narrative in music

[calimac]

Here are two posts, the second in response to the first, about the nature of music, neither allowing comments, so I'm putting mine here.

ACD says that certain minimalist works should not qualify as music "as they lack any semblance of a coherent, sustained musical narrative." Besides the fact, as Lisa Irontongue points out, that not all the works of the disapproved sound like that, it's a curiously blinkered definition of music to require something that's not at all essential to it. I wonder if ACD thinks of music as drama. I note that he excludes Philip Glass's operas from consideration under his strictures at all. Perhaps he sees opera as by definition "narrative," though Glass's operas are not exactly noted for urgently verismo plots.

The "narrative" content of instrumental non-dramatic music varies. Some works ("Till Eulenspiegel" or "The Sorcerer's Apprentice") tell explicit stories. Attaching these to music that doesn't is a sure way to irritate me. ("The whole orchestra cries out to no avail" etc.) It reduces the abstract to the allegorical. The idea that even non-story-telling music should be a teleological quest narrative, focused on seeking out (or sometimes evading) its end point, was invented by Beethoven, and carried on by composers like Mahler. Other composers, especially earlier ones, are more architectural, and the "narrative" of their music is like a walk through an architecturally distinguished building, watching perspectives change across a room, and passing from one room to the next.

But then there's Bruckner, whose works move in this manner, but on the way he spends so much time stopping and admiring a particular view that much of his music appears not to be moving at all. [Listen to one of my favorite bits of Bruckner] This is a major source of complaint from those who don't like him, and a major source of joy for those of us who do. The music isn't much interested in going somewhere; it's content to just be, staying where it is. What listeners get to do is surround ourselves with the effectively unmoving sound.

After Bruckner came other mystic composers like Hovhaness who equally preferred being to doing [Listen to some Hovhaness], and then came minimalists. If Steve Reich's sound world doesn't appeal to ACD, that's too bad, but that's personal taste. I find that Reich's music for large ensemble (18 instruments and up) is the most spiritually healing art that I know. I am anything but bored; I am entranced. The more it goes on, the longer I want it to last. [Listen to some Reich] (An earlier work by a usually more action-packed composer that strikes me the same way is Stravinsky's Symphony of Psalms. I wonder what ACD makes of that? [Listen to some of the Symphony of Psalms])

So no, narrative is not a requirement for music. What is? Irontongue defines music as "organized sound moving in time." Is there organized sound that doesn't move in time? Is a continual drone organized? Is it music? Did not John Cage (and Pierre Schaeffer, separately) advocate considering non-organized sound as music? And Irontongue also says that music is "typically organized by one or more of" several factors.

I'd say it needs several of those. When I first heard Varese's Ionisation for percussion ensemble, which is pure rhythm (and meter, if you class that separately, and timbre also enters in it, but it's hard to say there's melody or harmony), my reaction was, "This is wonderful, but it isn't music." [Listen to Ionisation] I decided that the field of "organized sound" is a larger set than the field of "music," though I do not insist on the terminology. You can call it all "music" if you want, but then "music" means two different kinds of things. I talked about this more here. Read especially also this comment.

The thing is, ACD says "it's not music" in order to dismiss and denigrate it. I say "it's not music" to put on the proper ears to listen and appreciate a different art form for what it is, instead of complaining because it doesn't fit my presupposed categories. Stuff I'd hate if I listen to it as "music" becomes art if I listen to it as "organized sound" instead.

Comments

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

I am completely befuddled by your comment about Ionisation and will take a look at the posting you refer to.

(And you'd be completely in line to block commenting here. :)

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

Okay, I disagree with your definition of music; rhythm-only works and Cage definitely count for me. I find it extremely interesting that you like some of that stuff anyway and am just confused by why you'd draw your definition of music to exclude it.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The key point, I think, is the one I make in the last paragraph. Apparently when most people say, "That's not music," they mean it as a criticism. I don't. I mean it purely descriptively. Most stuff called music that I really dislike, I have no trouble hearing it as music.

There is in a sense no answer as to why I'm drawing the distinction between "music" and the larger "organized sound" category here. The line does not have its origin in an intellectual process or a conscious decision to draw it. It's purely the expression of my emotional, gut-level perception of the work. (In all my musical analysis I follow D. Keller's Principle: always, first the emotional reaction, then the intellectual analysis to describe it.)

The best way I can explain the distinction I'm making to someone who doesn't hear that way is to point to things like "the music of poetry." A great actor speaking Shakespeare, for instance, has musical qualities to it, but people don't normally hear it as actually a work of music. It makes more sense heard as another kind of organized sound, organized with language and speech expressions (which can also occur in vocal music, of course, but here without certain features that vocal music has).

Sprechstimme stands very close to the line, bringing as much speech quality into a work as possible while still leaving it music; and what makes a work like Reich's "Come Out" so amazing to me is that it actually crosses the line: it takes pure speech, with only potential musical qualities, and awakens the potential until the speech qualities are gone.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

That's idiosyncratic but not anything I'd argue with, either!

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

I don't know if anything I say about this will strike you as having much point; your knowledge of music is vastly more sophisticated than mine. But the topic interests me as an amateur philosopher.

A year or so ago, I was think about Ayn Rand's definition of "art," which is "the selective re-creation of reality in accordance with the artist's metaphysical value judgments," a wording that has interesting minor parallels to Tolkien's idea of "sub-creation" (perhaps because Rand is not so much an Aristotelian, as she calls herself, as a Thomistic atheist). And it struck me that it really, really doesn't work for music. Rand herself confessed that she didn't have a good account of music!

This seems to be what an aesthetic theorist would call a mimetic theory of art, in which art is an imitation of something else, a kind of model or representation. And the narrative theories of music you refer to also seem to approach music in fundamentally mimetic terms. But it's hard to see what music is "representing." Oh, you can describe some musical pieces as "imitating" some observable process; Carl Nielsen's Helios Overture, for example, is pretty clearly an imitation of the sun's course across the sky. But in a lot of cases there's no person, place, object, event, or process that you can see being represented without artificiality.

And it struck me that the dimensions of music as an experience are not so much the dimensions of the perceived world, but the dimensions of human volitionality. Music has pace, and intensity, and tension (as when we wait for the final note or chord that brings a musical line to a point of rest. So maybe, when we listen to music, we're experience states of volition? Not will to do some specific external thing; it seems more than what we will and desire, when we listen to music, is the flow of the music itself.

Now, in terms of how human beings function, volition at the highest, most abstract level gives rise to volitional movement: to intention to move toward some goal, and to detailed intentional movements of the muscles. And music can inspire movement, especially dance. And on the other hand, volition is often tied up with emotion: willing something relates to desiring it. And we may feel that music is tied up with and evokes emotion. And both of those suggest that we could describe music as an "expressive" art. But it seems to me that maybe music is not necessarily expressing emotion, or giving rise to expressive movements of the body; it's more that the sound is expressing volition itself.

And, to look back at Rand, she's strongly inclined to underrate the expressive in art. For example, she has no sympathy at all for abstract and especially nonobjective art . . . the sort of painting where the focus is not on the portrayal of an imagined space holding imagined entities, but on the expressive quality of the artist's brushstrokes. (Someone who didn't have her agenda might instead say, "If you don't think of Jackson Pollack as 'painting' you may see things to appreciate in the form of gestural visual art he creates.") She's not especially interested in lyric poetry, either, whereas it's a form of literary art I value a lot.

Then, of course, it struck me that I had reinvented Nietzsche's contrast of the Apollonian and the Dionysian, which itself grew out of Schopenhauer's "will and representation."

Anyway, in poetry, narrative poetry is more toward the representational end; lyric poetry is more toward the expressive end. So by analogy, it makes perfect sense that someone would value music without insisting on a narrative aspect.

Does this make any sense?

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

That's extremely interesting. I should start by saying that you know more about philosophy than I.

The mimetic theory of art is a very common set of values. Art is considered successful exactly so far as it accurately reproduces life. Interestingly, this theory has big trouble dealing with non-representational art: in painting, not just the abstract but the surreal, which uses the techniques of natural realism to represent what is not in life; in literature, non-representational art includes fantasy, which can be somewhat abstract or, like Tolkien, use the techniques of descriptive realism to describe an imaginary world.

I am myself strongly attracted to art which uses realistic techniques to non-realistic ends. I tend not to see the point of pure reproductive realism. If art merely reproduces life, then what's it for? Life is already there. The more the artist alters it, the better.

But this attitude doesn't get you very far in the academy, though the purely abstract has grown to be accepted.

Turning to music, though, even in its heyday the mimetic theory obviously had serious troubles with music. For one thing, though some music does aim for the mimetic, as we both noted, it's not possible to claim that all the greatest music does so, the way that Leavisites claim D.H. Lawrence as a supremely great writer because of his intensely mimetic quality.

There are a couple ways to deal with abstract music in this problem. One is to try to annex it to mimetic music, by writing mimetic programs for it. This I mentioned; I find it repugnant. It's usually used as a teaching tool for beginners rather than as a serious artistic theory.

The other is to accept that music is a different kind of art. Walter Pater wrote that "all art aspires to the condition of music," which I take as meaning that music is the purest art because it's not tied to a quotidian representationalism. But then Pater was not a proponent of the mimetic theory but, so far as I understand him, more in favor of "art for art's sake."

Leonard Bernstein took great delight in pointing out that, if you don't already know the program, it's almost impossible to deduce it from the music. Even a piece as straightforward as Nielsen's Helios, though it clearly expresses a growing and then fading intensity, the completely naive listener couldn't be sure if it was the sun or something else or nothing representational at all. Many other pieces have been written on the same pattern without being considered to represent the sun.

I've had this experience myself. Carey Blyton wrote a "Hobbit Overture" that retells the book, but the first times I heard it I could make no sense of what was being told, though of course I know the book intimately. Then I read Blyton's explanation and it instantly made perfect sense, so much so that I now can't forget it. I explained the program to Michael Scott Rohan, the BBC Music writer, when I met him: he hadn't been able to figure it out either, though he too is a Tolkien fan.

I'm not sure I know what you mean by volition, but part of it appears to be emotional effect. This too is part of what Pater meant: music operates more strongly and directly on the emotions than other arts, at least for many people. Arts aspire to creating that effect, but music does it best.

I guess the contrast of the Apollonian and Dionysian operates at different levels, like each part of a magnet cut up still has a south pole and a north pole, just not necessarily where they were before. If representationalism is Apollonian and appeal to the emotions is Dionysian, that's very different from the way I see music critics using the distinction within music, where Apollonian music is restrained and formal while Dionysian is wilder and more uncontained. Ironically, it's Dionysian music which is more likely to be mimetic, and Apollonian abstract. In your order, I'm a Dionysian, but in music's order, I'm an Apollonian. I prefer narrative literature and pictorial art, though as I noted above I like it to be other than mimetic; but I prefer my music as completely abstract as possible. But then, like Pater I consider music the highest of arts.

[whswhs.livejournal.com]

Volition is a technical term in Ayn Rand's philosophical writings, where it has a very specialized meaning; but I'm not exactly thinking of that, though my intended meaning is associated with it. If you look at the organization of the brain, while neural functions are scattered through the lobes in an adventitious fashion (for the brain was not designed but kludged together, as it were), each of the lobes has a major theme: the temporal lobe deals with sound, the occipital lobe with sight, the parietal lobe with touch, and the frontal lobe with movement and musculature. So the planning of action takes place primarily in the frontal lobe. At the back of the frontal lobes, there is a detailed neural map of the body, the homunculus, paralleling the tactile homunculus in the parietal lobe (with the hands and the face each getting about a third of the map!). But as you move forward you get increasingly abstract intentions: from "my fingers are going to hit the apostrophe/quotation mark key and the shift key" to "I'm going to type a sentence in quotation marks" to "I'm going to make the following point" to "I'm going to reply to calimac's comment. Action controlled by the frontal lobe is normally volitional; but I use "volition" to mean mainly those highly abstract intentions.

Emotion, on the other hand, is a matter of bodily arousal in conjunction with certain experiences or cognitive states; the arousal can make certain actions more likely, and can even lead to actions that were not formulated as intentions (the sort of thing of which one says "it just came over me"). (This is the sound idea in Freud's "ego" and "id" in the original German, where he called them simply "the I" and "the it," before his American translators made them something arcane and mystical.) Emotion and volition can develop in parallel but don't have to.

I think that musical sound does produce a state of emotional arousal and readiness for emotion. But different people feel different emotions on listening to the same piece of music, and attribute different emotional content to it. So I think that music doesn't so much convey specific emotions, as encourage our brains to well up with whatever emotions in their repertoires best fit the higher cognitive processes that are engaged with the music at the same time.

Apparently Chinese aesthetic theory focused more on the expressive. There is a great passage quoted in a book I edited earlier this year: "Emotion moves within and takes form in words. When words are not enough, then we sigh and moan. When sighing and moaning are not enough, we chant and sing. When chanting and singing are not enough, we unconsciously use hands and dance, feet and tapping. Emotion is expressed in sound. When the sound attains form we call it music.' (Translated from the Mao Preface to the Book of Songs)

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I am less sure that the emotions aroused by music are so variable. There can occasionally be severe disconnects between reactions - I find that some music I hear as tense was intended as languid, for instance - but generally I think people will agree on emotional content. There is a remarkable book called The Language of Music by Deryck Cooke postulating, with specific examples, that particular note sequences within a key have particular emotional meaning universal across Western music.

What is harder to convey are concrete connotations: depictions of physical things or of events.

Generally, if I hear a work of music whose emotional language is alien to my then-current feelings, the music will either alter my state of mind, or else I will not respond to it well at that time. (I might later, when my feelings are different.)

[(Anonymous)]

I've been wrestling with a lot of these same questions recently, which would take far longer than a short mailing comment to detail; but briefly, I agree with you that there are artistic works of organized sound that do not fall under my definition of "music" (and that =Ionisation= is one of them); also, that my saying this does not mean I fail to appreciate their artistic qualities (although that doesn't necessarily mean I enjoy them).

I also agree--this has to do with a different post--that even within music one has to cultivate different ways of listening for different--shall we call them--subgenres. (I have been developing something of a jazz ear lately, myself.)

Further, I wanted to mention that I much enjoyed all the musical samples--even the Bruckner! But I think all of these pieces "move" more than some examples of minimalism.

And that, coincidentally, something I've been listening to a lot lately is the Philip Glass violin concerto, which is wonderful: Glass' style fits perfectly with the arpeggio figurations appropriate to violin playing (even--maybe especially--the slower figurations in the slow movement). I'd recommend it to people who may not think they like minimalism (though even for them I think it fits the definition of music).

Don Keller

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

These pieces do all move more than classic minimalism. But you will notice that ACD damned all Reich, and surely if he's heard enough Reich to do so he's heard Tehillim, which is in any case entirely typical of Reich's post-70s large forces/scale work. It is typical of people allergic to minimalism that they describe adaptive post-minimalism (i.e. what Reich, Glass, and, goodness knows, Reily, have been writing for over thirty years now) in inaccurate terms applicable only to the hermetic minimalism of the 60s.

Nevertheless, the examples, which I added only after I wrote the post, are not necessarily ideal, but what I could find on YouTube on a hasty search. The Hovhaness is not the best choice to show his contemplative quality, but it was the most typical orchestra work I could find on YouTube; and for Ionisation I had a bouquet of choices between inadequate performances and truly horrid recording quality. I picked the former.

That Bruckner coda is rather one of his most teleological moments, isn't it? Maybe that's why I like it so much. He moves so slowly that it's a startling contrast when he does move with intent purpose, and when he does, it's with towering inevitability, like a planet in orbit. (There's a key change in the first movement of the Fifth that feels to me as if the continents have suddenly shifted place.)

The part of the Stravinsky I had in mind was the end of the movement, beginning about 1:00 into the second clip, the one that, at least on my player, follows automatically after the first one. (And after that, it moves automatically into some Stockhausen. Sorry about that.) This isn't a great recording, but in performance this section has the same stillness and eternal sense of being that I hear in Reich.

[irontongue.livejournal.com]

>I also agree--this has to do with a different post--that even within music one has to cultivate different ways of listening for different--shall we call them--subgenres.

I am sure that is true for some people but equally sure it is not universal. For myself, I had to adjust my own sense of time-scale in music to really take in Wagner, and I will have to do the same if I'm ever going to understand Messiaen's St. Francois at all. I do not have a clear sense that I listen differently to the Rolling Stones, Dufay, Beethoven, and Carter.