A Winged Victory for the Sullen
I couldn’t tell you why, but my recent taste for “ambient” music has really felt like a guilty pleasure. Are there people out there for whom this is their main listening? Do they attend mild-mannered concerts and drive to work with the latest easy-going CD popped in their car?
If there’s one lesson I seem to have to keep relearning, it’s that there’s no shortage of value for any kind of music. As someone who has exactly two playlists in his music library (one called Jazz, the other Classical), the whole elitist vibe has really taken off without me even being totally aware of it. When I meet with professors I hope to study composition with, I wouldn’t mention some of what I listen to: it’s almost a different realm altogether. I hardly think it’s appropriate to mention Mingus. And yet, these things define who I am, as a listener and composer. Have I totally just gotten sucked into the narrow-mindedness of academia?
On this occasion, I think the answer is probably just: yes. During my four years of undergrad, despite what many professors, as a matter of fact, professed, I left school understanding my degree in music related to something else entirely different than what was on the radio. I studied classical music. I played contemporary music. I left campus on the weekends to go see live jazz. But what played in the car on the way there, or what was shuffling on Spotify when we all got together for drinks on a Friday…that was something different. Something we weren’t all in school for.
This is a mindset I’ve come to deeply regret. Sure, I still don’t care to listen to a whole lot of what’s on the radio. But, in the course of the last few years, I’ve spent a lot of time learning and reading about recording studios, and pop-hit ghost writers, and the theory behind funk and I’m left wondering how I can call what I learned in music school anything near comprehensive. Of course, there’s not enough time in the world to cover it all, but surely the balance could be more carefully set?
So now I’m left sitting back listening to A Winged Victory for the Sullen’s debut album of the same name, a cornerstone of modern ambient music. It is masterfully crafted, wonderfully creative, and perfectly contemplative. Will it spawn videos and analyses online like Mahler’s symphonies have? Probably not. But it could; the value is there. All it is is that the people who really like to take a piece and dig and dissect and label, they’re just not also typically the people that listen to ambient music.
And so what if I consider this group part of my own musical identity, as a listener? And so what if I mention this album when a professor asks me where I draw inspiration. If they don’t know Ben Johnston, or Travis Laplante, or (daresay) Caroline Shaw, what difference does it make? They’d probably just answer the very same way:
“Oh, alright.”
