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

[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.