Critical Musicological Reflections: Essays in Honour of Derek B. Scott 1409425606, 9781409425601

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Critical Musicological Relections Essays in Honour of Derek B. Scott

Edited by Stan Hawkins

CRITICAL MUSICOLOGICAL REFLECTIONS

Dedicated to Derek B. Scott

Critical Musicological Reflections Essays in Honour of Derek B. Scott

Edited by STAN HAWKINS University of Oslo, Norway

© Stan Hawkins and the Contributors 2012 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Stan Hawkins has asserted his right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identiied as the editor of this work. Published by Ashgate Publishing Limited Wey Court East Union Road Farnham Surrey, GU9 7PT England

Ashgate Publishing Company Suite 420 101 Cherry Street Burlington VT 05401-4405 USA

www.ashgate.com British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Critical musicological relections: essays in honour of Derek B. Scott. 1. Musicology. I. Scott, Derek B. II. Hawkins, Stan. 780.7’21-dc23 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Critical musicological relections : essays in honour of Derek B. Scott / edited by Stan Hawkins. p. cm. Includes index. ISBN 978-1-4094-2560-1 (hardcover : alk. paper) – ISBN 978-1-4094-2561-8 (ebook) 1. Music–History and criticism. 2. Music–Social aspects. 3. Musicology. I. Hawkins, Stan. II. Scott, Derek B. ML55.S44C75 2012 780–dc23 2011033887 ISBN 9781409425601 (hbk) ISBN 9781409425618 (ebk)

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Contents

List of Figures List of Tables List of Music Examples Notes on Contributors Acknowledgements Festschrift (Essays in honour of Derek Scott on his sixtieth birthday) List of Publications by Derek Scott

vii ix xi xiii xvii xix xxi

1

‘Great, Scott!’ Stan Hawkins (Editor)

2

Evidence of Things Not Seen: History, Subjectivities, Music Susan McClary

3

Musical Identities, Learning and Education: Some Cross-cultural Issues Lucy Green

39

Béla Bartók: Reintegrating the Semantic and Syntactic Axes in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle David Cooper

61

Amusing the Cultivated Classes and Cultivating the Masses: Changes in Concert Repertoires in Nineteenth-century Helsinki Vesa Kurkela

75

From Schizophonia to Paraphonia: On the Cultural Matrix of Digitally Generated Pop-Sounds Peter Wicke

95

4

5

6

7

8

1

21

Material Culture and Decentred Selfhood (Socio-Visual Typologies of Musical Excess) Richard Leppert

101

‘As Fast as One Possibly Can …’: Virtuosity, a Truth of Musical Performance? Antoine Hennion

125

Critical Musicological Relections

vi

9

10

11

12

13

14

On Music Criticism and Affect: Two Instances of the Disaffected Acoustic Imaginary John Richardson

139

The Development of Bob Dylan’s Rhythmic Sense: ‘The Times They Were a’Changin’ (1958–64) Charles Ford

159

How Genres are Born, Change, Die: Conventions, Communities and Diachronic Processes Franco Fabbri

179

Anatomy of the Encounter: Intercultural Analysis as Relational Musicology Nicholas Cook

193

One Way of Feeling: Contextualizing a Hermeneutics of Spatialization Allan F. Moore

209

The Virtuoso Body; Or, the Two Births of Musical Performance Lawrence Kramer

231

Epilogue Sheila Whiteley

245

Index

249

List of Figures

4.1 4.2 4.3 4.4

Lendvai tonic axis in C Trajectory of the music associated with the seventh door Trajectory of the main tonal areas of the opening of the opera Outline tonal map of the whole of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle

5.1

Programme for Henry Vieuxtemps in Helsinki, Societethuset, 25 August 1849 (Handbill in French and Swedish; Weckströms collection, National Library, Helsinki) Programme for the musical-dramatic soirée at the university auditorium in Helsinki, 18 May 1963 (Helsingfors Dagblad 18 May 1863) Percentage of non-living composers in Helsinki Symphony Concerts, 1847–93

5.2

5.3

7.1

7.2

7.3 7.4

7.5

7.6

Grand Pianoforte (c. 1840), by Erard & Co., London; marquetry case designed and executed by George Henry Blake; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Henry McSweeney, 1959 (59.76). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art Grand Pianoforte (c. 1840), by Erard & Co., London; detail of marquetry on lid. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Henry McSweeney, 1959 (59.76). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art Johannes Tilens (1589−1630), Apollo and the Muses; oil. Whereabouts unknown. Photo credit: © KIK-IRPA, Brussels Square Piano (c. 1850), by Robert Nunns and John Clark, New York. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of George Lowther, 1906. Photo: Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/Art Resource, New York Armand Pierre Fernandez (1928−2005), Accord Final [Last Chord: They Wouldn’t Let Me Play Carnegie Hall] (1981); bronze casting of a broken baby grand piano. Photo credit: Banque d’Images, ADAGP/Art Resource, NY Armand Pierre Fernandez (1928−2005), Chopin’s Waterloo (1961); pieces of piano attached to wood panel. Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou. Photo: Adam Rzepka. Photo credit: CNAC/MNAM/Dist. Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York

67 70 70 71

80

83 90

102

103 104

106

107

108

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7.7 7.8

7.9 7.10

7.11

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Sir Frank Dicksee (1853−1928), A Reverie (1895); oil on canvas. Liverpool, National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, Walker Art Gallery. Photo credit: © National Museums Liverpool Sigmund Walter Hampel (1868−1949), Allegory on the Genius of Ludwig van Beethoven (c. 1901); pastel. Vienna, Museum Karlsplatz. Photo: Alfredo Dagli Orti. Photo credit: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, New York Johann Baptist Hoechle (1790−1835), Beethoven’s Study in the Schwarzspanierhaus; drawing. Vienna, Museum Karlsplatz. Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York Josef Danhauser (1805−1845), Ludwig van Beethoven on His Deathbed (1827); lithograph. Berlin, Mendelssohn-Archiv, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz. Photo credit: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, New York Fernand Khnopff (1858–1921), Listening to Schumann (1883); oil on canvas. Photo: G. Cussac. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. Photo credit: © KIK-IRPA, Brussels

111

113

115

116

119

List of Tables

3.1

‘Barbie Doll’ adapted to a Zulu clapping game

45

4.1 4.2

The upper ive rows of the regional chart published by Weber Duke Bluebeard’s Castle: Principal tonal areas, key narrative themes, and Lendvai’s estimation of their polarity Segment of partially collapsed regional space as derived by Lerdahl from Weber aligned with Lendvai’s axis system

65

4.3

10.1

Proportional irregularities in Bob Dylan’s songs, 1968–1964

67 68 176

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List of Music Examples

2.1 2.2 2.3 2.4 2.5 2.6 2.7

Franz Schubert, String Quartet in G Major, Movement 1: bars 1–5 Franz Schubert, String Quartet in G Major, Movement 1: bars 15–24 Franz Schubert, String Quartet in G Major, Movement 1: bars 64–74 Franz Schubert, String Quartet in G Major, Movement 1: bars 284–88 Franz Schubert, String Quartet in G Major, Movement 1: bars 443–50 Cipriano de Rore, “Da le belle contrade d’oriente”, bars 1–9 Cipriano de Rore, “Da le belle contrade d’oriente”, bars 34–48

13.1

‘I want you now’; harmonic sketch of the verse (13``…)/ pre–chorus (39``…) Melodic/bass reduction of opening of chorus Outline of opening riff to ‘Helicopter’

217 219 224

Beethoven, opening of the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata and Schubert, opening of the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy (a) Beethoven (b) Schubert

236 236 236

13.2 13.3 14.1

23 25 26 27 28 31 33

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Notes on Contributors

Nicholas Cook took up the 1684 Professorship of Music at the University of Cambridge in 2009, having previously directed the AHRC Research Centre for the History and Analysis of Recorded Music at Royal Holloway, University of London. His books include A Guide to Musical Analysis (1987); Music, Imagination, and Culture (1990); Beethoven: Symphony No. 9 (1993); Analysis Through Composition (1996); Analysing Musical Multimedia (1998); and Music: A Very Short Introduction (1998), which is published or forthcoming in thirteen different languages. His most recent book, The Schenker Project: Culture, Race, and Music Theory in Fin-de-siècle Vienna (2007), won the SMT’s Wallace Berry Award, and he is now completing Changing the Music Object: Analysing Performance. He is a Fellow of the British Academy and of Academia Europaea. David Cooper is Professor of Music and Technology in the School of Music, and Dean of the Faculty of Performance, Visual Arts and Communications, at the University of Leeds. He is a composer and musicologist and has published extensively on the music of Bartók, ilm music and the traditional music of Ireland. He is author of the Cambridge Handbook on Bartók’s Concerto for Orchestra (1996), monographs on Bernard Herrmann’s scores for the ilms Vertigo (2001) and The Ghost and Mrs Muir (2005), and the study The Musical Traditions of Northern Ireland and its Diaspora: Community and Conlict (2009). He edited the irst modern edition of George Petrie’s seminal The Petrie Collection of the Ancient Music of Ireland (2002, 2005). He is the co-editor with Kevin Dawe of The Mediterranean in Music: Critical Perspectives, Common Concerns, Cultural Differences (2005); with Christopher Fox and Ian Sapiro of Cinemusic? Constructing the Film Score (2008); and with Rachel Cowgill and Clive Brown of Art and Ideology in European Opera: Essays in Honour of Julian Rushton (2010). He is currently working on a large-scale study of Bartók for Yale University Press. Franco Fabbri is a musician and musicologist, and teaches ‘Popular Music’ and ‘History of Contemporary Music’ at the University of Turin. His main interests are in the ields of genre theories and music typologies, the impact of media and technology across genres and musical cultures, and the history of popular music. He has served twice as chairman of the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). Fabbri has published on the rapport between music and technology (Elettronica e musica, 1984), on the confrontation of musical cultures in contemporary world (L’ascolto tabù, 2005) and on the intricate fabric of inluences and coincidences in the history of popular music (Around the clock, 2008). His most read book (Il suono in cui viviamo, three editions, 1996, 2002,

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2008) contains articles on diverse subjects including genres, analysis of popular music and aesthetics of sound. Charles Ford is an Associate Fellow of the Institute of Musical Research at London University. He practices a ‘micro-holistic’ approach to music – the analytic search for traces of an historical whole in leeting moments of music. The theoretical basis for this approach has recently been published in his article ‘Towards a new philosophy of music’ (Contemporary Aesthetics). At present he is turning his Così? Sexual Politics in Mozart Opera (1990) into another book called Musical Enlightenment: Mozart’s Figaro, Don Giovanni and Così fan tutte to be published by Ashgate in 2012. Meanwhile, he continues his research into irregular rhythms in late 1960s UK and US popular music. Lucy Green is Professor of Music Education at the London University Institute of Education. Her research interests are in the sociology of music education, specializing in issues of meaning, ideology, gender, popular music, informal learning, and new pedagogies. She is the author of four books and numerous articles and book chapters; has given keynotes in countries across the world; and serves on the Editorial Boards of eleven journals. Lucy led the research and development project ‘Informal Learning in the Music Classroom’ within the British venture ‘Musical Futures’, which is now being implemented in Australia, the USA, Canada, Brazil and other countries. Her current research is taking this work forward into instrumental tuition. Stan Hawkins is Professor of Musicology at the University of Oslo, and Professor II at the University of Agder, Kristiansand. He is author of Settling the Pop Score (2002)The British Pop Dandy (2009), and Prince: The Making of a Pop Music Phenomenon (with co-author Sarah Niblock (2011)). In addition he is coeditor of Music Space & Place (2004) and Essays on Sound & Vision (2007). His many publications appear in edited books and journals, with research specialities in music analysis, masculinity, sexuality, subjectivity and music sociology. He is on the editorial boards of Popular Musicology Online, Popular Music, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, Swedish Journal for Music Research and Journal of the Musical Arts in Africa. Antoine Hennion is Professor at MINES ParisTech and the former Director of the Centre for the Sociology of Innovation (CSI). He has written extensively in the sociology of music, of media and culture (radio, design, advertising, etc.). Working on mediation, he has participated with colleagues from the CSI into the deinition of a new problematization of innovation (in the ield of Science, Technology & Society, and in the sociology of the arts). He is now studying amateurs, taste and diverse forms of attachment and detachment. He leads a research workshop on human fragilities (aging, disability, dementia, addiction…). His main publications include Figures de l’amateur (2000), with S. Maisonneuve and É. Gomart, a book

Notes on Contributors

xv

on J.S. Bach in nineteenth-century France, La grandeur de Bach (2000), with J.-M. Fauquet, a revised edition in 2007 of La passion musicale (1993), a book on organic wine, Le vin et l’environnement. Faire compter la différence, with G. Teil et al., (2011), and Attachement (forthcoming). Lawrence Kramer is Distinguished Professor of English and Music at Fordham University in New York City. He is the editor of 19th-Century Music, a composer whose works have been performed internationally and a proliic author. His books most recently include Expression and Truth: On the Music of Knowledge (2012), Interpreting Music (2010), Why Classical Music Still Matters (2007), Opera and Modern Culture: Wagner and Strauss (2004), and Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (2001), all published by the University of California Press. Vesa Kurkela is Professor of Music History at the Sibelius Academy, Helsinki. He is the co-author of a history of Finnish popular music (2003) and has also written several books and articles on music history, radio music, and folk and popular music. Kurkela, together with three other scholars, is currently starting a new research project on the emergence of the ‘Finnish music life’ at the end of the nineteenth century, which is viewed as a gradual and transnational rather than as a nationalist-theological process. Richard Leppert is Regents Professor and Morse Alumni Distinguished Teaching Professor in Department of Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. The most recent of his ten books are Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema (2007), co-edited with Daniel Goldmark and Lawrence Kramer, published by the University of California Press; and Sound Judgment (2007), for the Ashgate series Contemporary Thinkers on Critical Musicology. Susan McClary is Professor of Music at Case Western University and Professor II at the University of Oslo. Best known for her book Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (1991), she is also author of Georges Bizet; Carmen (1992), Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (2000), Modal Subjectivities: Renaissance Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (2004), Reading Music: Selected Essays (2007), and Desire and Pleasure in Seventeenth-Century Music (2011). McClary received a MacArthur Foundation Fellowship in 1995. Allan Moore is Professor of Popular Music at the University of Surrey. Author/ editor of seven books and many articles in the ield, he is on the editorial board of the journal Popular Music, and was co-founder of Twentieth-Century Music. He is currently completing a monograph on the analysis and interpretation of popular song, and is co-editing a collection of articles on the folk revivalist Ewan MacColl. He is also series editor for Ashgate’s Library of Essays on Popular Music.

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John Richardson is Professor of Musicology at the University of Turku, Finland. He is author of the books, An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal (2011) and Singing Archaeology: Philip Glass’s Akhnaten (1999). He is currently co-editing two anthologies, The Oxford Handbook of New Audiovisual Aesthetics (with Claudia Gorbman and Carol Vernallis), and The Oxford Handbook of Sound and Image in Digital Media (with Carol Vernallis and Amy Herzog). Sheila Whiteley is Professor Emeritus at the University of Salford, Greater Manchester, and Visiting Professor at Southampton Solent University. As a feminist musicologist with strong research interests in issues of identity and subjectivity, she is known for her work on gender and sexuality as well as for longstanding interests in popular culture. She is author of Women and Popular Music: Popular Music and Gender (2000); and Too Much Too Young: Popular Music, Age and Identity (2005), and editor of Sexing the Groove: Popular Music and Gender (1996). Her most recent work includes the collection of essays, Queering the Popular Pitch (2006), co-edited with Jennifer Rycenga. Peter Wicke is Professor for the Theory and History of Popular Music and the Director of the Centre for Popular Music Research at Humboldt University. He author of numerous books and articles translated into more than ifteen languages, including Rock Music: Culture-Aesthetic-Sociology (1990), Bigger Than Life: Musik und Musikindustrie in den USA (1991), Music and Cultural Theory (coauthor with John Shepherd (1997)), Von Mozart zu Madonna (2001), and Rock and Pop. Von Elvis Presley bis Lady Gaga (2011). He is member of the Editorial Board of the journals Popular Music and Popular Music History.

Acknowledgements

That a Festschrift can be produced within a period of less than six months says much about its dedicatee. As often happens, the realization that a prominent scholar close to us has (or had already) reached a milestone birthday, in this case sixty years old, provoked an array of mixed reactions. How could we commemorate this, who should take the responsibility of editing a Festschrift, and what do we say? In what must be record time, a group of distinguished scholars committed themselves to this project, and within two months of assembling abstracts and putting forward a proposal, Ashgate had agreed to undertake the Festschrift’s publication. All was kept hush up until an event at the University of Agder, Kristiansand, in Norway in September 2010, where Derek Scott, with characteristic modesty, nearly collapsed when he was informed about this token tribute. From this point on there was no turning back, and producing this manuscript on time became a crucial objective. The fact that this materialized says much about Derek Scott. First and foremost my gratitude is extended to Nicholas Cook, David Cooper, Franco Fabbri, Charles Ford, Lucy Green, Antoine Hennion, Lawrence Kramer, Vesa Kurkela, Richard Leppert, Susan McClary, Allan Moore, John Richardson, Peter Wicke, and Sheila Whiteley for making this a reality. Thanks also goes to Heidi Bishop, Sarah Price, Barbara Pretty, and all the staff involved at Ashgate, who have been supportive throughout the process. Without the generous support of my own department at the University of Oslo, such a venture would not have been possible, and a special thanks goes to close colleagues, Anne Danielsen, Rolf-Inge Godøy, Ståle Wikshåland, and Hans Weisethaunet for assisting in the reviewing of some of the essays. In addition, Susan Fast and Erik Steinskog must be thanked for all their support and meticulous eye for detail, which was of great assistance during the detailed routines of reviewing. A very special thanks also goes to Jon Mikkel Broch Ålvik, one of my doctoral students at the time of editing this volume, who tirelessly assisted me with a range of editorial chores, as well as careful reading and commentary. Finally, I am grateful to Susan McClary and Lawrence Kramer for corrective guidance and assistance in the daunting task of identifying the discourse of critical musicology and New Musicology in my introductory chapter. Collections of essays of this nature can never be realized without the close support of others. As this is a Festschrift consisting of path-breaking essays in music research, I am compelled to emphasize its useful basis for guiding researchers, teachers and students towards understanding some of the ambitions behind a critical-based approach. The readers will hopefully arrive at their own informed understanding of the importance and position of musicology as a discipline that intersects with the social sciences, information technology, and the arts and humanities. Finally,

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I acknowledge a great personal debt to Derek Scott, who has been a colleague and friend for many years. I am well aware that his work continues to engender pioneering debates, and it is because of the inspiring quality of his creative intellect, good-humour, generosity in encouraging other scholars, and most of all his adoration of music, that this Festschrift has become a reality. Derek, this one’s for you. Stan Hawkins

Festschrift (Essays in honour of Derek Scott on his sixtieth birthday)

Fest comes from the German for ‘feast’, ‘celebration’ or ‘festival’, while schrift means ‘writing’. Festschrift designates a volume of essays by scholars, admirers and colleagues, compiled in tribute to a distinguished scholar. Usually it commemorates a sixtieth, sixty-ifth or seventieth birthday of a living author, or any other signiicant occasion. Oddly enough, there is no English equivalent term for Festschrift, which comes in any size from a slim-line single publication to numerous volumes. One can only wonder how the eminent German classical historian Joseph Vogt felt about his seventy-ifth birthday Festschrift, entitled Aufstieg und Niedergang der römischen Welt. Commencing with four volumes in 1972, it had expanded to eighty-nine volumes with an interval in 1998! This more modest-size Festschrift, assembled in honour of Derek Scott’s sixtieth birthday, consists of ifteen contributions that explore facets of music research that come under the aegis of critical musicology. The mix of approaches and cutting-edge perspectives presented throughout this volume addresses the continual interests of scholars working in diverse ields of music research, from sociology, history, feminism, queer studies, popular music analysis, semiotics, poststructural theory, ethnomusicology to music pedagogics. In tandem with Derek Scott’s own theoretical standpoints, all the essays pertain to the ways in which music functions socially, politically and ideologically, with a prime focus on subjectivity and the conventions of representation. These build upon the questions that have concerned and vexed musicologists for many years, and steered Scott towards diverse styles, ranging from Victorian parlour songs, symphonic and opera works, Viennese waltz and polka, black minstrelsy, café-concert, music hall, operetta, vaudeville, cabaret, ragtime to commercial mainstream pop. Derek Scott has had, and continues to have, a most important impact on the course of musicology, with a commitment to the interdisciplinarity of this everevolving discipline. As a founder member of the UK Critical Musicology Group in 1993, he organized the irst major conference, ‘Good-bye, Great Music!’ at Salford, UK, in 1995, now a landmark in musicology at the end of the twentieth century. While his earlier work concentrated on popular music of nineteenthcentury Britain and the USA, his later interests shifted towards cultural history and the position of entertainment music in metropolitan life, in particular London, Vienna, New York and Paris. Derek Scott’s major contribution to critical musicology is located in his development of a theory that deals with how ideology

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is rooted in musical style. It is of note that he has shed light on the historical shifts in meaning of the ‘popular’, a term often employed by sceptics to denigrate music that is fashionable and lightly entertaining in contrast to the serious, progressive and profound. In addition to his highly acclaimed edited volumes, Music, Culture, and Society (2000) and the Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (2009), his three monographs, The Singing Bourgeois (1989), From the Erotic to the Demonic (2003) and Sounds of the Metropolis (2008), are recognized for their excellent contribution to rethinking musicology within a vibrant intellectual climate. One of his greatest achievements to date has been his role as General Editor of the Ashgate Popular and Folk Music Series, with more than sixty volumes published within just over ten years (at the time of this Festschrift). This staggering accomplishment is a sign of his generous spirit, which, coupled with an original intellectual mind and great sense of wit, has made every moment of compiling this volume worth its while for all of us who have contributed.

List of Publications by Derek Scott

Editorial Note: This List of Publications is in chronological order. Non-refereed publications, journalistic items, notices and reviews, recordings,and musical compositions are not listed.

Books The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour. Milton Keynes and Philadelphia: Open University Press, 1989. Expanded second edition with CD recording, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. Music, Culture, and Society: A Reader. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000. Reprinted 2002. From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003. Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology. Farnham: Ashgate, 2009. Musical Style and Social Meaning. Ashgate Contemporary Thinkers on Critical Musicology. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. Bawdy Songbooks of the Romantic Period, Volume 4. London: Pickering & Chatto, 2011. Music and the Idea of the North, edited with R. Cowgill and D. Russell. Farnham: Ashgate, forthcoming.

Journal Articles and Book Chapters ‘Platonis Orpheus’. Composer, 72 (Spring 1981): 11–15. ‘Music and Sociology for the 1990s: A Changing Critical Perspective’. The Musical Quarterly, 74:3 (1990): 385–410. ‘Music and Ideas: A State of Flux’ (review essay). The Musical Quarterly, 75:1 (1991): 82–92. ‘Sexuality and Musical Style from Monteverdi to Mae West’. In S. Miller, ed., The Last Post: Music after Modernism, 132–49. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993. ‘The Sexual Politics of Victorian Musical Aesthetics’. Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 119:1 (1994): 91–114.

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‘Incongruity and Predictability in British Dance-Band Music of the 1920s and 1930s’. The Musical Quarterly, 78:2 (1994): 290–315. Reprinted in A. F. Moore, ed., Critical Essays in Popular Musicology, 337–62. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2007. ‘The Jazz Age’, The Blackwell History of Music in Britain, Vol. 6. Ed. S. Banield. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995, 57–78. ‘Popular Music in the UK During the Second World War’. Popular Musicology, 2 (1995): 55–9. ‘Cultuur, politiek en de Britse nationale hymne’. Trans. M. de Bruin. In L. Grijp, ed., Nationale hymnen: Het Wilhelmus en zijn buren, 112–27. Amsterdam: SUN/Meertens Instituut, 1998. ‘Postmodernism and Music’. The Icon Critical Dictionary of Postmodern Thought. Ed. S. Sim. Cambridge: Icon Press, 1998, 134–46. Lightly revised in second edition published as The Routledge Companion to Postmodernism, 122–32. London: Routledge, 2004. Revised third edition, 2011, 182–93. ‘Orientalism and Musical Style’. The Musical Quarterly, 82:2 (1998): 309–35. Republished in Edward Said, 4 Vols, Part 3: Cultural Forms, Disciplinary Boundaries. Ed. P. Williams. London: Sage, 2000. Published in Persian, trans. by N. Chubineh, Mahoor Music Quarterly, 14:53 (2011). Earlier shorter version in Critical Musicology Journal (1997), refereed Internet journal: http://www.leeds.ac.uk/music/Info/CMJ/cmj.html ‘Music and Social Class’. In J. Samson, ed., Cambridge History of Music, 19th Century, 544–67. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. ‘Variety Performance on Stage and Film: The Dictates of Different Media’. In P. Csobádi, et al., eds, Das Musiktheater in den audiovisuellen Medien: Vorträge und Gespräche des Salzburger Symposions 1999, 133–42. Anif/Salzburg: Verlag Müller-Speiser, 2001. ‘(What’s the Copy?) The Beatles and Oasis’. Beatlestudies, 3 (Jyväskylä 2001): 201–11. ‘The Music Hall Cockney: Flesh and Blood, or Replicant?’. Music and Letters, 83:2 (May 2002): 237–58. ‘Music and Social Class in Victorian London’. Urban History, 29:1 (2002): 60–73. ‘Ideology and Musical Style’. Orbis Musicae 13, Rethinking Interpretive Traditions in Musicology. Tel Aviv: Asaph Studies in the Arts (2003): 107–115. ‘English National Identity and the Comic Operas of Gilbert & Sullivan’. In B. Zon and P. Horton, eds, Nineteenth-Century British Music Studies, Vol. 3, 137–52. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003. Earlier shorter version in P. Csobádi, et al., eds, Wort und Musik 54: Politische Mythen und nationale Identitäten im (Musik-) Theater: Vorträge und Gespräche des Salzburger Symposions 2001, Band II, 869–77. Anif/Salzburg: Verlag Müller-Speiser, 2003. ‘Bruckner’s Symphonies – A Reinterpretation’. In J. Williamson, ed. Cambridge Companion to Bruckner, 92–107. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. ‘Light Music and Easy Listening’. In N. Cook and A. Pople, eds, Cambridge History of Music, 20th Century, 307–35. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004.

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‘From the Erotic to the Demonic: Scaling the Heights and Plumbing the Depths of Musicology’, Proceedings of the 1st Annual Conference of the Society for Musicology in Ireland, ed. B. Boydell. Maynooth: SMI (2004): 1–19. ‘England’. Umbrella entry on English popular music of the past two centuries for Continuum Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World, Vol. 7 ‘Europe’, 329–40. London: Continuum, 2005. ‘The Impact of Black Performance on the 19th-Century Stage’. In P. Csobádi, et al., eds, Das (Musik)Theater in Exil und Diktatur und seine Rezeption: Vorträge und Gespräche des Salzburger Symposions 2003, 262–74. Anif/ Salzburg: Verlag Müller-Speiser, 2005. ‘Mimesis, Gesture, and Parody in Musical Word-Setting’. In J. Williamson, ed., Words and Music series, Vol. 3, 10–27. Liverpool: University of Liverpool Press, 2005. ‘The Power of Music’. In A. Blackwell and D. MacKay, eds, Power, 96–115. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005. ‘Blackface Minstrels, Black Minstrels, and Their Impact on British Popular Music’. In J. Rushton and R. Cowgill, eds, Europe, Empire and Spectacle in 19th-Century British Music, 265–80. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006. ‘In Search of Genetically Modiied Music: Race and Musical Style in the Nineteenth Century’. Nineteenth-Century Music Review, 3/1, special issue on music and race (2006): 3–23. ‘A Problem of Race in Directing Die Zauberlöte’. In J. Kühnel, U. Müller, O. Panagl, et al. eds, “ Regietheater”: Konzeption und Praxis am Beispiel der Bühnenwerke Mozarts, 338–44. Anif/Salzburg: Verlag Müller-Speiser, 2007. ‘Edward Said and the Interplay of Music, History and Ideology’. In R. Ghosh, ed., Edward Said and the Literary, Social, and Political World, 104–23. New York: Routledge, 2009. ‘Sullivan’s Demonic Tea-making Scene: Homage to Weber, or Parody?’ In U. Müller et al., eds, Die ‘Schaubühne’ in der Epoche des “Freischütz”, 1–9. Anif/Salzburg: Verlag Müller-Speiser, 2009. ‘The Popular Music Revolution in the Nineteenth Century: A Third Type of Music Arises’. In V. Kurkela and L. Väkevä, eds, De-Canonizing Music History. Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009. 3–19. ‘The Britpop Sound’. In A. Bennett and J. Stratton, eds, Britpop and the English Music Tradition. Farnham: Ashgate, 2010. ‘Music, Morality, and Rational Amusement at the Victorian Middle-Class Soirée’. In B. Zon, ed., Music and Performance Culture in Nineteenth-Century Britain: Essays in Honour of Nicholas Temperley. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. ‘Irish Nationalism, British Imperialism, and Popular Song’. In P. Fairclough, ed., Twentieth-Century Music and Politics: Essays in memory of Neil Edmunds. Farnham: Ashgate, 2012. ‘Operatic Aspirations in the Late Twentieth-Century Musical’. In H. Greenwald, ed., The Oxford Handbook of Opera. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming.

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‘Song Performance in the Early Sound Shorts of British Pathé’. In J. Brown and A. Davison, eds, Sounds of Early Cinema in Britain. New York: Oxford University Press, forthcoming. ‘Imagining the Balkans, Imagining Europe’. In A. Theodosiou, P. Poulos and R.P. Pennanen, eds, The Ottoman Past in the Balkan Present: Music and Mediation. Papers and Monographs of the Finnish Institute at Athens, forthcoming. ‘La révolution des musiques populaires au xixe siècle’. Trans. Olivier Julien, Musurgia, forthcoming.

Short Works Six entries for the New Grove Dictionary of Women Composers, J. A. Sadie and R. Samuel, eds. London: Macmillan, 1994. Entry on Charlotte Alington Barnard for the revised New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. London: Macmillan, 2001. 61 bibliographic entries and 15 subject entries of varying length on blues, folk, chanson, country, and critical musicology for the Danish Musik Leksikon, 2 vols, F. Gravesen & M. Knakkergaard, eds. Copenhagen: Gads Forlag, 2003. Nine articles (Stanley Black, Al Bowlly, Michael Carr, Robert Farnon, Josef Locke, Anne Shelton, Victor Silvester, Dickie Valentine, Lawrence Wright) for the new Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. Oxford University Press, 2004–8. Two articles (Gilbert & Sullivan, Music Halls). In S. Mumm, ed., The Greenwood Encyclopedia of Love, Courtship, and Sexuality Through History, Vol. 5: The Nineteenth Century, 93–94, 163–65. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2008.

Chapter 1 ‘Great, Scott!’ Stan Hawkins (Editor)

‘It Was a Dream’ bears many Cowen ingerprints: it is in common time; the tempo is fairly slow; the refrain begins softly and ends loudly; the verse is in the minor, the refrain the tonic major; it makes use of pedal points and his favourite chromatic chords, the diminished seventh and augmented sixth; it features his favourite dominant extension, the dominant ninth; the rate of harmonic change is a basic two chords per bar; there are no ‘literal’ descriptive effects in the accompaniment; the latter has no real independence, being composed of chords given rhythmic impetus in a variety of simple ways such as by repeating, rocking, and spreading. Of course, many of these features are part of a common ‘ballad language’; they may all, for instance, be found in Frederic Clay’s ‘She Wandered Down the Mountainside’. But the number of times all of these features reappear together in Cowen’s ballads (and they usually include a prominent modulation to the mediant as well) does seem to indicate a feeling on his part that he needed to conform to certain procedures in order to ensure success in the rapidly expanding market.1 Here is a list of Orientalist devices, many of which can be applied indiscriminately as markers of cultural difference: whole tones; Aeolian, Dorian, but especially the Phrygian mode; augmented seconds and fourths (especially with Lydian or Phrygian inlexions); arabesques and ornamented lines; elaborate ‘Ah!’ melismas for voice; sliding or sinuous chromaticism (for example, ‘snaking’ downward on cor anglais); trills and dissonant grace notes; rapid scale passages (especially of an irregular it, e.g., eleven notes to be played in the time of two crotchets); a melody that suddenly shifts to notes of shorter value; abrupt juxtapositions of romantic, lyrical tunes and busy, energetic passages; repetitive rhythms (Ravel’s Boléro is an extreme case of rhythmic insistence) and repetitive small-compass melodies; ostinati; ad libitum sections (colla parte, senza tempo, etc.); use of triplets in duple time; complex or irregular rhythms; parallel movement in fourths, ifths, and octaves (especially in the woodwinds); bare ifths; drones and pedal points; ‘magic’ or ‘mystic’ chords (which possess uncertainty of duration and/or harmonic direction); harp arpeggios and glissandi (RimskyKorsakov changes the connotation of the harp with a mythical past to one of 1

Scott (1989), p. 148.

Critical Musicological Relections

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Oriental exoticism); double reeds (oboe and especially cor anglais); percussion (especially tambourine, triangle, cymbals, and gong); emphatic rhythmic igures on unpitched percussion (such as tom-toms, tambourine, and triangle). […] Whether or not any of the musical devices and processes listed in this paragraph exist in any Eastern ethnic practices is almost irrelevant.2 Minstrelsy was the catalyst for the unbridgeable rift between popular and art song in the nineteenth century. Before blackface minstrelsy, popular song had often been seen as diluted art song, but now there appeared a kind of song, especially in the 1840s, that seemed to some the antithesis of art song – which is not to say it was not enjoyed, even by some of those who concurred with that estimation. In the early twentieth century, blackface was absorbed into British variety entertainment in the shape of performers like G. H. Chirgwin, Eugene Stratton, and G. H. Elliott. There were some British women, too, who had shown themselves not averse to blacking up, such as May Henderson. Later blackface emerged in ilm – in the irst talkie, indeed, starring Al Jolson. […] Looking back on how all this has come about, you may be embarrassed by the role played by minstrelsy, or be offended by minstrels, or despise minstrelsy, but you cannot ignore its impact on popular music.3

Eloquently painted, these analytic cameos illustrate in quite extraordinary ways how music acquires its meaning. In paying tribute to Derek Scott’s contribution to music research, the chapters assembled in this collection intend to prompt an appraisal of the development of critical musicology and a relection on the various positions now established in our ield. How far have we come since Joseph Kerman’s call for change in the early 1980s, especially in the aftermath of his views on formalism and positivism? There is no mistaking that the paths taken by musicologists during the past thirty years have wended their way through new conceptions, interactions, and skirmishes. The signiicant changes in musicology during the closing years of the twentieth century resulted in the establishment of new approaches that probed the social and cultural relevance of music within a media-saturated political context. All of the authors in this volume form part of a general paradigmatic shift that took place in musicology from the 1990s onwards, and, in paying tribute to Derek Scott’s achievements, we share a common mission, namely that of interrogating the methods and traditions that have inluenced our discipline. During the 1980s changes in direction were shaped by the rejection of positivist and archive-based historiographies. At the same time, the discourses of mass culture, especially as relected in Marxist perspectives on modernism and ‘proletarian’ cultures, were problematized and reconigured. In 1990 an article by Derek 2 3

Scott (2003), pp. 174–5. Scott (2008), pp. 169–70.

‘Great, Scott!’

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Scott, ‘Music and Sociology for the 1990s’, appeared in The Musical Quarterly, asserting that the ‘prevailing climate of cultural relativism’ now needed to change. Scott’s plea for a better understanding of our culture in all its convoluted forms and guises meant tackling the assumptions surrounding the Western canon and the self-imposed value systems that had divided the high from the low. Scott would also question the ‘cultural fall’ sensed by some musicologists in the demise of a common heritage. Looking forward, Scott also glanced back reminding us that ‘art music’ criticism had been part of the agenda for ethnomusicologists, sociologists and music anthropologists for decades. Critical musicology in the UK, led by Scott and others, took little time to gather momentum due to a frustration shared by many about the ‘amount of time consumed in the futile search for an underlying coherent theory by which modernism could be rationally explained and understood’.4 At this juncture, Scott would also insist that the ‘ambitions of modernist music towards internationalism have been overtaken by rock, which has already become a more widely accepted international musical language’.5 Characteristic of the approach he advocated is a detailed critique of Western music history, whose narrative too often articulated a single culture with universal values. Spanning two centuries, a linear paradigm of music history had generated a practice of exclusion and marginalization bound up with ‘ideal typical’ views of music and composers wherein theoretical constructs were supposedly veriied by empirical evidence and seldom challenged.6 Thus, one of Scott’s foremost contentions would centre on music’s autonomous status in the wake of modernism. Systematically, he would unpack the discourse of art and aesthetics as laid down by Adorno, whose inluence profoundly shaped the course of musicology in the second half of the twentieth century. With the collapse of modernist idealism towards the close of the twentieth century, then, Scott’s work in the early 1990s made space for different aesthetic values and ideological judgments around music. If there has been one main agenda of critical musicology it has been the dismantling of the canon, its formation and the set of ideological values that have historically legitimated its study. During the late 1980s it would dawn on numerous musicologists that canons were not exclusive to classical or ‘art’ music, but also inherent within the ‘popular’, especially jazz, pop and rock music;7 canon formation, after all, is about cultural groupings of people who exert considerable power during the process of myth-making. Marcia Citron frames this as follows: 4

Scott (1990), p. 400. Ibid. 6 See Philip Gossett’s critique (1989) of Dahlhaus’s analytic methods especially in his relation to Max Weber’s approach. 7 Somewhat paradoxically, in his championing of a musicology that extended beyond formalism and positivism, Kerman exhibited little interest in non-Western and popular music, and thus failed to address the inextricable ties that existed between ethnomusicology and musicology. See Middleton (1990) for a major study into the political economy of popular music in relation to music analysis, semiology, aesthetics and ideology. 5

Critical Musicological Relections

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‘Universality, neutrality, and immutability: dificult myths to counter or even recognize as such, especially since the interests represented in a canon are generally content to let those myths stand’.8 Those of us entering the academy as teachers, researchers and students during the early 1990s discerned a decentring and deconstruction not only of the supercanons of ‘art’ music, but also of musicology’s own disciplinary identity.9 Aware of the pitfalls that had ensnared our predecessors, some of us felt compelled to open up the ield, modifying its methods and ideologies in a way that signiied something more than just the ‘new’. Perhaps the main driving force was to challenge a theoretical handling of the classics through formal analysis, the chief object of critique in Kerman’s 1980 article, ‘How We Got Into Analysis, and How to Get Out’. By the 1990s an upheaval in musicological practice was in full swing, with pioneering work emanating in the ield of gender, cultural politics, sexuality and subjectivity. Rising to Kerman’s call for a paradigm shift, a handful of scholars managed to rock the Establishment.10 Nobody can dispute critical musicology’s different moorings. Introduced irst by Kerman,11 the term ‘critical musicology’ not only designated directions in musicology that could accommodate neglected areas, but also referred to new ways of thinking that confronted the practice of music analysis and its positivistic status. In a bid to consider new ways of analysing popular music, Allan Moore claimed that both ‘new musicology’ and ‘critical musicology’ were ‘marked not only by the dissatisfaction with the methods (including conventional analysis) employed to undertake such a study, but also by dissatisfactions with the exclusive divisions into which musicology falls’ (Moore 2003, p. 4–5). Lawrence Kramer, who, in his introduction to Critical Musicology and the Responsibility of Response, points out that the new musicology was a term ‘only valuable as a mark of what seemed new at one time’, provides another spin on this.12 Later, in his Interpreting Music, Citron (1993), p. 22. For an insightful and critical discussion of the institutionalisation of music scholarship, with all its complex changes and disciplinary developments, see Korsyn (2003). In particular Korsyn critiques research as an institutional discourse, and, in line with Derek Scott and others, advocates change by modifying the ways in which we conceptualise disciplinary identities. 10 Susan McClary’s (1991) Feminine Endings, Carolyn Abbate’s (1991) Unsung Voices, and Lawrence Kramer’s (1990) Music as Cultural Practice are three seminal texts that would help pave the way forward for critical musicologists in a climate of scepticism and hostility. Notably, Ruth Solie’s later edited anthology, Musicology and Difference (1993), signiicantly contributed to expanding the discipline and decentring the canon of masterworks. 11 See Kerman (1985). Kerman’s position has been extensively problematized by numerous scholars in relation to the distinction between music theory and musicology. The controversy associated with New Musicology and Kerman’s sceptical conception of theory and analysis in the 1990s is taken up by Cook and Everist (1999), pp. v–xii. 12 Kramer (2006), p. x. 8

9

‘Great, Scott!’

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Kramer would assert: ‘Probably the best name for what has been called (used to be called?) ‘the new musicology’ is the term that developed contemporaneously in Britain amid similar though not identical concerns: critical musicology’.13 Predicated upon political and ideological differences, the trends that shaped critical musicology in the UK during the 1990s might well seem obvious today, and its struggles little more than a storm in a tea-cup. Yet during this period numerous musicologists were compelled to activate the term ‘critical’ in order to challenge entrenched traditions and established practices. Scholars with afiliations to ethnomusicology, popular music studies, sociology, psychology, gender studies, music semiotics and ilm theory, congregated for the irst time out of a willingness to engage with music research based on an inclusive epistemological position. Those working in UK institutions pushed for a more interdisciplinary approach that accommodated a broad-based network of values and interests. As Scott puts it, we were ‘united in agreement that one of the biggest problems that faced musicology was the collapse of the binary divide between the popular and the classical’.14 In the wake of a conference organized by Allan Moore and Charles Ford at Ealing in July 1992 – ‘Popular Music: the Primary Text’ – the idea was irst hatched to form a series of meetings, resulting in an oficial inauguration in the form of a conference entitled ‘Good-bye, Great Music!’ held at the University of Salford, Manchester, UK in 1995. Organized by Scott, who had recently been appointed head of department at Salford, this event was attended by over seventy delegates from thirty different universities in Europe and North America, with the goal of tackling the problems of our canon. The time felt ripe for new theoretical incursions into musicology; with the erosion of the high/low aesthetic binarism, epistemological approaches would now open up for a diverse range of music practices. At one of the early meetings held at Shefield University, UK, in 1993, we presented the following charter, composed on behalf of a critical musicology that might engage with: 1. social, political and cultural processes that inform the arguments surrounding musical practice within a new historical context, by avoiding teleological assumptions attached to meta-narratives; 2. aspects of critical theory necessary for the analysis of the values and meanings that are linked to the musical text; 3. issues of class, gender and race in music by addressing the dimensions of production, reception and positioning of the Subject; 4. problematics of canonicity, universality, aesthetic hierarchy and textual immanence, with reference to the binary divide between the classical and the popular;

13 14

Kramer (2011), p. 64. Scott (2003), p. 5.

Critical Musicological Relections

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5. studies of different cultures in terms of their own speciic and relevant social values with a focus on the diversity of musical forms; 6. questions relating music to political, anthropological, philosophical, psychoanalytical and sexual discourses in an attempt to recognize meaning as intertextual; 7. explorations of the multiplicity of music’s contemporary functions and meanings, with particular emphasis on the evolution of new technologies within late twentieth-century post-capitalist cultures.15 Adumbrated by these seven points were two overarching concerns: irst, to search for procedures capable of instigating a more accommodating framework for music research, and, second, to uncover the meanings and myths embedded in musical texts. It is worth emphasizing the start of popular music degree courses around this time,16 which brought together musicologists and pedagogues alike keen on including the study of the ‘popular’ within their curricula. Fusing the ‘critical’ with the ‘popular’ and the ‘classical’ entailed developing a wide variety of strategies for understanding musical meaning. Critiquing the existing body of analytic methods and criticism would also result in a focus on music traditionally left out of the canon. Gradually, the genres and styles linked to commerce, entertainment and leisure would gain more ground with the burgeoning of popular music studies and its links with ethnomusicology.17 In retrospect, it seems reasonable to say that critical musicology prompted some of us to rethink our discipline and to accommodate the study of different cultures and subjectivities in terms of their unique cultural values and ideological dimensions. In his introduction to From the Erotic to the Demonic (2003), published almost ten years after the ‘critical musicology’ manifesto, Scott placed emphasis on the need to theorize both musical practice and music historiography. Drawing on the work of theorists inside and outside musicology, he teased out his own deinition of ideology by excavating the erotic representations found in Monteverdi, African15

Scott and Hawkins (1994), p. 3. For an in-depth discussion of these points, see Hawkins (2002), pp. 25–9, as well as Scott’s later work, in which he mobilizes ten questions relevant to approaching the ideological dimensions of musical evaluation (Scott 2003, pp. 6–7). 16 See Scott (2009), pp. 1–21. Scott regards popular musicology as ‘a branch or subset of critical musicology that has tended, for the most part, to interest itself in one particular area more than others, that of the music industry, its output and its audiences’ (p. 2). The sheer diversity of popular musicology means that there is ‘no one party line’. For this reason it might be considered ‘a post-disciplinary ield in the breadth of its theoretical formulations and its objects of study’ (ibid.). 17 Mention should be made of Steve Sweeney-Turner, one of the irst critical musicologists in the UK, who founded the transdisciplinary online journal, Critical Musicology, hosted by the School of Music, University of Leeds. He was also instrumental in the early days of the online journal Popular Musicology Online, and as well as a member of the editorial panel he was the Internet editor, responsible for its design logo and layout.

‘Great, Scott!’

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American music practices, Orientalism, European classical music (Bruckner, Liszt) and British dance band music. Preoccupied with the mediation of metaphysical ideas through music, Scott explored the communication of meaning through stylistic structures set within a framework of sociomusicological theory. Wary of the arbitrary nature of the musical sign, Scott, in line with other critical musicologists, has been concerned with social and cultural semiotics extending beyond ‘the music itself’. Grounded in close readings of remarkable historical rigor, his studies have meticulously tried and tested the workings of ideology in music reception and interpretation. Music, Scott has repeatedly claimed, is never isolated in its own structural construction and formal features; rather, it is constructed upon the signifying practices that directly impinge on those spaces and places where we feel we belong. Recognizing the conditions placed on individual agency is a necessary step towards understanding music as a cultural trope. This raises the issue of the gendering of music and Otherness.18 In Feminine Endings, published in 1991, Susan McClary argued that musical structures and forms are never gender-free. Rather, they are heavily coded narratives. If Western performance and composition have marginalized the feminine, then music has been a gendered practice. Debating the sexual politics of music has had far-reaching consequences in the academy (on a scale McClary herself may not have imagined). Despite mixed responses, the idea of rethinking musicology through an interdisciplinary methodology oriented toward gender has steadily gained momentum.19 McClary has also acknowledged that her personal involvement in cultural criticism had spurred her to discard a ‘life-long prejudice against popular music’.20 Considering the accessibility of minimalist styles, groove-based rhythms, blatantly repetitive melodies, simple harmonies and lush tonality, she has consistently stressed that postmodern eclecticism is as valid as anything found in classical and modern art music. And, while modernism might have staked its strongest claims on art music, postmodernism’s turn (or moment of disruption) occurred in a context where the devices of performance and composition could be decidedly more pleasurable than the modernist norm. The absence of modernist complexity in much avant-garde postmodern music eventually culminated in a reversal of conventional closure, drawing musical styles and attitudes into new dialectical territories. Without doubt, McClary’s linking of the postmodern avant-garde with popular music inds a resonance in Scott’s work. By foregrounding Adorno and

For another anthology of essays that was ground-breaking in opening up the debates around music, gender and sexuality, see Brett et al. (1994). 19 Interpreting the music and performance practices of composers such as Laurie Anderson, Philip Glass, John Zorn, Madonna and Prince, McClary argued for the convergence of the avant-garde and popular culture (McClary 2000). Also see McClary (1989). 20 McClary (2007), ‘Introduction’, p. xi. 18

Critical Musicological Relections

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Foucault, both scholars expose the conceptual apparatus on which the hierarchical structures of the Western canon were grounded. In a vein similar to McClary’s and Scott’s, Kramer has made the argument that music was traditionally used to reinforce the autonomous subject while excluding the Other; the masculine subject, for example, becomes empowered musically by the formal (but precarious) subordination of the sensuality associated with the feminine. Similarly, Richard Leppert’s research into music as a sociopolitical form has drawn on connections between image and musical representation. His study of the iconography of pianos and pianists, and of their links with domestic economy, has illuminated music’s signifying function in sexualizing (and controlling the sexuality of) women.21 Leppert, too, contributed to critical musicology in the 1990s by theorizing music’s power as a social, and speciically a gendered, agency. In the main, then, critical musicologists have recognized the centrality of gender and sexual politics, insisting that the traditional assumptions we are accustomed to need to be challenged and redeined. Since the early 1990s a critique of gendered authorship has veriied that the authorial voice, and, moreover, the authorial performer, is central to music scholarship. The strategy of écriture, in Roland Barthes’s sense of “writing” as an intransitive verb, raises questions about the author’s body and privilege in determining the meaning, not only of the text, but also of the subject positions of the reader(s), or, in this case, the listeners.22 Identifying the encoding of gender through music changes traditional views of the canon, as the work carried out by critical musicologists exempliies. New perspectives are never without their staunch critics. In 1997, a short article appeared in The Journal of Musicology by Koi Agawu, which highlighted a concern over the trends found in New Musicology.23 Agawu claimed that Kramer’s enumeration read like a manifesto and was the ‘single most forthright statement’24 on New Musicology he had come across. He admitted that it was dificult to oppose Kramer’s proposal from the perspective of music theory, a discipline ‘constituted in large measure by practicing analysts’. He would, nonetheless, declare the aims of theory and New Musicology to be ‘fundamentally incompatible’.25 For Agawu, McClary’s analysis of the ‘narrative agenda’ in Brahms’s Third Symphony, for instance, ignored the ‘surplus of detail’ that theory-based analysis demonstrated. Agawu’s grievance, in a nutshell, was that the New Musicology had bypassed the bulk of innovative work in the discipline of theory and ethnomusicology through its very mission to be ‘new’:

See Leppert (1988). See Barthes (1983). 23 Agawu’s response (1997) was prompted by Ellen Rosand’s presidential address at the 1994 American Musicological Society, during which she had noted the prevalence of ‘new approaches’ to music and the critical enterprise of New Musicology. 24 Agawu (1997), p. 300. 25 Ibid., p. 301. 21

22

‘Great, Scott!’

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New musicologists’ failure to acknowledge this work does not, of course, deny it a place in the discourses of the musical sciences. It only testiies to a willed amnesia on their part, a necessary strategy, perhaps, for redrawing the boundaries of the musical disciplines.26

By referring to a group of ‘more innovative’ (predominantly male) scholars outside the New Musicology enclave, Agawu pointedly chose to align himself with them in a search for ‘a new and improved approach to analysis’ that could escape the practices the New Musicologists had set up.27 Paradoxically, his reservations were in many ways congruent with those of the ‘new musicologists’ he was criticizing, especially in renouncing the rigidity of formalism and modernist idealism in favour of a strategy that would foster new visions within our discipline. Agawu’s position also highlighted many of the same issues that ethnomusicologists had experienced for decades. Similar concerns would be taken up by Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist in their preface to Rethinking Music (1999). What was required, they would insist, was not so much new analytic methods and tools as an acknowledgment that ‘no inal, universally applicable decision on the matter is possible or even desirable’.28 In the wake of Kerman’s claim that ‘criticism cannot proceed as though history did not exist’,29 Cook and Everist urged music scholars to move forward by grappling more fully with the issue of autonomy and the intricate relationship between formalism and hermeneutics. If Kerman’s intention was to prod us into reconiguring musicology by pointing out the pitfalls of positivism behind historical and music analysis, then he succeeded, especially by encouraging us to reconsider the discipline’s autonomy and to embrace more complex perspectives.30 The collection of chapters in this Festschrift represents a myriad of complementary positions. Over the years, all the authors have had some afiliation with Derek Scott’s work, and, accordingly, the chapters all relect on and interpret the historical, sociological and ideological ties between performance and compositional practice. Although the contributors engage in heuristics via greatly differing positions, 26

Ibid., p. 304. Ibid., p. 307. It is worth noting that many of the younger music analysts Agawu referred to would later embrace the very practices and theories Agawu himself was attempting to avert. 28 Cook and Everist (1999), p. xi. 29 Kerman (1980), p. 329. 30 The use of re- (in rethinking) is not without its concerns either. Leo Treitler raises a pertinent observation that the preix re- (just as the word ‘new’) implies a narrative ‘of oppression followed by liberation’, which is at the base of ‘an ethos of exhilaration in newfound freedoms’ (1999, p. 356). Treitler sees the re- of thinking as redundant if ‘serious historiographical principles’ have not been relected upon from the outset: ‘It is not so much a matter of ‘rethinking’ the historiography of music as of thinking it’ (ibid.). 27

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styles and idioms, their contributions are nonetheless bonded by the common enterprise of accounting for what music communicates. Dealing explicitly with musical performance, Antoine Hennion in Chapter 8 explores the domain of virtuosity. Revisiting many of the assumptions that govern the distinctions between classical music and the popular – particularly lamenco and jazz – Hennion sets out to distinguish different approaches to virtuosity in a way that problematizes the aesthetics of virtuosity itself. Arguing that it is possible to restore virtuosity’s ability to express a certain ‘truth’, namely that of writing, that goes beyond the opposition between the popular and the serious, Hennion directs our focus to the compositional qualities of a work. The merit of his study lies in its illumination of performance practices across a variety of genres within a mobile cultural context. Virtuosity, in its many guises, surfaces as a common theme throughout this collection. Richard Leppert in Chapter 7 addresses its associations with musical excess. Relecting on a range of socio-visual typologies of such excess, Leppert probes the notions of somatic materiality and decentred Selfhood through carefully selected examples; these serve to illustrate how musicologists have envisaged and constructed notions of musical aesthetics over the years. Leppert insists that it is music’s pleasure (as much as its pain) that provides an account of our world. This idea is developed by conjoining readings of piano portraits with thoughts on the immaterial materiality of musical sound. Underpinning Leppert’s critique is the concept of performance, which leads to a critical appraisal of concert programming. This also constitutes the core of Vesa Kurkela’s study in Chapter 5, where an investigation of concert programmes in Helsinki from the 1830s to the end of the century produces a range of thought-provoking results. In his discussion of how this city followed trends developed in continental and Western metropolises, Kurkela points out that the Classical canon and symphonic repertoire was not established in Helsinki until the 1870s, when several symphonic works were regularly performed by local theatre orchestras. While ‘serious’ music concerts, often with a national lavour, were abundantly reported in local newspapers, they were nevertheless infrequent. By the 1880s and 1890s, the new permanent symphony orchestra and military bands would not only serve pleasure-seeking bourgeois audiences through the mode of ‘popular concerts’, but also they would cater to lower-class audiences, the intention being to ‘civilize’ and educate them. Turning to a similar period, albeit in a different geographical space, Franco Fabbri in Chapter 11 reminds us that during the nineteenth century many positivist musicologists treated genres as living entities. Biological metaphors pertaining to life – birth, infancy, growth, maturity, death – would subsequently be abandoned in the wake of the hegemony of formalist musicology. Fabbri argues that genres have nonetheless survived, are lourishing today, and are detectable in the discursive domains of musicians, critics, fans, concert promoters, record industry executives, sales people, web designers, and so forth. Fabbri’s inal prognosis is

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apprehensive though: while the evolution of genres is of historical signiicance, it has not received suficient attention within musicology. In the wake of the ideas aired by Hennion, Leppert, and Fabbri, Lawrence Kramer in Chapter 14 proceeds to scrutinize musical performance as a historical precipitate. Demonstrating how instrumentalists before the early nineteenth century were understood as ‘executants’, Kramer identiies their task as reproducing and embellishing the notes in a score. It is signiicant that contemporary reviewers of Haydn and Beethoven assumed the identity of performance and composition by concentrating almost entirely on the latter. By the mid-nineteenth century, however, performers aspired to being artists and personalities and accordingly unleashed performances that ranged (in Scott’s phrase) from the erotic to the demonic. Within a vibrant historical context, Kramer, like Leppert and Hennion, throws new light on virtuosity as a cultural practice of excess, turning his attention to the cult status of Liszt and Chopin. From this standpoint he raises issues concerning the problematic emergence of the ‘popular’ and ‘cultivated’. Underpinning Kramer’s critique is a suspicion of the universalist assumptions and patterns of hegemony that have inluenced traditional musicology, which, as Nicholas Cook suggests in Chapter 12, can be problematized through intercultural analysis. Advocating an approach that spotlights those particular musical features that activate intercultural sense-making, together with the resulting experiences that result, Cook emphasizes the role of performance; relational musicology, he argues, highlights intercultural reconciliation. His focus is on two original nonWestern examples, the Chinese long zither (qin) repertoire and the Hindostannie air, the latter employed to exemplify relational musicology in action. Underlying this study is an attempt to position relational musicology alongside developments in ethnomusicology, sociology, and aesthetics, with Cook situating intercultural analysis as a performative transaction. To varying degrees, all the chapters in this volume deal with subjectivities, individual agency, and cultural organization. After all, these are the things that critical musicological inquiry is all about. Lucy Green’s contribution in Chapter 3 moulds a discussion around the individual’s acquisition of a musical identity that transforms over time. Given that musical identities are formed at the junction of the personal and the collective, they entail a set of tastes, values, and practices, which, in turn, are connected to knowledge and skills. This raises a set of questions as to how music is learned and taught. One of Green’s salient points deals with the interface between musical identity, teaching and learning. This she proceeds to map against patterns of globalization, especially with respect to ‘world music’, arguing that this somewhat dubious generic category belies an interest in protecting local, traditional and national musical forms. Music education and its practice need to be receptive to both global and local musical practices that, in turn, can spark innovative musical pedagogies. The success of such an approach, Green suggests, requires a study of the cultural moulding of sound and its reception. In Chapter 6, Peter Wicke scrutinizes the systems and rules governing sound and its production. This involves the cultural documenting of ‘tone’, employing

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an analogy that reaches far beyond metaphor. Just as digital storage media entails formatting, so ‘tone’ stores the human interactions that produce what we know as music. Addressing the gradual dissolution of the connection between sound and human subjectivity through a close reading of Björk’s vocality, Wicke discovers how the voice can distance the listener by means of an ambiguity that manifests the digital reformatting of sound through the mediation of music-making. What emanates from this study is a careful consideration of those features of cultural production that directly affect our understanding of musical activity and its values. Wicke’s study certainly prompts a number of snapshots from other scholastic directions in the guise of a Renaissance madrigal, a Schubert string quartet and a commercial pop song by Madonna. In Chapter 2, Susan McClary does just this by promoting a wealth of interpretive approaches that direct musicological research toward the subjective qualities mediated by music at different moments in European and North American history. Congruent with other studies found in this volume, McClary’s strategy is to locate a range of diverse elements hermeneutically as a means to interpreting contemporaneous verbal sources or visual images. A principal tenet here is that music powerfully charts the domains of emotion that shape human experiences of selfhood. Music analysis and subjectivity are also part of Charles Ford’s circumspect study of Bob Dylan’s solo work between 1958 and 1964 (Chapter 10). Basing his account on a rhythmic analysis of 410 performances, Ford turns to speciic songs to show how each of them realizes one of ive levels of irregularity. Dylan’s intuitive rhythms, Ford insists, highlighted his need for a musical idiom that constituted a polemic against the slickness of Hollywood and Tin Pan Alley. Situated on the fringes of commercial mainstream pop, Dylan, through his rhythmic ingenuity, offered up a new dimension in the aesthetics of musical time that perfectly served the burgeoning hippie ideology of the day. The analytic methods employed in Ford’s contribution are not dissimilar to those of Allan Moore. In Chapter 13 Moore sets out to inspect spatial location in popular song recordings, an area of study crying out for more analytic attention. Combining music analysis with the development of a hermeneutic strategy stemming from a UK research council project, Moore turns to the British band The Feeling to give an account of how their music functions, and, more importantly, how it feels. Moore’s methodology is to interpret the ‘performer–persona–protagonist triple’ as manifested by the band’s lead singer Dan Gillespie Sells. Building upon his earlier theoretical position31 on listening competence, Moore considers the necessity of incorporating notions of subjectivity into the interpretive realm of his argument as he conceptualizes, via recording, the pop artist in an ‘intimate zone’. Approaching the intricacies of recording from quite another direction, John Richardson is also drawn to issues of subjectivity and music analysis. In Chapter 9, Richardson ponders the affective character, mood and tone of two bands, The Blue Nile and Sigur Rós. This prompts an in-depth conceptualization of the 31

See, for example, Moore (2001).

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disaffected acoustic imaginary. Adopting a post-Jamesonian position, Richardson contemplates how digital aesthetics iniltrate musical production in luid ways that redeine the sets of relationships between individuals and communities. A central objective in this study is to devise methodological tools for music criticism, the necessary basis for any reassessment of what we understand as ‘cultural critique’. The inventive method implemented by Richardson in his close readings takes into account the impact of technology in contemporary life, not least in the form of recent acoustic-oriented music at the fringe of mainstream pop.32 David Cooper, whose background includes ilm music analysis and contemporary music interpretation, presents a variety of perspectives in Chapter 4 that involve an axis of relationships between musical events of contrasting densities and the blurred, imaginary borders between them. Arguing that the semantic potential of Béla Bartók’s music is encoded through culturally acquired meanings and syntactic structure, Cooper questions whether it is possible to conceive of a rapprochement among recent activities in musical semantics, whereby music may be retrieved from its traditional self-containment in order to expose many other meanings. Cooper excavates a number of interpretative discrepancies that arise from existing musicological scholarship on Bartók’s opera, Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. Critical of his own strategies in reading Bartók’s music, Cooper relects on the potential danger of music analysis emasculating and normalizing the very music it seeks to elucidate. Uniting all the contributors in this volume is a common disciplinary concern. To underline an earlier point, musicological excursions into subjectivity, gender and sexual politics in the early 1990s were symptomatic of the transition from a high modernist position (to which classical music was supposed to defer) into spaces and environments inluenced by changing identities and the contradiction of market pressures. In hindsight it is not that paradoxical that numerous scholars of popular music in the 1990s should adhere to Adorno’s concept of mediation, which was based on the aesthetic properties and dialectics of Reason attached to autonomous art.33 And with this we return to the central concept of critical musicology: that social, political, and cultural contexts in music performance and composition are never ixed. Put differently, the musical environments we encounter abound with multiple meanings and variable mediations. Music’s mediation is aestheticized as an integral part of its socialization. In Music, Culture, and Society (2000), a volume edited by Scott and published a few years after the ‘Good-bye, Great Music!’ conference, three-dozen abbreviated chapters are grouped together thematically to endorse the study of music’s cultural For an extension of many of these debates within an audiovisual context, see Richardson (2011). 33 For instance, Antoine Hennion, one of the forerunners of popular music studies scholarship, initiated a signiicant theoretical breakthrough in an earlier article that extended Adorno’s work on mediation, insisting that all forms of music are based upon clearly deined intermediaries. See Hennion (1997). 32

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signiicance and social meanings. Undercutting the standard idea that modernism had ‘disintegrated into irrationality, failure, and irrelevance’,34 the writings in this collection seek to counter the neglect of composers, performers and artists who were not part of the ‘linear modernist account of the dissolution of tonality’.35 Scott’s position on this is crystal clear: that the cause for this neglect lay in a failure to comprehend the historic, social, economic, and psychological conditions that affected the output of composers in the modern period. Issues relating to reception, audiences, and commissioning bodies have been marginalized as part of a larger disregard for socioeconomic issues in music historiography. Over the years Scott has helped open up the ield in a way that engages with the ‘multiplicity of music’s contemporary functions and meanings’, suggesting new musicological approaches.36 Inevitably, any musicological pursuit requires a range of methodologies that offer up possibilities for interrogating ideological assumptions. To this end, Scott would set about demonstrating how his methods, when mapped onto speciic musical examples, could remedy the imbalances in the canon. One case in point is his study of African American performances as mapped against the European classical music traditions of the 1920s. This takes into account a marginalized, indeed stigmatized, group whose music-making was misconstrued, if not downright dismissed, at the time. Pertinent to this study is a critique of jazz from the vantage point of European classical composers in the early twentieth century. Scott’s narrative on the impact of jazz’s invasion of Europe after the First World War exposes the stereotypical perceptions of Africa and Africans. As he claims, it was around the 1920s that ‘the continent of Africa would be typically characterized by African-American jazz and the typical image of an African would be of a black-skinned person who lived in the hot jungle areas’.37 Jazz subsequently emerged proudly as a dominant popular form in Europe, with visits by the thousands of both black and white Americans to the continent – a historical fact that prompts critical insights into the matter of performance practice and appropriation. Scott argues that improvisation, a prime device in jazz, would be trivialized by proponents of the European classical tradition. This depreciation was a consequence of not recognizing the intrinsic values of improvisation as a compositional and performance-based structuring device. Of course European classical composers’ wariness of spontaneity in musical expression (and the non-notational aspects of jazz) underlined quite another problem, the suspicion of the Other, which arose from ‘the perceived physical quality of black music making’ and its potential destabilizing of the ‘reined and disciplined art music tradition’.38 In line with 34 35 36 37 38

Scott (2000), p. 11. Ibid., p. 14. Scott (2003), p. 5. Ibid., p. 180. Ibid., p. 201.

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Kramer’s discourse on the cultural anxieties surrounding blackness and the body,39 Scott sets the cultural and ethnic qualities of African American jazz within a broad European social context. He demonstrates that rigid musical practices are always constructed, and therefore continuously in need of re-construction. Thus, the evaluation of cultural Otherness in music, during a long historical stretch, has meant revealing how things have been represented through the misappropriation of jazz. Historiographical in its focus, Scott’s work is decidedly interpretive. His vigorous engagement with musical detail, historical event and cultural context indicates how subjectivity is an undeniable outgrowth of these things. If personal agency is bound up in the communicative processes of historically oriented forms, then subjectivity becomes mirrored in music and other forms of artistic expression for both their producers and their recipients. Comprehending this alerts us to the intricacies of subjectivity and its manifestations in the speciic responses of historical actors. Scott’s discourse thus underscores the conviction that neither cultural values nor styles and genres are ever static. In Sounds of the Metropolis,40 we learn that the stylistic revolution in modern popular music was driven by nineteenth-century social changes – dance trends in Vienna, minstrelsy in New York, the cabaret scene of Paris, and the music hall tradition of London. Mainstream musical trends in the nineteenth century all precipitated changes that would affect the entire twentieth century and beyond. Somewhat ironically, the ‘popular’ supplied its critics with the necessary ammunition to denounce the musical qualities of speciic styles that could be deemed ‘merely’ facile, trivial or simply entertaining. As I have already suggested, the critical part of Scott’s musicological theory lies in his preoccupation with interpretation and analysis. This becomes discernible through the various comparative studies in Sounds of the Metropolis that exhibit an intricate level of relection and expressive analytic action; the result brings to the fore the social and political tendencies that surround the styles, tastes and values of popular music. In the main, Scott’s trajectory canvases a wealth of facts, music examples, secondary sources, ilms, recordings and sheet music. Extending well beyond the historical facts into contexts that require rigorous critical response, Scott admirably fulils the combined role of historian, music analyst, sociologist and cultural theorist.41 His perspectives on the popular music revolution emerge as socially signiicant in a setting where musical meaning becomes far more than a bargaining chip.42 In rejecting the essentialization of ‘music as object’, Scott employs a method of Kramer (1996, 2002, Chapter 9). Scott (2008). 41 For another comparative study based around a historical sociomusical approach, see Weber (2008). 42 Also see Scott (1989/2001). 39

40

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‘thick description’ (also promulgated by Gary Tomlinson in one of his earlier essays43) that considers musical genre as a codiication of creative actions. He picks out the music hall Cockney, who traverses three different phases between the 1840s and the 1890s and suggests ‘a replication of an already-existing representation’.44 This idea alone prises open a range of pertinent questions: How does music relect shifts in social groups? In what ways does music hall style touch on the aesthetics of its time? And how are notions of authenticity forged through the agency and form of the ‘real’ Cockney? Resulting from this judicious study is a sophisticated survey of the social practices and contexts in which music is produced. Working out the values of a musical heritage entails a sustained and lexible approach to interpretation. The following extract bears this out: The inluence of African-American styles of music, particularly as mediated through dance bands, began to erode the dominance of music hall and variety theatre in British popular culture after World War I. But when the Cockney did reappear in song, it was as the replicant – think of ‘Wot’cher Me Old Cock Sparrer’ (1940) and ‘My Old Man’s a Dustman’ (1960). A glance at the lyrics of the irst of these will satisfy anyone that this is a Cockney picture produced with the most economical of imaginative means. The Old Kent Road and Lambeth are dropped in talismanic words, and the merely impressionistic function of ‘Wot Cher’ is evident in its redundant midpoint apostrophe – there is now no sense of that expression’s historical origins in ‘What Cheer!’ The tune adopts the jerky rhythm found in many Chevalier and Elen songs. It is surely not without signiicance that this rhythm reappears in the song ‘Wouldn’t It Be Luverly’ from Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady (1956). At one stage in the 1990s, the Cockney replicant seemed about to make a comeback in the shape of Damon Albarn on the pop group Blur’s album Parklife (1994), but this direction was not pursued further. He was stung, perhaps, by accusations of being a ‘Mockney.’ Yet this was a misconception on the part of his critics: like others before him, Albarn was faithfully reproducing a copy of a copy; he was not imitating or mocking an original.45

Scott’s account contextualizes the popular genres that grew out of the London metropolis, positioning them within a sociocultural framework that is rich in detail. In discovering that performers over the years derive their acts by replicating 43

Tomlinson (1984). The anthropological method of ‘thick description’, used to explain in thorough detail the symbols that guide and construct public meaning, can be attributed to Clifford Geertz and his seminal essay ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockight’ (1972). 44 Scott (2008), p. 171. 45 Ibid., pp. 194–5.

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already-replicated versions (such as exempliied by the Cockney), Scott questions the place of the performing artist in social history. Arguing that this is vital to understanding the continuities and manifestations of the past in the present, he concludes: The popular music revolution brought forth musical idioms whose difference in both style and meaning from the classical repertoire created inseparable problems for those who were unfamiliar with the new conventions and lacked the particular skills demanded by the new styles.46

Such an insight into music of the metropolis helps shed light on the gulf between the ‘popular’ and ‘serious’ and the notoriety with which it was perpetuated through most of the twentieth century. It is the scholarly tenacity with which Scott delves into sociohistorical contexts that leads to this wealth of critical relection on subjectivity. Indefatigably, his musicological inquiry uncovers many of the cultural meanings inscribed in human expression. Moreover, his approach includes a modelling of ideas that is crucial to understanding the prototypes of musical expression as represented by the historical documentation of our music. One might say that the ‘critical’ part of Scott’s agenda rests in his consideration of disparate forms of music, wherein a primary objective is to expose the contingency of the ideological values harnessed by musical structures and processes. By the same token, the paradoxical positioning of ‘great music’ in Western culture is subjected to a level of evaluation that is as enthusiastic as it is critical. Scott writes: ‘I am particularly interested in how ‘truths’ are constructed and the role played by historical and cultural determinants of human consciousness’.47 This standpoint upholds the realization that music (whose basis is teleological and ideological) is about the mediation of metaphysical concepts. Scott’s quest, then, is one of inding a footing for not only contesting, but also afirming the aesthetic and ideological values that grant canonization. In Sounds of the Metropolis the performative and aesthetic practices that were established across North America and Europe are placed in a new light. Like Max Weber, Scott is cautious about interpreting music as a mere relection of class struggle or other social realities; for, as he notes, struggles over the popular are rooted in searches for legitimation and cultural status that have ‘functioned frequently as an area of compromise over values’.48 In his highlighting of perceptions of class and the determinants of ownership via modes of production, Scott argues for an interpretation of those popular styles that during the modern era altered the cultural and social landscape of Europe. Above all, he draws attention to how musical styles paralleled the ideologies and aesthetic values of their time 46 47 48

Ibid, p. 4. Scott (2003), p. 8. Scott (2008), p.9.

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through a study that critiques the deployment of culture as a marker of musical taste and judgment. Throughout Scott’s work there is plentiful resistance to neatly packaging musicology. In common with all the scholars represented in this volume, he exempliies a musicological robustness that continually inds itself in search of meaning while still remaining suspicious of ‘scientiic proof’ – claims of conventional wisdom are little more than disguised ways of stating one has found the ‘truth’. Musicology only thrives within a mobile context, where the interactions of ideas and disciplines with each other are determined by a constructive sense of contextual and textual endeavour. Surely, this is what it means to wrestle with the ideas that arise from an acute sensitivity towards music, a process that involves critiquing the assumptions that underpin historical explication. Scott has taught us not to circumvent the ine line between music and context, for the interpretation of context is always predicated upon assumptions that are ideological: My own working deinition of ideology would be as follows: the study of how meanings are constructed within signifying practices and how that impacts upon our understanding of the world we live in. […] My contention, then, is that the coherence of my work is to be found in its focus on ideology and musical style.49

In retrospect, Scott’s mission seems all the more compelling as we continue to research the wealth of global musical practices, and to do so in the knowledge of our own musical experiences, which continually re-shape the formation of fundamental values, tastes and judgments.

References Abbate, Carolyn (1991) Unsung Voices: Opera and Musical Narrative in the Nineteenth Century (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press). Agawu, Koi (1997) ‘Analyzing Music under the New Musicological Regime’, The Journal of Musicology, XV(3): 297–307. Barthes, Roland (1983) ‘Authors and Writers’, in A Barthes Reader, ed. Susan Sontag (New York: Hill and Wang). Brett, Philip, Wood, Elizabeth and Thomas, Gary C. (1994) Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (London: Routledge). Citron, Marcia (1993) Gender and the Musical Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Cook, Nicholas and Everist, Mark (eds) (1999) Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Geertz, Clifford (1972) ‘Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockight’ in Myth, Symbol, and Culture, Winter volume, pp. 1–38. 49

Scott (2003), p. 8.

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Gossett, Philip (1989) ‘Carl Dahlhaus and the ‘Ideal Type’’, 19th Century Music 13(1): 49–56. Hawkins, Stan (2002) Settling the Pop Score: Pop texts and identity politics (Aldershot: Ashgate). Hennion, Antoine (1997) ‘Baroque and rock: music, mediators and musical taste’, Poetics, 24: 415–35. Kerman, Joseph (1980) ‘How We Got into Analysis, and How to Get out’, Critical Inquiry 7(2): 311–31. — (1985) Contemplating Music: Challenges to Musicology (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Korsyn, Kevin (2003) Decentering Music: A Critique of Contemporary Musical Research (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Kramer, Lawrence (1990) Music as Cultural Practice: 1800–1900 (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press). — (1996) ‘Powers of Blackness: Africanist Discourse in Modern Concert Music’, Black Music Research Journal 16(1): 53–70. — (2002) ‘Powers of Blackness: Jazz and Blues in Modern Concert Music’, in Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 194–215. — (2006) Critical Musicology and the Responsibility of Response (Aldershot: Ashgate). — (2011) Interpreting Music (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press). Leppert, Richard (1988) Music and Image: Domesticity, ideology and sociocultural formation in eighteenth-century England (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). McClary, Susan (1989) ‘Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition’, Cultural Critique, 12: 57–81. — (1991) Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). — (2007) ‘Introduction: The Life and Times of a Renegade Musicologist’, in Reading Music: Selected Essays by Susan McClary (Aldershot: Ashgate). Middleton, Richard (1990) Studying Popular Music (Milton Keynes: Open University Press). Moore, Allan F. (2001) Rock: The Primary Text: Developing a Musicology of Rock, 2nd edition (Aldershot: Ashgate). Moore, Allan F. (ed.) (2003) Analyzing Popular Music (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Richardson, John (2011), An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Scott, Derek (1989) The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour (Milton Keynes: Open University Press). (Second edition, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.)

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— (1990) ‘Music and Sociology for the 1990s: A Changing Critical Perspective’, The Music Quarterly, 74(3): 385–410. — (ed.) (2000) Music, Culture, and Society: A Reader (Oxford: Oxford University Press). — (2003) From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology (Oxford: Oxford University Press). — (2008) Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (Oxford: Oxford University Press). — (ed.) (2009) The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (Farnham: Ashgate). Scott, Derek and Hawkins, Stan (1994) ‘Critical Musicology: A Rationale’, Popular Musicology, 1. Solie, Ruth (1993) Musicology and Difference: Gender and Sexuality in Music Scholarship (Berkeley: University of California Press). Tomlinson, Gary (1984) ‘The Web of Culture: A Context for Musicology’, 19thCentury Music, VII(3): 350–62. Treitler, Leo (1999) ‘The Historiography of Music: Issues of Past and Present’, in Mark Cook and Nicholas Everist (eds) Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 356–77. Weber, William (2008) The Great Transformation of Musical Taste: Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

Chapter 2

Evidence of Things Not Seen: History, Subjectivities, Music Susan McClary

Anyone familiar with the Bible will recognize that my title grounds itself in scriptural authority. As St. Paul wrote in his letter to the Hebrews: ‘Faith is the substance of things hoped for, the evidence of things not seen’.1 Upon that fairly limsy rock he builds his sermon on spirituality; he is also, of course, asking his congregation to take his word for it, as in an ultimate-stakes conidence game. My chapter will similarly explore experiences not visible to the eye, but – like St Paul and my similarly fearless colleague Derek Scott – I hope to offer something of substance along with the leaps of faith I will invite you to take over the course of my discussion. In his book Eyewitnessing, Peter Burke explains how the visual arts can contribute to historical knowledge. Although he cautions his readers about the epistemological limitations involved in mining art works for reliable information, he demonstrates what we can learn about the clothing, living conditions, and even ideologies of other times from paintings.2 Alas, music offers little concerning material culture, though the study of musical practices in their social contexts sheds some light on the people who made and enjoyed music. But the music itself? Mere sounds that vanish as soon as they appear? To an intellectual community that relies almost exclusively upon the visual and particularly upon verbal testimony, music takes a very distant backseat even behind the plastic arts Burke so tenuously sets forth as viable sources for historical evidence. Playing the fool to Burke’s angel, I’ll rush in nevertheless. For music engages with aspects of human experience that remain hidden from the eye: it can simulate emotions, give precise shape to conceptions of temporality, evoke gestures of the body, induce erotic pleasure, point beyond itself to the transcendent. In short, it reveals – and also teaches us – what it feels like to be a self, as though from the inside.3 Accordingly, it leaves traces of human consciousness that otherwise remain inaccessible to the cultural historian.

1

Hebrews 11: 1. Burke (2001). 3 Derek Scott’s work has contributed signiicantly to this discourse. See particularly Scott (2003). 2

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But if Burke threw up danger signs when he dealt with pictorial evidence, how much more the musicologist must beware the pitfalls that bedevil such a project. Our ears can perform amazing cognitive feats: we can recognize a friend’s voice on the telephone from a single uttered syllable, and we can determine with great accuracy the direction of a sound source. Yet despite these skills, most of us would have considerable dificulty explaining in language how we make such discriminations. Moreover, although we can react physically to a dance groove within a second or two, it often seems as though the body picks up on the relevant signals without even consulting with the brain; indeed, it proves very hard to puzzle out and verbalize how those ininitesimal divisions of time translate into a precise choreography of bumps and grinds. And if we respond as reliably as Pavlov’s dog to the ambient music piped into restaurants, shops, and elevators to inluence our moods, we usually do not even notice the stimulus responsible. In other words, a sizable gap separates what we know concerning sound from what we deine as knowledge. Whereas Peter Burke can describe the contents of a painting (common objects, colours, and so on) through ordinary language, the musicologist seems doomed either to make use of a specialized vocabulary intelligible to no one outside the ield or to gesture vaguely through lowery images. As long as acceptable evidence depends upon the eye or the word, then the epistemological status of music interpretation is shaky at best.4 It gets worse. Before Edison’s invention of recording technologies, music was preserved (if at all) in the form of graphic notation. The actual sounds made by musicians of earlier times no longer exist: we must reconstitute them from dots on a page, a task that necessarily entails the decisions of performers from a signiicantly different era. Imagine having to bring into being the vocal and affective nuances of, say, Bessie Smith if we had nothing to go on except a score of ‘St. Louis Blues’ and a couple of ear-witness accounts. It’s as if we had to approximate Leonardo’s Mona Lisa each time we wanted to see it from paint-bynumber diagrams that happened to have survived. And yet. To anyone like Derek Scott and the contributors to this volume, most of whom came of age in the 1950s and 1960s and who witnessed the vast sea of change in sensibilities – physical, erotic, ethical – brought about in part by the inlux of rock ’n’ roll into middle-class suburbia, the power of music to transform appears undeniable. Fundamentalist preachers thundered from their pulpits about how ‘the beat, the beat, the beat’ was leading us all to perdition – and they were right to worry about the cultural ramiications of mere patterns of sound, for most of their dire predictions came to pass. Some tenured radicals have turned their attentions entirely to the popular musics that entered the academy as a result of this cultural upheaval: Robert Walser and Stan Hawkins lead the pack in this important new terrain.5 Strangely enough, my work has proven even more controversial in that I take what 4 See Kramer (2011) for a thorough discussion of this topic and a brilliant rejoinder to those who would put limitations on such activities. 5 See, for instance, Walser (1993), Hawkins (2002, 2009).

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I learned from the 1960s and seek prior moments in music history that similarly testify to ruptures in prevailing versions of subjectivity, that offer us experiential traces from the past of what Raymond Williams calls ‘structures of feeling.’6 In this chapter I discuss three examples from very different periods. I concentrate on pieces that challenge sanctioned conigurations of selfhood, but also discuss the conventions – the condensations of deeply held cultural beliefs – against which they rebel and thereby produce their meanings.7 Fortunately, some verbal testimony for those conventions exists, as do the controversies that followed in the wake of their violation. But the debates themselves cannot plunge us bodily and affectively into the pleasures and anxieties presented – as though with no mediation whatsoever – in the music.

Schubert’s Critique of Enlightenment Values Franz Schubert’s String Quartet No. 15 in G Major, Op. 161 (1826), opens with a powerful assault on the very premises of musical rationality he had inherited. As announced in its title, it starts on a G-major chord, but as that sonority increases in volume, it lips abruptly into its opposite: a terrifying G minor, marked with aggressive, jerky rhythms, answered by a whimper. Lest we miss this sequence, Schubert repeats it: major breaking off into minor, aggression, whimper. The whimper persists, holding on each time to its most plaintive element, the lamenting half-step (Example 2.1). Example 2.1 Franz Schubert, String Quartet in G Major, Movement 1: bars 1–5

6

Williams (1977), pp. 128–35. For a fuller discussion of conventions, see my Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (2000). 7

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The contrast between major and minor had served during the eighteenth century to encode opposite poles of the affective spectrum, with major generally aligned with positive emotional realms, minor with negative. The quintessential Beethovenian narrative schema progresses from grim minor, through heroic struggle, to glorious major (e.g. Fifth and Ninth). In his late years, Beethoven often gives us reason to doubt this optimistic fable in which effort and persistence guarantee success, but as a child of the Enlightenment, he usually delivers it nonetheless, even if saturated with equivocations. By contrast, Schubert chooses with some regularity to snatch tragedy from the jaws of triumph – to conclude blithe major-key pieces in minor-key despair.8 But even he had rarely presented the alternatives so starkly as in this quartet. It is as if he cannot bring himself to enact the iction his G-major title promises for more than a measure before he angrily rejects it – or, alternatively, before some other force enters to quash that gentle major-key beginning before it can even get started. At stake is basic musical identity, for not only a movement’s themes but also its key count as the locus of selfhood, up against which the ensuing struggles will unfold and make themselves intelligible. Ordinarily the threat of rival keys enters only after the listener has had the chance to become acquainted with the protagonist. Not so in this quartet, which consistently denies us the security of unequivocal identity. Indeed, we might regard this ambivalence as the G-major Quartet’s deining characteristic, as its true key note; within its historical context, the quartet performs a refusal of the Enlightenment-era archetypes that reward linear reason and hard work with happy endings. Schubert casts into serious doubt right from the outset on the viability – perhaps even the desirability – of such stories. A member of the Romantic generation that also produced sceptics such as Stendhal, Schubert peels back the veil that the eighteenth century had thrown over the less reassuring aspects of human experience, exposing us to the tribulations and uncertainties that beset even the most deserving of subjects. But if Schubert assails us with unpredictable anxieties, he also grants us tastes of unearned, unanticipated bliss. For immediately following the protracted whimpers of the opening passage, he produces a hushed tremolo over which a prayerful melody in G major reaches towards consolation. The materials themselves recall what Stuart de Ocampo has theorized as the subjunctive, the ‘as if’ quality of so many of Schubert’s secondary themes, all fated in advance to dissolve as mere illusions.9 But this particular illusory moment counts as the irst statement of the quartet’s announced key, thus positioning undivided identity itself as fantasy (Example 2.2). 8

See, for instance, his Impromptu, Op. 90, No. 2 in E@ Major, discussed in McClary (1997), pp. 20–34; and his Moment musical, Op. 94, No. 6, discussed in Cone (1982), pp. 233–41. 9 Stuart de Ocampo developed these ideas in the course of his graduate seminars at UCLA. I am grateful to him for this and many other invaluable insights.

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Example 2.2 Franz Schubert, String Quartet in G Major, Movement 1: bars 15–24

Schubert’s premature deus ex machina doesn’t appear out of nowhere, however. He cobbles it together out of elements already heard: the melody’s rhythms echo the jerky patterns of the opening, the descent by half-steps in the harmonic bass transigure the major-to-minor lip of the irst gesture and the plaintive sighs that follow. In other words, he takes precisely those items marked earlier as signs of trauma and willfully pushes them to speak differently. Yet this cobbled-together complex never pursues the mandatory dynamic trajectory of becoming. Instead, it proceeds through a series of variations, each negotiating in a new way the chromatic moves that had so jeopardized tonal identity at the beginning.10 But now the movement risks stasis or even regression, for music and individuals at this time were expected to develop. Suddenly, without preparation or rational 10 For more on the ways Schubert assembles materials as if they were facets of a crystal, see Adorno (2005).

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processing, Schubert imposes a change of key. Moreover, the major-key sonority upon which he arrives lies a half-step lower than our tonic, as if the deviant semitone had seized the terrain. What follows this crisis is a courtly, slightly difident little tune, which also features the half-steps, but now as endearing personality traits (Example 2.3). Example 2.3 Franz Schubert, String Quartet in G Major, Movement 1: bars 64–74

Occasionally the fury of earlier passages bursts through, only to give way again to the little tune, which uses its half-step component to slip furtively into unlicensed keys: the semitone that seemed an inirmity at the beginning thus becomes the means of survival and even agency. A cadence at the end of the exposition purports to celebrate the achievement of a conventional goal, only to unravel by means of half-steps in the cello back to the beginning, with its bitter refusal of major-key identity. All that effort was, apparently, for naught.

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Yet the slippery semitones that have iniltrated each idea in the movement enable even as they destabilize, and in the extensive middle section of the movement, they take centre stage. By means of their unpredictable manoeuvres, Schubert deposits us repeatedly on islands of melodic serenity, but with little apparent rhyme or reason along the way; he gives us either erratic motion or stasis. Yet his embrace of the semitone itself as his signature element allows him to push through the binary oppositions that still ground most of Beethoven’s narratives.11 A formal recapitulation typically brings back the key and theme that opened a movement, but that consolidation of initial identity can qualify either as a triumphant return or (in cases where the piece has laboured to escape its tragic beginnings) as an admission of defeat. The prospect of ending the struggle in this particular piece with a literal capitulation should inspire anxiety, and the lamenting quality of the passage leading up to the return bodes ill. But when the moment itself arrives, Schubert reverses his terms, for now a minor triad (which seemed to have prevailed) gives way to major and a graceful transformation of both jerky rhythm and whimper. To be sure, a split, self-contradictory identity still reigns, but the major-key element now has the upper hand (Example 2.4). Example 2.4 Franz Schubert, String Quartet in G Major, Movement 1: bars 284–88

Nevertheless, when the movement approaches its conclusion, the half-steps re-materialize, dragging us back to the still-unresolved dilemma of the beginning, now if anything more concentrated, more undecidable. Minor gives way to major, major to minor, until a plastered-on cadence in G major arbitrarily simply ends the alteration by iat (Example 2.5). A word about interpretation. During the last century, ‘classical’ music – whether liturgical chant or Mozart’s Requiem – has come to stand for the reassurances of 11 See my ‘Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert’s Music’ McClary (1994), pp. 205–33.

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Example 2.5 Franz Schubert, String Quartet in G Major, Movement 1: bars 443–50

High Art. Subjected on a daily basis to the strains of the ‘Ode to Joy’ in Starbuck’s or Vivaldi concertos in Victoria’s Secret, we learn not to pay attention to expressive detail but rather to hear any particular item from these repertories as lat tokens of elite taste. My discussion of Schubert’s quartet has sought to resituate the piece within its historical context, in which his moves would have elicited shocked responses. Only if we do so can we learn from music about the cultural hopes and traumas it records. Over the course of this extraordinary movement, Schubert simultaneously draws on the narrative paradigm of subjective Bildung characteristic of Enlightenment-era music and undercuts its very premises: this much seems certain. We cannot pin down with conidence, however, any external referents for the central ambivalence enacted in the quartet. Many possibilities present themselves – Schubert’s struggle with aspects of his own identity, perhaps, or his inability to believe in sorrow-to-redemption fairy tales, given his impending

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death, or his refusal of the myth of political progress in view of the repressiveness of Vienna during his lifetime. If we go to this quartet for actual historical facts, we ind ourselves disappointed by music’s famed lack of speciicity. Yet we can hear very clearly the challenge to cultural notions of identity formation treated by his contemporaries as fundamental, the critique of progress as mere illusion, and also the affective investment in working through the dilemmas moment by moment, even if the only viable conclusion is to openly embrace the terms of ambivalence. Of course, people have always had to face mortality and have tasted disappointment instead of fulilled aspirations. But Schubert’s G-major Quartet points to changes in the dominant ictions circulating within European culture concerning the relationship between individual striving and ultimate ends.12 If Schubert inally grants us major-key closure, he packages it in irony or in a cautious subjunctive: instead of resolving the structural dissonance that drives the piece, he builds a new kind of tonal plot by making an active, versatile agent of the very semitone that usually serves to patrol the border between major and minor. Along the way, we experience moments of fervent hope, of iconoclastic rage against illusion, of provisional joy, of efforts rewarded temporarily if never permanently. Whatever the quartet meant to its composer, it offers us a remarkably vivid structure of post-Enlightenment feeling: the strategies of a subject who learns to embrace the contradictions of his condition.

Cipriano de Rore Genders the Madrigal My second example predates the Schubert quartet by 260 years, and although it counts as a masterpiece of Renaissance music, it also predates the repertories of which musicologists have a irm theoretical grasp. Consequently, our debates still focus on the extent to which its musical details can bear up under analytical scrutiny. The intricacies of modal grammar are not covered here;13 rather, my intention is to show both how this madrigal produces its effects and how human subjectivity was construed during a very different historical period. Da le belle contrade d’oriente Chiara e lieta s’ergea Ciprigna et io Fruiva in braccio al divin idol mio Quel piacer che non cape humana mente,

From the fair region of the East Bright and joyful arose the Morning Star, and I In the arms of my divine idol enjoyed That pleasure that deies human understanding,

Quando sentii dopo un sospir ardente: ‘Speranza del mio cor, dolce desio,

When I heard, after an ardent sigh: ‘Hope of my heart, sweet desire,

12 For more on the manifestations of such elements in nineteenth-century literature, see Franco Moretti (2000); Fredric Jameson (2002). 13 See, however, my Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (McClary 2005).

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T’en vai, haime, sola mi lasci, adio. Che sarà qui de me scura e dolente?

You go, alas! You leave me alone! Farewell! What will become of me here, gloomy & sad?

Ahi crudo Amor, ben son dubiose e corte Ah, cruel Love, how false and brief are Le tue dolcezze, poi ch’ancor ti godi Your delights, for it even pleases you that Che l’estremo piacer inisca in pianto. ’This extreme pleasure ends in weeping.’ Nè potendo dir più cinseme forte Iterando gl’amplessi in tanti nodi Che giamai ne fer più l’edra o l’acanto.

Unable to say more, she squeezed me tightly Repeating her embraces in so many knots That never made more ivy or acanthus.

The text of Cipriano de Rore’s ‘Da le belle contrade d’oriente’ (published in 1566) operates within the generic bounds not only of the Petrarcan sonnet, but also of the auba: a dialogue between lovers for whom dawn announces the dreaded moment of separation. The poet divides the dialogue against the grain of the sonnet’s characteristic four-part structure: lines 1 through 5 belong to the principal speaker, who also delivers the concluding terzet, while lines 6 through 11 convey the utterances of his lover. In truth, however, all fourteen lines proceed from the speaker: his frame does not address his mistress in the heat of passion, but rather recalls the scene – complete with the ostensibly direct quotation that testiies to his lover’s travail – at a later moment for unspeciied auditors. In keeping with that fundamental difference, the framing voice indulges at leisure in long, syntactically complex sentences, classical allusions, and extended metaphors; by contrast, his mistress’s gasping phrases simulate the involuntary exclamations of love-making, and if her terzet all coheres as a single continuous thought, the effort ultimately melts down in the bodily secretions associated with what the Renaissance called euphemistically ‘the little death’ (Example 2.6). Whatever the intentions of the poet, the sonnet offers Cipriano the opportunity to explore and challenge the limits of his inherited musical language. But if he pits two discursive strategies against one another in this madrigal, he does so not only for the sake of pushing the boundaries of accepted musical practice, but also (and more important for our present purposes) as the means of coniguring contrasting models of human subjectivity. Just as the sonnet’s author employs a lofty register of speech for the male persona who addresses us directly, so Cipriano presents those lines within a style sanctioned by the scholastics who sought to regulate music. Thus, the outer sections of the madrigal reside within a serenely diatonic F-Ionian, and they match the speaker’s convoluted poetic syntax with studied, equal-voiced counterpoint. Thus far, this madrigal has given no indication that it harbours radical tendencies. But the opening of the second quatrain ushers in the lashback with a brief transitional phrase, at which point Cipriano hurls us across the threshold into an altogether different experiential world. If the opening section sustained a single mode for 21 bars, the next 30 bars suggest at least 10 key orientations. Even these

Evidence of Things Not Seen

Example 2.6 Cipriano de Rore, “Da le belle contrade d’oriente”, bars 1–9

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statistics fail to capture the degree of chaos conveyed by the passage setting lines 6 through 11; sufice it to say that we rarely get more than a couple of harmonies in a row that point to the same modal centre. Despite their deliberate assault on authorized rules of order, Cipriano’s choices do not reduce to arbitrary cacophony. Rather, he relies on the experiences of the performer and listener as embodied beings to translate the resulting patterns into meaningful gestures, for those patterns that strain upward only to break off precipitously, that sink to unfathomed depths, that accelerate or hover in suspension map onto the body. The solo voice yearns and despairs, heaves and thrashes like someone in the throes of passion. Cipriano can thereby break all the rules of grammar and render feelings we have never before heard articulated and yet remain intelligible. Observe, for instance, the setting of lines 9 and 10 (Example 2.7). The quatrain had concluded on a hopeful (though questioning) preparation for an arrival on D. But on the words ‘Ahi crudo Amor!,’ the woman lashes out with a C-minor triad that bears no relation to anything that had preceded it. Pursuing its own aberrant but inexorable logic, the passage penetrates deeper and deeper into the dark region on the lat side, until it halts with an enigmatic D@-major triad on ‘dolcezze.’ Those false and brief delights appear here as the site furthest from the discursive clarity of the male lover’s social realm, that mysterious locus of female pleasure. Time stands still for a moment of unfathomable bliss. Then Cipriano retraces the process that had brought us to this nadir, and the woman inishes her speech with a conventional questioning formula. Only that D@ remains as unknowable as it was when it occurred. The woman’s concluding gesture goes unanswered. Another musical ellipsis and we ind ourselves back in the male lover’s time, place and mode. The lashback completed, he continues to narrate his erotic adventure – in the past tense, with himself once again in the picture. The exquisite counterpoint that prevails from here to the end admits not a single chromatic alteration. F-Ionian serves as the suficient terrain for the representation of the embraces, and although an occasional extravagant melisma can be heard to register the speaker’s passion, he resists indulging in the unbridled ecstasy of his mistress. He operates always in the public domain, within the strictures of musical decorum shared by his cultivated male peers. And what about Cipriano, the ventriloquist who stands behind all these musical details? Clearly the D@ is no less a product of his imagination than the elaborate counterpoint of the inal section. No woman actually speaks here – let alone grants us access to her most secret recesses where she experiences that brief delight as a pause on D@. Like the persona who relates the sonnet, Cipriano maintains his grounding in the realm of reason while purporting to convey directly the nonrational feelings that attend female jouissance. Yet we remember Cipriano for the middle part of the madrigal – the woman’s speech; this radical experimentation constitutes his bid for the status of genius. Any of his contemporaries might have composed the framing sections of ‘Da le belle contrade d’oriente’, which stick

Evidence of Things Not Seen

Example 2.7 Cipriano de Rore, “Da le belle contrade d’oriente”, bars 34–48

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resolutely to the musical language of common practice. But in order to inscribe the interiority of the Other – she who by deinition evades conventional language – he must venture outside the bounds of accepted (male) discourse.

Madonna’s ‘What It Feels Like for a Girl’: Four Answers Cipriano takes us into modality’s dark continent and proposes a tentative answer to the age-old question: ‘What does Woman want?’ What is the nature of female pleasure, the invisibility of which continues to pose technical problems for pornographers? How can the artist represent the unrepresentable, offer evidence of things not seen? The exclusion of women from cultural production until very recently left this mystery and its possible solutions in the hands of male artists. Moreover, most female composers – wary of participating in a game that locates the essence of Woman in her sexuality – have chosen to turn their talents to nearly any other topic than the one for which Cipriano so eagerly sought the answer. Fortunately for my purposes, Madonna took up the challenge in a song titled ‘What it feels like for a girl’.14 She concludes her spoken introduction with the taunt: ‘But secretly you’d love to know what it’s like, wouldn’t you? What it feels like for a girl?’ Cipriano would be there, all ears, in the front row! Madonna’s lyrics dwell for the most part on the images that made her appear to critics in the early 1980s as a mere boy toy: ‘Silky smooth/Lips as sweet as candy; Hair that twirls on ingertips so gently.’ Yet the occasional protest rumbles just beneath the surface (‘Strong inside but you don’t know it/Good little girls they never show it’), and especially in her sardonic allusion to that most detestable of love songs, ‘My funny valentine’, when she sings ‘When you open up your mouth to speak/Could you be a little weak?’ The lyrics tell us little about the musical setting, however. Faced with producing music for such lyrics, Courtney Love would no doubt exploit the contrast between sweetness and irony to explode in snarling rage whenever feasible. But anyone seeking that kind of punk sensibility in Madonna’s song will be disappointed, for her musical choices put ‘What it feels like for a girl’ in league with that old hymn to wifely submissiveness, ‘The girl that I marry has got to be/as soft and pink as a nursery’. Drawing on musical stereotypes of ‘the feminine’ that range back to early opera, Madonna produces a reassuring, passive, repetitive melody, supported by static harmonies, with only obliquely shifting inner lines granting a modicum of movement toward the sighing refrain: ‘Do you know/what it feels like for a girl in this world?’ Freud (had he had the courage to listen to music at all) would be relieved at this response: Woman, in fact, does not want anything at all! A child of the MTV era, however, Madonna frequently produces her meanings dialectically between the apparent implications of her music and her mise-en-scène 14

On the album Music (2001).

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in performance. Sometimes she offers visualizations that reinforce the affective burden of the song (as in, for example, ‘Like a prayer’); other times the song acts as foil, surprising those who thought they knew what to expect. As it turns out, ‘What it feels like for a girl’ serves as the pretext for at least three radically divergent ilmed interpretations. The implicit anger of the lyrics, which never disturbed the placid surface of the song, erupts ferociously in the irst of these. The oficial video release (over a pumped-up club remix) stages a revenge fantasy, as Madonna and an elderlylady sidekick turn the tables on gender prerogatives and embark on a joy ride and shooting spree.15 Madonna’s then-husband, Guy Ritchie, famous for his ilm Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels, directed this video. No less focused on random violence than the video for Madonna’s song, the movie garnered widespread critical acclaim, while the video was withdrawn from circulation on MTV. She asks: Do you really want to know what it feels like for a girl? No, I thought not. Madonna mounted not one but two presentations of this song for her Drowned World Tour in 2001, each putting yet another spin on what those lyrics might mean and, not coincidentally, destabilizing the interpretation offered in the nihilistic video. The irst juxtaposes elements of the song with footage taken from Japanese animation, and it targets the violence against women celebrated so graphically in much popular culture.16 The last performance, by contrast, exploits the erotic serenity of the original song, but places it within an all-woman context in which Madonna plays femme to a multi-ethnic array of butch dancers. Not coincidentally, she also upgrades her question from ‘What it feels like for a girl’ to the Spanish ‘Lo que siente la mujer’: what a woman feels’.17 No longer victim or harpy on the rampage, Madonna here luxuriates in the self-possession the musical materials of the song imply. But this romantically inclined persona exists in a realm where no men need apply. Is this what Woman wants? I suspect that some ind this rendition even scarier than Guy Ritchie’s cartoon mayhem. Madonna’s performative reworking of her song threatens to undermine everything I set out to argue in this chapter, for my reading of the music itself fails to ind consistent corroboration when put alongside hard visual evidence. Yet the original song grounds these surprising – even shocking – renditions, all of which draw on the gap between the apparent docility of her recorded performance and her transgressive visualizations. Would I want to guess that Madonna’s ‘true’ subjectivity resides in any one of these versions? Not for an instant, for like so many female artists before her who have grappled with the cultural roles available to women, she recognizes the danger of actually revealing her interiority. She gives us masks – an endless array of masks. What does it feel like for a girl? You may as well ask Cipriano; Madonna’s not telling, nor am I. 15 16 17

‘What it feels like for a girl’ (2006). ‘What it feels like for a girl’ – Madonna – Drowned World Tour (2001). ‘Lo que siente la mujer’ – Madonna – Drowned World Tour (2001).

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In a cultural world that prizes ‘authenticity’ in art, which turns most especially to music to experience genuine feeling, Madonna’s chameleon aesthetic often gets dismissed as supericial. By contrast, our string quartet seems to have wrestled with deep existential problems, to surrender its conlicted persona nakedly for our examination; even Schubert’s friends read his later music as betraying his innermost condition. But if the Romantic invites us to perceive his art as a direct manifestation of his being, Schubert also operates through masks: does the ‘true’ Schubert reside in those moments of bliss or in the rage? Does the real Cipriano correspond to the male speaker in his madrigal or to the far more daring female voice he invents? And if there are no actual subjectivities in any of this music, then what are we talking about here? All our examples (as, for that matter, all of literature and cinema) count as ictions – not as documentation concerning any particular individual who ever lived. But that is not where I would want to locate historical evidence with respect to music. Rather, I would focus on the tensions performed between socially tolerated versions of personhood at any given moment and the music that would ly in the face of those conventional assumptions. Thus, Schubert rebels against the tidy pairs of binary oppositions and the afirmative narratives of the Enlightenment, Cipriano against the neoplatonic proprieties of scholastic authority, Madonna against a centuries-old etiquette that regulates the behaviour of ‘good little girls’. Neither Schubert nor Cipriano could have invented his particular scenario at an earlier point in history: indeed, their immediate successors backed off from the radical implications of their accomplishments, leaving formal philosophical treatments for future generations. Thus Schubert’s refusal of the antinomies that had sustained Enlightenment thought recurs in Kierkegaard or Nietzsche, while Cipriano’s denial of scholastic tradition comes to a head in Descartes’s much later ‘Cogito’. As Jacques Attali has argued, music is frequently there irst, offering to those who will hear a foretaste of what will only eventually be veriied in words.18 As for Madonna – well, time will tell. But cultural theorists have long hailed her as someone who has an uncanny grasp of the stakes of female representation and who concocts ever more dazzling performances of resistance, self-acceptance, and who knows what next. Feminists have scrambled to keep up, for she always seems to bound forward to the next, still-unexplored phase. As we look back at the last twenty years of gender negotiations, Madonna provides a veritable archive for historical structures of feeling: a speciic set of options for each point in time of what it felt like, what it can feel like, and sometimes even what it will feel like for a girl. When each of these musicians plays their ictional changes on our bodies and emotions, we experience to some degree the confusions, the antagonisms, the pleasures, and the anxieties from some moment in the past. Multiply mediated, to be sure, through musical conventions, through the necessary act of performative 18

Attali (1985).

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reconstruction, yet still offering insights not available through other media. If contemporaneous verbal conirmation fails to corroborate their bold enterprises, it may be because we have to wait for words to catch up. Until then, we have to accept what we can hear in the music on Faith, which is – as we know from Divine Authority – the evidence of things not seen.

References Adorno, Theodor W. (2005) ‘Schubert’, in Moments Musicaux (Frankfurt, 1964), trans. in 2005. Jonathan Dunsby and Beate Perrey, 19th-Century Music, 29: 3–14. Attali, Jacques (1985) Noise: The Political Economy of Music, trans. Brian Massumi, afterword by Susan McClary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). Burke, Peter (2001) Eyewitnessing: The Uses of Images as Historical Evidence (Ithaca: Cornell University Press). Cone, Edward T. (1982) ‘Schubert’s Promissory Note’, 19th-Century Music, 5: 233–41. Hawkins, Stan (2002) Settling the Pop Score: Pop Texts and Identity Politics (Aldershot: Ashgate). — (2009) The British Pop Dandy: Masculinity, Popular Music and Culture (Farnham: Ashgate). Jameson, Fredric (2002) The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act, 2nd edition (London: Routledge). Kramer, Lawrence (2011) Interpreting Music (Berkeley: University of California Press). McClary, Susan (1994) ‘Constructions of Subjectivity in Schubert’s Music’, in Philip Brett, Elizabeth Wood and Gary Thomas (eds) Queering the Pitch: The New Gay and Lesbian Musicology (New York and London: Routledge), pp. 205–33. — (1997) ‘The Impromptu that Trod on a Loaf: How Music Tells Stories’, Narrative, 5(1): 20–34. — (2000) Conventional Wisdom: The Content of Musical Form (Berkeley: University of California Press). — (2005) Modal Subjectivities: Self-Fashioning in the Italian Madrigal (Berkeley: University of California Press). Moretti, Franco (2000) The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture, 2nd edition (London: Verso). Scott, Derek (2003) From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Walser, Robert (1993) Running with the Devil: Power, Gender, and Madness in Heavy Metal Music (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press). Williams, Raymond (1977) Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

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Discography Madonna: Music (Maverick Records, 2001).

Filmography ‘What it feels like for a girl’ – Madonna – Drowned World Tour (2001). Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r-Je_lIR-Xo. ‘Lo que siente la mujer’ – Madonna – Drowned World Tour (2001). Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sAt8lJoH-w. ‘What it feels like for a girl’, Madonna, Guy Ritchie (dir.) (2006). Available at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qYwgG2oyUbA.

Chapter 3

Musical Identities, Learning and Education: Some Cross-cultural Issues1 Lucy Green

Introduction and Aims of the Chapter The global low of music today has profound effects on musical identityformation in relation to the teaching and learning of music both inside and beyond institutional provision. It is often said that there has never been a society without music. To what extent, however, does this mean that people in every society are apt to form ‘musical identities’? Understood as an ontological category, the concept of ‘identity’ must refer to a universal human condition arising from the development of self-consciousness; that is, the ability to distinguish between ‘self’ and ‘other’, and possibly the ability to distinguish between the sexes and to situate oneself – albeit problematically – in relationship to them. However, understood in the way I intend to use the concept within this chapter – that is, as arising from social and cultural roles and activities – the concept of ‘identity’ refers to a historically and socially speciic condition, which undoubtedly does not apply universally across all history and all humanity. Social and cultural identities tend to be formed in societies where diversity and distinction between the roles and activities of groups and individuals are the norm. This is because any social persona only comes to be what it is, that is, only takes on an identity, insofar as it is distinct from what it is not. Where there are no distinctions, or few distinctions, so there will be no identities, or few identities. In the case of musical identity, for example, it is doubtful whether a member of a society that engages in only communal musical practices, which is unaffected by any global culture, and has a relatively simple, organic social structure, would be likely to take upon themselves, or be ascribed, a ‘musical identity’ through which they are distinguished from other members of the society. This might be so even if some members are more involved in music-making than others.2 By contrast, Some material in this chapter was previously published in Lucy Green, Learning, Teaching and Musical Identity: Voices across Cultures. © 2011 Indiana University Press. Reprinted with permission of Indiana University Press. 2 See for example, Nettl (1983[1954], p. 10). Although his suggestion that some societies do not distinguish musicians is slightly contested by Merriam (1964, p. 23), the latter nonetheless notes the existence of societies such as the North American Indians and 1

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in most parts of today’s world, the complex and diverse nature of contemporary musical life, marked especially by the ready availability and indeed ubiquity of a range of musical styles, means that some kind of musical identity, or more likely, various musical identities, are likely to be developed by social groups, and by individuals within them.3 One aim of this chapter is to consider certain aspects of musical identities that can arise in similar ways across different cultures and areas of the world. Today, this very availability of a vast range of local and national musical cultures throughout the world goes hand-in-hand with the unifying and colonizing tendencies of globalization. This dialectical action, of a splintering into musical diversity on one hand, and a honing towards a culturally speciic, economically powerful musical uniformity on the other, has profound effects on the ways in which musical identities are formed, and on the content of those identities. A second aim of this chapter is to consider some examples of the ‘push-and-pull’ effect of globalization versus localization in relation to musical identity-formation, and the sometimes very different effects that both sides of the dialectic can produce. Musical identities are forged from a combination of musical tastes, values, skills and knowledge; and from the musical practices in which an individual or group engages, including not only production practices such as playing an instrument or singing playground chants, for example, but also reception practices such as listening or dancing to music. As Macdonald, Hargreaves and Miell remind us,4 musical identities can vary from something that is transitory and shortlived, to something that has a profound and lasting effect on a person’s life. In addition, the different components of a musical identity are likely to be continually formed and re-formed, and thus to be changeable throughout life. To this extent, musical identities are connected not only to the nature of the tastes, values, skills, knowledge and practices that make them up, but to a further, underlying aspect: that of the particular ways in which those tastes, values, skills and knowledge are acquired, or the particular ways in which those practices come about. In other words, I am suggesting that musical identities are intrinsically and unavoidably connected to particular ways of learning in relation to music.5 the Basongye, which, although they have musicians, do not allocate any special status to the musician as a social group (1964), p. 140. Also see Messenger (1958, pp. 20–21), who describes the Anang Ibibo society, where there was no concept of ‘being musical’, because everyone was considered to be so (cited in Sloboda et al. 1994, pp. 349–51). 3 For a range of discussions of musical identity, see for example Bennett (2000), Biddle and Knights (2007a, 2007b), De Nora (2000), Drummond (2005), Frith (1996), Green (2011), Macdonald et al. (2002a), O’Flynn (2009), Smith (2011), Stalhammar (2006), Stokes (1994, 2003). 4 Macdonald et al. (2002a, p. 11). 5 Etienne Wenger proposes that identity can be conceptualized as involving a ‘learning trajectory’, and that, as trajectories, ‘our identities incorporate the past and the future in the very process of negotiating the present’ (Wenger 1998, p. 155). According

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Music learning takes place through diverse practices and institutions. These range from informal self-directed learning, enculturation or immersion in sociomusical groups involved in music-making, transmission and/or reception, to involvement in music education that has been provided by a government or other social institution dedicated to that purpose. This provision might be what is known as ‘formal’, including for example school and higher education curricula or specialist instrumental tuition. It might be private or state-funded, and is often linked to recognized qualiications. Music-learning might also take place in ‘semiformal’ contexts, in the sense that they involve a certain amount of organized provision, but, for example, looser boundaries between teacher and taught, less likelihood of leading to a qualiication, and so on. Community music programmes would be one example of such provision.6 The third and inal aim of this chapter is to examine some of the different ways in which musical identity-formation is speciically intertwined with music learning, cutting across from the informal to the formal music education spheres. In sum, the aims of this chapter are to consider some of the ways in which individual musical identities are formed through formal and informal music learning across a range of contexts afforded by the contemporary dialectical relations between local and global musical cultures; to suggest some ways in which both similarities and differences occur in the processes of musical identityformation and the content of musical identities; and to consider some of the effects of globalization and localization in relation to the provision and content of formal music education.

Some Introductory Comments on Musical Globalization and Musical Identity In a loose sense there is of course nothing new about globalization – migration, cross-continental exchange and trade have gone on since the dawn of humanity. to Giddens also, the identity of the self presumes ‘relexive awareness’. Identity is of course not given, but has to be ‘routinely created and sustained in the relexive activities of the individual’ (Giddens 1991, p. 52). This involves a kind of narrative, a biography, ‘an ongoing story about the self’ that one creates and re-creates. Tia DeNora makes the link between a notion of narrative identity and speciically how this works with music, by showing how individuals develop a sense of self through engaging with musical materials, either as listeners or music-makers (De Nora 2000, p. 68). Also see Frith (1996), and other texts mentioned in n. 2 above. 6 The distinctions between informal, non-formal, semi-formal and formal music education are quite hard to identify and disentangle. This issue lies outside the focus of the present chapter, but for some discussions see e.g. Feichas (2006), Folkestad (2006), Green (2001), Mok (2010), Renshaw (2005); also special issues of the British Journal of Music Education (2010), Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education (2009) and Visions of Research in Music Education (2008).

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But the speciic term ‘globalization’ tends to imply a disassociation from previous cognate terms such as ‘imperialism’ or ‘colonialism’. Most especially, in the way I wish to use it here, globalization relates to the relatively new means of electronic exchange of ‘information’ and culture – particularly music for our purposes – that exploded in the last three or so decades of the twentieth century. Giddens succinctly explains the qualitative changes brought about by globalization, thus: the concept of globalisation is best understood as expressing fundamental aspects of time–space distanciation. Globalisation concerns the intersection of presence and absence, the interlacing of social events and social relations ‘at distance’ with local contextualities.7

In the case of music (and other cultural forms), globalization can be understood to involve two directional lows. One is the relatively new, electronic, cultural, musical imperialism or colonization by powerful nations or regions at the metaphorical ‘centre’ of the world, over smaller or less powerful ones at the ‘periphery’. This involves particularly the global export of styles of popular music that originated in, or are heavily associated with the USA, and (dating from pre-electronic means) the continuing export of classical musics that originated in Western Europe. The other is the diversiication in the quantity and types of music that are readily available in an exchange to and from peripheral and central regions across the globe. In such ways local musics such as reggae and salsa have become, to some extent, popular global phenomena; or local musics such as gamelan and Ghanaian drumming have become well-known in certain pockets (including educational ones) that are spread throughout the world.8 Musical identities are formed at the level of the individual and that of the group. The latter may involve a large-scale social group such as nation, class, gender, ethnicity, religion or age; or a smaller-scale ‘socio-musical’ group such as ‘jazz musicians’, ‘composers’ or ‘fans’.9 It may involve a visible or spectacular group such as a profession, sub-culture or scene, in which the members may work or socialize together; or a more amorphous group such as conductors or particular instrumentalists – say, pianists or drummers – who, because of the nature of their main musical involvement, rarely make music together, and do not work or hang about in social groups with each other. However, in this chapter most of the examples which I will use are located in the experiences of individuals. In the individual we can ind issues that reverberate at the level of the social group, and beyond to global matters. Again Giddens has a helpful way of conceptualizing the relation between these two extremes, which he refers to in the quote below as facets of ‘high modernity’ or in other words, advanced capitalism: 7 8 9

Giddens (1991), p. 21. See for example Biddle and Knights (2007a), pp. 3ff. See Green (1999) for a discussion of this relationship in the context of education.

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Transformations in self-identity and globalisation […] are the two poles of the dialectic of the local and the global in conditions of high modernity. Changes in intimate aspects of personal life, in other words, are directly tied to the establishment of social connections of very wide scope […] the level of time– space distanciation introduced by high modernity is so extensive that, for the irst time in human history, ‘self’ and ‘society’ are interrelated in a global milieu […].10

Thus the sociologist can focus on the individual, but in ways that, rather than denying the social whole, can illuminate how the individual and the social whole are in a dialectical relation of mutual production. Musical Identity as Relexive Self-afirmation I would like start with a hypothetical example. Let us take a young person who enjoys a weekly violin lesson, in which the teacher focuses mainly on notation and technique in Western classical music. The young player also attends regular rehearsals with a youth orchestra. Because the music involved in these activities is a global phenomenon, this young person’s activities could take place in a large number of different countries or areas of the world, from Australia to Japan, South Africa to Finland, or Argentina to Canada. Then let us take another young player who eagerly learns the violin – or iddle as it would be known in this context – by sitting in a session in an Irish pub with her family, watching and listening to traditional music-making around her, and joining in when she can. As well as the pub sessions, this young person also learns in the home, when a parent or older sibling shows her a tune and helps her to play it. In the case of both these young people, they are likely to be developing some kind of an identity as a ‘violinist’, or ‘iddle-player’. In this example both young players enjoy learning to play the violin, and do so willingly. But what of those to whom violin practice and violin lessons are a torture forced upon them by their parents, and activities to be avoided as much as possible? Could we say that two young people in that kind of position would be likely to develop identities as violinists? Probably not. This is because the concept of musical identity tends to imply a level of positivity, or ‘good feeling’ about one’s identity. As Giddens puts it, a key part of self-identity is the notion of an ‘ideal self’, which ‘forms a channel of positive aspirations in terms of which the narrative of self-identity is worked out’.11 However, the fact that two such young people may not develop identities as violinists is unlikely to mean that they will go through life with no musical identity whatsoever. On the contrary, being ‘forced’ to play the violin by one’s parents, and hating it, is likely to lead to the development of an alternative musical identity; 10 11

Giddens (1991), p. 32. Ibid., p. 68.

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one which, perhaps, will involve hating violins and hating classical music, or Irish traditional music, or whatever is the case. The two young people in the example above might turn to alternative music as a way of expressing their disdain for the violin or the iddle, and as a way of taking on a musical identity of a different kind. What of those young people who have either no opportunity or no desire to learn to play any musical instrument, or to take part in any kind of music-making activities? As we know, such young people are still unlikely to grow up without a musical identity, but will in the vast majority of cases develop an identity as music-listeners or fans; or at least, as people with certain musical tastes and values. For music in most parts of the world today enters into the interstices of people’s lives in such a way that the possibility of a person having no musical identity whatsoever is fairly remote. Globalization means that as Giddens puts it, ‘no-one can “opt out” of the transformations’ which it brings about.12 Although in making this statement he had in mind the unavoidability of eventualities such as nuclear war or global-warming, it is not far-fetched to apply the same principle to the cultural sphere. In this sense, even if a person’s musical identity could be described as ‘luke-warm’, most people are almost bound to have some musical tastes and values that would form the skeleton of a musical identity.

Globalization, Localization and Children’s Informal Musical Identity-formation A major channel for musical identity-formation is forged in the unsupervised play of children. Children’s playground games and other play activities in many regions of the world relect a mix of local musical identities derived from peers, family and kinship networks, and global identities reaped from the mass media and involving musics that – regardless of where the children live or what national or ethnic group(s) they identify with – tend stylistically or historically to originate in, or delineate, the USA.13 Some of the processes involved in this syndrome are well illustrated by Susan Harrop-Allin.14 She observed the musical play of South African township children in the Soweto area of Johannesburg. In this example of a playground game, she describes ten girls gathering under a tree and organizing themselves into two lines facing each other. They sing and move to the pop song ‘Barbie Girl’ by the DanishNorwegian group Aqua, but adapt the song to a Zulu clapping game (see Table 3.1).

12

Ibid., p. 22. See Gaunt (2006) for a wonderful study of African-American girls’ games in the States, and Marsh (2008) for her recently acclaimed book on children’s games in a range of global contexts; also Marsh (2011). For an example of their seminal work in the ield of children’s games, see Opie and Opie (1969). 14 Harrop-Allin (2011). 13

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Table 3.1

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‘Barbie Doll’ adapted to a Zulu clapping game15

Words

Translation

Actions and Musical Content

I’m a Barbie girl, in a Barbie world

On ‘girl’ and ‘world’, learners do a circular motion with their hands around their faces, indicating a girl. Words are sung to the tune of the pop song.

I have a boyfriend; my boyfriend is a tsotsi

On ‘boyfriend’, the learners gesture to their chins to indicate a man’s beard.

Ma s’hamb’ se y’ tjontja amaswitsi

Let’s go and steal some sweets

Pair cross-clapping pattern on word syllables.

Ang-i-fu-ni

I don’t want to

Sung melody to part of the ‘Barbie Girl’ song, accompanied by a gesture, wagging foreingers to communicate ‘I don’t want to’.

Asamb’ se y’ tjontja amaswitsi

Let’s go and steal some sweets

Ang’fu-ni, ang’funi

Syncopated rhythm; words are pitched doh, te, doh; doh, te, doh (a melodic fragment from the song).

Harrop-Allin comments: Retaining the pop song’s melody, the girls change the original lyrics to ‘I have a boyfriend, my boyfriend is a tsotsi’. This is a colloquial South African word for street thugs or gangsters, which refers to a thief, petty criminal or ‘clever, streetwise hustler’ in the township […]. On the word ‘tsotsi’ the gesture pointing to a man’s beard indicates a boyfriend in township gestural language and also suggests the riskiness implied in having a tsotsi boyfriend. The girls extend the word ‘angifuni’ [‘I don’t want to’] singing it to the descending melody of the original song words ‘uh oh uh oh’. Wagging their foreingers and rocking their hips from side to side on each individual syllable of ‘angifuni’ emphasizes the word’s connotations. The drawn-out stress on the word, combined with the ‘no’ gesture, accentuates a sense of deiance and control over the tsotsi boyfriend who tries to lure the ‘Barbie Girl’ into stealing sweets (in the game’s lyrics). Accentuating each fast pulse of the song instead of the song’s four-beat metre results in rapid alternative clapping back and forth across the two lines of girls. Their gestures replace claps on words like ‘girl’, ‘tsotsi’ and ‘ang’funi’, so that

15

From ibid., p. 161.

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individual actions are integrated into the rhythmic texture. The game increases in tempo, pitch and loudness […].16

She argues that such games highlight how township children’s play can be understood as culturally hybrid forms, through which the children realize complex music identities that produce, or tap into, both local and global culture. However, the co-existence of global and local identities in children’s culture, as Harrop-Allin would agree,17 does not always involve so organic or (apparently) harmonious a cultural blending. For example, Avra Pieridou-Skoutella18 discusses the construction of children’s musical identities in the Republic of Cyprus. As she explains, Greek popular music spans a continuum, from local or traditional musical characteristics at one end (Byzantine, rembétiko and laïko musical styles) to global characteristics relecting Anglo-American popular music at the other. She explores children’s involvement with these musical styles across urban and rural, schoolbased and out-of-school contexts, revealing tensions between globalization, localization, ethnic identity-construction, and the effects of Eurocentric ideology on the children’s musical identities. For example, despite the smallness of the country (with a population of 500,000 and a region spanning around 9,250 square kilometres) children who live in urban settings, where global inluences are stronger, express more disdain of both traditional Cypriot folk music and Greek popular music; whereas those living in more rural areas are far more willing to admit liking these styles, and were even prepared to sing examples of them to the researcher. As put by one of Pieridou-Skoutella’s young rural participants: I like dancing tsiftetéli [a dance from Asia Minor related to ‘belly’ dancing] and zeibékiko [a nine-beat dance of Turkish origins]. I like laïka [popular Greek music] and traditional songs. They make me feel very different. I don’t like the songs of modern Greek singers. They sound foreign, not ours. My cousin from Nicosia says they are modern, so that makes them better. She tells me that I am píso pou ton kósmo (behind the world) and chórkatos (peasant). When she comes to a village wedding she dances Greek laïka but she goes back to Nicosia and makes fun of them saying they are Arabic. (Kiriaki, age 11, from a rural school in Cyprus)19

Such issues are particularly pertinent to how music intersects not only with the formation, but also the possible rejection, of national as well as ethnic identities. There are also many ways in which early musical identities are produced, reproduced or rejected, not only through children’s informal musical games and other practices, but also through the formal music education that they experience 16 17 18 19

Ibid., p. 160. See Harrop-Allin (2010). Avra Pieridou-Skoutella (2011). Pieridou-Skoutella (2011), p. 128.

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in schools and other institutions. The identities associated with these latter experiences often contrast and conlict with those developed in the informal arena. I will now consider a few examples of these.

Formal Music Education, Western Cultural Imperialism and Musical Identity For centuries, and before the advent of the electronic media that are associated with globalization, musical cultural imperialism or colonialism took place primarily through the export of Western classical music as a status symbol and cultural icon, and along with this went the educational systems that were associated with this music. There are countries right across the world where, although their traditional or classical indigenous musics may themselves be rich and highly diverse, it is Western-style, classical music education that has been established in state schools through governmental policies, and in private educational arenas through the choices of middle-class and upper-class families.20 Roe-Min Kok presents an autobiographical analysis of the post-colonial inluences that the British instrumental grade-exam system had on her identity-formation while taking classical piano lessons as an ethnic-Chinese child in Malaysia: I am standing in an air-conditioned waiting area of an expensive hotel in Kuala Lumpur, the capital of Malaysia. My surroundings are meticulously Western in a city and climate unyieldingly tropical. I am seven years old. It is my irst piano examination. There he is. At a desk near the piano. Silver-haired, of regal carriage, replete with the self-conidence and authority of the colonial master. His skin is ruddy, fashionably sun-tanned – a genuine tan acquired in this exotic land. He is attired in white, because white refracts heat rays. It is the color traditionally favored by travelers to hot climes. I have been schooled in the gravity of the situation. I have been trained time and again in simulated settings to be meek and polite, to parrot ‘Good morning, Sir!’. Madams are rare. My piano teacher inds out in advance the gender of the examiner, so that we, her students, can practice the greeting until it is smooth on our young Malaysian tongues. The examiner is all-powerful. Not only can he administer a failing grade to you, thus wasting the previous year’s work, time and money; he can do so at his whim, because nobody else witnesses the examination, held behind closed doors in his hotel room. If this is only a suspicion, it is one born of a colonized mentality that constantly anticipates the white man’s displeasure and its consequences – 20 For discussions of the development of formal music education across a wide range of countries and regions see e.g. Campbell et al. (2005), Cox and Stevens (2010), Hargreaves and North (2001).

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whether it happens in a ladang getah (rubber plantation) or in a Western-style hotel. I, the child, have to be respectful at all times and to be careful not to annoy him. My piano teacher’s last-minute advice rings in my ears: ‘Remember to hand him your book of scales and to respond as soon as he asks you to play. Dog-ear the pages so that you can turn them easily. Don’t repeat passages in which you make mistakes; cut your ingernails so they don’t go “clack” on the keys – that will irritate him’.21

Through her analysis of this and similar experiences from her childhood, Kok reveals the informal, complex, and inluential relationships between the institutions of family and society, and between ethnicity, local culture and colonial history. For her, learning to play Western classical piano was an avenue for articulating and exploring changes in the formation of a mixed and complex ethnic identity. Many other countries throughout the world have adapted not only Western classical music, but the formal educational systems and pedagogies primarily associated with it. The Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music, which is the body discussed by Kok above, runs centres all over the world, particularly in countries that are ex-British colonies. It is, however, only one example of this phenomenon, which has been exported to many countries where it exists outside, but alongside, indigenous music-transmission processes. There are also many cases of school curricula and higher education courses that are based on the same fundamental pedagogic principles and, likewise, focus on Western classical music and its associated curricula and/or pedagogy. One example is the Brazilian Music Schools, that were originally modelled on the eighteenth-century French conservatoire,22 and retained this ethos throughout the twenthieth century, in spite of vibrant efforts to tap into and establish a speciically national ‘Brazilian musical psyche’,23 and the rise of Brazilian Popular Music (MPB).24 Similar Western-style educational provision, in parallel to but distinct from local musics, has grown up in other South American countries including Peru, Bolivia and Argentina,25 and places as far apart as Ghana, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Thailand and Korea, to name only some.26 In such contexts, families, educational organizations and governments have attempted to ‘Westernize’ or ‘modernize’ their social status, education system or society, and have found music a powerful as well as convenient means to help in that endeavour. Kok (2006), p. 89, or (2011), p. 74. Feichas (2011). 23 Reily (1994). 24 Warner and Nascimento (2007). 25 Oliveira (2001). 26 See Wiggins 2011 (Ghana), Yeh (2001) (China), Ho (1996) (Hong Kong), Murao and Wilkins (2001) (Japan), Maryprasith (1999) (Thailand) and Auh and Walker (2001) (Korea). 21

22

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This is by no means to say, however, that all countries of the world have been so susceptible to the importation of Western classical music and its associated education systems. A robust counter-example is India, which in spite of the existence of British-based classical instrumental grade exams there, has held on to a proud tradition of not only indigenous and highly specialized classical musics, but also very speciic forms of music education in the traditional guru-shishya mould.27 Additionally, today new, ‘hybrid’ forms of provision are developing, where local, non-Western musical cultures and/or social structures are integrated with Western classical music education in new ways. One example is the famous El Sistema programme in Venezuela, which has achieved incredible success, and turned around the lives of many street children by giving them the opportunity to play in Western-style classical orchestras.28 Another is the very recent setting up of a National Institute of Music in Kabul, where in the face of the previous moratorium on music decreed by the Taliban, children from the age of 10, mostly from poor backgrounds, are soon to be given the opportunity to acquire skills in both Western and Afghan classical musics.29 Furthermore, this latter development involves a low that is very much a twoway affair. Venezuela’s El Sistema for example is being taken up by educational and outreach organizations in many other countries, from Scotland to the USA. Other set-ups that connote local, non-Western regions or cultures are also rising up elsewhere, such as Brazilian samba schools or gamelan orchestras, which can be found in many European centres operating as independent units as well as offering workshops in schools and other institutions.30 Whilst such developments could be seen as a refreshing reversal of the trafic of music-educational practices from the North-Western or Westernised areas to other parts of the world, to what extent such schemes will survive and continue to succeed in these quite different local musical cultures remains to be seen. However, there are of course tensions concerning the Westernization and ‘modernization’ of non-Western musics, where many traditional musicians see this trend as a threat. I will now consider some issues relating to this.

27

See e.g. Farrell (2001) and Grimmer (2011). See e.g. Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Sistema), accessed 22 May 2010, amongst a huge number of websites on this issue. 29 Pellengrinelli (2010). 30 For El Sistema outside Venezuela see e.g. http://www.sistemascotland.org.uk/, http:// elsistemausa.org/, and for Samba Schools outside Brazil, and gamelan orchestras outside Bali or Java, see e.g. http://www.londonschoolofsamba.co.uk, http://www.edinburghsambaschool. org.uk/, http://www.gamelannetwork.co.uk/groups/southbank-gamelan.html, accessed 22 May 2010. There are many, many more websites in different countries. 28

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Localization Policies in Formal Music Education By contrast to the above examples, in many countries or regions, perceived threats from musical globalization, along with the expansion of the industrial category of ‘world music’, are causing a vigorous renewal of interest in ensuring the survival of existing local, traditional and national musics. Thus, at the same time as the colonizing effects of ‘central’ world superpowers is occurring through musical globalization, in ‘peripheral’ regions many moves are afoot from governmental, educational and other cultural organizations, and from musicians themselves, to encourage musical localization and nationalism. Some such moves can be regarded as involving a struggle to hold back globalizing trends, whilst at the same time affording the possibility of capitalising on the touristic attractions and marketability of indigenous music, and the cultural export of local identity. This can in turn put them in tension with issues of cultural preservation and ‘authenticity’. Such issues may occur more vigorously in ‘small’ countries or regions; and/or in countries with long histories of colonization or some level of subordination under a larger power. Illustrations of ways in which musical globalization has been resisted within formal educational arenas can be found in places as far apart as, and with local histories as different as, Brazil, Bali and Ghana, as I wish to demonstrate through three examples. In Brazil, the previously European-modelled conservatoires are now encouraging diversiication, not only of the music that is taught within their walls, but of the proile and prior musical experiences of the student body. Thus students with backgrounds in Brazilian Popular Music, as well as other popular musics and jazz, are for the irst time being given the opportunity to study in such places.31 However, whilst the backgrounds of the students inevitably means bringing in those national or ‘nationalized’ Brazilian styles of music such as were mentioned earlier,32 they are less likely to involve more overtly commercial manifestations such as US-American rap, or underground musics, which always ind their way into formal education more slowly and sporadically than forms that have attained a level of ‘respectability’, ‘classical’ or ‘national’ status. This is a process, therefore, of localization and nationalism within a bounded, middle-class context. In Ghana, Trevor Wiggins (2011) studied a number of cultural groups who are involved in music-and-dance activities, sometimes intertwined with story-telling, and who draw their materials from either their immediate location or a wider Ghanaian background. Although they all have in common the desire to forefront local or national culture, their approaches can contrast markedly with each others’, particularly in respect of tensions between the demands of state education and those of attaining regional cultural balance. Wiggins reveals the complexities involved: 31 32

Feichas (2011). Reily (1994), Warner and Nascimento (2007).

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There was a considerable debate in Parliament about how an Arts Council should be set up, its remit and role. As the Minister of Education asserted: ‘We all have an interest in seeing that our nation makes its proper contribution to the artistic and cultural life of the world’ (Arts Council of Ghana bill [ACG], column 300). Although this point was agreed, the nature of the relationship between the Arts Council and the government was more contentious – ‘The [Arts Council of Ghana] Bill […] is going to give power to the Government to control arts in the country. We must remember that art is culture and anything cultural should not be placed under the control of the government’ (ACG, column 303). There was a commitment to representation of the different ethnic groups in Ghana on the Arts Council but the practical issue of what constituted the national culture, particularly in a post-colonial setting, continued to exercise the minds of the members of Parliament. The minister was advised that: ‘The irst place he [the minister] should look for development of this [the arts] is the villages. Encourage young people in the villages because the villages are the true repositories of our cultural heritage’ (ACG, column 306). There was also a commitment and expectation to a broader national knowledge of arts rather than the transmission and preservation of an individual heritage within its cultural location. ‘On special occasions […] residents from neighboring and distant areas of Ghana should be invited because it is not enough to know the heritage of your own individual tribal grouping; it is not enough. We must expand and be true exponents of Ghanaian culture in toto.’ (ACG, columns 306–7).33

Tensions between local, national and global cultures are also identiied in Bali by Peter Dunbar-Hall.34 As he explains, Bali has a fragile local and national identity, as the only Hindu island in an archipelago-nation that is otherwise Muslim. This identity has recently been rocked further by the terrorist bombings of 2002 and 2005, the outbreak of numerous diseases and the general economic downturn affecting the tourist industry. Regarding the position of music on the island, independent learning studios have grown up, which are distinct from the traditional village-based teaching groups, and are amongst a range of responses to preserving local music and local music teaching-and-learning practices. In addition, both national (Indonesian) and local (Balinese) agendas for the use of music and dance as commodities of cultural tourism mean that learning to play music or to dance can become a means of personal, family and group economic gain, as well as affecting individual and group identities. Detailed comparative research about the attitudes and values of teachers, musicians and others concerning local musics across different nations could throw up some interesting issues. One could for example hypothesize that the local and national musics of ‘central’ or powerful countries with imperial pasts may be relatively more problematic as markers of identity for their indigenous, national 33 34

Wiggins (2011), pp. 171–2. Dunbar-Hall (2011).

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people, whilst the local and national musics of ‘peripheral’ or previously colonised countries or regions may be relatively attractive and inviting for their populations, as well as their governments. For example, in England, although there is a history of folk or traditional music at least as strong as that in Scotland or Ireland, and although the government and educational system have for over a century included English folk music in the school curriculum, arguably English folk music is not receiving the same level of interest from either musicians, listeners, teachers, learners or the mass media in England as its Scottish, Irish or Welsh counterparts are currently enjoying in their respective countries.35 The same could be said of Japan, where far more attention is given to Western or Westernized forms of both popular and classical musics, both inside and outside schools, than to Japanese traditional music, which entered the music curriculum there in 1998.36 Furthermore, in a way which bears parallels with the views expressed by school music teachers in England (see n. 9 above), Yumiko Endo found that teachers in Japanese schools, who had mostly been trained in Western classical music, were quite antipathetic to the incorporation of traditional Japanese musics in the curriculum.37 The main formal centres for the transmission of Japanese traditional musics seem to be found outside schooling in ‘cultural schools’.38 Diasporic Musical Identities: Some Complexities Whilst the construction of localized musical identities tends to connote an occurrence that takes place within national borders, musical identities are also, of course, carried across borders in particularly interesting ways through diasporic groups. I will illustrate this through two contrasting cases. One arises from research done by On-Nie Annie Mok. She studied a diaspora of female Filipino maids, who were born and brought up in the Philippines, then moved to Hong Kong to work as domestic maids, where they number in the thousands.39 The participants’ childhood and teenage musical enculturation had involved regular music-making in churches and social gatherings, where, as well as other skills, many of them had learned informally to sing in spontaneous two-part harmony, by ear. Having moved to Hong Kong they maintained this kind of musical involvement through groups organized amongst themselves, but were also eager to absorb new learning within this more wealthy society. They made use of the internet, radio and CDs,

35 For example, music teachers in English schools, questioned in 1982 and again in 1998, revealed their general disinterestedness in folk music, in spite of its fairly prominent position in the National Curriculum for Music, as reported in Green (2002). 36 Murao and Wilkins (2001). 37 Endo (2004). 38 Murao and Wilkins (2001). 39 Mok (2010, 2011).

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often raiding their employers’ collections, and through these means, listened to a range of music they had not heard before. A particularly interesting inding is that they took steps to beneit from the instrumental lessons given by private music tutors who were hired to teach their employers’ children. For example, they would listen to what was happening in the lesson, whilst at the same time getting on with the cleaning: ‘Yes, when the teacher comes, I learn it. My ears, I am doing the duties and hear, this is how you play […].’40 Some maids were allowed to observe, and even take part, in the lessons. Amongst other things, this provided them with their irst introduction to staff notation. Mok shows how their homeland enculturation processes had given them a profoundly personal musical identity and a deep love of music, along with a set of musical skills that many classically trained musicians would envy. Yet she also shows that they did not place high value on these factors, but rather wished to reject them in favour of what they saw as more advanced, Westernized musical identities, skills, knowledge and opportunities. The other diasporic group I will consider is that of a socio-musical group of male Muslim Khalifa barbers, who were studied by John Baily.41 The barbers originate in Gujarat, North India, and have settled in the UK over the past few decades. In the past, Baily explains, members of this community held low social status in Gujarat, which was closely bound up with two of their hereditary occupations: that of barber and that of musician. However, while Khalifas have historically acknowledged and actively pursued their connection with haircutting, music-making has been an area of contestation, with competing claims that on the one hand, ‘music is in our blood’ and on the other hand, music is not fully endorsed by Islam. Through his study of Khalifa groups in three urban centres in England, Baily examines participants’ changing attitudes towards their previously stigmatized occupations now that they have become members of a well-established and relatively successful community in the UK. He suggests how Khalifas conceive their own musicality, and illustrates how they pass on music through informal learning. Those who are deeply involved in music-making express considerable pride in being self-taught, which they regard as a sign of inherent musicality, and a fundamental aspect of their collective identity. Many interesting contrasts can be illustrated through these two cases. In each, members of the diaspora have strong musical identities arising from their enculturation in their familial ethnic groups, and from the informal musiclearning practices of their childhoods. But for the Filipino women, Mok shows how their removal to a different society resulted in a rejection of these identities and a search for new, more formalized and, as they saw it, more advanced ways of learning; whereas for the Gujarati men, as Baily illustrates, their new overseas status enhanced their pride in both their ethnic musical identities and 40 41

Ibid., p. 55. Baily (2011[2006]).

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their informal learning practices. Furthermore, the Filipino women were from the start engaged with Western music mainly brought to their country through the Christian church, and not with indigenous Filipino music; whereas the Gujarat men were engaged with a music very much identiied as ethnically and culturally ‘their own’, even though it had problematic and complex connections with their religious beliefs. The Filipino maids wished to beneit from and blend in with the more global musical culture – both popular and classical – which they found in their host country; whereas the Gujarati men wished to maintain and distinguish their musical culture from that of the host country. These two cases alone can illustrate the complexities of musical identity-formation, and the need to avoid generalizations about this challenging issue. A similar area is well illustrated by Andrew Bennett, who shows how even members of the same ethnic group living in the same city can develop highly different and even opposed identities in relation to the same styles of music.42

Concluding Thoughts In this chapter I have considered some issues concerning the formation of local, national and ethnic identities within a globalized musical culture, in relation to music learning and music education. Musical identity-formation carries with it many practical challenges as well as opportunities for the future of music teaching and learning, whether conceived as formal, informal or somewhere in-between. Recently there have been moves in countries right across the world, in which educators have begun to investigate, adapt and incorporate local and/or globalized, informal music-making and music-learning practices from outside formal educational institutions, and bring them inside. This has involved developing new teaching methods that aim to relect such practices, as well as the values and identities that go along with them.43 Such moves also contain implications for understanding different types, not only of learning, but of teaching too, and suggest that more knowledge about music learning and its relation to the formation of musical identities could continue to enrich the ways music educators think about teaching, and more importantly, the ways they go about it. Many music educationalists and music-education researchers today would agree that we should approach issues connecting musical identity and learning tentatively. Even a brief cross-cultural perspective on these issues quickly illustrates how different are the processes of musical identity-formation; how varied are the contents of musical identity for individuals and groups in different places; and how 42

Bennett (2000). See for example Campbell et al. (2005), Cope (1999), Green (2008), Hargreaves and North (2001), Harrop-Allin (2011), Lebler (2007, 2008), O’Flynn (2009), Westerlund (2006). There are many other sources, including for example the articles within the special issues of journals mentioned in n. 4 above. 43

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closely woven musical identity-formation can be with music learning. This points to a need for music educationalists and researchers to deepen our understanding of the complexity and multiplicity of the inluences on children’s, teenagers’, adultlearners’, and also our own musical tastes, knowledge and skills. This standpoint suggests that music education could gain in many different ways if it continues to act in parity and interchangeably with both global and local musical traditions and practices; and that global and local musical traditions and practices can complement and ill many gaps left by more formal approaches to music teaching and learning. These issues have implications for curriculum and pedagogy within and beyond schools, conservatoires, universities, community schemes and other education providers, and suggest the continued importance of opening up what we conceive to be music, musical identity, learning and education.

Acknowledgement A short version of this chapter was irst presented as a keynote address to the German Association for Research in Music Education, October 2010. Many of the empirical examples are indebted to the work of authors in my recent edited book, Learning, Teaching and Musical Identities: Voices Across Cultures (Green 2011).

References Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education (2009?) ‘Exploring the Contexts of Informal Learning’ (special issue), Action, Criticism and Theory for Music Education, 8(2). Auh, M-S. and Walker, R. (2001) ‘Korea’, in D.J. Hargreaves and A.C. North (eds) Musical Development and Learning: The International Perspective (London, New York: Continuum), pp. 102–19. Baily, J. (2011[2006]) ‘“Music is in our blood”: Gujarati Muslim musicians in the UK’, Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies, 32: 257–70. Bennett, A. (2000) Popular Music and Youth Culture: Music, Identity and Place (London and New York: MacMillan’s Press). Biddle, I. and Knights, V. (2007a) ‘Introduction: National popular musics: Betwixt and beyond the local and global’, in V. Knights and I. Biddle (eds) Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 1–18. — (eds) Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location: Between the Local and the Global (Aldershot: Ashgate). British Journal of Music Education (2010) ‘Special Issue on Informal Learning’ 27(1). Campbell, P.S., Drummond, J., Dunbar-Hall, P., Meith, H., Schippers, H. and Wiggins, T. (eds) (2005) Cultural Diversity in Music Education: Directions and Challenges for the 21st Century (Australia: Australian Academic Press).

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Cope, P. (1999) ‘Community-based traditional iddling as a basis for increasing participation in instrument play’, Music Education Research, 1(1): 61–73. Cox, G. and Stevens, R. (eds) (2010) The Origins and Foundations of Music Education: Cross-cultural Historical Studies of Music in Compulsory Schooling (London: Continuum). De Nora, T. (2000) Music In Everyday Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Drummond, J. (2005) ‘Cultural Diversity In Music Education: Why Bother?’, in P.S. Campbell, J. Drummond, P. Dunbar-Hall, K. Howard, H. Schippers and T. Wiggins (eds) Cultural Diversity in Music Education: Directions and Challenges for the 21st Century (Queensland: Australian Academic Press). Dunbar-Hall, P. (2011) ‘Village, province and nation: Aspects of identity in children’s learning of music and dance in Bali’, in L. Green (ed.) Learning, Teaching and Musical Identity: Voices across Cultures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), pp. 60–72. Endo, Y. (2004) ‘Japanese identity formation through Japanese traditional instrumental music’, unpublished MA dissertation (London: London University Institute of Education). Farrell, G. (2001) ‘India’, in D.J. Hargreaves and A.C. North (eds) Musical Development and Learning: The International Perspective (London, New York: Continuum), pp. 56–72. Feichas, H. (2006) Formal and informal music learning in Brazilian Higher Education, School of Arts and Humanities (Unpublished PhD thesis; London: London University Institute of Education). — (2011) ‘Diversity, identity and learning styles amongst students in a Brazilian university’ in L. Green (ed.) Learning, Teaching and Musical Identity: Voices across Cultures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), pp. 282–93. Folkestad, G. (2006) ‘Formal and informal learning situations or practices versus formal and informal ways of hearing’, British Journal of Music Education, 23: 135–45. Frith, S. (1996) ‘Music and identity’ in P. Gay and S. Hall (eds) Questions of Cultural Identity (London, Thousand Oaks, New Delhi: Sage), pp. 117–18. Gaunt K.D. (2006) The Games Black Girls Play: Learning the Ropes from DoubleDutch to Hip-Hop (New York: New York University Press). Giddens, A. (1991) Modernity and Self-identity (Oxford: Polity Press). Green, L. (1999) ‘Research in the sociology of music education: Some fundamental concepts’, Music Education Research, 1: 159–69. — (2001) How Popular Musicians Learn: A Way Ahead for Music Education (Aldershot: Ashgate). — (2002) ‘From the Western classics to the world: secondary music teachers’ changing attitudes in England, 1982 and 1998’, British Journal of Music Education, 19: 5–30. — (2008) Music, Informal Learning and the School: A New Classroom Pedagogy (Aldershot: Ashgate).

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— (ed.) (2011) Learning, Teaching and Musical Identity: Voices across Cultures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Grimmer, S. (2011) ‘Continuity and change: The guru-shishya relationship in Karnatic classical music training’, in L. Green (ed.) Learning, Teaching and Musical Identity: Voices across Cultures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), pp. 91–108. Hargreaves, D.J. and North, A.C. (eds) (2001) Musical Development and Learning: The International Perspective (London, New York: Continuum). Harrop-Allin, S. (2010) Recruiting Learners’ Musical Games as Resources for South African Music Education, Using a Multiliteracies Approach (Unpublished PhD thesis; Johannesburg: University of Witwatersrand). — (2011) ‘Playing with Barbie: Exploring South African township children’s musical games as resources for pedagogy’ in L. Green (ed.) Learning, Teaching and Musical Identity: Voices across Cultures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), pp. 156–69. Ho, W-C. (1996) Hong Kong Secondary Music Education: A Sociological Enquiry (Unpublished PhD thesis; London: London University Institute of Education). Kok, R-M. (2011[2006]) ‘Music for a postcolonial child: Theorizing Malaysian memories’, in S. Boyton and R.-M. Kok (eds), Musical Childhoods and the Cultures of Youth (Middletown: Wesleyan University Press), pp. 89–104. Lebler, D. (2007) ‘Student-as-master? Relections on a learning innovation in popular music pedagogy’, International Journal of Music Education, 25: 205–21. — (2008) ‘Popular music pedagogy: peer learning in practice’, Music Education Research, 10: 193–214. Macdonald, R., Hargreaves, D.J. and Miell, D. (eds) (2002a) Musical Identities (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Marsh, K. (2008) The Musical Playground: Global Tradition and Change in Children’s Songs and Game (Oxford: Oxford University Press). — (2011) ‘The permeable classroom: Teaching, learning and musical identity in a remote Australian Aboriginal homelands school’, in L. Green (ed.) Learning, Teaching and Musical Identity: Voices across Cultures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), pp. 20–32. Maryprasith, P. (1999) The Effects of Globalisation and Localisation on the Status of Music in Thailand (Unpublished PhD thesis; London: London University Institute of Education). Merriam, A. (1964) The Anthropology of Music (Evanston: North Western University Press). Messenger, J. (1958) ‘Esthetic Talent’, Basic College Quarterly, 4: 20–24. Mok, A. O-N. (2010) ‘Musical enculturation, learning and the values of four Hong Kong socio-musical groups’, Department of Arts and Humanities (Unpublished PhD thesis: London: London University Institute of Education). — (2011) ‘From homeland to Hong Kong: The dual musical experience and identity of diasporic Filipino women’, in L. Green (ed.) Learning, Teaching

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and Musical Identity: Voices across Cultures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), pp. 47–61. Murao, T. and Wilkins, B. (2001) ‘Japan’, in D.J. Hargreaves and A.C. North (eds) Musical Development and Learning: The International Perspective (London, New York: Continuum), pp. 87–101. Nettl, B. (1983[1954]) The Study of Ethnomusicology: Twenty-Nine Issues And Concepts (Urbana and Chicago: University Of Illinois Press). O’Flynn, J. (2009) The Irishness Of Irish Music (Aldershot: Ashgate). Oliveira, A.D.J. (2001) ‘South America’, in D.J. Hargreaves and A.C. North (eds) Musical Development and Learning: The International Perspective (London, New York: Continuum), pp. 187–201. Opie, I. and Opie, P. (1969) Children’s Games in Street and Playground: Chasing, Catching, Seeking, Hunting, Racing, Duelling, Exerting, Daring, Guessing, Acting, Pretending (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Pellengrinelli, L. (2010) ‘An Upbeat Afghan Story’, Wall Street Journal On-line; . Pieridou-Skoutella, A. (2011) ‘Greek popular music and the construction of musical identities by Greek-Cypriot school children’, in L. Green (ed.) Learning, Teaching and Musical Identity: Voices across Cultures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), pp. 128–41. Reily, S.A. (1994) ‘Macunaima’s Music: National Identity and Ethnomusicological Research in Brazil’, in M. Stokes (ed.) Ethnicity, Identity and Music: The Musical Construction of Place (Oxford: Berg), pp. 71–96. Renshaw, P. (2005) Simply Connect: Best Musical Practice in Non-Formal Learning Contexts (London: Paul Hamlyn Foundation). Sloboda, J., Davidson, J. and Howe, M. (1994) ‘Is everyone musical?’, The Psychologist, August: 349–54. Smith, G.D. (2011) “I drum, therefore I am”: A study of kit drummers’ learning, identities and values, in Department of Arts and Humanities (Unpublished PhD thesis; London: London University Institute of Education). Stalhammar, B. (2006) Music And Human Beings: Music And Identity (Orebro: Universitetsbiblioteket). Stokes, M. (ed.) (1994) Ethnicity, Identity And Music: The Musical Construction Of Place (Oxford: Berg). — (2003) ‘Globalisation And The Politics Of World Music’, in Clayton, M., Herbert, T., and Middleton, R. (eds), The Cultural Study Of Music (London, New York: Routledge), pp. 297–308. Visions of Research in Music Education (2008) ‘Beyond Lucy Green: Operationalizing Theories of Informal Music Learning’ (special issue), Visions of Research in Music Education, 12. Warner, R. and Nascimento, R. (2007) ‘The singer and the mask: Voices of Brazil in Antônio Nóbrega’s Madeira Que Cupim Não Rói’, in V. Knights and

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I. Biddle (eds) Music, National Identity and the Politics of Location (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 143–60. Wenger, E. (1998) Communities of Practice: Learning, Meaning and Identity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Westerlund, H. (2006) ‘Garage rock bands: A future model for developing musical expertise?’, International Journal of Music Education, 24: 119–25. Wiggins, T. (2011) ‘Personal, local and national identities in Ghanaian performance Ensembles’, in L. Green (ed.) Learning, Teaching and Musical Identity: Voices across Cultures (Bloomington: Indiana University Press), pp. 170–83. Yeh, C-S. (2001) ‘China’, in D.J. Hargreaves and A.C. North (eds) Musical Development and Learning: The International Perspective (London, New York: Continuum), pp. 27–39.

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Chapter 4

Béla Bartók: Reintegrating the Semantic and Syntactic Axes in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle David Cooper

The premise of a colloquium held in the University of Surrey in March 2006 was that ‘we might be seeing the return of a (repressed) formalism, perhaps in a refreshed guise’ in the ield of Bartók studies.1 In this chapter I would like to consider whether it is possible to imagine a rapprochement between activity on musical semantics, one of the principal themes of a ‘new’ musicology that, according to Lawrence Kramer in 1993, sought ‘to retrieve music from its traditional self-containment and to uncover its many worldly meanings’,2 and apparently much more abstract theorization of the quantitative metrics of pitch spaces that builds on empirical insights from music psychology (especially the ground breaking work of Carol Krumhansl) as elaborated in Fred Lerdahl’s 2001 study, Tonal Pitch Space.3 Jean-Jacques Nattiez discussed the relationship between two quite distinct approaches to musical understanding – one formalist and looking inward, the other referential and looking outward – in a paper irst translated into English in 1989. There he remarked that: the two perspectives are in no way incompatible unless one exercises an ontological exclusivism which quickly tends to become dogmatic and normative. Bright (1963) was probably right to see in music an element which is at once endosemantic (the structures refer to structures) and exosemantic (referral to the outside world). It is my belief that the distribution of importance accorded to these two dimensions varies according to historical period, aesthetics, culture and the individual, and that one cannot favour one to the detriment of the other.4

A year later, in relation to a perceived resurgence of musicological interest in musical narrativity, particularly from a literary perspective, Nattiez posed the 1 The symposium ‘Re-engaging Formalism: Bartók’ involved Elliott Antokoletz, Amanda Bayley, Julie Brown, Stephen Downes, Malcolm Gillies and the author of this chapter. 2 Kramer (1994). 3 Krumhansl (1990); Lerdahl (2001). 4 Nattiez (1989), pp. 21–75 (22). Also see Bright (1963).

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question whether it was possible to speak of such a concept at all. He concluded that ‘in itself […] music is not a narrative and that any description of its formal structures in terms of narrativity is nothing but superluous metaphor. […] because music shares with literary narrative that fact that, within it, objects succeed one another: this linearity is thus an incitement to a narrative thread which narrativizes music’.5 In an elegant and robustly argued riposte penned in 1994 to a review by Charles Rosen of a group of books whose approach was informed by what was then still relatively recently categorized as ‘new’ musicology, Lawrence Kramer presented the view that: music is radically enveloped and interwoven with meanings, which can be discussed as musical without naive invocations of referentiality. The protective barrier between music and the world is ictitious; it can stand only as long as we misperceive it as a commonsensical, self-evident fact. […] music is actually encountered through a host of discontinuous and fragmentary experiences, shot through with relection, memory, and desire, and sustained by wavering attention. This is equally true of listening to, playing, remembering, and relecting on music.6

Musical semantics, even in the broadest deinition and at the highest level of abstraction, has proved itself to be an extremely contentious and slippery area. In one of the classic texts of semiotics, Signs, Language and Behaviour, Charles Morris, for example, could see ‘no compelling reason for not regarding the arts as languages, dependent in part upon spoken language (so that the works of art often become interpersonal post-language symbols), less adequate than spoken language for some purposes of communication but more adequate than others. […] The differentiation of music and painting from other languages does not lie […] in what is signiied or how it is signiied, but in the dominant role which icons have in the signifying.’7 For the linguist Ray Jackendoff, however, while music and the visual arts can be accepted as ‘modes of communication’, it is not appropriate to regard them as languages.8 Scores for ilm and television have provided particularly fertile sites for recent investigation of music’s potential as a communicative medium beyond simple considerations of the iconic (or hypoiconic) carriage of meaning, or self-referential ‘syntactic semantics’.9 It is clear that music in such multimedia contexts can take on a literally signiicant, if at times partial and contingent, narrative role, just as (among others) costume, set and lighting design, camerawork and editing do, each 5 6 7 8 9

Nattiez (1990), pp. 240–57. Kramer (1994). Morris (1946), pp. 193–4. Jackendoff (1997), p. 184. See, for example: Cooper (2001, 2005).

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contributing to the exposition and elaboration of the overall narrative through the means of expression inherent in their ield and within their own discrete ‘languages’. Here, the expression of meaning through music, whether by means of its denotative or connotative potential, can range from the entirely unambiguous to the intentionally ambiguous.

Bartók Analysis and the Encoding of Meaning In a paper presented to the International Bartók Colloquium in Szombathely in 1995, and subsequently expanded into an article published in the special pair of issues of Studia Musicologica dedicated to the proceedings, Iván Waldbauer summarized the principal approaches to Bartók analysis that had developed by the mid 1990s.10 In his estimation, four basic phases could be discerned: the writings of Edwin von der Nüll, for whom Bartók’s ‘pitch organisation […] is tertian, tonal and diatonic’; Ernő Lendvai’s theories based on the golden section, the Fibonacci series, and the axis system; the work of a group of ‘post-Lendvai’ theorists, speciically the German Peter Petersen and two Hungarians, László Somfai and János Kárpáti, who share an interest in tonal pitch organization; and that of four American scholars – Allen Forte, Elliott Antokoletz, Paul Wilson and Richard Cohn, a ‘common thread between [whom] is reliance on theoretical concepts and systems that were developed originally to deal with music generally labelled atonal’.11 Waldbauer concludes that while ‘set theory and the concept of structural overlay are necessary to Bartók analysis’, his music is fundamentally governed by tonal principles, albeit ‘the means by which [tonal direction] is achieved and the patterns in which it results is an ever varying amalgam of western and folklore traditions and of novel non-tonal or atonal procedures’.12 Elsewhere, I have explored how such residual tonal traces in Bartók’s music can be analysed using a computational algorithm.13 Bartók himself observed in a marginal note scribbled in one of Nietzsche’s works that: When I was a little boy I felt certain musical phrases to be questions, reproaches, complaints, answers, hoaxing – without having known anything else outside instrumental music. If certain musical formations attach to certain ‘motions’ only by chance, these formations would connote a different symbolic meaning for each person, since the meaning would be the outcome of chance. But this is not so.14 10 11 12 13 14

Waldbauer (1996). Waldbauer developed this issue in his (2001), pp. 215–30. Waldbauer (1996), p. 104. Ibid., pp. 120–21. Cooper (1998), pp. 21–38. Tallián (1981), p. 22.

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The semantic potential of Bartók’s music is partly endosemantic, encoded by its syntactic structure; and partly exosemantic, through culturally acquired meanings that have accrued through association with traditional or art music practices, by imitation, allusion or quotation. The decoding of these meanings is contingent, as Stefani would put it, on the level of ‘competence’ of the listener (that is to say, the experience or familiarity with the broader repertoire and its signifying tokens).15 Although in his approach to Bartók, the Hungarian musicologist Ernő Lendvai demonstrated what might be seen by some as too great an enthusiasm for systematization (often founded on the interplay of binarisms as, for instance, in his discussion of the Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion in The Workshop of Bartók and Kodály), and while he could be accused of oversimpliication though his appeal to a rather naïve idealism and the invocation of what may be little more than pseudo-science, his writings offer a plausible and often convincing model for the integration of the syntactic and semantic axes in musical discourse.16 By using the term ‘axis’ here I do not intend to imply that something that is in reality both complex and multidimensional is either simple or uni-dimensional, for the syntactic ‘axis’ actually involves a multiplicity of relationships between musical events of varying densities and with very fuzzy borders between them. Equally, as almost no musical event has an absolute meaning that can be entirely comprehensible to all listeners, the ‘semantic axis’ must be regarded as potentially having a large number of ‘degrees of freedom’. It is certainly not appropriate therefore to imagine the interaction between musical syntax and semantics as something that can straightforwardly be plotted as if it were a coordinate in two-dimensional space.

Lerdahl and Tonal Pitch Space The approach taken by Fred Lerdahl to time-span and prolongational reduction in both tonal and non-tonal pitch spaces would appear to be of particular interest to the Bartók theorist. In his analyses of nontriadic chromatic tonal music in the chapter ‘Prolongations in Chromatic Spaces’ from Tonal Pitch Space, Lerdahl draws on work by Charles Morrison on the Lydian/Phrygian polymode (a collection that contains all the pitches of the chromatic scale) in relation to the Fourth String Quartet. He offers a pair of closely related versions of a pitch space derived from this polymode, and demonstrates that ifth/leading tone space can perform a local hierarchical function, which on the larger scale is performed by [0167]/octatonic space.17 In so doing, he addresses important issues about the nature of prolongation in non-triadic tonal music and the characteristics of cadences within Bartók’s syntax. Perhaps the most signiicant technical aspect of Lerdahl’s examination of non-triadic tonal spaces is his discussion of the three ‘perceptual preference 15 16 17

Stefani (1987). Lendvai (1983). Lerdahl (2001), p. 336.

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rules’ that provide a rational basis for the selection of the head of a time-span reduction, namely a series of ten salience conditions, an anchoring/reduction rule and a sensory consonance rule.18 Lerdahl acknowledges that these rules interact in non-trivial ways, and can be contradictory in implication, but despite these caveats, they do offer a systematic means of establishing pitch hierarchies that are validated by the results of psychoacoustic investigations. However, it is his consideration of Wagner’s Parsifal that is most pertinent to the theme of this chapter. Here Lerdahl explores an approach to the connection of musical narrativity with tonal syntax, by the symbolic mapping of locations in the ‘geography’ of Wagner’s pitch space onto two pairs of luidly deined concepts: heaven/salvation and earth/the tangible world; and good/truth and evil/ sin.19 Lerdahl’s point of departure is the regional chart published by Gottfried Weber (1779–1839) in Volume 2 of his Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonsetzkunst (1817–21) – see Table 4.1. He ‘partially compresses’ this pitch space by closely aligning the major and minor species of each pitch name (in uncompressed space, the regional areas surrounding a key name are assumed to be equidistant from it).20 Lerdahl argues that in the mapping of Parsifal using this space, ‘direct ascent, or motion upward by ifths, points towards heaven; direct descent, or motion downward by ifths, points toward the tangible world; motion by thirds to the right (= das Recht) points toward Christian truth (as conceived by Wagner); motion by thirds to the left (= sinistra) points toward Christian sin (as conceived by Wagner).’21 He goes on to suggest that tonal trajectories within the opera can be regarded as ‘superleitmotives’. Table 4.1 C F B@ E@ A@ … D@@

The upper ive rows of the regional chart published by Weber a d g c f

A D G C F

f# b e a d

F# B E A D

d# g# c# f# b

D# G# C# F# B

b# e# a# d# g#

B# E# A# D# G#

g* c* f* b* e*

Ibid., p. 320. Ibid., pp. 119–38. See also Lerdahl (1994), pp. 121–46. 20 In this diagram, regions directly above, below or to either side are assumed to be equidistant from it. Thus the distances from E major at the centre of the graph to A, B, e and c# are equal. In a compressed space there is assumed to be a smaller cognitive distance between major and minor species of the same pitch than in the surrounding areas. It should be noted that the version of Weber’s regional chart given as Figure 2.1(c) on page 43 of Lerdahl’s (2001) Tonal Pitch Space, is differently orientated to the version in Weber’s Versuch. See Thomas Christensen (2002), p. 786 for a facsimile of Weber’s original chart of key relationships. 21 Lerdahl (1994), p. 119. 18

19

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Exploring Tonal Pitch Space in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle While admitting that this may seem a rather elementary exposure of musical meaning though pitch space analysis, it does at least acknowledge the feasibility of such an approach. The following discussion of A Kékszakállú herceg vára (Duke Bluebeard’s Castle), which was written in 1911, subsequently revised in 1912 and 1918 and premiered in the latter year, considers whether Lerdahl’s overall approach in relation to Parsifal might be applicable to Bartók’s use of pitch space in his only operatic work. The opera is suficiently well known to require little further introduction or exegesis here, and sufice it to say that it concerns the desire of Duke Bluebeard’s new wife Judit (Judith) to see inside the seven locked doors of his castle (metaphorically his soul or psyche), which in turn open onto: the torture chamber, the armoury, the treasure chamber, the secret garden, the Duke’s domain, the lake of tears and a room housing his three living former wives, whom Judit is fated to join as a result of her inquisitiveness.22 The opera is fundamentally tonal in that it is built around signiicant stretches of music underpinned by identiiable and relatively stable pitch centres, though its melodic and harmonic coniguration is often non-diatonic. Table 4.2 presents my analysis of the main tonal areas of the opera (with subsequent movements from them indicated by ~), the key narrative themes associated with the various chambers, and Lendvai’s description of the ‘polarity’ of the scene (whether positive or negative).23 While most commentators are in agreement about the main tonal centres, there are some differences of interpretation: for example, while Leafstedt regards the tonality associated with the irst door as C#–G#, for Lendvai it is F#;24 equally, for Leafstedt the tonality linked with the second door is C#, but for Lendvai it is the combination of F# and D#. Such interpretative discrepancies are indicative of the ambiguous nature of Bartók’s language in which different modal structures may be superimposed or coalesced. Thus, for example, towards the start of the music accompanying the opening of the irst door, we initially ind an alternation between two different (though closely related) modal collections: F# [G ] F#

A# A#

B B#

C C*

D D*

E E#

F# F#

A melodic idea is presented beneath expanded versions of these igures from rehearsal number 31 that is based on a pentatonic scale on F# (F# G# A# C# D#) and this is harmonized by the use of parallel chord structures that combine whole tone and pentatonic characteristics (G–A–C#–D#–F# in its irst appearance). 22 For further information see Leafstedt (1999), Frigyesi (1997), Lendvai (1983), pp. 219–45, John (1991), and Cooper (2009), pp. 53–68. 23 Lendvai (1983), p. 219. 24 Leafstedt (1999), p. 56, Lendvai (1983), p. 222.

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Table 4.2

Duke Bluebeard’s Castle: Principal tonal areas, key narrative themes, and Lendvai’s estimation of their polarity (the tilde indicates an area of tonal lux)

Section

Tonality

Narrative

Lendvai

Opening First door Second door Third door Fourth door Fifth door Sixth door Seventh door Closing

F#–D#–C#–D–F# F#/C ~ C# F#/D# ~ B ~ C# D E@ C A (min) C (min)–B@–C–D (min)–F# (min) ~ B@–F#

Night/Castle Torture chamber Armoury Treasury Secret garden Nature Lake of tears Former wives Night

Negative Negative Positive Positive Positive Negative Negative

And at rehearsal number 33, a melodic line that is effectively in Mixolydian F# (employing the pitches F# G# A# B C# D# E F#) is supported by alternating chords of E–G–B–C and A#–C–E–F#. Lendvai articulated what is probably the most inluential and broadly sweeping theorization of Bartók’s approach to tonality in the late 1950s through his socalled axis system.25 He proposed three sets of tonal functions – tonic (in C these are C, E@, F# and A), subdominant (F, A@, B and D) and dominant (G, B@, C# and E). Taking the tonic axis in C (Figure 4.1), it should be noted that Lendvai felt that ‘a much more sensitive relationship exists between the opposite poles of an axis – the “counterpoles”’.26 According to Lendvai: ‘The pole-counterpole relationship is the most fundamental structural principle in Bartók’s music, in respect to both small and large forms. Already the inner form of Bluebeard’s Castle was conceived in pole–counterpole tensions.’27

Figure 4.1

25 26 27

Lendvai tonic axis in C

See Lendvai (1957), pp. 91–137. Lendvai (1971), p. 4. Ibid.

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In Table 4.3, Lendvai’s three axes are placed onto the relevant segment of the Weber regional space as employed by Lerdahl in his analysis of Parsifal. As has already been noted, the vertical component of this pitch space is organized by rising perfect ifths and the horizontal by descending minor thirds, and Lendvai’s three axes are mapped onto three successive rows. Given Bartók’s tendency to employ a polymodal approach (in other words, a single tonal centre may be expressed by any of a number of possible modes that may be present simultaneously), the distinction between major (uppercase letter) and minor (lowercase) is generally less valuable in the analysis of his music than it is in common-practice tonal music.28 Table 4.3

Segment of partially collapsed regional space as derived by Lerdahl from Weber aligned with Lendvai’s axis system

Lendvai Axis Dominant axis Tonic axis Subdominant axis

Weber/Lerdahl Regional Space G C F

E A D

C# F# B

B@ E@ G#

G C F

Lendvai regarded F# and C respectively as the tonal nadir and apex of the work: Tonally, the basic axiom of this form is the identiication of counterpoles F-sharp and C with ‘darkness’ and ‘light’ respectively. The former stands on the lowest, the other on the highest point of the ifth-circle. Accordingly, on the lowest points of the opera – the ‘night themes’ at the beginning and end – are rooted in the F sharp pole, while the climax – the ‘light theme’ at the ifth door – originates in the counterpole.29

I am inclined to a slightly different perspective from Lendvai on this matter and propose instead that the pitch of F# shaded at the centre of the igure expresses both darkness and a kind of numb neutrality from which the opera begins and returns. It can alternately emotionally ‘brighten’ through E@ to C as in the transition from the fourth door (secret garden) to the ifth door (Bluebeard’s domain), but also perhaps ‘darken’ through A (minor) to C (minor) as from the sixth door (the lake of tears) to the seventh door (the chamber containing the former wives). It is surely inconceivable in the case of the C minor that opens this scene that the tonality can have the same positive function as the C major of the ifth door. For Leafstedt, through this return to C, ‘Bartók takes the tonality of the light and shifts it into the

28 In this theorization of the pitch space, it can be imagined to ‘wrap round’ as if in bands inscribed on a cylinder. 29 Lendvai (1971), p. 219.

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minor mode, revealing here, perhaps more openly than the rest of the opera, the hidden tragedy in bringing light to the castle’.30 All but one of the primary areas associated with the seven doors in the opera lie on Lendvai’s tonic axis – only the music for the third door, the treasury (in D), falls outside this band of tonalities. In his Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Ideas Toward an Aesthetic of Music, 1806 [1784] which includes one of the classical descriptions of the affective character of keys, Christian Friedrich Daniel Schubart described D major as ‘Der Ton des Triumphes, des Hallelujas, des Kriegsgeschrey’s, des Siegsjubels’ (the key of triumphs, of Hallelujahs, of war cries, of victory rejoicing).31 Despite the passage of time and the opera’s context in the early twentieth century, this affective resonance remains relevant. An association between riches, sex and death was central to the great Hungarian poet Endre Ady’s poem ‘Blood and Gold’ from the 1907 collection of the same title, a work (along with others from Ady’s output) that had a palpable inluence on both Bartók and his librettist, Béla Balázs, in their creation of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle. In Anton Nyerges’s translation, the irst verse of Ady’s poem reads ‘it sounds alike upon my ears – / the gasp of lust, the groan of ache, / the squirt of blood or gold ashake’.32 Immediately after the opening of the seventh door of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, Bluebeard sings the following lines that might be seen to spring from a similar stance: They have gathered all my riches, They have bled to feed my lowers, Yea, they have enlarged my kingdom, All is theirs now all my treasures.

I would argue that D is established as a signiicant tonal area lying outside the C–E@–F#–A axis because of this association between Bluebeard’s treasures and his wives (and speciically Judit). In the treasure chamber, Judit sees the jewels, pearls, ermine robes and ‘crowns of glory’ that ill it, and in a staging direction in the score it is noted that ‘she kneels down and digs into the pile of treasures, lays jewels, a crown and a luxurious cape on the threshold’. In the inal scene, Bluebeard adorns and crushes her with these same items that she left at the doorway. I would now like to consider the inal scene in a little more detail, in which Bartók explicitly links speciic tonal regions with Bluebeard’s former wives, each of whom also represents a time of the day. Thus the irst wife, who wears a crown of silver and who arrived at daybreak, is associated with B@ (on Lendvai’s dominant axis); the second, with her crown of gold, who appeared at noon, with C; and the third, with a ‘grave and umbered mantle’, who arrived in the evening, with D minor (on the subdominant axis). Finally, Judit herself, who was brought 30 31 32

Leafstedt (1999), p. 123. Schubart (1806), p. 379. Poems of Endre Ady (1969), p. 130.

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to the castle at nighttime, is placed in the opera’s home tonality of F#. This set of tonal relations can be modelled in the composite Lerdahl/Lendvai space as in Figure 4.2, and this presents an almost sinusoidal movement across the cylindrical representation of the space from dominant, through the counterpole of the tonic axis and the subdominant axis, to the pole of the tonic axis. In his study of the opera, Lendvai traced out this same set of relationships with C major (noon) placed graphically at the twelve o’clock and f# minor (night) at the six o’clock positions; and with B@ major (dawn) at three o’clock and d minor (evening) at the nine o’clock positions.33

Figure 4.2

Trajectory of the music associated with the seventh door. The dotted line indicates that the pitch space is conceptualized as being cylindrical and pitches at the extreme right wrap round to the equivalent pitches at the extreme left

Moving now to the opening section of the opera, Figure 4.3 illustrates some of the main tonal areas in the material that leads to the opening of the irst door. In particular it shows those moments of tonal stasis that frame the opening section (in F#) and those that are underpinned by ostinato patterns (from igure 8 + 6, D#; from igure 12, C#; 1 bar before igure 19, B). More localized tonal excursions are ignored in this analysis. This arguably demonstrates a further form of cycling, around regions neighbouring the tonic F# and across the dominant and subdominant axes.

Figure 4.3

Trajectory of the main tonal areas of the opening of the opera

Lendvai (1971), p. 230. It should be noted that the tonal areas of B@, C, D and F# are also related by lying in a whole tone collection from which E and G#/A@ are absent. Such whole tone relations are also found in other works of Bartók. For example, in the irst movement of the Concerto for Orchestra (1943), the exposition of the second subject is in B, the recapitulation of the second subject in the reversed recapitulation is in A then G, and the irst subject is recapitulated in F. In the Fifth String Quartet, the tonalities of the individual sections of the irst movement form a complete whole tone scale. See Cooper (1996), p. 69. 33

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Finally I present an overall tonal map of the opera (Figure 4.4). This summarizes: 1. the large-scale dominant to tonic cadential motion between B@ and F# at the end of the score; 2. the movement to the subdominant for the third door (this and the music associated with the third wife are the most signiicant large-scale uses of the subdominant axis in the work and in both cases are in D); 3. the avoidance of any large-scale motion between F# and A; 4. the parallels with the tonal trajectory of the material associated with the four wives in the seventh door (B@–C–D–F#).

Figure 4.4

Outline tonal map of the whole of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle

This graph clearly underplays the signiicance of C# (as the conventional dominant of F#) in the work, for there are several important sections in key areas such as the three ostinati passages in the introduction (igures 12–13, 14–15 and 17 [bar 5]–18 [bar 4]), the climax of the scene in the irst chamber (igures 40–42 [bar 4]), and the culmination of the scene in the second (igures 53–4). Despite these passages, however, and indeed the ultimate conclusion of the opera on a thrice repeated C#, this tonal region is by no means used systematically in a dominant function in the work. The tonality that seems to be reserved to function as the large-scale dominant is B@, an area that makes few substantial appearances in the work. There is a brief passage at the end of the fourth chamber (the lower garden), as Judit sings: ‘Ah! Tender lowers! Giant lilies tall as men!’34 The two other signiicant uses of B@ are in association with the description of the irst wife, whose domain is ‘the dawn of every new day’, and the penultimate section of the work as Bluebeard sings to Judit: Thou art lovely, passing lovely, Thou art queen of all my women, My best and fairest!

34 It is signiicant in relation to this scene that the lily is a symbol both of chastity and of sexuality.

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According to Balázs, ‘The man’s dream kills her, the very dream she has conjured up in him. And the dreaming man remains alone once more, his castle again locked and dark.’35 Thus Judit is inally assigned to the tonality of Bluebeard’s irst wife, and displaced from the F# that is linked to the castle and to Bluebeard. There are several semantic levels at play in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle that could be taken to be what Lerdahl describes as ‘superleitmotives’. I have suggested elsewhere that ‘Bluebeard is locked into an endless cycle of futile repetition from which he seems incapable of escaping’,36 and the trajectory through pitch space that can be inferred from the tonal centres of the opera can be seen to support this view, moving as it does in an erratic orbit. In the largest view, the music appears to be trapped in an oscillating track around the tonic axis, just as Bluebeard is. At the more restricted level of the music for the seventh door, the opera’s climax, we ind a similar cyclic process that underlines the signiicance of the four primary tonal areas (B@–C–D–F#) in relation to Bluebeard’s wives. Overall, the work is built around a scheme which places Bluebeard and his castle, his essential psychic core, on the tonic axis of C–E@–F#–A, that places the subdominant region of D as signifying the riches brought by his wives and the dominant B@ as both their arrival and loss.

Conclusion This analysis may seem to be consistent with the facts of the work – at least as I have reported them – but does it really add any value to our understanding of the narrative that is Duke Bluebeard’s Castle? In a review of Paul Wilson’s The Music of Béla Bartók, published in Music Analysis in 1994, I considered the overall function and value of analysis and noted that: The success of any new analytic venture can only be gauged by judging the value of the aesthetic illumination produced by its insights, and estimating the extent to which they are congruent with our experiences as listeners and performers. Any method whose essentially conservative purpose is merely to vindicate the genius evinced by particular compositions and so assign them safely to the canon of great works may be of limited long-term value. Compelling analysis is usually both committed and independent, causing the reader to question his or her own conditioned responses. We may object to the work of a igure like Lendvai for his naive appeal to supposed natural law, but we can hardly fail to be moved by his engagement with, and enthusiasm for, the music. His analyses may not be true in any absolute sense (if such a thing is even conceivable), but they are a cause of constant stimulation, drawing the reader further into the music.

35 36

Balázs (1999), pp. 201–3. Cooper (2009), p. 68.

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It may be that the endless search for coherence and integration has in the end a negative effect, in that it numbs our responses to the challenges posed by the actual aural experience of music. Perhaps there is even a potential danger in such an analytical method, in that it may emasculate the very music it is trying to explain, by rendering it too comfortable. Bartók’s music remains, despite all attempts to pacify it, a potent symbol of both the chaos and the order we perceive in the external world, dancing on the fractal boundary between Apollo and Dionysus.37

Despite the passage of time, I would still stand by this statement. In offering this reading of Duke Bluebeard’s Castle, and suggesting that the semantic and structural axes could beneit from further reintegration, I acknowledge that I may be committing the same offence I warned about in this review, that of normalization and emasculation. Perhaps, however, the only honest conclusion I can offer is to quote some words that Derek Scott and I encountered when we were examining together on an undergraduate popular music programme of a college afiliated to my university – he as external examiner and I as the validating university’s moderator. At the end of a piece of work, the student had attached a short note for the examiners which tersely stated: ‘I really enjoyed writing this log book, and I hope you like it, but if not f*** it’.

References Balázs, Béla (1999) ‘Duke Bluebeard’s Castle’, in Carl S. Leafstedt, Inside Bluebeard’s Castle: Music and Drama in Béla Bartók’s Opera (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), pp. 201–3. Bright, William (1963) ‘Language and Music: Areas for Cooperation’, Ethnomusicology, 7(1): 26–32. Christensen, Thomas (ed.) (2002) The Cambridge History of Western Music Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Cooper, David (1994) ‘Paul Wilson: The music of Béla Bartók’, Music Analysis, 13(2–3): 319–25. — (1996) Bartók: Concerto for Orchestra (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). — (1998) ‘The Unfolding of Tonality in the Music of Béla Bartók’, Music Analysis, 17(1): 21–38. — (2001) Bernard Herrmann’s Vertigo: A Film Score Handbook, Greenwood Press Film Score Guides (Westport: Greenwood Press). — (2005) Bernard Herrmann’s The Ghost and Mrs Muir: A Film Score Guide (Lanham: Scarecrow Press). 37

Cooper (1994), pp. 319–25 (324).

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— (2009) ‘Béla Bartók’s Duke Bluebeard’s Castle: A Musicological Perspective’, in Griselda Pollock and Victoria Anderson (eds), Bluebeard’s Legacy Death and Secrets from Bartók to Hitchcock (London: I.B. Taurus), pp. 53–70. Frigyesi, Judit (1997) Béla Bartók and Turn-of-the Century Budapest (Berkeley: University of California Press). Jackendoff, Ray (1997) The Architecture of the Language Facility (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press). John, Nicholas (ed.) (1991) The Stage Works of Béla Bartók (London: John Calder). Kramer, Lawrence (1994) Letter in response to Charles Rosen’s review ‘Music à la Mode’, The New York Review of Books, 41(15). Available at: http://www. nybooks.com/articles/archives/1994/sep/22/music-a-la-mode/, accessed 28 January 2006 and 29 October 2010. Krumhansl, Carol K. (1990) Cognitive Foundations of Musical Pitch (New York: Oxford University Press). Leafstedt, Carl S. (1999) Inside Castle: Music and Drama in Béla Bartók’s Opera (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press). Lendvai, Ernő (1957) ‘Einführung in die Formen – und Harmoniewelt Bartóks’, in Bence Szabolcsi (ed.) Bartók, Weg und Werk, Schriften und Briefe (Budapest: Corvina), pp. 91–137. — (1971) Béla Bartók: An Analysis of His Music (London: Kahn and Averill). — (1983) The Workshop of Bartók and Kodály (Budapest: Editio Musica). Lerdahl, Fred (1994) ‘Tonal and Narrative Paths in Parsifal’, in Raphael Atlas and Michael Cherlin (eds) Musical Transformation and Musical Intuition: Essays in Honor of David Lewin (Roxbury: Ovenbird Press), pp. 121–46. — (2001) Tonal Pitch Space (New York: Oxford University Press). Morris, Charles (1946) Signs, Language and Behaviour (New York: Prentice Hall). Nattiez, Jean-Jacques (1989) ‘Relections on the Development of Semiology in Music’, trans. Katharine Ellis, Music Analysis, 8(1–2): 21–75. — (1990) ‘Can One Speak of Narrativity in Music?’, trans. Katharine Ellis, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 115(2): 240–57. Poems of Endre Ady (1969) Trans. and introduction Anton N. Nyerges (Buffalo, New York: University Press of America). Schubart, Christian Friedrich Daniel (1806) Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst, ed. Von Ludwig Schubart (Wien: J. V. Degen). Stefani, Gino (1987) ‘A theory of musical competence’, Semiotica, 66: 7–22. Tallián, Tibor (1981) Béla Bartók: The Man and His Work (Budapest: Corvina). Waldbauer, Iván (1996) ‘Theorists Views on Bartók from Edwin von der Nüll to Paul Wilson’, Studia Musicologica, 37(1): 93–121. — (2001) ‘Analytical Responses to Bartók’s Music: Pitch Organization’, in Amanda Bayley (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Bartók (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 215–30.

Chapter 5

Amusing the Cultivated Classes and Cultivating the Masses: Changes in Concert Repertoires in Nineteenth-century Helsinki Vesa Kurkela

This chapter takes up the discussion of the development of the ‘concert institution’ and the changes in concert repertoires in Helsinki from the 1840s to the 1890s.1 The main purpose is to present a very local perspective on the development that William Weber calls ‘the great transformation of musical taste’ in Western concert life. According to him, before the mid-century, the classic canon of Western orchestral music was formed and a similar canonizing also occurred in solo recitals organized by travelling instrumentalists. For instance, from the 1850s onwards, the pianists Clara Schumann, Charles Hallé and Hans von Bülow were famous for their purely classical repertoires.2 Similarly, the so-called virtuoso or beneit concerts, still very popular in the 1830s, fell from favour in concert life. In these concerts various artists – singers, instrumentalists and choirs – performed in turn in a single concert – a programme should maintain contrast in its sequence of pieces.3 This kind of miscellany, however, persisted, but now would be used in new kinds of popular concerts aimed at wider audiences, the so-called general public. This was part of the process that Derek Scott calls ‘the revolution of popular music’, containing a ‘issure between art and entertainment’ and also including the birth of new musical venues (music hall, café-concerts, varieté), and many new musical genres and styles. Western musical life began to be divided into serious and light sections, mentally and stylistically, as well as in musical practices.4 Both Weber’s and Scott’s studies focus on the Western metropolises only, and the reason why the great transformation began in these very places is obvious: a vast intellectual and material capital was concentrated in Paris, Vienna, London, Berlin, Leipzig and New York; the audiences were big and wealthy; these cities attracted the most talented musicians and composers; the best conservatories 1 I would like to thank my colleagues Olli Heikkinen and Markus Mantere for consultation and helping to ind research material for the research. 2 Weber (2008), pp. 35–9, 173–80, 245–9. 3 Ibid., pp. 5, 40–42. 4 Ibid., p. 273 ff., Scott (2008), pp. 3–8.

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were there; and in these cities a lourishing music industry essential to modern musical life – publishing, entertainment, business and instrument building – was developing.5 However, the change in metropolitan concert life does not imply an identical development in smaller local centres such as Helsinki. At least it is reasonable to assume that in Helsinki the change in musical taste, concert practices and the development of the new popular music scene was slow and belated. The subject is relatively wide and previous research is scarce. Hence the review I provide here can only be preliminary and limited in scope. Accordingly, I shall focus on two main subjects. First, the formation of light repertoire in nineteenthcentury Helsinki will be studied from the following angles: how was the light repertoire connected to the various concerts and venues and for whom was it intended? In this context I shall also discuss what ‘popular’ actually meant in local music culture. Did the issure between art and entertainment really take place in local concert life and did this extend to musical practices? The second subject is the repertoire of symphony concerts or ‘symphonic soirées’ held in Helsinki from the late 1840s to the early 1890s: how did the serious repertoire change and whose works were performed to local audiences? The research material consists of mainly printed concert programmes – handbills6 and newspaper announcements – the latter being easy to access on the Internet as a result of a special service provided by the Finnish National Library.7

Helsinki Concert Life – Some Background In mid-nineteenth-century Helsinki, the tiny capital of the Imperial Russian Grand Duchy of Finland, concert life adhered to ancient models. Audiences were conined to the aristocracy and upper middle class, and in the 1840s admission to many musical events was still limited to academics and members of musical societies. In 1850 the non-military population of the city was about 15,000, the upper and middle classes numbering about 5,000.8 Thus, concert audiences were small – in 1852 a local newspaper estimated that potential Helsinki concert-goers numbered about 1,000; active music audiences were around 300–400.9 So-called Biedermeyer culture dominated social – and musical – life in Helsinki and other smaller centres in Finland. Everything was intimate and minimal. Audiences, musical ensembles and venues were small-scale, likewise the music played and heard at home and in public. According to Jukka Sarjala, local art music concerts in Finland were far from serious. If anything, musical 5 6 7 8 9

Cf. Scott (2008), p. 8. Weckström collection (n.d.), Offentliga concerter (n.d.). Historical Newspaper Library (n.d.). Varis (1950), pp. 11–14, 35. Helsingfors Tidningar, 22 December 1852.

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evenings were ‘a mixture consisting of the worlds of opera, restaurant and circus. There was no concert without at least one instrumental and vocal soloist and no programme without bravura variation and fantasia, paraphrase or opera medley, romance, caprice and sentimental aria’.10 It is even doubtful if the early concerts in Helsinki could be called ‘art music concerts’ at all. Contemporaries called musical events by many names: concerts, soirées, music-soirées, musical-dramatic soirées, symphonic soirées, music evenings and even tableaux vivants.11 The music presented in concerts was not necessarily more serious than that in soirées. As will be shown below, the concert names varied widely in successive decades even though form and content remained quite unchanged. Actually Helsinki lacked nearly all that is normally deemed necessary for a lourishing concert life: There was no court life, the bourgeoisie and upper middle classes in general were relatively poor and small in number; there were only a few concert venues and these were humble and small; the audiences for classical music – the aristocracy and the educated classes – were small in number; there were no permanent professional ensembles and only few trained musicians were available, and, last but not least, institutional music education was non-existent. Despite the modest facilities, many concerts – orchestral music, oratorios and even operas – were already organized in Helsinki in the 1830s. The favourable development of concert life was due to two main reasons. First, the only university in the country had been removed from Turku to Helsinki in 1828. The university supported musical activities by hiring a music teacher with the task of improving academic musical life. In 1835 the university successfully recruited a competent professional for the post. Fredrik (originally Friedrich) Pacius (1809–91) came from Hamburg and was a very talented violinist and a pupil of Louis Spohr. It did not take long before Pacius was able to reorganize the students’ musical activities with prospering male-voice quartet singing and an amateur orchestra. He also planned several public concerts where he himself appeared as conductor and soloist. Moreover, inluenced by German musical life with its patriotic choir movement, Pacius organized performances of oratorio and other major musical works almost annually, and encouraged local amateur singers and players to artistic achievements – and shared social experiences – that were totally unprecedented in Helsinki.12 Second, the town’s location on the northern shore of the Gulf of Finland ensured that shipping from Sweden and Central Europe to St Petersburg, the capital of Imperial Russia, habitually stopped off in Helsinki. St Petersburg with a population of nearly half a million in the mid-nineteenth century was a true metropolis eager to encourage the inest European musicians to extend their

10

Sarjala (2005), pp. 138, 141. The names can be found in printed concert programmes 1834–68 (The Weckström collection). 12 Mäkelä (2009), pp. 65–70. 11

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concert tours to remote Northern Europe.13 Tallinn on the opposite shore of the gulf was also so close that the connections to the musical centres of Riga and Königsberg in the Baltic countries, on to Central Europe, were easy and natural. In 1837 steamships began to travel regularly between Turku, Helsinki, Tallinn and St. Petersburg. In a few years, new maritime routes were opened to Stockholm and Lübeck.14 This enabled regular visits by musicians; only the winter seasons were quieter because the sea ice made the shipping lanes impassable. As a result of the good communications a fairly permanent concert life with regular visits from foreign artists developed in Helsinki as early as the 1840s. Through touring artists, continental novelties – fashionable tunes, new concert practices and repertoires – arrived in the town relatively quickly. During this period of interest, the best concerts were given in the University Auditorium (Solenitetssal), in the grand salon of the upper-class assembly rooms, Societetshuset (Seurahuone), and the nobility’s assembly hall, Riddarhuset. Other major venues included two theatre buildings, restaurants, the university Student House (built in 1870) and, especially in the summer, the spa of Brunnshuset (Finnish: Kaivohuone) and other outdoor bandstands.

Mixed Repertoires In the 1840s, the only professionals for orchestral music were German musicians engaged by a local restaurant, which also owned the spa facilities, Brunnshuset, just outside the city. The main function of the musicians was to entertain members of the upper classes who came to take the waters. Much dance music was played; new polkas and waltzes with a local lavour were composed, performed on the piano and even published in piano scores. In addition, the spa musicians accompanied touring artists – opera and vaudeville singers, actors, and virtuosi who gave concerts and performances in Helsinki quite regularly.15 Between 1843 and1852 the spa orchestras in Helsinki were led by the following conductors: Johann Neumann of Dresden, Louis (Ludwig) Löwe of Lübeck, Carl Ganszauge of Zwickau, and two other musicians from Saxony, Christian Hohmuth and Ernst Wilhelm Floessel.16 Their ensembles were relatively small – between nine and twelve players – and notably quite similar to the Viennese restaurant orchestras of the 1820s through which the waltz kings Joseph Lanner and Johann Strauss the Elder rose to fame.17 Public concerts in the city, however, were usually organized by the musical societies around the university and conducted by Fredrik Pacius. Professional 13 14 15 16 17

Cf. Taruskin (2010), pp. 14, 73–4, 272–3. Tommila (1982), pp. 27–8. Ibid., pp. 51–69. Hirn (1997), pp. 22–7, 58. Wicke (2001), pp. 58–9, Scott (2008), p. 121, Morgonbladet, 20 November 1848.

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musicians were still required for many performances, and the cooperation between the spa orchestras and academic amateurs was normal practice when bigger concerts were given. The concert series followed the subscription principle: the audience had to pay for a whole concert season in advance.18 In the 1840s, the following internationally acclaimed performers gave concerts in Helsinki: ‘the Swedish nightingale’, opera singer Jenny Lind (1843), the pianists Theodor Stein (1843) and Anna Roemer (1845), the violinists Joseph Ghys (1843, 1844) and Miska Hauser (1844), the cellist Adrien-Francois Servais (1845), and the violinists Heinrich Wilhelm Ernst (1847) and Henri Vieuxtemps (1849). These celebrities were followed by a great number of other Nordic and Central European musicians, who are completely forgotten today.19 Signiicantly, the touring instrumentalists performed their own compositions, which, according to prevailing practice, usually comprised virtuoso fantasies or variations on well-known tunes – opera melodies or ‘national favourites’, commonly folksongs. These concerts normally followed the principle of miscellany originating from the eighteenth century: The works and performers in a programme had to be arranged in a balanced manner with maximum alternation. Songs and instrumental pieces were performed one after another. The organizer of the concert, a visiting musician, very seldom appeared alone. He or she invited other touring professionals or local amateurs to appear.20 In Helsinki amateur performances in concerts were usual because there were only a few professionals available. The spa orchestras and university players often participated in these concerts, but not always. In 1849 the great Belgian violinist Henry Vieuxtemps (1820–81) gave two concerts in Helsinki without any local orchestral assistance (see Figure 5.1). During this time Vieuxtemps was the irst violinist of the Imperial Court Theatre in St. Petersburg.21 He already had a long career as a virtuoso touring Europe and even the USA, and his repertoire faithfully relected the idea of miscellany. Accompanied by his pianist wife, Vieuxtemps irst played a violin concerto by Charles Bériot, his own teacher, and this virtuoso opening was followed by his own compositions, romantic mood music. According to the programme, the vocal music needed was to be performed by ‘M:lle de ***’ with some romances. However, a local newspaper review reported that the vocalist in question was no obscure local amateur but the Estonian opera singer Marra Vollmer who sang a cavatina from the contemporary opera Linda de Chamounix (Donizetti, 1842). Furthermore, a blind clarinet virtuoso, Carl Wohllebe of Dresden, played his own version of Beethoven’s famous song ‘Adelaide’.22 The rest of the programme consisted of typical virtuoso numbers from a well-known classical opera and from 18 19 20 21 22

Marvia and Vainio (1993), pp. 14–15, Rosas (1952), pp. 460–63. The Weckström collection, Lappalainen (1994), pp. 30–31. Weber (2008), pp. 40–42. Classical Composer Database: H. Vieuxtemps. Morgonbladet 27 August 1849.

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Figure 5.1

Programme for Henry Vieuxtemps in Helsinki, Societethuset, 25 August 1849 (Handbill in French and Swedish; Weckströms collection, National Library, Helsinki)

‘original thema’, the latter likely referring to a national or popular tune. The concert concluded with Vieuxtemps’s most popular rendition, Variations burlesques sur ‘Yankee Doodle’ introducing American national music to the Finnish upper-class audience in a humorous way.

Theatre Orchestras In autumn 1860 a new theatre building was opened in Helsinki, and the theatre company The New Theatre (later known as The Swedish Theatre), hired a permanent orchestra with a Finnish conductor, Filip von Schantz (1835–65). The orchestra began performing in 1860 with ifteen musicians, but the number of players at its greatest was some twenty. There were some Finnish musicians in the ensemble who had studied in Leipzig conservatoire on scholarships from the Finnish Senate (Government). However, the majority of the players were from the German countries. In 1860–67 the theatre orchestra gave public concerts quite

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regularly, irst under the baton of von Schantz, succeeded in 1863 by the German cellist August Meissner (1833–1903).23 The earlier historiography of Finnish music is inclined to emphasize the merits of the theatre orchestra in organizing regular symphony concerts in Helsinki in the 1860s.24 Yet, some other merits have so far gone unnoticed. However, the theatre orchestra seems to have been very active in promoting light programmes. First, the orchestra played a central role when a real musical novelty, French operetta, was launched in Helsinki. Many of Jacques Offenbach’s works became known relatively soon. For instance, La Belle Helene was performed in Helsinki in December 1865, exactly a year after the Paris premiere.25 The other forgotten merit, nevertheless, was the orchestra’s crucial position in the production of musical soirées and assisting touring vocal and instrumental soloists. In many concerts, the latest dance music – concert waltzes and polkas – was interspersed with romantic salon music and overtures. The combination of serious and light is apparent in the concert the orchestra gave in the Arcadia theatre on 28 January 1862: Concert by the Theatre Orchestra conducted by Filip von Schantz in Arcadia Theatre, 28 January 1862 (Helsingfors Dagblad, 25 January 1862) 1. Overture, Martha 2. Valse Windsor-Klänge 3. El Ole 4. March from Tannhäuser

Flotow J. Strauss junior Spanish national dance Wagner interval

5. Overture, Kullervo 6. Valse Krönungs-Lieder 7. Finale, Les Huguenots

von Schantz Joseph Strauss Meyerbeer interval

8. Overture, Don Juan 9. Trio from Marco Visconti 10. Polska 11. Magenta-March

Mozart Petrella von Schantz Burmeister

The programme emphasizes symmetry and diversity. In contrast to traditional virtuoso concerts, the miscellany could not be created with the aid of alternating 23 24 25

Marvia and Vainio (1993), pp. 16–18. Ibid., pp. 17–18, 28. Hirn (1997), pp.114–15.

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soloists and orchestral parts, because the concert included only orchestral music. The symmetry was created by dividing the programme into three parts, all of which began with an overture and ended with a rousing march. Between these frames the Viennese waltzes highly popular at the time and national dances were played. It is noteworthy that the programme contained so much local music – three pieces altogether. The second part began with Filip von Schantz’s Kullervo overture, which was one of the very irst works based on the Kalevala, the Finnish national epic. In addition, the concert concluded with Finnish/Swedish folk dance potpourri by the conductor and a march composed by Mr Burmeister, the lautist of the orchestra.26 With the exception of Mozart’s Don Juan (Don Giovanni) overture, the concert focused on contemporary music, music by living composers. Nearly all the light music concerts in the 1860s followed the same line. Older music was not canonized, and new popular tunes were performed as soon as the scores became available. The permanent theatre was a real novelty in early 1860s Helsinki and this also inluenced the supply of concerts. The theatre orchestra appeared in many ‘musical-dramatic’ soirées where the old model of miscellany was innovatively applied. In mid-May 1863 the orchestra together with some theatre actors organized a soirée prompted by a recent accident (Figure 5.2). The new theatre building had been burnt down some days before and the soirée revenue was to beneit the theatre company’s female employees, who were now without work. The destruction of the theatre building meant hard times for everyone working at the theatre; it also stopped local concert life for several months: the musicians had to travel to Sweden to make a living. Interestingly, the second part of the concert consisted exclusively of excerpts from the comic opera Le Macon by Daniel-Francois-Espirit Auber. There was so far no permanent opera stage in Helsinki and operatic art was still a novelty. Accordingly, opera excerpts were attractive enough to assume a dominant position in a dramatic soirée. The irst part of the concert combined music, poetry and drama alternating to ensure as much variety as possible. It is even likely that musical-dramatic soirées in the 1860s created a model for the festival activities that notably developed as part of voluntary mass organizations some ten years later. New festival practices typically favoured programme content where music, gymnastics, recitations, plays and choral singing alternated – the main idea was contrast and symmetry. Thus the concert format, with a miscellaneous programme adopted from the Continent for upper-class use in Finland, became common festival practice from the 1870s onwards. Very soon this festival type acquired a Finnish name: iltama (pl. iltamat, lit. evening party). As part of voluntary organizations the iltama tradition spread throughout Finland in the last decades of the nineteenth century and remained a permanent part of cultural life until the mid-twentieth century.27 26 Burmeister’s position becomes evident in another concert programme from the previous year, where he was featured lute soloist (Helsingfors Dagblad, 17 May 1862). 27 Lehtonen (1994), pp. 169–75.

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Figure 5.2

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Programme for the musical-dramatic soirée at the university auditorium in Helsinki, 18 May 1963 (Helsingfors Dagblad 18 May 1863)

New Concert Practices After the 1860s, new concert practices and special names delegated to them appeared. The alternation of serious and light music still seems to have been a permanent feature in almost all kinds of concerts. The principle of miscellany was even applied to church concerts, for example, by ending the religious repertoire with Beethoven’s irst symphony or by inserting a violin solo in a

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series of vocal renderings.28 Cosmopolitan artists visiting Helsinki introduced new trends and practices in their concerts. The visits of foreign concert-givers increased considerably after 1870 as a result of the railway connection between Helsinki and St Petersburg. During the last decades of the nineteenth century Helsinki was quite a transnational meeting point for many celebrated European musicians, and there were more concerts organized by foreign artists. For instance, the following celebrities gave concerts in Helsinki, many of them several times: Henryk Wieniawski, Ferdinand Laub, Leopold Auer, Anton Rubinstein, August Wilhelmj, Alfred Reisenauer, Zelia Trebelli, Desirée Artôt, Hans von Bülow, Eugene d’Albert, Eugène Isaye, Emil Sauer and Pablo Sarasate.29 The 1870s was an intensive period for music theatre in Helsinki. At the time there were two theatre buildings with three separate theatre companies, Swedish, Finnish and Russian. Each of them featured a variety of music dramas in their programmes. ‘The Song Department’ of the Finnish Theatre focused on Italian and French opera classics with the libretti translated into Finnish. The Swedish Theatre was renowned for its operetta performances and the Russian Theatre favoured irst Russian Singspiel and vaudeville until, at the turn of the 1880s, a new theatre building, the Alexander Theatre, was completed, making it possible to import from St Petersburg a troupe of Italian opera singers who performed classical and contemporary Italian operas (Bellini, Donizetti, Verdi) in the original language.30 The dominant igure of orchestral music was a British-born musician, Nathan B. Emanuel, conductor of the Swedish Theatre orchestra 1870–78. The other theatres also had their own orchestras, the Finnish theatre under the baton of the Czech-born Bohuslav Hrimaly, whereas the Russian vaudevilles and operettas were performed by some Finnish military players and a couple of Russian theatre musicians.31 The central position of operetta and opera on the Helsinki theatre scene gave rise to the popularity of joint concerts by several opera singers. In the twentieth century these events were called ‘opera gala’, but in Helsinki the name was ‘concert’ or ‘vocal soirée’ following an old custom. However, the principle of miscellany had changed, because instrumental solo numbers were nearly absent. Variety was achieved by alternating operatic arias and national songs.32 The new practice faithfully relected the development of the metropolitan scene where,

Religious concerts in Nikolaikyrkan (Helsinki Cathedral), Helsingfors Dagblad, 26 September 1871, 19 October 1877. 29 Lappalainen (1994), pp. 51–98. 30 Byckling (2009), pp. 7–79, 103–12, Aspelin-Haapkylä (1907), pp. 467–71, Hirn (1997), p. 115. 31 Byckling (2009), pp. 74–5, Hirn (1997), p. 65. 32 Various programmes of musical soirées, e.g. Hufvudstadsbladet 2 September 1877, 3 June 1877, 5 May 1877. 28

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according to Weber, after mid-century ‘devoting concerts almost entirely to opera selections represented a major change in concert tradition’. 33 The other novelty of the 1870s was the monstre concert. It is possible that the model came from England, as one decade before, a Finnish newspaper had reported on grandiose promenade concerts in London with hundreds of musicians, choir singers, and soloists.34 In the modest circumstances of Helsinki the only way to create a big orchestra with dozens of musicians was to amass military bands. There were a few military brass bands stationed near Helsinki – Finnish and Russian – who started to cooperate with local theatre orchestras to mount big open-air concerts. In autumn 1874 the irst monstre concert was held with more than eighty musicians,35 which created a sensation in Helsinki, where the very biggest orchestras hardly numbered twenty musicians. These concerts became very popular and took place quite regularly, at least until the new century. Like their foreign models,36 the Helsinki monstres favoured a national, uplifting repertoire in keeping with their military image. Thus, the irst concert in 1874 ended with the joint performance of all the orchestras with two patriotic songs familiar to all Finns even today: ‘Suomi’s sång’ (The Song of Finland) and ‘Finnarnes marsch från trettiåriga kriget’ (March of the Finns in the Thirty Years’ War). The structure of the main programme followed the principle of miscellany, where well-known old opera overtures framed Viennese concert waltzes and romantic mood music.37

New Audiences, Old Content During the last two decades of the nineteenth century concert life in Helsinki was strikingly lively and diversiied. Cosmopolitan performers and variety artists appeared regularly in assembly halls, theatres and restaurants, while foreign orchestras were also engaged for several weeks where entertainment was required. Choral music was also highly appreciated and presented in many kinds of concerts and festivals. The commercial entertainment supply was dominated by variety and circus performances.38 In fact, Helsinki, with its 50,000 to 65,000 inhabitants (1885–90)39 was still too small a centre for the creation of separate popular music market or modern music industries. Instead of commercial entertainment companies it seems reasonable to emphasize the role of voluntary organizations as reformers of concert life. 33 34 35 36 37 38 39

Weber (2008), pp. 278–9. Collan (1865). Hufvudstadsbladet, 11 September 1874. Scott (2008), p. 43. Hufvudstadsbladet, 13 September 1874. Hirn (1997), pp. 130–50. Åström (1956), p. 12.

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In this context, the most important concert-givers were amateur brass septets, considerably bigger military brass bands and, last but not least, the orchestra directed by Robert Kajanus. ‘Nationalist musicology’40 considers the year 1882 a watershed in Finnish music history, because a conservatory (Helsingfors Musikinstitut) and the irst great orchestra – except for a couple of military bands – were founded in Helsinki. In autumn 1882 the Finnish composer Robert Kajanus with some local businessmen established an Orchestral Society (Orkesterförening/Orkesteriyhdistys) and engaged an orchestra of thirty-nine musicians. Most of them (all in all twenty-nine players) came from Germany or other Central European countries.41 Compared to earlier theatre orchestras Kajanus’s orchestra was really large – with the aid of additional amateurs the orchestra could almost be enlarged to the size of a modern symphony orchestra and, accordingly, works requiring a big orchestra could be included in the repertoire. Thus, in the 1880s the orchestra performed some symphonies by Berlioz and Brahms and the Festival Overture 1812 by Tchaikovsky, for the irst time in Finland.42 The foundation of local orchestral activities was clearly stronger than in earlier decades. However, a more fundamental transformation was related to concert audiences – a change that was also obvious in the monstre concerts: Music was intended for the wider public, regardless of social class. As William Weber puts it, they were popular in a new way; they carried a social meaning indicating that music was intended for the general public.43 Such popularity was a real novelty in local concert life. Previously in Helsinki all the concerts had been designed for select audiences and by no means for the lower classes. At the same time lighter concerts were renamed. A closer look, however, reveals that the content and structure of new concerts remained relatively unchanged. The change can be summarized in two new concert names: popular concert (in Swedish/Finnish: populär konsert/helppotajuinen konsertti) and people’s concert (folkkonsert/kansankonsertti). These concerts became common at the turn of the 1880s and although the names refer to similar light repertoire, the concerts were aimed at decidedly different audiences. Interestingly, the Swedish term populär did not yet carry a modern social connotation of popular, as the Swedish term folk did. Thus, popular concerts in Helsinki were aimed at the educated classes, whereas people’s concerts were aimed at the public at large. Kajanus’s orchestra had a ‘high-cultural’ image and its symphony concerts achieved much publicity. However, the orchestra was a commercial enterprise and 40

The term refers to music historiography in Finland before the Second World War, based on a theleological view according to which the ‘rise of Finnish music’ was a necessary and unavoidable process, of which the present provides the proof. Cf. Huttunen (1993), pp. 109–29. 41 Marvia and Vainio (1993), pp. 49–50. 42 Ibid., pp. 150, 174, 182–3. 43 Weber (2008), p. 275.

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received only a minor municipal subsidy. Accordingly, playing in restaurants and theatres became its main source of revenue. Playing in the theatre was normally managed with an ensemble of twelve musicians. Economically speaking, popular concerts in restaurants were the most lucrative.44 The idea of Kajanus’s popular concert can be explained more exactly by its name in Finnish, helppotajuinen konsertti, literally ‘easily comprehensible concert’. In other words, the aim was to perform classical and semi-classical music to restaurant guests without disturbance, harmlessly and amusingly. The programme of a popular concert in January 1892 highlights the idea of easy listening: Kajanus’s Orchestra, popular concert at the Society House, 3 January 1892 (Päivälehti 2 January 1892) I Overture from Ruslan and Ludmilla Valse Hommage aux Dames Du bist die Ruh for strings Finale from Rienzi

Glinka Waldteufel Schubert Wagner

II Overture from Robespierre Violin concerto E major (movements 2 –3) (solo: concertmaster Anton Sitt)

Litolff Vieuxtemps

III Slavonic Dance No. 3 Intermezzo March (not speciied)

Dvorak Delibes

Popular concerts were a direct continuation of older orchestral soirées in their repertoire. As in the concerts of Filip von Schantz in the 1860s, it was contemporary music that was mostly played and the programme was grouped into distinctive parts with an overture at the beginning. Brisk waltzes and virtuoso violin solos brought tension and variety to the programme. Popular concerts were usually given in Societetshuset, a irst-class restaurant patronized by wealthy bourgeois, artists and civil servants. It is likely that the popular concerts adopted some new practices from international variety performances, a real novelty in Helsinki restaurants at the time: The public sat at small tables and enjoyed drinks and snacks during the concert. In a way, the popular concert was a local version of the Parisian caféconcert, although the programme was slightly more serious and consisted of orchestral music only.45 44 45

Marvia and Vainio (1993), pp. 127, 227–38. Cf. Weber (2008), pp. 293–4.

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The 1880s was the time when the so-called culture of voluntary organizations in Finland was expanding and many voluntary associations concentrated on improving the liberal education of the lower classes. Reading clubs, public festivals, and sports, theatre, choral and music societies also spread around the country.46 Such education efforts also included people’s concerts, the goal being enlightenment, with the general mood of the repertoire often patriotic, always luctuating between entertaining and noble in a variety of ways. People’s concerts actually deviated from the older concerts only in the fact that the entrance fee was low or non-existent. Accordingly, under the title of ‘people’s concert’, there were concerts resembling opera or song ‘galas’ where several famous singers rendered arias and national songs one after another – often supplemented by romantic quartet song.47 Furthermore, many people’s concerts followed the traditional line of virtuoso or beneit concerts with a perfect miscellany, for example, classical overture (brass septet), romance (female singer), lyrical songs (mixed choir), folk-like songs (opera singer), romance and opera medley (brass septet), classical aria (female singer), folksong, romance, and march (mixed choir).48 Furthermore, after 1888 Robert Kajanus regularly organized people’s concerts with orchestral programmes quite similar to those of his popular concerts. The number of orchestral works, however, was considerably smaller and the concerts normally featured one or two concert singers with patriotic or classical repertoire.49

Behind the Miscellany: A Narrow Symphonic Canon In the preceding section various concert repertories in Helsinki concert life were highlighted. I discussed a certain popular repertoire that is, in fact, not even regarded as popular music today: mood pieces, marches and concert waltzes, choir songs, opera arias, and folksong arrangements were the basic repertoire for concerts with less serious and easy-listening repertory. At the same time (as at the end of the 1870s), the audience also diversiied and grew because various voluntary organizations started arranging concerts for ordinary people, the uneducated classes. I will now switch the focus to the more serious orchestral repertoire. Four two-year periods will be selected for more detailed scrutiny at 15-year intervals:

46 47

Kurkela (1989), pp. 21–7. ‘New Year’s people’s concert at the Students’ House’, Uusi Suometar, 31 December

1884. ‘People’s concert at the Students’ House’, Uusi Suometar, 21 February 1885. For example, the concert programmes in Uusi Suometar 21 December 1890, 3 May 1891, 31 January 1892. 48

49

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1847–48, 1862–63, 1877–78, and 1892–93.50 My point of departure is William Weber’s notion regarding the change in the repertories of the most prominent symphony orchestras in the nineteenth century. According to him, the change in the repertoire meant two things. First of all, an aesthetic divide emerged between ‘serious’ and ‘light’ music. What eventually came to be seen as ‘great music’ – multi-movement symphonies, for instance – was placed at the end of the concerts.51 Second, historical music – that of the Baroque masters and Viennese Classical composers – took its place as part of the concert repertoire. While at the turn of the century the orchestras mostly played contemporary music, as early as the 1830s the same ensembles changed their focus to Viennese Classicism. For instance, in the 1860s, the Wiener Philharmoniker featured only older music – music by dead composers – and this same tendency applied to other important orchestras all over Europe.52 Furthermore, the decades after the mid-century were the golden age of symphonic poems and massive choral works in novelty repertoires. A ‘nonprogrammatic’, multi-movement symphony as a general composing model seemed old-fashioned – it was no longer viewed as a site of potential creative energy. As a result, between 1850 and 1870 there were only a few new symphonies by the prominent composers available for orchestral repertoires.53 The miscellany principle was at least partly replaced by a more elevated variety: concert overtures and opera overtures maintained their established place at the beginning of concerts, and variety on the whole was sought by featuring virtuoso concertos. By contrast, operatic arias were performed less and less as entertaining light musical titbits between more ambitious works.54 All this applies to concert life in the Western metropolises. There is good reason to assume, however, that a similar canonizing process was decidedly under way in Helsinki. One sign of the intention to move to a more elevated and more demanding concert repertoire was the founding of a speciic Symphony Society (Symphoniföreningen) in 1844. The initiative for this came from the Music Society (Musikaliska sällskapet i Helsingfors) supported by the upper bourgeoisie and aristocracy in Helsinki. The society placed its sheet music library at the disposal of the new Symphony Society. The man in charge of all this, however, was the university music director Fredrik Pacius, who also acted as the conductor in the symphony concerts in the following years. Musicians from German spa orchestras

50

Data was mainly collected from concert announcements and reviews in the following local newspapers: Morgonbladet, Helsingfors Tidning, Helsingfors Dagblad (1847–48), Helsingfors Dagblad (1862–63), Hufvudstadsbladet, Helsingfors Dagblad, Morgonbladet (1877–78), Uusi Suometar, Hufvudstadsbladet (1892–93). 51 Weber (2008), pp. 175–7. 52 Ibid., pp. 171–2. 53 Taruskin (2010), pp. 675–6. 54 Weber (2008), pp. 173–7.

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and military bands formed the symphonic ensemble. Of course, local amateur musicians were also involved.55 In the years 1847 to 1848 events known as ‘Symphony concerts’ in Helsinki numbered eleven in total. The canonizing process described above was at least emerging, because no fewer than ive of them featured Beethoven’s symphonies (the irst, third, fourth and sixth). In addition to this, two of Mozart’s symphonies and one by Joseph Haydn were performed in these concerts. In three of the concerts, two symphonies by the German composer Bernhard Romberg (1768–1841) were performed. However, canonizing was restricted to symphonies. The relative share of dead composers in the whole repertoire was just a little less than 47 percent (22/47), which indicates that the classical repertoire did not dominate the concerts in the 1840’s (see Figure 5.3). In other contexts, the classics were played even less. The remaining historical documents on concerts in Helsinki in the years 1847–48 list 203 works, out of which only sixty-two (30%) were older music.

Figure 5.3

Percentage of non-living composers in Helsinki Symphony Concerts, 1847–93

Fifteen years later, in 1862–63, the classics were on the rise in the repertoires: 67 percent (42/63) of works performed in the symphony concerts in Helsinki consisted of older music. As far as symphonies go the Viennese classics were prominent in the repertoire, now accompanied by new classics Schumann, Mendelssohn and Spohr. Only one contemporary symphony, by the Danish composer Niels Gade, was performed. In the decades to come, new symphonic 55

Rosas (1952), pp. 461–7.

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music played in Helsinki concerts quite often came from the Nordic countries (for instance, Grieg and Svendsen), because of the close contact between Finnish and Scandinavian musicians. At the end of the 1870s the substance of the classical canon seems to have remained exactly the same, judging by the share of 67 percent (30/45) of works by deceased composers in the symphony concert repertories. Nathan Emanuel’s theatre orchestra held only seven ‘symphonic soirées’ during the two years, and grand works performed in those were few. ‘Soirée’ indicates here the revival of an older practice in Helsinki – beneit concerts – in which opera singers and other visiting soloists were the main attraction. In the symphony concerts, the most often performed composer was again Beethoven, represented by nine works, of which two were symphonies (the second and sixth). This strong emphasis on Beethoven during this two-year period is partly explained by a ‘historical concert’ featuring only his music. Thus concert historique acquired a relatively peculiar re-interpretation in Helsinki. While historical concerts in Paris and Leipzig in the 1830s and 1840s focused for the most part on Baroque masters,56 only less than half a century later in Helsinki it was Beethoven who was represented as the glorious musical past, celebrated by a special occasion. This concert seems to have remained a unique event, but Beethoven certainly did not disappear from the repertories. In point of fact, Beethoven’s position in the serious concerts of Helsinki even increased during the last decades of the nineteenth century. In Emanuel’s ‘symphonic soirées’ one notices another important feature: only eight symphonies were performed – Beethoven’s two works were accompanied by Schubert’s ‘Uninished’ Symphony, Mozart’s KV 183,57 Mendelssohn’s ‘Scottish’ Symphony, and Schumann’s Third Symphony. Symphonies by contemporary composers were Gade’s Fourth Symphony and Anton Rubinstein’s First Symphony. The majority of works in Emanuel’s soirées were songs with orchestral accompaniment – particularly arias from popular operas running at the time in various Helsinki theatres. The composers of these operas were Wagner, Beethoven, Mozart, Meyerbeer, Weber and Kreutzer. At the beginning of the 1890s the canonizing of the symphonic repertoire seems to have reached its peak, as in the fourteen symphonic concerts held by Robert Kajanus’s orchestra in 1892 to 1893, a total of 54 works were performed, of which 40 (74%) were older music. Even the concertos performed in nearly all the concerts were mostly classics; among them there was only one contemporary work, the cello concerto by Camille Saint-Saëns. The most visible part of modern concert repertoire was the works of young Finnish composers – Jean Sibelius, Armas Järnefelt, Ilmari Krohn and Karl Flodin. 56

Weber (2008), pp. 178–9. The work is mentioned in the programme as ‘Symphony No 2 in G minor’, which, according to Einari Marvia (Marvia and Vainio (1993), p. 197) likely refers to the ‘small G minor symphony’ (KV 183) and not to the better known KV 550. 57

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A few years earlier Kajanus had tried to increase the share of contemporary music in the repertoire, featuring music by Scandinavian composers (Svendsen, Holter, Hartmann, Gade, Lassen, Grieg) in the programmes. Other contemporary composers in concert programmes of the time were Raff, Hofmann, Saint-Saëns, Goldmark, Brahms and Tchaikovsky, the last of these receiving particular attention. Brahms’s symphonies, however, were clearly not well received by audiences – or perhaps rather the Wagner-sympathizing critics. Presumably Kajanus’s concern over the decrease in the popularity of symphony concerts made him want to play safe by including more and more Viennese classics in the concert programmes.58 Just as ifteen years earlier, actual symphonies were still quite rare in symphony concerts. However, a major orchestral work (concerto, symphonic poem, orchestral suite, etc.) was invariably performed. During the two years, ten symphonies were performed – all but one by dead composers. Beethoven was in a class of his own; the Fourth, Sixth and Eighth Symphonies were performed once, the Ninth Symphony twice. Other composers included Joseph Haydn (Symphonies in C major and D major), Mendelssohn (the ‘Reformation’ Symphony), Schubert (the ‘Uninished’ Symphony), Lalo (Symphonie espagnole) and Tschaikovsky (the Second Symphony). Tchaikovsky died in 1893, which, as far as his position in concert repertories is concerned, meant a rapid ascent into the pantheon of classics.

Conclusions Concert life in Helsinki from the 1840s to 1890s followed only partly the metropolitan development in continental Europe. A great transformation of musical taste with the canonizing of the classics also occurred in Helsinki, but it was mainly related to symphony concerts. The principle of miscellany dominated all other musical concerts, be they religious, romantic, entertaining, patriotic or, as was usually the case, a combination of these. Furthermore, there were some features in Helsinki concert life that can be explained by the small audience numbers and restricted musical availability. First of all, the repertoires of serious concerts seem to have remained fairly narrow. The very same symphonies of Mozart, Haydn and notably Beethoven were repeated from one decade to another, and when contemporary symphonic music was included in the programme, only a few composers and works were presented. There was slightly more variation in overtures, but those were also for the most part composed by classical composers and masters of the Parisian Grand Opera until two separate events took place: Wagnerism reached the northern latitudes, and the overtures of operettas to open the parts of concerts came to be seen as equal to those of operas. And, second, serious and popular concerts developed in tandem. The small audience did not lead to the emergence of separate entertainment venues typical 58

Marvia and Vainio (1993), pp. 169–86.

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of a continental metropolis. No permanent variety theatres or other entertainment institutions – except restaurants – were established in Helsinki, although a great number of foreign entertainment artists – varieté, operetta, and circus – would perform in various venues (restaurants, theatres and outdoor bandstands) at the time.59 The lack of entertainment institutions in Helsinki had one important consequence: ‘high’ and ‘low’, as both institutional and aesthetic categories, could not be completely separate throughout the nineteenth century. This was the reality, although music critics in local newspapers shared the same tenor with their continental colleagues – uplifting classics and true art ighting against the perils of the facile and trivial.60 The separation of art and entertainment lacked a inancial base. Not even at the end of the century – the ‘lourishing of Spring’ in Finnish music with Sibelius, as the period was later called in Finnish music historiography61 – was this possible, even though the irst professional symphony orchestra and the conservatory were established. At any rate, money played irst iddle: Kajanus’s orchestra was irst and foremost in the service of entertainment. More serious music was limited to symphony concerts once per month, and even then symphonic masterworks were not always performed. The canonizing of the symphonic repertoire – playing the classics only – was presumably brought about by the austere conditions of the economy. With the conservative repertoire the management of the orchestra wanted at least to retain their normal audience. In the Helsinki concerts during the nineteenth century the role of foreign musicians was prominent if not decisive, and this very fact made local music life cosmopolitan and by no means national in the narrow sense of the word. In this transnational framework, a modern concert life with regular serious concerts was born. However, a number of other simultaneous processes got underway. In the 1880s international varieté in high-society restaurants and its folksy variant, iltama in the assembly halls, were established and, consequently, the concert supply for wider audiences soon developed. The old principle of miscellany, established in metropolitan concert life in the eighteenth century and applied in various musical venues ever since, was a cornerstone that never disappeared from the Helsinki concerts during the nineteenth century.

References Aspelin-Haapkylä, Eliel (1907) Suomalaisen teatterin historia II (Helsinki: SKS). Åström, Sven-Erik (1956) ‘Kaupunkiyhteiskunta murrosvaiheessa’, in Ragnar Rosén & al. (eds) Helsingin kaupungin historia IV:2 (Helsinki: SKS 1956), pp. 9–333. 59 60 61

Hirn (1997), pp. 130–63. For this discussion, see Sarjala (1994). Haapanen (1940), p. 94.

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Byckling, Liisa (2009) Keisarinajan kulisseissa, Helsingin venäläisen teatterin historia 1868–1918 (Helsinki: SKS). Classical Composer Database (n.d.) ‘Henry Vieuxtemps’, available at: http:// www.classical- composers.org/comp/vieuxtemps, accessed 18.11.2011. Collan, Karl (1865) ‘Musik-minnen från London’, Helsingfors Dagblad 25 April. Haapanen, Toivo (1940) Suomen säveltaide (Helsinki: Otava). Hirn, Sven (1997) Sävelten tahtiin. Populaarimusiikki Suomessa ennen itsenäisyyttämme (Jyväskylä: Kansanmusiikki-instituutti). Historical Newspaper Library (n.d) National Library, Helsinki, available at: http://digi.lib.helsinki.i/sanomalehti/secure/main.html?language=en, accessed 18.11.2011. Huttunen, Matti (1993) Modernin musiikinhistoriankirjoituksen synty Suomessa (Helsinki: Suomen Musiikkitieteellinen Seura). Kurkela, Vesa (1989) Musiikkifolklorismi ja järjestökulttuuri (Jyväskylä: Suomen etnomusikologinen seura). Lappalainen, Seija (1994) Tänä iltana Yliopiston juhlasalissa. Musiikin tähtihetkiä Helsingissä 1832–1871 (Helsinki: Yliopistopaino). Lehtonen, Eeva-Liisa (1994) Säätyläishuveista kansanhuveiksi, kansanhuveista kansalaishuveiksi (Helsinki: Suomen historiallinen seura). Mäkelä, Tomi (2009) Fredrik Pacius, kompositör i Finland (Helsingfors: SLS). Marvia, Einari and Vainio, Matti (1993) Helsingin kaupunginorkesteri 1882–1982 (Porvoo–Helsinki–Juva: WSOY). Offentliga concerter (n.d.) Offentliga concerter i Åbo på 1800-talet, available at: http://bibbild.abo.i/musik/index2.htm, accessed 18.11.2011. Rosas, John (1952) ‘Musikaliska Sällskapet i Helsingfors’, Historiska och litteraturhistorista studier 27–28: 425–98. Sarjala, Jukka (1994) Musiikkimaun normitus ja yleinen mielipide (Turku: Turun yliopisto). — (2005) Poeettinen elämä. Biedermeyerin säveltäjä-kirjailija Axel Gabriel Ingelius (Helsinki: SKS). Scott, Derek (2008) Sounds of the Metropolis. The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press). Taruskin, Richard (2010) Music in the Nineteenth Century (Oxford–New York: Oxford University Press). Tommila, Päiviö (1982) Helsinki kylpyläkaupunkina 1830–50-luvuilla (Huhmari: Helsinki-Seura). Varis, Heikki (1950) ‘Helsinkiläisyhteiskunta’, in Helsingin kaupungin historia III: 2 (Helsinki: SKS 1950), pp. 9–211. Weber, William (2008) The Great Transformation of Musical Taste. Concert Programming from Haydn to Brahms (New York: Cambridge University Press). Weckström Collection (n.d.) The Weckström Collection, National Library, Helsinki. Wicke, Peter (2001) Von Mozart zu Madonna. Eine Kulturgeschichte der Popmusik. (Leipzig: Suhrkamp).

Chapter 6

From Schizophonia to Paraphonia: On the Cultural Matrix of Digitally Generated Pop-Sounds1 Peter Wicke

Samples, loops and streams form the indicators of digitally produced pop sound. They are the signatures of a musical world that extend notions of how the playing of music occurs today. Essentially, they have changed the cultural and epistemological matrix within which sounds function as music. The Canadian composer, R. Murray Schafer, diagnosed a similarly fundamental change after the introduction of phonographic technology at the onset of the twentieth century, describing it as ‘schizophonia’.2 By this he referred to the technological split between the production and the perception of sounds – the binary simulation of sonic events marks the transition to ‘paraphonia’, the coexistence of primary sounds and their restoration (or better, simulation) in the process of analog/digital/ analog transformation. This sheds light on the culturally produced characteristics of sound that make it a medium of playing music. The way sound is organized as music and transformed into music is always connected to the dominant modes of its production, such as the predominant technologies of producing sound. The percussive use of the body through vocal forms of tone production, the origin of performance in many non-Western societies, forms the basis of a musical universe quite different from the complexities of musical instruments. This applies all the more to digitally generated sequences of tones, which, as calculated real-time simulations of sound events, differ in principle from conventional forms of playing music. The difference, however, is not at all limited to the respective patterns of interaction that are embedded in the technologies of tone production, which create a framework for playing music as ‘rules of interplay’. For instance, the interaction of players and listeners within an African percussion ensemble is organized differently from that of a European string quartet or an American hip-hop performance. Another more important aspect involves the cultural moulding that sound has to go through to be receptive according to the attributions and prescriptions of a given culture; in other words, the particular way that human societies turn tone 1 2

An earlier version of this paper has been published in Stefanija and Schüler (2011). Schafer (1977), p. 124.

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into a medium of playing music. Underlying this is the basic distinction between sound (as the physical-acoustic bearer of tone) and tone (as the material medium of music). The rules relating to sound are produced and perceived as tone, while tone as music is crucially subject to a shaping determined by the technologies of sound production. This entails, so to speak, the level of the ‘cultural formatting’ of tone, an analogy that goes beyond metaphor. Just as digital storage media requires formatting to be inscribed, so is tone culturally formatted to take on and ‘store’ that special form of human interaction called music. Thus, what comes into play are the operators, the technologies of articulation and their discursive parameters, which are tied to conceptual and processing patterns of perception. Auditory sensory perception made possible by phonograph technology has already intervened deeply in the process of the cultural formatting of tone by separating tone production from the act of its perception as music. This is precisely what Schafer sought to characterize as ‘schizophonia’. This stands to reason if the prevailing mode of tone production is one of the binary calculations of auditory perceptual realities from arbitrarily generated streams of data. The level of cultural moulding of tone and its formatting as a medium of the music in question can be scrutinized when one’s focus falls on a singular element that is prominent in all musical sound: the production of sounds by the human voice. From the songs of people in the tropical rainforest to the vocal manipulations of the techno avant-garde, from opera to hip-hop, from folk music to pop music, from classical modernism to rock, the voice is omnipresent as an instrumental force of sound generation. As the most natural form of this process, it has experienced probably the most incisive changes through its coupling with the machines of sound storage and sound manipulation to a point that it almost vanishes in the techno tracks of, say, contemporary dance and club culture. Thus, it is its most direct in the display of the aforementioned modes of cultural formatting. From this one might conclude that phonographic and microphone technology has left its deepest traces, placing the tone of the human voice, independent of and prior to any sung realization, within a novel cultural frame of reference, which becomes the precondition of vocalization in music. The microphone and ampliication technology associated with singing renders the softest vocal sounds audible, which is distinct from natural singing techniques. Initially, this shaped the intimacy in the voices of the American ‘crooners’ (Bing Crosby, Frank Sinatra). But it did not take long before Elvis Presley, Jerry Lee Lewis, and all the other stars of American rock ’n’ roll in the 1950s, introduced an entire spectrum of guttural noises into music. Sound recording would separate these voices from their carriers and disrobe them of all visibility, reducing them to an ideal acoustic presence in the context of radio and record music and providing their shape as pure sound. However, there is more to this than a mere shift in spatio-temporal coordinates as the American pop star Buddy Holly spectacularly revealed in 1957 while recording his ‘Words of Love’, a duet he sang with himself by overdubbing an earlier recording. This demonstrated that musical interaction with the technical reproduction of one’s own voice not only allows the singer to

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be doubly audible, but also that the doubled voice exempliies the technological ability to separate voices from the artist in the form of ‘pure’ sound tracks. Thus, the voice has become a technologically produced construct, a result of the synthesis of human sound production and machine mutations. While the ‘natural’ voice of Elvis Presley, as with every other pop star, might be capable of a synthetic sound formation, the technologically unampliied and unprocessed use of voice does not work within a media context. It is only technology that can provide sensual presence to vocal imagery in the recorded form. In other words, without the microphone and ampliication, voices cease to exist. As technical products they have no carrier anymore; they are separated from their emitters and, with their particular tone characteristics, begin to settle somewhere between the human and the machine. The artist only provides the raw material as the microphone becomes the instrument for the disembodied tone of the media age. It was not long before the voice and the body would be separated in reality, and through this process not only technologically or virtually. In 1975, when the German music producer Frank Farian landed a surprise hit with ‘Baby Do You Wanna Dance’, it was not only a commercial success but also posed a big problem. The recording was a result of a studio experiment in which he had taken part. Because of his extreme stage fright he could not adhere to the customs of the pop universe and present his song to a live audience. In this case, it seemed only natural to hire a session singer, Bobby Farrell, who literally embodied Farian’s singing voice by lip-synching on stage. So convincing was this performance that to this day hardly anyone realizes that the singer of this recording was marketed under the name Boney M. It was also Farian who, in 1988, took a decisive step further by bringing together the vocal recordings of the three studio musicians, Charles Shaw, John Davis and Brad Howe, with the two dancers Robert Pilatus and Fabrice Morvan under the name Milli Vanilli. The process became a scandal in 1989 when Milli Vanilli, Pilatus and Morvan, received one of the coveted Grammies from the American National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences for their supposed vocal achievement. It was not long before they had to return it when the story leaked out. This remains one of the curiosities in pop music history, where the technological synthesis of voice and body was turned into a reality for the irst time and concealed on stage through technical means. This marks a turning point even in the most primal ield of musical performance, singing. Something reached perfection that had long characterized instrumental playing in the studio, namely the drifting apart of tone and tone production, of sound and body. Since the 1960s, the studio musician has provided nothing more than a triggering impulse for steering a chain of apparatuses that are kept in motion by sound engineers, sound technicians, and music producers. Whether the result captured on tape sounds as ‘natural’ as possible, as close to the unprocessed sound of instruments, or if it is notably ‘synthetic’, is a purely aesthetic and arbitrary decision. And these decisions are seldom made by the musician, but rather by the recording technician at the mixing desk, in collaboration with the producer.

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What has ensued is a gradual dissolution of the connection between sound and the human subject, who creates something that is not only part of centuries of Western musical tradition, but also a veritable connection that has had its starting point in the singing voice, in the unity of the person playing music and the producer of sound. When sound turns into music it encodes an ‘interior’ that becomes an ‘exterior’ through the musically expressive subject, which takes on a shape that is mediated in a unique way. The dissolution of this connection is a process whose implications can hardly be overestimated. On the level of the tone signal the difference between the human vocal apparatus as a biological-mechanical producer of vibrations and a tone generator providing sinus waves shrinks into insigniicance. These tone signals are inscribed within the same parameters. The digitalization of sound has been a decisive step in this process. In its binary representation, sound has severed its connection with the modalities of its production. It has become a calculated, real-time simulation of itself, where the process of simulation (the process of making the digitally acquired numerical values audible again by means of digital/analog converters) has not only made the difference between corporeal, mechanical and signal-based electrical forms of sound production meaningless, but also has eliminated that difference. Rhythmic patterns and sound streams of techno tracks, for example, can be machine-generated or hand-played using a MIDI keyboard or a mixture of both. This can occur through a technologically created loop of a live performed or sampled musical igure. No expert can accurately distinguish between the aural result of the instruments and that of the signal processing devices to identify the modalities of sound processing and transformation or the methods used to technically synthesize tone. As a result, sound has undergone a signiicant de-referentialization. While it was once the symbolic medium par excellence – every audible tone, as a kind of vector of meaning, pointed more or less unambiguously to its production and producer – in digitalized form sound is suspended in space, completely free, unattached, without origin, traceless and thereby arbitrary. Digitalized tone, when made audible, represents nothing more than binary numbers, even when its values are extracted from the sampling of a natural sound. Hence, tone has become a pure inherent state of perception; the unity of material, medium, and perception has dissolved forever. The self-evidence of a tone heard as a sign of expression, subjectivity, and symbolic representation corresponds with how sound can be perceived as a medium, whose origin – whether played, technologically manipulated or technologically generated – is unimportant because sense and meaning result from the connections and transformations that can be literally ‘docked’ onto sound shapes. Access to a universe understood in terms of the data bank, and, thus, as relational, is abstractly addressable, where the linking of elements to create networks without even slightly affecting the identities of the elements are the key technologies in a form of making music that avoids even the term ‘music’. Emblematically, this carries the technical quality of the production of sound – techno – in its designation. Central to this is the concept of repetition, not so much in the sense of repeated

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action, but rather in the form of technologically generated chains of events: loops or synthesizer sequences that replace the former narratively composed structure of sound sequences in music. All this might imply that the singing voice has lost its privileged position in a musical world. Here it is nothing more, no more signiicant, no more meaningful, no more laden with emotion, and certainly no more ‘natural’ than any technologically generated noise welling up from the ubiquitous soundscapes of the media age: through loudspeakers at home or in public. Behind this stands a machine-generated code of rules of combination, a network structure turned into sound for mobile (dancing) bodies to ‘log on to’ – a term whose frequent use in this connection is telling. To exemplify all this, let us turn to the productions of the Icelandic singer Björk Guðmundsdóttir. The basis of Björk’s career as a pop star is deeply rooted in the already mentioned changes. Born in Reykjavik in 1965, she originates from a place that might seem as ‘un-pop’ as possible. Into the 1990s, it is no coincidence that artists were predominantly excluded from access to the global pop market if they did not present a pop-speciic authenticity that lay claim to their origin, whether this was urban, ‘hip’, and in one way or another ‘far out’, or at least itted into the ideas of the ‘exotic’ as propagated by the tourist industry. Björk, however, corresponds to none of this, which is made possible by the authenticity of her origins, which no longer plays a role in her music. Like many artists of her generation all over the world, she began making music in a punk band. The pleasure in experimentation took her from punk rock to post punk, which commercialized the pop avant-garde. But she did not gain the status of an international pop star until she collaborated with the legendary techno artist Mark Bell, who in 1988 joined Gez Varley in the immensely inluential Shefield techno duo Low Frequency Oscillator (LFO). In the realm of dance and techno, the impact of the digitalization of music, not least in the anonymous productions and their connection to frequently changing, fantasy names, had long since been felt. Now Björk would become one of the irst pop stars from outside the narrow techno ield to exhibit the aesthetics of digitalized sound. Against the backdrop of his techno-club experience with an audience shaped by the high-tech media world, Bell transformed Björk’s singing voice into a digitally generated (or reprocessed) world of sound that was diverse. Yet, the way in which music was produced is neither relevant nor retraceable even if the singer surrounded herself with a select circle of musicians from most parts of the world in order to record freestyle sessions (i.e. without any score or direction at all). In turn, this led her to ind the spirituality that enabled her to generate suitable sound material. On the computer, producer Mark Bell and the singer, who coproduced the tracks, used synthesizers, sequencer programs, sound-morphing, and sound editing to create soundscapes that have caused a sensation since the mid1990s. The reason for this is that they let the reformatted medium of making music develop into an aesthetic re-dimensionalization of music. In the productions of

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Björk and Mark Bell, the illusion of using digital real-time simulations of sound to mimic supposedly ‘genuine’ sounds is relinquished. A very characteristic example of this is the album Homogenic, released in 1997, whose cover design exempliies such technological synthesis forms, a computer-generated artiicial igure of multiple cultural identity in which the facial features create an image of the singer. In a peculiar way, the album’s music fulils the paradox of sensual abstraction. The voice, for example, Björk’s trademark, is not really technologically distorted; rather, the exhibited character of digital simulation processes makes it post-human. It connotes a sense of icy beauty that resists the ‘alien’ as an unambiguously technological product, thereby distancing the listener. This ambiguity is what manifests the digital reformatting of sound as a medium of making music. In digitalized form, the sequential processing of sound becomes a ‘link’ in the mediatized world. The processes of development sketched in this chapter point to an overarching aspect that has a fundamental relevance to music research: that the epistemological parameters with which music is theoretically viewed are already given in the respective culturally formed matrixes that underlie sound as a material medium of music.

References Schafer, R. Murray (1977) The Tuning of the World (Toronto: McCelland & Stewart). Stefanija, Leon, and Schüler, Nico (eds) (2011) Approaches to Music Research: Between Practice and Epistemology (Frankfurt/New York: Peter Lang).

Chapter 7

Material Culture and Decentred Selfhood (Socio-Visual Typologies of Musical Excess) Richard Leppert

Material Culture The one striking, indeed remarkable feature of an Erard Grand Pianoforte, c. 1840 (Figure 7.1), now in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, is its satinwood marquetried case, ‘probably […] the most exquisite intarsias of any musical instrument ever made’,1 the work of one George Henry Blake. The instrument’s owner, Thomas Henry, 4th Baron Foley of Kidderminster, is identiied by inclusion of his arms, monogram and coronet; the insignia of several previous generations of family members are also incorporated as part of the instrument’s elaborate decorative scheme. The piano stood in the family’s gigantic, lavish country residence, Witley Court in Hertfordshire/Worcestershire, destroyed by ire in 1937 but still extant as a burned out stone shell.2 The Foleys were English aristocrats at a time when noble lineage no longer carried the guarantee of cachet that bloodline alone once claimed. The newly emerging manufacturing class was already well on the way to overtaking the aristocracy’s long-established status in the various domains of social authority, political power and economic circumstance. Within this context, the Foley’s stunning piano, insistently asserts the family’s genealogical pedigree and, presumably, the security of their fortunes, despite the tide of history in a dramatically changing new world order. In a way, the Foley Grand was a kind of metaphor of protest against an uncertain future. It was also an instance of protesting rather too much. In the homes of the rich, the grand piano commonly functioned as high-caste furniture. Whether it was actually played was rather less important than the Winternitz (1966), p. 250. In fact, there remains a degree of uncertainty as to which of the Lord Foleys the instrument was made for, though the 4th Baron (1808–69) is the most likely. Winternitz (1966), p. 250, points out that the lock on the piano indicates manufacture during Queen Victoria’s reign, which began in 1837. A small entry in The Metropolitan Museum of Art Bulletin 47(1) (1989), p. 45, indicates that the piano was made for Lord Foley’s wife, a reasonable assumption, since, among amateurs at the time, pianos were most typically played by women. That said, Lord Foley only married in 1849, roughly a decade after the piano was made. 1

2

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Figure 7.1

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Grand Pianoforte (c. 1840), by Erard & Co., London; marquetry case designed and executed by George Henry Blake; New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Henry McSweeney, 1959 (59.76). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

semiotics proclaimed by its look alone, to say nothing of the space required to exhibit it to full advantage. Indeed, such pianos didn’t need to be played in order to justify the expense of their purchase. The grand piano, notably advertent, helped to underscore the owner’s social standing, wealth and attendant taste, whether real or merely imagined. As part and parcel of the vast caches of stuff that commonly illed the domestic enclosures of the Victorian well-to-do, and (if to a lesser extent) those of their social-climbing economic and social inferiors of the middling orders, the instrument’s social purpose was fundamentally fulilled simply by the fact of its observable existence. In short and above all, the Foley Grand was an expensive piece of family propaganda. The instrument’s working parts, its guts, so to speak, are essentially identical to those of other grand pianos built by Erard during this period. They are state of the art, especially the double escapement action, which was the best then available. Indeed, as has been well established, the piano was one of the most striking success stories of early industrial technology and, for that matter, of capitalist economic expansion and mass marketing. But for the moneyed classes, mass production had a downside, to the extent that upper-class identity was self-marketed by the

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pedigree of uniqueness. No worries here for the Foleys. What quickly strikes the viewer of this piano is the skilled-artisan labour congealed on its highly worked surfaces (Figure 7.2), in regard to which Thorstein Veblen, in 1899, put his inger on the relation between prestige and specialized craft labour. Hand labour, Veblen commented, ‘is a more wasteful method of production; hence the goods turned out by this method are more serviceable for the purpose of pecuniary reputability; hence the marks of hand labour come to be honoriic, and the goods which exhibit these marks take rank as of higher grade than the corresponding machine product’.3

Figure 7.2

Grand Pianoforte (c. 1840), by Erard & Co., London; detail of marquetry on lid. New York, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of Mrs. Henry McSweeney, 1959 (59.76). Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Visually commanding, the instrument is a nostalgic throwback to the ancien régime, a visual statement on behalf of old money at the expense of the nouveau riche (money, yes; bloodline, alas, no). That is, the piano’s case advertises the family’s distinguished past as if to insist on the security of its future in the face of profound social, political, economic and cultural transformation then sweeping England as the epicenter of the early industrial revolution. Accordingly, there 3

Veblen (1979), p. 159. On the same point, see also Baudrillard (1981), pp. 112–22.

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is a bizarre logic to the case’s decorative scheme, which, besides incorporating comic grotesqueries such as monkey musicians, on a more serious note intermixes allusion to mythological deities (face masks of Apollo, Venus, Diana, Aeolus, Ceres and Bacchus, Persephone etched in ivory and, in a full-igure miniature sculpture on the understretcher, either Orpheus or Apollo with lyre) with family lineage (various coats-of-arms extending back at least nine generations), as though the Foleys owned property on Mount Olympus; as though their ancestors once cavorted with the Muses and maybe even witnessed the original manifestations of music charming the animals (Figure 7.3).4 To quote Thorstein Veblen again: ‘The wealth or power [of the leisure class] must be put in evidence, for esteem is awarded only on evidence.’5

Figure 7.3

Johannes Tilens (1589−1630), Apollo and the Muses; oil. Whereabouts unknown. Photo credit: © KIK-IRPA, Brussels

4 See also Libin (1985), cat. no. 24; Rueger (1986), p. 122; and Winternitz, (1961), pp. 45–47. The Metropolitan Museum’s iles provide a detailed account of the instrument’s measurements, and a full catalogue of the imagery constituting the case decoration; intarsia decoration includes musical instruments (hurdy-gurdy, tambourine, viol and bow, lute, panpipes, hunting horn and French horn), music sheets, and a volume labeled Beethoven Symphonies; the full list is considerably longer. 5 Veblen (1979) p. 36 and, p. 55: ‘[G]entle blood is blood which has been ennobled by protracted contact with accumulated wealth or unbroken prerogative’.

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The instrument takes control of its surroundings. Nothing competes well against it. It overwhelms, ironically, even before it sounds − or, again, even if it doesn’t. The piano likewise demonstrates dominion over a geographical space that lies far beyond its domestic setting to the extent that the case is decorated with various exotic materials garnered from throughout the colonized world: ivory (India or Africa), ebony and satinwood (southern Asia), mahogany (various tropical regions, from Central America to Africa and the Philippines), tulipwood (South America), as well as holly, burl walnut and mother of pearl: all of it a tangible metaphor of the global strength of England, Europe’s greatest imperial power. This is to acknowledge the cultural crossover between an aging aristocracy, its money traditionally locked up in landholdings, on the one hand, and on the other an apt relection that Britain’s economic order now looked a bit like that of old Rome: the globalization of trade that allowed the import of decorative materials for piano cases and keyboards was coterminous with imperialism. The case of the Foley piano is grand to astounding excess, even by the standards of its time. Eyes passing over its surfaces conirm − seeing is believing − what money can buy: namely, the time of a highly skilled artisan. The instrument’s worked surfaces encode a dramatic expenditure of physical labour and artistry. The degree to which these materials are worked, often with tortuous exactness and delicacy, silently afirms the Foley’s class status, dependent alike on the mutually reinforcing combination of wealth and an aggressively projected sense of taste. In the end, to be sure, the instrument itself suggests rather little about music (by which, here, I mean sound), but it says a good deal about how music and art can be called into the service of personal politics. In brief, the Foley Grand is a hallmark for what would later be called conspicuous consumption established on the principle that too much is nowhere near enough. A square piano (Figure 7.4) required considerably less space than a large grand. Better suited to a townhouse than a country mansion, this vastly overwrought, singularly ostentatious hunk of carved rosewood of American manufacture was exhibited in 1851 at the Crystal Palace industrial arts exhibition where it won a irst prize, which is to suggest that its decorative vocabulary itted the moment in response to a cultural need,6 one anchored in contradiction. Like the Foley Grand, this square piano asserts a wholeheartedly materialist world order but one mapped onto whatever aesthetic claims can be put into service on the basis of the music’s sonic immaterialty, which all too conveniently served as a cultural stand-in for spirituality in age that made spirituality fungible. Ironically, the instrument’s deadly, weighty massiveness provides ample evidence that its keyboard, and what the keyboard activates, is nearly an afterthought,7 which is to suggest that music’s spiritualizing quotient in the 6

Winternitz (1961), p. 45; 19th-Century America (1970). The Metropolitan Museum’s iles catalogue the instrument’s decorative materials (mother-of-pearl natural keys, and tortoise-shell covered accidentals with abalone inlay on the front, and silver pedals); and iconographical details (carved portrait medallion of a man 7

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Figure 7.4

Critical Musicological Relections

Square Piano (c. 1850), by Robert Nunns and John Clark, New York. New York: The Metropolitan Museum of Art, Gift of George Lowther, 1906. Photo: Image © The Metropolitan Museum of Art/ Art Resource, New York

art-religion of period aesthetics all too easily could serve to promote the very crass materialism and social rapaciousness that the arts, music especially, were otherwise charged at least to mitigate, if not to subvert. With the beneit of historical hindsight, we readily recognize the dialectics embedded in the epistemic order underwriting the aesthetic correlatives of Kant’s ‘purposeless purposiveness’, fundamentally a non-instrumental aesthetics of the immaterial. The world Kant actually inhabited, however, like our own, was already fully in the grasp and thrall of materialist life practices tout court, if over the protest of art, or at least some of it, and the protesting role assigned to music especially (all the ink spilled on the spiritualizing mythologies about Absolute Music, for example). Closer to our own time, art engaged the dialectics of cultural materialism by means of what got named Modernism, or what Stuart Hall has aptly explained as ‘modernity experienced as trouble’.8 Simply stated, aesthetic and woman in proile over a pair of dolphins next to a trident, perhaps implying a whaling captain and his wife; the iron frame is painted and gilded with acanthus leaves, lowers, birds, and insects). For additional details of the decoration, see 19th-Century America (1970), cat. no. 145. 8 Hall (1989), p. 12.

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Modernism commonly, if hardly always, attacked the dialetics of social, political and cultural materialism and its supporting political apparatus, sometimes directly so. Very recently, for example, Arman Pierre Fernandez Arman (1928−2005) got at this nicely in two sculptures, one of a baby grand piano, cast in bronze (Figure 7.5), and in another constructed from bits and pieces of a piano suficiently broken and fragmented as to leave one wondering what it was to start with (Figure 7.6).9 What cannot be imagined in these works is a statement that even remotely resembles the world claimed, or fantasized, by the two intact pianos with which I began. But what is perhaps odd, and distinctly affecting, at least about the irst of these objects, is that it seems powerfully to invoke music despite music’s profound, indeed absolute absence; that is, the broken piano speaks the sounds of which it is no longer capable by marking loss. The Foley Grand and its square analogue are (or once were) fully playable. But in the absence of their being played, they seem oddly mute: Arman’s bronze piano and his other shard-like piano-ruin speak plainly to modern society and its (‘classical’) music culture; the same holds for the

Figure 7.5

9

Armand Pierre Fernandez (1928−2005), Accord Final [Last Chord: They Wouldn’t Let Me Play Carnegie Hall] (1981); bronze casting of a broken baby grand piano. Photo credit: Banque d’Images, ADAGP/Art Resource, NY

For numerous other examples of pianos, e.g., Concerto for Four Pianos (1998) and Now You See It (1999), from his ‘Fragmentations’ series, an assemblage of sliced-up grands; see http://www.arman.com, the artist’s oficial website. The website reproduces many of his other ‘broken’ musical instruments, various strings in particular, but also winds.

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Figure 7.6

Critical Musicological Relections

Armand Pierre Fernandez (1928−2005), Chopin’s Waterloo (1961); pieces of piano attached to wood panel. Paris, Musée National d’Art Moderne, Centre Georges Pompidou. Photo: Adam Rzepka. Photo credit: CNAC/MNAM/Dist. Réunion des Musées Nationaux/Art Resource, New York

historical instruments I’ve discussed, but with a difference. The social relations of the historical instruments are hidden behind a disguise of aesthetic distraction (furniture). Arman’s sculptures lift the veil from the pretence and the pretend. In modernity, the subject–object relation is marked by the reality that objects increasingly deine the very terms of what it is to be a subject: objects are the agents of subjectivity, hence identity (therein the principle of commodity fetishism sorted out by Marx in the irst volume of Das Kapital: Kritik der politischen Ökonomie, 1867). The pianos, grand and square, with which I began, duly mark this principle. Arman’s ‘pianos’ critique it.

Somatic (Im)Materiality and Decentred Selfhood The human body constitutes itself as a transfer point between musical sound and musical meaning. One might say that the body is a medium − a foundation or a ground − for musical knowing. Indeed, the body often becomes the terrain on which we come to terms with music’s impact. Music and imagination, and music as imagination, however oddly, are tropes often envisioned through somatic discourse. Western music aesthetics from around the date of the pianos with which I began (Figures 7.1 and 7.3) was deeply affected then, and for decades to come,

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by Eduard Hanslick’s anti-Wagnerian Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (1854, with numerous editions thereafter), though his particular account about the musically beautiful hardly went unchallenged. Hanslick’s aesthetics dialectically − and precariously − balanced itself between an almost strident objectivism, on the one hand, and a mystifying subjectivism, on the other, all of it differentially mapped, in turn, onto the imagined soma of composer, performer and auditor. What interests me is how Hanslick’s discourse imagines the musical body: what it does, and what it means. The composer irst. ‘During the act of composing [he] is in that exalted state of mind without which it seems impossible to raise the beautiful from the deep well of the imagination.’ The remark reads like a standard Romantic-period account of the creative imagination, but in fact this is not what most interests Hanslick; instead, it’s this: irst and foremost, the composer is a maker of music, a kind of exalted craftsman charged with keeping good (classical) order, so as to prevent descent into a mere ‘emotional whirlpool which might wreck the powers of artistic invention’.10 The composer, after all, ‘aims at giving an objective existence to his (musical) ideal and at casting it into a pure form. […] It is not the feelings but a speciically musical and technically trained aptitude that enables us to compose. […] [T]he composing of music is constructive in its nature and, as such, is intrinsically objective.’11 Hanslick is vague as to the speciic nature of the aesthetically inclined imagination, to say nothing of the deep well (Schacht) within which it resides (a metaphor that presumes something ineffable, ironically in tension with his notion of composition as objectivist practice, a manufacture of sorts. For Hanslick, the objectivism underwriting composition is underscored by physical act, the work of actual writing, an embodied labour requiring a pen-holding hand. The composer, diligently attentive to maintaining (self-disciplined self-)control, produces an aesthetic product, which is to say that for all his regard for ‘the deep well of the imagination’, in the end he brings art very much back to the earth’s mundane surface, and hence out of the deep well and free of the emotional whirlpool. In sum, the mindful work of composing stays the danger of drowning. Hanslick claims no such objectivism for either the performer or the auditor. The only thing objective for them is their profound somatic response to sonority, a phenomenon he explains by means of a strikingly weird metaphor involving suffering, and one tinged with masochistic pleasure: ‘Whoever is obliged to hear or play music while in a state of painful excitement will feel it like vinegar sprinkled on a wound. No other art, under equal conditions, can cut so sharply to the very quick.’12 In this small allegory, music arouses intense excitement akin to Hanslick (1957), p. 71. This translation is based on the seventh edition (1885); Cohen’s translation was irst published in 1891. For the purposes of this chapter, I have a slight preference for this translation over what now serves as the standard in English. Hanslick (1986), pp. 45–7, 49–50. Payzant’s translation is based on the eighth edition (1891). 11 Hanslick (1957), pp. 72–73 (translation modiied; emphasis added). 12 Ibid., p. 78. 10

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agony. It should be safe to say that Hanslick, never at a loss for words, is clearly at a loss for iguring out what music does to those who reproduce and experience it. That is, the objective physical actions by the performer that make musical sound are duly wrapped up by Hanslick in language that is most noteworthy for the vagueness of his account of its effects: The player has the privilege of venting directly through his instrument the feeling by which he is swayed at the time, and to breathe into his performance passionate excitement, ardent longing [das sehnliche Ausbrennen], buoyant strength, and joy. […] His subjetiveness thus makes itself directly heard in the music, and is not merely a silent prompter.13

(In short, think Liszt, or at least Lizst’s effects on his audiences.) ‘Breathe into’ (seines Innern zu hauchen) Hanslick says: give life to, and this via a Scripture-like image of creative agency. But what Hanslick means is not, simply, that notation is made aural; instead, what he’s after is to insist that the performer’s ‘breathing into’ brings forth a kind of living entity that is (and also is not) himself, and maybe the composer as well. The living entity is a subjectivity made real by discernible − audible − emotions. In the end, Hanslick has a dificult time letting go of precisely what he cannot make sense of: how music moves us, and this not least on account of the fact that he’s unable work it into his otherwise somewhat instrumental account of the musically beautiful. To wit: The piece of music is worked out by the composer, but it is the performance which we experience. Thus the active and emotional principle in music occurs in the act of reproduction, which draws the electric spark from a darkly mysterious origin and directs it toward the heart of the listener.14

The words that most interest me, precisely on account of the degree to which they articulate the paradox that Hanslick has failed to unravel, are ‘electric spark’ (electrischen Funken) and ‘darkly mysterious origin’ (aus dunklem Geheimniß), ironically foundational to his insistence about the objectivism he anchors in composition. Yet he does no better in his account for performance, which he seems to divorce from cognition. In performance, he seems to suggest, the player projects personal subjectivities triggered by the implications anchored in notation. Not the least of the confusion at the heart of his explanation stems from the radical partitioning of aesthetic subjectivities, those of the composer and the performer/ auditor. He produces a quite hopeless taxonomy for the production of musical affect to the extent that a gap exists between what the composer accomplishes and what the performer realizes and the auditor hears. In the end, the story seems profoundly muddled. It’s as though Hanslick is trying to sort out a philosophical 13 14

Ibid., p. 76. Ibid. (emphasis added; translation modiied).

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imaginary, a kind of dream, where the presumed logic of the narrative cannot ultimately be captured.

Reverie (Excess Subjectivity) The nineteenth century was enamored with dreams, among the most privileged sites of the human imagination and spirituality. Darkly mysterious, dreams played themselves out within, and commonly against, the narrative parameters of mundane material existence. Dream narratives (that is, dreams narrativized) have an ancient history in literature, but in the nineteenth century their cultural importance was particularly over-determined, and often as a device for projecting identity by means of fraught subjectivity.15 In the nineteenth century, the taste for musical dream narratives was considerable (Figure 7.7), concerning which two examples, distinctly different, illustrate the phenomenon. The irst is morbid (about which only a little needs to be said), the second ecstatic (and requires more).

Figure 7.7

Sir Frank Dicksee (1853−1928), A Reverie (1895); oil on canvas. Liverpool, National Museums and Galleries on Merseyside, Walker Art Gallery. Photo credit: © National Museums Liverpool

15 For more on the place of the dream or reverie in nineteenth-century European culture, see Perrot (1990), pp. 512–18.

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In 1895 Sir Frank Dicksee, a major Victorian painter, produced a very dark night-scene Reverie of a husband lost in the song his wife sings to him from the piano. The scene represents a presence, but also an absence (cf. p. 111). As it were, he is real, actually in the room. She is not; she’s dead, alive and embodied only in his imagination (a diaphanous spirit, dressed in a bed gown, she operatically gestures as if she too is in mourning). When the image was irst exhibited at the Royal Academy, Dicksee included a verse in the catalogue: In the years led,/ Lips that are dead/ Sang me that song.16 The man’s reverie is an impotent fantasy (limpness is effectively encoded by his left arm hanging over the arm of the chair), charged by a kind of transixed necrophilia focused on her ‘lips that are dead’. The song itself matters to the extent that it releases in him what is otherwise beyond reach, namely, the spectre of his lost spouse, a present absence.17 Music in this instance serves as little more than an acoustic trigger for the visual representation of banal emotional manipulation. But not all musical dreams are so grimly dispirited, especially in instances where the dreamer himself makes the music. In such instances, the reverie can exhibit agency at the highest level of culturally valorized aesthetic comportment: purely immaterial, the imaginary of Spirit. In the aesthetics of romanticism, no musician evoked dreaming quite like Beethoven (Figure 7.8), and probably no other Western musician apart from Wagner was so commonly subject to being visualized − part and parcel of Beethoven worship, the result of what Barthes called ‘the mythic role which the entire nineteenth century assigned to him’, a ‘bio-mythology’.18 What is at stake, part of a well-established cultural discourse, is aptly captured in a pastel drawing, circa 1901, by the Austrian artist Sigmund Walter Hampel (1868–1949), Allegory on the Genius of Ludwig van Beethoven, that narrates a cultural tale about both the musician and his music by means of the capture of an ‘essence’ in an instant of frozen time. The challenge that attaches to the act of representation, invariably faced by visual artists, is considerable, a fact well articulated by Barthes: In order to tell a story, the painter has only an instant at his disposal, the instant he is going to immobilize on the canvas, and he must thus choose it well, assuring it in advance of the greatest possible yield of meaning and pleasure. Necessarily total, this instant will be artiicial, […] a hieroglyph in which can be read at a single glance […] the present, the past and the future; that is, the historical meaning of the represented action. This crucial instant, totally concrete and totally abstract, is what Lessing subsequently calls […] the pregnant moment.19 16

Quoted from Reynolds (1987), p. 93, cat. no. 59. Barthes (1991a), p. 257: ‘In [actual] dreams, the sense of hearing is never solicited. The dream is strictly a visual phenomenon, and it is by the sense of sight that what is addressed to the ear will be perceived: a matter, one might say, of acoustic images.’ 18 Ibid., pp. 262–63. 19 Barthes (1977), p. 73. 17

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Figure 7.8

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Sigmund Walter Hampel (1868−1949), Allegory on the Genius of Ludwig van Beethoven (c. 1901); pastel. Vienna, Museum Karlsplatz. Photo: Alfredo Dagli Orti. Photo credit: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, New York

The moment that matters is one that captures identity, the fundamental essence of the self, which in the nineteenth century, was a preoccupation ‘to the point of neurosis’, as Peter Gay puts it.20 Identity, however profoundly abstract, demands legibility in order to be recognized. Challenged to make identity visible − in effect, objectively concrete − we employ the physical body as its proving ground, because the body is the only available terrain onto which the non-physical can be visualized. Consider portraits. Portraits usually confront viewers. They are always ready to be seen, prepared, as it were, forever to be looked at. Norman Bryson points out that: ‘Essentially advertent in form, [portraits] show their sitters as turning a persona, decked out and waiting, toward the one who will come and view.’21 In portraits, whether painted or photographed, we read people irst and foremost via their general 20 Gay (1995), p. 3. See pp. 11–35 for a summation of the emergence of bourgeois ‘inner life’ and its relation to music and listening practices. 21 Bryson (1991), p. 7 (original emphasis).

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physical demeanour (the body as a whole), and via facial features especially. But in a portrait, the put-on face, in conjunction with the gestural totality of the sitter’s body, must account for all the complexities of the person represented; it must encapsulate a meaning or set of meanings that deine the portrait’s very purpose. Stated differently, portraits are never painted simply to document that ‘I am …’, but rather to document what ‘I mean …’. Their ultimate purpose is less to denote (that this is Joe) but to connote (that this is the sort of person Joe is). Everything about Hampel’s allegory of Beethoven’s genius serves this purpose, captured in a single moment. Dressed rather more like Liszt or Wagner, Hampel’s Beethoven, eyes closed, is lost in a reverie of inspired − and inspirational − compositional/improvisatory performance. We in turn are offered access to what Beethoven evokes. Whether the evocation is evident to Beethoven himself is uncertain. In any case, we’re visually let in on something that several decades of Beethoven-inspired musical talk had long since over-determined – a ‘something’ nonetheless that is beyond either thought and measure. Beethoven’s accomplishment, simply put, can only be represented as a sublime. Beethoven and Beethoven’s music, Hampel seems to suggest, can be experienced but not fathomed, and that of course is the pleasure of the reverie’s narrative plenitude, in this case coded in the transgressive amalgamation of the sacred and the distinctly erotic − a psyco-cultural excess − perfectly ordinary for a dream, if less so for a dream (the drawing itself) in part about musical aesthetics. The scene invites scopophilia, in this instance a pleasure taken from the viewer’s intrusive gaze onto the private world of the Genius inventing. Indeed, the enormity of the psycho-cultural agency assigned to Beethoven in the nineteenth century was suficiently great as to spill onto the physical space he inhabited, even in his absence (Figure 7.9). His empty chair, pushed back from the piano in his study, was suficient to carry the appropriate semiotic spark, despite the fact that the space itself as represented might as easily be that of almost anyone of Beethoven’s social standing in the Vienna of his time. But once the name ‘Beethoven’ is assigned, the space takes on all of the distinction associated with Beethoven mythology and becomes culturally and aesthetically sacred. It would be reasonable to suggest that virtually any representation to which the denominator ‘Beethoven’ could be attached gained allegorical status as a trustworthy indicator of the categories ‘genius’ and ‘music’; the same, of course, applied all the more to the composer’s death mask or to a postmortem deathbed drawing transformed into a lithograph (Figure 7.10), both massively reproduced, and well suited for − and indeed employed as − domestic wall decoration. I’ll leave aside the relic-quality attached to Beethoven’s hair (of which there was a lot available), snipped from his head by admirers both shortly before he died and, presumably more conveniently, after.22 22

See Gibbs (2000), p. 241; and Martin (2000), an entertaining, if more than slightly bizarre, history from 1827 to the present of the several hundred strands of Beethoven’s hair clipped postmortem by ifteen-year-old Ferdinand Hiller. See also Leppert (2004), pp. 49–53.

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Figure 7.9

115

Johann Baptist Hoechle (1790−1835), Beethoven’s Study in the Schwarzspanierhaus; drawing. Vienna, Museum Karlsplatz. Photo credit: Erich Lessing/Art Resource, New York

Representations provide us access to Beethoven − the Beethoven of the imagination − only as voyeurs, visual-acoustic Peeping Toms, as it were, straining our ears for the sonoric signature that is his alone, or so suggests the wellestablished mythic foundation on which Beethoven imagery, and the Hampel pastel in particular, depends. As for the pastel, were Beethoven’s body positioned otherwise, and not hunched over, were his eyes open instead of shut, the sexy spectres at the left, rising from the soundboard, would be the more jarring, even nonsensical. But Beethoven’s self-privatization, a key component of the Beethoven myths, thus encoded, renders his reverie aesthetically logical for its period in history. It also empirically fantasizes for us. Whatever might be on Beethoven’s mind would be guesswork, except for the fact that we’ve got a crib sheet with the answers. The semiotic instability of the sign ‘Beethoven’, alike in its own historical moment and in ours, is duly acknowledged by Hampel’s effort to transliterate Beethoven into the allegorical signiiance (sign-ness) assigned to what visually emerges from his piano as the evanescent vapours of dream imagery, and which

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Figure 7.10

Josef Danhauser (1805−1845), Ludwig van Beethoven on His Deathbed (1827); lithograph. Berlin, Mendelssohn-Archiv, Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin, Stiftung Preussischer Kulturbesitz. Photo credit: Bildarchiv Preussischer Kulturbesitz/Art Resource, New York

together give form to Beethoven as Creative Imagination: Beethoven is the music that objectively lows from his daydream. In Hampel’s pastel, Beethoven’s sonic/silent reverie evokes the sacred and the distinctly secular as a visual scrum of spiritual religiosity and sexual ecstasy: the cruciied Christ loating in the ether, an orgasmic woman, and a physically heroic naked man (almost certainly borrowed from Michelangelo in a somewhat belaboured reference to pedigree-by-association with another Artist Genius).23 In other words, a muddle, but a compelling one, a sublime impossibility made real by the agency of what is imagined to be Beethoven’s imagination. Hampel’s Beethoven requires no Lisztian performance histrionics in order to permit us access to his Genius. Indeed, wild gesture in the usual form would mortalize his immortality, whereas the overwrought totality of the gestural quotient assigned to the characters in his dream exceed by some distance anything that his body could encode on its own. The status of Beethoven as the sublime manifestation of Artist in the aestheticphilosophical imaginary of his century is dificult to overestimate. Indeed, it is 23

See Csórdas (1993), pp. 135–56.

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not going too far to suggest that Beethoven was the manifestation of all that his contemporary Hegel embedded in his elaborate concept of Spirit/Geist, on behalf of which music ‘releases the Ideal […] from its entanglement in matter’;24 and likewise what Beethoven’s other contemporary, Schopenhauer, cited in his no less elaborate concept of Will/Wille, a perfect description of art religion’s utopian sublime: The unutterable depth of all music by virtue of which it loats through our consciousness as the vision of a paradise irmly believed in yet ever distant from us, and by which also it is so fully understood and yet so inexplicable, rests on the fact that it restores to us all the emotions of our inmost nature, but entirely without reality and far removed from their pain.25

Music, as he put it, ‘exhibits itself as the metaphysical to everything physical in the world, and as the thing-in-itself to every phenomenon’.26 In sum, Schopenhauer more or less articulates the whole of modern aesthetics prior to Modernism, just as his quoted remark could ably serve as the programme for the design of Hampel’s drawing. Beethoven, not least because he is both musician and Music (and not, say, poet or painter) is the condition to which all art aspires, the sublation of the distinction separating matter from form, and subject from object.27 In this context, Hampel’s pastel is a cultural-pedagogical guide to an ideal form of ideal musical reception for its time. External to the composer’s dream is the world outside, visible through the open window framing the composer’s proile. Even the natural world provides witness to the allegory, evident in the weirdly shaped and weirdly coloured clouds fashioned to evoke an expression of cosmic empathy, a bit like the sky that precedes the arrival of the celestial mother ship in Steven Spielberg’s ilm Close Encounters of the Third Kind, (1977) as though Beethoven’s genius alters even the natural world. Schopenhauer gets at something similar in his one reference to Beethoven, assessing the impact of an unnamed symphony (but presumably the ifth, or more likely the ninth). The Beethoven symphony, he says, presents to us the greatest confusion, which yet has the most perfect order as its foundation, the most vehement conlict, which is transformed the next moment into the most beautiful concord. It is rerum concordia discors, a true and perfect 24 Hegel (1975), Vol. 1, p. 88; and Vol. 2, p. 855: Music ‘has to do with the inner movement of the soul’; p. 952: ‘The principle of music is the inner life of the individual’; see further on this claim, p. 906. 25 Arthur Schopenhauer (1964), vol. 1, p. 341, emphasis added. On this passage, see Lütkehaus (2006), pp. 103–04. 26 Ibid., p. 340. 27 Pater (1948), p. 271. Pater continues: ‘For while in all other kinds of art it is possible to distinguish the matter from the form, and the understanding can always make this distinction, yet it is the constant effort of art to obliterate it.’

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picture of the nature of the world which rolls on in the boundless maze of innumerable forms, and through constant destruction supports itself. But in this symphony all human passions and emotions also ind utterance; joy, sorrow, love, hatred, terror, hope, etc., in innumerable degrees yet all, as it were, only in abstracto, and without any particularisation; it is their mere form without the substance, like a spirit world without matter.28

Giorgio Agamben points out that images reify and obliterate gesture; he refers to the imago as death mask or symbol. But he also suggests that images preserve the dynamis of gesture intact (as in Muybridge’s stop-motion photography, or a modern-day sports photo). The frozen gestural dynamis, as Agamben puts it, ‘corresponds to the image lashing in the epiphany of involuntary memory’29 − a phrase that owes as much to Benjamin’s concept of Jetztzeit 30 as to Proust. Agamben further suggests that the gestural dynamis of the image ‘always refers beyond itself to a whole of which it is a part’, here obviously enough, however unintentionally, channelling Adorno. What Agamben invokes, in toto, is the historicity of gesture, whether of gesture itself or of gesture frozen in representation. This collective insight leads Agamben to his principal point, that gesture ‘opens the sphere of ethos as the more proper sphere of that which is human’.31 And with ethos, to be sure, comes politics, matched to Brecht’s idea of gesture, in Agamben’s phrase, ‘intended as a crystal of historical memory’.32 In sum, then, in his words, gesture is ‘communication of a communicability; […] the gesture is essentially always a gesture of not being able to igure something out in language’,33 and yet to igure it out by other means, through the body’s sight acting out in the face of worldly phenomena that is, in the matter of my concern, the immaterial materiality of musical sound. Beethoven’s solo keyboard reverie happens, ironically, in the silence of an image alike in the silence of the composer’s deafness, doubly articulating ‘the lack where all signiication is lodged’.34 If silence, as the opposite to sound, and as John Cage understood it, is death, then Beethoven’s deafness (the silence of his private world) speaks out to the nineteenth century as a noise-laden protest on behalf of life, translated into the language of ethereal imaginings about complimentary forms of desire for pleasure (the orgasmic woman), agency (the heroic nude), and spirituality and salvation (Christ cruciied). Through music, the ultimate locus of life − the soul − speaks both from and through its somatic prison. Thus Hegel: Schopenhauer (1964), p. 235. Agamben (2000), p. 55. 30 Walter Benjamin (2003), p. 395: ‘History is the subject of a construction whose site is not homogeneous, empty time, but time illed full by now-time [Jetztzeit].’ 31 Agamben (2000), p. 57. 32 Ibid., p. 54. 33 Ibid., p. 59. 34 Barthes (1991b), p. 264 (original emphasis). 28

29

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For however inward the soul, emotion, and feeling remain, they still always have a connection with the sensuous and corporeal, so that they can now disclose the inmost life and existence of spirit outwardly through the body itself, through a look, facial expressions, or more spiritually through words and musical notes. But the external can enter here only as being called upon to express this inmost inner life itself in its inwardness of soul.35

Here, in sum, is the function of Beethoven’s gesture.

Figure 7.11

Fernand Khnopff (1858–1921), Listening to Schumann (1883); oil on canvas. Photo: G. Cussac. Royal Museums of Fine Arts of Belgium, Brussels. Photo credit: © KIK-IRPA, Brussels

En écoutant du Schumann (1883) (Figure 7.11).36 An old woman in proile looks away from the pianist and shades her face from our gaze. What we can see of the 35

Hegel (1975), Vol. I, p. 540. What follows is a reworking of a lengthier discussion that forms the conclusion of Leppert (1993), pp. 230–33. 36

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musician’s body, his right arm below the elbow, barely intrudes into the visual frame, almost needing to apologize for its presence as the functional necessity by which there comes to be some Schumann to be listened to. The performance of Schumann’s music is all but disembodied so as to privilege the sound, and only the sound, of Schumann. In this respect, it’s no compositional accident that the woman not only turns her back to the pianist but also hides her face from us. (She might as well be listening to her iPod as to the man at the piano.) Someone (whoever she is) listens; she matters only because of the sonorities provided by Schumann. Otherwise, she is even less relevant than the pianist. Everything important is invested in ethereal silence of the Genius of Music; the pianist and auditor are necessary only to the extent that they narrate music’s service − and essence − as Spirit and Will.37 In the end, this is a sad, unfortunate business, all of it encoded by looking away and the gesture of hiding the face. In this setting, these are moves that denaturalize themselves in the mode of their strangeness − a mode of estrangement, precisely in the Brechtian sense: what Joy Calico aptly describes as ‘stylized behaviors designed to reveal the socially constructed nature of human interaction’,38 a deinition that its here, and despite the mystiications of romanticism that work hard to erase history in favour of the eternalization of aesthetic ontology. There is, however, a happier alternative to this ultimately dystopian allegory about love for a particular music, here Schumann’s. Roland Barthes, music lover and musical amateur, in particular loved the music of Schumann. Indeed, he couldn’t leave Schumann alone, and he knew why.39 For him, Schumann’s music was relational, a reconciliatory conjunction of subjectivity and objectivity, spirit and lesh: ‘Loving Schumann […] inevitably leads the subject who does so and says so to posit himself in his time according to the injunctions of his desire and not according to those of his sociality.’40 For Barthes, loving Schumann is to adopt − and to risk − what he calls a philosophy of ‘Night’ (he references Nietzsche and the untimely, or perhaps the out-of-time). We might equate the metaphor with reverie, but to stop there is insuficient. More signiicant is that Barthes locates his love for Schumann in the 37

The painter, later in life and while in his studio, preferred listening to music played on a piano situated on the loor below him. See Howe (1982), pp. 149–50; see also on this painting pp. 5–6, 121–22. 38 Calico (2008), p. 44. Brecht’s articulation of gestus irst appeared in 1930 in regard to his collaboration with Kurt Weill on The Rise and Fall of the City of Mahagonny; see (2008), p. 47. Gestures are by no means natural. Body comportment is both learned and inconstant; see Norbert Elias (1982). 39 With regard to playing Schumann, Barthes evoked the musical body; see Barthes (1991b), p. 261: ‘There are two musics (or so I’ve always thought): one you listen to, one you play. They are two entirely different arts, each with its own history, sociology, aesthetics, erotics: the same composer can be minor when listened to, enormous when played (even poorly) − take Schumann.’ 40 Barthes (1991c), p. 298.

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eroticized body, notably his own, informed by a philosophy of lovemaking − a sonoric connection to the utopian agency of embodied desire, thus well in excess of an aesthetics of spirituality. What Barthes recognizes in loving (to play) Schumann is, in the making of the music, a sound-palimpsest of the body, and one whose traces cannot be seen by averting one’s eyes. In other words, what Barthes hears and sees in music is, speciically, a sensate and historical materiality that romanticist aesthetics attempts to erase. The issue is not that all art aspires to the condition of music, but that the Spirit and Will encoded in music is most of all about life itself, and life with a body.41 In this one regard, if in no other, Listening to Schumann intersects Allegory on the Genius of Ludwig van Beethoven. Adorno, in his last great work, Aesthetic Theory, articulated what he regarded as music’s utopianism structured by a reconciliation with otherness. His simple statement reads: ‘Music says We directly, regardless of its intentions.’42 Music’s gesture, for Adorno, is an embrace. Consider in this regard the importance that singers ascribe to the act of reaching out with their arms to their audience, a gesture of supplication and regard, I suspect, as well as one that puts to the body the task of ‘saying’ what the text cannot quite manage on its own. Singers’ gestures help make visible music’s acoustic form of knowledge. Adorno once referred to music as a gestural art akin to crying: Music and crying open the lips and bring delivery from restraint. In tears and singing, the alienated world is entered. ‘Tears pour, the earth has taken me back’ − this is the gesture of music. […] The gesture of returning, not the feeling of waiting, describes the expression of all music, even in a world worthy of death.43

Stendahl, in his Life of Rossini, referred to music an art that ‘suffuses the soul of man with sweet regret, by giving it a glimpse of happiness; and a glimpse of happiness, even if it is no more than a dream of happiness, is almost the dawning of hope’.44 (Adorno, in turn and borrowing from Stendhal, often referred to music as a ‘promesse de bonheur’.) But the dream must be known; in a word, it must not only be heard but also be experienced. Gestures at once think and experience music, and the gestures are several: those internal to the music (music’s immanent processes), those congruent with music’s realization (performance, through which we experience the hermeneutics of realization) and, inally, those we see (bodies in action, or in frozen action, in the case of the musical image). Music’s knowability is real, but in degrees that are uncertain and unstable. In the end, and in the apt words of Lawrence Kramer: ‘Musical meaning does not depend on being decoded; 41 One of the best and most intellectually ambitious forays into this rich topic is by Derek Scott (2003), all the more in that Scott considers the issue within musical sound itself via an examination of acoustic gesture. 42 Adorno ( 1997), p. 167. 43 Adorno (2006), p. 99. The internal quotation is from Goethe, Faust, I, line 784. 44 Stendhal [Henri Beyle] (1972), p. 347, original emphasis.

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it depends on being lived.’45 The stakes of musical knowing are considerable to the extent that music may encode an otherness, an alternative, to dystopian realities of lived experience. Music is lived through the body. The body’s gestures are by no means the least sign of the social and cultural urgency to which music responds. Allegorical Genius Beethoven, in the late time of postmodernity seems well more than a bit much. But for all the social, cultural and indeed ideological mystiication that trails in the shadow of such conceptualizations there still resides the positive, progressive quotient of such notably dialectical mythologies. Beethoven Hero, whatever else it once was, and to whatever degree its shadow is still discernable, is worth engaging as one means among many by which we might better fathom what music offers us as the auditory semblance of something better. That semblance certainly doesn’t need to be Beethoven; it does need to be someone (preferably very plural), for it is human beings who make the world, and it is human beings who make music. Music’s pleasure (or its pain) is a sonoric account of the world, and at its best perhaps less of what it is and more what it might someday be.

References Adorno, Theodor W. (1997) Aesthetic Theory, eds Gretel Adorno and Rolf Tiedemann, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press). — (2006) Philosophy of New Music, trans. Robert Hullot-Kentor (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press). Agamben, Giorgio (2000) ‘Notes on Gesture’, in Means without End, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press), pp. 49–60. Barthes, Roland (1977) ‘Diderot, Brecht, Eisenstein’, in Image–Music–Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Hill and Wang), pp. 69–78. — (1991a) ‘Listening’, in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 245–60. — (1991b) ‘Musica Practica’, in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 261–6. — (1991c) ‘Loving Schumann’, in The Responsibility of Forms: Critical Essays on Music, Art, and Representation, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 293–8. Baudrillard, Jean (1981) ’The Art Auction: Sign Exchange and Sumptuary Value’, in For a Critique of the Political Economy of the Sign, trans. Charles Levin (St. Louis. MO: Telos Press), pp. 112–22. 45

Lawrence Kramer (2007), p. 8.

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Benjamin, Walter (2003) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 4: 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Edmund Jephcott and others (Cambridge, MABelknap Press of Harvard University Press). Bryson, Norman (1991) ‘In Medusa’s Gaze’, in Bernard Barryte (ed.) In Medusa’s Gaze: Still Life Paintings from Upstate New York Museums (exhibition catalogue) (Rochester, NY: Memorial Art Gallery of the University of Rochester), pp. 6–30. Calico, Joy H. (2008) Brecht at the Opera (Berkeley: University of California Press). Csórdas, Thomas J. (1993) ‘Somatic Modes of Attention’, Cultural Anthropology 8(2): 135–56. Elias, Norbert (1982) The History of Manners, Vol. 1 of The Civilizing Process, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: New York: Pantheon). Gay, Peter (1995) The Naked Heart: Victoria to Freud, Vol. 4 of The Bourgeois Experience (New York: Oxford University Press). Gibbs, Christopher H. (2000) ‘Performances of Grief: Vienna’s Response to the Death of Beethoven’, in Scott Burnham and Michael P. Steinberg (eds) Beethoven and His World (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), pp. 227–85. Hall, Stuart (1989) ‘Ethnicity: Identity and Difference’, Radical America 23(4): 9–20. Hanslick, Eduard (1957) The Beautiful in Music, trans. Gustav Cohen (Indianapolis, IN: Bobbs-Merrill). — (1986) On the Musically Beautiful: A Contribution Towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music, trans. and ed. Geoffrey Payzant (Indianapolis, IN: Hacket Publishing). Hegel, G.W.F. (1975) Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, trans. T. M. Knox (2 vols., Oxford: Clarendon Press). Howe, Jeffrey W. (1982) The Symbolist Art of Fernand Khnopff (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press). Kramer, Lawrence (2007) Why Classical Music Still Matters (Berkeley: University of California Press). Leppert, Richard (1993) The Sight of Sound: Music, Representation, and the History of the Body (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993). — (2004) ‘The Musician of the Imagination’, in William Weber (ed.) The Musician as Entrepreneur, 1700–1914 (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press), pp. 25–58. Libin, Laurence (1985) Keynotes: Two Centuries of Piano Design (exhibition catalogue) (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art). Lütkehaus, Ludger (2006) ‘The Will as World and Music: Arthur Schopenhauer’s Philosophy of Music’, trans. Richter, in Jost Hermand and Gerhard Richter (eds) Sound Figures of Modernity: German Music and Philosophy (Madison, WI: University of Wisconsin Press), pp. 92–105.

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Martin, Russell (2000) Beethoven’s Hair: An Extraordinary Historical Odyssey and a Scientiic Mystery Solved (New York: Broadway Books). 19th-Century America (1970) 19th-Century America: Furniture and the Decorative Arts (exhibition catalogue) (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art). Pater, Walter (1948) ‘The School of Giorgione’, in Richard Aldington (ed.) Walter Pater: Selected Works (Melbourne: William Heinemann), pp. 269–81. Perrot, Michelle (ed.) (1990) A History of Private Life, Vol. 4: From the Fires of Revolution to the Great War, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press), pp. 512–18. Reynolds, Graham (1987) Victorian Painting, rev. ed. (New York: Harper & Row). Rueger, Christoph (1986) Musical Instruments and Their Decoration: Historical Gems of European Culture, trans. Ron Schneeman (Cincinnati, OH: Seven Hills Books). Schopenhauer, Arthur (1964) The World as Will and Idea, trans. R.B. Haldane and J. Kemp (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul). Scott, Derek (2003) From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology (New York: Oxford University Press). Stendhal [Henri Beyle] (1972) Life of Rossini, trans. Richard N. Coe (Seattle: University of Washington Press). Veblen, Thorstein (1979) The Theory of the Leisure Class (New York: Penguin). Winternitz, Emanuel (1961) Keyboard Instruments in the Metropolitan Museum of Art (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art). — (1966) Musical Instruments of the Western World (London: Thames & Hudson).

Chapter 8

‘As Fast as One Possibly Can …’: Virtuosity, a Truth of Musical Performance?1 Antoine Hennion

Virtuosity is a concept that has the double advantage of being transverse with respect to different musical genres and of pointing at performance2 – at music that is not ixed by the score. These are two characteristics that directly refer to approaches developed by Derek Scott, which he has done by focusing, as I intend to do, on the nineteenth century – a period when great divides were established.3 These divides still govern current musical practices, and perhaps even more, the academic disciplines that target them. In the course of the questioning of the opposition between popular and art music as carried out by critical musicology,4 and mirroring its focus on the notion of performance,5 I have decided to pay respect to the way musicians themselves have taken on the constitutional ambivalence of virtuosity. Indeed, for them this refers less to the speciic property some types of music or artists possess than to a distanced attraction – a dangerous temptation, an impossible injunction of which they need to be wary.

1 A irst version of this chapter was published in French in an online journal: http:// ateliers.revues.org/8764 (Hennion 2011). The chapter has been translated by Anne Paterson Farina and Stan Hawkins. 2 I note that the English word ‘performance’ is far more relevant than the French usage, which expresses interpretation, or worse, execution. 3 Scott (1989, 2008). 4 This theme was introduced in the 1980s by scholars, such as J. Kerman and A. Durant, gaining momentum in size and content through an alternative promotion of popular culture (e.g. Leppert and McClary 1987, Frith 1996, Whiteley et al., 2004). 5 Typically, performance studies are divided because of the dual meaning of the word: a reference to theatre taken as a model of self-expression (Jackson 2004); and the idea of the necessary performativity of a social identity (Schechner 2002). This opposition – ‘life as performance’ vs. ‘performance as life’ – seems less an ambiguity that requires resolving than a founding ambivalence that makes the word interesting. It all depends on whether one takes theatrical performance just as a case study or, conversely, as Judith Butler did, an interest in performance as the production of oneself or of collectives that, in that way, we allow to exist, we realize, we produce – all the words illed with the same dual meaning, referring both to the world of performance and to a pragmatism of existence and identity (Butler 1997, 2005).

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Undoubtedly, virtuosity is part of indigenous musicians’ vocabulary – it signiies the height of a musician’s skills or the seductive prowess of an illusionist. Used both by specialists and by amateurs, the word is powerful in its critical load, albeit positive or negative: it enables the listener to qualify and disqualify an interpreter, to honour an artist or to despise another. There is the matter of the ‘virtuosityeffect’, which this use of the word, accusing or laudatory, demonstrates. I would posit that this effect is able to guide us into the domain of the mysterious issues of performance. My contribution to this volume is therefore not an analytical effort to afford virtuosity a musical and sociological deinition that would be as deinite as possible (and that indeed is what the word deinition suggests), nor to provide it with a sense that is stable and independent of situations: for this is exactly what virtuosity, by playing with boundaries, continually seeks to bypass. It would also be somewhat problematic, considering that virtuosity tries to express just the opposite, to give voice to a sense of instability and the leeting moment by accepting as a criterion the bliss of a performance as nothing but its radical dependence from the present situation.6 While extending the boundaries that separate musical genres, my purpose is rather to question two contrasting deinitions of virtuosity that are strongly present in debates and judgments. On the one hand, virtuosity has been considered rather negatively as a performance aimed at a public that outwardly demonstrates exceptional agility in terms of instrumental or vocal technique, especially as related to speed of execution. Such displays are both admired as demonstrations of a divine gift and condemned as a diabolical perversion of musical performance. On the other hand, pushing things to their limits is a pressing need in musical practice, which implies that virtuosity is a more complex issue. This involves a musical urge from within. It is perceived as a corporeal and risky litmus test of the mysterious power of music and musicians’ talents in a way that forces them to extreme points where they not only reveal their drive, but also topple a music event into states whose boundaries are less easy to determine. This refers to states that words are less capable of deining: primary emotion, collective intoxication and moments of trance.7 As is evident from this very formulation, these two ways of describing virtuosity are not as contradictory as they might seem. Sorting them out (‘virtuosity for its own sake’ vs. ‘virtuosity in the service of a work’, to coin a cliché) is easier to do ex post, once a concert has ended, than during the course of performance when the status of what is at stake at the moment is nothing but obvious, nor is the very fact of evaluating whether it is a success or a failure: how, why, and to what end are we to distinguish between the emotion caused by incredible skills and one’s fascination with a rare talent, or by that sense of being carried away by a whirlwind of music, an intense ‘breakaway’ when music inally no longer exists as a score or a ‘piece’, but rather as an emotion; when it emerges from the moment 6 7

Sudnow (1978). Rouget (1980).

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as a licker? It is not what is played, but what comes out of ingers and bodies in motion, uncontrolled, the speed and contrasts of which make the material of sound crack, stripping the screen of its notes.

If You Have to Ask What It Is … Theoretically, there is a great dificulty in inding the right register through which to address intermediate words, such as virtuosity (as is the case for words such as ‘grace’ or ‘presence’). They accompany and describe a common experience with which they are familiar. Then, it is impossible to determine whether they help in analysis or whether they are directly involved in its accomplishment. They serve in analysing the phenomenon they refer to, but at the same time they put things in shape, they allow a grasping of it in some way that contributes to bringing it out. Certainly, this applies to all our categories, something ethnomethodology has taught us. However, what is interesting here are not the basics of the way any qualiication operation runs. These are not the limits of any effort to put things into words insofar as, partly constituting the reality they are designating, they are reciprocally called to evolve with it. It is the peculiarity of certain odd words, such as virtuosity, that are suggestive but indeinable, resistant to formalization, as if they only make sense through their own uncertainty and, far from giving them additional weight and eficiency, the effort made to ind a more analytical or general basis for these ideas causes them to escape like water in a creek, leaving us void. Such evanescence – the way in which wear and tear takes its course – is in fact particular in every single case, although it is not necessarily the usual destiny of such musical categories. Instead, many other categories have provided musical performance with a framework that has been reinforced precisely because it gave rise to an intense collective task towards its deinition, stabilization and clariication: genres and forms, and, of course, concert programmes and concert hall repertoires, as well as less institutionalized variables, such as the features of tempi, alternating moments of tension and relaxation, typiication of instruments and timbres, postures and expressions expected from soloists, and so on. By contrast, this partial list suggests the strange and fragile position occupied by those other more synthetic but less precise words that seek to capture the ‘spirit’ of what is happening and not to delineate the elements that make it up. They are both more important and less self-conident, as if describing all at once the heart of a phenomenon and the impossibility of achieving it. ‘If you have to ask what jazz is, you’ll never know’, Louis Armstrong reportedly said. Soul or inspiration, feeling or virtuosity, saudade or ‘blue note’, prodigy or genius: while vocabulary changes with genres and musical styles, there is still a persistent need to pin down things beyond what is describable, and to put a word to those utterly unspeakable but decisive feelings. What we face here is the speciic problem raised by these empty

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words that try to designate without designating, to indicate a question more than to mean anything whatsoever.8

A Truth of Mechanics? While words such as swing or genius create a strong polarity between the letter and the spirit and between technical means and emotion, reinforcing this dualism, the paradox of virtuosity is that it aims to posit something about the ‘spirit of skill’; it suggests a part of the truth that exists in mechanics. Far from opposing art and its means, it speaks of what the art itself could be from within its means, or making the means an art in itself. It thus recovers the older sense of the word art, which verges on technique: art is always in the art of making, in the art of doing, something which magicians and clowns remind us of in performances that are primarily a sideshow. There is yet another more historical path that emerges here: this involves a virtuosity that, in opposition to the aestheticism of art, sustains the skill and craftmanship that is central to a performance. Art is a bodily gesture, and not just a mental projection or the expression of one’s soul. In their oppositional directions, such dualistic formulae nevertheless miss what, in my view, the word virtuosity signiies: as I have already said, it is not as viable to isolate, separate or analyse performance trends as to hedge one’s bets on their secret junction; playing the game of an unlikely rapprochement in the alchemy of the moment. ‘To hide art by very art’.9 One of the irst tensions worth noting indeed draws the issue of virtuosity close to that of improvisation, of risk taking, of being on stage; all these unevenly mixed ingredients, taken together, are what constitute the power of a performance. This relationship is a reminder of an aspect I have only touched on so far; a strong constraint that weighs on the bliss of the sequences of breathtaking virtuosity as they determine the success of a brilliant improvisation: the fact is that they move forward only when they are slightly concealed, producing their effect when they seem to arise from a moment.10 If they hint at too much sweat, if they seem too prepared, and if they give the impression of having been heard a hundred times, they rapidly lose their charm, dwindling to nothing short of pointless exercises. Furthermore, the speed that deines virtuosic quality is bound to be looked down on as soon as one becomes afraid of affording it too much importance: while it has little else to show but its acts to prove its point, these acts themselves are subject to assessments that cannot be grounded.

Jankélévitch (1961). The formula is by Rameau, in the letter he wrote in 1827 to Houdar de La Motte in order to convince the playwright to write a libretto for him (it has been published in Le Mercure de France, 1865). 10 See the issue of Tracés (2011) dedicated to improvisation. 8

9

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Olympia the Doll … This prerequisite is severe; it forces virtuosity to break away from both the work that makes it possible and from the device that makes it attractive. One must receive it without entirely seeing it for what it is; the audience must not be overtly sensitive to the staging required by the performer. The problem is not so much the tedious side of a performance, which offers itself as luidity incarnated, but rather its predictable aspect – seeing it from a mile away with the performer’s intention of knocking the socks off the receiver. One can observe strong but risky contiguities, which virtuosi sustain. In particular, two characters emerge as natural friends: 1. Magicians, from whom virtuosi borrow many of their stage tricks, learn to know the ropes as well as peddlers’ tricks, which are so good at capturing attention; classical interpreters draw from tavern iddlers, balalaika players, accordion dance musicians or bar pianists threading their devilish ragtimes. In so doing, they ind out things that go against everything they have ever learned – the glamorous side of scales and arpeggios played one after the other on simple and repetitive canvasses at a frenetic pace, faster and faster, triggering the frenzy of the audience itself, quite unable to say whether it is carried away by the lood or whether it enjoys pretending to believe it is being carried away; these two states are hardly distant from one another! 2. Automatons, whose virtuosi seem to seek mechanical perfection while fearing to be mistaken for being automatons – because the only appeal in the way they play resides in the fact that they perform features one might think only a machine could do, whereas they are human beings like you and me. There is no more brilliant idea than that of Offenbach’s librettists to stage a double play in the irst of the Tales of Hoffmann with the doll Olympia: the confusion between a diva and an automaton is irst used literally in the scenario. The poor Hoffmann is in love with the singer whose virtuosity he admires without knowing what everyone else knows – that she is only a doll. However, this confusion is also used by Offenbach metaphorically quite precisely because Olympia is played by a real singer, whereby her very skilful ‘performance’ is applauded as the performance of an artist imitating an automaton, and not as that of a doll imitating an artist! In the background, even deeper in terms of metaphor, Offenbach is actually engaged by bitterly criticizing the prowess of coloratura singing with a dose of talent and humour: constantly playing around with crossing the boundaries between the automatic aspect and the virtuoso aspect of the soprano’s shrill notes, he presents the audience with a real bravura, which indeed exists in all coloraturasopranos’ repertoire (at least for those who are able to deliver it). And in the same gesture, a comic parody of these operatic arias – a parody whose plot entirely rests on the mechanical and artiicial character of these arpeggios that shatter before starting off again once the key in the doll’s back has been rewound. Finally, with

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no solution of continuity besides that of the robotic qualities of the virtuoso doll, the stage reveals its magician, and evil one at that. For behind the doll there is its creator, the shady magician who amazes the complicit audience, deceiving the all too poetical Hoffmann.11

Rascher und rascher … Velocity, a path of large intervals within very short periods of time, escalations of ornamentation and variations, notes doubled an octave apart … those processes, fully exploiting the characteristics of each instrument or its limits, demonstrate virtuosity that is necessary for its display. They also constitute what reveals vanity, quickly toppling it into its opposite, pointless acrobatics, soulless agility. The case of classical music is interesting in that it has greatly increased in tension, in terms of this ambivalence of virtuosity; whereas popular music has managed it with good nature and indulgence: ‘come on, minstrels, just play for us!’ The Romantic aesthetic expression of the subject, however, ampliies the discomfort aroused by virtuosity, whose illusionist facet articulates poorly in a quest for truth in works that are demanding. The obvious use of artiice, which was no problem as related to classical aesthetics,12 has to be thoroughly reworked; it has to be contained in order to be made endurable. Yet, once it is perceived as being ‘dedicated’ to art, is virtuosity a protective barrier against its excesses, or a comfortable denial behind which one can, without scruples, give oneself up to it? It is dificult to decide. But for sure, it was at the very moment the theme of the necessary subjection of virtuosity became commonplace that it took on far unknown dimensions, particularly through the development of the modern piano in the early nineteenth century: that was the moment when in high society circles and on the stages all over Europe Czerny, Moscheles, Chopin, Thalberg, Alkan, and eventually Franz Liszt (the one who was to become the very epitome of an evil and brilliant virtuosity) took their places. In depending on genres and instruments, it seems to me that these Romantic artists used two different approaches to deal with virtuosity. The irst involves mainly the aesthetic. The contempt that Schumann could not help feeling towards Liszt – despite the generous support Liszt gave him – perfectly exempliies this attitude. Schumann, the man for whom there were no laws in art other than those of morality,13 had a hard time coping with exhibitionism, seduction, taste for 11

Musical abstracts illustrating the case can easily be found on the Internet (they are inserted in Hennion 2011). Here, see for instance, Natalie Dessay’s performance in ‘Les oiseaux dans la charmille’ at the Bastille Opéra in 1992 (staging by Roman Polanski). 12 To whom artiice, on the contrary, is the most direct path towards Nature (Kintzler 1983). 13 Cf. in the ‘Musical Rules at Home and in Life’ he wrote as a Preface to his Album für die Jugend for the piano (1848): ‘The moral laws are also those of Art’.

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popular success, pursuit of the brilliant effect, indeed all the features he perceived in Liszt’s character and in his music. The problem is far from simple, because it is not a matter of pushing away the dificulty of writing and performing works, which composers such as Chopin or Schumann did take to an extreme as much as Liszt (barely had Schumann written Als rasch wie möglich 14 at the beginning of a piece than the same Schumann had added, a few staves later, Rascher und rascher …), but rather it is to obey to the letter the absolute injunction of ‘may the interpreter serve the work, not the work serve the interpreter’. Declined in a thousand ways, this rhetoric of the means and the goal – or for that matter the master and the slave – becomes an indispensable topos when it comes to virtuosity. Arthur Rubinstein used it cunningly while reaping all the beneits of fame and success, repeating ‘with modesty’ that performers only had talent while composers had genius. This reminder rapidly sounds like a somewhat handy alibi, a position with no opposition that each and every one ensures he occupies himself while accusing others of giving in to the easy way. Nevertheless, this complex topic cannot be reduced so simply: at the very heart of composition, it refers to a very strong requirement – in the great Romantics’ works – to that of a maximum coherence among all musical parameters. This is the irst response of classical music to virtuosity, and however dificult they may be, Schumann’s pieces or, in a less unambiguous way, those of Chopin15 are not virtuosity pieces. So, what does this mean? I have no intention of taking this statement for granted, but rather to see if it leads to the possible illustration of technical differences in the form of pianistic writing itself. The idea has a relevance, even though I will not endeavour to prove or develop it in this context. It is that which the word composition, taken literally, expresses well: the opposite of a virtuoso piece is not necessarily an easy piece, or a work that foregoes exploiting the resources of techniques, but more an integrated piece, a piece whose various elements closely respond to each other and constitute one another. It is this vital distributed aspect of music that makes inappropriate the vocabulary of virtuosity. However, this vocabulary can be deployed without embarrassment in a musical space where, on the contrary, the variables are clearly separated: an easily recognizable melody on which one can make all imaginable variations (plus a few others …), a ixed harmonic grid on which one can improvise, a basic rhythm on which, say, Liszt could indulgently superimpose chromaticisms and demisemiquavers. Referring to Bach and Beethoven, Schumann would often insist that a melody is much more than what one can imagine: in more modern terms, one might say that to him, a melody is indeed distributed between (and no longer on) harmony, rhythm, igures that respond to one another. Conversely, harmony or form are not separable, but arise in successive layers by ampliication to constitute one another and to com-pose one another: then there is no place any longer for the left hand droning an Alberti bass or striking its chords while the right hand 14 15

‘As fast as possible.’ Eigeldinger (2000).

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spins in all directions! To say it in other terms, there is no longer a way to isolate a virtuoso line from its harmonic well-established framework, nor to hear it as the ornate variation of a given theme. In my opinion, this is precisely what undermines the idea of virtuosity, both under the composer’s pen and in the amateur’s ear.16 All said and done, this should not force one to be fooled by art history, which is constantly rewritten ex post like the long and dificult path towards the demands, purities and autonomies that aesthetic conformism has become. The idea is only to note how, as ideals, this ascetic, puritan repression of effects for effects had an effect, which, in turn, deserves to be recognized and analysed: ideals such as these have made possible the invention of a new language, characterized by coherence, by maximum integration that, in depriving virtuosity of much of its relevance, shifts the issue towards that of the overall dificulty of interpretation. The more popular or hedonistic aesthetics that these stringent requirements have repressed have no need to be defended, given their success. But neither can they be reduced to easy exploitations of existing processes. They also have to be elaborated through multiple channels. Incidentally, the continuities between art and popular musicians are striking as regards this matter. Virtuosity itself is so aligned with technical excellence that, when pursued, it never goes very far away. In the case of one of the more ‘serious’ composers, Brahms, one never ceases, for instance, to hear the gypsy accents of the violin, which the skill of classical quartets had managed to erase and disembody till nothing was left but a heavenly voice. Conversely, when Ravel methodically runs counter to the canons of Modernism, when he rehabilitates waltz, descriptive music, programmes and the ‘gypsy’ violin (inadvertently reasserting the value of virtuosity), it would be problematic to infer that his only aesthetic concern lies in the pleasure of impressing his public.

‘Vissi d’arte’ There is a second way that classical musicians accommodated virtuosity that I wish to mention. As early as the nineteenth century, well before the artists of the twentieth century’s ironic or iconoclastic posturing, Romantic composers were 16 To get a musical idea of the point, one can compare György Cziffra playing Liszt’s Hungarian Rhapsody No. 3, and Martha Argerich in the ending of the third movement of Schumann’s Fantasy in C major Op.17, which is very dificult not because of Liszt’s lines, but because of everything occurring at once: a very fast and repeated rhythm jostling large arpeggio chords with both hands. The same ‘à la Schumann’ non-virtuosic virtuosity can be heard in ‘Aufschwung’, his Phantasiestucke Op.12 No. 2, and also in pieces by Chopin, such as the Study Op. 25 No. 11 in A minor, for instance played by Sviatoslav Richter. Chopin is of interest because he is somewhere between Liszt and Schumann: if there is obviously a clear opposition between chords and lines as in Liszt, his lines are closely linked and stress the percussive power of chords, which are not of the sort ‘in’ which twirling passages can be played.

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able to turn to other means than pure aesthetics to conine the virtuosity, to exploit it without allowing it to decimate the music: and the most important approach, in tandem with the previous, involved a resistance to this ‘virtuosity-effect’ by opposing the mixed richness of emotion, the never-ending quest for the expression of feeling, as in opera, rather than the uncompromising autonomy of a work. A priori, as a virtuosic development material, the voice had every reason to compete with the violin or the piano. It did not deprive itself of so doing.17 With vocalizations, arpeggios, sostenuti, endless ornaments and cadenzas, singers rival each other in skill, stripping the works of composers who are powerless in limiting their excesses: here we are again facing the very words of the argument about virtuosity. However, in contrast with chamber or orchestral music, opera has never been under the inluence of autonomous aesthetics, of which it is the absolute antithesis.18 Wagner’s revolutionary pretensions, which were to favour his Modernist annexation, targeted a total art, which was quite different: only a deaf person would not hear the heterogeneous diversity of the effects that saturate his writing, both on stage and in the pit. As for other composers, from Mozart to Debussy, from Gounod to Verdi, from Mussorgsky to Strauss or to Berg, they all instinctively accommodated opera within another space, which consistently reversed the representations of ‘pure’ music: a mixture of ambiguity, entertainment and dance, where the bodily pleasure of voices, projection and identiication eroticized characters, the place where the plot, the stage play and the words attempt, with variable success, to marry singing with the orchestra.19 One can understand that such an unlikely union can only last if it is armoured with conventions. The Modernists themselves, fascinated by this anti-model that opera shows them, have repeatedly promised its death, before rushing into its arms at the irst opportunity.20 And yet, also on this stage – a stage that is so far away from purifying asceticism and from art for art’s sake, so conducive to spectacular excess – virtuosity has had to surrender. The never ending fragility of Norma’s melodic ascent, the spellbinding power of Isolde’s complaint, Carmen’s sarcastic accents or La Traviata’s bloody tears: while requiring from singers an inordinate performance, they hardly evoke the idea of virtuosity. Just as Chopin’s Etudes, straight as an arrow despite their chromatic descents, or Schumann’s Fantasy, whose rhythm is impossible to maintain, it is not so much that these lyrical summits stand beyond the diagnosis of virtuosity, but rather that they make it obsolete, useless, that they 17

There is a profusion of examples here. See e.g. Rossini’s ‘Una voce poco fa’ (‘A voice has not much power’!) in The Barber of Seville: 65 years before Olympia, already a ‘mise en abyme’ lesson, Rosina’s contest, sung for instance by Maria Callas in 1959. Or, again in the Barber, ‘Largo al factotum’, for instance by Thomas Hampson in 1992, for Rossini’s 200th anniversary, in which he acts as a clown and adds notes. 18 Fulcher (1987). 19 Hennion (2007a). 20 Hennion (2007b).

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outstrip it from itself. But they do it in ways that are contrary to those of the great Romantic piano composers, not by the rigour and coherence of a musical form, but through the tentative mobilization of an emotion that is both intimate and collective, leaning on all the age-old techniques of performance: the mythical narrative, the drama of love and death, the exposure of bodies and the painful tension of extreme performance. Then there is the impossibility of love proiled by the backdrop of a tragic chorus: from Orfeo to Lulu, we might ask which opera is the exception to the process? At the same time, this ageless canvas, this endless da capo is an opening that has no boundary, no background and no horizon. Is it still even music? What pleasure is there in hearing a long, shrill note, to listen to a tune for the thousandth time that one owns ten versions of, or to observe the accents and impetus of a voice with a magniied potential through extraordinary technical developments? Who can say what that ‘emotion’ exactly comprises – another of these intermediate words impossible to deine.

A Well-tempered Virtuosity Nothing prevents an amateur liking both nineteenth-century piano sonatas and Romantic operas. The abstraction of a musical language pushed to its limits, and the sensual and projective ambiguity of the great lyrical machine, do not exclude one another. Moreover, these genres are all laden with a thousand virtuoso feats. Nevertheless, in both cases, virtuosity has been pushed back to the fringes, or conined to a closely observed enclosure. While virtuosity is certainly present, the genre unfolds against it in a double sense, where the genre in question both leans against and opposes virtuosity. This founding gesture, which deines virtuosity by default after having stripped it of any aesthetic value, also disqualiies it in other genres, as if by contamination. Two centuries of Romantic then Modernist aesthetics have managed to turn it into some kind of primary background for our musical and dramatic instincts, which any self-respecting artistic practice has a duty to surpass. My point is that there is no reason for this to be so. It is quite possible to elaborate on the rigour of aesthetics, not in spite of virtuosity, but for it. By not relegating virtuosity to the margins of the deinition of quality, but by making music arise from its effects, by starting from the virtuoso gesture to make it express what it can bring. This is worth repeating, I think, with an entire aesthetic tradition in mind: our frayed vision of virtuosity is not a necessity; it is irst and foremost the effect of the dualistic vision of Romanticism, further ampliied by Modernism. The more we adamantly oppose idea and matter, means and ends, mind and body, the more we impose a dichotomized musical space; between art and technique, between the truth of an inner feeling and the artiice of the notes that express it. On the one hand, the work bequeathed by the genius; on the other hand, a humble servant who deciphers the composer’s mysterious ‘intentions’. This entire topology, which is so paradoxical when talking about the art of playing

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and performing, goes against a conception that is, instead, connected, continuous, articulating gesture and effect, confounding the work and its interpretation, unable to dissociate means and ends, and refusing to separate body and emotion. Yet, is that not that exactly the positive programme that one can build virtuosity upon? The assumption is not at all crazy; rather, it’s more a reassuring return of the repressed. When playing, the majority of classical performers continue to live what they deny, and keep connecting through their bodies what their minds believe they have severed. What they seek is the lexible, subtle articulation of a gesture that is to be made over and over again; this strives towards a music that is never there, which is far from the blinding clarity that too aptly separates the ‘score’21 from its ‘interpretation’.

Giant Steps Which brings us to aesthetics. What happens if we leave the temples of classical music? Just think of lamenco, open-air dance music and the intoxication of accordions, or African drums: an intense emotion may occur – not beyond the prowess of the bodies, but within them. Flamenco is nothing but virtuosity, that of ingers on strings, that of the improvised melisma of a husky voice lying away and stroking the breaks of the rhythm, that of tap-dancers’ heels slamming and speeding up, that of busts and bellies that swirl and arch, constantly bounced from the broadest movement to the immobile, lying in wait, and that of hands carving the air. Everything concerns the body in terms of deftness and dificulty, but who would have the idea of turning away from this physical tension to search for the source of the pleasure, and of looking instead for it in the intimacy of an inner soul or in the absolute beauty of a work? The moment, the place and the performance are there at centre stage. Music and emotion are but the same words made to express a single event, that which gives the present its density. My purpose in referring to lamenco is not to isolate a genre, which, like Asterix’s little Gallic village resisting the general invasion of form and pure emotion, would have preserved the rare cult of the virtuoso gesture, but rather to suggest from real examples that an aesthetic of virtuosity is possible; a positive, contemporary aesthetic that creates new worlds rather than an aesthetic by default. And this would not be to assign it exclusively to one music rather than another: but instead, to regard it as surreptitiously adhering to the noblest, the most sublime and the most sensitive genres. But dwelling on the lamenco may be too easy an example to prove the possibility of a bodily aesthetic: does the lamenco not typify the music of ‘the other’? One might say that I am just extending the dualism I wish to oppose between ‘them’ and ‘us’,22 between the popularity and corporeality of popular music on the one side, and classical music, made of written works, on the 21 22

The music score is, so revealingly, named ‘partition’ in French! Geertz (1988).

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other. Everyone seems content now to grant exoticism opposite qualities to those championed by the Christian West – the power of trance, the vitality of rites, the mobility of bodies, the intensity of a people, as relected in music. Is the unsettling question really about wondering whether this ‘other’ music is beautiful? Who still doubts it? But what if this music did do what scholarly music does: what if ‘other’ music were also constructing a work of art, and were doing so by stressing even more the etymology of the word – working at having the ‘art work’, so to speak? To provide a positive answer, albeit without concluding, I want to make my point by turning to jazz – a genre that is partly other, at least when compared to the classical tradition. Yet it is an ‘other’ with its origins at the heart of our culture, and not its periphery. ‘Mozart played by blacks’, people claimed when referring to ragtime. This is probably what resulted in jazz becoming a concentration of divergent forces. Jazz could be considered as representative of African Americans, and under the aegis of an illusory radicality, iled a few decades later on another shelf in the store of folklore or at the museum of ethnicities. Instead, jazz has incorporated all the ingredients of modern Western music, both in its forms, harmonies and instruments, and processes of mediation. Rapidly, jazz became radio and recorded music rather than music from plantations. It was black music played for white men, irst for their entertainment, then as music approved of by the Europeans.23 Its accelerated history became the result of a succession of renunciations (of whatever could reduce it to a particularistic music) and adoptions (of anything that could integrate it into time and space). It only remains identiiable through a few, minimal but decisive traces: the blues, the improvised choruses, a frenetic pace. Returning to the central theme of this chapter, I would like to suggest that jazz may have invented something unique due to its intrinsic qualities: like classical music through its material, its format, its performance, but with only one small entity that makes all the difference – its emphasis on performance, not on the work.24 This has come about through a historical shift resulting in its transposition and transformation into a contemporary mould. Bebop is not lamenco precisely because of this internal resumption: it is played and dressed up in a Western manner. Moreover, it meets the requirement of the clean aesthetic carved out by Western music, concentrating on itself and aiming at the production of differentiated works. In this sense, it is obvious that jazz is a form of modern Western music, and not a traditional or ethnic music. Nor is it a popular music with a common cultural or social identity ixed by stable codes. Virtuosity in jazz is neither the proof of a collective performance made indistinct by the body through dance and ritual in the form of entertainment, nor is it the basic starting point from which music evolves. Let me say things again in a different way: whereas the mapping of the music of Western culture is granted by original scores, jazz privileges the act of playing, of engaging through exhilarating pleasure virtuoso sequences of scales and chords, 23 24

Gumplowicz (1991). Berliner (1994).

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and, as with lamenco, it is located in the here and now, in the collective heat of a public that is beside itself with joy. Yet, unlike lamenco, its sole concern is in the making of music:25 for jazz is a dedicated Western style – it has not so much rid itself of the notion of work as it has emphasized the work as being the performance itself. Take Coltrane, an artist in the modern sense of the word: he does not play ‘jazz’, but rather takes the risk of offering a separate version of the standard each time he performs. The issue I leave open is: in listening to Giant Steps (what a nice summary of the history of jazz that title is!), what I hear is an aesthetic of virtuosity – a formula that has a meaning only provided one gives equal weight to both words. Jazz is music that has succeeded in making virtuosity itself the very subject of aesthetics.

References Berliner, Paul F. (1994) Thinking in Jazz. The Ininite Art of Improvisation (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press). Butler, Judith (1997) Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative (New York: Routledge). — (2005) Giving An Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press). Eigeldinger, Jean-Jacques (2000) L’univers musical de Chopin (Paris: Fayard). Frith, Simon (1996) Performing Rites. On the Value of Popular Music (Cambridge: Harvard University Press). Fulcher, Jane F. (1987) The Nation’s Image. French Grand Opera as Politics and Politicized Art (New York: Cambridge University Press). Geertz, Clifford (1988) Works and Lives: The Anthropologist as Author (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press). Gumplowicz, Philippe (1991) Le roman du jazz: première époque, 1893–1930 (Paris: Fayard). Hennion, Antoine (2007a) ‘Rewriting History from the Losers’ Point of View: French Grand Opera and Modernity’, in V. Johnson, T. Ertman and J. Fulcher (eds) Opera and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press), pp. 330–50. — (2007b) ‘Étudier le modernisme ?’, in D. Colas et al. (eds) Musique, esthétique et société au XIXe siècle. Mélanges en l’honneur de Joël-Marie Fauquet (Liège: Mardaga), pp. 19–31. — (2011) ‘Aussi vite que possible … La virtuosité, une vérité de la performance musicale?’, in E. Grimaud, G. Jones, V. Stoichita (dirs) Ateliers du LESC, 35, pp. 1–23, put on line at http://ateliers.revues.org/8764 on 10 June 2011, accessed on 18 November 18 2011. Jackson, Shannon (2004) Professing Performance: Theatre in the Academy from Philology to Performativity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Jankélévitch, Vladimir (1961) La musique et l’ineffable (Paris: Colin). 25

Or ‘being music’, to say it in a perhaps more accurate way.

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Kintzler, Catherine (1983) Jean-Philippe Rameau. Splendeur et naufrage de l’esthétique du plaisir à l’âge classique (Paris: Le Sycomore). Leppert, Richard and McClary, Susan (eds) (1987) Music and Society: The Politics of Composition, Performance and Reception (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Rouget, Gilbert (1980) La musique et la transe. Esquisse d’une théorie générale des relations de la musique et de la possession (Paris: Gallimard). Schechner, Richard (2002) Performance Studies: An Intro (Oxford: Routledge). Schumann, Robert (1848) ‘Musical Rules at Home and in Life’, Preface to Album für die Jugend for the piano. Scott, Derek B. (1989) The Singing Bourgeois: Songs of the Victorian Drawing Room and Parlour (Milton Keynes: Open University Press). (Second edition, Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001.) — (2008) Sounds of the Metropolis: The 19th-Century Popular Music Revolution (in London, New York, Paris, and Vienna) (New York: Oxford University Press). Sudnow, David (1978) Ways of the Hand. The Organization of Improvised Conduct (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press). Tracés (2011) ‘Improviser’ (special issue on improvisation), Tracés, 18, 2010(1). Whiteley, Sheila, Andy Bennett and Stan Hawkins (eds) (2004) Music, Space and Place: Popular Music and Cultural Identity (Aldershot: Ashgate).

Chapter 9

On Music Criticism and Affect: Two Instances of the Disaffected Acoustic Imaginary John Richardson

Suspicious and Spotless Minds Those of us who were around close to the beginning of the so-called cultural turn in musicology occasionally ind ourselves in the position of having to explain to incredulous students why it is that the tone of some of the landmark writing in our ield was so polemical; in short why it seems quite so critical. Students will often accept the premises of culturalist approaches without question, but have little appreciation of the battles that were waged in order to get us to the point where we ind ourselves today. To revisit those old debates that shaped the ield charted in this volume can seem like a trip in a time machine whose dial has been set for the early 1990s.1 A suspicious mindset suffuses the discourses of this era, which might be contrasted with the ‘spotless mind’ attitude of those who bracket the subject of their inquiries more tightly (whether it is with reference to autonomy theory or some form of phenomenology).2 The idea that a balance might be struck between critical and more reparative or phenomenologically descriptive approaches in musicological inquiry informs the principal argument of this chapter. This is not, of course, an entirely new area of debate. Anxieties about just how critical inquiries should be were expressed already in the early days of culturalist approaches to musical interpretation. I recall giving a paper a conference at Salford University, UK, in 1995, when working as a doctoral student in Finland. It was here that I irst encountered Derek Scott, who seemed bemused that someone The resistance that met the irst wave of feminist criticism in musicology, especially the canonical debate involving Susan McClary, Pieter van den Toorn, Ruth Solie and others, is especially dificult to explain to those entering the ield today, who tend to take the presence of critical perspectives for granted. 2 I am alluding here to the ilm, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Gondry 2004), in which the protagonist (played by Jim Carrey) has the content of his mind erased in order to escape heartbreak (his opposite number is played by Kate Winslet). Those musicologists who have no time for critical debates about music and discussions about discursive meanings might be said to be bracketing their experiences (or selectively forgetting) in a similar way. 1

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should have travelled so far to take part in an event provocatively titled, ‘Goodbye, Great Music!’ Despite all the questioning of canons and the relativization of Western musical tradition that was implied in the title of this event, as well as the principles drawn up by Scott and the editor of this volume, Stan Hawkins, in their seven-point manifesto of critical musicology, there appears to have been an implicit need to signal outwardly that the primary impetus behind their critical pursuits was not iconoclastic.3 The methodological framework many of us working under the rubric of cultural musicology or Susan McClary’s ‘project of critical musicology’4 employ is almost an anti-methodology, insofar as it is amenable to a large number of theoretical impulses and disciplinary inluences. As such, the concept of criticism (as designating ‘the critical method’) has some clear advantages, although it might not be as satisfactory to all scholars due to its strong associations with high culture (Art) and with journalist writing. Setting aside these reservations, let us briely consider the meanings that have been assigned to the word criticism in crossdisciplinary contexts. The type of academic criticism Kerman espoused implies a mode of writing about music that does not hesitate to relate musical sounds to surrounding discursive formations.5 Such writing shares a fundamental expository function with journalistic criticism, but it responds to different reader expectations concerning the necessity of acknowledging sources and the evidentiary bases of academic inquiry. In addition, a level of thoroughness is expected in academic criticism that usually (but not invariably) surpasses that found in journalistic writing. Criticism implies a methodological outlook more than it does a theoretical orientation. It requires the ability to write from experience, to apply knowledge of cultural codes to primary research materials, and to extrapolate from theory when undertaking interpretations. Finally, critical writing in the hermeneutical sense requires the writer to relect upon taken-for-granted assumptions and to interrogate these when necessary (often through applications of critical theory; this is where critical theory and criticism overlap most signiicantly). Criticism as a method can be parsed out into a number of interrelated activities, including description (or elucidation), analysis, interpretation and evaluation.6 Research in the 1990s placed a strong emphasis on interpretation and hermeneutical method. Concurrent with the turn of the third millennium, there has been a noticeable turn towards matters of experience and performance, as indicated by phrases such as the performative turn, the phenomenological turn, and the affective turn. This has brought with it a heightened interest in the irst of the above categories, description, which has traditionally occupied a prominent

3 Originally published in Critical Musicology periodical and later republished in both authors’ books; see Hawkins (2002), p. 26 and Scott (2003), p. 5. 4 McClary (1991), p. 26. 5 Kerman (1985). 6 Bordwell (2008) employs these categories in his discussion of academic ilm criticism.

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position in writing on phenomenology.7 Phenomenology in the sense in which I ind the term most useful is bound up to some extent with the idea of ‘close reading’.8 So as not to confuse this term with the closed readings of autonomous texts espoused by the New Critics in literary criticism, let me be clear that I am referring to something resembling Clifford Geertz’s ‘thick description’, which was intended to ‘inscribe social discourse’ through the very action of writing it down.9 Along similar lines but leaning quite heavily on the assumptions of phenomenology, Lawrence Kramer writes of ‘vivid’ and ‘constructive descriptions’ in which ‘a construction from meaning is extended to the object addressed’.10 The effect of such descriptions, he contends, ‘is not simply to repeat or reafirm something about the object described, but to reconstitute the object in the act of describing it’.11 The best phenomenological writing, I would contend, requires a form of lucid description that allows us to imagine experiencing in kilter with the writer, but to extrapolate from this towards a Gadamerian historical horizon by means of inductive reasoning.12 Kramer’s constructive descriptions, as he calls them, might be said to articulate cultural experiences to the extent that language itself is saturated with historical assumptions.13 Analysts embarking upon constructive descriptions would do well to remain mindful of this encoding function and the necessity of bridging the distance between irst-hand experiences and the recollection of those experiences in writing. By minding the gap between expression and re-expression, constructive descriptions have the power to capture something of the qualitative richness of musical experiences while nesting them within a discourse that inscribes its own historicity.14 A tendency to argue from the particular to the general is arguably the greatest strength of phenomenology when compared to the theory-driven approaches that have dominated critical theory.15 7 Merleau-Ponty writes, for example, that phenomenology implies ‘description, not explanation or analysis’ (2002), p. x. For a discussion of the concept of description in phenomenology, see Glendinning (2007), pp. 16–17. 8 Close reading has been championed by several musicologists working in popular music studies, including Lori Burns (2002), pp. 31–51 and Stan Hawkins (2001, 2002). 9 Geertz (1973), p. 19; see also Titon (2003). 10 Kramer (2003), p. 128. 11 Ibid. 12 See Torvinen (2008), p. 11. 13 Kramer (2003), pp. 128–9. 14 Ibid., p. 129. 15 To the extent that popular music studies has long neglected musicological and ethnographic evidence and relied upon sociological theories to argue from the general to the particular, it might be said to contradict the phenomenological impulse, which calls for inductive reasoning. For a staunch defence of theory-driven sociological popular music studies that is overly critical of close reading and phenomenology, see Shepherd and Wicke (1997). Writing in popular musicology that pays greater attention to musical performance and experience has to a certain extent resisted the dominant theory-driven approaches of

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Phenomenology in this understanding requires the utilization of what Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (drawing on the writing of Silvan Tomkins) calls ‘weak theory’.16 In weak theoretical alignments, affective response is seen as paramount and much stock is given to local, transitory and conditional modes of structuring experience. Weak theory can be contrasted with ‘strong theory’, which has long inluenced writing in sociology and cultural criticism due to its amenity to generalizations, the lipside of which is nevertheless a tendency towards monolithic and tautological formulations. Weak theory in this sense becomes an ameliorative descriptor, the inference of ‘weakness’ belying the strength such a mode of address wields to contour itself around the experiences of those whose consciousness it tracks.17 For the present purposes, it is signiicant that Sedgwick considers ‘imaginative close reading’ to be a deining feature of the weak theoretical approach (a near synonym of Kramer’s ‘constructive description’), but at the same time she hastens to add that weak and strong theory have always ‘interdigitated’ in scholarly work.18 In any convincing or plausible critical approach these modalities might be thought of as mutually implicated. Criticism possesses another shade of meaning, which is inseparable from the identity of cultural studies as an interdisciplinary ield of study. The concept of criticism has been the subject of vigorous debate almost since its inception as a ield, in the writing of the so-called Frankfurt School social theorists, Max Horkheimer, Theodor Adorno and Walter Benjamin. Horkheimer was the irst to apply the term criticism to his orientation, in the essay ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ (1937), where he contrasts the position of the theoretically orientated (and critical) scholar with those who pay greater attention to empirical data (a standpoint he inds naïve and overly accepting). Adorno and Benjamin followed Horkheimer’s lead in deining their approaches to cultural studies around this concept.19 Criticism implies a lineage that extends back to the transcendental idealism of Kant (his Critique of Pure Reason). More imperatively for these writers, it is reminiscent of Marx’s ‘critique of political economy’. It is motivated, therefore, by a concept of social justice bound up with assumptions about economic equity that requires everyone to work for the common good. This whole framework is so multifaceted as to defy categorization in this context. For the present, let it sufice to note that criticism in this view implies an action-based form of social critique that popular music studies. See the introduction and many of the chapters in the anthology, The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (Scott 2009). 16 Sedgwick (2003), pp. 133, 145. 17 Ibid.; also Sedgwick and Frank (1995), pp. 165–72. Raymond Williams’ idea of ‘practical consciousness’ (1977), pp. 35–42, quite closely resembles Sedgwick’s weak theory. On practical consciousness, see also Kramer (1990), p. 14. 18 Sedgwick (2003), p. 145. 19 Horkheimer’s deinition of cultural criticism is found in the collection Horkheimer (1972). Benjamin’s views on criticism can be found in the two essays, Walter Benjamin (1996a and 1996b).

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strives to unveil the capitalist world order’s ‘false consciousness’ by means of critical relection and thereby to motivate change. The idea of criticism in this arrangement assumes a certain position of exteriority with respect to society. To his credit, Adorno was well aware of the conceit of this positioning, which Horkheimer was in fact the irst to identify. Criticism in Adorno’s view required an act of detachment into relective (or philosophical) consciousness, which itself becomes symptomatic of the very processes of abstraction that are the primary object of his Marxist critique.20 To be a critic, he writes, is to play at being more cultured.21 Indirectly related to this position of critical ‘outsiderness’ is an attitude of ‘self-othering’ that scholars inluenced by anthropology working in musicology have often espoused (including Tomlinson, Kramer and McClary): the idea that there is value in approaching the culture(s) to which you belong in much the same way as you would that of others; and the corresponding value of some notion of thick description as a means of attributing meaning through critical consideration of how the various pieces of a cultural jigsaw puzzle interconnect. Implicit in the above is the idea of culture as a discursive entity, a connective web of culturally encoded meanings and interactions, which can be better understood in the course of detailed critical inquiry. The attitude of outsiderness that is set forth in the Frankfurt school position is symptomatic of what Paul Ricoeur and subsequently Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick have dubbed ‘the hermeneutics of suspicion’.22 The suspicious scholar (modelled after such igureheads as Freud, Marx and Nietzsche) takes it as their duty to reveal through interpretative inquiry the hidden mechanisms that give rise to the multifarious forms of oppression current criticism has been concerned with exposing.23 The value of such a positioning will be self-evident to many readers of this volume. Sedgwick nevertheless contends that by privileging this mindset an imbalance has resulted in which our view of the world is conditioned primarily by negative affect (the suspicious scholar always expects the worst and usually inds it). A further signiicant weakness is the leap of faith theoretically weighted models require from theory into experience. In her Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity,24 Sedgwick argues for the interdependency of paranoid and reparative modalities in scholarly work, achieved by paying closer attention to affective consciousness and through a suspension of the critical function to allow for the emergence of a more reparative frame of mind. Such an attitude paves the 20

Adorno was consistent about the need to stand outside a phenomenon in order to effectively critique it, for example in the debate about Schoenberg versus Stravinsky in The Philosophy of Modern Music (1973), where he objected to the latter’s neoclassicist complicity with the dominant musical order. 21 See Adorno (1983), pp. 19–34. 22 Sedgwick (2003). 23 For a different perspective on the reparative/paranoid dichotomy, see Suzanne Cusick (2008). 24 Sedgwick (2003).

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way towards encounters with the world that are more about pleasure, the ‘merely aesthetic’ and the ameliorative.25 At stake is not a narrow aestheticism but rather an altogether more fulsome mode of understanding that recognizes how pleasure itself inds expression within a politicized arena. Sedgwick’s 26 theorization of camp performativity exempliies this turn towards sensory engagement and reparative bracketing, offering perhaps the most convincing justiication for her theoretical argument. The question of affect is at the centre of Sedgwick’s formulation. Affect can mean many different things in a musicological context, from the Affektenlehre of Baroque theorists to the complex taxonomies of music semiotics. What I have in mind here is something different. Naomi Cumming has offered one of the most convincing models for coming to terms with the workings of affect in a musicological context. Cumming describes music as conveying emotional potentialities through a synthesis ‘of different elements … [which] add up to an emergent affect that is complex and subtle yet in some sense singular’.27 The literary critic Sianne Ngai28 discusses literature in much the same way, employing the notion of ‘mood’ or ‘tone’, which should not be confused with the more restrictive musical sense of the latter word. For Ngai, tone is a cultural artefact’s ‘global or organising affect, its general disposition or orientation towards its audience and the world’.29 This sense of the word encompasses ‘the formal aspect of a literary work that makes it possible for critics to describe a text as ‘euphoric’ or ‘melancholic’, and, crucially, how these and other more subtle designations can be related to ‘a holistic matrix of social relations’ (ibid.).30 Affect does not exist separately from semiotic and discursive layers of meaning; it is modiied and channelled by them. Richard Dyer explains: When we attend to the extra-semiotic, amodal dimension of an artwork, we are never entirely within extra-semiotic or amodal reality precisely because we are in art and discourse, we are in what is already only analogous to affect, what is always already worked, historical, contingent. Art can never quite get affect, partly because it can never actually be affect, only its formalized and conventionalized objectiication. I believe everyone knows this intuitively; everyone knows that art falls short of the real. Yet still we respond, still we are moved.31

25 26 27 28 29 30 31

Ibid., p. 144. Ibid., pp. 149–51. Cumming (2000), p. 217. Ngai (2005). Ibid., p. 28. Ibid. Dyer (2007), p. 256.

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The above statements touch on some key features of the idea of affect as I shall employ the term in this chapter: the idea that a general affective tone can be perceived in the sounding music; a layer of understanding that is conditioned by culturally contingent expectations and responses (in processes resembling Raymond Williams’s ‘structures of feeling’ and Lawrence Kramer’s ‘structural tropes’), on the one hand, and the modifying effects of textural and performative details, on the other. The affective character, mood or tone that is most central in this chapter is what I will call the disaffected acoustic imaginary. It is imaginary because it is a discursive construct, an idea, whose boundaries overspill strict ontological deinitions of the acoustic. My discussion largely bypasses, therefore, the debates over authenticity that have dominated discussions of folk music, which prioritize one ontological view over another (the ontology of the acoustic over that of the electrical). I prefer the term disaffected to any implication that the phenomena I am discussing are entirely without affect. This concept resonates with Fredric Jameson’s ideas about the waning of affect under postmodernism.32 However, I do not believe affect can be dismissed as an experiential entity simply because it has been negated. Rather it becomes strengthened in a certain way, seeping up from between the cracks of the discourse rather than constituting it. Affect in this sense is different from conventional narrative impulses, comprising cumulative and modiicatory mechanisms of intensiication and dis-intensiication that provide a rubric for different structures of feeling. Silvan Tomkins’s concept of ‘affect ampliication’ seems particularly apt when it comes to one of the central questions of this work.33 The fact that electrical ampliication could be said to modify and to mediate the intensities of pop and rock music is widely accepted, but this relationship also relects back also onto practices of acoustic music, which are less innocent, less of a utopian escape from the conditions of modernity, than some commentators have assumed in the digital age. This is true of both of the examples discussed below. More than electriication, which might have been the crunch issue for those performing acoustic music in the 1960s, the modes of production and aesthetic understanding we have learnt from digital culture impinge directly on the musical examples to be discussed here. Surpassing to some extent old distinctions between the urban and the agrarian (read: alienated vs. authentic communities), digital aesthetics can be seen as iniltrating musical production and consumption in ways that are more luid and bound to redeine the relationship between individuals and communities. Folk revivals in such contexts are undoubtedly not what they used to be.

32 33

Jameson (1991), p. 10. See Sedgwick and Frank (1995).

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Instance 1: ‘Because of Toledo’, Performed by The Blue Nile Released in 2004, the song ‘Because of Toledo’,34 composed and performed by the Glaswegian singer Paul Buchanan and his band, The Blue Nile, presents a number of challenges to the analyst interested in elucidating its expressive meanings. Namely, there is something introverted and refractory about this recording, which seems designed to fend off identiication with the singer and the song. Despite Buchanan’s deining vocal presence, an impersonal element is articulated in the acoustic guitar accompaniment. Performed in strict metronomic time, Buchanan’s guitar playing resembles the pre-programmed sequencer parts found in the Blue Nile’s early electronic work (from the late 1980s) more than it does the expressive performance styles ordinarily associated with the instrument. Not only is the guitar played with a distinct lack of embellishment and expressive contouring, but also the musical syntax is put together in such a way as to highlight the blandly repetitive nature of the musical terrain. Throughout the entire duration of the verses, changes result from incremental bass movement alone. Built on a thirdless, and consequently hollowed out (or disaffected), voicing of G, each variant of the chord outlines the same angular trajectory. A hint of polymeter in the 3 + 3 + 2 patterning of the arpeggios strains against the surrounding  time signature, suggesting a push toward ternary time, which does eventually happen in the chorus. In addition, a constant abrasive minor-second dissonance is folded into the guitar patterning through the simultaneous presence of g1 and f#2, suggesting an inner wound or scar – a grating sense of melancholy – in the subjectivity of the performer. My point resembles one that is made by Naomi Cumming in her writing on the Adagio in Bach’s Sonata in G minor for Solo Violin.35 Starting out from an affective ground-tone of minor pathos, she shows how a major-seventh dissonance enfolded within the Adagio’s inner voices occasions a grating sense of melancholy, which is nevertheless contained within a harmonic schema that is suggestive of poise, relection and – because the music is performed rubato – spontaneity. The impression is quite similar in Buchanan’s song, although the environment that the harmony represents is different in tone to the all-encompassing rationality of Bach’s music. Above all, Buchanan’s treatment is suggestive of the barren yet luminous backdrop of twenty-irst-century urban life, in which technological containment is an unavoidable fact. Through an implied dialectic between the singer and his accompaniment, the guitar becomes the implacable (mechanized) environment to the song’s ‘self’, articulated in the main melodic line, which is so often the locus of subjectivity in Western music (almost unavoidably so in the popular song). Given the implacability of the guitar part, attention is easily diverted towards the vocals. After an initial statement of the song’s main hook (‘Because of Toledo’), the melody rises up to a laboured high d2, concomitant with the loaded line ‘I got 34 35

From the album High (The Blue Nile, 2004). Cumming (2000), pp. 216–24.

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sober and stayed clean’. At the same time, the bass line and bass guitar drop to an affectively charged low E. Thereafter the singer soars to an even higher and strained e2, before descending in a series of carefully weighted meandering phases. The last of these culminates on the emotionally fraught line (‘I live here but I don’t really live anywhere’), which is coloured musically by ending on the dissonant major seventh of G. Technically speaking, the song might be major (although this is debatable, given that E minor is an equally viable alternative key centre); it nevertheless comes across as melancholic, due to the enfolded dissonances of the guitar part, the descending arpeggiation (vaguely homologous with falling rain, referred to in the lyrics), the mournful melody and the pitches Buchanan highlights in his setting of the lyrics. The line ‘another faded waitress dressed in pink’, for example, sounds bleak because it comes to a halt a dissonant second above the tonic. As if to conirm the impression of desolation, the bass line falls again to a brooding open E following this phrase (root note of the related minor chord). Nevertheless, the vocals are characterized by an element of stylistic distancing, which to some extent counteracts the dominant impression of melancholy. In short, Buchanan’s singing is characterized as much by affectation as affection; I am referring to the inluence of 1950s-style jazz crooning on his vocal style (from Sinatra36 to Nat King Cole), including the use of stylized portamenti, Tin Pan Alley mannerisms, such as a tendency to dwell on the major seventh, and a rubato, speech-driven approach to vocal phrasing.37 Such stylization can be understood as a form of parodic distancing, an interpretation that inds support in the sonic environment of the music, where the voice is left to reverberate across empty spaces, a solitary subject in inhospitable surroundings. Buchanan’s evocation of the jazz crooner intersects with a construction of masculinity that is markedly romantic in its juxtapositioning of the hard-boiled and solitary male in opposition to the unattainable and irrational female. It can be related in some measure to Glaswegian Americanophilia and local ideas about manliness as arising from an existential battle in which the starkness of ordinary life is used to justify an irrevocable downward spiral towards depression and alcoholism, from which the singer must extricate himself (‘I got sober and stayed clean’). However, that is not all. As I have indicated already, the music is executed with considerable performative swagger and historical awareness, implying an appreciation of style that transports the music into a more reparative register. An unlikely point of reference, but one that I would maintain is potently relevant, is Tom Waits’s parody of Americana in much of his musical output, evidenced particularly in his heavily ironic portrayal of Frank Sinatra on the album, Frank’s Wild Years.38 This nostalgic landscape of guys and broads, whisky and diners 36 Buchanan speaks in numerous interviews of the inluence of North American music of his father’s generation. Sinatra is commonly cited as an inluence. See Brown (2010), p. 112. 37 See Potter (1998), p. 55. 38 Tom Waits (1987).

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is executed with a gravelly voice, occasionally rising to emotive heights, and a sympathetic twinkle of the eye. It harks back above all to the post-Second World War era, a time of Tin Pan Alley tunes and fraught but erotically heightened gender roles, such as those found in ilm noir. In short, the vocal style is evocative of courtly heterosexual love and an affective terrain of inner turmoil that remains bottled up rather than inding outward expression. Essential here is the distance that is inscribed between the song’s contemporary and implied geographical setting and the psychological landscape it alludes to. This distance, doubly inscribed, turns the song into a performative rendering of archetypal gender positions rather than their direct expression. Buchanan is known to be a Scottish man interpreting (re-presenting) the North American actual and psychological landscape; just as he is understood to be a modern man relecting on how the old tunes used to sound (those of his father’s generation). Buchanan’s approach to music–text relations is characterized by close attention to mood, often conveyed through descriptions of the material world more than references to the narrator’s feelings. There is a cold luminosity to his verbal descriptions that brings to mind the approaches of imagist poets such as Ezra Pound and T.S. Eliot, the new novels of Alain Robbe-Grillet, and the painting style of Edward Hopper. In all of these forms, the ‘thingness’ of objects becomes concentrated. Meaning is implicit in lyrics such as ‘another faded waitress dressed in pink’, who becomes a sign of romantic disaffection projected onto disaffected consumerism more than a real person. The theme of facelessness, spelled out in the chorus, permeates the rest of the lyrics: everything from the mediatized real virtuality of the ‘early morning news’ to ‘shadows dancing’ on the prairies, an ingenious double entendre that links up with an earlier reference to ‘pick-ups’, inferring both a popular form of transport in rural America and inconsequential relationships: one-night stands. Like so much music rooted in digital culture, the structure of ‘Because of Toledo’ is shaped by a constant low of beats divided into ields of varying intensity. In this respect, the most signiicant transformation happens in the chorus, when a simple subtractive musical procedure, the removal of an eighth note from each bar, results in a transformation of the time signature from  to  . This brings about an overall heightening, or ampliication, of affect, which in addition to meter is indicated by Buchanan straining to reach to the highest note of his song, and by a corresponding thickening of musical texture. Most strikingly, ampliied instruments are introduced in the chorus, the electrifying presence of other musicians serving to dispel some of the lonely disaffection of the verses. The sense of plenitude brought about by this reinforcement is transitory, however, just as images relating to the lost object referred to in the lyrics are fragmentary – like forensic evidence at a crime scene, these material traces (of lipstick and cocaine) stand in for but cannot replace the person to whom they belonged. Echoes of Romantic orchestral music (Wagner or Mahler) can be heard in the 6–5 suspension that spans the irst and second bars of this section, while voice-leading in the second chord (C) moves restlessly along a dissonant trajectory without resolving

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(ninth, tonic and major seventh). These are mere echoes, however, heard in the context of a repetitive looping pattern, which liberates musical procedures from the formal obligations of the past, but in so doing creates its own kind of (digital or mechanized) trap. Escape from this cycle of Romantic yearning comes abruptly through rhythmic addition and a harmonic shift to the darkest sonority of the song, E minor. Though the dominant affect in ‘Because of Toledo’ may be one of bleakness, the inal verse does bring a modicum of relief. Here a trumpet obbligato joins the singer in unison, a traditional way of signifying the presence of a transcendental other39 – a projection perhaps, but a comforting presence nevertheless. In these inal moments, the singer announces how he would like to return to Toledo, a gesture that is underwritten in the music as he joins himself in a harmonization that scoops up to the positively affected major third – the missing link in the broken harmony of the verses. All in all, Buchanan’s song summons up the image of a tortured artist, which audiences have traditionally responded to. The intertextual ield invoked in the song extends back to a time when gender roles were sharply differentiated and the image of the lonesome stranger was heavily romanticized in North American popular iction (from cowboys to hard-boiled detectives). Both hedonistic and humorous, the igure of the crooner that is embodied by an artist such as Sinatra and his Rat Pack associates is subjected here to a more worldweary rendition that encourages critical relection.40 Essential to this impression of relexivity is how Buchanan constructs his singing persona performatively in relation to a musical accompaniment that connotes technological disaffection.

Instance 2: ‘Heysatan’, Performed Live by Sigur Rós A second example exempliies the principle of the disaffected acoustic imaginary more vividly still. Performed outdoors in the Icelandic wilderness, the song ‘Heysatan’ by Sigur Rós41 incorporates several silences, which seem to convey not only a conspicuous absence of sound, but also something that it is dificult to express in words about what it means to experience Nature in the digital age. As in the above example, music and corresponding visual images in ‘Heysatan’ are See also Richardson (1999), pp. 180, 208–09. Brown considers the more problematic side of this construction of masculinity to be distinctive to Glaswegian sensibilities; speciically, the ‘the bourbon-drinking, straighttalking, roughly sentimental America of Sinatra’, which conveys a fantasy of ‘a city of guys and dolls, of wry stoicism and urban night’ (Brown, 2010, p. 144). This construction, he notes, is conveyed in the music of the Blue Nile. The performative side of such a persona is illustrated in Buchanan’s comments about hats (in relation to the title of the second Blue Nile album), which ‘become a synonym for people in all their faded glory. A hat gives them character and comes to represent the individual’ (ibid., p. 130). 41 ‘Heysatan’ means ‘haystack’; the song is featured on the DVD Heima (2007). 39

40

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imbued with an atmosphere of melancholic reverie. Directorial choices in the ilm dwell on this point by drawing the viewer’s attention to images of gravestones and what looks like a derelict group of buildings (in fact, this is an architectural ‘folly’, designed by the naivist Icelandic artist, Samúel Jónsson, and set in the desolate outpost of Selardalur on the West coast of the island).42 Outside and apparently mingling with the performing musicians are a group of inanimate life-sized statues representing seals and people. An ecological impulse would seem to be at work in both images and sounds. Environmental sounds blend with the performed music, while moving clouds seem to match up with the atmosphere created in the song’s static although subtly shifting harmonies and resonant sonorities, thereby providing an aspect of continuity between the musicians and their physical setting. Musically, the song comprises individual chord strikes concentrating on the core functional areas in the key of G major (tonic, subdominant and dominant: G, C and D) as well as their adjacent minor sonorities (mediant and submediant: B minor and E minor). Notably, the gaps between the strikes are so protracted that the musicians can be seen to visibly count out time and rock to an unsounded beat. Gaps in the continuity of the song seem to occur almost arbitrarily on any degree of the scale. This is apparent already in the instrumental introduction, where the rhythmic patterning conforms to a mechanical order in which beats are subtracted with each repetition of the chord sequence (initially, G–G–Bm6–E minor–D). In the irst cycle of the sequence, each chord is sustained over a complete bar (four beats in slow tempo). In subsequent cycles these relations become more dynamic as minimalist reductive processes are implemented: irst E minor and D major are compressed into a single bar, with two beats sounding on each chord; then, in the inal two cycles, several chords are held for a single beat, including the above chord change and shifts between the tonic, subdominant and mediant chords. At one point, the dominant chord is held over an asymmetrical count of nine beats in a half cadence whose inconclusiveness is conspicuous. As in ‘Because of Toledo’, an uncanny opposition is realized between sounds we recognize as organically produced and traditional and musical organization that implies dehumanized mechanization.43 ‘Heysatan’ has a distinct hymnal quality to it, an aspect that is reinforced in the use of the harmonium, including church organ-like pedal tones. But the music is drawn out to such an extent that the directionality of these changes occurs at key moments divested of all temporal animation. This is especially striking in the inal verse when the musicians cease to perform for almost two bars (it is dificult to count this passage accurately as the musicians treat it as an extended fermata). This interruption comes to rest on the dysphoric submediant, E minor (an important sonority also found in the previously See the oficial Heima website (http://www.sigur-ros.co.uk/tour/diary/?p=781, accessed 12 December 2010). 43 My work on the use of looping in the live performances of the nu-folk singer KT Tunstall addresses an obvious form of mechanical organization imposed upon traditional acoustic forms. See Richardson (2009). 42

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discussed song), during the sounding of which we observe extended shots of rusty grave stones standing amidst long grass. Environmental sounds impinge on the music during these silent moments, including the white noise of wind hitting a microphone and birdsong, reminding us that the music and musicians are transitory and part of a greater environmental continuity. The drones in the music provide a similarly large canvas to the physical environment where the musicians perform; in fact, the music becomes homologous (and sonically continuous) with its physical environment. If the harmonium part sounds hymnal, the electric guitar produces chords that resemble those played by Paul McCartney in the Beatles’ ‘Blackbird’; characterized by movement in parallel tenths (an octave plus a third), with the tones b2 and g2 humming sympathetically across the changes. In ‘Heysatan’, however, the predominant direction of the music is descending and the tempo slow, which steers the mood away from McCartney’s chappy cheerfulness. The songs share an appreciation of open spaces, which the airy voicing of chords combined with the unchanging chordal backdrop are largely responsible for conveying (note that the outdoors is implied also in the lyrics of both songs). A densely orchestrated crescendo in the bridge carries the song effectively towards its apex, but it is the barren atmosphere of the verses that establish its overriding affect, which once again connotes (urban) disaffection. Most distinctive about this song is the fact that there is something arbitrary, even mechanical, about the places where the music is made to come to rest. In this way, the musical discourse is removed from the teleological impulse that would ordinarily determine how it moves in time. This imbues the song with a sense of stasis and contemplative reverie that belies the conventional tonal qualities of the harmony. So unusual is the manner in which the music repeatedly stops in mid-low that it is tempting to interpret ‘Heysatan’ as expressing a deconstructive attitude. By this I mean that attention is directed away from the song’s conventional connotative ‘meanings’, which take on a retrospective or haunted quality as a result of the numerous acts of interruption. With lyrics in Icelandic about an aging farmer watching over his ields while contemplating his approaching demise, it is of little surprise that the music feels as though it expresses similar qualities (detachment and wistful reverie). This is achieved by a kind of halting relectiveness in which musical actions are divested of their expected consequences. The music no longer sounds ‘religious’ or ‘folky’, and seems to go nowhere. Instead, it moves the listener differently, most notably by means of sonic motion itself. The corporeality of the music is underlined in two ways. First, the song cannot be performed effectively without physical movement and eye contact between the musicians; it is too loosely conigured rhythmically to hold together in the absence of a visualized beat. Second, its corporeality can be attributed to the sonic properties of the instruments: the initial percussive strikes on a vibraphone and the ensuing warm vibrato afterglow; the deep sound of an electro-acoustic bass guitar; the sharp onset of plucked guitar chords; the dark and fat tones of a brass quartet comprising two trombones and two lugelhorns (note that these instruments both occupy low registers). This instrumental emphasis gives rise to sonic beats

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and knots that seem to arise not so much as a result of gestural contact with the instrument or dynamic chord movement, but out of the intrinsic properties of the acoustical sounds (in this respect, a presumed ontological distinction between acoustical and electrical sounds might be misleading, since both types of sound engender a similar complement of knots and lows in the musical texture). The emphasis on sound as such creates musical entanglements that seem to be bound up with the visceral qualities of moving air more than discursive ‘musical’ logic. The resulting sonorous fullness (and implied semantic vacuity) leaves abundant room for the imaginative faculties. Above and emerging out of this sonic mass (mass also in the religious sense, because of the hymnal quality of the instrumentation and musical syntax) soars Jónsi Birgisson’s ethereal countertenor voice, conveying its own ‘nonsensical truth’.44 Like the accompanying music, the voice of the male falsetto singer directs attention outwards from a semantic to a prosodic and ecological plane. It does this also in terms of gender coding, by the way the singer’s voice refuses to be subsumed within the binary gender order. By offering a window onto a naïve and (phenomenologically) bracketed domain of experience, Jónsi and his fellow musicians provide something that resonates with the priorities of surrealism, where spectral meanings collide with instant attraction in a dialectic that cannot be easily resolved. This sensibility infuses the outdoor performance, conveying its tones onwards in time and space, across the low spaces of digital age and into the privatized sonic spaces where we reside. Above all it is the corporeal qualities of sounds that permit these recorded audiovisual spaces to come into contact (nondialectically) with our personal lived spaces. The music moves listeners, quite literally, in a manner that relies upon but seems to transcend its technological mediation. Might this be considered a straightforward audiovisual representation of folk authenticity, in which performers and audiences alike are returned to a lost utopian garden? The music does not support such an interpretation. For one thing, several of the instruments are ampliied, thus complicating the relationship between the acoustic and its electriied Other. Moreover, the music is structured in such a way that it is recognizably a product of a digital sensibility. Even the silences seem mechanized and posthuman – in the sense in which Katherine N. Hayles employs the term:45 virtual insofar as they imply detachment from the human, but nevertheless resulting from performed physical gestures and evincing embodied responses. Highly signiicant here is the fact that in optimal conditions, which are fast becoming the norm in home hi-i set-ups as well as in cinemas, the ilm seems to suggest the presence of a continuous line between the encapsulated silences of the ilmed world and those silences that are part of the audience’s immediate 44 See Miller (2003). For more on uses of the countertenor voice in contemporary opera and its cultural meanings, see Richardson (1999). 45 Hayles (1999).

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listening environment. Michel Chion offers a useful theorization of such instances in his essay, ‘The Silence of the Soundspeakers’.46 Because of the technological advances brought about by the use of technologies such as Dolby Digital and THX surround sound, silences in recent cinema can make audiences increasingly aware of corresponding and contiguous silences in their immediate listening environments. The two can never merge seamlessly: we cannot fully immerse ourselves in the Icelandic pre-ilmic reality since we are always more closely connected with our own environmental reality, but the images and sounds of this ilm present audiences with the illusion of continuity between the two domains, resulting in a silence that seems to be listening to us (while audibly enveloping us). This is not an entirely comfortable sensation, but it does encourage a degree of relection that was not so easily accomplished in the pre-digital age, in which silences in audiovisual media were less complete. ‘Acoustic music’ of this kind encourages the adoption of such a listening position: a quietness that contains considerable potential for relective experience. As we have seen, silence in the instances discussed above seems to connect with two different types of cultural coding, which, roughly speaking, might be accounted for with reference to deconstructive and environmental imperatives. Roland Barthes has distinguished between two such modalities in his posthumously published collection of lectures, The Neutral.47 The form of silence he calls tacere resides in discursive gaps and might be considered rhetorical or deconstructive. That which he calls silere, on the other hand, implies a stillness resulting from the absence of movement and corresponding noise, which thereby gives rise to a more contemplative and restorative affective tone.48 An environmentally aware agenda is implicit in perceptions of the latter kind. Both modalities are present in the Sigur Rós song, which can be understood as representing the cessation of the mechanized low of media, the ubiquitous discourses of the digital age, and a second silence that lows into and out of an ecological discursive space. In the digital age, we are never truly at one with nature, but rather with an idea of what nature has become in an age of media low and digital surround sound. I suspect that this is the reason that the new acoustic music resonates so deeply with contemporary experience – the fact that it touches on both of these levels of understanding. This impulse behind traditional ideas of ‘the acoustic’ places an emphasis on pre-ideological directness and auratic immediacy in an age when these qualities are thought to have been lost. More speciically, traditional folk aesthetics implies a rejection of the alienated discourses of electriied modernity. The two examples discussed above suggest a somewhat different dynamic, in which the reach of the digital is understood to permeate even the virginal sanctuary of the acoustic, bringing about a tangible state of disaffection. Drawing on the ideas of Roland Barthes and Raymond Bellour, Laura Mulvey offers a further concept from 46 47 48

Chion (2009), pp. 147–61. Barthes (2005), pp. 21–3. Ibid.

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audiovisual research that might prove useful when considering the affective category of the new digital acoustic. In Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image,49 she addresses moments of stoppage in cinematic low in which the gaps that lie between the individual frames of the ilmic medium are brought into sight, either through directorial intervention or strategies of viewer activation. If the auditory equivalent of the visual gap in ilm is silence, we approach an understanding that could help us to arrive at a new theorization of acoustic music, which interprets it as saturated with media consciousness rather than as an idealistic escape from such consciousness. For Mulvey, moments of stillness (for our purposes, silence) in cinema create the conditions necessary for the emergence of ‘a ‘pensive’ spectator who is equipped to relect ‘on the cinema’.50 She continues: ‘Not only can the “pensive” spectator experience the kind of reverie that Barthes associated with the photograph alone, but this reverie reaches out to the nature of cinema itself’.51 For Mulvey, this allows two kinds of time, narrative time and its cessation, to cross-contaminate one another. The new acoustic music articulates precisely such a sensibility, allowing the emergence of a pensive listener through a deeper appreciation of embedded silence.

On Media Absorption, Neutralizing and Remobilizing the Critical An assumption guiding this and my previous work on the disaffected acoustic imaginary (and digitally produced music more generally) is that there can be no critique of the dominant forms and practices of current media culture without a mimetic relationship to the aforementioned set of practices.52 A signiicant drawback of such double-voiced positioning (in the Bakhtinian sense) is that immanent critiques of this kind can easily be taken as offering themselves up for absorption within the very paradigm they would seek to dismantle. In the case of Sigur Rós, it is dificult to ignore the extent to which essential features of the band’s distinctive sound and look have been repeatedly turned into fodder for an advertising industry bent on marketing a new and desirable (ecologically friendly and aesthetically independent) lifestyle. In this respect, Sigur Rós might have surpassed even Philip Glass, whose music was ubiquitous in television commercials in the 1990s. Reacting indignantly to appropriations of their musical sounds and associated imagery in advertising, Sigur Rós have addressed the matter quite directly on two oficial webpages (‘homage or fromage?’ and ‘homage or fromage? part deux’), where their own original songs and videos are presented side by side with advertising doppelgangers.53 Conspicuous though 49 50 51 52 53

Mulvey (2006). Ibid., p. 186. Ibid. See Richardson (2005, 2009, 2011). See Sigur Rós (2001–11a, 2001–2011b).

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these appropriations might be, they are evidently not quite obvious enough to justify cease and desist orders to be issued for copyright infringement. For the present, then, the advertisers have escaped legal sanctions. All of which should matter little to an indie band such as Sigur Rós with its own cult following and broader popular appeal. Why, then, are the group so troubled? Most likely it has little to do with lost revenue over unpaid royalties, but instead with how the copies might be understood to have altered perceptions of meanings in the original songs. Because of the susceptibility of music in audiovisual settings to re-encodings, the question might be asked, will the music of Sigur Rós ever sound the same once we know that it is so amenable to media ‘misuse’? On a more general level, what does this appropriation say about the aesthetics of ‘the alternative’ or ‘the independent’ in an age when it is increasingly dificult to distinguish the mainstream from its critical margins? Critical aesthetics depends upon the ability of artists to occupy a position of ‘outsiderness’ (one cannot get much more ‘outside’ geographically than Iceland) not dissimilar to that which Adorno reserved for his critical project – and which those of us who have been involved in McClary’s ‘project of critical musicology’ over the past couple of decades have also reserved as a kind of intellectual sanctuary. As critical musicology moves into the academic mainstream (just as indie music has moved into the mainstream), and the ‘non-critical backlash’, or a new generation of differently minded scholars ills our shoes at the critical margins (ah, but is difference itself at the root of the problem?!), are we adaptable enough to realign our ield with respect to some its fundamental concerns? Should we renege from a critical alignment that is exempliied in the very act of interpretation (which implies a suspicious rather than a reparative mindset, according to Sedgwick)? Put differently, should we stop interpreting music altogether, as some writers have urged us to do?54 Or should we take special care to produce readings that more closely map experiences while assigning a weaker but more dynamic role to theory within our interpretative endeavours?

References Adorno, Theodor W. (1973) Philosophy of Modern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and Wesley V. Blomster (London: Sheed & Ward). — (1983) Prisms, trans. Samuel and Shierry Weber (Cambridge: MIT Press). Barthes, Roland (2005) The Neutral: Lecture Course at the Collège de France (1977–1978, trans. Rosalind E. Krauss and Denis Hollier (New York: Columbia University Press). Benjamin, Walter (1996a) ‘The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), pp. 116–200. 54

See, for example, Moore (2009).

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— (1996b) ‘The Theory of Criticism’, in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. 1 (Cambridge: Harvard University Press), pp. 217–19. Bordwell, David (2008) ‘In Critical Condition’, in David Bordwell’s Website on Cinema, 14 May 2008. Available at http://www.davidbordwell.net/ blog/?p=2315, accessed 19 October 2010. Brown, Allan (2010) Nileism: The Strange Course of the Blue Nile (Edinburgh: Polygon). Burns, Lori (2002) Disruptive Divas: Feminism, Identity and Popular Music (New York: Routledge). Chion, Michel (2009) Film, A Sound Art, trans. Claudia Gorbman (New York: Columbia University Press). Cumming, Naomi (2000) The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signiication (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). Cusick, Suzanne G. (2008) ‘Musicology, Torture, Repair’, in Radical Musicology 3. Available at http://www.radical-musicology.org.uk/2008/Cusick.htm#_ edn6, accessed 5 December 2010. Dyer, Richard (2007) ‘Side by Side: Nina Rota, Music, and Film’, in Daniel Goldmark, Lawrence Kramer and Richard Leppert (eds) Beyond the Soundtrack: Representing Music in Cinema (Berkeley: University of California Press), pp. 246–59. Geertz, Clifford (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays by Clifford Geertz (New York: Basic Books). Glendinning, Simon (2007) In the Name of Phenomenology (Abingdon, Oxon: Routledge). Gondry, Michel (2004) Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. USA: Focus Features. Hawkins, Stan (2001) ‘Musicological Quagmires in Popular Music: Seeds of Detailed Conlict’ in Popular Musicology Online 1. Available at http://www. popular-musicology-online.com/, accessed 26 October 2010. — (2002) Settling the Pop Score: Pop texts and Identity politics (Aldershot: Ashgate). Hayles, Katherine N. (ed.) (1999) How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Horkheimer, Max (1972) Critical Theory: Selected Essays (New York: Continuum). Jameson, Fredric (1991) Postmodernism or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Kerman, Joseph (1985) Musicology (London: Fontana Press). Kramer, Lawrence (1990) Music as Cultural Practice, 1800–1900 (Berkeley: University of California Press). — (2003) ‘Subjectivity Rampant! Music, Hermeneutics and History’ in Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton (eds), The Cultural Study of Music (New York: Routledge), pp. 124–35. McClary, Susan (1991) Feminine Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (Minnesota: University of Minnesota Press).

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Merleau-Ponty, Maurice (2002) Phenomenology of Perception (London & New York: Routledge). Miller, Edward D. (2003) ‘The Nonsensical Truth of the Falsetto Voice’, Popular Musicology Online 2. Available at http://www.popular-musicology-online. com/issues/02/miller.html, accessed 16 November 2010. Moore, Allan (2009) ‘Interpretation. So What?’, in Derek B. Scott (ed.), The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (Farnham & Burlington: Ashgate), pp. 411–26. Mulvey, Laura (2006) Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image (London: Reaktion Books). Ngai, Sianne (2005) Ugly Feelings (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press). Potter, John (1998) Vocal Authority: Singing Style and Ideology (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Richardson, John (1999) Singing Archaeology. Philip Glass’s Akhnaten (Hanover, NH & London: Wesleyan University Press & University Press of New England). — (2005) ‘“The Digital Won’t Let Me Go”: Constructions of the virtual and the real in Gorillaz’ “Clint Eastwood”’, Journal of Popular Music Studies, 17(1): 1–29. — (2009) ‘Televised Live Performance, Looping Technology and the “Nu Folk”: KT Tunstall on Later … with Jools Holland’, in Derek B. Scott (ed.) The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (Farnham & Burlington: Ashgate), pp. 85–101. — (2011) An Eye for Music: Popular Music and the Audiovisual Surreal (New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press). Scott, Derek B. (2003), From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology (New York: Oxford University Press). — (ed.) (2009) The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (Farnham: Ashgate). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky (2003) Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky and Frank, Adam (eds) (1995) Shame and its Sisters: A Silvan Tomkins Reader (Durham, NC: Duke University Press). Shepherd, John and Wicke, Peter (1997) Music and Cultural Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press). Sigur Rós (2001–11a) ‘homage or fromage? (innblástur eða stuldur?)’, in Eighteen Seconds Before Sunrise: The oficial Sigur Rós website. Available at http://www. sigur-ros.co.uk/media/homage-or-fromage.php, accessed 31 January 2011. — (2001–11b) ‘homage or fromage? part deux (innblástur eða stuldur? seinni hluti)’, in Eighteen Seconds Before Sunrise: The oficial Sigur Rós website. Available at http://www.sigur-ros.co.uk/media/homage-or-fromage-part-deux/, accessed 31 January 2011. Titon, Jeff Todd (2003) ‘Textual Analysis or Thick Description?’, in Martin Clayton, Trevor Herbert and Richard Middleton (eds) The Cultural Study of Music: A Critical Introduction (New York & London: Routledge), pp. 171–80.

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Torvinen, Juha (2008) ‘Fenomenologinen tutkimus: lähtökohtia kriittiseen keskusteluun’, Musiikki, 1: 3–17. Williams, Raymond (1977) Marxism and Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

Discography The Blue Nile: High (Sanctuary, 2004). Tom Waits: Frank’s Wild Years (Mercury Records, 1987).

Filmography Sigur Rós: Heima, Dean DeBlois (dir.) (EMI Records, 2007).

Chapter 10

The Development of Bob Dylan’s Rhythmic Sense: ‘The Times They Were a’Changin’ (1958–64) Charles Ford

The Signiicance of Bob Dylan’s Irregular Rhythmic Sense This chapter is intended to demonstrate the extraordinarily high level of rhythmic irregularity in Bob Dylan’s music between 1961 and 1964. This musical phenomenon is immensely signiicant at a sociohistorical level. Apart from recordings of pre-war acoustic blues, which were both scarce and irregular,1 and some of Woody Guthrie’s songs, there was nothing to compare with Dylan’s informal rhythms in the prior history of recorded popular music, and there has been very little since. His wayward rhythms at this very early stage of his career must surely offer some explanation for the huge popularity that he achieved. They also represent not only a musical caesura, but also a dissident sub-cultural one, and were part and parcel of his public musical and general persona, which for its time was radical and informal. Many of his album and song titles were in the vernacular, such as The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan, The Times They Are a-Changin’ and ‘A Hard Rain’s a-Gonna Fall’. His working man’s clothes directly opposed the suits and ties in which most pop of that time was performed. In concerts he fumbled around with his harmonica holder and capo, spent ages tuning up, and strummed a single chord seemingly endlessly between verses whilst he tried to remember the words of the next. He coughed and giggled and told long rambling stories. I have two recordings of him asking to borrow a harmonica in a particular key from anyone in the audience who might have one. As can be assumed from listening to various bootleg recordings, his audiences enjoyed this aspect of his performances.2 This desire for informality can be likened to that which endeared British hippies to the DJ John Peel in the late 1960s, who also rambled, and put on the wrong record, or the right record at the wrong speed. Dylan’s, and then other pop musicians’, musical and personal informality were signiicant features of burgeoning teenage sub-cultures. As a result of the proits to 1 2

See Ford (1998). Keith Negus (2008, p.1) gives other examples of Dylan’s informal stage manners.

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be amassed from target marketing to youth, their age range became more tightly deined and restricted to the seven years of the ‘teens’.3 ‘Teenagers’, as they were now deined, became not merely distinct from, but opposed to, both children and adults, economically, culturally, sexually, and almost ontologically. Teenagers celebrated their new economic identity as an opportunity to espouse a sub-cultural persona, and the leading edge of this new identity involved listening to music that was radically distinct from that of their parents. In this chapter I am not concerned with Bob Dylan’s words, which some of his fans might ind tantamount to blasphemy. My contention is that to neglect his music is just as problematic. Dylan himself has bemoaned the lack of critical attention to his music in his autobiography Chronicles.4 It was his seemingly spontaneous stream of remarkable poetry in combination with his intense musicality, his always highly focussed performances, and, not least, his rhythmic sense, that has made him such a compelling singer/songwriter for half a century. However, although this article focuses on rhythm, it also refers to other musical qualities such as melody and structure, and Dylan’s singing and playing. Music, above all, provides the promise of an alternative reality before or beyond customary concepts and representations. This is especially true of any apparently intuitive music, which appears to directly oppose the rational ordering of a market economy and its proit motive. It was this same pre-commercial quality that attracted US and UK 1960s’ youth to pre-war blues, and to other ‘declining forms of Negro popular music’,5 which, along with folksong, were valued for their source in pre-capitalist, agrarian poverty, as if that gave their contemporary exponents, and their fans, an ‘authentic’ edge. Dylan’s rough and ready musical and personal self-presentation addressed this need, just as did his words, for they contributed to a general reaction against the formality and self-satisied precision of Hollywood, Tin Pan Alley and show business altogether, which was perceived to be ‘all front’. Bob Dylan seemed to have no ‘front’, and neither did he seem to care to have one. He played primary chords, often in non-classical tunings, his voice was ‘too nasal’ and ‘forced’, his visionary words were off the edge, and his informal, intuitive rhythms offered a new sense of musical time, and of a place for middle-class teenagers to ind themselves in an ‘authentic’ social space somewhere below, above or beyond the mass culture they at once embraced. In this respect, Dylan’s incorporation of the blues is particularly signiicant. Because the blues are quintessentially Black, his effortless, seemingly organic, inclusion and transformation of their characteristics leant his music that same atavistic, ‘authentic’ cache. All music is not so much ‘in time’ as formative of time – the time of our musical experience. Whilst slight rhythmic irregularities rufle, enliven and even ambiguate our senses, highly irregular rhythms lend a vivid sense of remaining-in3 4 5

Hobsbawm (1994), p. 323ff. Dylan (2004), pp. 119–20. Gillett (1983[1970]), p. 257.

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the-present rather than dissolving it into an ongoing linear musical low. Irregular rhythms intensify our sense of our own ‘musical presence’. Such accentuation of ‘the now’ held particular appeal for the sensibilities of the beatnik/protohippy generation. As Joni Mitchell sang around this time, ‘And we’ll talk in present tenses’.6 The micro-holistic precept that wholes can be found in particulars underlies my concern here to unpick the rhythmic minutiae of irregular moments in Bob Dylan’s rhythms, in the understanding that they once helped to form a previously unknown, relatively static, far less directed style of (musical) subjective time. Approach I suggest that, at least during this very early, formative period of Dylan’s development, his rhythmic sense was intuitive. This is, however, not to say that his rhythms were in any sense ‘arbitrary’ or disorganized – rather the reverse if anything – but that he played and sung spontaneously and unselfconsciously. For instance, he probably did not plan to play a    bar in the middle of a series of ¦¼ ones: it just came out that way, at least in part in accordance with the words. There are three sets of tables associated with this chapter that extend the indings of my analyses to 1017 songs up to the most recent of his recordings. Because they are far too long to be published, I have uploaded them onto my website.7 These three sets of tables are called ‘Songs’, ‘Comparisons’ and ‘Aggregates’: 1. ‘Songs’ gives rhythmic details (along with other musical information) of all these songs. 2. ‘Comparisons’ lists all the songs I know that Dylan recorded more than once, in alphabetical order. There are many recordings of Dylan performing the same songs, and each performance is often considerably different, rhythmically and otherwise. Dylan has always performed his songs in concerts and in recording studios, rather than merely reproduced them, even to the extent of changing their melodies.8 3. ‘Aggregates’ quantiies all the qualitative information given in the tables entitled ‘Songs’. Each of these latter tables gives totals of the rhythmic categories in which I have placed the songs in any one table. In ‘Aggregates’ I have aggregated these totals in terms of the years in which the songs were recorded, and in terms of the sort of venue – live gigs, radio shows,

6 7 8

‘Chelsea Morning’ from the album Clouds (1968). See http://www.c.c.ford.btinternet.co.uk/Dylan.htm. Negus (2008), p. 133.

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recording studios and so forth – in which they were recorded. Later in this essay I explain how I arrive at percentages of irregularity.9 4. The tables provide all the data from which I draw my generalizations, and provide a range of information about these songs that might provide a useful resource for anyone interested in Dylan’s music. These tables represent work in progress insofar as there are many more performances I expect to add. Whilst I have analysed many illegal bootleg collections, I only make passing reference to their many songs because I cannot assume readers have access to any of them. They are nonetheless of value to this work because their sheer volume adds statistical weight to my indings. I use ive rhythmic categories to deine the rhythms of songs – Regular, Less Than Regular, Irregular, Regularly Irregular and Highly Irregular. These terms are designated by capital letters in order to distinguish them from more general usages of the words ‘regular’ and ‘irregular’. They derive from my similar work for an essay on Martin Carthy’s rhythms.10 I will discuss the rhythmic qualities of songs that I have selected to best represent the sort of irregularities in any one particular category. First, I explain Bob Dylan’s characteristic uses of ‘pause-like’ bars, then shift the discussion over to ‘lat’ and Irregular hypermetric structures. Following this I deal with substantial cases of rhythmic irregularity. Finally, I close with an overview, in which I return to the social-historical signiicance of Dylan’s irregular rhythms. Pause-like Bars Inserted bars and fractions of bars of accompaniment often sound like pauses between sung lines. Such ‘pause-like bars’ are the most important source of irregularity in Dylan’s songs of this period. Such moments are not empty of signiicance in themselves because they interrupt forward movement. Moreover, when he inger-picked his accompaniments, the cessation of the voice left alone for a moment a mesmeric stream of guitar arpeggios. The fascination of these arpeggios results from the way in which their metre, pitches and harmony do not accord with the way these parameters normally interrelate in tonal and modal music, but derive from ingering patterns, which often renders them rhythmically/ harmonically ambiguous at the level of the musical microsecond. Most signiicant in this respect is the arrangement of bass notes, which throws up arbitrary irst-, second- and third-position chords, irrespective of their metric position.

9 Note that I explain in more detail how to read these tables on my website (see above n. 2). 10 See Ford (2007).

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I will discuss four types of pause-like bars: ‘structural and regulating’, ‘fractional’, ‘ambiguating’, and ‘dynamic’ or ‘anti-pause-like’ bars. Now and again during the course of this discussion I use a distinction between ‘metre’ and ‘hypermetre’.11 ‘Metre’ means the number of beats per bar, whereas ‘hypermetre’ means the way in which bars join up into periods of ‘super bars’, usually of four bars each. I call these ‘super-bars’ ‘periods’ in accordance with ‘classical’ analytic methods. They are deined principally by melodic shape and harmonic change, and in nearly all popular song they also correlate with verses, and lines of verses. Structural and Regulating Pause-like Bars In Bob Dylan’s songs of this period, and in those of many other solo singer/ guitarists, verses are very often followed by a bar of guitar accompaniment so as to separate each verse from the next. Often, though less so, such pause-like bars occur between the lines of verses. The typical hypermetric rhythmic structure of the verses of many of Dylan’s songs, with a structural pause-like bar shown in parenthesis, is 4 + 4 (1) = 9 bars, which is to say, with one extra bar before the next verse. Because such structural pauses between verses probably sound ‘normal’ to anyone versed in acoustic pop, I do not consider them irregular. Pause-like bars between the lines of verses demand a slightly different approach. If such a bar completes a 3 (1) = 4-bar period, it regulates, as it were, Dylan’s tendency to cut off vocal phrases just before the irst beat of the fourth bar, which is standard practice with many ‘rock’ (in the broadest sense of the word) singers. On the other hand, when a pause-like bar extends an already complete 4-bar period within a line, I hear the resulting 4 (1) = 5-bar period as irregular, since then the pause renders the hypermetre asymmetrical. However, such asymmetric periods do not, by my criteria, render a song Irregular, though, in the absence of other irregularities, they do render it Less Than Regular. Just as regulating pause-like bars do not disturb the rhythm of songs, so too do a couple of rhythmic blips leave most of a song completely unrufled. So, in the absence of any other irregularities, I also deem these Regular. I also ignore irregular instrumental introductions, which are commonplace within Dylan’s solo acoustic songs. Consider irst one Regular song as an initial explanation of my procedures. ‘My back pages’ (Another Side of Bob Dylan, 1964) is in ¹¾, but for my purposes here it is best explained by representing it in a fast ³¾. Each verse comprises four 4-bar periods, each with two 2-bar sung phrases. So, whilst the introduction is represented as four 3s, it is most likely to be heard as one slow ¹¾ bar. The four 2-bar phrases begin: ‘Crimson lames …’; ‘Pounced with ire … ‘; ‘We’ll meet again …’; ‘I was so much older then …’. The irst numbers in all the analytic representations of the rhythms of songs in this chapter – 0.00 etc. – give the onset times of verses, which are indicated by 11

See Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1981).

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V1, V2, and so on. The letter ‘I’ at the beginning stands for instrumental introduction, which in this instance is one ¹¾ bar of guitar alone: 0.00 0.05

I V1

3+3+3+3 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 3 + 3 + 3 (3), 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 3 + 3 + 3 (3), 3 + 3 + 3 + 3 3 + 3 + 3 + 3, 3 + 3 + 3 + 3, 3 + 3 + 3 (3 + 3 + 3 + 3)

The irst and second lines of each verse comprise seven sung ³¾ bars followed by one pause-like bar, which completes each 8-bar period, or in metric terms, two slow ¹¾ bars. However, the voice takes up all the third 8-bar period, and so, in the absence of a pause-like bar, brings the last chorus line – ‘Oh and I was so much older then …’ – in early, because the now established rest between lines is taken away, resulting in a slight push, to great effect. This scheme holds for the irst three verses, and is only altered very slightly thereafter. The last 7-bar period of the irst verse is extended by four more pause-like bars. In terms of ¹¾ a one-and-three quarter bar period is extended by a further three quarters of a bar. Because this is the only substantial irregularity in the song, apart from one ¦¾-bar in the second period of the ifth verse, setting the words ‘fearing not I’d become my enemy’, I deem it Regular overall. ‘I don’t believe you’, which is on the same album, has exactly the same pattern of internal pauses in the irst and last of its ive verses : 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 (4), 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 (4); 4 + 4 + 4 + 4, 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 (4), though the others are irregular. Fractional Pauses The presence of fractional pause-like bars, meaning a number of beats between lines and verses that do not sum to a complete bar or bars, is suficient for me to consider a song to be Irregular. These fractional pause-like bars, though not quite so common as whole bar pauses, are nonetheless common features of Bob Dylan’s intuitive rhythmic sense in the early sixties. Consider for instance ‘Boots of Spanish leather’ on The Times They Are a’Changin’ (1964). A couple of nonrhythmic points irst. First, this song is musically almost identical to ‘Girl from the north country’ on the previous album, The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963). Second, along with the version of ‘Baby let me follow you down’, which Dylan recorded for Witmark publishers in the same month – January 1964 – it was (as far as I know), the last song Dylan recorded that he inger-picked until ‘Dark eyes’.12 I suspect that Dylan stopped inger-picking because his priorities at this time lay in song-writing and singing, and not with his guitar accompaniments. During his New York Town Hall Concert of 1963, which is not available as a legal recording,13 Dylan suggested these dificulties when he introduced ‘Don’t think twice its alright’, which involves 12 13

Empire Burlesque (1985). New York Town Hall Concert (1963).

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fairly intricate picking, although he referred only to singing. He said, ‘You gotta be pretty good to sing this song here. I don’t know if I can sing it really. But I wrote it so …’. When he performed it again at the Philharmonic Hall Concert in October the next year (which is commercially available14), he strummed the accompaniment. Every verse of ‘Boots of Spanish leather’ takes the following metric form (in numbers of beats per bar): 4 + 4 (4), 4 + 4 (2), 4 + 4 (4), 4 + 4 (4 or 6 or 4 + 4)

Because the 2-beat, ½ bar at the end of the second period sounds in all verses, I call this song ‘Regularly Irregular’, despite the changed pattern of pause-like bars at the end of each verse. I focus on this category later. Ambiguating Pauses Sometimes whole, multiple or fractional pause-like bars contradict, and thereby ‘ambiguate’, the melodic structure of verses, in which case I, once again, deem the song to be Irregular. This point is particularly telling with respect to the hypermetric rhythmic structures of several of Dylan’s songs at this time. Take for instance ‘The times they are a’changin’’ (on the 1964 album of the same name), which is in triple time. At irst glance this is a simple song comprising three 4-bar clauses in þ¾, with an equally simple melodic structure: a + b a1 + c d + e, in which d is a repeated note: a: 2 bars of  ‘Come gather round people wherever you roam’ b: 2 bars of  ‘And admit that the waters around you have grown’ a1: 2 bars of  ‘And accept it that soon you will sink like a stone’ c: bars of  ‘If your time to you is worth saving’ d: bars of  ‘Come get out the old one if you can’t lend a hand’ e: bars of  ‘For the times they are a’changin’.’

However, this is not how Dylan (and many cover singers) performed it, and the difference is telling. Rather, he broke up the clauses with pauses, not between the 14

Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live (1964).

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three clauses but within them. It is the position of these pauses that lends the song its distinctive character. a: 2 bars of  ‘Come gather round people wherever you roam’ (½ bar pause) b: 2 bars of  ‘And admit that the waters around you have grown’ a1: 2 bars of  ‘And accept it that soon you will sink like a stone’ (½ bar pause) c: bars of  ‘If your time to you is worth saving’ d: bars of  ‘Come get out the old one if you can’t lend a hand’ e: bars of  ‘For the times they are a’changin’.’

Thus ‘b’ and ‘a1’ become associated at the middle of every verse, which ambiguates their repetition. In the irst verse the pause between a and b is a whole bar, but in the other four verses it is a ½ bar, setting ‘a’ as one bar of þ¾ and one of ݾ. Dynamic Pause-like Bars or ‘Anti-pauses’ Cut-back verse endings, in the form of fractional last bars, dynamize the movement into following verses, because they begin slightly earlier than expected. Such moments of metric acceleration can be thought of as ‘anti-pause-like bars’, since they cut back the musical continuum, and thereby have the opposite effect. Their presence is another cause of Irregularity. There are many examples of these in Dylan’s early songs, such as, for instance, the 2-beat bar into the choruses of ‘A hard rain’s a-gonna fall’ (Freewheelin’, 1963), which I discuss below. More often than not, such half-bar fractional pauses lead into instrumental verses, as in ‘Pretty Peggy-O’ (Bob Dylan, 1961) and ‘Blowin’ in the wind’.15 Very often, as evident in these songs, Dylan used a 2-beat 1–2–3–2–1 quaver or semiquaver harmonica phrase almost as a pre-conscious nervous tic, sometimes playing it three or four times in a single verse, and then as a 2-beat upbeat at the end of sung verses to push the music onwards into instrumental ones. Hear for instance, ‘She’s no good’, ‘Talkin’ New York blues’, ‘Gospel plow’ and ‘Freight train blues’ on the irst album.16 There is even more forward musical movement when Dylan elides his vocal verses with the following instrumentals. By ‘elision’, I mean when the beginning 15 16

The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963). Bob Dylan (1961).

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of the last bar of a 4-bar period of a verse is also that of the beginning of the following chorus or instrumental verse.17 Not only is there no pause-like bar in such instances, but also there is no last bar either! Take for instance ‘Mixed up confusion’, which was Dylan’s irst studio recording with a band, and released as his irst single, backed with ‘Corrina Corrina’ in 1962.18 This prescient R & B number consists of 6–10” bursts of voice and band alternately. Because every verse is elided onto the following instrumental one, this latter takes off from Dylan’s last vocal note on the ifth bar line of each verse. These constant elisions are the main source of the song’s dynamism. Having discussed these various types of ‘pause-like’ moments in Dylan’s songs of this time, I now go on to consider hypermetric structures, which is to say ‘periods’ of bars. ‘Flat’ Hypermetric Structures Several of Dylan’s melodies of the early 1960s are built up of repeated motivic cells or riffs. Because such repetition is unstructured beyond the level of 2-bar periods, I think of such songs as having a ‘lat’ hypermetre, meaning that they don’t have ‘normal’ 2 + 2 = 4 8-bar, hierarchic structures. They can be Regular, Less Than Regular, Irregular, though not Highly Irregular. These lat structures go back to the ‘white blues’ period in Dylan’s output between 1961 and 1962, when he was giving brilliant performances in the style of pre-war, often riff-based, one-chord Delta blues, as typiied by John Lee Hooker. For Hooker and the older blues men, Charlie Patton and Robert Johnson for instance,19 the so-called ‘12-bar blues’ was no more than three, freely metred, phrases. Dylan absorbed this framework, together with the blues’ repeated guitar and vocal riffs, and Black vocal ‘dirt’. Dylan’s irst album includes three such hypermetrically lat, blues songs all of which are inger-picked: ‘In my time of dyin’, ‘Fixin’ to die blues’ and ‘Highway 51 blues’. Then there are ive other songs that are not commercially available: ‘Two trains running’, ‘Backwater blues’, ‘ Rocks and gravel’, ‘James alley blues’ and ‘Standing on the highway’. All these Black-style covers are irregular in terms of both metre and the extent to which Dylan sings all around and across the beat. The ‘songs’ tables on the website20 indicate those songs that Dylan sang relatively freely by the words ‘free voice’. In his recent book on Bob Dylan, Keith Negus refers to the repeated accompanimental motives of these blues-style songs as ‘riffs’. Whilst from the standpoint of conventional musicology they lack interest after a while, Negus defends them: 17 18 19 20

Lerdahl and Jackendoff (1981). Collected on Biograph (1985). See Ford (1998). See n. 7 above.

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The riff allows the song to form, to take shape; it provides an integral part of the architecture of a song. It is the cyclical, non-goal oriented repetition of musical phrases and verbal sounds that draws us in, allowing us to enter the song. The riff becomes the song, and words and vocal melody are held in tension to the riff, intimated by and implicated in it.21

Consider the most-well-known version of ‘A hard rain’s a-gonna fall’:22 this accumulates repeated motives within a metrically irregular, hypermetrically lat, structure. There are two ways of hearing it. Either the vocal phrases take up whole 4-beat bars, and are answered by 3-beat guitar pauses, or the last notes of ³¼ vocal phrases end on the downbeat of a ¦¼ bar, leaving the rest of that bar to the guitar. The metre, with the bar-lines shown as vertical beams is thus, ‘Oh |where have you been my blue-eyed| son’ or ‘Oh |where have you been my blue-eyed son|’: 3 + 4, 3 + 4; 3 + 4, 3 + 4, 3 + 4, 3 + 4, 3 + 4

Or: 4 (3), 4 (3); 4 (3), 4 (3), 4 (3), 4 (3), 4 (3)

Either way, there is a 7-beat scheme throughout, apart from a slight irregularity at the beginning of verse 4, and a 2-beat bar at the end of four of the ive verses. These interruptions push the music forwards into the chorus line. The effect of this extended motivic repetition is one of drear instability, which its the words like a glove. Meanwhile, the chorus is mainly in 2-beat bars, though ending with a further 7-beat guitar cell: 2 + 2 + 2 + 2, 4 (3 + 4)

Similar repetition of melodic cells can also be heard in ‘Masters of war’,23 ‘The lonesome death of Hattie Carroll’24 and in ‘Mr. Tambourine man’.25 Irregular Hypermetric Structures In some of Dylan’s early songs rhythmic irregularity operates not in terms of numbers of beats in bars, but at the hypermetric level of how many bars there are in a period. Because such longer term irregularity has less impact on listeners than 21 22 23 24 25

Negus (2008), p. 134. The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (CBS, 1963). The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963). The Times They Are a-Changing (1964). Bringing It All Back Home (1965).

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quicker metric irregularity, I only ever categorize such songs as Less Than Regular (in the absence of other irregularities), rather than Irregular. I will give just one such example. Whilst ‘To Ramona’26 is in ³¼ throughout, the hypermetre (and the pulse) vary. The hypermetric analysis of this song, which is given below, shows alternating voice and guitar periods, rather than beats, as was the case in my analysis of ‘Hard rain’ above. The ‘5 (3)’ cell, which sounds twice at the beginning of the irst verse, is regular in the sense that the guitar completes an 8-bar period, but most of the other cells are irregular. In these pause-like bars between lines Dylan used a quiet and gentle form of the standard R & B 5–6–b7 accompanimental guitar riff, which now takes on a fascinating lingering quality. He used the same igure between the lines of ‘No more auction block’,27 ‘Blowin’ in the wind’,28 ‘Chimes of freedom’ and ‘My back pages’.29 0.00 0.02 0.40 0.52 1.35 2.18 3.00 3.42

I V1 I V2 V3 V4 V5 I

2 ? (fades in) 5 (3), 5 (3), 5 (5), 7 (1) 5 (3), 2 (2) 7 (3), 5 (3), 7 (3), 7 (4) 7 (3), 7 (2), 5 (3), 7 (5) 7 (3), 7 (3), 5 (3), 7 (3) 7 (3), 5 (3), 7 (3), 8 (1) 2 (slows to close)

The guitar’s gentle completion of periods strokes our ears (and the beloved one of the words) in the most musically comforting way. This comfort is sometimes extended when the seventh chord is left unresolved until the end of the following period. The ‘5 (3)’ hypermetric model is usually extended by motivic repetition across ‘7 (3)’ bars, which intensiies our sense of musical time: our sense of where the music is now and where it has come from. As if to balance this suspended time, each of these cells slows down towards its end – beautiful! Rhythm aside, Dylan sings the ends of many phrases with a fast, 3- or 5-note descending scale to the tonic. The most impressive of these is at the end of the third vocal group of the ifth verse: ‘Everything passes, every thing changes, just do what you think you should do’. Such quick descents at the ends of lines can also be heard on ‘Chimes of freedom’ and ‘Ballad in plain’ D’, which are also on Another Side,30 and to my knowledge on no other album. I now turn to more substantial and disturbing metric irregularities.

26 27 28 29 30

Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964). Gaslight Tapes (1962). The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963). Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964). Ibid.

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Regularly Irregular Metre In some of Dylan’s early songs irregular metric features remain constant across all verses. I deem such songs to be ‘Regularly Irregular’. Just one such change, if it occurs in every verse, is suficient for me to consider the rhythm of the song in this way. These songs are especially interesting as regards which came irst: a set of irregular lines, or an irregular musical structure. It is not necessarily the case that Dylan wrote several verses, and then itted the music around them. Rather, he might have introduced a rhythmic irregularity to match the irst verse of a song, and then written the words of further verses to it in with that irregular musical metre. I have already referred to three such songs: ‘Boots of Spanish leather’, ‘The times they are a’changin’’, and ‘A hard rain’s a-gonna fall’. They show what a strong intuitive sense of rhythm Dylan had, insofar as he could hold irregular rhythmic patterns across verses apparently effortlessly. The best examples I know of this, which are both, sadly, unavailable, are the two outstandingly beautiful versions of the English folksong, ‘Young but daily growing’ – one recorded at Bonnie Beecher’s Apartment in May 1961, and the other at the Carnegie Recital Hall in November of that year. In this latter performance, a 3 + 4 3 + 4, 4 + 2 + 4, 3 + 4 3 + 4 metric scheme remains constant throughout most of the six verses. The two versions of ‘Mamma you been on my mind’, one from the Another Side sessions of June 1964,31 and the other from his Witmark Publishers transcription sessions of the same year32, are hypermetrically asymmetrical in every verse, and Regularly Irregular at the metric level, because of the varying length ifth bar of every verse. The rhythmic waywardness of this song, which is enhanced by the voice loating freely around what is sometimes an exquisitely variable pulse, is fascinating. I take the metre almost entirely from the guitar’s chord changes. Consider the commercially available Bob Dylan Bootleg Series version:33 0.00 0.04 0.31 0.57 1.27 1.54 2.20 2.45

I V1 V2 V3 V4 harmonica V5 harmonica

1½ + 4 4 + 4 + 4, 7; 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 (4) 4 + 4 + 4, 5; 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 (4) 4 + 4 + 2 + 4, 8; 4 + 4 + 4 + 4 (4) 4 + 4 + 4, 9; 4 + 4 + 4 + 2 (4) 4 + 4 + 4, 4; 4 + 4 + 4 + 2 (4 + 4) 4 + 4 + 4, 7; 4 + 4 + 4 + 2 3+4

The irst 4-bar period is subdivided unusually into 3 + 1 bars, with each last 1-bar sub-period extended to between seven and nine beats. These variable length extensions do not function the same as pause-like bars because Dylan sings right 31 32 33

Bob Dylan Bootleg Series Vol. 2 (1991). Let My Poor Voice Be Heard (n.d.). Ibid.

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through them. In the irst verse the extension sets the words, ‘The crossroads I’m standing at’, whilst the exceptionally prolonged 9-beat fourth bar of the fourth verse, which has ten syllables, sets ‘I have no place I’m calling you to go’. The one exception to this rule is the harmonica solo, which, although also subdivided 3 + 1, has a regular 4-beat fourth bar. Dylan’s harmonica playing was generally more regular than his singing, probably because his vocal rhythms derived from those of the words. The second period of every verse is regular apart from the last – ‘As someone who has had you on his mind’, which slows down towards the end, and is then cut back by a harmonica play-out. Highly Irregular Songs The songs that I deem ‘Highly Irregular’ are those that have so many occasional, rather than systematic, irregularities as to be in constant metric turmoil. All the ‘talking blues’ that Dylan performed in the early years, principally ‘Talkin’ New York’,34 ‘Talkin’ Bear Mountain massacre blues’35 and ‘Talkin’ John Birch blues36’, are either Irregular or Highly Irregular. They are all in G major and follow the same pattern. Each verse begins with ¦¼ repetitions of a ixed G–C–D chord sequence before moving into more-or-less un-metred strummed G major chords. It seems to be a characteristic of these latter parts to include half bars. Given that Dylan soon dropped talking blues from his repertoire, I say no more about them. Just one commercially unavailable song, ‘Standing on the highway’, in the version that he sung for the radio programme, Folksinger’s Choice in January 34 There are at least four recorded performances of ‘Talkin’ New York’: (1) on his irst album, Bob Dylan (1961); (2) during his 1962 Gaslight Café show in New York (Bob Dylan Live at the Gaslight 1962, (2005), or Like Marlon Brando (n.d.), or The Gaslight Tapes (n.d)); (3) during his 1963, Gerdes Folk City show, also in New York (For Somebody By Somebody (n.d.); (4) and during his 1964 New York Town Hall show, New York Town Hall Concert (2008). 35 Dylan recorded ‘Talkin’ Bear Mountain massacre blues’ at least four times: 1) at the Gaslight Café in 1961 (Bob Dylan Live at the Gaslight 1962, (2005) or Like Marlon Brando (n.d.), or Gaslight Tapes (n.d); 2) during his concert at the Carnegie Recital Hall in 1961 (Talkin’ New York, n.d.); 3) during a transcription session for Leeds Music in 1962 (Let My Poor Voice Be Heard (n.d.); and 4) during the 1962 recording sessions for Freewheelin’ (Talkin’ Bear Mountain Massacre Picnic Blues (1972), and Bob Dylan Bootleg Series, vol. 1, (1991). 36 Dylan recorded ‘Talkin’ Bear Mountain massacre blues’ at least four times: 1) at the Gaslight Café in 1961 (Bob Dylan Live at the Gaslight 1962, (2005) or Like Marlon Brando (n.d.), or Gaslight Tapes (n.d)); 2) during his concert at the Carnegie Recital Hall in 1961 (Talkin’ New York, n.d.); 3) during a transcription session for Leeds Music in 1962 (Let My Poor Voice Be Heard (n.d.)); and 4) during the 1962 recording sessions for Freewheelin’ (Talkin’ Bear Mountain Massacre Picnic Blues (1972), and Bob Dylan Bootleg Series, vol. 1, (1991)).

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1962 is worth mentioning here.37 This song is uniquely ambiguous in the context of Dylan’s output. It has no change of metre, but once you have found the pulse in a riff, which seems to be constantly stumbling over itself, it is in either or both ³¼ or a slightly quicker ¦¼! The constant ambiguity is exceptionally dynamic. I now turn to four Highly Irregular songs: ‘Highway 51 blues’;38 ‘Tomorrow is a long time’ from his 1963 New York Town Hall Concert,39 which is the only commercially available song from that amazing evening;40 ‘Lay Down your weary tune’ (1963),41 and ‘Spanish Harlem incident’.42 ‘Highway 51 Blues’ All of Dylan’s riff-based blues are Highly Irregular, and ‘Highway 51 blues’ is not alone in being close to metric chaos, closer than any other popular song I have heard apart from Robert Johnson’s ‘Preaching blues’.43 This quality sounds intense despair and thoughts of imminent death. ‘Fixin’ to die’ on the same album is similar in all these respects. ‘Highway 51 blues’ is fast, highly ambitious and largely improvised, combining varying verse lengths, irregular accentuated blues riffs and impassioned vocals that crash all around the beat. Nonetheless there are signs of Dylan’s fantastic dialectic between rhythmic freedom and control, with each enabling the other. Thus, there are two regular rhythmic aspects that control this freedom: the preponderance of 4-beat bars; and the fact that the beginning of each of the three components of the 12-bar blues is almost always an undivided 8-beat bar. Because of the freedom of the voice and the metric ambiguity of the guitar, I concede that the metric representation below is somewhat provisional. When the guitar’s irregular accents break down all sense of metre, I hear downbeats arising from the voice. I have divided each line of the verse into three parts in order to clarify the underlying 12-bar blues structure. The sheer length of the guitar bars makes them seem like instrumental inserts rather than ‘pause-like’ bars. The underlined numbers indicate dropped half-beats: 0.00 0.15 0.51 1.36 2.14 37 38 39 40 41 42 43

G V1 V2 V3 V4

2, 4 + 4 + 3, 4 + 5, 4 + 3 7 + 4 (4 + 6) 8 + 4 (2 + 4) 8 + 2 (4 + 4 + 4 4 + 10) 8 + 4 (4 + 6) 8 + 1 (7 4 + 6) 8 + 1 (7 4 + 6) 9 + 4 (4 + 6) 8 + 4 (4 + 6)

Roar of a Wave (n.d.). Bob Dylan (1961). New York Town Hall Concert (1963). More Bob Dylan Greatest Hits (1971). Biograph (1985). Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964). See Ford (1998).

8 + 4 + 4 (3 + 4 + 4 + 10) 8 + 4 + 4 (4 + 4 + 6, 4 + 4 + 2 + 4) 8 + 7 (4 + 6 + 4) 8 + 6 + 4 (4 + 4)

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‘Tomorrow is a Long Time’ The irregularity of this song is caused not just by whole and fractional pauselike bars between both lines and verses, but also by metric shifts. Furthermore, the freedom of the voice, which is mainly ahead of the beat, and the rhythmic ambiguity of the inger-picked guitar lends an intimacy to this song in a concert that had so far been quite raucous. The last two verses are almost regular in their irregularity, and there is a preponderance of 4 + 6 = 10-beat units throughout. There is a slight break in the voice on the second syllable of ‘river’ in the third verse –‘there’s beauty in that silver singing river’; then, even more intense, the heartbreaking articulation of ‘love’ in the opening of the inal chorus – ‘Yes, and only if my own true love was waiting’: 0.00 0.16 0.39 1.05 1.27 1.52 2.21

intro v1 chorus v2 chorus verse 3 chorus

2 + 2 + 3, 5 + 2 + 5 4 + 6 4 + 4, 4 + 4 4 + 6 4 + 4 3 + 4, 4 + 6 4 + 4 + 8 4 + 6 4 + 4, 4 + 4 4 + 6 4 + 6 4 + 4, 4 + 4 4 + 4 + 2 (3 + 6) 4 + 6 4 + 6, 4 + 6 4 + 2 (6) 4 4 + 6 4 + 6, 4 + 6 4 + 4 + 4 (8 + 4)

‘Lay Down your Weary Tune’ Dylan said he borrowed this exceptionally high-proile melody44 from a Scottish song.45 The guitar accompaniment provides very little sense of metre beyond changes of chord, and so downbeats are usually articulated by the voice. Whilst I deem this song to be Highly Irregular, there is still some regularity. Much of the irregularity results from different length upbeats, which I don’t think I have heard in any other of Dylan’s songs. Moreover, various versions of the opening melody fall in different parts of the bar, which is one key to the unusual beauty of this tune. So, the chorus, ‘Lay down your |weary tune’, involves a 3-beat upbeat into ‘weary’; whereas the next phrase, ‘Lay down the song you| strum’ forms a 6-beat upbeat. Every 2-bar phrase takes off from the second beat of the bar, apart from the third phrase of the second, fourth and sixth choruses, which gives them an extra push at this point. In the last two choruses this push is given further momentum by the preceding cut back 2-beat bars. The odd bar at the end of all but two of the verses or choruses (excluding the last) forms an upbeat into the next verse. Whilst the ive verses are rhythmically the same, apart from the 6-beat irst bar of the second, the metre of the irst three periods of the ive choruses are never the same. 44 I have registered all those songs with a high-proile melody in the ‘songs’ table in the ‘songs tables on my website (see n. 7 above). 45 Crowe (1985), p. 47.

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One reason why the ends of verses are so satisfying is because they resolve the metric differences of the irst three periods: 0.00 0.30 0.57 1.25 1.54 2.22 2.47 3.13 3.41 4.06

ch v1 ch v2 ch v3 ch v4 v5 ch

3|6 + 4 6 + 4 8 + 4 4 + 4 + 2 (4 + 4) 4 + 4 6 + 4 8 + 4 4 + 4 + 4 (3) 6 + 4 6 + 4 6 + 4 4 + 4 + 4 (4) 6 + 4 6 + 4 8 + 4 4 + 4 + 4 (4) 6 + 4 6 + 4 8 + 4 4 + 4 + 4 (4) 4+46+48+44+4+6 6 + 4 6 + 2 6 + 4 4 + 4 + 4 (4) 4 + 4 6 + 4 8 + 4 4 + 4 + 4 (4) 4+46+48+44+4+6 4+46+26+44+4+4

‘Spanish Harlem Incident’ This, the third song on Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964), is ambiguous. If I take the metre purely from the voice I hear a highly irregular pattern with many 5-beat bars. However, if I privilege 4-beat bars, and divide my metric attention between the voice and guitar, I hear just ten 6-beat bars across the three verses: 0.00 0.06 0.43 0.54 1.31 1.39

I V1 I V2 I V3

4+4+4 4 + 4 4 + 4 4 + 4 4 + 4, 6 + 4 + 4 + 4, 6 + 4 + 4 (E) 4+44+44+6 4 + 4 4 + 4, 4 + 4 4 + 4, 4 + 4 + 6 + 4 6 + 4 + 4 (E) 4+44+6 4 + 4 4 + 4 4 + 4 6 + 4, 4 + 4 + 6 + 4, 6 + 6 + 4 + 4 (4)

The sense of quite a high level of rhythmic irregularity is not so much a metric phenomenon as a function of changing grouping patterns across the bar, of the way in which Dylan’s vocal groups falls around beats, and his sometimes ‘unnatural’ speech rhythms. Note especially ‘temperature’ in verse 1, and the extended upbeat for ‘you got me swallowed’ in verse 2, and the ambiguity of the third line, ‘I have fallen far beneath’. Then again in the third line, ‘The night is pitch black come and make my pale face it into place ah please’, there must be a 6-beat bar somewhere, but in which of the four bars it falls is ambiguous. Finally, in the third verse, the second line ‘on the cliffs of your wildcat charms’ comes in early with a half-bar upbeat. Songs with a Variable Pulse There are a few songs from this period of Dylan’s output that have a highly variable pulse:

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175

‘Freight train blues’46 (Bob Dylan, 1963) ‘I was young when I left home’47 ‘Who killed Davey Moore?’48 ‘Only a pawn in their game’49 ‘The lonesome death of Hattie Carroll’50 ‘With God on our side’, ‘Only a pawn in their game’, ‘Restless farewell’51 ‘I shall be free (# 10)’, ‘To Ramona’, ‘Ballad in plain D’52

Whilst most of these songs have a mobile pulse, two have none: ‘Who killed Davey Moore’ and ‘Restless farewell’. The pulse of the latter is extremely slow, averaging for the verses 34.01 beats per minute, and slowing down to 32.2 beats per minute (bpm) in the last. There are no regular short notes such as quavers to use as a measure by which to estimate a pulse. Whilst I can sense a 4 + 4, 4 + 4; 4 + 4, 4 + 4-bar scheme, deviations from this scheme are too complex to be represented after the manner of the earlier analytic representations here. The pulse of ‘Ballad in plain D’ is only a touch variable, but nonetheless worth mentioning in this context. The song’s exceptional luidity sounds most obviously in the opening upbeat, which has no real sense of pulse or metre: ‘I |once loved a girl …’. There are similarly ill-deined upbeats into verses 4 and 9. I have always found the way that these upbeats spill over into the relative regularity of the irst bar, particularly magical. Furthermore, the song has an irregular and asymmetric hypermetre, which is caused by, often multiple, pause-like bars; and there are twelve metric irregularities. But it is the luctuations of pulse, together with Dylan’s tendency to swing his vocal articulation around the beat that gives this song such a luid temporality, despite its melodic simplicity. Fluctuations of both pulse and metre reach a climax, along with the drama of the story, in the irst half of verse 9, beginning ‘The tragic igure her sister did shout, leave her alone godamn you get out’. Bob Dylan’s Early Songs – Overall Rhythmic Proile The summary presented in Table 10.1 for this period of Dylan’s output is taken from the full tables on my website. I arrive at the percentages of irregularity by a simple process of reduction. First I conlate the Regular and Less than Regular categories and call all the songs so identiied as ‘regular’. Then I conlate all the 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Bob Dylan (1964). Recorded at Bonnie Beecher’s Apartment, 1961. Broadcast on Stud Terkels’s Wax Machine radio show, 1963. Newport Festival and the Carnegie Hall Concert, 1963. Carnegie Hall, 1963. The Times They Are a-Changin’ (1964). Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964).

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other categories – Regularly Irregular, Irregular and Highly Irregular – and call these ‘irregular’. Thus I can express the proportion of irregularity in any particular group of songs as percentages. Table 10.1

Proportional irregularities in Bob Dylan’s songs, 1968–1964

1958–1964 Concerts: 54% irregular Albums: 53% irregular Radio and TV shows: 46% irregular Transcriptions: 40% irregular Various: 39% irregular Home recordings: 32% irregular Total 43% irregular

Total

R

R-

RI

I

HI

127 47 41 47 46 102 410

24 10 24 20 16 48 142

35 12 2 8 12 21 90

6 4 2 1 4 2 19

25 12 6 14 6 9 72

37 9 7 4 8 22 87

The level of metric irregularity across these years is, according to my criteria, very high, and in this respect alone, completely unlike all other popular music that was around in the UK and USA at this time. Whilst there are no highly signiicant differences across various venues, Dylan’s albums and concerts stand apart, similarly, as the most irregular. Nonetheless, his concert performances of songs were often more regular than the versions collected on albums. For instance: the live performances of ‘The times they are a’changin’’ in 1963 and 1964 are more regular than the two studio versions of that time; the 1962 Carnegie Hall version of ‘Hard rain’ is more regular than that on The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (1963); ‘With God on our side’ on The Times They Are a-Changin’ (1964) is Highly Irregular, and far more irregular than the other seven versions I know. ‘It ain’t me babe’ on Another Side of Bob Dylan (1964) is Irregular whilst the ive other versions I know, which are all live, are either Regular or Less than Regular. It still surprises me that any popular music studio producer in the early 1960s should have tolerated such rhythmic behaviour. There is no sense of Dylan’s rhythmic sense having been compromised either by publishers’ stenographers in the transcription sessions (though the rhythms of his songs were ironed out in subsequent songbooks) or by record producers. It comes across quite clearly that Dylan was not letting anybody in the studio stand in his way.53 He remained his own rhythmically dissident, musical man in recording studios; and, given the enormous popularity of his records, this was clearly what his audiences wanted. This brings me back full circle to the opening of this chapter. Dylan’s irregular rhythms (combined with his extraordinary way with words, and his compelling delivery) gave his contemporary fans a completely new sense of musical time that suggested a psychologically fundamental and ‘authentic’ move away from the linear time of burgeoning mass culture. 53

Keith Negus (2010) underlines Dylan’s concerns to control studio production.

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References Crowe, Cameron (1985) Liner notes to Biograph (USA: CBS). Dylan, Bob (2004) Chronicles: Volume One (Simon and Schuster: New York). Ford, Charles (1998) ‘Robert Johnson’s Rhythms’, Popular Music, 17(1): 71–93. — (2007) ‘Martin Carthy’s Rhythms’, Popular Music History, 2(3): 285–307. Gillett, Charlie (1983[1970]) The Sound of the City (Souvenir: London). Hobsbawm, E. (1994) Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century 1914–1991 (Abacus: London). Lerdahl, Fred and Jackendoff, Ray (1981) ‘On the Theory of Grouping and Meter’, Musical Quarterly, LXVII(4): 479–506. Negus, Keith, (2008) Bob Dylan (Equinox: London). — (2010) ‘Bob Dylan’s phonographic imagination’, Popular Music, 29(2): 213–27. Discography Bob Dylan Commercially Available Albums Bob Dylan: Gaslight Tapes NMD Records (n.d). — Bob Dylan (CBS, 1961). — The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan (CBS, 1963). — Another Side of Bob Dylan (CBS, 1964). — The Times They Are a-Changin’ (CBS, 1964). — Bringing It All Back Home (CBS, 1965). — More Bob Dylan Greatest Hits (CBS, 1971). — Empire Burlesque (CBS, 1985). — Bootleg Series Vol. 6: Bob Dylan Live 1964 (CBS, 2004). — Bob Dylan Live at the Gaslight 1962 (CBS 2005). Bob Dylan Commercially Available Collections Bob Dylan: Biograph (3 CDs) (CBS, 1985). — Bob Dylan Bootleg Series Vol. 1 (CBS, 1991). — Bob Dylan Bootleg Series Vol. 2 (CBS, 1991). Bootleg Albums Bob Dylan: Talkin’ New York (Carnegie Chapter Hall concert, November 1961) (Scorpio, n.d.). — Like Marlon Brando (2 CDs) (Carnegie Recital Hall, November 1961; Bonnie Beecher’s Apartment, December 1961; ‘Carnegie Hall Hootenanny’, September 1962; Gaslight Café, October 1962; Carnegie Hall, October 1963) (Hollow Horn, n.d.).

178

Critical Musicological Relections

— Talkin’ Bear Mountain Massacre Blues (Bonnie Beecher’s Apartment, December 1961; Freewheelin’ outtakes, December 1962) (LP, TMOQ, 1971). — For Somebody By Somebody (2 CDs of club concerts: Gerdes Folk Club, April 1962; Finjan Folk Club, July 1962; Gaslight Café, October 1962) (Hollow Horn, n.d.). — Roar of a Wave, Hollow Horn (2 CDs of radio shows: ‘Saturday of folk music’ July 1961, ‘Folksong Festival’, October 1961, ‘Folksinger’s Choice’, January 1962, ‘Broadside Show’ May 1962, ‘Billy Faler show’, October 1962, Skip Wesner show’, February 1963, ‘Oscar Brand show’, March 1963, ‘Studs Terkel’s wax machine’, April 1963 ) (Hollow Horn, n.d.). — Find Out Why (2 CDs: selections from New York Town Hall concert, April 1963 and Carnegie Hall October 1963 concert) (Hollow Horn, n.d.). — New York Town Hall Concert April 1963 (2 CDs), Rattlesnake Records, 2008). — Unravelled Tales (2 CDs: complete Carnegie Hall Concert, October 1963) (Hollow Horn, 2008). — John Birch Society Blues (Bonnie Beecher’s Apartment, December 1961; Freewheelin’ outtakes; December 1962; Carnegie Recital Hall, October 1963; The Times they are a’Changin’ outtakes, October 1963; Another Side outtakes, June 1964) (LP, TMOQ Records, 1970). — Let my Poor Voice be Heard (2 CDs: Witmark publishers transcription sessions, July & November 1962, various dates 1963, January 1964; Leeds publishers transcription tapes, January 1962) (Hollow Horn, n.d.). Other Artists Joni Mitchell: Clouds (Reprise, 1969).

Chapter 11

How Genres are Born, Change, Die: Conventions, Communities and Diachronic Processes Franco Fabbri

New types of music emerge at unexpected points in time. The main objective of this chapter is to outline a theoretical and methodological framework for the diachronic processes that engender such developments, commenting on existing taxonomic explanations in an attempt to improve them.1

Naming Types Concepts of music types, and their associated names, exist (are employed) in many cultures; however, the existence of names for distinct music types does not necessarily imply the existence of a name for the ‘music type’ itself. In European languages, derivatives of ancient Greek and Latin words such as ‘γένος’, ‘τύπος’ and ‘stylus’ are used, often with the addition of nouns and adjectives (in English, ‘music’ and ‘musical’) to specify the context. If we add the German noun ‘Gattung’, we have a wide range of expressions used to denote music types in Western musicology and related disciplines. Some readers will know my preference for ‘genre’ (and its equivalent in my Italian mother tongue, ‘genere’), which I have explained elsewhere.2 As I contend, paramusical 3 aspects are quite often involved in discourses about music types; ‘genre’ is therefore a more appropriate term than ‘style’. This is why I apply ‘genre’ extensively throughout this article. However, most of my observations do apply 1 Though I have studied music genres in the past thirty years and have investigated related diachronic processes since the beginning of my study, I was moved to write again on the subject by Derek B. Scott’s excellent article ‘The Popular Music Revolution in the Nineteenth Century: A Third Type of Music Arises’ (2009). This happened just a few months before I was invited to contribute to the present volume. An intriguing combination of history and chance. 2 See Franco Fabbri (2007), pp. 49–62. 3 Following Philip Tagg’s usage, I prefer ‘paramusical’ to ‘extramusical’ or ‘nonmusical’: see Philip Tagg and Bob Clarida (2003), n. 161, p. 271.

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if other terms (such as ‘style’ or ‘type’) are used instead, though I am convinced that what I’m going to say will make my choice of ‘genre’ stronger (with obvious exceptions: that is, when strictly stylistic matters are addressed, or when a neutral term such as ‘type’ is preferable4). It is a matter of fact that musical genres exist in many cultures. Nineteenthcentury positivist musicologists even treated them (or what was then conceived as genres) as living entities. Such biological metaphors – implying concepts of birth, infancy, growth, maturity, death – were soon abandoned, in the wake of the hegemony of formalist musicology, and its devaluation of any concept related to function, context, community. Genres, however, continued to survive and are still lourishing: their existence today found in the domains of culture, of common sense, that is, in the semiosphere, in the discourses and practices of musicians, critics, fans, concert promoters, record industry executives, sales people, web designers, and so on. One of the main challenges for scholars is to relate such existences to an understanding of the meaning and working of music taxonomies: ethnographies are useful, but without theory they are blind.5 As cultural units (and not metaphysical categories), genres are rooted in history: which would imply that for each genre that comes to our mind there must have been a time when it didn’t yet exist. This might be an obvious observation, but one that does not seem to have troubled many of the scholars who have dealt with the subject. On the contrary, I believe that no genre theory – be it a ‘strong’ theory or a simple description of how the concept is used in contemporary communities – can be valid if it doesn’t take genre formation and diachronic processes into consideration. According to several theoretical approaches, which, in my view, should be seen to overlap and/or complement (rather than contradict and oppose) each other, the ‘birth’ of a genre can be located in the establishment of conventions within a community, in the ‘semiotic act’ of naming, as well as in the acknowledgement of ‘family resemblances’, in the acceptance of prototypes. Such processes, however, do not take place in a void, but within a system or network of existing genres: this also implies that some or all of them can be activated, or catalysed, or polarized by existing genres, to which the new genre is opposed, or put on their side as a variant.

4

For example: is popular music a genre? According to colloquial usage and to some deinitions, yes, but when referring to it as a superordinate category, which includes many genres, one may prefer to call it a type of music. Also, in discourses where distinctions between genre and style are not relevant, type may be a useful synonym for both. 5 This is my basic critique of otherwise excellent works, such as Holt (2007). For a review, see Fabbri (2008).

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Rules or Black Boxes? I have to admit that, to date, my suggestion of a kind of ‘complementarity principle’ among theories (or between two main theoretical categories) is just a little more than wishful thinking. Proponents of general or music-speciic taxonomic theories, in fact, seem to be convinced that theories based on conventions (on the one side) and theories based on prototypes, family resemblances and schemata (on the other side) do actually oppose and exclude one another. There seems to be something in common between such diverse theories as George Lakoff’s (and other cognitive scientists’) theory6 on prototypes and ‘basic level recognition’, Pierre Bourdieu’s habitus (‘principles which generate and organize practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing conscious aiming at ends or an express mastery of the operations necessary in order to attain them’7), and Daniel Levitin’s neo-Kantian ‘schemas’ (or schemata):8 they all strongly oppose rules and property-based deinitions (to the point, in Levitin’s case, of ridiculing them9), and are in favour of explanations based ultimately on neural phenomena, on the formation of cognitive and behavioural habits hardwired in human bodies. In terms that those authors would probably not accept or have accepted, this means bringing such phenomena well below the domain of semiotics. At least in Bourdieu’s case, the dismissal of rules was part of an anti-structuralist stance (aimed especially at French structuralist anthropology, i.e. Lévi-Strauss);10 and in Levitin’s case, with his grotesque description of propertybased deinitions, I would claim a misunderstanding of semiotics’ basic principles (such as coding). In Lakoff’s case, moreover, a thorough commentary, as well as a revision of semiotic theories, has been provided by Umberto Eco in his Kant and the Platypus.11 In all cases, even in Eco’s theory of ‘cognitive types’, a kind of black box is invoked: all we seem to be allowed to know is that there is something functioning at the interface between perception and cognition, and that it inluences our behaviour. It is suggested that our neural system, with speciic associations of neurons ‘iring’, is at the physical base of such a black box. It is also implied that we ‘learn’ how to recognize and behave (Bourdieu is the one who worked more on this issue, though he admitted that it was a very complex matter), but it is unclear what learning processes are involved, and whether cognition plays any part in it. Most of these explanations (whose authors have been particularly keen in reproaching other theories for the same reason) tend to be ‘static’ in one way or another. It is clear that we are not born with a schema to recognize heavy metal (Levitin’s example), and that at some point we can form one, based on family 6 7 8 9 10 11

Lakoff (1987). Bourdieu (1992), p. 53. Levitin (2008). Ibid., pp. 142–3. See Jenkins (2002). Eco (1999).

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resemblances or prototypes. But how does it happen? Is it possible to improve our schemata so that we recognize heavy metal more promptly? Is it possible to forget them? And how was heavy metal irst recognized (as there must have been someone who had this experience before any other)? Moreover, does the expression ‘heavy metal’ exist only to allow a listener to recognize speciic pieces of music? What about guitarists who want to learn to play like one of the prototypical heavy metal guitarists: must they develop speciic schemata? Similar to or different from an average listener? What about the manager of a stadium where a heavy metal gig is planned: will their considerations about seat placement, security, and so on, be part of a distinctive schema? Or of a habitus? Or are such considerations in the domain of cognition, of ‘conscious aiming at ends’? How we recognize things is very important, as is how we make sense of such recognition. Unfortunately, albeit all the more interesting, concepts (cultural units) such as genre extend over both domains. Humans use genre – genre names, especially – to talk about music. For many, this is one or maybe the only way to verbalize their own experience of music. Some people are deinitely able to talk about a genre without even being able to recognize a piece of music that ‘belongs’ to it. Genres are also about beliefs and lies: as such, they can be an object of semiotic study. But can semiotics make sense of the diachronic aspects of genre? Isn’t a semiotic approach to genre (as a cultural unit, or ‘a semantic unit inserted into a system’12) ‘static’, as a number of scholars maintain?13 Often what emerges from such criticism is a distorted image of semiotic concepts: not distorted enough to make the destructive rhetoric clear even to those who are not familiar with the discipline, yet just right to accommodate common sense prejudices against a ield of study that hasn’t been fashionable in the past decades. Semiotic codes – according to that rhetoric – are like commandments, they are agreed upon deliberately by ixed communities and are there for good. Codes (or norms, or conventions) are binding, they are not negotiable, no conlicts about their meaning are possible. It is implied by such criticisms that semioticians (and their associates: linguists and language philosophers) don’t know how to handle collective processes: only sociologists know what a socially shared norm is and how it works. I would argue that this is not so. Yet, I do not imply by this that sociological approaches to genre are wrong.

Community and the Case of X I would like to now consider the concept of ‘community’. For linguists and semioticians, codes are accepted and shared by a community. This, however, does not imply that the competence of the code(s) is the same among different members of the community. Communities, moreover, may vary in scope and articulation: 12 13

Eco (1976), p. 67. See, for example, Santoro (2010), pp. 27–8.

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they can be formed by a small number of persons who know each other, as in the original meaning of the term (communitas), or be similar to those ‘imagined communities’ that Benedict Anderson identiied with nations: ‘Imagined’, he wrote, ‘because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion.’14 Communities, as sets of human beings, may be the union of smaller communities, or be formed by individuals who also belong to other communities. In this way they may ind themselves at the intersection between two or more communities. If we think of the community accepting and sharing the norms that deine a genre, we’ll ind that it is probably formed by the union of various, more homogeneous communities, and that each individual is a member of other communities, accepting and sharing the norms of other genres. Let me give an example (which some will be familiar with): X used to belong to the community ‘of’15 avant rock as a performer and record producer. Now he is a music scholar, and in this capacity he is also involved in the community of the singer–songwriter genre, in different languages; he considers himself a competent listener to contemporary jazz, and knows how to behave at jazz concerts; the same can be said about his belonging to the communities of experimental music (including so-called minimalism) and contemporary concert music and music theatre, and so on. By accepting and sharing the codes of aforementioned genres, he is probably inluenced by belonging to multiple communities (though he will not applaud between movements in a concert hall, attempting to recognize the hidden standard at a jazz gig). To a lesser degree, in speciic contexts, it may happen that the position of X at the intersection of various communities will in turn inluence them. X also speaks a number of European languages (with varying competences: he belongs to the community of people speaking and – hopefully – writing decent English, which is not an explanation for why his French is poorer), likes to travel, to swim, to trek, to walk with snowshoes on; he goes to the cinema, listens to the radio, manages his own website, and does not have a Facebook proile (so he also belongs to the communities of all people sharing such interests, activities, preferences). Is X then such a strange person? Are there not many people like him (male or female or gay/lesbian, reggae, britpop or gypsy wedding music fans, football supporters or religious fundamentalists, Twitter addicts) who belong to more than one community, and still basically accept and share the norms of each of them? How can the fact that a code is accepted by a community imply that norms are ixed and not negotiable? Isn’t there a slightly outdated idea of community behind such an implication? Instead, I would suggest that a social structure made with luid, overlapping communities be part of the explanation of diachronic processes in genres. In a

14

Anderson (2000), p. 6. For the sake of brevity, I will imply that this ‘of’ stands for ‘which accepts and shares the norms of the genre known as’. 15

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schematic, maybe rudimentary way, I made the same suggestion some time ago in 1981:16 […] it seems plausible that the opposition existing between competence and analytical competence,17 among various components of the musical community, can be traced to the individual function of these components, which result from a non-ideological point of view.18 The main consequence of this difference is the possibility of an aberrant decoding, that is, the usage of codes different from those of the emitter. Rather than a scientiic misadventure, this seems to be among the main causes of historical movement and of the richness of musical life. Let us suppose that a new musical event is brought to the public attention. One part of the musical community, let’s say the critics, can, thanks to their analytical competence of codes, consider it an admissible variant of an already known genre. But another part, let’s say the audience, can consider a particular combination of rules to which the event conforms, so unusual as to be signiicantly against the already established ideology, so that the creation of a new genre is considered necessary. […] If we extend these examples to all possible relationships within a musical community, we see that the life of genres has little or nothing in common with a Teutonic respect for rules and regulations; but, rather, it is nourished by relationships between various rules, by transgressions against them, and above all by ambiguities.19

Convention Another advantage of semio-linguistic approaches to genre, opening new, interesting perspectives to the otherwise ‘mysterious’ act of initial codiication, is pointed out by the philosophical study of convention made by David K. Lewis (1941–2001) in 1969. Aimed at a rigorous deinition of one of the fundamental processes that make language possible, the study is based on a class of games (coordination games) that were overlooked by game theorists at the time. With examples of growing complexity, Lewis shows how conventions can be established without ever stipulating them explicitly. Therefore, the conventional nature of 16 The following quotation is from the paper I presented at the First International Conference on Popular Music Research, Amsterdam, 1981. The paper was written in Italian and translated by an English friend who wasn’t an expert in any of the involved disciplines. I have slightly edited the translation to include it here. All remaining mistakes and truisms are mine. 17 See Stefani (2007), pp. 19–34. 18 As explained in another section of the paper, ideology can be seen as a meta- or hyper-code, regulating the hierarchy among other codes. The concept is derived from Eco’s Theory of Semiotics (1976). 19 Fabbri (1982), p. 63.

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language, and of any code (or set of norms) established conventionally, doesn’t imply that at any point there be a clear agreement, or that the involved parties (or community) shall declare the acceptance of the convention(s). Of course, the existence of a convention can be recognized and even oficially acknowledged, but recognition happens when the convention is already in place, and is based on the actual functioning of the convention itself. There is no black box, though. Here is the irst rough deinition of convention given by Lewis: A regularity R in the behavior of members of a population P when they are agents in a recurrent situation S is a convention if and only if, in any instance of S among members of P, (1) everyone conforms to R; (2) everyone expects everyone else to conform to R; (3) everyone prefers to conform to R on the condition that the others do, since S is a coordination problem and uniformity to R is a proper coordination equilibrium in S.20

Given the other, more reined deinitions in the book, Lewis himself warns against the risk of hiding ‘the concept beneath its reinements’.21 The rough deinition is enough for our purpose,22 especially if we complement it with a few extracts from the book’s ‘Foreword’, by Willard Van Orman Quine: When I was a child I pictured our language as settled and passed down by a board of syndics, seated in grave convention along a table in the style of Rembrandt. The picture remained for a while undisturbed by the question what language the syndics might have used in their deliberations, or by dread of vicious regress. I suppose this picture has been entertained by many, in uncritical childhood. Many mature thinkers, certainly, have called language conventional. Many have also in other connections been ready with appeals to agreements that were historically never enacted. […] We have before us a study, both lucid and imaginative, both amusing and meticulous, in which Lewis undertakes to render the notion of convention independent of any fact or iction of convening. […] in the course of the book the reader comes to appreciate convention, not analyticity, as a key concept in the philosophy of language.23

The inal comment, made by the quintessential analytic philosopher Van Orman Quine about one of his pupils, is meaningful. But are we allowed to extrapolate Lewis’s ideas from the philosophy of language to genre theory? Yes, without any 20

Lewis (2002), p. 42. Ibid. 22 I made a reference to Lewis’s deinition when my 1981 paper on genre theory was irst published in Italian: Fabbri (1996), n. 5, p. 16. 23 Willard Van Orman Quine, ‘Foreword’, in Lewis (2002), pp. xi–xii. 21

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doubt, I would say. In fact, Lewis does the opposite: he attaches to the philosophy of language a theory based on the observation of ordinary recurrent situations, such as: who should recall irst if a telephone call is unexpectedly cut off? Such coordination problems are essential in music practice. Although Lewis’s examples do not cover music activities, one of the earliest examples in the book could easily be translated into musical terms: An example from Hume’s Treatise of Human Nature: Suppose you and I are rowing a boat together. If we row in rhythm, the boat goes smoothly forward; otherwise the boat goes slowly and erratically, we waste effort, and we risk hitting things. We are always choosing whether to row faster or slower; it matters little to either of us at what rate we row, provided we row in rhythm. So each is constantly adjusting his rate to match the rate he expects the other to maintain.24

In a recurring music event, maximizing the pleasure of each of the participants, or ensuring everyone has the best understanding of what’s going on, or minimizing the amount of information that must be processed to obtain pleasure and understanding may be perceived as coordination problems; conforming to genre conventions, to use Lewis’s words, is ‘a proper coordination equilibrium’ in that recurring event. What is especially fascinating in Lewis’s theory is that it makes sense of the ‘subconscious’ aspects of categorization and behaviour (see Bourdieu’s ‘practices and representations that can be objectively adapted to their outcomes without presupposing conscious aiming at ends’), but without making use of black boxes. Or, instead, looking into them. In order to make a comparison let us return to some other theories. According to prototype-based theories, genres are deined by resemblance; in my opinion, it may well be that crucial resemblances are established by convention. Moreover, I would argue that although prototypes and family resemblances are fundamental in the recognition of stylistic features by individuals, what makes them meaningful in collective music practice is that they are conventionally formalized; that is, that a community socializes such recognition and takes full advantage of it. Of course an individual can learn a schema to distinguish ‘heavy metal’ as the genre where music resembles pieces by Led Zeppelin, the ‘quintessential heavy metal band’ (as Levitin maintains25). But, which piece(s)? And who developed that schema irst? And how is it transmitted to a whole community? And is that resemblance enough to deine all aspects of the genre? Levitin himself acknowledges that prototypes and family resemblances are not satisfactory explanations for the many nuances of music competence, though he doesn’t seem worried by the circularity of arguments such as ‘we say that something is heavy metal if it resembles heavy 24

Lewis (2002), p. 5. Levitin (2008), p. 142. By the way, what about the fact that Led Zeppelin were initially dubbed a ‘heavy rock’ band, and that ‘heavy metal’ later became a name for the genre, or maybe simply another genre? 25

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metal’. Looking for diachronicity on the basis of a theory that is exempliied by such statements can be a hopeless task. On the other hand, convention (as described by Lewis) is a process situated in time: there is a time before a convention takes place, and a time after; it is also possible to describe the process by which a convention ceases to exist (when, for example, it is recognized that a certain regularity in the behaviour of the population is not a coordination equilibrium anymore, and members of the population stop conforming to it). Looking for a theory that helps to explain how genres are born, we also need a theory that accounts for ‘dead’ genres.

Naming Genres Of all conventions that deine a musical genre – that is, of all regularities in the behaviour related to music events to which members of a community conform – naming conventions deserves special attention. In many historical cases I can think of, it seems that the naming of a genre is a kind of sanction, of ratiication that other conventions exist and have been acknowledged. In such cases practice anticipated naming: that is, a general acceptance of styles, social practices, functions, etc., under a speciic name, followed years, decades, maybe even centuries of similar music activities, as with fado, lamenco, tango, the blues, jazz, rembetika, up to rock ‘n’ roll. Often, music historians wonder if a certain genre existed before any reference to its name could be found: I would suggest that in many cases some of the most relevant conventions deining a genre tend to operate before a name for the genre is agreed upon, but that the ‘act’ of naming makes other conventions more ‘visible’ and helps to create new ones. Though apparently pointing in the opposite direction, the way ilm historian Rick Altman describes the early development of cinema could also be interpreted in the light of the above-mentioned theoretical scheme:26 During the last years of the nineteenth century and the irst of the twentieth, it simply cannot be said that there was such a thing as ‘cinema’, clearly separate from other phenomena. On the contrary, what we now retrospectively think of as cinema was at the time recognized as several quite different phenomena, each overlapping with an already existing medium. This multiple identity is made manifest by contemporary terminology, which applied to moving picture projection such shared terms as ‘views’, ‘pictures’, ‘electric theater’, ‘living photographs’, and ‘advanced pictorial vaudeville’, each self-evidently identifying the new technology with an already existing medium.27

26 27

In this context, we could think of cinema as an entertainment genre. Altman (2004), p. 19.

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In the case of cinema, names based on existing media polarized practices around each of a number of established conventions prevented the main common element (moving picture projection, i.e. ‘cinematography’) to emerge both as a name and as the activity around which new conventions could be formed. From this example we may concede that rather than identifying previously unnamed practices (and conventions), a new naming convention can, so to speak, rearrange the whole ield, by deleting previous names. That is how ‘cinema’ worked (and, maybe, ‘jazz’). Names are crucial. However, while I would insist that a name may be a suficient condition to deine a genre (though a named genre that keeps together any kind of music events, without any kind of codiied regularity among them, is hard to imagine), it is not a necessary one. A genre with no name may exist: that is, a set of music events that conform to some conventions established within a community, while the community itself has not given it (and/or does not want to give it) a name at all; unless we decide that ‘music that does not belong to any genre’ is actually a genre name, such a genre exists (a few festivals celebrate it every year in some European countries28). And, of course, many genres with a name probably existed without one (for a short or long period), before getting one. A Deinition (and Further Suggestions) To sum up some of the issues discussed so far, and in order to investigate the diachronic processes by which genres are created, changed and deleted, we need to consider the deinition of a musical genre as ‘a set of music events regulated by conventions accepted by a community’. This is a compact form of a deinition that has circulated for thirty years,29 which beneits from the reinements I suggested above, namely that, irst, ‘convention’ must be intended within the framework of David K. Lewis’s study, second, prototypical effects and family resemblances can be intended as socially acknowledged by convention, so they do not need to be referred to speciically, third, norms or rules can also be omitted in the deinition, because although laws and regulations act as regulatory principles and may help in deining genres, they perform such a function within or among genres only if they are made relevant by convention (for example, a juridical norm can exist on paper, while being ignored by a community), and, fourth, ‘community’, in the strictest sense, is the ‘population’ where a convention is established. Usually, the community accepting genre conventions is the union or stratiication of many diverse communities. Can such a short deinition be of any use for the study of music(s)? Can it shed some light on the work of scholars? We will now see.

28 29

I am thinking of the Angelica festival in Bologna, for example. It was irst formulated in Fabbri (1981), p. 45.

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What does it mean for a music historian to study the birth of a genre? It means, irst, to examine any kind of document (manuscripts, scores, newspapers and magazines, letters, marketing material, recordings if available, etc.), with the help – when possible – of direct witnesses, for the earliest traces of the genre’s name; second, to investigate, similarly, the genre’s community, and evaluate recurring behaviours, norms, codes and prototypes (within the framework of other existing genres, so evaluating oppositional functions); and, third, to confront the chronologies of naming and other conventions, and to formulate hypotheses on a possible pre-history of the genre. Of course, this is what historians usually do. But there is a strong tradition in musicology that favours notated music above all other sources (not just because scores are more easily found30), and, in the end, what scholars often come up with is an evolutionary description of styles, rather than a history of genres. There is much to learn from the methods of the École des Annales, as suggested by Rick Altman in his study of silent ilm sound: Just as the French ‘new’ historians of the Annales school found the texture of history in the daily fabric of common lives, rather than in the exceptional existence of the ruling class, so I ind the most important lessons in the most common uses of sound located in the most banal practices. Who plays the piano? Where is it located? Is it used just for the ilm or for other parts of the program as well? And what kind of music is selected?31

The ‘daily fabric of common lives’ is made with conventions, and, as Altman suggests when discussing methodology, it is essential that historians look at past practices as they were, without being inluenced by their subsequent evolution.32 Musical historical investigation, I would add, requires a continuously shifting perspective, an uninterrupted comparison among conventionally accepted practices before and after a genre is born. Investigating the present, which is what music sociologists, music anthropologists, cultural scholars do, demands a similar approach. In order to be more than snapshots of passing instants, demographic studies and ethnographies must give historical sense to their speciic context and circumstances, in particular to their time and place. And this means, at least, to provide links, hooks to the past and the future, and to other places and cultures. There is a kind of study 30 An example: scholars of the Italian language and popular music were informed by a record producer that the neologism cantautore was irst used in the summer of 1960, in the press material of the Italian subsidiary of RCA, to promote singer-songwriter Gianni Meccia; the word – according to interviews – was also included in the liner notes of one of Meccia’s singles. None of the documents was ever found. Just imagine how dificult it could be to ind similar documents for earlier genres. See Cartago (2005), pp. 317–28 and Tomatis (2009). 31 Altman (2004), p. 6. 32 Ibid., p. 17.

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of the present (whatever this is: I know that ‘present’ isn’t an easily deinable concept!) that I would like to see: a real-time monitoring of new genre names and new conventions. For many contemporary genres, this might be performed on the Internet: a chronological listing of the number of web pages containing a certain genre’s name (obtained from a search engine) is a very rough approximation to what I intend as a web-based research method, but software engineers could develop ways to trace new genre names before they become commonplace. New conventions are a tougher matter, of course, but a large enough team could successfully create the proper mesh to collect ‘early warnings’ for practices that seem to emerge as new. To some extent this is what already happens sometimes in scholars’ blogs and mailing lists, like those set up by the International Association for the Study of Popular Music (IASPM). However, a far quicker method needs to be found: when a scholar writes to a mailing list asking for more information on some new music practices, a new genre has existed long enough to make the request outdated.

Conclusions Perceiving genres as sets of music events regulated by conventions accepted by a community is not an obstacle to understanding diachronic processes, like those that can be metaphorically described as the birth, change or death of a genre. Rather, such a deinition can help by describing more accurately than others (or better than no deinition, anyway) diachronic processes, and, thereby, may suggest methods for music historians, sociologists, anthropologists and other scholars, be they interested in music(s) of the past, or in current music practices. Here ‘community’ and ‘convention’ are the key concepts: an interdisciplinary approach to their understanding is fundamental for the study of genre.

References Altman, Rick (2004) Silent Film Sound (New York: Columbia University Press). Anderson, Benedict (2000) Imagined Communities (London: Verso). Bourdieu, Pierre (1992) The Logic of Practice (Stanford: Stanford University Press). Cartago, Gabriella (2005) ‘Cantautore, canzone d’autore e le voci della popular music nella lessicograia non specializzata’, in Lingua letteraria, delle arti e degli artisti (Florence: Franco Cesati Editore), pp. 317–28. Eco, Umberto (1976) A Theory of Semiotics (Bloomington: Indiana University Press). — (1999) Kant and the Platypus (London: Secker & Warburg). Fabbri, Franco (1981) ‘I generi musicali: una questione da riaprire’, Musica/ Realtà, 4: 43–65.

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— (1982) ‘A Theory of Musical Genres: Two Applications’, in David Horn and Philip Tagg (eds), Popular Music Perspectives (Gothenburg and Exeter: IASPM), pp. 52–81. — (1996) Il suono in cui viviamo. Inventare, produrre e diffondere musica (Milan: Feltrinelli). — (2007) ‘Browsing Music Spaces: Categories and the Musical Mind’, in Allan Moore (ed.), Critical Essays in Popular Musicology (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 49–62. — (2008) ‘Genre in Popular Music, by Fabian Holt’, Popular Music, 27(3): 490–92. Holt, Fabian (2007) Genre in Popular Music (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Jenkins, Richard (2002) Pierre Bourdieu (London and New York: Routledge). Lakoff, George (1987) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things. What Categories Reveal about the Mind (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press). Levitin, Daniel (2008) This is Your Brain on Music (London: Atlantic Books). Lewis, David K. (2002) Convention, a Philosophical Study (Oxford: Blackwell). Santoro, Marco (2010) Effetto Tenco. Genealogia della canzone d’autore (Bologna: Il Mulino). Scott, Derek B. (2009) ‘The Popular Music Revolution in the Nineteenth Century: A Third Type of Music Arises’, in Vesa Kurkela and Lauri Väkevä (eds) De-Canonizing Music History (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Publishing), pp. 3–20. Stefani, Gino (2007) ‘A Theory of Musical Competence’ in Allan Moore (ed.), Critical essays in popular musicology (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 19–34. Tagg, Philip, and Clarida, Bob (2003) Ten Little Title Tunes. Towards a Musicology of the Mass Media (New York and Montreal: The Mass Media Music Scholars’ Press). Tomatis, Jacopo (2009) ‘Ideology, neologisms, neo-realistic aesthetics: Deinition of a musical genre. The case of Italian cantautori’, paper presented at the International Conference on Popular Music Studies, Liverpool, UK.

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Chapter 12

Anatomy of the Encounter: Intercultural Analysis as Relational Musicology Nicholas Cook

Whenever anyone speaks of a ‘system’, a ‘global feature’, a ‘structure’, a ‘society’, an ‘empire’, a ‘world economy’, an ‘organization’, the irst ANT [Actor-Network-Theory] relex should be to ask: ‘In which building? In which bureau? Through which corridor is it accessible? Which colleagues has it been read to? How has it been compiled?’1

A Relational Turn All encounters, musical or otherwise, are conditioned by socioeconomic context, by history, by ideology. This means that agency is like improvisation: it can never be totally free. But in recognizing the extent to which actions are conditioned by their larger contexts, writing about music has frequently slipped into construing the latter as impersonal forces and in this way reducing human agency to the playing out of a predeined destiny. Of course, nobody nowadays accepts the full-on Hegelian epistemology that underlies, for example, Schenker’s idea of the Urlinie realizing itself through the actions of composers, sometimes even without their conscious knowledge or contrary of their actual intentions. But today’s music theory might be characterized as kind of ‘Hegel Lite’: it construes music as a kind of technology that develops through its own logic, so that if the local decision-making of free agents is not eliminated, their role is at least marginalized. Nor does this apply only to music theory. Mark Slobin makes a similar point when, in ‘Micromusics of the West’, he argues that the global must be understood as a second-order outcome of local actions: as he puts it, citing Arjun Appadurai, ‘there is no overall sense to the system, no hidden agency which controls the low of culture’.2 And this argument translates to the domain of time through concepts of inluence understood as a process of the past conditioning the present, or the present conditioning the future: as Slobin says, the way to counteract this reifying approach is to see being inluenced as a choice, an exercise of agency,

1 2

Latour (2005), p. 183. Slobin (1992), p. 5.

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rather than just something that happens to you.3 The thrust of this argument is to move musical encounters, of whatever nature, to the centre of musicological explanation, emphasizing how they embody the speciic actions, judgements and choices of human agents, and how these are afforded but not determined by the speciic circumstances within which people act, judge and choose. Slobin links his focus on the local to the idea of a ‘relational’ approach to music, deining this in terms of ‘the musical interplay – the cultural counterpoint – between individual, community, small group, state and industry’.4 He extends this relational approach by coining the term ‘interculture’, which relects the extent to which cultures do not simply signify in their own right but are constructed and acquire meaning in terms of their relationship to other cultures. It is the relational dimension of cultural identity that explains such apparently paradoxical phenomena as Peter Sculthorpe’s creation of a distinctively Australian music through imitating Balinese and Japanese models in his Sun Music compositions from the 1960s: while on the one hand this might be seen as part of the cultural reconstruction of Australia as an integral part of the Paciic Rim region rather than an anomalously displaced part of Europe, it also represented a negation of the British or more broadly European identity that had up to then underpinned Australian musical culture (and in which Sculthorpe had participated as a student at Oxford). The point can be expressed as the syllogism X ≠ Y, X ≠ Z, hence Y = Z: European music (X) stands in opposition to Balinese and Japanese music (Y), and hence Balinese and Japanese music are available to signify an Australian identity (Z) that equally stands in opposition to Europe. This logic of alterity is an example of the complex semiotics of cultural representation in music, and it is this semiotics that Ralph Locke is invoking when he speaks of the exotic features that a community perceives in a particular musical work being not ‘in’ the music, but rather ‘the product of a relational process between that community and the work’.5 And to the extent that semiotics is grounded in the insight that meanings arise not so much out of things as out of relationships between things, this sense of the term is also continuous with Dahlhaus’ characterization of a neglected dimension of musical analysis: ‘From material and functional differentiation’, he writes, ‘one must separate – if the neologism be permitted – a relational one which proceeds, not from any single element of the composition (harmony, rhythm, dynamics), but from the relationships between elements’.6 If cultural identities are constructed relationally, the same can be said of personal identities, and this gives rise to another – and probably the most common – sense in which music has been described as relational: it is relational because it has to do with human relationships. Slobin’s concept of the relational embraces this, and it is in this sense that the term has been used by such writers as Ingrid 3 4 5 6

Ibid., pp. 65–6, citing the art historian Michael Baxandall. Ibid., p. 4. Locke (2009), p. 11. Dahlhaus (1983), p. 45.

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Monson (who approaches jazz improvisation in terms of ‘an interactive, relational theory of music and meaning’7), David McDonald and, most recently, Georgina Born. Both McDonald and Born speciically refer to ‘relational musicology’. McDonald is concerned with the way Palestinian hip-hop artists construct an identity that is neither Arab nor Jewish but a performative construct embodying elements of both (as he puts it, ‘entrenched political binaries may be refashioned into unique moments of collaboration and relational listening’), and he claims that in this context ‘a move towards a “relational musicology” is important’.8 Born adopts the term in order to advocate ‘a fully relational and relexive, social and material conception of all musics’, in other words a musicology that ‘addresses different orders of the social in music and their complex interrelations’.9 For her this entails a reconiguration of the disciplines around music: ‘the development of a relational musicology depends upon a break with dominant conceptions not only of what counts as music to be studied, but also how it should be studied, with these principles applying as much to scholarship in ethnomusicology and in jazz and popular music studies as to that in musicology’.10 Deployed in this sense, the term ‘relational musicology’ carries useful resonances that extend beyond musicology and sociology. Jane Edwards’s claim that music therapy works within ‘a relational frame’,11 for example, draws on the conception of the caring professions, such as nursing, as relational practices predicated on intersubjective dialogue. But perhaps more unexpected is the intersection with Nicolas Bourriaud’s ‘relational aesthetics’,12 the key insight of which is that art need not necessarily be addressed to the individual subject but may rather aim to create relationships between its spectators. As in the case of the visual arts, academic studies of music – particularly those that involve close reading or listening – have long been dominated by the aesthetic perspective of the individual subject, relecting the bias of Romantic and modernist aesthetic traditions, and as a result the key role that music plays in the mobilizing of social relationships has been either neglected or (as in the case of music therapy) relegated to an instrumental rather than an aesthetic signiicance. As Alfred Schutz argued in his seminal essay ‘Making music together’,13 the real-time negotiation of just-so parametrical values – Schutz’s focus was on time, but his point applies equally to pitch, dynamic balance and timbre – that goes on between musical performers, and that is replicated less tangibly among all participants in a musical event, is an enacting of intersubjectivity and social relationship in which each is dependent on the other, and in which there may be no absolutes speciiable outside the context 7 8 9 10 11 12 13

Monson (1996), p. 186. MacDonald (2009), p. 120. Born (2010), pp. 242, 235. Ibid., p. 230. Edwards (2011), p. 99. Bourriaud (2002). Schutz (1964).

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of performance interaction: it is in this sense that the performance even of ixed texts can be understood as an act of collective improvisation. Seen this way, music becomes not just a metaphor but a metonym of social interaction.

Analytical Encounters The idea of a relational musicology, then, is gaining momentum as a means of addressing key personal, social and cultural work that is accomplished by music in today’s world: this is helping to counteract some of the blind spots of a traditional musicology oriented more or less exclusively towards the aesthetics of subjectivity, and towards musical products rather than processes of meaning production. There is, however, a further element in the mix that I wish to develop in this chapter, and I shall do so through focussing on the intercultural encounter and its implications for musicology. Regula Qureshi, whose research has centred on the ‘art’ musics of India and Pakistan, writes that ‘emergent strategies are moving away from essentializing towards a relational scholarship by calling for dialogue, […] for acknowledging the situatedness of one’s own as well as the other’s musicology’.14 A few pages later she enlarges on this: in her experience, Qureshi says, engagement with other musicologies – other ways of thinking about music – is ‘inevitably a process of recognizing how foundational premises constrain one’s scholarship and, eventually, how scholars, as “theorizing subjects”, are themselves constituted by such premises’.15 Another way of expressing this is that the attempts at intercultural sense-making that Qureshi is describing are themselves situated encounters, in which the attempt is made to reach out across cultural divisions and negotiate a shared understanding. To appreciate what is at issue here, we need to set it into context. In a keynote address at the iftieth anniversary meeting of the Japanese Musicological Society, which took place at Shizuoka in 2002, I argued that Western philosophers and psychologists of music have claimed to set out general principles that should be applicable across cultures, but in reality have made highly culture-speciic assumptions about what kind of a thing music is, including the assumption that it is a ‘thing’ at all: I cited Aaron Ridley’s demonstration of the extent to which established music philosophy works to an agenda set by the Romantic and modernist traditions of instrumental music, and the cultural insensitivity of some cross-cultural studies by psychologists.16 To borrow Qureshi’s terms, such work is constrained by foundational premises that at the same time are highly culturespeciic and go unrecognized. The same argument has sometimes been made of ethnomusicology: Lawrence Witzleben claims that there remains a widespread assumption that ‘truly meaningful commentary in music […] can only be provided 14 15 16

Qureshi (1999), p. 317. Ibid., p. 323. Ridley (2004); Kessler et al. (1984).

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by the scholar conversant with the current concerns and terminology of intellectual discourse in Western society’. The result, he says, is that ‘for many scholars in Asia and elsewhere, ethnomusicology is still widely perceived as ethnocentric and predominantly oriented towards the study of “others’” music by Western scholars’.17 This has the paradoxical consequence that in Japan, where the study of traditional Japanese music is classed as ‘ethnomusicology’, such study involves a double process of self-othering: irst you assimilate the ‘current concerns and terminology of intellectual discourse in Western society’, as Witzleben put it, and from that perspective you study the music of the other, which is in fact your own. (Of course, this exactly corresponds to the experience of Takemitsu, whose musical identity was originally resolutely Western, and who realized the compositional potential of traditional Japanese music only from the perspective of Cage’s aesthetics, thereby coming to it from the position of an outsider.) My argument at Shizuoka, however, was that stable distinctions between self and other, and consequently between musicology and ethnomusicology, are no longer plausible in a world where – as Slobin pointed out – the local and the global have become comprehensively enfolded within one another, and where multiple, overlapping identities have become the norm. I accordingly suggested that ‘a relational model of the discipline can encompass both what we are accustomed to call musicology and ethnomusicology – which stands to reason, since musicologies of every stripe are concerned with the relationship between self and other, whether the disjunction to be bridged is in the geographical, social, or historical domain’.18 In this chapter I return to these issues, developing the idea of an intercultural musicology based on situated encounters, exploring what this might mean in terms of analysis, and attempting to set it within the larger context of an emerging relational musicology. Perhaps the best place to start is by saying what a relational model of intercultural analysis is not. The non-relational model of intercultural analysis is to develop approaches that apply across different cultures because they are based on universally valid principles. Just putting it that way makes the problem clear. It seems too obvious to say that in culture (as opposed to, say, pharmacological medicine), there is no objective domain independent of local interpretation; yet, as I have said, the existence of such a domain is tacitly presupposed by music-related disciplines from aesthetics and experimental psychology to ethnomusicology. But perhaps the most extreme example is music theory. This is not because theorists have ignored music outside the Romantic and modernist instrumental tradition, but because of the way they have approached other musics. An obvious illustration is Jay Rahn’s 1983 book A Theory for All Music.19 This has its origins in the logical positivism espoused by Benjamin Boretz, who argued in his legendary doctoral thesis that talking about responses to music is just an obscurantist way of

17 18 19

Witzleben (1997), pp. 237, 221. Cook (2004), p. 21. Rahn (1983).

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talking about the ‘observables’ that underlie responses.20 So Boretz built his theory of music – what he called an ‘all-musical system’ – on minimal units of structure, what he called ‘qualia’, which, differently assembled, could give rise to any musical system from tonality to twelve-tone serialism and beyond. In essence Rahn simply developed this idea into the intercultural sphere.21 The problem with this approach, however, seems obvious. Observation is itself a form of response, and as such culturally located; it does not give access to pre-cultural qualities. In effect the entire approach is based on a musical ontology – a set of foundational premises – which is not just characteristically Western and twentieth-century, but characteristic of East Coast American academia in the decades after the Second World War. This is beginning to sound like standard ‘New’ musicological or ethnomusicological ideology critique, but I do not want to deny – as much socialconstructionst discourse has – that there can be such things as cross-cultural universals in music. By this I do not just mean the increasing evidence that music evolved as a means of managing social uncertainty, implying that there is a biological foundation to such phenomena as entrainment:22 I am talking about the more speciic kinds of musical features with which analysts are concerned. In performance, for example, gestalt-style principles involved in the construction of accent may very well apply across any and all cultures, as is the case of their visual analogues, but the manners in which accents are structured and the meanings that arise from them are highly culture-speciic. (This explains how, within as short a period as a century, the styles of Western ‘art’ music performance audible on early recordings have become largely unintelligible.) Another possible example is the morphologies of tension or affect created by the large-scale accelerandi that are equally characteristic of Rossini’s overtures and South-East Asian music, though again the manners in which such morphologies are discursively elaborated into emotional and other forms of musical representation may be highly culture-speciic. The point then is not to deny the existence of universal principles, but to emphasize their limited scope within the cultural sphere. To put it practically, we do not need to solve the problem of universals in order to carry out productive intercultural analysis. A good way to develop this point is in terms of the application of quasiSchenkerian linear reductions to non-Western music. The use of such reductions in an intercultural context has a history going back more than thirty years, a conspicuous early example being David Loeb’s 1976 study of variation technique in the Japanese koto composition Midare.23 But a more pertinent example in the present context, because of its methodological relexivity, is Jonathan Stock’s 1993 article ‘The Application of Schenkerian Analysis to Ethnomusicology: Problems and Possibilities’, which appeared in Music Analysis. Stock’s concern 20

Boretz (1995); previously serialized in Perspectives of New Music, 1969–74. I should add that Rahn (personal communication) does not accept this characterization, though he acknowledges that this is how most people have read his book. 22 See e.g. Cross (2006). 23 Loeb (1976). 21

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in this article was to argue for the usefulness of quasi-Schenkerian reductions (the ‘quasi’ relecting the fact that techniques of elaboration vary between cultures), while sidestepping the charges of cultural insensitivity, uncritical universalism, or covert neo-colonialism that he evidently anticipated from the ethnomusicological establishment. In trying to carve out this analytical space between a rock and a hard place, he focused on the relationship between such reduction and ‘folk’ theoretical traditions. In the case of Beijing opera, Stock says, there is a well elaborated ‘folk’ theory, in which certain occurrences of melodic materials are regarded as underlying others, but the former still embody presentational aspects that are not present in the latter: as Stock claims, ‘a more neutral melodic reduction prepared by the analyst’ can eliminate irrelevant incidentals and hence make the same point as the folk theory, only more clearly.24 In other cases, again involving varied presentations of given materials, there is no folk theory comparable to the analytical reduction, but the analysis captures what the musicians actually do and thus ‘presents eficiently and clearly a plausible cognitive skeleton upon which actual real-time performance events are founded’.25 Stock’s key claim, then, is that that ‘people can enact music consistently without necessarily being aware of the common structures which seem, to the analyst, to underpin these enactions’.26 While calling for psychological investigation of non-Western musics to place such ‘common structures’ on a irmer footing, Stock frankly admits that this implies some limited acceptance of universals: ‘Although the creation of musical structures may not universally involve the opposition of different pitch levels, with motion towards one perceived as inherently terminal or stable’, he says, ‘this does appear to be a feature of a great deal of music-making worldwide.’27 This suggests that there might be a case for adding the ideas of elaboration and even directed motion to the list of possibly universal features I mentioned on the previous page. One of my stated aims in the Shizuoka keynote was to provide ‘concrete illustrations of what a “relational” musicology might be’, and although I did not discuss Stock’s article on that occasion, I see it as an example of relational musicology in action. Stock does not, however, present it as such, and I would argue that it is the non-relational manner of its presentation that accounts for the element of discomfort that is evident throughout the article. A comparison with the analysis of performance helps make the point. There is an assumption inherent in much of the performance analysis literature, but made explicit in an article from 2003 by Bethany Lowe,28 that there is an element common to both compositional structure and its expression in performance. Lowe calls this the ‘interpretation’, the point being that both compositional analysis and performance embody 24 25 26 27 28

Stock (1993), p. 235. Ibid., p. 227. Ibid., pp. 232–3. Ibid., p. 236. Lowe (2003).

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interpretation, and so we end up with three distinct elements: the performance, the analysis and the interpretation, with the third element feeding into the irst and second. Lowe’s ‘interpretation’ corresponds to the ‘common structures’ of Stock’s analysis, the ‘neutral’ level that is represented by the melodic reduction (and of course, in juxtaposing the words ‘neutral’ and ‘level’, I intend the echo of Nattiez). But, in both performance and intercultural analysis, it is this third level – the ‘neutral’ level or ‘interpretation’ that supposedly exists independently of both compositional analysis and performance – that causes the problem. Gilbert Ryle would make an instant diagnosis: the problem arises from the mentalistic assumption that things can exist independently of their enaction, to repeat another of Stock’s terms. It is in the attempt to locate such disembodied ideas – in the belief that there is a domain of reality that they occupy – that the problems of universalism, neo-colonialism and the rest arise. The relational way to think about this would be to see the third level not as something that exists in its own right, but rather as a temporary construct brought into being – or maybe a better word is enacted – by virtue of the encounter between a Western analyst and a non-Western musical practice: in short, to see it not just as something enacted, but as a transaction between self and other. In essence Stock’s article is the narration of a series of productive efforts at intercultural sense-making: a hierarchical way of thinking, prominently represented within the contemporary Western ‘art’ tradition by Schenkerian analysis, intersects with certain aspects of non-Western traditions and so forms a kind of bridge between cultures. Of course the bridge metaphor, with its implication of two unproblematically separate domains, is too simple: Stock has himself studied at the Shanghai Conservatoire, and points out in his article that many performers of Chinese traditional music are also conservatory-trained and have experience of the Western tradition, in fact quite possibly of Schenkerian analysis (which has been practised at Shanghai for several decades29). Nevertheless, like a bridge, intercultural analytical methods facilitate exchange between cultures moulded by different histories, and again like a bridge, they are grounded in the domains they link. The central point I am making is one that Pandora Hopkins made about intercultural transcriptions back in 1966, when she described them as ‘a comparison of that which is unfamiliar to that which is familiar’.30 In other words, one does not simply hear music, one hears it from a speciic perspective that is deined by one’s situation and life history. Perhaps the clearest expression of this idea comes not from musicology at all, but from a composition: Maurico Kagel’s Die Stücke der Windrose für Salonorchester (1988–94), which is a depiction of different musical cultures. But they are not represented ‘in themselves’: they are rather 29

Cheong (1997, n. 4) traces Schenkerian analysis in China back to 1987, when Central Conservatory (Beijing) instituted a course in it. On a visit to Shanghai Conservatory in 1989, however, I pitched a lecture on the subject embarrassingly low: they had known about it for a long time. 30 Hopkins (1966), pp. 311–12.

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depicted from different, speciic vantage points, such as Cuba from Argentina, or Oceania from Mexico. (It is a further twist that all are depicted through the simulation of an early twentieth-century salon orchestra, the ‘light’ music genre invoking a rich tradition of exoticizing representation.) In an interview with Björn Heile, Kagel asked, ‘What is north, what is south? What is south for you, what is north for me, west for an Asian? It’s worthwhile considering these questions, because then one can expose the results of thinking in ixed categories’.31 Seen in these relational terms, the grasping of certain particularities of non-Western music through an approach based on Schenkerian reduction does not depend on the existence or non-existence of universals: the afinities between the respective cultures might be entirely contingent, all that matters is that they are there. Nor does this intercultural transaction entail the objective existence of Boretz-style ‘observables’. It is realized in the enaction of subjective understanding, and also in the intersubjective communication of such understanding that established analytical methods help to bring about. But what is at stake emerges more clearly from another example, dating as it happens from the same year as Stock’s article, where the performative dimension of the intercultural transaction is more complex. Joseph Lam’s ‘Analyses and Interpretations of Chinese Seven-string Zither Music: The Case of the Lament for Empress Chen’, which appeared in Ethnomusicology and which I discussed at Shizuoka, again adopts a graphing technique clearly indebted to Schenkerian analysis (though the word ‘Schenkerian’ nowhere appears in the article).32 But Lam’s intention is not simply to show that this approach can be productively applied to the music of the qin. His starting point is rather the existence of three different analytical and critical approaches that are current within the culture of the qin: what he calls ‘traditional’ analyses, written by qin players and intended for other ‘insiders’; ‘repertorial’ analyses, which seek to draw general conclusions from ‘traditional’ analyses; and ‘Western’ analyses adopting a range of structuralist techniques. These approaches, he argues, are incommensurable, because they are based on different aspects of the music. Yet, he continues, ‘diverse data about the same qin piece cannot be incompatible: the same object cannot generate incompatible information about itself’.33 His aim, then, is to ‘correlate’ the three analytical and critical approaches by ‘locating corresponding parameters employed by different analyses, and matching related information’. This he does by means of a reductive method that involves identifying structural notes and showing how they fall into a small number of recurring patterns: he sees these patterns as representing the basic gestures that underlie the music, and that each of the incommensurable analytical and critical approaches interprets in a different way. Several of the issues that arise from Stock’s article recur here. Just as Stock sees reductive analysis as saying the same as the ‘folk’ theory of the Beijing opera, only 31 32 33

Heile (2004), p. 60. Lam (1994). Ibid., p. 361.

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more precisely, so Lam suggests that the gestural analysis articulates something that programmatic interpreters of the ‘Lament for Empress Chen’ have struggled but failed to articulate in the ‘limited technical vocabulary’ of ‘traditional’ analysis.34 Again, Lam’s argument about objects generating incompatible information is reminiscent of Boretz’s argument about reponses to music, while his conclusion that the interpretive afinities between the three analytical and critical approaches are ‘shrouded by only surface differences of intellectual orientation, methodology, and terminology’35 could easily be read as carrying with it the implication that there is an underlying and perhaps more meaningful level of objective and hence culturally neutral observables, in the manner of Boretz’s all-musical system and Rahn’s theory for all music. But once more as in the case of Stock, these philosophically and ideologically uncomfortable issues arise out of a nonrelational manner of presentation that is in no way mandated by the substantive content of Lam’s article. To understand it as relational musicology – that is as an intercultural transaction – directs attention away from putative universals and their ideological use or misuse, and towards the performative effects of the analysis, of which I shall mention two. Both involve issues of institutionalization. The irst is that, just as in the case of jazz and rock, so in the music-theoretical climate of early twenty-irst-century America you can endow a non-Western repertory with prestige by demonstrating its amenability to quasi-Schenkerian analysis, and so to culturally resonant conceptions of ‘depth’: just as the musicological canon of rock emerged in the 1980s and 1990s, so a musicological canon of world music seems to be in formation today, or perhaps has already formed – and either way, qin music, with its timehallowed written tradition and scholarly associations, is one of its monuments. The second performative effect of the analysis involves the way in which it seeks to bridge East and West, an idea with obvious cultural and political consequences in terms of the ongoing realignment of the world’s political economy. Yet if this was over-simpliied in Stock’s case, it is all the more so in the case of a scholar who trained at Hong Kong, Tokyo and Harvard, and has forged an academic career on both sides of the Paciic. To the extent that the bridge metaphor remains adequate at all, trafic across it is here running freely in both directions. But as I have suggested, the whole idea of a binary encounter between self and other needs revising in a world in which (in the words of Witzleben, who combines positions in Hong Kong and Maryland), ‘Every researcher is an insider in some respects and an outsider in others’.36 This does not, however, invalidate the concept of intercultural transactions. It is just that the transactions take place at multiple levels and in increasingly complex, technologically mediated networks.

34 35 36

Ibid., p. 368. Ibid., p. 369. Witzleben (1997), p. 223.

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Anatomizing an Encounter So far I have focused on speciically analytical encounters, that is to say acts of intercultural sense-making involving on the one hand an analyst and on the other a musical piece or repertory. But the same approach can be applied to intercultural encounters that are not explicitly analytical, and I can illustrate this in terms of the Hindostannie air. This is a repertory of transcriptions into Western notation of the lighter genres of North Indian music as performed by professional entertainers in the Anglo-Indian circles of Lucknow and Calcutta during the inal decades of the eighteenth century.37 They frequently involved special transcription sessions, normally with a professional musician trained in Western music taking down what the Indian musicians played or sang and subsequently arranging it, generally for harpischord and voice. Warren Hastings, who was Governer-General of Bengal from 1773 to 1785, was a noted singer of Hindostannie airs, but more typically they were performed by Anglo-Indian women such as Sophia Plowden, whose illustrated manuscript of transcriptions is held in the Fitzwilliam Museum at Cambridge, UK. Such performances generally took place in domestic surroundings, but there is an account in one of Plowden’s letters of a masquerade that took place at Calcutta in 1783, at which everyone wore Indian dress and chewed betel: ‘The songs I sang were very pretty ones’, Plowden wrote, ‘and the Groupe were so admirably dress’d that many people insisted on our being really Indostanis. I recd an ininite number of ine compliments on my appearance, and after wearing my Mask for about 2 hours was glad to take it off and speak in my own language.’38 An obvious difference between the analytical encounters I have been describing and the encounters that gave rise to the Hindostannie air is that the latter involved interactions between the differently situated individuals who came together for the transcription sessions. They were in other words social as well as musical encounters. But they still involved analysis in the sense of attempted sense-making – the attempt to bring two quite different musical conceptions into line with one another. Transcriptions such as Plowden’s, or the more inished airs published at Calcutta in 1789 by William Bird, contain faint echoes of the drones and vocal roulades of the originals, but overall they display remarkably little in the way of recognizable Indian elements. They have in consequence been interpreted, for example by Gerry Farrell,39 as early exercises in orientalist appropriation, and from such a perspective it would be easy to interpret the racial and musical crossdressing of the 1783 Calcutta masquerade as a Saidian ‘staging’ of the orient. Such applications of postcolonial orthodoxy, however, tend to conlate two very different traditions within the Hindostannie air: on the one hand the notations produced 37 I am using ‘Anglo-Indian’ in the older sense of meaning the British living in India, not in the sense of ‘Eurasian’. The account of the Hindostannie air I offer here draws on Cook (2007). 38 Woodield (2001), p. 173. 39 Farrell (1997).

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in India by musicians such as Plowden and Bird, who had irst-hand experience of Indian music, and on the other, those published in London a decade or two later, generally by musicians who had no such irst-hand experience. The history of the latter is indeed one of increasing appropriation within the contemporary Western common-practice style of glee and part song, sometimes with only the title surviving as a trace of the music’s exotic origins. By contrast, what is remarkable about the irst-generation Hindostannie airs of Plowden or Bird is the extent to which common-practice norms are deformed by the impact of the Indian original: for instance harmonies, ornamentation and dynamic markings get out of kilter, losing coordination with melody and phrase structure. Basic principles of common-practice musicality, in other words, are sacriiced in the attempt to represent the other. It is easy to dismiss the resulting notations as simply incompetent, but more productive to see them as the traces of an only partially successful attempt at intercultural sense-making. It is the very deformation of the common-practice style that discloses these musicians’ willingness to transform their own identity in the attempt to embrace the cultural other, and to this extent the Hindostannie air might be seen as a paradigm case of inluence understood, to repeat what I said in the opening paragraph of this chapter, as an exercise of agency. Such an interpretation might situate the 1783 masquerade in a long tradition of attempted identiication with the other, of transgressive desire to ‘go native’, that paralleled and subverted more conventional expressions of the colonialist ideologies that had not yet congealed in the India of Warren Hastings, and of which a later conspicuous example was what Dennis Porter calls the ‘cultural transvestism’ of T.E. Lawrence.40 When I characterized the musical encounter in terms of the actions, judgements and choices of human agents, I added that these are ‘afforded but not determined by the speciic circumstances within which people act, judge, and choose’. The Hindostannie air furnishes an excellent opportunity to anatomize an intercultural encounter in terms of its speciically musical affordances, and the key to this lies in its most bafling aspect: the constant emphasis of those involved in the creation and performance of Hindostannie airs on their authenticity. Plowden’s claim about the participants at the masquerade insisting on ‘our being really Indostanis’ resonates with many comments about the music. When another of the AngloIndian women involved in the creation of Hindostanne airs, Margaret Fowke, sent some Hindostannie airs to her father, she wrote, ‘You may be assured they are exact’, and when she sent them to Sophia Plowden, the latter replied, ‘how you could note them down so correctly I cannot conceive’. Fowke also sent a book of Hindostannie airs to Warren Hastings, who replied, ‘I have had the Pleasure to hear them all played by a very able performer, and can attest that they are genuine Transcripts of the original music, of which I have a perfect Remembrance’; this assertion of authenticity becomes the more striking in view of Hastings’s statement in the same letter that ‘I have always protested against every Interpolation of 40

Porter (1993), p. 157.

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European Taste in the Recital of the Music of Hindostan’.41 It seems impossible to make sense of such claims when they are set against the surviving notations. And that was precisely the reaction of musicians back in London. In 1813 Charles Edward Horn, a singer and composer who pursued a career on both sides of the Atlantic but never went to India, published a collection of Hindostannie airs obviously based on Bird’s transcriptions, in the preface to which he commented that ‘Many of them have been communicated to me to me in a form so irregular, and confused, (interspersed, indeed, with passages utterly foreign to the key,) that I have suspected them to have been committed to paper by some unskilful hand, so as to have deviated from the native Melody.’42 As I see it, the solution to this conundrum lies in the nature of the representation by virtue of which the irst-generation Hindostannie airs stood for the original music. As Heile’s study of Kagel’s Die Stücke der Windrose makes abundantly clear, the phenomenon of intercultural representation is a highly complex one, and such representations are easily misunderstood when approached in terms of reproduction or imitation. Critics inluenced by postcolonial theory often emphasize the disjuncture between such representations and the empirical qualities of what is represented; Derek Scott, one of the irst musicologists to explore this area, writes that ‘Orientalist styles relate to themselves rather than to ethnic practices’, while Matthew Head makes the point more trenchantly: ‘attempts to relate musical Orientalism to techniques of non-Western music’, he writes, ‘are a relatively minor, and potentially misleading and obfuscating, line of enquiry within the broader context of studies of Orientalism’.43 Yet it can hardly be denied that there is an element of imitation, of the iconic, in such representation: that after all was the point of the cross-cultural transcription sessions through which the Hindostannie airs came into being. Indeed the element of iconicity will have been particularly salient in a situation where (as in late eighteenth-century Anglo-Indian circles) well-elaborated codes of musical representation had not yet developed. The all-purpose representation of the exotic through arabesques, augmented seconds and other stereotyped features is a phenomenon of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries rather than the eighteenth. The point, in short, is not to deny or belittle the element of iconicity, but to appreciate that an icon is still a sign, and as such functions as part of a larger and more complex semiotic economy. As in the case of Stock’s and Lam’s quasiSchenkerian representations of Chinese music, there were clearly certain common elements between the Indian originals and the common practice style to which the Anglo-Indian transcribers attempted to assimilate them: one might speak of an intersection set consisting perhaps of certain melodic turns of phrase, some more or less generalized contours, certain successions or transitions, some kind of textural nexus, and a degree of formal shaping. If one thinks of this in terms of 41 42 43

Woodield (2001), pp. 193, 171, 174. Horn (n.d.[1813]). Scott (1998), p. 320; Head (2000), p. 135.

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metaphor theory, with the Indian and common practice styles as the input spaces, then these shared attributes would have enabled a cross-domain mapping between them, giving rise to a blended space that combined the attributes of both. In this way, for the irst-generation Anglo-Indians, the Hindostannie airs would have mobilized and reconigured remembered experiences, quite possibly resulting in a sense of the authentically Indian that was actually more vivid, more palpable, than when they heard the real thing. But the musicians back in London had no such memories to be mobilized, and that is why they reacted with bewilderment. In short, the irst-generation Hindostannie airs represented the original not by virtue of straightforward, objectively veriiable similarity, not in Pierce’s terms by means of simple iconicity, but rather through much more complex processes of semiosis that demanded highly speciic cultural knowledge of the listener. In this way the notations of Plowden, Bird and other Anglo-Indian transcribers were, in a sense, analyses of what they heard, attempts to grasp the unfamiliar in relation to the familiar – though evidently also incorporating ‘irrelevant incidentals’ in the same way as the melodic presentations of Beijing opera that Stock sought to clarify through his ‘more neutral melodic reduction’. And as in the case of Stock’s reductions, such representation depends not, or at least not necessarily, on universal properties common to all music, but on contingent intersections between two essentially unrelated styles, purely relational conjunctions between one culture and another. To this extent, present-day techniques of intercultural analysis can throw light on the cross-cultural encounters of which the Hindostannie air notations are the mute traces. But light is thrown in the opposite direction too. The different ways in which the Hindostannie airs were experienced in Calcutta and in London highlight the complex nature of all musical representation, and this applies just as much to other forms of intercultural analysis. Like the Hindostannie airs, Stock’s and Lam’s reductive notations signify not through the simple embodiment of a given percentage of the ‘observables’ inherent in the respective musics, but through mobilizing experiences and so creating a bridge between one world and another. Because there is no third, objective level that exists independently of one culture or another – because all intercultural perceptions are bilateral – intercultural analysis is always situated, always a performative transaction, always replete with meaning. It is here that the kind of relational musicology I have been talking about comes closest to Qureshi’s ‘relational scholarship’. The willingness of the Anglo-Indian transcribers to rethink, or at least unthink, basic aspects of common-practice musicality evidences precisely the kind of openness to the other that Qureshi asks for – which is an equally desirable quality in any intercultural transaction, analytical or otherwise. Applied in a non-relational manner, institutionalized Western analytical techniques such as quasi-Schenkerian reduction can be a means of colonizing the other: the ethnomusicological orthodoxy that Stock was concerned to sidestep had a point. Understood in relational terms, however, as a vehicle for cross-cultural understanding, such techniques can (again in Qureshi’s words) ‘offer to those who are mutually “other” a domain of valued experience

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that they can share’.44 The difference lies not in the speciic techniques that stage the encounter, but in the epistemology that informs their use and the ends to which they are put.

References Boretz, Benjamin (1995) Meta-Variations, Studies in the Foundations of Musical Thought (Red Hook, NY: Open Space). Born, Georgina (2010) ‘For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinarity, Beyond the Practice Turn’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135: 205–43. Bourriaud, Nicolas (2002) Relational Aesthetics, trans. Simon Pleasance and Fronza Woods (Dijon: Les Presses de Reel). Cheong Wai-Ling (1997) ‘Theory Reception in China: Report on Journals of Central Conservatory and Shanghai Conservatory of Music’, Music Theory Online, 3(4). Cook, Nicholas (2004) ‘“One Size Fits All”? Musicology, Performance, and Globalization’, in Musicological Society of Japan, Musicology and Globalization: Proceedings of the International Congress in Shizuoka 2002 (Tokyo: Musicological Society of Japan), pp. 13–22. — (2007) ‘Encountering the Other, Redeining the Self: Hindostannie Airs, Haydn’s Folksong Settings, and the “Common Practice” Style’, in Martin Clayton and Bennett Zon (eds) Portrayal of the East: Music and the Oriental Imagination in the British Empire, 1780–1940 (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 13–37. Cross, Ian (2006) ‘Four Issues in the Study of Music in Evolution’, The World of Music, 48(3): 55–63. Dahlhaus, Carl (1983) Analysis and Value Judgment, trans. Siegmund Levarie (New York: Pendragon). Edwards, Jane (2011) ‘A Music and Health Perspective on Music’s Perceived “Goodness”’, Nordic Journal of Music Therapy 20: 90–101. Farrell, Gerry (1997) Indian Music and the West (Oxford: Clarendon Press). Head, Matthew (2000) Orientalism, Masquerade and Mozart’s Turkish Music (London: Royal Musical Association). Heile, Björn (2004) ‘Transcending Quotation: Cross-Cultural Musical Representation in Mauricio Kagel’s Die Stücke der Windrose für Salonorchester’, Music Analysis 23: 57–85. Hopkins, Pandora (1966) ‘The Purposes of Transcription’, Ethnomusicology, 10: 310–17. Horn, Charles Edward (n.d.[1813]) Indian Melodies Arranged for the Voice and Piano Forte as Songs, Duettos & Glees (London: J. Power). 44

Qureshi, ‘Other Musicologies’, p. 322.

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Kessler, Edward, Hansen, Christa and Shepard, Roger (1984) ‘Tonal Schemata in the Perception of Music in Bali and the West’, Music Perception, 2: 131–65. Lam, Joseph (1994) ‘Analyses and Interpretations of Chinese Seven-String Zither Music: The Case of the Lament for Empress Chen’, Ethnomusicology, 37: 353–85. Latour, Bruno (2005) Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-NetworkTheory (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Locke, Ralph (2009) Musical Exoticism: Images and Relections (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Loeb, David (1976) ‘An Analytic Study of Japanese Koto Music’, The Music Forum, 4: 355–93. Lowe, Bethany (2003) ‘On the Relationship between Analysis and Performance: The Mediatory Role of the Interpretation’, Indiana Theory Review, 24: 47–94. MacDonald, David (2009) ‘Carrying Words like Weapons: Hip-hop and the Poetics of Palestinian Identities in Israel’, Min-Ad: Israeli Studies in Musicology Online, 7(2): 116–30. Available at http://www.biu.ac.il/HU/mu/min-ad/ 8-9-II/07_McDonald_Carrying-Words.pdf. Monson, Ingrid (1996), Saying Something: Jazz Improvisation and Interaction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press). Porter, Dennis (1993) ‘Orientalism and its Problems’, in Patrick Williams and Laura Chrisman (eds) Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader (Harlow: Longman), pp. 150–61. Qureshi, Regula Burckhardt (1999) ‘Other Musicologies: Exploring Issues and Confronting Practice in India’, in Nicholas Cook and Mark Everist (eds) Rethinking Music (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 311–35. Rahn, Jay (1983) A Theory for All Music: Problems and Solutions in the Analysis of Non-Western Form (Toronto: University of Toronto Press). Ridley, Aaron (2004) The Philosophy of Music: Theme and Variations (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Schutz, Alfred (1964) ‘Making Music Together: A Study in Social Relationship’, in Arvid Brodersen (ed.) Alfred Schutz: Collected Papers II: Studies in Social Theory (The Hague: Nijhoff), pp. 159–78. Scott, Derek (1998) ‘Orientalism and Musical Style’, Musical Quarterly, 82: 309–35. Slobin, Mark (1992) ‘Micromusics of the West: A Comparative Approach’, Ethnomusicology, 36: 1–87. Stock, Jonathan (1993) ‘The Application of Schenkerian Analysis to Ethnomusicology: Problems and Possibilities’, Music Analysis, 12: 215–40. Witzleben, J. Lawrence (1997) ‘Whose Ethnomusicology? Western Ethnomusicology and the Study of Asian Music’, Ethnomusicology, 41: 220–42. Woodield, Ian (2001) Music of the Raj: A Social and Economic History of Music in Late Eighteenth-Century Anglo-Indian Society (New York: Oxford University Press).

Chapter 13

One Way of Feeling: Contextualizing a Hermeneutics of Spatialization1 Allan F. Moore

Introduction: Theoretical Background This chapter emanates from a recent UK Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC) project whose explicit aim was the development of a hermeneutic strategy for the consideration of spatial location in popular song recordings. The theoretic assumptions underlying this enterprise are addressed in detail elsewhere,2 but it will be necessary to summarize some of them here. Foremost among these considerations is the very nature of the exercise itself, whose dificulty is laid bare by Paul Ricoeur: ‘[in interpreting the text,] what has to be appropriated [understood] is nothing other than the power of disclosing a world that constitutes the reference of the text. In this way we are as far as possible from the Romanticist ideal of coinciding with a foreign psyche. If we may be said to coincide with anything, it is not the inner life of another ego, but the disclosure of a possible way of looking at things, which is the genuine referential power of the text[…] .’3 Two points are crucial here. The irst is that ‘the possible way of looking at things’ be subject to an activity, which is disclosure. Things are not self-evidently so, and the more explicit the process of disclosing, the better, since it is only a ‘possible’ way. The second is that this disclosure, in order to be communicable, needs to be based on explicit foundations. Both these points underlie what follows, even though I do not explicitly reiterate them. Arguments continue over the semiotically arbitrary nature of the signiication of harmony, and over the possibly less arbitrary nature of the signiication of rhythm. It does not seem likely, however, that it would be possible to erect an arbitrary signifying system for the meaning of spatial location – at least, there is no record 1 Research for this chapter was supported by an AHRC grant for the project ‘The Meanings of Spatialization in Popular Music Recordings’, run at the University of Surrey in 2008–09. I am exceedingly grateful to Patricia Schmidt and Ruth Dockwray, my coworkers on that project, for the sourcing and development of some of the ideas on which this chapter builds. 2 Allan F. Moore (2010), pp. 145–82; (2012), pp. 81–112. 3 Paul Ricoeur (1976), p. 92. While key to the wider project, I return only briely to Ricoeur in this essay.

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of such an attempt in the literature. Because spatial location is an element of our everyday experience, which inds its way directly into our experience of recorded music,4 it has seemed most appropriate to base a hermeneutic understanding on this observation. This has led to a consideration of the principles of ecological perception5 wherein a principal inding is that some features of the environment present themselves to us as already-interpreted: certainly this is the case with the distinction between objects to our right and left, near and far from us, high and low in relation to our reach. There is, of course, much more to ecological perception than this, and certain developments will be referred to below. There is also a point of contact with concepts drawn from the world of embodied cognition, particularly image schemata, which are frequently spatially-based.6 Other theoretical positions cognate with these play a part, and will be introduced as necessary. One important feature yet to be properly addressed in work coming from the AHRC project is the relationship between consideration of spatial location and consideration of the other domains through which music is addressed. The academic community’s general theoretic arsenal for the discussion of harmony, melody and rhythm, is internally coherent, and one aim of this article is to show how consideration of spatialization can be annexed to such a repertory. It does so through writing about parts of the irst album by The Feeling. The band’s name is, in one sense, purely incidental, but it also acts as a token of what I am actually trying to do here – to take account not only of how the music works, but to try to approach how, potentially, it feels.7 I do this principally through the twin theoretical substrates for the project, of ecological perception and embodied cognition. Embodied cognition has developed over the past thirty years or so into a powerful body of approaches that have the potential to revitalize debates within key ields as disparate as philosophy, cognition, linguistics and neurology (and in some cases have already done so). In this work, embodied meaning is prioritized over abstract, or conceptual meaning. Embodied meaning is not, however, uniform, even within thinking about music. Judith Becker describes three, interlinked, modes of consideration of embodied experience: ‘the body as a physical structure in which emotion and cognition happen […] the body as the site of irst-person, unique, inner life […] the body as involved with other bodies in the phenomenal 4

See, for example, Moylan (2007). As reformulated for music in Clarke (2005) and elsewhere. The ‘already-interpreted’ tends to identify items of speech, too. 6 Johnson (1987). Fuller discussions of the impact of Johnson’s work on musical hermeneutics can be found in Moore et al. (2010). 7 I draw attention to Antonio Damasio’s distinction: ‘I separate three stages of processing along a continuum: a state of emotion, which can be triggered and exectued nonconsciously [where “emotions automatically provide organisms with survival-oriented behaviors”]; a state of feeling, which can be represented nonconsciously; and a state of feeling made conscious, i.e. known to the organism having both emotion and feeling’ (Damasio 1999, pp. 37, 56). 5

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world, that is, as being-in-the-world.’8 In other recent work Naomi Cumming has developed David Lidov’s theory of gesture, arguing that ‘the music creates a bodily possibility that listeners may entertain, as freeing them from known limitations’;9 she opposes ‘feel’ to structure, following the work of Charles Keil. My approach, however, is not to seek such escapism (not to accept such a duality), but to observe the grounds of embodied meaning that pay heed to our limitations, another reason for the adoption of a broadly ecological approach. Work on embodiment in music is of course not new, but it is beyond my scope here to trace its origins. One of the clearest expressions of the embodied nature of understanding from within cognitive science comes from the philosopher Mark Johnson. Johnson effectively conlates the understandings offered by Becker in insisting that our most fundamental ways of knowing, and of acting in the world, cannot be understood without the recognition that they take place within the body: all abstract thought and language can only build on this recognition.10 According to Johnson, this embodied experience is processed, cognitively, in terms of schemata that have speciic inherent qualities. Ecological perception proceeds according to what at irst may appear to be very different principles. First developed in the 1950s by James J. Gibson,11 it has been utilized for the discussion of music most notably by Clarke12 and some of his former pupils.13 Although cognition plays a part in this ield, the main emphasis is on the perception of facets of our bodily environment, which lead to action without the need for the creation of mental representations – such action is thus considered direct. A reading of one of the more prominent apologists for embodied cognition, George Lakoff, would imply that these two ields are not entirely compatible.14 Lakoff’s argument focuses squarely on the work of Gibson. Subsequent developments in the ield of ecological psychology15 have markedly developed Gibson’s theory, while Clarke makes two important observations: that other writers have made criticisms similar to those of Lakoff; and that Gibson did indeed imply that ‘affordances are the product both of objective properties and the capacities and needs of the organism that encounters them’.16 In other words, affordances17 are not just present in the environment. This is the key 8

Becker (2004), p. 8. Cumming (2000), p. 193; Keil and Feld (1994); Lidov (2004). 10 Johnson (1987), p. 20. 11 Gibson (1966, 1979). 12 Clarke (2005). 13 For example, Windsor (2004), pp. 179–98. 14 Lakoff (1987), pp. 215, 216. 15 For example, Reed (1996). 16 Clarke (2005), p. 37. 17 This is a key term, which Gibson deines thus: ‘When the constant properties [i.e. the invariants] of constant objects are perceived (the shape, size, color, texture, composition, motion, animation and position relative to other objects), the observer can go on to detect their affordances. I have coined this word as a substitute for values, a term which carries 9

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criticism Lakoff makes of Gibson.18 Other workers within this tradition writing more recently, such as Gibbs, Kövecses and arguably Coulson,19 in their reliance on environmental affordances, posit no such contradiction. Indeed, focusing on a speciically musical notion, that of musical motion, suggests a good deal of complementarity between these positions. Both Clarke and Mark Johnson (co-author with Lakoff of the book20 that irst made principles of embodied cognition familiar to general readers in the humanities) have addressed this issue, and a detailed comparison of their perspectives21 demonstrates that their positions are congruent. While I undertake such a detailed comparison elsewhere,22 I summarize the position here. In brief, both Johnson and Clarke accept an environment that is at least partially already-interpreted. They both acknowledge ambiguity over ‘what’ is moving in music, describing a duality between observation of musical movement and the experience of self-motion through listening to music. They describe this sort of motion differently: ‘metaphorical’ (Johnson) and ‘virtual’ (Clarke), but agree on the process of making sense of it: for Johnson the process of making sense is not one of ‘experience irst, understanding second’, just as Clarke insists the process is not one of ‘perception irst, cognition second’.23 Johnson describes the relationship between the two terms as ‘woven’ and Clarke as ‘continuous’. I think the way to move between conceptual metaphor and ecological perception is perhaps to suggest that the ecological experience generates schematic structures (structures that Johnson would argue extend our perceptual experience), and that underlying what we may want to call the ‘truly’ perceptual is metaphorical abstraction, even if only primitive.24 If we accept that there is a general congruence between the position Johnson takes up and those of other theorists of embodied cognition to whom I shall refer, then on the basis of a comparison of understandings of musical motion, I contend that there is no less congruence between principles of cognitive science and ecological perception and, thus, that the hermeneutic perspective I adopt here is not tout court self-contradictory in utilizing variously the languages and indings of both. an old burden of philosophical meaning. I mean simply what things furnish, for good or ill’ (1966, p. 285). 18 There is a second, less substantial, which I omit here due to lack of space. I deal with it in Moore (2012). 19 Gibbs (2006), pp. 43–4,Kövecses (2005), p. 19, Coulson (2001), p. 121. 20 Lakoff and Johnson (1980). 21 As found in Johnson and Larson (2003), pp. 63–84, later reined in Mark Johnson (2007), and Clarke (2005), pp. 62–90. 22 Moore (2012), Chapter 8. 23 It seems to me that the differences of usage between perception and experience (and see Reed (1996)) and cognition and understanding, in these writings, are merely semantic. 24 I am very grateful to Patricia Schmidt for this particular characterization of the relationship, far more elegant than I was able to come up with.

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‘I Want You Now’ (and more theory) I begin now to focus on Twelve Stops and Home by The Feeling. There are inherently interesting things to say about the tracks on the album, but this is not a prime reason for my choosing it. More importantly, in demonstrating the relevance of any particular way of addressing music, there is always a danger of focusing only on extraordinary examples, which can so easily beg the case. I would argue that, in genre terms, Twelve Stops and Home is a comparatively ordinary (if successful) album, in a mainstream genre. It was released in 200625 and was reviewed variously as ‘bland’ and ‘retro’, while many fan postings drew attention (nonetheless) to its ‘hidden depths’.26 The album consists of thirteen tracks, most of which appear to be love songs of one sort or another, but with a number of moments, which are illuminated by the perspective I offer. While it opens with an annunciatory lourish on the kit, a more important function of this introduction27 is to begin the setting out of the virtual space within which the album will move. The kit is generally central in the soundbox.28 The opening cymbal extends the space of the drums upward – not only does it appear generally high in pitch, but its upper frequencies are emphasized. The tomtoms are in the centre of the soundbox, with the snare slightly lower and towards the right. The bass guitar enters at 3``, and is doubled by a beefy guitar further to the left, balancing the snare in the kit’s groove. Already, we encounter an element requiring explanation – that stereo balance between snare and guitar. Notwithstanding that it is a generic convention that positions the sound-sources in this way, why do we ind this? It is time to understand the schemata that I have already introduced by way of Mark Johnson. These are a common component of analysis within the psychology of perception, developing particularly from the work of Ulric Neisser29 and, in the concise formulation of Mike Rinck, they are ‘mental representations of the properties that concepts usually have’.30 Johnson’s key development is that of image schemata. He introduces a limited number of schemata of which a visual representation is inevitable: balance, containment, scale, path, and so on.31 He insists that ‘in order for us to have meaningful, connected experiences that we can comprehend and reason about, there must be a pattern and order to our actions, perceptions, and conceptions’. He argues that a schema ‘is a recurrent pattern, The Feeling: Twelve Stops and Home (2006). A representative selection can be found at http://www.metacritic.com/music/artists/ feeling/twelvestopsandhome, accessed August 2009. 27 The song is ‘I want you now’. 28 The ‘soundbox’ heuristically models the location of sound-sources within a fourdimensional space (laterality, prominence, register, time). It is explored, for example, in Moore and Dockwray (2009), pp. 63–85 and Dockwray and Moore (2010) pp. 181–97. 29 Johnson is also keen to acknowledge a debt to Kant here. 30 Rinck (2005), p. 337. 31 By convention, individual schemata appear capitalized in the literature. 25

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shape, and regularity in, or of, these ongoing ordering activities. These patterns emerge as meaningful structures for us chiely at the level of our bodily movements through space, our manipulation of objects, and our perceptual interactions. It is important to recognize the dynamic character of image schemata. I conceive of them as structures for organizing our experience and comprehension’.32 A moment’s relection will conirm some constant experiences: of the lateral balance of our bodies as we walk, look out of the window, or type; of the boundedness made possible by containers (kettles, rooms, computer housings, torsos) and the fact that our reach (whether of arms, legs, sight, hearing or understanding) encounters limits; of gradation as we climb, watch the CD counter, set the oven temperature, or turn the pages of this book; of successfully reaching home from work, via the pavement, the bus, and the train. Such extensions of these schemata (the ways they are realized in our experience) are all-embracing, and are limited only by our experience. But they are extended metaphorically, too, a key point of Johnson’s study. Johnson observes, for instance, that our experiencing of our balanced bodies generates our understanding of such things as balanced personalities, balanced views, balanced systems, balanced equations, the balance of power, the balance of justice, etc.33 Throughout this article I endeavour to observe the ways particular musical formations metaphorically extend references in the lyric text. To return to ‘I want you now’: recall the balance between snare and bass, either side of a virtual vertical axis (which will come to be occupied by the voice, but more of that anon). Quite possibly you didn’t notice it until I pointed it out. Such aural balances have been ubiquitous since the invention of stereo. The question is: why should this be? Why should studio engineers, producers (and perhaps even musicians) ind it satisfying34 to achieve such balances? Johnson encourages us to start from the body. Clarke, too, suggests beginning from the observation of the organism in the environment. When hearing a new sound in an environment, we are able to judge its location by the subtle difference in time between the soundwaves reaching irst one, and then the other, of our ears. If it demands our attention, we will then frequently turn our heads toward it, so that the sound-waves set in motion by the sound-source reach both ears simultaneously. This process enables us to locate the object laterally; we are then able visually to identify the source of the sound (which, in ecological terms, is to be understood as an environmental invariant) and thus to determine what action to take (an ecological approach always asks what action ensues from perception, even if that action is no more than ‘recognition’). The seeking of balance is thus endemic to our acting as aural beings, to our being-in-the-world. Rather than have to determine why it should 32

Johnson (1987), p. 29. Ibid., p. 87. Johnson’s discussion of balance can be found on pp. 73–98. 34 My assumption that they ind this type of balance satisfying rests on two observations: that they very rarely abstain from providing it; and that audio engineering literature, whether professional or journalistic, treats it as axiomatic to ensure, without qualiication, that a mix is organized in this way, but without (ever) explaining why. 33

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be that we prefer the soundbox to be balanced, it would require determining how we would cope were it not to be balanced: an unbalanced soundbox is the marked term of the pair and would thus require explaining. At 6`` into the track, West Coast backing voices35 extend the upper reaches of the soundbox. Everything to this point has unproblematically asserted a harmonic area centred on A. This is a strong gesture for the opening of an album, which therefore contributes to a feeling of security (the harmonic area is unchallenged), but such opening gestures are necessarily typical. Encountering a speedy exploration, an ‘opening up’ of an available domain (which, in this example, is the soundbox) that ‘sets the scene’, would be automatically read in other art-forms (a Romantic symphony, a ilm or TV drama prior to the opening credits, a thriller novel) as betokening planning and vision, as preparation for the drama to come, and such a reading seems plausible here, at least at this point. As the singer, Dan Gillespie Sells,36 enters the texture for the verse (and notice that he enters in the centre of the lateral axis), an overdriven chordal guitar has moved to the right, balanced at irst by an organ, and then subsequently by a backing vocal phrase which tails off, moving from centre to left, on each repetition. This places Sells in an intimate zone; he appears near to us (if fractionally to our left) and acknowledges such presence in the verse’s second line: ‘My innards go berserk/ Every time your voice gets near’.37 At one level, this is a (subtle) pun – at another, it is more fundamental, but I put off discussion of this depth for a while. The insecurity expressed by these opening lyrics (‘it’s never gonna work…’) seems congruent to the rather obvious38 rhymes, which almost convey an inability to think straight in the face of his pent-up excitement (the feeling in his ‘innards’). His glottal stops in these opening lines can, thus, be read endearingly. I have suggested that Sells appears to us in an ‘intimate zone’. This concept needs exploring. In addition to the theoretical positions I have already discussed, our project has had recourse to a body of theory that originated in the 1960s, under the label proxemics.39 The term originated with the anthropologist Edward Hall, 35 The repeated syllable ‘pa’ was common material for those wordless periods in recordings by mid-1960s LA vocalists, such as the Turtles and the Association. 36 I should say right at this point that I am completely uninterested in the identity of Dan Sells, beyond the recording, i.e. in any details of his own personality or life, for the reasons sketched in my early quotation of Ricoeur (p. 209). 37 The lyrics to these tracks are available at many sources on the Internet. I am particularly fond of some of the (what seem to me candidates for) mishearings at http://www. lyricsmania.com/lyrics/feeling_the_lyrics_8475/twelve_stops_and_home_lyrics_28208/i_ want_you_now_lyrics_308541.html, which has ‘evenings’ for ‘innards’ here, for instance. 38 In songwriterly terms. 39 Although the term ‘inter-personal distance’ (IPD) is now more commonly used, particularly in environmental and social psychology, we retain reference to the original identiier, which retains currency in cognate projects. See, for example, Maasø (2008), pp. 36–50.

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who used it to refer to the communicative use of space.40 Hall divided such space into four zones, with reference not only to visual and aural, but also to gestural and olfactory factors. Of course, in relation to recorded sounds, these clearly need reformulating, but the difference between the intimate, personal, social and public zones that he so carefully described, remains pertinent. These zones are activated between the physical position of the listener and the virtual position of the persona, as modiied by the personic environment. These latter terms develop from an earlier article of mine.41 The proxemic zones are identiiable through a number of factors. Loudness of the persona’s voice (relative to the environment) is important, together with the observation that sonic objects can appear to be in or out of focus, and surrounded by space or enclosed by matter.42 Francis Rumsey offers a nuanced reading of Bregman’s auditory scene analysis that suggests greater precision:43 he focuses on the attributes both of sound-sources and of the spatial environment, arguing for three categories of each of four levels. He writes of width; depth/ distance; and envelopment of: the individual sound-source; a (homogeneous) ensemble of sound-sources; the environment; and the entire scene. While the difference between environment and scene is unnecessary for my purposes here, and while there is no homogeneous ensemble, the width and depth of individual sound-sources and of the spatial environment remain valuable. The difference between ‘depth’ and ‘distance’ is subtle: distance recognizes the gap between the ‘front’ of a sound-source and a listener, while depth acknowledges that there can be a ‘back’ to that sound-source, and the difference between front and back delivers depth. From the perspective of theoretical coherence, note that Rumsey’s scene-based analysis is modelled very speciically on Bregman’s auditory scene analysis, and that Clarke regards auditory scene analysis as having ‘applied certain aspects of the ecological approach to auditory perception’.44 What is ultimately at issue is not simply a question of varying degrees of dynamic level and proximity, but more complex attributes of the various sounds that contribute to the perceived reception of sonic events. It is the environmental attributes of the sounds that afford the listener the ability to differentiate between the various proxemic zones, and establish the link between proxemics and ecological perception. That complexity is not fully in play on this album. Sells’s presence is offset by a number of factors. First, the guitar that I have described as ‘beefy’ is so because of its width – it covers quite a broad area of the soundbox. In this it is replicated by the backing voices – even the irst three 40

Hall (1969). Moore (2005). 42 This development is borrowed from Meyrowitz (1982), pp. 221–41, and again transferred to the aural realm. 43 Rumsey (2002). Bregman is interested in sound per se; his work (1990) is extremely abstract with respect to music. Rumsey’s development is coherent with discussions of the soundbox. 44 Clarke (2005), p. 6. 41

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attacks (of a single pitch) are broad, although centred. The impression of width is enhanced as the backing voices split into two-part harmony. A curious buzz enters low, centre and wide, as an additional held third enters in the backing voices (at around 8``). Thus far all the sound-sources have exhibited some width, with the exception of the individual components of the drum kit (which, as a single unit, also covers a large area of the soundbox). Thus, when Sells enters so dramatically, over an aeolian VI/1,45 his possible tentativity suggested by his intimate positioning is only enhanced by the narrow space he inhabits. The point toward which the opening of the song moves is represented by the word ‘now’: the entire verse leads toward Sells’s expression in the chorus that ‘I want you now’. Such metaphorical writing (‘leads towards’) is endemic in all writing on music, however closely considered, but it should not go unchallenged – certain developments in embodied cognition suggest why such a metaphor is appropriate, and I shall justify the phrase below. For the moment, we might note that anticipation of, and a slightly weary waiting for, this ‘now’ is encouraged by the way the music moves both harmonically and melodically. While the introduction has unambiguously asserted A, the verse refuses to afirm this. While the bass remains rooted on A, the verse moves constantly through D, E and F where F represents a cadential side-step. This meandering is interrupted by the entry of the pre-chorus, with a change of texture (becoming more choppy as the bass becomes more mobile), as the F irst overshoots to an f# (note the pun ‘eye’/’I’) but then slides back. We actually reach A at a metrically weak point (in the second half of the pre-chorus, from a repeat of the f#, replacing the slip back to F), and then swivel around it (b, G) before a strong arrival on the tonic A at the beginning of the chorus (51``). It is possible to envisage a stronger point of arrival, and I shall return to this moment in a while. The harmonic outline up to this point is summarized in Example 13.1 (upper case signiies major chords, lower case minor): I give the bass to make the point that harmonic inversions are unusually prevalent here. Example 13.1 ‘I want you now’; harmonic sketch of the verse (13``…)/pre– chorus (39``…)

The melody is equally important. The opening motif, which had focused on a comfortable A/G reaches no higher than D, and emphasizes an aeolian third (C$). The ionian third (C#) appears at the beginning of the pre-chorus, marking 45 I adopt here the neat form of notation pioneered by Walter Everett (2009), formalizing vernacular usage, whereby the number after the stroke refers to the bass scaledegree of the harmony. VI/1 is thus a irst inversion VI chord.

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a growing irrelevance of the ‘F’ interpretation of the bass A (just after 39``), but the melody remains poised (or repetitive, if you prefer). The chorus melody then shoots right up to an upper G# and A without any gradual move on the lyric ‘… want you…’ This sudden alighting on a top note seems metaphorically to match his ‘reaching’ for ‘you’; at least, the stretching of the voice can be felt by trying it oneself. But how may we make such an interpretive leap? This is another formulation of the question I have already posed: what is it that enables us to talk of the music moving ‘towards’ this point? As a listener, are you in any doubt about feeling it thus? Why not? On the basis, I would suggest, of a particular skill speciied within embodied cognition, that of cross-domain mapping. ‘Crossdomain mapping is a process through which we structure our understanding of one domain (which is typically unfamiliar or abstract) in terms of another (which is most often familiar and concrete)’.46 Lawrence Zbikowski illustrates the concept by suggesting we understand electrical conductance through a hydraulic model – we talk of electricity lowing, for example (although whether we are all more familiar with hydraulic than electrical processes is perhaps a moot point). Zbikowski exhaustively demonstrates the way that lyrics and setting work thus by way of some nineteenth-century concert music, through the construction of an analogous process, conceptual blending.47 Such a process seems to explain why it is that we are not only willing to accept the transformation of elements from one domain into another, but eager to make such transformations ourselves. But this says nothing about the type of reading we make. For this I return, again, to the idea of image schemata, and speciically to the schema known as path: for Johnson, such paths are ‘routes for moving from one point to another’. In his formulation, path has three essential components: ‘(1) a source, or starting-point; (2) a goal, or end-point; and (3) a sequence of contiguous locations connecting the source with the goal.’48 The source, in this example, is given by the initial avoidance of a tonic A over a bass A at the opening of the verse. A series of events provide the sequence of contiguous locations, the minimum of which are: the constant avoidance of this tonic at three subsequent opportunities during the verse; the harmonic shifts during the pre-chorus, but shifts that maintain the potential of an arrival on A; the melodic replacement of C$ by C#. The melodic leap at the beginning of the chorus, however, hardly its into the notion of a series of contiguous locations – a gap-ill pattern is a very common tonal melodic strategy49 – but it does not tend to mark a point of arrival. It is this ‘lack of synchronization’ that is expressively meaningful here. The destination that Sells’s protagonist is seeking, that of getting ‘you now’ is never achieved. He sings ‘I want you now’, reaching the upper tonic on the word ‘you’, in conirmation. But 46

Zbikowski (2002), p. 13. Fauconnier (1997). I do not really make use of this concept in this article here, but I explore its value in Moore (in press). 48 Johnson (1987), p. 113. 49 Narmour (1990), pp. 220–32. 47

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as his phrase ends, on ‘now’, the harmony has moved away, no longer supporting his melody. The same happens on every ‘now’ as it appears in the chorus, even when the word ‘now’ itself appears on a melodic tonic. Example 13.2 identiies two such occasions together with the points at which the chorus rhymes with ‘now’, thus carrying something of the same force. As can be seen, completion of the path is studiously avoided. (Whereas in the verse and pre-chorus the bass had a somewhat wayward relationship with the harmony, here it underpins the harmony with unsurprising stepwise motion.) Getting ‘you’, then, is always deferred. Thus, a potential plot for the album is set up, with the possibility that at some point their union is achieved. In order to test this out, I shall move on next to the album’s inal cut; before I do, however, there is something more I wish to say about the album’s opener. Example 13.2 Melodic/bass reduction of opening of chorus

Verse 2 introduces two characters, Timmy and Janie. These are people with a social function, however mundane, against which are contrasted ‘we’ who just idly waste our time. What is interesting is that no characters are provided to aver that the protagonist and his addressee are ‘too young to be sitting around’. This is a judgement that comes from the inside, presumably the voice of an internalized ‘parent’.50 The chorus really activates ‘you make me live’ in its greater liveliness, given partly by the backing voices that, at 2`30``, break into a number of individual lines. How might we understand this strange intrusion? If the backing voices are taken to represent an individual’s internality51 then this could mark either a breakdown, a loss of individuality, or alternatively an enriching (a taking of multiple perspectives). If I hear the music as joyous (which I do), I will prefer 50

See Harris (1970) for an introduction to transactional analysis, an assumption that I am using here. 51 Such as in The Beatles’ ‘With a little help from my friends’, where they represent the protagonist’s internal representation of these ‘friends’ (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967).

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the latter. The ensuing guitar solo recalls the tune, but with mixed reminiscences of early 1960s guitar instrumentals.52 The joyfulness of the chorus is matched by Sells’s energetic repetitions of ‘yeah’ at the end, although the avoidance of words as the song reaches an unambiguous inal cadence leaves it open as to whether ‘you’ are achieved.

‘Blue Piccadilly’ According to the packaging, the album’s inal song is ‘Blue Piccadilly’, a song with an even more extensive harmonic path than the irst. On the one hand the presence of such a path suggests stylistic coherence within the album, but on the other it might betoken a more general idiolectal competence (for which the harmonic language of their second album offers some support53). And just as making sense of the irst song hinged on identifying the degree of certainty asserted by what was to be achieved ‘now’, the sense of this inal song hinges on the word ‘home’. It is a while coming, though, for irst we get a strange hang-over from the previous song, and then two sections each of which, alone, sounds as if it could function as a verse. We are presented in the initial lyrics with two coupled individuals both of whom ‘gave it all’ in their relationship, but the rather distanced delivery from the persona, and the song’s lack of pace, implies that their gifts were misplaced. The song does not refer to them again, and so a plausible reading is that the remainder of the song (no longer delivered from a narrator’s external, observing, viewpoint) takes us inside the relationship, where ‘he’ addresses ‘her’. The initial, declarative lines, are presented with a voice very close to the listener, but it is not conventionally intimate (the subject matter is not, at this point, interpersonal). A piano is just off to one side, simply outlining block harmonies; a second voice, much compressed and deeper in the mix, echoes the description of why ‘he gave it all’. As it comes to an end, it is overwhelmed by a high, thin-toned sound that gradually imposes itself in full-ledged harmonies, The harmonic loop here, VI7– II9–V7–I9 in E@, leads to the end of each line, but the unresolved nature of the harmonies’ non-triadic tones suggests that the end is slightly inconclusive. The verse proper is marked by an offbeat ride cymbal to the left of Sells, matching the piano on the right, and initially by a regularity in the vocal line, a regularity that indicates a step towards something undeined, but certainly away from the free tempo of the introduction. This spatially activates the balance schema, which, as I have argued above and elsewhere,54 is to be regarded as normative in terms of its activation of the stereo spectrum. The regularity is that of a slow þ¾, as opposed to the implicit¦4 of the introduction. It is at this point that we hear the key phrases ‘beneath woods’ and ‘down where it’s rumbling’. What context should we 52 53 54

Particularly, perhaps, the Tornados’ [sic] ‘Telstar’ from 1962 (The Tornados, 1998). Join with us (2008). Moore (2012).

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assume for these strange phrases? Charles Fillmore is a key developer of the idea of semantic frames: a frame provides a necessary context for understanding a speciic word. In opposition to standard semiotic thinking, Fillmore suggests of any category determined by a particular word that ‘the word’s meaning cannot be truly understood by someone who is unaware of those human concerns and problems which provide the reason for the category’s existence’.55 The frame that provides a context for ‘beneath’, for the ‘rumbling’ of ‘it’, is, perhaps, clariied by the appearance in the chorus of ‘the blue Piccadilly’ and, in the tail, ‘twelve stops and home’. A train journey is never explicitly mentioned, but it is the experience of a train journey that ‘he’ is recounting. And it seems to be a deinable sort of train journey, one on London’s underground system, on maps of which the Piccadilly line is conventionally coloured blue, and twelve stops from town takes us to the region of Bounds Green, apparently where Sells once lived.56 For so very many commuters, London’s underground is the means to get to and from home and work, and is thus invested with those (positive, negative) emotions and feelings that such destinations carry. It is thus a strong image on which to build the track. The protagonist’s relationship with ‘her’ is only very briely sketched – he begins to list for us things that he did for her, and refers to her ability to ‘make’ him do things that others could not (speciically, to ‘run’). She clearly has some sort of hold over him. And yet, this ‘verse’ has used the same chord sequence as did the introduction, suggesting that they function as two alternative verses, but with very different emotive senses. The latter verse also enacts development, as the melody in the second half is more widely spaced and more mobile, although still rhythmically regular. The pre-chorus begins to take us elsewhere. The E@ is reinterpreted as an upper neighbour to D, which latter then acts as II in the following very common sequence: II7/1–V/7–v7/@7–IV/6–iiØ7–V, suggesting a resolution to C to come. Such a resolution would come at the beginning of so many choruses, as stability is asserted. Not here, though. The harmonies of the chorus take us further away (IV, V, vi, V at the beginning of successive sequential phrases) from a resolution to C, although the end of the chorus brings the realization that this has simply been a massive parenthesis: IV–ii–V–I/3–iii–vi–@VI+–I/5–ii7/1–V/2. And that irst chorus is excitingly underplayed, as Sells is accompanied only by piano chords marking out every quaver of the þ¾, contrasting with the melody’s long held notes. A second verse is texturally richer, and takes us on from the texture of the opening, as beits a path. An arpeggiating guitar adds textural density, and rhythmic motion, to the harmonic scheme, while the bass and kit are also present. All are pretty central in the mix, although there is width to the ensemble, as they unite behind Sells. The pre-chorus is then enriched by an overdriven chromatically 55

Fillmore (2006), p. 382. In case we’re in any doubt, the album’s cover carries a stylized passenger handle, indicative of crowded underground trains. 56

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descending line in the guitar, entering on his declaration that ‘he never knew anyone tougher than you’, and the guitar seems to play a part in ecologically specifying that toughness.57 The pre-chorus is then extended by two bars (at 2`35``) in a move that leaps vocally from  58 to , omitting . This is a clear peroration, calling out its identity as such: the  never falls to the . The second chorus has a fuller sound, partly due to the level on the guitar, while its arpeggiation of the vi@VI+-I/5-ii7/1 sequence recalls similar playing on the Beatles’ ‘I want you (she’s so heavy)’,59 or the bridge to Cream’s ‘Badge’. The greater depth to the sound marks another step on the way of the path that, here, is clearly textural in nature. The end of the chorus is then harmonically altered, to permit its re-entry at 3`05``. The most notable feature of this alteration is surely the chromaticized descending bass-line on the guitar. Sells’s tentative declaration of love (‘I think that I love ya’) is now accompanied by smooth upper vocal lines, a generic device common since the 1960s, betokening a solidarity we are almost invited to feel. The thick texture vanishes at 3`24``, while the chorus fails to conclude, on the line ‘I think I’ll go home’. From this it becomes clear that the protagonist has not been at home, but is presumably on the train heading north from Leicester Square (twelve stops away from Bounds Green). We are now ‘marking time’ over two repeated chords (V/2–IV/1). Since neither are in root position, they still promise some other inish, as Sells sings the album’s title, answered by ‘there is no better friend’. His addressee is unresolved at this point, although one could hear the friend either as the underground train (which takes him home), or even as the (comforting) pub to which the action will move in a moment.60 The ‘why are you here again’ sung by the backing voices is presumably asking why Sells is not, preferably, at home. A inal thinning of the texture at 3`53`` (piano alone, low and to the right) leads to the big inale at 3`57``, but the backing singers have receded from private to social space – a clinking of glasses at 3`52`` (the irst intrusion into the track of an external effect) eases their move to that of a large pub chorus. The lilting waltz tempo, with strong drum on the second beat and bass on the inal shufled upbeat, has now taken over the mood of the song and created one of a wordless ‘singalong’ into which it is hard not to be drawn. Sells re-enters at the end of the chorus with ‘you take me down’, this time presumably addressing his mode of transport.61 A inal time through this same pattern, his voice is replaced by the ringing guitar arpeggio, with the location having moved entirely to the pub (identiied by the banging of glasses and calls of ‘time’s up’). We then inally achieve the root position tonic This could be identiied as a kinetic anaphone in Philip Tagg’s terminology but, as Eric Clarke has implied to me (private communication), what is an anaphone but the representation of a speciied source? 58 I use the caret to indicate scale-degree, thus  is the second degree of the scale. 59 Ian MacDonald (1995), p. 275. The Beatles, Abbey Road (1969), Cream, The Very Best of Cream (1969). 60 My thanks to an unnamed reviewer for these plausible suggestions. 61 And thus strengthening the likely reading of ‘friend’ as ‘train’ earlier. 57

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and the goal of the path is achieved, that achievement signalled in part by the kit’s ecstatic hemiola at 4`32``. My slight doubt as to who/what is addressed by the identity of the addressee in this latter portion of the track relates to my earlier discussion of musical motion: as both Clarke and Johnson note, there are two viewpoints that a listener adopts in the presence of musical motion: one either observes the motion from outside (as ‘observer’), or experiences it as if moving oneself (as ‘traveller’), but it is not necessary to resolve the ambiguity of viewpoint. This experience is also important in the presences of the path schema. Although one might argue that the embodiment of this schema is more apparent from the ‘traveller’ position, the act of observing is no less apparent, as one moves one’s eyes, head and possibly even body in order to track the movement of an object across different distances. Key strategies from both these tracks are employed elsewhere on the album. This is to assert rather more than just saying that there is a stylistic consistency to the album, for the particular points I want to refer to are the deferral of resolution (which appears over different spans in both these tracks) and the PATH schema. On ‘I want you now’, the deferral of A takes place harmonically, repeatedly through each verse (side-stepping to F a number of times, and f# twice). Once A is achieved, at the beginning of the chorus, with the vocal upward leap, the vocal melody continues to undermine it. On ‘Blue Piccadilly’, until 3`25``, every formal section has a greater weight of texture than the previous, and it is mostly in terms of texture that this track’s path is enacted. At 3`25``, however, the texture thins to re-launch the song for its glorious ending. French has the perfect phrase for this move – reculer pour mieux sauter – to retreat momentarily in order to reach/ launch forward more effectively. This device, if we may call it that, is also found elsewhere in the album, both on ‘Never be lonely’, and on ‘Rosé’. In ‘Never be lonely’, the retreat is at 2`29``, indulging briely the vocal lines’ individuality. Its three verses show subtle but minimal textural growth, largely focused on the role of the guitar. In ‘Rosé’, the retreat is at 2`48`` in preparation for an ecstatic chorus, and again at 3`20`` for the ending, which has the thickest texture of the entire song. Its inal moments then echo the ‘delicate ways’ of the lyric. In ‘Blue Piccadilly’ too, of course, it occurs doubly. In ‘Rosé’, the sense of path is stronger than on ‘Never be lonely’. Both, though, are out-performed in this respect by ‘Helicopter’, the track that precedes ‘Blue Piccadilly’.

’Helicopter’ ‘Helicopter’ begins with a very awkward-sounding piano riff, with odd tones off to the right, strange buzzes generally to the left, and an unsubtle kit groove which almost stutters. The piano is not ‘out of tune’ as the lyric surmises, but timbrally it is decidedly odd, as if it has been compressed not only technically, but also within the soundbox – this individual sound-source is unusually narrow. The stanza is very short, seemingly irrelevant, and reminiscent of those moments

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when we are quite unable to concentrate on the matter in hand. Texture grows through the end of the verse and into the chorus, and this growth is then replayed in the second verse. The chorus ends with us ‘crawling in the mud, mud, mud’, a sensation reinforced by the thickening texture, and also part of the same world as the ‘lack of concentration’ evinced in the verse. At 1`46``, with the song all but over, a new rising bass enters, and the tentative moves toward thicker texture are inally realized with a rich, overdriven (and surely overwrought) guitar solo which brings the track to an end in the quasi-environmental sounds with which ‘Blue Piccadilly’ begins. What, though, might we think it ‘about’? It has a very particular manner. Example 13.3 sketches the opening piano riff, which so characterizes the track. The upper line is dogged, and almost oblivious to where the harmony is going; the lower line simply ‘noodles’ about with no sense of harmonic direction; the phrase structure is unbalanced, returning to chord i too early; the harmony itself (despite somewhat unconventional shifts to phrygian III/7 and II) does not succeed in escaping the pull of the tonic. This is very much of a part with the ‘lack of concentration’ I have mentioned in the context of the opening lyric and the nearlystuttering kit, the idea of crawling through mud and, indeed, of musing without intellectual direction, alone. But what has a piano to do with a helicopter (verse 1), or a telephone with an ocean liner (verse 2)? It can be said that all are media of communication, of a sort, and each verse pairs one of small scale and high speed of communication with one of larger scale and comparative slowness of movement from location to location. (Whereas musical sound reaches the listening mind at the speed of sound, effectively, as does a voice over the telephone line, the pace of arrival of a helicopter and an ocean liner is anything but instantaneous, for all their power.) A conventional approach to lyric would perhaps look for poetic features, and would build an interpretation along these lines. Barbara Bradby demonstrates a far more effective (if not directly transferable) approach in, so to speak, looking at the real world as the basis for a lyric62 – there, lyric as conversation rather than as poetry. A source of theory for such an approach can be found within work on cognitive semantics, in frame theory and in various ideas put forward by Leonard Talmy. In order to explore this latter, I turn to consideration of the track ‘Kettle’s on’. Example 13.3 Outline of opening riff to ‘Helicopter’

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Bradby (2007[2002]).

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’Kettle’s On’ The opening piano chord of ‘Kettle’s on’ is telling in its minor inlection (I–iv is often a sobering experience). Sells is forward of the piano, but with the same resonance, in the same space. The double-tracking reinforces his presence. The chorus is based on a repeating V–vi–IV–I/3, the minor vi now turning to a major IV on the words ‘with me’, as the protagonist asks his antagonist to return home. I suspect it is this combination of expression and harmony that makes the track ‘work’, why it is an effective portrayal of comfortable homeliness, the ‘come “home”’ resonant but empty, almost welcoming as the arms are open. One of the four schematic systems of Talmy’s conceptual structuring theory is that of attention.63 Talmy argues that language enables the focus on ‘only a certain portion or portions of the referent scene’,64 by the way in which it is used. Only partial discussion of a scene means that the attention of the listener is directed – Talmy coins the term ‘windowed’ – toward what is thus described. We have already seen this (although I did not comment on it) – in discussion of the path of the journey on the Piccadilly line. There, our attention was drawn to the process of travelling, rather than the beginning or the end of the journey, both of which are of course indispensable to the actual taking of such a journey. In ‘Kettle’s on’, things work differently. As with many allusive lyrics, but also with so much everyday conversational language, the listener’s attention is given space to negotiate between what is actually said and what is implied; by observing the difference between what is ‘windowed’ and what is not, room for interpretation opens up. The song opens with the lines ‘I turn on the tap and run some water/Flick a little switch (up) on the wall’.Attention is drawn to the tap, but there is no context provided for the water. It is as if both actions were absent-minded gestures, as in such lines as ‘sugar for your bowl’ in the irst song; there is thus another level of continuity behind that action taking the persona as an entity across the album. (And I would add, at this point: notice the timbre of the piano, which is far more similar to the sound of a carpeted living-room than it is to a performance space; this timbre only adds to the picture of domesticity that is being created.) Not only is no context provided for the water, but nor is there for the switch. Indeed, from the subsequent lines, which are not directed outward toward overt action, but inward toward contemplation of his situation, it would even be possible to draw a parallel between the lowing of water and its cross-domain mapping into the lowing of electricity.65 We know the title, of course, but at this point it has not 63

The others are to do with the structuring of a scene in terms of its temporal and spatial properties (the ‘conigurational’ system); the perspective from which a scene is ‘viewed’ (the ‘perspectival’ system) and the ‘force-dynamics’ system. See Evans and Green (2006), pp. 191–200, for a concise introduction. 64 Talmy (2003), p. 258. 65 Fauconnier (1997), pp. 9ff., draws attention to the incorporation in our mental sense-making procedures of cross-domain mapping that I have referred to by way of

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come into play within the narrative of the song. Returning to the switch: it could be on or off; it could work an appliance or it could work a light. Clearly, asking the purpose of these actions is the wrong question at this point – no answer is provided and we must run with the low66 of the persona’s thought. The next lines show that the protagonist’s mind is on ‘you’, and on some prior conversations from a perspective where he is in the ascendancy. The tense then moves forward to the present, but a present that is clearly a repeat of past situations. He projects himself to wherever ‘you’ is currently situated to note the champagne is inished. Then, almost as an afterthought, the tense moves to the future, where ‘you’ will come home and ind the kettle already on, in a setting of cosy domestic security that the protagonist clearly needs This shifting of tense, according to Fauconnier’s and Lakoff’s collaborator Mark Turner, is a basic facet of narrative structures where the coinciding of the viewpoint of the narrator (or here, the protagonist) with the present cannot be considered normative.67 Now we understand the right context for the tap and the switch, but had their purpose been made clear at the beginning, there would have been no toehold for what takes place in the chorus. The second verse reinforces this. The action is now all internal. The tap and switch are not mentioned again, although the persona does refer to ‘pouring out my heart’, which I guess we should identify as a poetic metaphor. Now I turn to the song’s harmonic context to complete my interpretation. The chorus makes plain that the protagonist wants ‘you’ home. The chorus ends with an abrupt mixolydian VII–I, almost yanking ‘you’ out of one space (identiied with ‘champagne’) and into another (identiied with ‘the kettle’). This abruptness is necessary because the repeated pleas to ‘come home’ in the chorus are met with a irst inversion tonic, refusing to inalize the harmonic sequence, to bring it to rest (as ‘you’ clearly are not on your way home). And note that, at the end of the second chorus, the mixolydian VII fails to reach the tonic, but sinks back into the chorus loop. And then, as we reach the playout, once the protagonist has pleaded his heart out, so to speak, again root position tonics are resolutely avoided. Thus, by intensely experiencing the music, we are invited to relive the experience that the relationship will remain precarious, at best.

Playout I could continue, but space has beaten me. I have endeavoured, through discussion of and reference to about half the tracks on the album, to demonstrate that the methodology that I and my colleagues have developed for consideration of the spatial domain in recorded song can be directed also at the other domains through Zbikowski, the only musicologist as yet to make a full-length study of the application of cognitive science to music. 66 Metaphor and pun both intended, here! 67 Turner (1996), pp. 149–50.

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which music is addressed, and that doing so provides justiication for some of the hermeneutic leaps so common (it seems to me) in the attribution of meaning to music. In so doing, I have done little more than scratch the surface, but I hope this chapter does suggest that there is more mileage in this approach, and that it is worthy of careful consideration.68

References Becker, Judith (2004) Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion and Trancing (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press). Bradby, Barbara (2007[2002]) ‘Oh, Boy! (Oh, Boy!): Mutual desirability and musical structure in the buddy group’, reproduced in Allan F. Moore (ed.) Critical Essays in Popular Musicology (Aldershot: Ashgate), pp. 567–95. Bregman, Albert S. (1990) Auditory scene analysis: the perceptual organisation of sound (London: MIT Press). Clarke, Eric F. (2001) Ways of Listening (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005). Coulson, Seana (2001) Semantic Leaps: Frame-shifting and Conceptual Blending in Meaning Construction (New York: Cambridge University Press). Cumming, Naomi (2000) The Sonic Self: Musical Subjectivity and Signiication (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press). Damasio, Antonio (1999) The Feeling of What Happens: Body and Emotion in the Making of Consciousness (New York: Harcourt Brace). Dockwray, Ruth, and Moore, Allan F. (2010) ‘Coniguring the soundbox, 1965– 1972’, Popular Music, 29(2): 181–97. Evans, Vyvyan, and Green, Melanie (2006) Cognitive Linguistics: An Introduction (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). Everett, Walter (2009) The Foundations of Rock (New York: Oxford University Press). Fauconnier, Gilles (1997) Mappings in thought and language (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Fillmore, Charles J. (2006) ‘Frame semantics’, in Dirk Geeraerts (ed.) Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter), pp. 373–400. Gibbs, Raymond, Jr. (2006) Embodiment and Cognitive Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Gibson, James J. (1966) The Senses Considered as Perceptual Systems (Boston MA: Houghton Miflin).

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To close with a personal point: It gives me some great pleasure to contribute to this volume the inal output from our AHRC project, bearing in mind that the initial output appeared in Derek Scott’s own Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (2009).

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— (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception (London: Lawrence Erlbaum). Hall, Edward T. (1969) The Hidden Dimension (London: The Bodley Head). Harris, Thomas A. (1970) The Book of Choice (London: Jonathan Cape). Johnson, Mark (1987) The Body in the Mind (Chicago IL: Chicago University Press). — (2007) The meaning of the body (Chicago IL: Chicago University Press). Johnson, Mark L. and Steve Larson (2003) ‘“Something in the way she moves” – metaphors of musical motion’, Metaphor and Symbol, 18(2): 63–84. Keil, Charles, and Feld, Steven (1994) Music Grooves (Chicago IL: Chicago University Press). Kövecses, Zoltán (2005) Metaphor in Culture: Universality and Variation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Lakoff, George (1987) Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things (Chicago IL: Chicago University Press). Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark (1980) Metaphors We Live By (Chicago IL: Chicago University Press). Lidov, David (2004) Is Language a Music? New and Selected Writings about Musical Form and Import (Bloomington IN: Indiana University Press). Maasø, Aarnt (2008) ‘The proxemics of the mediated voice’, in Jay Beck and Tony Grajeda (eds) Lowering the Boom: Critical Studies in Film Sound (Urbana IL: University of Illinois Press), pp. 36–50. MacDonald, Ian (1995) Revolution in the Head (London: Pimlico). Meyrowitz, Joshua (1982) ‘Television and interpersonal behaviour: Codes of perception and response’, in Gary Gumpert and Robert Cathcart (eds) Inter/ Media: Interpersonal Communication in a Media World (Oxford: Oxford University Press), pp. 221–41. Moore, Allan F. (2005) ‘The Persona/Environment relation in recorded song’, Music Theory Online, 11(4). — (2010) ‘Where is here? An issue of deictic projection in recorded song’, Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135(1): 145–82. — (2012) Song Means: Analysing and Interpreting Popular Song (Farnham: Ashgate). — (in press) ‘Beyond a musicology of production’, in Simon Frith and Simon Zagorski-Thomas (eds) The Art of Record Production (Farnham: Ashgate). Moore, Allan F. and Dockwray, Ruth (2009) ‘The establishment of the virtual performance space in rock’, Twentieth-century Music, 5(2): 63–85. Moore, Allan F., Schmidt, Patricia and Dockwray, Ruth (2010) ‘A hermeneutics of spatialization for recorded song’,Twentieth-century Music, 6(1): 81–112. Moylan, William (2007) The Art of Recording: Understanding and Crafting the Mix (Burlington MA: Focal Press). Narmour, Eugene (1990) The Analysis and Cognition of Basic Melodic Structures (Chicago IL: Chicago University Press).

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Reed, Edward S. (1996) Encountering the World: Toward an Ecological Psychology (New York: Oxford University Press). Ricoeur, Paul (1976) Interpretation Theory: Discourse and the Surplus of Meaning (Forth Worth TX: Texas Christian University Press). Rinck, Mike (2005) ‘Spatial situation models’, in Priti Shah and Akira Miyake (eds) Cambridge Handbook of Visuospatial Thinking (New York: Cambridge University Press), pp. 334–82. Rumsey, Francis (2002) ‘Spatial Quality Evaluation for Reproduced Sound: Terminology, Meaning, and a Scene-based paradigm’, Journal of the Audio Engineering Society, 50(9): 651–66. Scott, Derek (ed.) (2009) The Ashgate Research Companion to Popular Musicology (Farnham: Ashgate). Talmy, Leonard (2003) Toward a Cognitive Semantics, Vol. 1: Concept Structuring Systems (Cambridge MA: MIT Press). Turner, Mark (1996) The Literary Mind: The Origins of Thought and Language (New York: Oxford University Press). Windsor, Luke (2004) ‘An Ecological Approach to Semiotics’, Journal for the Theory of Social Behaviour, 34(2): 179–98. Zbikowski, Lawrence (2002) Conceptualising Music: Cognitive Structure, Theory, and Analysis (New York: Oxford University Press).

Discography The Beatles: Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (Parlophone, 1967). The Beatles: Abbey Road (Parlophone, 1969). Cream: The Very Best of Cream (Polygram, 1969). The Feeling: Twelve Stops and Home (Island, 2006). The Feeling: Join with Us (Island, 2008). The Tornados: The Tornados (Rialto, 1998).

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Chapter 14

The Virtuoso Body; Or, the Two Births of Musical Performance Lawrence Kramer

The Piano and Performance: From Mouth to Hand Musical performance was born in Vienna in the second and third decades of the nineteenth century. More exactly, like Dionysus, it was born twice: once in Vienna in the piano scores of Beethoven and Schubert, and once in the cult of the piano virtuoso that traversed all of Europe in the two decades following the deaths of those already iconic igures. Of course these statements sound absurd, and so they should. Musical performance predates musical composition, predates the score; music itself, as a cultural institution, is a historical precipitate of performance. So in what sense could performance have been born a mere two centuries ago in one city and in one genre, no matter how celebrated? One sense is this: with one prominent exception, before the early nineteenth century musicians who performed from score in public were understood primarily as executants. Their job was to reproduce (or earlier, with igured bass, to realize) and in some cases to embellish the notes in a score. Contemporaneous reviews of the symphonies of Haydn and Beethoven regularly assume the identity of performance and composition and concentrate almost exclusively on the latter. By the mid-nineteenth century, performers were, or aspired to be, artists and personalities. Their job was to interpret the musical work or, better, in a nearly literal sense, to bring it to life through skilled and inspired playing or, even better, to release through performance latent energies barely containable by social protocols and prone to range, as the title of one of Derek Scott’s books tells us, from the erotic to the demonic.1 No longer a functionary, the performer becomes a presence. In performing a score the virtuoso performer also performed a self, a public persona uniting expressive power and sensitivity with celebrity. The result of this union was to incorporate excess into the very ield of social relations meant to restrict excess: the excess on the one hand of the performer as a charismatic exception to whom all things are permitted and the excess on the other hand of the spectator drawn into the licensed intoxication of ecstatic fandom. Positioned as the mediator between 1

Scott (2003).

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the performance and the work, the performer is always poised to exceed the limits of both, even when, perhaps especially when, going to that limit but not past it becomes the regulatory ideal (and later on the means of discriminating ‘popular’ from ‘serious’ art). Which brings us back to the piano – by way of the voice. The exception I mentioned a moment ago was the star opera singer of the previous century, especially the castrato. These singers were the beneiciaries of a long-standing tradition identifying the power of music with the power of voice, with its own long-standing tradition of metaphysical privilege. In nineteenthcentury music this privilege of voice eroded; it did not disappear entirely, but much of it collapsed into metaphor as the piano increasingly replaced the voice as the chief instrument of musical dissemination and musical pedagogy. The nineteenthcentury birth of performance consists initially in the transference of the expressive power of music away from the voice, away from the head, and to the body as a whole, especially to the hands. And not only to the body, but to its tools. The era transfers vocal expressiveness to voiceless instruments; it displaces and simulates voice by instrumental sound. In part this happens through writing cantabile melody, melody that sounds songlike. (The point to emphasize here is writing. In the eighteenth century, the cantabile principle applied more to the way the player phrased a melody than to the way the composer wrote it. In the irst instance the player played as if singing; in the second, the player made the instrument sing.) But the displacement of vocal qualities to the body and its tools happens more broadly through the spread of the idea that both music and musical performance are forms of expression. They work by translating physical effort into emotion by means of an external instrument that acts as an extension of the body. In the art music of the nineteenth century the voice becomes only one instrument among others; its privilege, usurped by the piano, is restored only with the development of twentieth-century popular song. Once we understand the birth of musical performance as a displacement of voice, the fundamental principle of its difference from the past comes into sharp focus. The performer is not an artisan of sounds but an embodied subject with a mandate to translate the musical score into a quasi-animate embodiment of subjectivity. The score is a text, an inscription or monument, that the performer is charged with spiritualizing. To that end, scores must be composed that pose precisely this challenge. To some degree, the change in the status of performance is a product of changes in the habits of composition most familiarly associated with the career of Beethoven. The score becomes less transparent; notation becomes more complex; expression markings proliferate; greater precision paradoxically induces greater indeterminacy. Once the score is conceived as a problem rather than as a simple set of instructions, the culture of virtuosic performance becomes almost inevitable, and the obvious feedback loop – more challenge requires more virtuosity which in turn requires more challenge – swings into action. The musical and cultural consequences are too numerous to canvass briely. For example, the demand that the performer’s body audibly translate its corporeality

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into expressivity is one factor in the rise of solo performance as a pre-eminent mode, not only on the piano but also on the voice and the violin, each of which has its own trajectory. The rise of the symphony during the same period, like the rivalry between piano and vocal soloists, is a separate story, the chief theme of which might be called the glory of the simply impossible – who can compose symphonies after Beethoven? (It is not that Beethoven’s symphonies pre-empt an ideal, extraordinary though they are; they are appointed as a pre-emptive ideal. They cannot ind their peer by deinition.) In contrast, the tradition of the piano virtuoso inds its theme in the glory of the formerly impossible – the impossible appropriated as the possible by a gifted few and presented, as a gift, to the fortunate many that make up the concert audience. Virtuosity at the limit of the possible is the theme on which I propose to focus. It is revealing both as a cultural and historical symptom and as one of the primary origins of soloistic performance practices that persist into the present in both the classical and popular arenas.

Performing (at) the Piano: Technology and Technique The public performance of solo works for piano was a relative rarity before the 1830s, although piano concertos had been popular since shortly after the instrument’s invention. The standard concert format of the era was essentially that of a musical variety show; although solo piano pieces sometimes igured on the programmes, partly as advertisements for the printed music, their position as concert music was marginal. To some degree, the proto-virtuosic piano pieces of Schubert and Beethoven to which we will turn in due course were composed without a proper outlet; they were almost perversely impractical. The piano recital as we know it today was, famously, the invention of one man, Franz Liszt. The careers of Liszt and his virtuoso colleagues and progeny depended on developments in both technology and pedagogy: on the one hand the evolution of the piano in sonority, dynamics, pedal, range and sensitivity to touch, and on the other hand to the proliferation of piano methods drilling the body to perform the demanding new techniques (octaves, thirds, sixths, rapid staccato, irregular rhythmic groupings, wide leaps, and so on). The result was the production of virtuoso works of extreme dificulty, conspicuously beyond the powers of the amateurs who constituted the main market for piano music throughout the century. To realize the sensibility expressed by such music, the up and coming virtuoso had to cultivate the insensibility of a ruthless discipline. This trend had the ironic effect of turning the virtuoso’s body into a machine and thus of emphasizing the machinic character of the piano itself – the very opposite of what the ruling aesthetic of the era desired. So Liszt’s innovation was to write music that presents itself as far too dificult for a mere machine – it requires a genius, the genius being precisely one who can convey the music’s heightened expressivity through an ininitely malleable body, especially through the hands.

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The question of machinery, famously one of the pre-eminent questions of the rapidly industrializing nineteenth century, helps suggest why the piano, even more than the voice or the violin, becomes the era’s preeminent medium of virtuosity. The violin may be an ideal surrogate for the voice; it too can ‘sing’. But voices and violins come to singing naturally, or seem to; the violin even has a voice that emanates from the proximity of head and chest. Pianos are noise-makers; they work with hammers. To make a piano sing one has to overcome nature. One has to turn a contraption into a body. A very big contraption, too: unlike an instrument one can hold, a piano is machinic on a scale that exceeds the player’s body. The singer, literal or metaphorical, only does to a superlative degree what anyone can do. Anyone can sing; not just anyone can take power in hand and be master. A similar logic may also apply to the symphony conductor, who also arises as a persona at this time. The Lisztian piano virtuoso is not a siren; he is an Orpheus. He tames the furies to whom he consigns the visually fragmented or disassembled body, the impossible object, produced as his hands, arms, and ingers swarm over the keys, as they multiply themselves before the dazzled eye and often virtually disappear into a blur that is the wake or precipitate of the music.2 There was, however, a telling exception, to this ideal of mastery—an exception that, as usual, proves the rule. The Lisztian model of the virtuoso became the almost uncontested norm but it did have a shadow or double, weak but resilient and resilient in its weakness, a igure in whom the body depleted by performance visibly failed to recompose itself before each new trial. The emblematic person around whom this singular alternative developed was Chopin, who was regularly regarded as the Other of Liszt, the siren to his Orpheus. With Chopin deicit becomes a positive quality, performance ineffable, the performer invisible. Hence the very impulse that created the vast Liszt iconography created an iconography manqué for Chopin, scarcely photographed, rarely drawn. Piano Music: Dificulty and Subjectivity The evolving virtuoso repertoire sorted itself into genres that articulated an early and still highly permeable form of the distinction between the popular and the serious, entertainment music and art music. On one hand there were arrangements and paraphrases that subjected well-known, usually operatic melodies to extravagant embellishment and variation; on the other hand there were formally complex works conceived along the organicist lines that would at the time have supplied them with aesthetic legitimation. There were also intermediate forms, such as Liszt’s highly faithful piano transcription of Wagner’s Tannhäuser Overture, the 2 On the era’s sense of the piano as a machine and of its performance as a species of contortionism, see Parakilas (2001, esp. Leppert (2001)); Kramer (2001), pp. 68–99; and Dana Gooley (2004).

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performative point of which is to transfer the activity of Wagner’s very large and busy orchestra to the virtuoso’s two hands. The transcendental surge that ends the overture thus merges with the ‘transcendental performance’ that Liszt designated as the proper medium for his famous set of concert études. All of this music takes the dificulty of its performance as part of its raison d’être, which puts it revealingly at odds with another of its sources of legitimation. Partly as participants in the canon-building that was one of the chief musical enterprises of the age, and partly to establish themselves as the heirs of the heritage thus created, Liszt and his colleagues built up a ‘classical’ repertoire based on the piano sonatas of Beethoven – music not performed in public during Beethoven’s lifetime. A half dozen or so of these works do pose formidable technical challenges, but their mode of dificulty is less one that the virtuoso tradition emulates than one it appropriates. Beethoven’s pianistic dificulty is always the by-product of a constructive demand; it derives from the effort to work through a dynamic process of purposeful action and its obstacles. That much is old news. What we can take from it in the present context is that the dificulty of this music is ‘transcendental’ only in a quasi-Hegelian sense: it is less an expressive signiier than an indexical sign that one will do anything musically necessary to realize the idea of which the music aims to become the sensuous embodiment. The dificulty testiies to the effort to get beyond mere sound even if one is not, like the composer, deaf. In this music the law of nature is succeeded by the law of the supersensible. Liszt typically invokes what he thinks of as the rhetoric of this model but he departs from the model’s substance in terms that fundamentally transform it. He grounds his ‘serious’ compositions not in dynamic or dialectical development but in continuous reiteration and transformation, each successive phase of which tends to incorporate the display of virtuoso technique more fully. This compositional difference reorients expressive value from the supersensible to the sensible, even the sensuous, even the merely sensory, and the associated dificulty invites apprehension not as a means but as an end. There is, though, nothing in this so simple as taking up dificulty ‘for its own sake’ or as an instrument of protocapitalist display. The point, rather, is that dificulty comes to provide the medium in which the animating force of the embodied subject may be realized, and then, eventually, must be realized, as dificulty by the end of the century has become a mandatory element of serious composition. Liszt’s predecessor in this, largely unrecognized at the time, was Schubert, whose habit it was to treat Beethoven’s dynamically oriented genres in reiteratively oriented ways. The paradigmatic example, and the work in which the culture of Romantic performance can be said to arise in nuce, is the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy, which Liszt arranged as a piano concerto. This continuous four-movement work was composed in 1822, probably as a response to the most dificult of Beethoven’s piano sonatas, the ‘Hammerklavier’ of 1818. The openings of the two pieces are remarkably similar (see Example 14.1). Both are fortissimo outbursts of raw repercussive energy, both make sure that the pianist literally has his hands full, and

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Example 14.1 Beethoven, opening of the ‘Hammerklavier’ Sonata and Schubert, opening of the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy (a) Beethoven

(b) Schubert

both close twice in succession on the same punchy core rhythm. Schubert seems bent on expanding the run-up to that close by channeling the force of Beethoven’s wide opening leaps into the pianist’s concentrated attacks on a single unchanging sonority. Schubert’s version reorients the expressive emphasis from action to feeling, a change signaled clearly enough in the difference between Beethoven’s tempo marking, a bare Allegro, and Schubert’s Allegro con fuoco ma non troppo— the non troppo referring to the tempo, not the ieriness. At this point in the orally delivered paper from which this chapter developed, I played the openings of the ‘Hammerklavier’ and the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy from a CD and promised to identify the pianist later. The pertinence of this seemingly inconsequential fact will become clear before we are done. Each movement of the Fantasy evolves via the reiteration of a single repercussive motive, that is, one that consists primarily of the repetition of a single

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note or chord. The repetition, rather than any diversiication it leads to, is the main vehicle of expression, and the fantasy takes this feature of its melodic proile as the deining character of its overall form. The reiterative material is wilfully static and neutral, or continuously threatens to become so. Its expressive value can come only via, perhaps only from, the performer’s embodied sensibility. What touches the listener is the pianist’s touch on the keys. In other words, the repercussive igure – actually a small family of igures – articulates the zero degree of melody. It troubles the idea of an expressivity immanent to melody by peeling away the immanence but not the expressivity. It registers as directly as possible the address of the performer’s body, and the subjectivity assumed to impel the body, to the instrument. The work’s insistence on this repercussion has – well, repercussions, in that it transfers the immediate effect of subjective embodiment to the considerable dificulty involved in performing the work throughout its duration of some twenty-one minutes. The music thus disengages dificulty from any motive presumed to be more primary. It renders dificulty autonomous, a peer on the one hand of the Hegelian law of the supersensible implicit in Beethoven and, on the other hand, of the law of nature as expressed in counterpoint. The latter is the source of dificulty in Bach’s keyboard music, a context relevant here not only because Bach’s fugues in particular were contemporaneous teaching tools but also because the inale of the Fantasy explicitly invokes them along with their offspring in Beethoven. The ‘Hammerklavier’ inale is a fugue; the inale of the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy begins as a fugue. It does not stay that way. The inale of the Fantasy dissolves the complexity of fugue into the dificulty of virtuosity. It begins with almost ostentatious rigor, handing over the most insistent of its repercussive igures to the discipline of contrapuntal repetition. But as the movement proceeds its originating polyphony gives way to a virtuoso play of hands. Variants of the primary motive (a fugue subject no more) leap between right hand and left hand, high treble and low bass, at full volume and at high speed. The result is a fragmentation or multiplication of voices portending the centripetal energy of (future) virtuosity and of the historical modes of subjectivity associated with it. This outcome is almost foreordained, or so the fugue subject seems to proclaim. The subject articulates itself around a series of four syncopated accents, the irst two marked forzando. It also combines its reiterative insistence with wide leaps, so that each statement of it seems to unfold on two planes of action at once. The incorporation of force and self-division is alien to both the spirit and the instrumental technology of Bachian counterpoint. And I use the term incorporation advisedly; Schubert’s fugue subject is distinctly corporeal and it marks the contrapuntal texture as a ield of bodily effort and virtuoso energy. Forzando indeed. The dissolution of fugue at the close of the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy can be taken as a portent in a further sense. Fugue appears virtually not at all in the piano music of either Liszt or Chopin, even though Chopin’s textures possess a well-attested

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contrapuntal integrity. As the idea of fugue become increasingly associated with intellectual rigor and pure musicianship, as represented by the concert fugues of Mendelssohn and Schumann (little-played) and Brahms’s Variations and Fugue on a Theme by Handel, the impulse found in Beethoven and Schubert to create a muscular braininess via fugue gives way to a search for pianistic textures that more directly relect bodily effort and the body’s speciic address to the instrument. Counterpoint becomes less a matter of melodic saturation than an expression of the virtuoso’s ability to span the keyboard nimbly and to sustain multiple levels of sonority either concurrently or in rapid alternation. Complexity of line yields to juxtapositions of mass.

Piano Culture (I): The Virtuoso and the Body Between Liszt and Schubert two enormous changes altered the ield and function of virtuoso performance. The instrument for which Liszt was writing was far stronger and more sonorous than Schubert’s (or Beethoven’s) and Liszt was writing with the expectation of performing charismatically, as a star, for an audience intent upon consuming his performance as well as the music performed. The purpose of such a performance was to create a sensation by creating sensation; in that respect it helped deine and perpetuate a cultural trend outlined sharply by Adorno: ‘In Locke [sensation] means simple, direct, perception, the opposite of relection. It then became the great Unknown, and inally the arouser of masses, shock as a consumer commodity. To still be able to perceive anything at all, regardless of its quality, replaces happiness’.3 The virtuoso body is like a battery charged with the shock of the great unknown; the function of the virtuoso performance is massive discharge – a public transference of cathexis, understood to pass from the interior of the virtuoso to the interior of the audience. The signs of this condition, also largely invented by Liszt, are the gestures that dramatize extremes of energy and exertion and that end with the performer depleted, sustained at the end only by the rapturous applause of the audience of whom he is the humble servant. The body of the Lisztian virtuoso pushes its capacity to channel overwhelming force to the outer limit of possibility, and in that way it becomes the material counterpart of the nearly impossible music that the virtuoso produces. Sensuous form and the idea, the terms of Hegelian embodiment, shatter and divide in the process; that breakup is the performative aim of virtuosity. In relation to the audience, the virtuoso performer becomes the representative of what Adorno would call the social totality and Lacan the big Other. The virtuoso performance becomes a subjective self-immolation through which the virtuoso disseminates the favours of the whole or the Other to the assembled throng. The virtuoso’s self-sacriice, which is also his self-aggrandizement, allows the audience in some degree to possess the performer by focusing on bodily part3

Adorno (2005), p. 236.

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objects and thus to take possession of the Other’s pleasure. Virtuosity is a thorn in the lesh. The virtuoso grasps this thorn and calls the result pleasure; the audience, observing this, pretends to see or hear only the musical rose held out to it. The bouquets that audiences in the nineteenth century sometimes tossed on stage were actually a return gift. The tradition of virtuosity depends on this bodily logic, as its creator was well aware. In the glory days of his touring career, Liszt tended to rely on three props, all intimately connected to the body: his costume, which was notably distinguished and fetching; his gloves, which he would ostentatiously toss on the loor before beginning to play, leaving them to be claimed later as souvenirs; and his hair, which was worn long and shaken this way and that during the performance. (It was really Liszt, father of ‘longhair’ music, who invented Liberace). One well-known result was that Liszt became a cultural icon in the two contradictory areas of desire and aggression, an embodiment of Freudian dualism before its time. As a model of sexual prowess, Liszt was swooned over by female fans. For some observers, he eroticized his relation to the keyboard too. At the same time he was a paragon of heroic, aggressive masculinity, ‘defeating’ both challenging scores and the big, impressive machines that supplied him with a battleield: the pianos whose strings he broke and whose keys he was said to make bleed. The lover-virtuoso sacriices his libidinal forces, lets them be drained off (vampiristically sucked out, to adopt an image popular at the time) by the piano, which stands as a surrogate for each of the erotically invested listeners, of both sexes, who are his interlocutors. The ighter-virtuoso becomes a monster, a machinebody that sacriices every social tie on behalf of a victory against impossible odds. In a certain sense, the virtuoso who triumphs in every performance always does so posthumously; the virtuoso’s performance is a rehearsal of ennobling death.4 The virtuoso pianist is a thus a counter-sadist as a high male voice is a countertenor: he suffers the pleasure of the Other in order to inlict it pleasurably on the listener. Like the sadist as theorized by Jacques Lacan, the virtuoso is the instrument of the Other’s pleasure, which he alone knows.5 But his suffering-assadism has the effect of transferring the Other’s power, Prometheus-like, to the audience. The result is paradoxical, not to say confounding: the audience becomes a material embodiment of social force as such but only insofar as its members surrender themselves unconditionally to the virtuoso’s transiguring presence. This surrender characteristically expresses itself in a display of self-abnegation, 4 On the military aspect of Liszt’s performances, see Gooley (2004), pp. 78–116; on the erotic, see Kramer (2001), pp. 82–6 and, with speciic reference to fan fetishism, pp. 90–92. Both aspects tend to blur at the extremes into the demonic mode that, musically speaking, is essentially Liszt’s invention; for a comprehensive account see Scott (2003), pp. 128–54. 5 See Lacan (2006) pp. 645–70. As Zizek (2006) puts it, ‘The [Sadian] executioner always works for the Other’s jouissance and not his own. He thus becomes an instrument solely of the will of the Other […] whose pure form is that of the voice of the Law’, p. 121.

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from abject worship to screaming, shouting, weeping and yielding to the headless intimacy of a milling crowd. Here once again the contrast between the Lisztian norm and its Chopinesque shadow is instructive. The Chopin persona is immune to the voracity of the audience because he is already consumed before he plays a note. The big Other can do nothing more to him; his playing is posthumous in advance of his death. Chopin’s body in particular – its frailty a constant topic of observation at the time – was not a plausible source of either the power or the tenderness that emanated from it, so that it, he, represented to many of his contemporaries a pure triumph of the spirit, invulnerable to the charges of vulgarity that dog the Lisztian tradition. Where the Lisztian virtuoso uses unwonted ability and sensitivity to ‘transcend’ the sphere of mechanical effort, the Chopin persona possesses a talent, a gift, that he uses only with reticence, wary of compromising a reinement so ine that it could barely stand even to make an effort, even for a moment. Where the Lisztian virtuoso aggressively shows himself, the Chopin persona reluctantly allows himself to be seen. But it is the Lisztian model, with its repertoire grounded in Beethoven and to a lesser degree in Schubert, composers of little interest to Chopin, which prevails. It prevails, perhaps, not in spite but because of its ‘vulgar’ showmanship. The question slowly being broached here is that of ecstatic fandom, which is the social outcome – Adorno would doubtless call it the industrial product – of Romantic performance. Piano Culture (II): Fandom and Festivity Ecstatic fandom comes about when the totality represented by the star, whether as the true, as Hegel claimed, or the false, as Adorno countered, surrenders its gifts to the spectators, who may then share in the consumption of the star’s charisma. In this mock-sacramental process, spectatorship ignites into participation through the symbolic fragmentation of the star’s person into a form or forms that embody the gift of self – a voice quality, bodily trait, item of clothing, style of dress or hair, a turn of phrase, a signature tune, and so on. This treasured item, call it a relic, a fetish, or the objet petit a as you like, occurs or recurs during the performance with quasi-ritual force. The incitement of ecstatic fandom takes the form of a potlatch in which what is expended to excess is symbolic capital. The performer gives more than his all to the audience in return for unlimited adoration; the fact that this exchange is an echo of a disavowed economic counterpart (the event is carefully promoted and stage-managed; the audience pays for the gifts it receives) not only fails to undermine but actually enhances the ritual magic of the event. Indeed, if we assume that the nineteenth century was increasingly characterized by the experience of expropriated labour – the de-subjectifying recognition described variously by both Hegel and Marx that one’s own work is (and always was) owned by another, or by

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the Other – then the economics of virtuosity represents a fantasy of expropriation without loss. Both the virtuoso and the fan get back more than they give, even though they give without limit. In virtuosity, sacriice is regenerative. In ecstatic fandom, anything is worth everything. The genealogy of this condition may be traced to premodern festive practices in which, in effect, everyone is both the virtuoso and the fan. This conception of the festival derives from Rousseau, for whom, according to Jean Starobinski, ‘The exaltation of the collective festival has the same structure as the general will of The Social Contract. The description of public joy gives us the lyrical aspect of the general will: it is the aspect that it assumes in its Sunday best’.6 Note that what assumes its Sunday best is the general will, not the public; the general will relaxes its sovereignty and the public gathers in a festive spirit to participate in what Bakhtin, with carnival in mind, characterized as an anti-theatrical performance that ‘does not know footlights’. The festivity ‘does not acknowledge any difference between actors and spectators. Footlights would destroy a carnival, as the absence of footlights would destroy a theatrical performance’.7 Rousseau envisions the same afirmative collapse between seeing and being: ‘Let the spectators become an entertainment to themselves; make them actors themselves; do it so that each sees and loves himself in the others’.8 Ecstatic fandom comes about a century later as and after a decisive break with this mode of collective, decentred narcissistic mirroring, or, to be more exact, as and after its recentring on the igure of the virtuoso-cynosure: the star.9 The scene of ecstatic fandom is the theatricalization of festive anarchy. The star personiies the general will as devoted or self-sacriicing gift-giver. The spectators entertain themselves by taking the gift as the occasion of a public joy in which all share. But the gift is not so much disseminated by the star as it is a symbolic dissemination of the star, through whose body and its appendages each spectator sees and loves himself. In Of Grammatology, Derrida links the exaltation of festival as Rousseau describes it with ‘the desire of making representation disappear, with all the meanings that converge in that word: delay and delegation, repetition of a present in its sign or concept, the proposition or opposition of a show, an object to be seen’.10 Derrida notes that festival so conceived speciically excludes play by suspending ‘the substitution of contents, the exchange of presences and absences, chance and absolute risk’.11 The festive entertainment is a secular or profane form of full presence. It is metaphysics brought down to earth and not ‘embodied’ in an abstract sense but given over to bodies in all their urges and appetites. 6 7 8 9 10 11

Quoted in Derrida (1976), p. 306. Bakhtin (1984), p. 7. Quoted in Derrida (1976), p. 307. For further discussion, see Kramer (2001), pp. 87–92. Derrida (1976), p. 306. Ibid., p. 307.

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Virtuoso performance is at one level a more regulated or disciplined version of festival; the discipline derives from the hierarchy created by making the star the object of theatrical spectacle. But at another level the difference is not a matter of reinement but of appropriation, even commodiication. Unlike the festival, the virtuoso performance is not tied to the calendar; performances come about not from observances but from production schedules. This independence goes hand in hand with a return of representation ‘with all the meanings that converge in that word’. But the return is vertiginous, which is precisely the point. The symbolic parcelling out of the star’s person reinstates play but it also transforms play into the very metaphysics that play ordinarily disturbs. Substitution becomes what it nominally displaces, metaphor becomes the truth that eludes it, and distance from the origin becomes the origin – though all only in the passing frenzy of fandom. The element of festivity persists in the transient and exceptional character of this metaphysics for all, this metaphysical free for all. In the consumption of the star by the fan the big Other undergoes a material metamorphosis. The conceptual understanding that play is the medium of différance remains in place but its action is suspended; it is simply not applied.

Beyond the Piano: The Virtuoso Body and its Vicissitudes This process, together with the role of music in it, takes different routes as the classical and popular traditions gradually separate by the early twentieth century and continue to do so more dramatically as the century proceeds. Classical music transfers the representation of the big Other from the composer-performer, for whom only the dificulty of the music matters, to the great composer whose music needs a great performer, for both of whom the quality of the music – so to speak its matter – is what matters. The link to showmanship is broken, but only to be recreated in a more rareied form as aesthetic substance. The popular tradition transfers the same personiication from the composer-performer to the performer alone, shifting the composer to a position of virtual anonymity, even when the performer is in fact still the composer. The classical instance produces the ideal image of the musical work and treats it, on the occasion of performance, as the equivalent to the star’s disseminated body. The popular instance absorbs the music, which has a form of ideal identity but does not constitute a ‘work’, into the body – by which in both cases I mean the symbolic body, the fragmented and disseminated form demanded by the festival of spectatorship. This duality makes a cultural institution of the antithesis between the performance of art and art as performance. On the one hand there is the composed art music that mandates its own reproduction in the form of musical works yet still encourages charismatic performers who can rival the works they perform. On the other hand there are the various modes of popular music that foreground charismatic performance even though there exists an abundance of well-loved tunes, arrangements and recordings that acquire ‘compositional’ status. Each party

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to the quarrel both holds the other at arm’s length and steals from it without a moment’s scruple. The quarrel, not its resolution, is what counts. Something about what culture wants from music requires this quarrel, its excesses and vacillations, its energies of ardour and argument. But at the same time the growing ubiquity and easy reproducibility of all music over the past century have so diminished musical claims to charisma that these claims, which once depended only on ‘inimitable’ modes of performance, now have to be supplemented by a massive technical and promotional apparatus. Virtuosity originated as a technique supplemental to amateur or even professional performance; now virtuosity itself requires the supplement of spectacle, marketing and the proliferation of media. Even so, this entire apparatus still tends to orbit around the charismatically invested body inaugurated by the virtuoso, or at least around the idolized iction of such a body and its magniied images. This symbolic body is in a sense more real than any real one. Earlier I recalled a promise made when reading the paper from which this chapter comes to an audience: after playing extracts from the ‘Wanderer’ Fantasy and the ‘Hammerklavier’ I pledged to identify the pianist ‘later’. But the truth is that there was no pianist. I had generated the extracts using music notation software. The music the audience heard was literally disembodied. The rationale for this bit of trickery was to point up the recognition that the embodied subjectivity required of Romantic performance is fundamentally ictional, despite the necessity in the era of its origin for a real body at the keyboard. To make a sensation required a construction. The body of the Romantic performer is not so much lived as it is inhabited, impersonated. Yet this very iction is more real than one might suppose. My little trick set the audience up to let the computergenerated performance pass a Turing test it would probably otherwise have failed. I referred to a pianist, the audience had no reason to doubt me, and so what they heard, as they told me afterward, was a pianist. That ‘pianist’ was a phantom, but it was not just any phantom. It was the phantom of any and every virtuoso performance, the simulacrum of the living body that must show, and expend, itself in order for the effect of virtuosity to take hold. With the virtuoso out of sight, any listener can supply that simulacrum in the person of the body that listens. One need only allow the listening body to be pleasurably appropriated by the music. Someone or something else can play for us, and even though no one else can listen for us, we can listen right out of ourselves. Such listening becomes a mode of projection, a ventriloquism of self. The Romantic culture of performance introduces a mode of embodiment that disengages the body – everybody’s body – from its ‘own’ identity, just as the composition of virtuoso scores disengages dificulty from the sovereignty of expression. If the body of the Romantic virtuoso survives as a phantasm in the age of the music’s digital reproducibility, that is because it was never anything else.

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References Adorno, Theodor W. (2005) Minima Moralia: Relections on a Damaged Life, trans. E.F.N. Jephcott (London: Verso). Bakhtin, Mikhail (1984) Rabelais and his World, trans. Hélène Iswolksy (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press). Derrida, Jacques (1976) Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press). Gooley, Dana (2004) The Virtuoso Liszt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press). Kramer, Lawrence (2001) Musical Meaning: Toward a Critical History (Berkeley: University of California Press). Lacan, Jacques (2006) Écrits, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: Norton). Leppert, Richard (2001) ‘Cultural Contradiction, Idolatry, and the Piano Virtuoso: Franz Liszt’, in James Parakilas (ed.) Piano Roles: A New History of the Piano (New Haven: Yale University Press), pp. 200–223. Parakilas, James (2001) Piano Roles: A New History of the Piano (New Haven: Yale University Press), Scott, Derek (2003) From the Erotic to the Demonic: On Critical Musicology (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Zizek, Slavoj (2006) Interrogating the Real, ed. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens (New York: Routledge).

Epilogue Sheila Whiteley

There is no doubt that Derek Scott’s relationship with music takes centre-stage in this book, and rightly so. His inluence on scholarship, especially his critical perspectives, have changed the way in which we understand music’s sociocultural context. What makes Derek’s writing so relective is its depth, breadth and, above all, its readability – academics and students alike can understand and learn so much, whether this be the fantasies surrounding the erotic and demonic, or the café societies and cabarets of London, New York, Paris and Vienna. Then there’s his wit, and for me this is what gives his writing, and indeed his lectures, that identiiable ingerprint. There’s no doubt that Derek always sees the irony and humour lurking beneath the surface, a probable legacy of his love of music-hall songs and the performative antics of its Edwardian stars. And so to anecdotal interlude 1: Derek’s inaugural lecture as Professor of Music at Salford University. It was, as they say, the day when profound verbiage was replaced by the sight of Derek, seated at Peel Hall’s grand piano, giving his rendition of ‘My Old Man (said Follow the Van)’ and other raucous music hall songs. I am tempted to recollect that there was also Amy Woodforde-Finden’s Edwardian love song, ‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar’, but I may well be confusing his performance with the collection I still have, and enjoy: a cassette of Derek singing Edwardian and Victorian Parlour Songs, which, in turn, takes me back in time to Open University Summer Schools and the (in)famous Victorian evenings that graced A102’s Arts Foundation Course. Happy days and happy memories of friends and students past. As a musicologist, Derek’s role as general editor for Ashgate’s Popular and Folk Music Series gave both established academics and those less familiar with the mysterious interface between research and publishing the boost in conidence needed during those heady years of the 1990s when popular musicology irst made an impact on the music scene. Looking now at what might be termed the Ashgate Stable, it is possible to see just how much we have all beneited from his commitment and energy. We have become a truly international body of academics, and it is especially gratifying to see a third generation (our academic grandchildren, if you like) busy not only in universities across the globe, but also continuing to develop those arguments and ideas that are evident in the critical and theoretical approaches most relevant to contemporary society and its relationship to music. As Derek writes in his preface to the Ashgate books, ‘the emphasis has shifted to cultural context, reception and subject position. Together these have conspired to eat away at the status of canonical composers and categories of high and low

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in music […]. It is designed to embrace the world’s popular music from Acid Jazz to Zydeco, whether high tech or low tech, commercial or non-commercial, contemporary or traditional.’1 Undoubtedly, it is due to Derek’s vision as much as commissioning editor Heidi Bishop’s conidence in the burgeoning series that Ashgate is today recognized as being at the forefront of publishers with an interest in popular music, and for that ‘we are all truly grateful’ (as our childhood grace goes!). This, of course, reminds me of our times together at Salford University. And so to anecdotal interlude 2: the battles we had (as Scully and Mulder in The X-Files) in confronting the Establishment and inding the necessary support for our ledgling doctoral students. Research dissertations were acceptable, albeit a few quizzical eyebrows were raised when our students irst presented their indings on heavy metal, punk, Northern Soul, the anti-psychiatry movement, and the inluence of Norwegian folk music on the development of jazz – to cite but a few examples. I myself have been personally written up in an otherwise illustrious music journal as ‘an academic in psychedelic loon pants’, and with Derek fronting the academic worth of popular music as a founder member of the UK Critical Musicology Group, we knew all too well the prejudice that existed. As such, our Thursday research seminars and the success of our students will always be a highlight of both our academic careers, and an important part of what might be called ‘The Salford Experience’. For those of us who have had the pleasure of working with Derek, it is the way in which his thoughts are always tempered with a somewhat quizzical wit that has been most important. As we are all aware, universities (like life itself) are all too often governed by notions of being a business enterprise; spreadsheets and budgets loom all too large in an academic’s life. Managing to stay aloat and, more important, to see the humour in otherwise grim management retreats is, then, no mean feat, but as we all know, a raised eyebrow from Derek could work wonders. Putting students irst is not always that straightforward, yet during our years together at Salford (in total a combined eighteen I reckon) we were able to shape both undergraduate and postgraduate courses in a way that both relected and developed what we believed to be important, with Derek involved not simply in the more recognizably academic ields of composition and dissertation studies, but also leading an important discussion on how to assess popular music performance. It is not so very long ago that punk was seen as somehow less worthy than jazz or, indeed, classical repertoire, in terms of musical performance, and Derek’s lead here rightly took the emphasis away from the normative by insisting that each genre had its own performing and musical characteristics and that it was these that we were assessing. And so to anecdotal interlude 3, which has to be Derek’s television appearance when, with spiked tin helmet and an appropriate Prussian swagger, he performed on Channel 4’s Television production Three Kings at War. Those who know Derek and have followed his professional career as a composer and performer, will be 1

See for example, Stras (2010), p. xv.

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aware that his personality and devilish sense of humour can lift the mundane and provide new insights into genres as diverse as drawing-room ballads, operetta and music theatre. Then, of course, there is his enthusiasm for the bagpipe, which, we understand, greets each New Year on the lonely hillside surrounding his home town, Todmorden. Love, then, to Derek, and an undoubted admiration for all that he has achieved. Yet, as we know all too well, ‘intellectuals, on the whole, are not used to thinking of the ‘capacity to admire’ as a valuable human quality; indeed so profound are our modern prejudices against anything smacking of enthusiasm or emotional excess, we are more likely to take such receptivity to others as a sign of moral and intellectual weakness’.2 There is no doubt that Derek’s work has opened up new and exciting possibilities for academics, researchers, students and performing musicians, and if my enthusiasm is a sign of moral and intellectual weakness, then so be it. After all, he has enriched so many of our lives, and as a friend and colleague, I would like to say ‘thank you’ – and here’s to a long and exciting future.

References Castle, Terry (1993) The Apparitional Lesbian: Female Homosexuality and Modern Culture (New York: Columbia University Press). Stras, Laurie (ed.) (2010) She’s So Fine: Relections on Whiteness, Femininity, Adolescence and Class in 1960s Music (Farnham: Ashgate).

2 Thanks to Martha Mockus, ‘Response’, for this quote from Terry Castle (1993), in Stras (2010), p. 235.

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Index

References to illustrations and music examples are in bold. Adorno, Theodor W. 3, 142, 143, 238 Aesthetic Theory 121 mediation concept 13 on music 121 Ady, Endre, ‘Blood and Gold’ 69 aesthetics relational 195 and virtuosity 130–31 affect and art 144 meanings 144 and postmodernism 145 affordances 211–12 deinition 211n17 African–American performance 14 Agamben, Giorgio, on image and gesture 118 Agawu, Koi 8–9 Altman, Rick 187, 189 Anderson, Benedict 183 Antokoletz, Elliott 63 Appadurai, Arjun 193 Arman, A.P.F. Accord Final 107, 107 Chopin’s Waterloo 107, 108 pianos, critique of 108 Armstrong, Louis 127 art and affect 144 as performance 242 art representation, Barthes on 112 Artôt, Desirée 84 Auber, D.-F.-E., Le Macon 82 auditory scene analysis 216 Auer, Leopold 84 Australia, musical culture 194 Bach, J.S., Sonata in G Minor for Solo Violin 146

Baily, John 53 Bakhtin, Mikhail 241 Balázs, Béla 69, 72 Bali, music education 51 ‘Barbie Doll’, Zulu clapping game, adaptation 45 Barthes, Roland 8 on art representation 112 on Schumann 120–21 on silence 153 The Neutral 153 Bartók, Béla Duke Bluebeard’s Castle 13 narrative themes 66, 67 polarities 66, 67 semantic levels 72 tonal functions 67 tonal map 71 tonal pitch space 66–72 tonality 66–7, 68–9, 70, 72 tonic axis in C 67 wives, musical key associations 69–70 musical analysis of 63 Beatles ‘Blackbird’, Sigur Rós’ ‘Heysatan’, comparison 151 ‘I want you (she’s so heavy)’ 222 Becker, Judith 210–11 Beethoven, Ludwig van 92, 112, 113, 114 allegorical signiicance 113, 115, 116, 117, 122 on deathbed 116 ‘Hammerklavier’ 235 ‘Wanderer Fantasy, comparison 235, 236–7, 236 representations of 114, 115, 115, 116 study 115

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symphonies, Schopenhauer on 117–18 Beijing opera, folk theory 199, 201 Bell, Mark 99, 100 Bellour, Raymond 153 Benjamin, Walter 142 Björk (Guðmundsdóttir) 12, 99 Homogenic 100 voice digitalization 99–100 Blake, George Henry 101 The Blue Nile band 12, 146, 149n40 body, the and music 108, 109–10, 122 and virtuosity 238–9, 242–3 Boney M 97 Boretz, Benjamin 202 theory of music 197–8 Born, Georgina 195 Bourdieu, Pierre 181 Bourriaud, Nicolas 195 Brahms, Johannes 132 Variations and Fugue on a Theme of Handel 238 Brazil, music education 50 Brazilian Music Schools 48 Brazilian Popular Music 48, 50 Bregman, Albert S. 216 British Isles, folk music 52 Bryson, Norman 113 Buchanan, Paul, ‘Because of Toledo’ cultural references 148–9 expressive meanings 146 jazz-style crooning 147, 149 mood 148 time signature changes 148 vocals 146–7 Bülow, Hans von 75, 84 Burke, Peter 22 Eyewitnessing 21 Calico, Joy 120 canon dismantling of 3–4 formation 75, 235 canonizing process, Helsinki 90–91 Carthy, Martin 162 castrato singers 232 Chion, Michel 153 Chopin, Frédéric, as Lisztian Other 234, 240

Cipriano de Rore, madrigal 29–34 gender issues 32, 34 music examples 31, 33 radicalism 30, 32 text 29–30 Citron, Marcia 3–4 Clarke, Eric 211, 212 classical music, Western 27, 28 dominance of 47–9 Cohn, Richard 63 community 182–3 and music genres 183–4 compositional structure, and performance 199–200 concerts, virtuoso 75 convention 184–7 deinition 185 as process in time 187 Cook, Nicholas 11 & Mark Everist, Rethinking Music 9 Cooper, David 13 craft labour, Veblen on 103 Cream, ‘Badge’ 222 critical musicology 2, 3, 125, 155 central concept 13 criticism of 8–9 development 5 manifesto 5–6, 140 origins of term 4 scope 5 Critical Musicology Group (UK) xix, 246 Critical Musicology journal 6n17 criticism, meanings 140, 142–3 crooners 96 cross-domain mapping 218 Cumming, Naomi 211 on Bach’s Sonata in G Minor for Solo Violin 146 on music 144 D major key, character of 69 Dahlhaus, Carl 194 d’Albert, Eugene 84 Danhauser, Josef, Ludwig van Beethoven on His Deathbed 116 de Ocampo, Stuart 24 Derrida, Jacques, Of Grammatology 241 Dicksee, Frank, A Reverie 111, 112

Index disaffected acoustic imaginary 12, 154 ‘Because of Toledo’ 146–9 ‘Heysatan’ 149–54 see also under Buchanan, Paul; Sigur Rós dream narratives, musical 111, 111 Dunbar-Hall, Peter 51 Dyer, Richard 144 Dylan, Bob 12 albums Another Side of Bob Dylan 176 The Freewheelin’ Bob Dylan 159, 164, 176 The Times They Are a-Changin’ 159, 164, 176 autobiography, Chronicles 160 blues music 160 inger picking 167 informality 159 regularly irregular metre 170–71 rhythmic irregularity data sources 161–2 elision 166–7 hypermetric structures 167–9 pause-like bars 162–7 signiicance 159–61 rhythmic proile 175–6 riffs 167–8, 172 songs ‘A hard rain’s a-gonna fall’ 159, 166, 168, 170, 176 ‘Baby let me follow you down’ 164 ‘Ballad in plain D’ 175 ‘Blowin’ in the wind’ 166, 169 ‘Boots of Spanish leather’ 164, 165, 170 ‘Chimes of freedom’ 169 ‘Corrina Corrina’ 167 ‘Dark eyes’ 164 ‘Don’t think twice its alright’ 164–5 ‘Fixin to die blues’ 167, 172 ‘Freight train blues’ 166, 175 ‘Girl from the north country’ 164 ‘Gospel plow’ 166 ‘Highway 51 blues’ 167, 172 ‘I shall be free’ 175 ‘I was young when I left home’ 175 ‘In my time of dyin’ 167 ‘It ain’t me babe’ 176

251 ‘Lay down your weary tune’ 173–4 ‘Mamma you been on my mind’ 170 ‘Masters of war’ 168 ‘Mr. Tambourine man’ 168 ‘My back pages’ 163, 169 ‘No more auction block’ 169 ‘Only a pawn in their game’ 175 ‘Pretty Peggey-O’ 166 ‘Restless farewell’ 175 ‘She’s no good’ 166 ‘Spanish Harlem incident’ 174 ‘Standing on the highway’ 171–2 ‘Talkin’ Bear Mountain massacre blues’ 171 ‘Talkin’ John Birch blues’ 171 ‘Talkin’ New York blues’ 166, 171 ‘The crossroads I’m standing at’ 171 ‘The lonesome death of Hattie Carol’ 168, 175 ‘The Times They Are a-Changin’ 165, 170, 176 ‘To Ramona’ 169, 175 ‘Tomorrow is a long time’ 173 ‘Who killed Davey Moore’ 175 ‘With God on our side’ 175, 176 ‘Young but daily growing’ 170 talking blues 171 variable pulse songs 174–5

Eco, Umberto, Kant and the Platypus 181 ecological perception 210, 211 psychology 211 Edwards, Jane 195 El Sistema programme, Venezuela 49 Emanuel, Nathan B. 84 symphonic soirées 91 embodied cognition 210–11, 212 and schemata 211 Endo, Yumiko 52 Erard & Co., Grand Pianoforte 101, 102–3, 102, 103 Ernst, Heinrich Wilhelm 79 ethnomusicology 5, 6, 8, 195, 196 Japan 197 perceived Western bias 197 Schenkerian analysis 198–9 Everist, Mark see Cook, Nicholas

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Fabbri, Franco 10 fandom, ecstatic 241, 242 Farian, Frank, ‘Baby, Do You Wanna Dance’ 97 Farrell, Bobby 97 Farrell, Gerry 203 The Feeling 12, 210 ‘Blue Piccadilly’ analysis 220–23 BALANCE schema 220 PATH schema 220 retreat/launch forward 223 semantic frame 221 ‘Helicopter’ 223–4 opening riff 224 ‘I want you now’ 213n27 analysis 214–20 backing vocals 216–17 harmonic outline 217 melodic/bass reduction of opening of chorus 219 melody 217–18 snare/bass balance 214 ‘Kettle’s On’ 225–6 chorus 226 piano timbre 225 ‘Never be lonely’ 223 ‘Rosé’ 223 Twelve Stops and Home 213 festival Derridean 241 Rousseauan 241 virtuosity as 242 Filipino maids, musical identity 52–3, 54 Fillmore, Charles 221 Finland iltama concert tradition 82 ‘nationalist musicology’ 86 voluntary associations, and education 88 see also Helsinki lamenco, as virtuosity 135 Flodin, Karl 91 folk music British Isles 52 Cypriot 46 Norwegian 246 Ford, Charles 5, 12 Forte, Allen 63

Frankfurt School, social theorists 142 Gade, Niels 90 Gay, Peter 113 Geertz, Clifford 141 gender 4 in Cipriano de Rore’s madrigal 32, 34 coding, and male falsetto voice 152 in music 5, 7, 8, 13 and musical identity 42 negotiations 36 roles 148, 149 studies 5 gesture and image 118 and music 121, 211 Ghana, music education 50–51 Ghys, Joseph 79 Gibson, James J. 211 Giddens, A., on identity 40n5, 42–3 globalization meaning 42 musical, resistance to 50 and musical identities 41–3 Greece, popular music 46 Green, Lucy 11 Guthrie, Woody 159 habitus concept 181, 182 Hall, Edward 215–16 Hall, Stuart 106 Hallé, Charles 75 Hampel, Sigmund Walter, Allegory on the Genius of Ludwig van Beethoven 112, 113, 114, 117 Hanslick, Eduard on performance 110 Vom Musikalisch-Schönen 109–10 harmony, and virtuosity 132 Harrop-Allin, S. 45–6 Hauser, Miska 79 Hawkins, Stan 140 Haydn, Joseph 92 Hayles, Katherine N. 152 Head, Matthew 205 Hegel, G.W.F. 118–19 Heile, Björn 201, 205 Helsinki

Index canonizing process 90–91 celebrity performers 79, 84 concert audiences, numbers 76 concert life development 77–8, 92–3 voluntary organizations 85–6 concert programmes 10 example 81–2 miscellany concerts 81–2, 83–4, 85 monstre concerts 85, 86 Music Society 89 music theatre 84 opera/operetta 84–5 Orchestral Society 86 people’s concert genre 86 content 88 popular concert genre 86 programme example 87 venues 87 population 85 soirée programme 82, 83 spa orchestras 78 symphony concerts (1847–93), nonliving composers 90–91, 90 Symphony Society 89 theatre companies 84 orchestras 80–83 Hennion, Antoine 10 Henry, Thomas, Baron Foley of Kidderminster 101 Hindostannie air 11, 203–4, 206 authenticity 204–5 hip-hop, Palestinian 195 Hoechle, Johann Baptist, Beethoven’s Study in the Schwarzspanierhaus 115 Holly, Buddy, ‘Words of Love’ 96 Hooker, John Lee 167 Hopkins, Pandora 200 Horkheimer, Max 143 ‘Traditional and Critical Theory’ 142 Horn, Charles Edward 205 Hrimaly, Bohuslav 84 IASPM (International Association for the Study of Popular Music) 190 ideal-self, and identity 43 identity

253

Giddens on 40n5, 42–3 and ideal-self 43 see also musical identities iltama concert tradition, Finland 82 image, and gesture 118 improvisation 14 and virtuosity 128 intercultural analysis 11, 200, 205, 206 interculture 194 Isaye, Eugène 84 Iván Waldbauer 63 Jackendoff, Ray 62 Jameson, Frederic 145 Japan ethnomusicology 197 music education 52 Japanese Musicological Society 196 Järnefelt, Armas 91 jazz 14–15 and performance 136 and virtuosity 136–7 Johnson, Mark 211, 212 on schemata 213–14 Johnson, Robert 167 ‘Preachin’ blues’ 172 Kabul, National Institute of Music 49 Kagel, Maurico, Die Stücke der Windrose für Salonorchester 200–201, 205 Kajanus, Robert 86, 88 symphonic concerts 91, 92 Kalevala 82 Kant, Immanuel, Critique of Pure Reason 142 Kárpáti, János 63 Keil, Charles 211 Kerman, Joseph 2, 4, 140 Khalifas, musical identity 53, 54 Khnopff, Fernand, Listening to Schumann 119–20, 119 Kok, Roe-Min, music exam system, personal narrative 47–8 Koto music, Loeb 198 Kramer, Lawrence 8, 11, 61, 62, 141, 145 Interpreting Music 4–5 Krohn, Ilmari 91 Kurkela, Vesa 10

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Lacan, Jacques 239 Lakoff, George 181, 211 Lalo, Edouard, Symphonie espagnole 92 Lam, Joseph 201, 202 Laub, Ferdinand 84 Leafstedt, Carl S. 66 on Bártok’s tonality 68–9 learning, and musical identities 40–41 Lendvai, Ernő 63, 64, 66 Bartok’s tonality 67–8, 70 Parsifal analysis 68 Leppert, Richard 8, 10 Lerdahl, Fred Tonal Pitch Space 61, 64 tonal pitch space 64–5 Levitin, Daniel 181, 186 Lewis, David K. 184, 185, 186 Lewis, Jerry Lee 96 Lidov, David 211 Lind, Jenny 79 Liszt, Franz cultural icon 239 piano virtuosity 233, 238, 239–40 Schumann’s attitude to 130–31 Tannhäuser Overture, piano transcription 234–5 ‘Wanderer Fantasy’, arrangement 235 Locke, Ralph 194 Loeb, David, Koto music study 198 Love, Courtney 34 Low Fequency Oscillator (LFO) 99 Lowe, Bethany 199–200 McClary, Susan 12, 140 Feminine Endings 7 McDonald, David 195 Madonna Drowned World Tour 35 ‘What it feels like for a girl’ 34–7 ilmed interpretations 35 gender prerogatives, overturning of 35 major/minor key contrast Beethoven’s music 24 Schubert’s String Quartet in G Major 23, 24 Meissner, August 81 melody, cantabile 232

MIDI keyboard 98 Milli Vanilli 97 miscellany concerts, Helsinki 81–2, 83–4, 85 Mitchell, Joni 161 Modernism, aesthetic 106–7 Mok, On-Nie Annie 52, 53 Monson, Ingrid 194–5 monstre concerts, Helsinki 85, 86 Moore, Alan 4, 5, 12 Morris, Charles, Signs, Language and Behaviour 62 Morrison, Charles 64 Mozart, W.A., Don Juan 82 Mulvey, Laura 153–4 Death 24x a Second: Stillness and the Moving Image 154 on silence 154 music acoustic, vs. electriication 145 Adorno on 121 and the body 108, 109–10, 122 classical/popular, binary divide 5 and crying 121 and cultural Otherness 15 Cumming on 144 feeling 210n7 gender issues 5, 7, 8, 13 and gesture 121, 211 narrative role 62 Schopenhauer on 117 and the soul 118–19 universals 198, 199 see also world music music education 55 Bali 51 Brazil 50 Ghana 50–51 Japan 52 localization policies 50–52 music genres and community 183–4 deinition 188 naming of 187, 188 origins 189–90 resemblances 186 semiotic approach 182 use of term 179–80 music hall style 16

Index music learning 40–41 diversity 41 and musical identities 55 Music Society, Helsinki 89 music therapy 195 musical culture, Australia 194 musical excess, and virtuosity 10, 11, 130, 231–2 musical genre 10–11, 16 use of term 179–80 musical heritage 16 musical identities 11, 51–2 diasporic 52–4 Filipino maids, in Hong Kong 52–3, 54 formation 39–40 children’s play 44–5 complexities 54 and gender 42 and globalization 41–3 Greek children 46 group level 42 individual level 42–3 Khalifas 53, 54 and learning 40–41 and music learning 55 as self-afirmation 43–4 South African children 44–6 variability 40, 54 musical ideology, Scott on 6–7, 18 musical performance 10, 11 birth of 231 and displacement of voice 232 Musical Quarterly 3 musical understanding, approaches 61–2 musicology new approaches 2 see also critical musicology; popular musicology; relational musicology National Institute of Music, Kabul 49 Nattiez, Jean-Jacques 61–2 Negus, Keith 167–8 Neisser, Ulrich 213 new musicology see critical musicology Ngai, Sianne 144 Nüll, Edwin von der 63 Nyerges, Anton 69

255

Offenbach, Jacques La Belle Helene 81 Tales of Hoffmann, virtuosity 129–30 opera, and virtuosity 133–4 Pacius, Fredrik 77, 78, 89 ‘paraphonia’ 95 Patton, Charlie 167 Peel, John 159 performance African–American 14 of art 242 and compositional structure 199–200 Hanslick on 110 and jazz 136 meanings 125n5 and virtuosity 125, 126, 231, 238, 243 see also virtuosity persona, and portraits 113–14 Petersen, Peter 63 phenomenology 141–2 pianos ascendancy of 232 Erard’s Grand Pianoforte 101, 102, 102 as conspicuous consumption 105 decorative materials 105 dominance of surroundings 105 marquetry on lid 103–4, 103 as high-caste furniture 101, 102 as machines 234 square 105, 106 massiveness 105 technological development 233 Pieridou-Skoutella, Avra 46 popular musicology 141n15, 245–6 deinition 6n16 Popular Musicology Online 6n17 popular song, spatial location 209 theory 210–11 portraits, and persona 113–14 postmodernism, and affect 145 Presley, Elvis 96, 97 proxemics 215–16 qin music 11, 201, 202 Qureshi, Regula 196, 206 Rahn, Jay 198

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Critical Musicological Relections

A Theory for All Music 197 Ravel, Maurice 132 Reisenauer, Alfred 84 relational musicology 11, 194, 206 example 199 scope 195 reverie 111–22 Richardson, John 12–13 Ricoeur, Paul 143, 209 Ridley, Aaron 196 Rinck, Mike 213 Roemer, Anna 79 Romberg, Bernhard 90 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, The Social Contract 241 Royal Schools of Music, Associated Board 48 Rubinstein, Anton 84 First Symphony 91 Rubinstein, Arthur 131 Rumsey, Francis 216 Ryle, Gilbert 200 Saint-Saëns, Camille, Cello Concerto 91 Sarasate, Pablo 84 Sarjala, Jukka 76 Sauer, Emil 84 Schafer, R. Murray 95 Schantz, Filip von 80, 81, 87 Kullervo overture 82 schemata deinition 213–14 image 213, 214 PATH schema 218 use 214 musical 181–2 Schenkerian analysis 200 ethnomusicology 198–9 example 201 uses 202 ‘schizophonia’ 95, 96 Schmidt, Patricia 212n24 Schopenhauer, Arthur on the Beethoven symphony 117–18 on music 117 Schubart, C.F.D., Ideen zu einer Ästhetik der Tonkunst 69 Schubert, Franz 92

String Quartet in G Major 23–9 critique of Enlightenment values 24, 28, 29 major/minor key contrast 23, 24, 27 music examples 23, 25, 26, 27, 28 ‘Wanderer Fantasy’, ‘Hammerklavier’, comparison 235, 236–7, 236 Schumann, Clara 75 Schumann, Robert attitude to Liszt 130–31 Barthes on 120–21 Schutz, Alfred, ‘Making music together’ 195 score, complexity 232 Scott, Derek 5, 40, 73, 75, 125, 139, 205 music-hall songs, love of 245 on musical ideology 6–7, 18 publications From the Erotic to the Demonic 6, 231 Music, Culture, and Society (editor) 13 ‘Music and Sociology for the 1990s’ 3 Sounds of the Metropolis 15, 17 reminiscences about 245–7 Sculthorpe, Peter, Sun Music 194 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 142, 144 Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity 143 Sells, Dan Gillespie 12, 215, 216, 217, 220, 221, 222, 225 semantic frames 221 semantics, musical 62 Servais, Adrien-François 79 Sibelius, Jean 91 Sigur Rós 12 ‘Heysatan’ 149–54 Beatles’ ‘Blackbird’, comparison 151 chord strikes 150 corporeality 151 countertenor voice 152 environmental sounds 151 hymnal quality 150 silences 149, 152–3 statues 150 music, media misuse of 155 silence Barthes on 153

Index in ‘Heysatan’ 149, 152–3 Mulvey on 154 Slobin, Mark 194 ‘Micromusics of the West’ 193 Somfai, Lásló 63 song see popular song sound 11–12 digitalization 98 human subject, separation 97–8 and knowledge 22 repetition of 98–9 tone, distinction 96 sound recording, and the voice 96–7 Spohr, Louis 77 Starobinski, Jean 241 Stein, Theodor 79 Stendhal, Life of Rossini 121 Stock, Jonathan 198–9, 200, 202, 206 on the Beijing opera 199, 201 Sweeney-Turner, Steve 6n6 Symphony Society, Helsinki 89 Talmy, Leonard 224 Tchaikovsky, Peter, Second Symphony 92 Tilens, Johannes, Apollo and the Muses 104, 104 Tomkins, Silvan 145 tonal pitch space 64–5 in Duke Bluebeard’s Castle 66–72 tone 11–12 cultural moulding of 96 literary 144 sound, distinction 96 Trebelli, Zelia 84 Turner, Mark 226 van Orman Quine, Willard 185 Varley, Gez 99 Veblen, Thorstein 104 on craft labour 103 Venezuela, El Sistema programme 49 Vieuxtemps, Henri 79 concert programme 80 Variations burlesques sur ‘Yankee Doodle’ 80 virtuosity and aesthetics 130–31

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approaches 10 and the body 238–9, 242–3 containment of 134–5 economics of 240–41 examples 129 as festival 242 lamenco as 135 and harmony 132 and improvisation 128 indeinability 127 instrumental 130 and jazz 136–7 meanings 126 and musical excess 10, 11, 130, 231–2 and opera 133–4 paradox 128 and performance 125, 126, 231, 238, 243 piano, Liszt 233, 238, 239–40 Tales of Hoffmann 129–30 see also performance voice digitalization, Björk 99–100 displacement of, and musical performance 232 male falsetto, and gender coding 152 and sound recording 96–7 Vollmer, Marra 79 Wagner, Richard, Parsifal Lendvai’s analysis 68 tonal trajectories 65 Waits, Tom, Frank’s Wild Years 147–8 Weber, Gottfried, Versuch einer geordneten Theorie der Tonsetzkunst 65 Weber, William 75, 86, 89 Wicke, Peter 11 Wieniawski, Henryk 84 Wiggins, Trevor 50 Wilhelmj, August 84 Wilson, Paul 63 The Music of Béla Bartók 72 Witzleben, Lawrence 196, 197 Wohllebe, Carl 79 world music 11, 50 Zbikowski, Lawrence 218 zither, Chinese 11