I had a light-bulb moment the other day.
George Michael’s music is a garden, not a journey.
That may make a kind of intuitive sense to you. More likely you’re wondering if I’m mad. For all I know you’re not in my age-group and have no idea who I’m talking about or why. For now, hold the thought, at least, that music can be like a garden, or like a journey, and that these can be contrasted. I’ll come back to it.
What this is about is what people like, what they find interesting, satisfying, fulfilling, and what they don’t. It applies to a lot of life, because we’re driven to maximise our enjoyment, which makes much of what we do and take in count as entertainment in some way.
So. People like different things.
Take music. Long ago, I became convinced that a lot of people listen to music for reasons that have nothing to do with whether they like it as music. It was my brain’s defence against a world in which people could claim to enjoy something that is the opposite of enjoyable.
I’m no longer so sure that’s quite true, but still think it’s sort of true.
People like different things, and exactly what they like about things can be so radically different that we don’t always recognise it even as a possibility.
But, I think, there are patterns.
When it comes to things we treat as entertainment, of all sorts, possibly the most important key is a ratio between familiarity and surprise.
It’s most noticeable, again, with music. Almost everybody needs existing expectations met, at least to some extent, when they hear music. At any point in history, what was “avant garde” at the time met with bewilderment or hostility. The music that was ahead of its time gained an audience as people got used to it, and the sounds and patterns became more familiar, and in some cases it’s now difficult to hear what people objected to when it was new. But music that doesn’t conform in any way to existing patterns is discordant noise to pretty well everyone.
Most people, though, also get bored by the completely predictable. Otherwise we’d choose one song and listen to it on repeat forever.
Some people, of course, come quite close to that, which illustrates that you can almost fingerprint people by the exact mixture of surprise and familiarity they find best. For example, I like more surprise than my wife does, quite noticeably. We have a big overlap in the kind of music we enjoy, fortunately, but my absolute favourites sound messy and complicated to her, and her absolute favourites often sound “another of those” to me. Plus when she finds a new favourite she’s happy to listen to it over and over. When I find a new favourite it goes on a strict rationing regime in case I wear out the magic. And there are others more extreme than us in both directions.
Overall, though, we all seem to have a spot where the comfort of “rightness” balances with the tingle of the unexpected, and we just love the result. The fact that the precise location of that spot is different for each of us doesn’t stop that being true.
It applies as much to all forms of entertainment, though I suspect the ratio varies for each of us for different things.
Even in writing, the thesis holds. Not just in novels, where the book-reading world goes from people who worship experimental literature to those who can devour an endless list of formulaic genre books, but any text intended for anyone to read. Like this. Like reports for business. Social media posts.
You need to have a decipherable message, to be playing by recognisable rules (and again, those rules vary in different contexts), which is the familiarity. But without a certain proportion of originality in some way, few will read it, and almost none of those retain anything. Let alone enjoy it. The surprise needs to be dangled to entice people to keep going, even if it’s only a different turn of phrase.
Which brings me to the journey.
It’s easier to bring a touch of surprise to the familiar if there is development. Everything can be comfortingly normal, and still the sequence have a touch of the unexpected, a lack of knowledge of where it’s going.
(In writing terms, of course, it’s become standard to point out that even these journeys tend to conform to a template, that there are conventional ups and downs and patterns. But it’s still easier to take a reader around a corner and reveal the next vista than to surprise in most other ways.)
The same applies to music. Most pieces of music develop, and we expect them to.
So “journeys” are introduced to all sorts of things, where we are led through things in an orderly sequence even if it isn’t the natural way we think of them. Exhibitions and galleries try to steer viewers along certain tracks, knowing that turning a static display into a story of sorts holds the interest in a way that a mere collection of objects doesn’t.
It isn’t necessary, though, just the easier option.
A garden, by contrast, is conventionally all there in front of you (leaving aside garden designers who create layouts that work like exhibition curation, with paths). A garden, if it’s interesting, holds the interest in a different way that’s usually harder to achieve.
It’s all there, and you can peruse it in any order and at any depth.
So in that case there needs to be a sort of fractal mix of familiarity and surprise. Casual glances need to have the comfort of expectations met and tingles of intrigue, which continue when looking closer. A good garden, being curated natural elements, can do that in ways that would be very hard to achieve for other things.
But to work and hold interest, the same ratio is needed.
Which brings me back to George Michael, at least his solo output.
When I hear certain songs of his, I am awed each time as they open, and wonder why I don’t listen to them more often. There’s a richness, a rightness and a slight alien quality that matches what I want from music very exactly.
… but, within a minute or two, I remember that, for me, that initial impact is all there is. The song won’t go anywhere from there. That’s a legitimate artistic choice, and clearly works for a lot of people. It’s a garden, where from the first the entirety is laid out, and enjoyment comes from the attention paid to the subtleties, or revelling in the lack of change for those who prize familiarity. It’s the polar opposite of, say, Ravel’s Bolero, which is all development. And there are music connoisseurs who still sniff at Bolero as a sort of technical cheating by playing on what catches people’s ears rather than “true composition”.
Which is really my point. If you want or need people to be interested, there are easier and harder ways to do that, including tricks.
Like opening a rather abstract essay with a strange statement about a deceased popular musician.
Overall, though, the idea of the familiarity/surprise ratio is useful to bear in mind in all sorts of situations where you need anyone’s attention. It pays thinking about how it applies almost every time.