If you listen to a lot of different kinds of music you might notice that there are two fundamental elements. This is on an abstract level, not a concrete one. The two elements are syntax and semantics, both words coming from ancient Greek. So do the words melody, harmony and rhythm, by the way!
Syntax is the way things are put together. In language it is the way sentences are constructed and the subject of grammar. Semantics is the meaning of the words and sentences. In music this distinction is often referred to as form vs content, but I want to get away a bit from that historical approach.
I see composers as falling into roughly three groups: the syntax composers, the semantics composers and the ones who manage to balance them both. For example, a composer like Steve Reich, in his earlier works, was a purely syntactical composer. Drumming is about nothing more than rhythm, downbeat, hemiola and phasing which is just the incremental shifting of rhythmic patterns. There is literally NO semantic content. Early Philip Glass is similar, for example his Music in 12 Parts has no extra-musical content but is just about patterns and pitches. But we also have earlier examples. Bach's Art of Fugue is a purely syntactical piece as is his Well-Tempered Clavier and the two and three-part inventions.
The program music of the 19th century starting with Hector Berlioz' Symphonie fantastique was an attempt to focus on the content rather than the form, color rather than contour in visual art terms. French composers, starting in the 17th century, made rather a specialty of making pieces about their extra-musical content. Of course, once you integrate referentiality into a piece of music then that becomes part of the music. There are innumerable examples from the French clavecinistes in which they fill conventional forms like the rondeau with all sorts of referential content. The tombeau, for example, is nothing but an allemande with special reference to the death of someone.
Then there are composers who manage a real synthesis of form and content. Bach is a great example of this as well in his cantatas, passions, masses and so on. Haydn is another good example. In many of his symphonies and string quartets, which are primarily syntactical forms, i.e. "pure" music, he infuses referential content. Some examples: the "Farewell" Symphony, the "Rider" String Quartet and so on. In Beethoven there have been many efforts to uncover or elaborate on referentiality in the symphonies and piano sonatas, some of them encouraged by Beethoven himself. The association of the Symphony No. 3 with Napoleon and the nicknames attached to some piano sonatas like the "Tempest" or "Hammerklavier" are other examples. But in all of these works, the syntax is equally involved, it is not a question of merely dumping content into a conventional form. That is why I refer to these works as syntheses.
Mind you, there are lots of examples of pieces that have such an evocative atmosphere that they have acquired a nickname that is not related to anything the composer did. The "Moonlight" Sonata of Beethoven had no associations with moonlight in Beethoven's mind.
These categories survive in the music of the present day, Caroline Shaw, for example, uses a lot of traditional musical syntax in constructing new pieces with often ambiguous titles: Boris Kerner for cello and percussion, for example, uses a very traditional harmonic and melodic syntax combined with contrasting percussion. Become Ocean by John Luther Adams is the opposite in that the referential atmosphere predominates and it is difficult to discern any traditional syntax.
There is a kind of progression from the mind of the composer to the mind of the ultimate listener. The composer often thinks in terms of syntax because that has a lot to do with how the music is written. The listener however takes the opposite approach and asks themselves "what does this music mean to me?"
Interestingly, jazz also seems to have these two fundamental elements. There are lots of referential pieces that draw on popular song forms like Louis Armstrong's "What a Wonderful World" and many other examples, but there are more purely syntactical pieces like "So What" by Miles Davis or "Giant Steps" by John Coltrane. In popular music, however, the purely syntactical seems not to exist outside rare examples like Deep Purple's Concerto for Group and Orchestra.
Here is the Tombeau sur la mort de M. Comte de Logy by Sylvius Leopold Weiss played by lutenist Edin Karamazov.
9 comments:
I took some terrific painting classes in college from a guy who argued that there is no purely representational or purely abstract art. No matter how photorealistic a painting is, you will never confuse it for the thing it depicts, if only because the painting is two-dimensional. And usually there is quite a lot of abstraction separating the colored patches on the canvas from the bowl of fruit or whatever. And on the abstract side, we can't help but connect every shape or color field or brushstroke to something in our visual experience.
I believe that music is the same way. A "purely" syntax-driven piece like Drumming still has plenty of semantic content - it evokes West Africa, as filtered through the imagination of a white Jewish American. The WTC can't help but bring up associations to emotions and moods, not to mention its associations to eighteenth century Germany. On the other side of things, the most programmatic piece or literal-minded pop song still has syntactical structure or it won't function as a piece of music. I was just transcribing "We Don't Talk About Bruno" from Encanto, which is single-entendre musical theater storytelling, but which still has lots of abstraction in its rhythms and harmonies.
Also, not to split hairs, but "What a Wonderful World" isn't a jazz song. Louis Armstrong recorded lots of incredible jazz, but later in his life he was mainly a pop singer. A great one! But his presence on a track doesn't automatically make it jazz.
Yes, I should have chosen a different example than What a Wonderful World!
I think the concept of referentiality helps us a bit here: some artworks, whether visual or musical, are heavily referential, such as a landscape painting or a song with words. Others are only marginally referential such as a Bach fugue or abstract expressionism. But yes, you can always argue the adjective "purely" as being not quite true!
Not related to this thread, but may be of interest. A recital I wished I had attended.
https://washingtonclassicalreview.com/2022/01/24/isbin-brings-virtuosic-fire-story-telling-charm-to-spanish-program-at-wolf-trap/
Many composers mentioned that I was not familiar with, although I'm sure you are Bryan.
Yes, a lot of that music I have played and recorded.
Just a footnote on Steve Reich, yes, he studied West African drumming, but he also studied Javanese gamelan music. He also did a lot of work with tape loops and he studied philosophy at university. But this does not mean that any of these influences define the semantic content of the music--if any.
the Laurence Dreyfus book I alluded to earlier got into some of the extra-musical associative meanings with certain styles (i.e. French, English, etc) within Bach's German milieu.
It sounds like there's consensus that "abstract" and association can be read on a continuum but that there are probably no "pure" iterations of either in real-world musical terms.
Not confusing a painting for the real world thing it depicts reminds me that I slogged through Scruton's The Aesthetics of Music at long last. It's something that's part of an incubating writing project. I've written about Scruton's work before but finally slogging through his big book has been useful for establishing the contrasts between `99 Scruton and `09 Scruton that I want to discuss more some time later. His picking up on Taruskin's comment on the HIP debate in classical music as a bad sign of how completely insular the classical music scene had become compared to the wealth of transcriptions, arrangements and every-day musical adaptation in ordinary life pop music had would be easy to miss amidst all his highbrow elitism but it was interesting that even back in 1999 he made that observation.
Quite right Wenatchee, the project to uncover meaning in so-called abstract instrumental forms was pursued quite extensively in music semiotics, but with fairly meagre results. But sure, this is all on a continuum but at the syntactical end we are likely injecting our meaning into the work.
What exactly did Scruton say about Taruskin's thoughts on the early music movement? This is an issue I have found quite interesting.
I might have to get more detailed later but Scruton pointed to Taruskin's comments on how modern HIP really was and added his own thought that a HIP debate was only possible because classical music had become completely isolated from larger culture and insulated within its own academic debates. It was in a blink-and-you-missed them string of sentences near the end of one of the later chapters. I have a few IRL things going on lately so I'm not blogging and don't have the Scruton book immediately at hand but I hope to return to the topic in more detail in the future.
Sure, if you had a link or could point me in the right direction, thanks. I'm thinking of doing a post on Taruskin's idea of the modernity of the early music movement.
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