Experimentation is a science, not an art, despite having been used as a technique in art for many years.

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According to the Cambridge Dictionary, experiment and art are defined as follows:

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Experiment: (noun)

A test done in order to learn something or to discover if something works or is true

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Art: (noun)

An activity through which people express certain ideas

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These are okay definitions, although I feel this definition for art leaves something to be desired. It all rides on the meaning of that word - idea

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Idea: (noun)

A suggestion or plan for doing something

OR

An understanding, thought, or picture in your mind

OR

A belief about something

 

None of these feel quite right for insertion into the definition of art, but let’s not get hung up on that. We know art has to do with ideas, but what this definition fails to recognise is the relevance of communication and means. Activity doesn’t quite do it for me either. After some thought, I think a better definition for art may be:

 

The physical or abstract object through which one intentionally delivers a message in an other-than-direct way via means of one or more of the bodily senses, words, or theoretical concept, to a person or group recreationally receiving it.

 

The word experimental has become a bit of a buzzword in the art world, and the worst thing is, it has, sadly, completely lost its meaning. It is no longer a test, and it most certainly is not about learning. Few people dare to admit it, but, particularly in contemporary music, the word experimental in fact refers to quite a specific aesthetic. An aesthetic that is not new, not risky, not something where the outcome is in any way unknown. Definitely not an experiment by our Cambridge definition. Perhaps a better definition for experimental by modern art standards may be:

 

The unnecessary use of artistic resources in any obscure way that does not relate to the way they were originally designed to be used, to create works of art which have no basis in communication of any abstract ideas, but intended purely to make the artist in question momentarily appear as if to be cutting-edge, which they are not.

 

I’m being facetious, of course, but the point stands. The aesthetic is centred around exclusively and perversely rejecting all traditional production methods, becoming less about the so-called art and more about the sociological image of the artists themselves.

 

As earlier mentioned, the traditional purpose of an experiment is to learn from the results. If a scientist puts two random chemicals together only to find that nothing happens, they note down that nothing happened, and move on. What certainly does not happen is another scientist hears of this, repeats the ‘experiment’ purely for show under the facade that nobody has ever done it before, and receives a round of applause out of respect for their groundbreaking audacity. They may well repeat certain experiments to reaffirm results or move further with them, but the mere notion of doing the experiment in itself is not impressive or worthy of comment. A discovery, however, should be widely acknowledged, and then applied to future work. This is called progress.

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So why is it that so many artists deem it so important to be seen to be experimental anyway? Many an artist will tell you that is the sole purpose of art; to be cutting-edge, to do what has not been done before. And they are not completely wrong, however it is all too frequently approached in the wrong way.

 

To bring this now specifically to music - there are three main contributing parties which work together. The composer, the piece, the audience. The composer - the person who puts the thing together, who decides what an audience will hear and how. By piece I mean the material; the intellectual property. Everything that’s written on the page; programmed in the Logic file etc. And audience - whomever receives it. Be that a literal audience in a concert hall or a commuter with their headphones on. What they experience. These factors have a symbiotic relationship, and, to fully understand how we can affect what happens with each one, we must analyse the links between them. It looks something like this:

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The aforementioned fixation on experimentation is the result of many composers wasting their believed powers of innovation on the piece, paying all too little attention to the audience. The idea the composers have to be cutting-edge gets thrown around willy-nilly, and this dogma often results in composers obsessing over writing pieces that sound different to anything else that has ever been written. But it is not about the piece; it’s about communication - that arrow between composer and audience. If composers focus their subjective, artistic creativity on the message they want to convey and then work backwards to find the piece (using their objective skill, the arrow between composer and piece), a much greater directness and clarity of communication tends to be achieved. So it is not about writing a piece, a score that is like no other, but an experience. The piece is merely the vehicle towards making a situation whereby the feeling in the event of it being received by an audience is completely new. 

 

You do not have to make up new words to say something nobody’s ever said before. And if you do, the likelihood is no one will know what you mean.