it's not "all just music"
Feb. 4th, 2007 06:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacI 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.
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.
