If You Can't Hum It, It Ain't Music?

To be sure, I'm a big fan of Gary North's work. Occasionally, however, Gary moves outside of his field of expertise and the results aren't always pretty. His guitar play list was, as I said in my previous post, fine. It was not, though, even close to a representation of what has been accomplished with the guitar by its greatest players. I made a video play list in response which included Eddie Van Halen, Steve Vai, Joe Satriani, Junior Brown, and Brian Setzer.

Mr. North replied to my post via email:

"Technical virtuosity is no substitute for a lack of musical taste.

If you can't hum it, it ain't music."

While I agree that technical virtuosity is no substitute for musical taste, let me translate Gary North's first line: the guys on your list blow away the guys on my list so rather than acknowledge that I'll fall back on something nebulous like "taste".

All of the players from my list are virtuosos with great taste (Brian Setzer won a Grammy for his version "Sleepwalk", a song played by many prominent guitarists who didn't garner that award). So we just disagree on this point--fine. I also had to take issue with the second statement, "If you can't hum it, it ain't music".

Here are some absurd conclusions that flow from this "Humability Standard":

1. Chords (three or more consonant notes played together) are not music since a person can only hum one note at time. A trio humming together could make music with chords; North's "you" would be a plural in this case.

2. Since the capacity of the lungs, which humming depends on, is limited, if some series of notes goes on rapidly and long enough that the hummer(s) must take a breath and therefore miss a note, the sounds are no longer music.

3. If sounds are being played rapidly enough that the pitch being hummed cannot be changed rapidly enough to keep up, the sounds are not music (sorry "Flight of the Bumble Bee").

4. Any notes not within the human vocal range are not music since they can't be hummed.

So the "Humability Standard" in defining music introduces an arbitrariness, i.e., every person can call the same sounds "music" or not according to their own vocal range, lung capacity, and ability to rapidly change the pitch of the notes to be hummed. So what is music to Mariah Carey may not be music to the rest of us.

"If you can't hum it, it ain't music" has a folksy charm, but it's the same sort of nonsense a father of a generation ago might have used to dismiss the rock and roll racket coming from his son's room that the son apparently mistook for music.

My players are far better than Gary's and his reply was as absurd as legendary classical guitarist Andres Segovia's statement that the electric guitar wasn't even a musical instrument. Segovia actually broke off a possible professional relationship with Chet Atkins when he learned that Atkins played electric guitar. I'm also pretty sure that the players in his list would agree that they do not measure up to the players on my list.