"The word music is a convenient way to talk about what I'm interested in, but actually, in some ways, it's a limitation"
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Braxton’s jab at the word “music” isn’t modesty; it’s a refusal to be domesticated. Calling the term “convenient” admits its social usefulness: it’s the passport you show to grant panels, record stores, venue listings, and curious strangers. But he’s also naming how that passport polices the border. “Music” arrives with preloaded expectations about genre, pleasure, legibility, and even duration: songs, swings, hooks, applause at the right time. Braxton’s work has always treated those expectations as optional, sometimes irrelevant.
The subtext is a critique of institutional language. Once your practice is tagged “music,” it’s pulled into the economies and hierarchies that decide what counts: conservatory technique versus “noise,” jazz versus “classical,” composition versus improvisation, Black experimentalism versus European avant-garde. Braxton has spent decades being misfiled in all of them at once, praised as a visionary and dismissed as an irritant, often in the same review. The “limitation” is less about a dictionary definition than about a cultural script that narrows how listeners listen.
He’s also protecting the real engine of his interest: systems, symbols, ritual, architecture, game-like structures, the social choreography of performance. For Braxton, sound is only one output of a larger thinking process. The line reads like a quiet manifesto for the “creative music” tradition that grew alongside (and against) the market category of jazz: don’t mistake the label for the practice, and don’t let the audience’s comfort be the boundary of the work.
The subtext is a critique of institutional language. Once your practice is tagged “music,” it’s pulled into the economies and hierarchies that decide what counts: conservatory technique versus “noise,” jazz versus “classical,” composition versus improvisation, Black experimentalism versus European avant-garde. Braxton has spent decades being misfiled in all of them at once, praised as a visionary and dismissed as an irritant, often in the same review. The “limitation” is less about a dictionary definition than about a cultural script that narrows how listeners listen.
He’s also protecting the real engine of his interest: systems, symbols, ritual, architecture, game-like structures, the social choreography of performance. For Braxton, sound is only one output of a larger thinking process. The line reads like a quiet manifesto for the “creative music” tradition that grew alongside (and against) the market category of jazz: don’t mistake the label for the practice, and don’t let the audience’s comfort be the boundary of the work.
Quote Details
| Topic | Music |
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