"It is not possible to step into the same river twice" --Heraclitus
Why? Because πάντα ρει, "panta rei," "everything flows." We might not think everything flows, but we certainly think that some things flow, rivers, for example. Oh, and music. Yes, music definitely flows which makes the idea of musical structure a very peculiar one. Music is like a river in that it flows through time, always changing (and even if it is not changing, your perception of it is changing). If you can't step into the same river twice (different time, different water) then you perhaps cannot hear the same piece twice. You certainly can't play it exactly the same twice, not can you listen to it the same twice. As an example, Six Pianos by Steve Reich:
When people try to show the structure of a piece of music, they sometimes resort to schematics like ABA or very elaborate sketches like this:
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With a great deal of listening and study you can, somehow, "visualize," perhaps, this structure. But really any schema you can put on paper is just a wildly distant metaphor. You have to go listen to the piece. Then you are hearing the "structure" which is really just the articulated flow. Music structure is not spatial, it is temporal.
Music has no structure!
It just has time.
Since you brought up Heraclitus' river the difference between a "river" and a "flood" is that the former has a structure and constraint to its flow and the latter doesn't. :)
ReplyDeleteFerdia Stone-Davis took Roger Scruton to task for making his acoustic/acousmatic distinction between the acoustic sounds and the "acousmatic" structural/intentional listening state that hears the directions between and across notes by pointing out that this ignores the proprioceptive nature of our listening as an embodied experience. Creating too firm a dualism between the "structure" we impute to the music we hear and what is present in the physical sounds we hear is a kind of dualism that Stone-Davis argued doesn't do us any favors and fails to account for what we hear "in" the music and what the physical/acoustic performance we're listening to is. Yeah, "flow" but people wouldn't bother writing out scores if there was no way to account for what kind of "flow" you want.
ReplyDeleteMusical experiences are spatial as well as temporal. Chiara Bertoglio has written a book or two on how from as far back as the sixteenth century in European contexts musicians and philosophers and theologians have found music to be an art that, more than others, lends itself to spatializing our concepts of time and translating our concepts of time into visualized space (i.e. scores).
In the cases both of a river and a flood it is the context that provides the structure, not the water.
ReplyDeleteThe score is not the music any more than the map is the territory. And yes, musical experiences have spatial aspects, but the great bulk of it is auditory. All scores, plans, charts, schematics of music are like frozen water.
I think you're forcing apart time and space in ways that simply don't plausibly account for actual human experience on this one. If you think humans are capable of dealing with time in a way that excludes space you might try to explain how that works a bit more.
ReplyDeleteScores are merely one potential way in which we spatialize music but people listening to Dark Side of the Moon in surround sound experience it in spatial terms. Berlioz positioning brass instruments in specific places to make them seem distant (ditto Wagner) creates a sense of space in performances which is part of the auditory experience.
I suspect that this might be one of those little insights that I stumble across from time to time that really deserve a whole book treatment. So let me try and offer a couple of details. Music is a particular kind of experience, and one in which we often turn away from the spatial environment. We often tend to close our eyes when playing. Music tends to be an interior sort of experience, though of course one we create and experience in groups as a shared interiority. When we follow the thread of a piece of music, we do so interiorly. A large part of music training consists in developing the skills to convert from notation to sound and vice versa. We can, over time, learn to look at a bunch of signs on a piece of paper and, with no preparation, convert them into a stream of music. If you step back and consider, this is actually a very unusual thing to do.
ReplyDeleteOh yes, people like Berlioz and, before him Andrea and Giovanni Gabrieli were famous for their polychoral music at the San Marco in Venice with its spatial effects. What is so special about this bringing the spatial into the auditory is that it is unusual, out of the ordinary.
I just want to reiterate the insight that whatever we put on paper to describe or instruct about music is a metaphor that requires considerable training to convert into music.
Notated music, yeah, non-notated music, not necessarily.
ReplyDeleteAdorno's complaint in PHilosophy of New Music was that in newer music "spatialization has become absolute". He didn't bother to define what he meant by the space of music but he identified musical spatialization as overtaking a sense of musical time.
The Anglican theologian Jeremy Begbie has proposed our concept of auditory space can be easily ignored because we tend to interpret it in light of visual sensory input but he pointed out that while mixtures of yellow and blue dots look green from far enough away the notes C and E and G in the triad never blend together in our cognitive processes in the same way, and that three independent musical lines can exist simultaneously in our musical experience of time. Although in Western notational conventions it might be tempting to delimit all of that experience of counterpoint to time there is, Begbie proposes, a spatial element to how our body keeps the different pitches distinct. C and E don't become an indistinguishable sonic mass in the way that blue and yellow combined become green in painting.
Rochberg distinguished between what he called timespace and spacetime music based on what the music was used for. Concert music, like a Haydn string quartet, would have timespaces whereas Varese had spacetime, but dance music had spacetime to, inasmuch as music played with music in openly and overtly spatial terms. He proposed that a nexus of time and space is part of every musical experience but that Western concert music tended to emphasize the "Time" element whereas dance musics and non-Western musics could often emphasize space.
Take out notational conventions from Western norms and the observation about music being pure time becomes murkier and in some ways harder to sustain. The metaphorical translation and transference from time to space and back again is fascinating and that's the point of Chiara Bertoglio's book on the topic that I"m reading right now, but she's looking at it from a musical-theological perspective as a practicing musician and Catholic rather than as a philosopher.
Non-notated musics are a somewhat different topic, yes. Take a piece like Strawberry Fields Forever. I assume that somewhere there is a scrap of paper or a paper napkin with scribbled lyrics on it, probably some chords. This is just a mnemonic for the growth of the composition in Lennon's mind and later in the studio where he was joined by other minds. Then the magnetic tape took over the role of preserving the musical flow. Much later some guys sat down and made the attempt to record the song in conventional music notation.
ReplyDeleteNo, of course music is not pure time--there are lots of elements mixed in: references and intertextualities, performing spaces, the materiality of musical instruments and a host of other things. But the structure of the music is in time and hence can only be depicted in space, on paper, with metaphors and a whole bunch of specialized training to understand the schematics.
Music is flowing structure. Too rigid and predictable and we don't like it as much, that is boring music. Taking such a model all the way, on the job yesterday I listened to a cement-mixing machine (and kept mentally sketching songs about doing laundry), but to go to the other extreme, without any form it is also just noise. There has to be real signal in the noise, however abstract as compared to words and other literal communication. And to me, that signal can't be AI, it would have to be human...or at least sentient. Music flows like life because it can only come from life, it is "structured" of experience, it structures experience in a deliberate way, unlike a cave or wind.
ReplyDeleteEven abstract paintings somehow convey a larger not-fully-random totality of experience, a scenario or situation, even if just relationships of color and line...some kind of signal and not just static or pure randomness. Because music, unlike images, cannot be perceived all at once but requires time, the structure or form or signal in it must indeed flow, since if absolutely nothing moved (or changed) we would say time itself had stopped.
I think the signal you are referring to is what we might call the meaning of the music. This is the next step beyond structure.
ReplyDeleteTo consider a difficult case, the piece "Crepescule" composed by Ana-Maria Avaram (which can be heard on Spotify), it might be compared more to "noise rock" than any kind of composed music. What structure could be in these noises? Well, ultimately there is some constancy of the voices, however electronic and mechanical, they remain together in concert or dialogue, a very finite set of voices that have been selected by the composer or perhaps by the performer interpreting whatever notation or momento the composer has used to indicate the sound. It is not the kind of structure with orderly lines or rhythmic regularity. more the way a tree is structured with disappearing symmetry the closer one examines it. But altogether it is a thing, and, in the difficult case of hearing structure in Crepescule, altogether it is a single thing, however abstract in form and unpredictable in detail. The structure is our experience of the sensory relationships. A structure that slips away with every moment and never recurs in the piece or in another performance of the piece. Rivers do have structure, however changing and dynamic, at least at human scale we know where it is and where it is not, however quantum in tiniest detail and however blurred into the earth around it. For our purposes, the structure is its "real" form as we experience it, not as any formal formula might formulate it. In Crepescule, unlike a river of fluid dynamics and ecosystem of many centers of life, there is one living center, it is the playful and sonically mischievous and curious expressor interpreting...maybe nothing but sounds themselves, how a base of rumble can be a room for fidgets and explosions, all somehow as a single unfolding sound situation? OK, no "real" structure here, except the scape of sound and experience that emerges from the deliberate creation of vibrations. Certainly none of the beautiful structure we hear in Mozart!
ReplyDeleteYes Brian, the signal is not the actual phenomena but rather something behind it, the "meaning" as you say, perhaps, but not a meaning that can be literally conveyed, not something we are trying to "show" or "describe," because in music I think the signal is just about putting us in a subjective state, it is very interior, as you wrote in your article.
ReplyDeleteHere are excerpts of a conversation I found online, in italics I paste words (in translation) of Ana-Maria Avram:
...there is a difference between what the title tells, which even the composer, perhaps, imagines that this music wants to express and what it truly is.
If truly it could be a question of something, it is only of the memory in oneself, the sensation in oneself, and not of the sensation of something which is defined. The music is nothing. Therefore it cannot express something, concrete, palpable, like a "battle" or something else. The music is not concrete. [Many thinkers tried to explain and analyze music by semiotics. It is an enormous, silly mistake! Because in semiotics you always need the triangle of signifier, signified and referent (object). But in music tertium non datur! (the third is excluded). There is no object, referent! Never! That's also why music isn't a language. Languages need a referent. Even laws of a grammatical genre — or which can be compared with those — can be found in music (by analogy, only by analogy!) the lack of referent makes music something different from what a "language" has to be...
And here she gets at how musical structure is not necessarily an order that can be measured or quantified in scalars and vectors, as if in spacetime, but rather only in the structure of interiority, in subjective sensation as experienced at that moment:
...The difference between noise and music is not what we learned in acoustics class, a matter of the shape of the sound, but this possibility of transcendence, that is the musical level. Noise as noise is, in fact, a true pollution, but noise in music, I think, is opening some new, in-depth and genuine ways of prospection.
Will, thanks for introducing me to Ana-Maria Avram--never heard of her before. Crepescule doesn't seem to be on YouTube, but there are several other pieces.
ReplyDeleteYes, it's quite true, semiology has a tough task with music, despite a number of efforts. Music does not have a referent , except in isolated cases.
Well Bryan, there’s probably a reason you hadn’t heard of Ana-Maria Avram. Neither had I until yesterday. I experience fascination in the first minutes of this or that piece of her music (they’re not all the same!), but soon become bored and sometimes also uncomfortable. There’s a harshness, a sharpness and jarring in much of it, and without the poise, beauty and –here it comes….STRUCTURE that together make other musics so much more pleasant to me. I came across her in a google search for Romanian composers, because I wanted to complement my current reading, the book “In Europe’s Shadow” by Robert Kaplan. The few pieces of her music that I’ve listened to give a similar reaction as I get with some visual art: provocative, even disturbing, something I would never take home to live with but my life is enriched to occasionally visit it in a gallery, to have at least had “that experience” too.
ReplyDeleteAs with many of your articles and the discussions under them (thanks for being there Wenatchee!), a day later I’m still pondering the problem you present. So while in that torturous music yesterday, as I read your stimulating article inquiring into whether something as flowing, immaterial and ephemeral as music can have structure. I took your essay as a challenge to be contrary and somehow find structure even in that difficult noise-music. Probably I twisted the word beyond it’s true range in order to argue that because a work is “a thing” then it has structure both objectively as that thing and also in one’s experience of it, however impossible to formulate or signify, and however without formula or any significance beyond that experience.
ReplyDeleteBut after all that, upon reflection I don’t think that’s really what structure means. Music theorists probably open a study of musical structure with things like the sonata form, with discrete elements like motifs and phrases and with regular intervals of beat and pitch, etc. And to non-theorists who just want to listen, no doubt they would agree with such obvious common sense building blocks of structure and hear much more of it Mozart and none of it in Avram. I think Steve Reich’s “Six Pianos” is highly structured, too much in fact for my liking, I think I prefer the cement mixer I was listening to a few days ago because at least it had variety in the swooshing of the mass, then the silence of a rest as it fell away from the drum surface and then the downbeat of the plop starts it over again. In steady beat like Steve Reich, but with a goopier texture and some relief in the rest on every 4th beat. Reich gives zero relief, unrelenting in an even more torturous sadism than Avram herself! God please stop the pounding! I don’t want structure, I want freedom!
Of course complete and total freedom can feel like meaningless chaos, no values pulling more this way than that, a lonely and desolate vacuum –or worse, pure noise. As in most things in life, most of the time we want a balance rather than to be at the pure absolute end of a spectrum. Some structure, some ground on which to stand, something from which we must proceed coherently in relation to that enduring structure. And some freedom to explore, to experiment and to sample variations and surprises. But whatever the balance, let’s do it with some poise, some dignity and even elegance, some fineness of articulation and tone quality, real finesse that is, as an artist can make something seem free and spontaneous and organic but behind what seems willful or just effortless there is indeed structure, there are standards of how it is to be done.
ReplyDeletePeel away at structure and we find a deeper struct where the material and experiential dimensions might be joined. Structure endures objectively, like the warm house I want to be waiting for me on a cold sleepy night. But perhaps the word “instruct” gives us the bridge to internal, experiential flowing structure. At least to “struct in,” as in the construction of something interior, something cognitive such as skill or knowledge as opposed to an external solid edifice. To experience music one is not too far from that cognitive place. All these physical and cognitive dimensions come together if most cognition is somatic, as is convincingly argued by Lakoff and Johnson in their book “Philosophy In The Flesh.” The body exists in and experiences the material world, the space-time world, which gives sensations to shape the cognition that guides our navigation in the external material world. From those elements of sensory experience a whole cognitive world is built, such that even language and concrete ideas are mostly built from metaphors of bodily sensation.
So maybe music only rarely has a concrete or literal referent, but still it cannot come completely out of nothing. Always it has root in subjective condition, which itself was built from sensory inputs however internally abstracted, and now in making music that condition is translated back out through controlled vibrations to provide sensory inputs that stimulate another internal condition. Such is the larger flow around the musical flow. We measure and notate and perceive those vibrations, but the purpose is for the interior experience provoked. Does all that come together as “structure”? It’s in there somewhere.
Those comments provide a lot of things to consider, Will. Both you and Wenatchee contribute so much to these discussions. Let me take another stab at describing my basic intuition. Our fundamental notions of structure are, I believe, geometric. Structure is defined as:
ReplyDeleteThe way in which parts are arranged or put together to form a whole; makeup.
"triangular in structure."
Structure is something essentially frozen and we can put it down on paper in a diagram or plan. Structure is architecture, it's not dance. Music is essentially time, organized in various ways. It can't be triangular or square or round, instead it is divided into durations. We can't very easily "visualize" a musical structure unless it is reduced to a plan and put on paper. Music has structure in a laminar flow kind of way, there can be various and simultaneous streams in the flow. Music is a series of events; structure is a picture with various parts.
But maybe this is a trivial insight...
ReplyDeleteDavid Hume and Ivan Pavlov are good referents to musical structure. Music structure is no different than artistic structure and the fact that music is organized in time is not a qualitative difference with other arts but a difference in degree of difficulty. Art is a mental construct quite obviously and is organized the way the brain/mind habitually organizes experience through contiguity, repetition, similarity (contrast) and the emotional affect incidental to such perceptions.
Maury, I'm quite sure you are correct.
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