it's not "all just music"

[calimac]

I attended a piano recital last night that included works calling for the pianist, or rather the person seated at the piano, to recite or half-sing texts by James Joyce and Oscar Wilde while tapping on the piano frame, lifting the lid over the keys and slamming it shut with a resonant bang (ouch!), or perforce playing a few notes.

This description being conveyed to B. afterwards, she immediately responded, "That's not music," and indeed it is not: to my ear it came across as an actor's recitations accompanied by additional sounds. The composers, or rather the persons who issued the instructions to do this, would say that any sounds can be music; and indeed the Joyce pieces were by John Cage, the man who elevated this declaration into an artistic principle.

But what they have actually proved is that the set of music is smaller than the set of organized sound, and they have demonstrated this by creating works that fall into the larger set but not the smaller.

This is not a criticism of the artistic achievement: even a whole 30 minutes of Wilde's letters from Reading Gaol (instructions by Frederic Rzewski) was a riveting experience. (Besides hitting the piano frame, Rzewski's performer also slaps various parts of his own body and honks a rubber horn - you know, the kind the likes of Harpo Marx used to carry; I'm blanking on its proper name).

Indeed, even early tape music, which makes patterns out of traffic noises and the sounds of people moving furniture around, can with sufficient creativity be successful as an art form, whether the art form be music or not. And I would far rather listen to an artistically imaginative work of that kind than to Webernian pontillism, which unquestionably is music - it consists of people playing conventional instruments in the conventional manner - but which adds up to nothing coherent, emotionally moving, or even interesting so far as I can hear. Cage and Rzewski have created art; it just demands to be listened to on its own terms, which are different terms than those of music.

The importance of recieving artistic works for what they are and not as something else, no matter how thin the line that separates the categories, even when the categories are subsets of the unquestionably musical, was brought home by the other half of the program, an essay in the evolutionary origin of jazz piano.

Short pieces by five composers were offered in chronological order, and it seemed to me abundantly clear that Louis Moreau Gottschalk and Scott Joplin are best heard as one type of music, call it "classical" to stretch a point, while Jelly Roll Morton and Art Tatum were writing something quite different, with James P. Johnson as the hinge point marking the creation of a new kind of music. Listen to jazz with classical ears and it will merely be annoying, the way pop songs usually are to opera ears (and vice versa), and many classical composers of the time did find early jazz very annoying.

Jazz requires different ears, which for the most part I don't have, though this evolutionary context was a useful lesson in showing me what someone like Tatum was up to, even though - alas - he sounds to me less like the original genius he undoubtably was than like the unwitting grandfather of a thousand lousy cocktail lounge pianists.

Comments

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

If I'm not mistaken, you and I have been having this argument for more than 20 years. Therefore I will state ritually, simply for the record, that from what you describe above, you clearly DID attend a music recital.

Maybe, as you describe in your last two paragraphs, it's a question of what ears you have. It appears to me, from what you describe, that in your definition you're insisting on 'melody," and only one definition of "melody" at that, while ignoring the other elements of music, such as pitch, tone, timbre, interval, rhythm, ensemble, subject, and harmony. I cannot join you, or apparently wild_patience, in your definition. Anyway, bla-de-bla, ritual statement, ground well covered, horse corpse beaten, done.

But I *am* sorry I missed this concert. (Naughty, naughty left leg, for keeping me at home!)

I wonder how you'd have classified Stockhausen's "Hymnen," which I heard last Sunday at the San Francisco Tape Music Festival.

The horn was probably a bulb horn, though everyplace I looked also classified it as a "Harpo horn." Talk about life imitating music art.

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

My apologies for overusing the word "describe" up there.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

All sounds have timbre; all combined sounds have ensemble; so that proves nothing. I have heard works that are pure rhythm; and they too do not strike me as music. I do not hold that music is melody only, but music = melody + harmony + rhythm, in the same way that science fiction = scientific advances + future settings + other genre conventions, and you can omit some of these things and still fall in the category, but the more you omit, and the more conspicuously you omit them, the less well such a label applies.

But the label put on the outer edges of organized sound is not that important. You can call it music if you want, but doing so tends to muddy the point that I consider essential, and that I'm underlining by making the distinction.

Which is that different types of music, and different types of "artistically organized sound" (whether they're music or not), must be listened to with different aesthetic expectations, different "ears" as I put it, or they will sound like failures at what they're not trying to be.

Fortunate I am that works like these (I've heard these specific Cage and Rzewski pieces before, though not in concert) immediately click for me, and switch my ears to the right position. For other works my ears don't switch by themselves, and I'm lost.

I can try to listen to these works as music, but if I do, they sound egregiously limited and unsuccessful. I could just as easily listen to an actor speaking Shakespeare as music, and there is such a thing as the music of speaking poetry, but how much one misses if one insists on looking at it that way! Better to not call Cage & Rzewski music if that's what I have to do to appreciate their quality.

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

(various restatements of years of discussion omitted) I'm perfectly happy to use different aesthetic standards for different types of music. It always seemed to me that that was part of the problem with people saying that rock wasn't music, or that hip-hop isn't music: the rotary switches in their ears didn't turn in that direction. "These kids today -- their music is just noise!", and so forth.

I read a study somewhere that found that most people's musical tastes freeze somewhere near age 35. It's a fair bit of work to keep paddling while the river flows. Livejournal has done as much as anything lately to help me at least *recognize* new names and genres in the pop world, not that I know jack about them but at least I can nod my head.

In poetry, drama, or prose, hearing the music doesn't mean one can't perceive the rest of the performance; it's another layer of the cake, to be eaten or not.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I'd say "bulb horn" or "bike horn" or maybe "Harpo horn."

Have you heard Rzewski's set of variations on "The People United"? It's the only thing I know by him, but it's pretty impressive, and a good jumping off point for trying to appreciate some of the more modern stuff you can do on a piano. It's almost a catalog of piano technique up to 1960, or whatever year he wrote it.

I've heard pieces by Cowell and Ives that use unorthodox techniques but still sound like regular old music (the Cowell more than the Ives). I'm still enough of a stick in the mud to distinguish between what sounds like music to me and what sounds like some sort of novelty or con job.

I think my favorite outer edge stuff is Nancarrow and his player piano studies. He found ways to make the piano sound like a completely different instrument, doing nothing more than playing notes. Granted, they are played with insane speed or in numbers greater than a human being can press down, but they're still notes.

Tatum's ability is almost scary. There's one recording where he's playing a solo that's kind of neat, but not incredible, and there's audience applause afterwards. I suspect he was playing it with one hand. His recording of "The Kerry Dance" shows an off-kilter sense of humor that's refreshing.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

I hereby certify that when I started typing my previous comment, I had not seen the one above, which was clearly written by a great mind.

[liveavatar.livejournal.com]

We think alike!

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

We also heard Cage works for prepared piano, and Cowell's "Banshee" (which is played by leaning over the open piano box and stroking the strings), and those definitely sounded like music, if very weird music.

The whole program is on PDF at the "Program Notes" link here. (The Booker and Floyd were omitted to save time, though the whole thing took about 100 minutes anyway.)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

100 minutes

I can't count. Over 2 1/2 hours: about 160 minutes.

[rozk.livejournal.com]

I was going to make precisely this point - some of the work of Rzewski is clearly music in the sense in which you define the term (not just the quite wonderful variations, but also some of the shorter pieces) and the same can be said of much of Cage - I would say that most of the pieces for prepared piano are quite precisely music in the sense you mean it,rather than just organized noise, but I can see your point, yet the dance scores are clearly within your remit.

How do you gloss the apparent paradox of people who consider themselves composers, who compose music and yet produce this other sort of organized sound which you respect as art but will not consider music?

I speak as one with no great fondness for Cage and considerable regard for Rzewski - a performance of the variations by Hamelin at the Wigmore Hall was one of my most profound musical experiences of recent years.

[kip-w.livejournal.com]

How do you gloss the apparent paradox...

I'm not entirely sure this is to me, but I'll respond anyway. My answer is, I don't know. I know that somebody who has written what sounds like music has written this other thing they say is music that doesn't sound like it to me, and I think, well, maybe they know something I don't, but it still sounds like B is music and A is not (happy, undeserving A!). There are also people whose opinions I respect greatly who seem to be able to perceive of some things as musical that I can't. I just have to keep getting up in the morning and living my life, because I am not (yet?) at the stage where I get it.

And I have progressed along the line of being able to appreciate some things. There was a time when I wouldn't have dug the Nancarrow, for instance, or gotten much out of Ives's 4th Symphony (which is now a favorite bit of musical comfort food for me). So either there's hope, or maybe it'll turn out that my gut feelings were right, and my respected friends were able to appreciate something that wasn't really music, in the same way I used to enjoy setting the radio to a spot where three stations came in clearly.

I have to hand it to Cage for coming up with the idea of prepared piano. Though I haven't gotten into Cage's music for it, it has been used for some enjoyably goofy recordings by Ferrante & Teicher (notably SOUNDBLAST -- the pop music of the future TODAY! [Turns out that in the Future of the late 50s, everybody will be listening to South American dance music on prepared pianos. Who knew?]).

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I was referring specifically to these Joyce & Wilde settings, not to the entirety of Cage's and Rzewski's work, certainly not of their piano work. Cage prepared piano pieces and Rzewski's "Winnsboro Cotton Mill Blues" (the only work of his I'd heard live before) also appeared on the program; the former are definitely music by any definition, though the emphasis is so much on the striking timbre that other aspects of musicality tend to fall short; and "Winnsboro" is no less music than is "Pacific 231", and for approximately the same reasons.

I see no paradox in composers writing different things. I'm just drawing the distinction of genre where I perceive it. The same is true for writers. Shakespeare wrote both drama and lyric verse, and they're both poetry but they're also quite different.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Approaching another issue in your original post (and leaving to those who care what is and is not "music": like Art, I know what I like).

Jazz. Jazz ears. Since a discussion we had a couple of years ago on the 'phone, I've been thinking about this, and about improvised soli on rock records, and I think the point of entry for someone with "classical ears" is to consider the cadenza.

Now, I am no historian of orchestral music as you are, but (with the help of a few references) I am reasonably sure that the nature of a cadenza has somewhat mutated over time, but the original idea was that, in a piece like a concerto which featured a particular instrument playing with/against the orchestra, there would be a point at which the orchestra would either stop or reduce itself to the merest harmonic pulse, and the instrumentalist would (basically) show off. Some pieces had pre-written cadenzas, others basically told the violinist or pianist or okarinist or whatever to just cut loose for five minutes or so, hopefully in a manner that had something to do with the themes of the piece in which said soloist was cadenzifying.

I am also given to understand that this was pretty much killed by a few ultravirtuosi like Paganini, so that very few composers write pieces with cadenzas anymore, and when repertory pieces with cadenzas are performed, they generally use pre-written ones.

Assuming that my understanding has some reasonable relation to the facts in the matter, it's interesting to note that almost exactly the same thing has happened in rock music: by the '70s, a lot of rock music would consist primarily of two verses with a long guitar or keyboard solo in between ("solo" in this context usually meaning that the band continued to provide rhythmic/harmonic backing while the soloist showed off). In concert, these soli would frequently drag on for ten or twenty minutes -- this being part of the "self-indulgence," "bloatedness," and "pretentiousness" that punk and new-wave music revolted against. Except in the realm of metal (which mostly exists for purposes of anything-you-can-play-I-can-play-faster machismo anyway), long soli, even precomposed ones, pretty much died around 1979-80 and have only slowly started coming back.

Meanwhile, about jazz. All of the above actually was relevant, but in ways I can't exactly explain. Part of it, of course, is just that I know rock better than I know jazz. But anyway:

The thing about jazz is, it looks at first glance as if it were mostly about the soli, but that's not really true.

In good jazz, the whole combo is improvising together. One or two of the instruments is usually soloing, but the others don't play preprogrammed accompanyment; they are improvising accompaniment (this is called "comping"), including harmonic and rhythmic changes. For this to happen, each member of the combo must maintain in him/herself a heightened awareness of what the others are doing, because a harmonic shift can happen very suddenly and the whole group is expected to move together.

LJ is limiting my comment size, so I'm breaking this into two parts.

[sturgeonslawyer.livejournal.com]

Memo to self: Always preview comments, you can't edit them.

When it's done well, it almost looks like telepathy. When it's done badly, it's a terrible mess. Analogy? It's like four guys on trapeze, working without a net, and without a pre-arranged routine. When it works, it's amazing -- and the most amazing thing about jazz is how often it does work with experienced performers.

Of course, the "dancing bear" problem interposes itself here; the fact that it's amazing doesn't mean it's actually worth doing. Rhythm, melody, harmony, and timbre all have their places in jazz: but they interact very differently from they way they interact in symphonic or rock music. It's not even clear at any given moment which of the elements is taking precedence; a jazz performance can be very rhythmic, or it can be all about harmonic shifts ... and it is exactly not about reproducibility.

At its best, it's sublime. To listen to something like John Coltrane's A Love Supreme, or the changes he played on "My Favorite Things," is to listen to melody being born from the head of Zeus -- so to speak, and you should pardon the brutally mixed analogy.

But to listen to them does, yes, require a very different set of ears, a set of ears tuned to this moment in the music rather than the idea of large structure. Large structure can be there (and indeed is there in all my favorite jazz), but ... well, in symphonic music, the moments sort of add up to and build the large structure; in jazz, the large structure is more of a framework upon which individual moments can be hung. The moments still add up to something, but what they add up to is more accreted than built -- if a great symphonic piece is built like a castle, a great jazz performance is built more like a coral reef, with all these branchings-out that don't have anything immediately obvious to do with each other but which still contribute to the beauty of the whole.

I don't know if any of this helps, or, even if it does, whether you'd want to make the effort (and it does take effort) to grow a set of "jazz ears." The rewards are substantial.