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.
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no subject
Date: 2007-02-04 04:41 pm (UTC)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
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
musicart.no subject
Date: 2007-02-04 05:12 pm (UTC)no subject
Date: 2007-02-04 05:41 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-04 08:01 pm (UTC)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.