I just started the second volume of Taruskin's massive Oxford History of Western Music and he reprints the introduction to the whole series at the beginning which I re-read because it is a fairly dense meditation on the problems of music historiography.
History is, of course, all about time and music is the time art. Everything in music is about time: the pulse of the music is reiterated beats in time, the melodic pitches themselves are just reiterated pulses at a faster speed: A pulses at 440 times a second, for example. And harmony? Well, harmony is just melodic notes sounding together. So it is all about time.
We perceive music in time as well in layer after layer. There are layers of immediate sensation that might make us want to dance, that's the somatic element. Some melodies might make us melancholy or cheerful. Here's a couple of pieces from John Dowland to illustrate: first Semper Dowland, Semper Dolens played by Nigel North:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xi7c5S4_97E
And for the cheerful example, My Lady Hunsdon's Puffe, also by John Dowland played by Cecilio Perera (with some church bells):
But there are many layers to our perceptions. Both of these pieces are what we call "early music" because they were composed quite a while ago--four hundred years in this case. Wonder why we don't call it "old music"? Marketing reasons, I guess.
But an important binary in the whole welter of our perceptions of music, and everything else, is that old/new division. We like old things and new things for different reasons. I bought a little jar of jam the other day and the name of the producer was La Vieja Fábrica. For marketing reasons again, they tell us that this is from the old factory, which presumably makes better jam than the new factory just as grandmother's cookies were presumably better than those from Megacorp. And who knows, there may be some truth to it.
We like old things for a variety of reasons: over long stretches of time the wheat separates from the chaff and perhaps that is true of jam as it seems to be of music and art in general. But as I have mentioned several times before, we are moving through time as well and our tastes change so perhaps over time our love for Mendelssohn wanes and our love for Schubert waxes.
But what about our love for new stuff? I suspect that a lot of so-called "new" music is actually quite familiar music with a shiny veneer. But occasionally there is some genuinely new music with a lot of novel features even though, as in the case of the Rite of Spring, for example, there was a fair amount of Russian folk music tucked in here and there.
There is no denying the invigorating shock of something truly new in music and that is the attraction of new music--the possibility of hearing something really unlike anything you have ever heard before.
When it came out this was a pretty good example: Partita for 8 Voices by Caroline Shaw:
Partita for 8 voices probably did sound like nothing anyone heard before if they weren't already into microtonalists playing with extended techniques ... but I've heard stuff similar to Shaw's work in Toby Twining's Chrysalid Requiem. I enjoy Partita while I'm listening to it but ... for some reason it doesn't exactly stick with me. Compared to songs I love by Stevie Wonder, Bob Dylan, Blind Willie Johnson, and others I try to think of what Caroline Shaw's Partita is actually "about" in terms of texts and associations and all I come up with is that it's the kind of music that seems to be, in Adorno's withering appraisal "music about music".
ReplyDeleteMusic is about time ... but also rhythm because, clearly, 440 pulses a second can be construed as the kind of pulsation that produces pitch as distinct from what we'd conventionally call "rhythm" in music.
Rhythm is time.
ReplyDeleteyes, rhythm occurs in time but it also occurs in space
ReplyDeleteAdorno's complaint was Stravinsky rendered the "spatialization of music" as absolute, although George Rochberg, building off an idea from Victor Zuckerkandl, proposed that the nexus of space in time can be mapped out as timespace and spacetime respectively. I know Taruskin described Rochberg's writings as quasi or pseudo-scientific but that core distinction between the "line" of a string quartet and the immersive surround-sound experience of a moment by moment process of listening to Dark Side of the Moon "does" get at the distinction between the timeline of a timespace and the spacetime of any given listening moment.
ReplyDeleteRemembering that while we listen to music in time we listen to it in three dimensions and not one may be Captain Obvious and General Observation but compared to some other stuff I've read it's a necessary Captain Obvious observation. ;)
Taruskin was also no fan of Adorno.
ReplyDeleteand I can see why. :) Adorno's rant about how the jazz man erroneously believed he would only achieve potency after being castrated is a ghastly howler for the ages.
ReplyDeleteAdorno was wrong about jazz in his judgment but it's amazed me the extent to which even conservatives on aesthetics and music have done nothing more than weakly rephrase Adorno's scathing take-downs of Cage and Stockhausen and Boulez and pop music and apparently without 1) realizing Adorno beat them to these issues circa 1955 and 2) having bothered to read enough Adorno to know this happened. I side with Schoenberg over against Adorno on Gershwin, for what little that's worth. Schoenberg didn't write in popular musical styles but he admitted he thought American "light music" was far more fun than its "serious" music. It's like he was telling people to skip Copland and listen to Joplin. ;)
A is whatever frequency the musicians agree will be called "A".
ReplyDeleteTo me, time and change are synonymous. If there were no change, we would say time had stopped. As for rhythm, I think the human body naturally finds regular intervals in pulse, in walking, and dance has always been a way of sharing with others a deeper immersion in the music. Before electricity ruined music and promoted a sedentary lifestyle of passive entertainments, people were either making music or dancing to it.
ReplyDeleteor maybe, as some people have insisted is a good thing in Western cultures, "listening culture" happened where silently attending to the sublimity of concert music meant people were not supposed to dance to music or make it. ;) That happened before electricity although ... arguments that the electrically recorded commercial music industry lowered standards WAS certainly one of Adorno's polemics.
ReplyDeleteI wonder whether that's the case.
I agree that, from the listener's perspective, recordings and broadcast vastly increased the range, quality and opportunities for serious listening. That was me for my first 49 years of life, a very serious listener and collector.
ReplyDeleteI had always thought of that as raising the standard, not lowering it, because the best musicians would get wide listening and be very intimidating to pretend to imitate, discouragement of the "I could never be that good" type.
Interesting how classical music mostly abandoned the dance function of much of its roots. Much the same could be said for the liturgical and sacred roots. Those functions have retreated to the taverns and cathedrals, leaving concert listening music for the sedentary concert hall.