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: 2007-02-05 06:17 pm (UTC)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.
no subject
Date: 2007-02-05 06:19 pm (UTC)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.