Dial "M" for Musicology

Orality and literacy

So I ended my last post on sound/media/performance by wondering how the literate notion of a musical work would appear to someone who had never encountered written music. Or, to turn it around (and this is one problem that musicology is now facing), how would oral, non-literate music appear to someone completely conditioned by musical literacy? This is much like the question that Walter Ong asks at the beginning of Orality and Literacy as he ponders the unfortunate term "oral literature." It's an unfortunate term because it seeks to define orality—the experience of language as it is spoken and heard, not as it is written and read, which is to say, language as an auditory and not a visual phenomenon—in terms of "literature," which is a concept only possible when you can write words down. It is only through a great exercise of the imagination that we can begin to understand what it would be like to life in a word where not only can we write words down, but the very idea of writing has never occurred to you. 

Think about it. What can you tell me about dogs? Like, how many breeds are there, what are their characteristics, what kinds of jobs are dogs made to do,  etc. Imagine telling me verbally, person-to-person. Maybe you'd have a fair bit to say (or maybe not), but it would be a miniscule part of the total amount of information contained in the AKC Dog Breed Bible. If you wanted to ask a particular question, like "what is the ideal range of hind leg length for a miniature grayhound?" you'd have to look it up. Now, imagine you can't look it up. Not because somehow, mysteriously, all the AKC publications in the world have vanished, or you're shipwrecked on a desert island without books, or whatever, but because no-one has ever written anything down. Indeed, you don't know what it would mean to write something down: in this case, the very idea of "looking something up," seeking knowledge external from your own physical presence, would be incomprehensible. Even the kind of information I asked about -- hind leg lengths -- presupposes some external, objective system of measure that can be written down . ("Long enough to run fast" is not enough for a reference book, but it is just fine as a rule-of-thumb.) In a state of pure orality, knowledge is never something external from a memory -- it is always corporeal. Word is always made flesh. And the implications of this are profound and difficult to imagine.

So with that in mind, here's what Ong says:

Thinking of oral tradition or a heritage of oral performance, genres and styles as 'oral literature' is rather like thinking of hoses as automobiles without wheels. You can, of course, undertake to do this. Imagine writing a treatise on horse (for people who have never seen a horse) which starts with the concept not of 'horse' but of 'automobile', built on the readers' direct experience of automobiles. It proceeds to discourse on horses by always referring to them as 'wheelless automobiles', explaining to highly automobilized readers who have never seen a horse all the points of difference in an effort to exercise all idea of 'automobile' out of the concept 'wheelless automobile' so as to invest the term with with a purely equine meaning. Instead of wheels, the wheelless automobiles have enlarged toenails called hooves; instead of headlights or perhaps rear-vision mirrors, eyes; instead of a coat of lacquer, something called hair; instead of gasoline for fuel, hay, and so on. In the end, horses are only what they are not. No matter how accurate and thorough such apophatic description, automobile-driving readers who have never seen a horse and who hear only of 'wheelless automobiles' would be sure to come away with a strange concept of a horse. The same is true of those who deal in terms of 'oral literature', that is, 'oral writing.' You cannot without serious and disabling distortion describe a primary phenomenon by starting with a subsequent secondary phenomenon and paring away the differences. Indeed, starting backward in this way—putting the cart before the horse—you can never become aware of the real differences at all. (Ong, Orality and Literacy 12-13.)

The connection to music should be obvious.* If we begin with the assumption (usually unconscious and unexpressed) of the musical Work, then the dimension of performance, the aural experience of the music (and oral, too, since performance traditions, however grounded in the score, are transmitted orally, the the master-teacher's atelier), is defined negatively, becomes all that is not-Work. Thus we have a strange and pitilessly restrictive conception of what it is performers do: they exist only to make the work audible, and succeed only when they transmit no more or less than the work itself (which invariably means what's in the printed score). Or, as Arnold Schoenberg put it, "music need not be performed any more than books need to be read aloud, for its logic is perfectly represented on the printed page; and the performer, for all his intolerable arrogance, is totally unnecessary except as his interpretation makes the music understandable to an audience unfortunate enough not to be able to read it in print."** In this view, there is no room for a performer to be any sort of creative artist, and the performer's contribution becomes seen as a kind of contamination: the work is a pure immaterial timeless inhuman thing to which performers introduce grubby human contingencies. As Richard Taruskin put it in his classic essay "The Pastness of the Present and the Presence of the Past," this is an ideology for which "people are dirt." 

Avior Byron commented on my las post:

When a performer performs different scores, he or she create different versions of their music, of their work. My point is that it is misguided to try to reduce all performances to the score. There is something very unique and creative in performances. People can hear Gould in many pieces that he plays.  

And this is exactly right. So the question for musicologists becomes, why study compositions alone? Why not study performances of compositions? And indeed a number of scholars late have been thinking along these lines: Taruskin himself, John Rink, Jose Bowen, and Nicholas Cook, who has suggested that studying, say, Beethoven 9 means studying it as it has come down to us at the hands of its exemplary performers. “When we hear [Beethoven’s] Ninth Symphony, we hear it against a horizon of expectations established by past performances and especially by recordings: a new interpretation signifies by virtue not only of what it is, but also of the pattern of differences it establishes with respect to the interpretations of Mengelberg, Toscanini, Furtwängler, Karajan, Norrington, Hogwood, Harnoncourt.”*** 

The alert reader will have noticed, though, that what Cook is talking about isn't performance: it's recorded performance, and this makes a very big bit of difference. And this leads me to the second part of my tripartite sound-media-performance topic: media. I will continue thinking about this in my next post . . . 

*Ah, I can her you saying, but there is no such thing as pure and pristine orality, in music or anywhere else, least of all in the western art music tradition. Very true, but my point here is that there *is* an oral/aural dimension of music, even the music of a literate tradition, which is hard to think about clearly when music itself is defined entirely in literate terms.

**Dika Newlin, Schoenberg Remembered: Diaries and Recollections (1938-76) (New York: Pendragon Press, 1980), 164.

***Nicholas Cook, “Words About Music, or Analysis Versus Performance,” in Cook, Peter Johnson, and Hans Zender, Theory into Practice: Composition, Performance, and the Listening Experience (Leuven: Leuven University Presss, 1999), 38.

Sound, Media, Performance

I've been gone. Sorry about that.

About a year ago I was planning my first doctoral seminar at Indiana and ended up assigning these books:

Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture.
Theodore Gracyk, Rhythm and Noise: An Aesthetics of Rock.
Hans-Ulrich Gumbrecht, The Production of Presence: What Meaning Cannot Convey.
Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire.
Elisabeth Le Guin, Boccherini’s Body: An Essay in Carnal Musicology.
Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word.
Joseph Schloss, Making Beats: The Art of Sample-Based Hip-hop.
Jonathan Sterne, The Audible Past: Cultural Origins of Sound Reproduction.

I also assigned a number of articles, among them Carolyn Abbate's "Music—Drastic or Gnostic?" along with responses by Karol Berger and Lawrence Kramer, essays on performativity by J.L. Austin and Richard Schechner, pieces on sound and technology by Glenn Gould, R. Murray Schafer, and Brian Eno, some pieces of art-music performance analysis by Janet Schmalfeldt and John Rink, a couple of philosophical pieces by George Steiner (from Real Presences) and Jerrold Levinson, etc. And there were a number of readings from books it killed me to leave out: Richard Taruskin's Text and Act,  Simon Frith's Performing Rites, Mark Katz's Capturing Sound, Albun Zak's The Poetics of Rock, etc. (These I have used many times for other classes, though.)

I had a very good idea of what I wanted to teach and had fun putting together the reading list, but then I was seized by a doubt: is there a coherent single topic that all these readings represent? In my mind there was, but it was not a topic for which there was a ready name. What was I going to call this seminar? I went through a number of options: "Orality/Aurality" (too Barthian), "ərality" (too clever by half, and annoying and unwieldy besides), "The Phenomenal Experience of Music" (wordy, and anyway I wanted to talk about sound as well as music, plus this was not a class in phenomenology as such, and besides it looks dumb: my experience of music is totally phenomenal!). Dammit. So I decided to just straightforwardly list the three main areas that my seminar comprised: Sound, Media, and Performance. But this begs the question of what those disciplines have in common, so I wrote a little explanation in my syllabus:

This seminar deals with the study of performance, recording, and sound, with approaches sampled from musicology, ethnomusicology, theater, cultural studies, and philosophy. However, within this variety of disciplines we will follow a common thread, something we might call either presence or performativity. These terms are not interchangeable, but both can be used to frame the auditory experiences of real bodies in real spaces and real time—although recordings introduce complications by mediating those bodies, spaces, and temporalities. Studies of sound, performance, and recording must all come to terms with an experience of sound that cannot be abstracted from its playing or sounding context. Unlike the aspects of music accessible in formal analysis of the score, presence/performativity is tied to the phenomenal experience of sound; it exists in oral and aural space and is the special domain of Western art music performance, hiphop, rock, and the postwar avant-garde—all areas of music that we’ll be thinking about this semester.

Not perfect, but it'll do. Those of our readers who do not come from an academic background (and even a lot of you who do) will probably think that this is over-the-moon abstraction, but it's actually a pretty simple idea. It's what Abbate calls (a bit polemically, throwing an elbow) "real music" -- "music that exists in time, the material acoustic phenomena." If this still sounds abstract (doesn't all music take place in time? why make a big deal out of it?) it's because musical notation -- another abstraction -- has taught us to think of music as something else: The Work.

If you can write music down in a score notation that defines pitch and rhythm to a fair degree of accuracy (and performance style a little more approximately), then you might be tempted to identify a piece of music with the score, not with the performance in which you hear those dots on the page transformed into vibrating air molecules. If I go to hear a pianist playing a Beethoven program, I might say, "I just heard the 'Moonlight' sonata," but more properly I would say that I heard a performance of the "Moonlight" sonata. The piano sonata in C sharp minor op. 27 no. 2  (which is the more formal name for it) carries on existing regardless of whether no-one plays it, one person plays it, or a million people play it. So a performance is not the same as "the work."* 

The point is, when we put music into notation -- when our music-making becomes literate** -- our thinking changes. Music is no longer necessarily something we hear: it's something we can potentially hear. When a piece of music becomes a work of music it becomes an abstract entity, something we can "read," something we can make versions of when we play it, something we can hear when other performers recreate it, but something that is not exhausted by any of these actions. So where is the "the work"? Its manifestations are everywhere -- on the radio, on the bookshelf, under the couch (so that's where my CD got to!), at the concert hall -- but the work itself is nowhere. It is not identical with any of those contingent manifestations; rather, it seems to inhabit some airless, timeless realm of Platonic Idea.

Now, imagine how deeply strange this idea would be to anyone who had no way of writing down music. I will continue these thoughts in the second part of this post . . .

*And a performance of it is not a copy, exactly -- it's not like buying a Harry Potter book or something, where there are millions of identical copies in circulation, because each performance is unique and different. (Even bad performances are unique; great ones are unique in a good way.) Indeed, performance is an art in itself: the difference between Rudoph Serkin playing op. 27 no. 2 and some lame-o on Youtube doing it is the difference that art makes.

**"Literate" in the same sense that a culture that discovers a way to write its language is called literate, not literate in the sense of wearing an ascot.

A Pluto Transits the Canon

Pluto’s demotion from Planet to Minor Planet has been worked over to death. (In fact, didn’t Phil’s first blog on Dial M reference Pluto’s unfortunate encounter with fortune’s wheel?) So I’m not going to talk about the real Pluto. Likewise, The Canon (bless it) has—in the abstract and in actuality—been much discussed, problematized, reviled, and in general belabored. I’m not going to talk about that either, except indirectly.

The way we regard Tradition means we are much more comfortable letting new additions accrue than we are letting go of the old. This is true with almost anything I can think of. Curriculum is an obvious case, as becomes apparent when someone suggests review or revision:

“What do you mean, ‘incorporate new material’? We don’t have sufficient time to teach what we need to cover as it is! Perhaps if you added a separate class in X, taught by someone else, someone younger, someone who…but then, of course, you would have to add units in the Music Education major, which the state wouldn’t allow. Well, I suppose we could establish a committee. Besides, I’m not convinced that this more recent stuff is anything more than ephemeral; why don’t we wait to see if it has any staying power before we make it part of the curriculum? Well, I have another meeting to go to; perhaps if we revisit some of these questions at a later point, but not next year because I’m on sabbatical…”

Jewish tradition is another example, much on my mind as we approach the Days of Awe. Over the millennia prayers and repetitions and other rituals were added for various reasons, but almost never deleted—how can you delete what is holy? Of course, far be it from me to imply that services are FAR TOO LONG, but…

Reluctance to let go of things that have acquired both familiarity and sanctity is normal and all too human. Thus with the concert music canon: we study it, we play it, but we are really reluctant to let things go, sometimes in defiance of reason. So: I would like to make a nomination.

I recently heard a live performance of Bizet’s early Symphony in C. It’s like a student work, really; lots of Mozart, some Haydn, a bit of Beethoven, some recognizable Mendelssohn, and a pseudo-Arabic oboe solo that shows (to me, anyway) a pretty clear influence from Félicien David’s Ode-Symphony Le Dèsert. It is formally clear and clean—going beyond “classical” to “textbook,” I would say—and it’s tuneful and attractive, or is generally considered to be. It has an additional existence as a famous Balanchine ballet, which means that in the minds of many of the dancers I knew (in my previous existence as a ballet pianist) it was sort of the artistic equivalent of the Bach double violin concerto. You know, one famous Balanchine ballet, another famous Balanchine ballet. (I know, I know. You get used to swallowing your outrage.)

I’d like to nominate Bizet’s Symphony in C for the next Plutonian demotion. Bizet produced a competent piece, but he was not really a symphonist, and the piece is ultimately a bit boring. To what extent do we need the Immortal Western Performance Canon (irony intended) to include also-rans like this? With which other symphonies is this equal? Franck’s D Minor symphony used to be more a part of the Canon than it is now, and even D’Indy’s Symphony on a French Mountain Air (with piano obbligato) once had a firm place in the repertoire. Does Bizet’s piece stand above those? Are the overtures and concertos of Joseph Joachim really inferior to this Bizet piece? I’ve always enjoyed Virgil Thomson’s Symphony on a Hymn Tune; it is not often played, and the symphonies of Hanson and Piston are even rarer. The Bizet is better than all of those?

It isn’t. It’s light and inoffensive, and the composer is famous because of Carmen, and that may be it. Time to allow this piece to recede into the distance; there’s plenty of New and Should-Be-Better-Known Old that is better deserving of time in the concert hall.

Brian Eno, Mr. Potato Head opera theater, etc.

There are some people who have a genius for awesomeness. This is not the same thing as being cool. Having a genius for awesomeness means that you have an unerring instinct for awesome ideas, for figuring out what things out there in the big wide world are awesome, for thinking of awesome things to do. Stewart Brand has that kind of genius, as does Edward Tufte. It's the kind of genius that album producers ideally have: someone like Rick Rubin is famous not only for knowing which knobs to twist, but for having out-of-left-field intuitions about framing concepts, like being the guy who invented rapcore and then getting Johnny Cash to do a series of recordings of songs by people like Glenn Danzig, Beck, and Trent Reznor in stark minimalist roots arrangements. My friend DD liked to call such people conceptualists. The greatest musical conceptualist of them all is probably Brian Eno: indeed, his "Oblique Strategies" deck, which I have been perusing this last week, is both a stockpile of concepts and, as a mechanism for deploying them, a particularly elegant concept itself.* 

My Ph.D. advisee Kim Schafer, who is writing about the carillon as a component of the collegiate soundscape in America (and is herself an expert carilloneur), informs me that Eno is now working on something called the Dartington Carillon. The carillon is itself one of the great undiscovered cool things in the world (well, undiscovered by musicologists, for the most part): when you think of it, what musical instrument is as environmental, as intimately bound up with architecture and landscape, as the carillon? And no kind of music from before the 20th century is as well suited to the style of background listening that contemporary listeners have developed in response to the 20th-century ubiquity of recorded and broadcast music.** It's probably not surprising, then, that Brian Eno (who theorized and damn-near-invented ambient music) would be interested in carillons. The as-yet-unrealized Dartington plan is a grab-bag of modern-artsy ideas  -- it's a combined theater and art gallery with poetry written on the bells and leather-head mallets provided to visitors so they can strike the bells themselves and participate actively, etc. -- which makes it sound a little like a whole bunch of community arts project funding proposals all jammed together. But still, it's a cool idea to emphasize the carillon's environmental properties and create a building that is at the same time both a landscape and a musical instrument:

On an unrelated note, I found the most heartbreakingly sweet video clip at Parterre Box. A four-year-old boy listens to Donizetti's La fille du régiment while his Mr. Potato Head guys dance along. The look on his face at the end . . .

La Cieca also tells us that Celine Dion is planning on starring (and singing!) in a new biopic of Maria Callas. Now Carl Wilson has written a wonderful book making the case for Dion, so I'll tread lightly here and suggest that while Dion's art doubtless has its value, she might be overreaching a bit. The news article to which La Cieca links is worth a read: at one point La Dion told Kent Nagano (the conceptualist of the piece, the guy who's been putting this together) that she doesn't read music, and he consoled her by saying, well, Pavarotti didn't either. He also suggested she get some coaching from someone like Renata Scotto. I wonder what that would do. No, seriously, I'm actually kind of curious. OK, now that I think of it, I'm in favor of this. Do it, Celine! it would be kind of interesting to see what happens. I think the project is doomed to almost certain failure (as when-worlds-collide crossovers often are) but it would be an interesting failure. 

*Today's oblique strategy: Be extravagant. OK!

**Click here for an old cogitation of mine on kindred topics -- the best thing about it is the recording of Kim and Leanne Zacharias playing a cello-and-carillon duet.

All Music is Soundtrack music

[Orig.: “Every Life is a Biography.” A & E network blurb for the TV show Biography.]

A week ago our friend Eric had a gathering at his house to watch the films made by his 16-year-old son Connor, who has already won a variety of film-making awards (film competitions often have high-school divisions). Connor’s special talent is silent films—he excels in a kind of off-center retro take on Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin. The event was a hoot, and I could well have been seeing the early works of the next Robert Rodriguez.

What I could not help thinking about throughout was the music he chose. The silent films had generic honkytonk piano throughout (I came home and was gleefully playing some of it by ear much to Debbie’s and Ben’s…disgust; what does a guy have to do to get a little adulation at home? And don’t say “SOME HOUSEWORK,” ladies, it hasn’t worked so far), a kind of period-specific musical white noise that did not necessarily accompany, comment upon, or interact with the visual material in any way, but locked in the century-old context inside the first three notes. Other films had random cues stuck in—stuff from the Lord of the Rings soundtracks, I think, and from other soundtracks, musicals, whatever. Often these were used with ironic effect, and I found myself giggling much of the time. Sound cues that come under the categories of Epic and Momentous and Tragic and so on can be sidesplittingly funny when the actors are a high school student’s friends and the scripts are, y’know, by high schoolers. High school humor can miss a lot, but when it bull’s-eyes something, that something is forever skewered—film conventions, literary pretensions, whatever. It’s wonderful.

Was it Cadillac who advertised the “set your life to music” feature for their car CD players, where you program in tracks from your own CDs and work in the fades so that you can basically assemble your own soundtrack for the drive home from work? It’s like that moment in the Disney feature The Emperor’s New Groove where the narrator (David Spade, I think) snipes at another character for singing his own cheesy soundtrack music while skulking about on some comically fell errand. A camp Disney joke, sure, but how many of us haven’t, at some point or other…

All Common Practice music, including most soundtrack music, has ideas of reference. The vocabularies of film music—I’m saying nothing new here—are derived from virtually all music that came before: the symphonic and operatic repertories, orchestral Jazz, popular music of all kinds, everything. In this, composed soundtrack music is no different from the music a talented theater accompanist would provide for silent films. You could do generic white noise, or follow the drama, making musical references and providing sound effects and so on. So it was with some of the soundtracks we were hearing on Connor’s films: knock-offs of Liszt’s Second Hungarian Rhapsody, of Sousa’s “Stars and Stripes Forever,” etc. That is not so different from famous cues that scream Epic or Momentous or whatever; in fact it’s precisely the same pattern: you need the music to say something that you either can’t, or that you feel would be crude if you just came out and said it. You need a strategy with more deftness.

Now, think of—let’s say—a young person in love with his or her favorite song. James Huneker has a cute, if dated and saccharine, image of the female Chopin fan: “Surely these Nocturnes are my whole life!” Is our attraction to the popular songs with which we have most closely identified in the past really all that different, though? Man, that one hits me right…there. Cosmic Truth, that one. That’s me surviving the hopelessness of work, that’s me wandering alone on dark streets, that’s me tormented nigh unto death by my memories. Oh, man, and that guitar solo says it all. ALL! I’ll just hit “play” again and turn it up…

My favorite quotation from Gustav Mahler is “There is no music, from Beethoven onwards, that is without its inner program.” In Mahler’s view, that makes The Great Masterworks Of The Repertoire…soundtrack music. They either narrate or accompany a story, most often unknown to the listener, with a coherence and continuity that establish them as real, lasting art. In no way does it mean, though, that they aren’t talking about something else: love or war or a hunt or a hopeless quest or whatever. The natural way of listening—letting your mind wander and allowing a story to be told—may be far closer to the “right” way than listening for structure and thematic coherences and the rest of the stuff people with training are supposed to be listening for. In some measure, all art is escapism, as all literature is: escape to the imagination, to idealization, to something that both entertains and teaches something deeper about this Real World. But as we negotiate this Real World, we need our soundtrack: inner conversations, inner music: favorite tunes we play in our heads or on our iPods, and it can be the most celebrated of masterworks or the most ephemeral of pop songs. The soundtrack spins on and on.

When I was just 18, I was given John Hale’s Renaissance Europe, 1480–1520 to read in preparation for my first year of college (some catch-up for my year reading history at Portsmouth Polytechnic—Portsmouth, England—when my father was teaching there on exchange). One image that stuck with me was that of the constant presence, in the ear of the Early Modern European, of bells: bells for the many church services, for civic notices and signals, for marking the hours. The soundtrack, in other words. Other epochs have had street singers (often satirized iconographically), laborers and farmers who sang at their tasks, the huge repertory of folksong that is the human inheritance. A constant sounding, a constant accompaniment, a constant association of particular music and songs and gestures with particular emotions and activities.

Plus ça change, in other words. What I like about this is the image of us all singing our own soundtracks, so to speak, setting our lives to music, and that in key ways most western music functions the same way—accompanimentally, referentially, children’s rhymes up through symphonies. And, one suspects, it has been this way for a long, long time.

A Style Out of Time

“They were graceful and heroic songs in a style out of time…” (Maddy Prior)

One of the questions commonly asked of music students and musicians—probably something like the one asked to physicians: “A friend of mine has this problem…”—is asked by friends and family members who, y’know, like classical music but not that dissonant modern stuff. The question is something like, “Well, why don’t people write like Mozart anymore? We’d like modern music then, wouldn’t we? I mean, what he wrote worked…”

This one is surprisingly hard to respond to. You’re studying music, and you’ve just fallen in love with Pierrot Lunaire, with George Crumb, with Bartok, with Cage, with Ligeti. And you’ve just fallen in love with all this really challenging music but you can’t really explain it to people who want their music to be purty, period. And they think they’ve stumped you, and you think they’ve let their stupid side show, and in any case there’s no real way to respond to them—you cannot explain to them why Mozart is really edgy, in a sense not pretty, why people who liked nice music didn’t really respond to Mozart, all that you hear in Mozart. Forget it. They’ll think you're crazy, or pretentious.

I wasn’t thinking about Mozart when I had the radio on a couple of days ago; I was thinking about…Traffic. (Not traffic but Traffic: the fabulously gifted early-to-mid 1970s ensemble, consisting of Steve Winwood, Jim Capaldi, and Chris Wood.) Steve Winwood has a new solo album, and the single, “Dirty City,” sounds an awful lot like Traffic in the glory days. It sounded wonderful, but…old, from Back Then. I honestly was not sure if it was an old song or new song. Really enjoyable, beautifully played, but…well, dated. Great, but somehow not right. The retro stuff on Springsteen’s latest (I’m hearing “The Girls in Their Summer Clothes” on the radio these days) is not old-style dress-up in the same way, but rather a tribute, and (somehow) more current and immediate. I really like this new Winwood tune, but it just does not feel culturally vital; it feels not like the immediacy of my youth, but rather like me too comfortably remembering my youth.

There is a reason, though probably an inexplicable one, why even the best music written in counterpoint class sounds like a beautiful…museum-piece, exercise, or artifact, but not really an expression of anything real. Contrast Brahms’s olden-style pieces for, say, women’s chorus, which sound like he is ruminating on a beloved style of music, which is something different—there is still elements of Brahms and own time there, hence an intensity and vividness (and, I guess, the same is true for Springsteen). This may be why much academic music sounds so blisteringly yesterday; it is, too often, music constructed in response to a codified structure or belief-system or aesthetic (whether historical or “contemporary”) and ends up talking to itself only, if it talks at all. I can’t help thinking of the vanilla silliness of what the composition profs in the 1970s were turning out, or the sugar-water of the New Agers later. The Moment for those styles was brief indeed, and the compositional nokhschleppers (draggers-after) were so weirdly self-righteous about How It Ought To Be, long after their stuff stopped communicating. I have to admit that some of this self-righteousness can be heard among Classic Rock aficionados: it was fantastic then, now it has no foundation, the kids don’t know what they’re hearing, it all sucks. O Tempus, O Mores!

Myself, I can’t get through the wall to the Mystery—why music from its time can sound timeless, but music out of its time is somehow culturally less connected, less vivid and immediate. And I will still listen to it, and gladly; good music commands attention. There’s a nagging feeling, though, that music in a believable historical stylistic costume just a tad too comfortable. The sort of thing a middle-aged guy listens to in the car. No offense, Mr. Winwood, Sir.

Glenn Gould's 3-D House of Pancakes

OK, I'll admit it, I've been kind of phoning it in on the blog for the last little bit. It's lame to blog about how you're too busy to blog (something I've called "the Teachout method"), but you get to do it once a year, I reckon, so I'm doing it now. You might have noticed that the number of "cool" postings has increased in proportion to "hot" ones, which basically means, more posting to other people's funny/smart/imaginative doings and more posting of Youtube clips.

This isn't going to change anytime soon. I've still got a lot of stuff to do before the semester ends, and all discretionary brain power (i.e., whatever's left over after teaching) is being used to write about angry hippies with guns.

Another sure-fire way to get hits 'n' links without trying very hard is to write something -- anything -- about Glenn Gould. So here we go. The other day in my sound and performance studies seminar I talked a little about Gould's approach to recording. Gould thought of a recording as a crafted audio composition in itself rather than a transparent rendering of a performance -- or, in Thedore Gracyk's terms, it is an autographic artwork. Gracyk's excellent book Rhythm and Noise rejects what he calls realism in favor of a notion in which a recording -- rock recordings especially, though hiphop does it too -- tiles together sounds assembled in the recording studio to create virtual performances, which is to say, performances that never existed in real time or a real place.

Anyway, the culture of classical music almost never challenges the realist ideal of recording. Even after 4+ decades of rock musicians and their audiences taking studio-based composition for granted, classical heads still get in arguments over the morality of splicing. Glenn Gould is an interesting historical figure (quite apart from the interest his piano playing as such might hold) because he is such an unusual figure within classical music, arguing what is basically a rock position on recording in a classical culture to which such a position is almost totally alien. A good article about all this may be found here. Its author makes the point that Gould's own studio practice is actually rather conservative in his piano recordings. Gould really only broke out into something more innovative in his "Solitude Trilogy" of CBC documentaries. There's a rather beautiful representation of his this in Thirty-Two Short Films About Glenn Gould:

In my seminar the other day, I played one of the recordings that Gould made late in life, when he had begun to experiment with what he called "acoustic choreography." This idea was basically that since studio recording allows one to create various acoustic "perspectives" on the piano, one could change from one perspective to another within the same piece, in effect creating the musical analog of a cinematic zoom. So, for example, in Sibelius's Kyllikki op. 41 no. 3,* Gould set up four microphones at varying distances from the piano, and in the first section, where he wanted a dry, analytical sound, he faded the distant mikes and boosted the close ones, eliminating most of the room sound and drawing close into the piano. In the more lyrical middle section, he "zooms" way back, boosting the room sound and giving the recording a "wet," bathroom-like acoustic ambiance. It sounds as if the microphone is mounted on a cart that has just been pulled away from the piano. Compared to the very sophisticated pseudo-spatial effects in an album like, say, Kid A, this is a rather obvious effect, even a bit absurd, like SCTV's classic skit, "Dr. Tongue's Evil House of Pancakes":

Still, you gotta love Gould for trying. And I think it's the fact that he did try, and in the face of considerable hostility and incomprehension from the classical music establishment, that has made him the unlikely hero of such musicians like Buckethead and Uri Caine.

*This example is drawn from Kevin Bazzana's extremely awesome scholarly monograph on Gould, Glenn Gould: The Performer in the Work, the last chapter of which contains a fine detailed investigation of Gould's "acoustic choreography," including photo reproductions of the scores Gould marked up to reflect his planned zooms and pans.

The Original Instrument

I suppose this is what I deserve for studying performance practices, and what you deserve for reading a blog by professors. A student found an old recording of the Schubert Arpeggione Sonata (arpeggione, which is a bowed guitar—also called a guitarre d’amour in its time—and piano), and shared it with me. Coincidentally, the very same day a different recording came in on an old LP, ordered by our music librarian. I mentioned before the I was dying of curiosity to hear what the thing was like, how idiomatic, etc. Now, at last, my chance! This rare instrument, how Schubert plumbed its depths, the new light about to be cast on a familiar piece…

The first recording I heard, very well played by Gerhart Darmstadt (arpeggione) and Egino Klepper (Schubert-era piano) did not change my world. It is always possible—I admit up front—that my expectations are colored by versions of the piece with which I have already become familiar. That said, my initial feeling about the arpeggione os as follows: it must have seemed like a good idea at the time. Six strings on one bridge doesn’t give the player much in the way of room to maneuver without hitting other strings; a cello allows for much more room. On the basis of the melodies and textures I hear on this recording, I suspect Schubert was no more intimately familiar with the arpeggione that was anyone else; he was probably thinking of a “Supercello’ with a better high range than the cellos we know. This music seems to need a member of the violin family to speak, really: powerful bow-work is balanced by gloriously insouciant melodies. And the arpeggione sounds like a …viol. For me, at least, that’s just the wrong sound-world. The instrument is not sufficiently robust and extroverted to stand out against a Schubert-era piano, and the entire presentation seems like an idea that just didn’t quite work. Of course, the straight, uninflected, and polite (though wonderfully accurate) interpretation did not help bring vernacular Vienna alive for me, either.

Enter Klaus Storck, arpeggione, and Aloys Kontarsky, Schubert-era piano, on the 1974 Archiv recording. My objections are softened somewhat, but not completely. Where Darmstadt sounded a bit awkward on strums and chordal playing (what they English viol players called “playing the lyre way”), Storck sounds lovely. This recording also has a lot more Viennese vernacular flexibility and rhythmic kick (if you think I’m making this up, read Hans Gál on the subject), and so I found it more persuasive for that reason also. It is also recorded better, so the arpeggione does seem to hold its own against the piano.

All that said, I don’t regard a cello or viola transcription as so far off as to betray the piece. It is still a masterpiece, and works beautifully on the members of the more robust violin family. As it happens, I have just recently, for the first time, heard a recording of Ravel’s Tzigane for solo violin and luthéal, as was originally written—some kind of a contraption that made a piano sound more like a cimbalom, I think. Interesting, but the piano is fine on that one. For the Arpeggione Sonata, I'm fine with the middle strings, though clarinet, alto sax etc. are beyond the pale. It is possible to take the original-instrument fetish too far.

So, let’s summarize. Those who read this far have read my comparison of two long-out-of-print recordings of an instrument that had, essentially, the life of a dragonfly and had a negligible effect on the history of western music, and some philosophy in the bargain. Is this self-satire? Am I really this boring and peripheral? If so, at least it’s MY turf to stake out.

Go easy on the comments, please!

Rediscovered Ginsberg tapes

A wonderful discovery -- a tape recording of Allen Ginsberg reading Howl in 1956 at Reed College for a small audience. Much to their credit, the college made the tapes available for free this morning. The whole unedited tape contains seven other poems and a certain amount of informal chit-chat before Ginsberg begins Howl (slightly after the midpoint of the recording). I'm not the biggest Ginsberg fan -- don't hate it, don't love it -- but audio postcards like this always interest me. Ginsberg's reading style in Howl is self-consciously intense, in marked contrast to his very introverted style in the 1949 Holmes acetates. He says in his introduction to Howl that he's trying to emulate the feeling of chorus piled on top of chorus in bop -- he references a fabled Lester Young performance of "The Man I Love." Interesting to hear him trying for a jazz style; it's intense but it's actually not very jazzy. His reading doesn't have the musicality of Kerouac's readings, which are really very beautiful.

An unintended, but lovely and poetic touch -- the drone of the passing airplane (a prop plane -- this is 1956, after all) just as Ginsberg begins to read Howl. Don't know why this sound is so perfect -- mechanical but dolorous, like a train whistle.

More Lost Sounds

Friend Eric (eba) forwards several links to youtube clips of forgotten instruments: the Ondes Martenot (for which Messiaen among others composed), the Toy Piano (a favorite of mine; I’ve played such and (once or twice) really moved the parents of the kid-owners of such instruments), Trautonium, and even the Mellotron. Those who remember it from late-1960s Rock albums may be surprised to find how it’s used here.

To these I will add a clip of my old friend Roland Hutchinson introducing the Baryton, a mostly bowed instrument for which Haydn wrote many works, and a more modern version of the Arpeggione, which here—in a more modern version (but I believe essentially the same instrument)—is called a Bowed Guitar. What I continue to await is a serious performance of Schubert’s Argeggione Sonata actually ON one of these instruments—even a newer one. I’ve been the collaborating pianist on this piece, and it is a masterwork, but is only performed in transcription: double-bass, cello, viola, alto saxophone, what-have-you. It is a probably unique situation for a superb piece like this to have been written for an instrument that really never caught on at all, so all questions of performance practices, idiomatic writing for the instrument and so on are…utterly irrelevant until we see how the instrument really worked.

I’ll keep waiting. I’m used to waiting.