Abstract

does that make coldplay abstract? ;)

If abstract painting is painting without representation, I've always thought of abstract music as the equivalent. What does that mean? hmm, thinking on my feet here.

Firstly, no words that have any meaning to distract you from pure sound: so Cocteau Twins more abstract than Frank Sinatra.

Secondly, no extended melody to tell your emotions a story/distract you from pure sournd - ie the less it has verse/bridge/chorus the more abstract it is, the less it has a 'tune' the more abstract it is. So Metal Machine Music more abstract than Pet Sounds.

Any rock or dance instrumental break that goes on for a long time and simply repeats - for example a riff - is therefore highly abstract, though not as abstract as white noise.

There's a long example in the middle of the early Subway Sect b side 'Dontsplitit' - several minutes of riff-and-a-cowbell, with an organ punching away some improvisation or other. For some reason I've always thought of that messy, noisy, full, chaotic, beautiful-as-pure-noise passage as a little bit of Abstract Expressionism turned into music.

perhaps you're right given there's not much license for abstraction in something like hip hop which tends to be governed by rules like fixed beats, rhymes/lyrical flow etc. - Handsome Boy Modelling School's 'Megaton B-Boy 2000' doesnt strike me as abstract - tho definitely unorthodox!

to be honest i'm still not clear on how abstract literally differs from unorthodox myself....are Karl Hyde's lyrics and delivery of them abstract? i'm inclined to say yes here but perhaps thats just unorthodox as well...

taking this definition from now then...give up some examples of abstract music and song pa-lease!

hurrah!

Actually, a lot of concrete stuff was about using sounds as instrumentation - i.e. using the sound of a car door slamming as representing something other than a car door slamming - in much the same way that traditional instrumentation is used to represent something - i.e. melodic string movements = lyrical, syrupy, emotional, whatever as opposed to signifying scraping a bow across some strings. Very few concrete practitioners looked at something like a car door slamming as representing itself. One of the few exceptions I can think of to this is the work of Luc Ferrari.

To tie back to the larger question, I think that abstraction in music is basically anything that doesn't reference a pre-conceived musical conceit. You can certainly play abstract music on instruments other than electronic ones, just as long as you're not playing something that passes for "narrative" or "lyrical" music in the Western tradition's sense of those words.