A different imagination

One of the reasons I was attracted to Cage's music at an early age is that he famously declared to have no feeling for harmony, a sentiment I recognize clearly in myself. A few years ago, I had a piano teacher who claimed that he could hear the tonal structures in big romantic symphonic works, a feat I find staggering. Despite many years of enthusiastic and studied involvement, I can't hear key changes or any of the other great harmonic movements that constitute nineteenth-century tonality as demonstrated by Schenker, Rosen, and numerous other well-respected musicologists. While this hasn't impaired my enjoyment of listening to music generally, I believe that my inability to hear the elements widely proclaimed to be the very essence of the music steered me to a music that didn't hold these values with as much importance.

Nicholas Cook starts his book Music, Imagination and Culture from the observation that the majority of listeners don't hear the formal structures of classical pieces, despite the near ubiquity of program notes and education that leads us in this direction. He spends considerable time providing evidence from ad hoc and formal academic psychological studies as well as his own experiences, many of which I lived as well. But rather than approach this discrepancy as a problem that needs to be solved, Cook finds that it is one of the defining attributes of musical culture.

Deep structure commentators often draw on language metaphors for music, divided into phrases and sentences, but the language comparison is rooted in production. Looking at reception, the comparison falls apart. The knowledge required to produce music is extremely complex, but generally irrelevant to the listening experience. Piano fingering is a superb examples of a detailed and deep musical competence that is completely unnecessary for a listener, completely essential for a pianist. More generally, the asymmetry between production and reception for music is "embodied in the very means by which musicians imagine sound as music" (85). An examples of non-musical imagination is the dreaded earworm, a piece of music that gets stuck in our head in an endless cycle of half-choruses and melodic fragments. Cook dissects these fairly well, showing that they aren't really complete pieces of music, just isolated fragments in a dream-like state. A musician has a whole other imagination portfolio, a multiplicity extending beyond simple technical matters and extending all the way to the deep structure so highly touted in theory and musical criticism.

At least within the context of western art music , the great stimulus for the musical imagination and the depositor of the deep structure is the score. But the surface details vary from one performer, or even from one performance, to the next. Every performance becomes an improvisation, a marked contrast from an electronic realization or a recording, which is the same every time. "A fluent performance means that the notational symbols are stripped off their burden of signification and then jettisoned" (129). This is especially true for chamber music, where the performers achieve a level of synchronicity that is absent from a complex orchestral composition, such as Stockhausen's Gruppen, where the individual performers have no innate sense of what role they play in the overall musical fabric.

The western art music culture tells us what's important, what to listen for, based from the musician's perspective, but doesn't account for the way people really listen to music. Cook calls the former 'musicological' listening ("whose purpose is the establishment of facts or the formulation of theories") to distinguish the 'musical' way, "listening to music for purposes of direct aesthetic gratification". Virtually all academic music psychology and perception research speaks to musicological listening, which we all do when we read a score along with a performance, or even listen to music in preparation for a review. Of a completely different order is the deep, immersive trance we get alone in our headphones. Although we engage in many types of listening, at best the musicological listening should enhance our musical listening, not substitute for it. This is why music appreciation classes don't have much success in teaching people to enjoy music. "To think that one can understand music in some abstract, symbolical sense that can be separated from such aesthetic participation is simply to misunderstand the whole nature of the enterprise" (186).

Placing the value of music on its abstract relationships as specified in the score does more than evade how people actually listen to music, it emphasizes notes, intervals and fancy chords as if they are more than notational conventions with no objective foundation in reality. Violinists and singers, unconstrained by the equal-tempered system, demonstrably diverge from the rigid tuning systems, simply based on what sounds right at the time. These unspecified intonational variations are what separate the good from the great, the mechanical from the human. The score is discarded, left behind as the music is created. The confusion arises between the rationalizations and the tools used for creation, and their inchoate effects, where the musical significance is found.

Music, Imagination and Culture is available from Amazon, as a paperback, for $74! Check your local university library instead. Thanks to the anonymous commenter way back when who recommended it.

Still more notation

The more time I spend looking at alternate musical notation, the more I come to Graham Collier's statement about jazz: all that matters is the performance. Notation always leaves something out, although classical musicologists might like to think otherwise. Recent entries around the blogosphere provide more evidence, or at least food for consideration.

Composer, educator and writer Kyle Gann had a crise de conscience a few weeks ago, publicly wondering why he persisted with blogging. Heartened by comments, he found that one reason to continue was to share a wealth of music that's not in general circulation and "whose score notation, if it exists at all, doesn't adequately represent it." This is a long post, with musical examples — both scores and mp3s — from Meredith Monk, Robert Ashley, Mikel Rouse, David First and Glenn Branca. Money quote:

Perhaps we can begin by de-fetishizing the printed score and admitting that it is only a tool, and not always a complete or even necessary tool, that it can sometimes be thrown away once the music exists.

One of the comments to this post calls the faith in notation "scriptism" and points out that it already represents the minority practice in contemporary music.

Meanwhile, over at the Rambler, Tim Rutherford-Johnson is engaged in a three-part round table discussion with members of the ELISION ensemble and associated composers (Liza Lim, Richard Barrett and Evan Johnson). Part one focuses on interpretation, and the participants present the their multiple perspectives. I especially liked Johnson's statement that the goal of composition is "to present a textured and bounded space for interpretation." I'm not terribly familiar with the ensemble or its composers — a cursory listen makes me think they incline towards more complex music than I usually like. Part two of the discussion aims at extra-musical influences and whether they foster the creation of a new program music; the ever-fascinating conceptual composer Peter Ablinger features heavily here. Part three went up this morning, dealing with Klaus K. Hübler and radical instrumentalism, but I haven't had time to digest this part yet. All worth reading.

Roots of interpretation

Jean-Jacques Nattiez's book Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music (available from Powells or Amazon) hypothesizes a musical work as a series of configurations, from composition to listening, in one of the most stimulating works I've read in some time.  It explicitly acknowledges a problem with music analysis that I have always felt intuitively, which is that very often the explanations that we get for new music don't seem very relevant toward understanding. How many times have I read that such-and-such a piece is based on a specific tone row? Am I supposed to hear the row as a 'theme' in the way that Beethoven uses the technique? Not likely. Am I supposed to hear inversions (retrograde and otherwise), or uses of the row in chords? Not very likely either. One thinks of the detailed documentation that Lev Koblyakov made of the compositional processes involved in Pierre Boulez' work Le marteau sans maître, which are not required to appreciate the beauty of the piece.

Instead of considering that an account of the compositional processes explains a piece of music, Nattiez distinguishes three distinct areas of concern in music analysis, what he calls the tripartite analysis: the process by which the music is composed, the musical work itself (which Nattiez identifies with the score because a realization of the score is already a kind of interpretation or analysis), and the process by which the music is perceived. Of course, being French, he must cultivate his jargon and create new words for the compositional and perceptual processes, but this is the cost of new ways of understanding. And my oversimplified explanation should not eclipse the nuances and subtleties that Nattiez evinces in his descriptions of the musical work.

One of the most fruitful suggestions from the separation of concerns for Nattiez' tripartite analysis is that multiple analyses are possible for a specific situation, and Nattiez spends some time in the final chapter covering some of the many analyses of Wagner's Tristan chord. Although Nattiez refuses to go to a complete relativism that would allow any possible explanation, he seeks to place an analysis in a larger schema that he calls a 'plot', a pre-established set of criteria that an analyst will use for guidance. Musicians perform the same operation. When I play Takemitsu's piano pieces, I have in mind the whole story that I have constructed in my mind for Takemitsu's place in music, and which I've outlined in previous posts. When I read Burt on Takemitsu, I may gain understanding about the compositional processes, but it is the perceptions that I have about Takemitsu that are more important. I don't hear the scale that he may have used in a particular composition, I hear the poetic effects and the colors.

Nattiez leaves out one very important process in musical understanding, which is the work a musician does in order to turn the musical score into an audible artifact. Traditional analysis doesn't necessarily translate into better performances, but often seems directed at creating better composers. A performer must not only make decisions about the meaning and intent of a musical work, but must be able to translate those decisions into sound. This is a different kind of work altogether from a scholarly analysis. Nattiez also glides fairly quickly over contemporary electronic works that exist only as recordings, saying that it 'would be easy enough to identify and describe the sound-objects that make up these works' — as a reviewer of various electronic works, let me respectfully disagree. An impartial description of an electronic recording is extraordinarily difficult if not impossible to make, and the examples that Nattiez adduces (such as the listening score for Ligeti's Artikulation) were all made with significant assistance and cooperation from the composer.

While I was reading Music and Discourse, the John Cage mailing list had a discussion about Atlas Eclipticalis, a work I've written about before. Various correspondents testified to a significant oral tradition around Cage's music that remains essentially undocumented. Daniel Wolf paraphrased composer Richard Winslow: "if you want to reproduce something precisely, transmit it orally; if you want to guarantee that something changes over time, write it down." While I somewhat reluctantly agree with Petr Kotik's assertion that all notated music must be learned by direct encounter (after all, I still take piano lessons), Cage's scores are tantalizing entry points to a unique perspective on sound and music. And frankly, it's not easy to find a teacher with a direct lineage back to Cage, in the way that my previous teacher traced her Bach lineage to Rosalyn Tureck. The ambiguity inherent in a Cage score is part of the attraction, and I feel compelled to deal with his music, and that of his successors, because even when I get it wrong, the effort still moves me closer to understanding and enlightenment. Nattiez illustrates some of the problems inherent in interpreting a score, the decisions a musician must make to realize music from the score, all while examining the assumptions that provide the unstated background for this sublime and mysterious activity.