I am sure that our lead article will ring a bell with anyone who has ever tried to explain their area of musical speciality to someone with entirely different musical interests. It is not an easy thing to do, primarily because there are so many different areas of music in which one can specialise – but witness the excitement when two people do find they have a common musical interest and can discuss all the half-ideas that hitherto they had been thinking about on their own.

It is because discussion about music can be so exhilarating that the way in which music is discussed (or not discussed), in interviews, articles and reviews in the wider media, is so disappointing. The challenge to describe music is a unique one, but more often than not it is skipped over, or simply carried out appallingly. One sloppy approach is to talk about someone’s music in terms of their ‘influences’. If someone grew up listening to A, B and C, so the thinking goes, then their music is a mixture of A, B and C all wonderfully mashed up together. So everpresent is this approach to writing and talking about music in the media that musicians now actually present and package their music in these dreadful terms, and the more ‘influences’ one has, the more exciting one’s music will be!

This obsession, as I call it, with ‘influences’ is perhaps a response to this globalised age. We are now so relentlessly exposed to so many different global images, cultures, musics, foods and so on, that we are naturally seeking some affirmative cultural manifestations of how we can join this multitude of ideas together. Poor old music, it seems, has been chosen to carry the can for this global insecurity.

The only response (and John McLachlan’s article is a good example) is to slowly pick apart this sloppy thinking and try and build up a more realistic picture. of the subtleties involved in one’s understanding of music. We may find that our range of influences – or our ‘musical idiolect’, as McLachlan describes it – does not reach as far and wide as we like to think.

Toner Quinn
Editor