Evaluation

[DelBocaVista]

Below is a tighter version of what I wrote on listology a while back.

My criteria addresses the dichotomy of “Programmatic” and “Absolute” music, extrapolated from the Classical community. Programmatic refers to music which attempts to express something (non-musical) using musical aesthetic choices that serve as metaphor, while Absolute refers to music which attempts to use its aesthetic purely for musicological creativity. The latter is a more recent invention, but it’s become customary for modern music to have elements of both, so I feel comfortable holding artists accountable for both. The Programmatic element should be judged in terms of depth of expression AND creativity with respect to that expression. So there are 3 elements I look at and I actually treat them equally rather than weighting them 50%-25%-25%.

1: Degree of expression of concept
People usually use emotion as a shorthand, but there are other things besides emotions which music can express. It can express thoughts, ideas, beliefs, the moral of a story, a story itself, etc. I will generalize these things as “concepts”. Note that some form of emotional CONVICTION regarding a concept might be necessary to help sell it, even if the concept is not an emotion per se, but this is not what I’m referring to.

While it might be unfair to artists who see “song” (music plus lyrics) as their artform, I don’t focus on lyrics in and of themselves, but only as a tool for figuring out what concept is being expressed to begin with. This helps guide the focus when listening to the music. Knowing what the concept is enables me to accurately judge the degree of expression of concept. This is occasionally complicated when dealing with lyrics that have an atypical relationship to the music: some music is set to nonsensical lyrics or lyrics which are only present for commercial purposes or which were written by a different person than the author of the music (without regard for the music) or which have a sarcastic relationship with the music (with it often being unclear as to which one is the true voice ). Note that, when lyrics seem written for their sonic value (ie crazy rhymes or onomatopoeia), I will fully count them since they contribute significantly to the sound after all.

In some cases, I might dock some points due to a concept's lack of obvious appearance within the music. In other words, I don't want music to be so theoretical that it loses credibility as to whether it really had a given concept in mind. There are also some cases in which a concept's execution makes sense but can only be derived via outside knowledge and the artist comes across like s/he was trying to impress a niche group rather than express anything. Similarly, an extremely shallow concept would almost always seem to me as likely to have been meant to impress the lowest common denominator. Note that I wouldn't hold it against the artist when the lack of understanding is just due to a lyrical language barrier.

Conceptual unity is a factor in evaluating the expresson of a concept at the album level. It's what happens when an album is "about something" on the whole. I feel that it is usually weakened (and I reduce points accordingly) when an album has too many themes or too many unrelated aesthetics (meaning that in purpose or execution there wouldn't be a single vision). Exceptions include cases where themes are related enough so as to make a larger whole (which would score extra points due to a cumulative effect) and where the same music somehow simultaneously expresses two unrelated things well/interestingly. As with tracks, an album's concept has to be believable and not just a belated excuse to tie unrelated songs together. Consider a rock opera like the Pretty Thing's S.F. Sorrow. The music for each individual track represents a part of a written story made in advance, so the album as a whole has a clearly defined and achieved goal of telling the story through the music. But then consider Sgt. Pepper's. Some songs were written and recorded without the concept of "music hall band goes psychedelic in concert on their 20th anniversary" in mind. While the reprise encapsulates everything into a concert after all, "A Day In the Life" doesn't function as an "encore" in this concert (too hard to play live), making the concept arguably weak/not sustained/invalid. The album's conceptual nature can be salvaged if you frame the album as being about the Beatles dealing with existentialism (the concert being a dream which is gradually exited through more real-life-like songs, culminating in the more mundane-themed "A Day In The Life", which itself has elements of a degeneration back into dreamland).

The profundity created by high scores in both this criteria and the second one below concern expression of a concept, not the concept in-and-of-itself. While I respect the idea, in my ratings, I am not judging artists on their merits as philosophers or on their ability to come up with a "good idea for an album". However, an album concept that is not very profound in-and-of-itself is more likely to have already been set to music by many artists , many of whom might have done so more extensively/creatively (read: profoundly). This also means that, for an album born out of a profound philosophy or unique viewpoint, a lack of apples-to-apples comparisons might skew the rating. Therefore, it is important to evaluate albums on their own terms when comparisons aren't available, rather than necessarily take the lack of comparisons to be a sign of merit. Suppose I made an album that musically expressed an amphetamine user's mania and wisdom regarding the proper way of life and arrogance toward the non-converted instead of a different album which would have expressed what it's like to eat 4 slices of a pizza pie and stare hesitantly at the remaining 4. My album would probably suffer very unfavorable comparisons to Bob Dylan's Highway 61 Revisited, whereas the alternative one probably would have been vastly overrated.

I give an advantage to concepts which are expressed with a lot of nuances. I admit that sometimes this might seem like an unfair result of the fact that the concept itself (as a topic, pre-music) has a lot of nuance. In other words, even if there is a lot to be said about something, I still give kudos to s/he who manages to say it all.

2: Creativity of expression of concept
Here's where I evaluate the creativity with which a given concept is expressed. It could be that other artists have expressed the same concept before, but never in a particular way that a given work of art does. Note that there's more to creativity than originality. Creativity also involves ingenuity (not all new ideas are brilliant). Also, the creativity should be executed in such a way that it makes sense (perhaps in retrospect) that a given concept is what was expressed. So this idea should ideally work with Criteria # 1 (rather than against it) and create something the aesthetic of which is simultaneously novel ("no one thought of it before") and retrospectively obvious ("why hadn't anyone?"). Just like with Criteria # 1, emotional CONVICTION can come into play here (even if the concept is not an emotion per se) as it might be necessary to help sell how compellingly a concept is expressed, perhaps a sort of self-confidence regarding the artists' own cleverness. As with Criteria # 1, if I'm re-evaluating an album after realizing I was wrong about what the concepts actually are, I should re-evaluate the extent to which the true concepts are creatively expressed.

3: Creativity in-and-of-itself
The first two criteria combine to make "depth of expressio of concept". But some artists are trying to be creative (read: original + ingenious) in a musicological sense, outside of what their art expresses, if anything. As such, I feel that Fleetwood Mac's Rumours album very creatively conveys a sense of reserved anger through its aesthetic, but, in the process, does not venture out deeply into extremely original/ingenious music. On the other hand, some random band following the Resident's tradition could theoretically be making very intriguing music that is pointless. Arguably, for absolute creativity to be profound, it has to conjure up images/thoughts which end up impacting the evaluation. In other words, there is a possibility that this criteria is really a hybrid of the spirit of the first 2, now applied to PRESUMED concepts which weren't intended.

Overall Score
I consider the above 3 criteria to be of equal importance, so they get equal weight in my evaluations. Obviously, some artists are focusing more on the third or the combination of the first two (or, for the extremely cathartic-oriented, just the first one). So, as I mentioned in my point about lyrics, it is a bit unfair to evaluate something the artist didn't intend. Still, I can consider my ratings to be "extent to which the art fulfills my criteria" without necessarily commending/criticizing the artist on behalf of fulfilling it well/poorly (as s/he didn't necessarily intend what I thought).

I use the above 3 criteria to evaluate individual tracks and, weighting by length, derive an overall track score. I do the same for the album as a whole. In the whole-album context, Criteria #'s 1 and 2 evaluate the way that conceptual unity is expressed through continuity/cumulative effects and structure/inter-track relationships, while Criteria # 3 evaluates how interesting I find the album structure to be in-and-of itself (suites, album sides mirroring each other, etc.).

Experience
It's hard to avoid measuring many of the above elements indirectly instead of directly since I'm measuring their IMPACT on me personally. That impact is a function of my own psychology/feelings/knowledge/etc. If a song expresses a certain mood, I might be better able to understand it if I'm in/have been in that mood (or, conversely, I might be better able to dismiss it as an insufficient attempt to relay that mood). So it is important for the listener to learn about the human condition/be book smart/etc and to re-evaluate albums as knowledge/wisdom increases throughout life.

[AfterHours]

Great to see this more polished version. I'll try and find the time to read it closely today.
_________________
Best Classical
Best Films
Best Paintings

[YoungPunk]

How do you figure out the concept without lyrics? Don't know any way personally... Maybe its just that my music sucks

[DelBocaVista]

Nah I do usually need to hear the lyrics to fully understand. It's just that their poetic merits don't factor in.

[AfterHours]

To clarify, my "bottom up methodology" is not really opinion-based. It is based on the fact that songs/tracks (not just songs, but can be applied with different wording to all art works) are a progression of elements from virtually nothing at the moment one begins, then passing through a given amount of time, into more than what they started with.

(even in minimalistic cases where the whole song might be the same note struck over and over, or a drone on and on and on, time and sustenance alone has still rendered this a different experience than when it began).

And as the song/track progresses, it is changing (either increasing or decreasing) in quality/merit at all times (no matter how much or how little the change in quality/merit). Light My Fire (et al) is a song of a much different quality and merit if one ends it at the 10 second mark ... or before the instrumental break (etc). Further, The Doors album would be of different quality/merit if one removed Light My Fire from it. And so on.

So, that part of the methodology is not really mine, but a factual representation of how the progression of a work is such a primary factor in correlation to its quality.
_________________
Best Classical
Best Films
Best Paintings

[Kool Keith Sweat]

Excellent, well thought out criteria, but how does it practically translate to parroting Scaruffi

[DelBocaVista]

I don't think it's that much different from how any critic would do it, provided that s/he ignores:
- lyrics as poetry
- merit of the actual concept being expressed
- significance (to oneself) of the concept being expressed
- skill involved in composing/playing something objectively "sophisticated"
- skill involved in composing something pleasant catchy
- influence

[Tap]

[DelBocaVista]

The factors that go into my ratings are just my perceptions of: how powerfully (1) and how creatively (2) does the album say what it has to say as well as how creative it is abstractly (3). I might find some albums to have personal significance to me for reasons other than these, enough for me to listen to or think about them often, seek memorabilia, etc. But I don't think those things fall under artistic merit, so they're not relevant here (I should have picked a more nuanced subject name for the post).

The Faust album covers some of the same themes as your Olivia example (and more) and does so through its actual musical aesthetics (not that Olivia doesn't, I haven't heard her) with every nuance.

[YoungPunk]