November was quite a productive month and there were several posts with a flurry of comments, but the most came from one of those posts I put up occasionally where I just toss off a dissertation-level concept or theme. This one was on Musical "Structure." The basic idea here was that the basic meaning of the word "structure" refers to a physical plan like an architectural drawing or a street plan or a geometrical drawing. Music can't quite fit into this so I made the claim that "structure" applied to music is a metaphor. Music is like water in a river or stream: it flows. The stream bed or course of the river has structure, but the water itself does not. This caused quite a few comments!
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.
Scores 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.
To which I replied:
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.
Oh 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.
Another comment:
David 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.
A good envoi to this post might be La Mer by Debussy with its very aquatic "structure."
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