Dial "M" for Musicology

Song as Genome?

Jonathan Bellman

A videorecording of a very interesting presentation, perhaps fifteen to twenty minutes, is to be found here.  Dutch evolutionary biologist —now working in England at Imperial University, London—Armand Le Roi discusses how he met Brian Eno at a party, and was talking to him about the music history of ancient peoples, far back in our evolution, and whether or not it would be possible to resurrect any of this.  Eno set him on Alan Lomax’s data and quantifications of many, many songs, since Lomax believed that songs were quantifiable; he had had a million-dollar research grant, had sought unsuccessfully to crunch the data, and so on.  So Prof. Le Roi went and got this data, and refined his crunching techniques, and hey presto! is now of the opinion that song- or melos-resemblances can be a key to not only geographical migrations but really our human history in song.  Of course, this hasty paragraph does not do his presentation justice; I urge you, dear reader, to click on the link and hear his presentation yourself.  Listen all the way to the end.

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That said—one notes a couple of familiar tropes in Prof. Le Roi’s presentation.  The first is the Bad Young Genius Scientific Polymath: evolutionary bio, music, ancient history, and oh he must have mastered it all, and he’s so brilliant and hot and hip he can dress like—well—a homeless person and if you’re so uncool as to notice that a grey T-Shirt and jeans may not be the most appropriate dress in which to present research near and dear to your heart, research about which you would like to persuade your audience, then that says something about you.  (My folks stressed dressing in a way that at least shows respect, so to my eye: should Le Roi’s ensemble have been accessorized, the most natural addition would have been some vomit on the front of the shirt.)  Then there’s the self-righteous, anti-musicology maverick trope, one of the most tired: of Lomax’s data, Le Roi proclaims, “You might have expected it to have revolutionized musicology, but it didn’t.  Musicologists hate it.  I think it’s because musicologists don’t understand numbers!”

Well, maybe we don’t—every last one of us.  I certainly don’t, as my wife and son (him of the A in calculus as a young high school junior) will happily tell you.  I like to think I understand music, however, and one of my most sensitive allergies is to people who think they understand music way they (apparently) understanding everything else, and who then consider themselves entitled to speak confidently about those silly head-in-the-sand musicologists and what we’re obviously missing.  Purveyors of this kind of nonsense, who can be extremely bright people, nonetheless evidence astoundingly fragile egos regarding trained musicians and especially musicologists, as if we’re somehow so much more intimidating than other specialists.  Let me be clear: I  certainly don’t think we are, or have any right to be, or consider ourselves to be so, but I am sick to death of being treated as a bête noire by people who have some undefined, nonspecific, probably wholly imaginary grudge/inferiority complex about musicology. 

Le Roi’s concept, as oversimplified in his presentation, is that similarities in the songs of peoples across the world amount to, essentially, an aural trail of breadcrumbs that traces not only the migrations of language and cultural groups but also preserves cultural practice long effaced from human record and memory.  To me, the presentation is attractive and lively and sets the imagination alight: I myself am extremely vulnerable to the promise of recovering sounds long-forgotten, as I have blogged before.  So the task of doing musically what evolutionary biologists have done with mitochondrial DNA and philologists have done with language, over the last couple of centuries, is particularly alluring to me.  The problem is that past a certain specious suggestiveness, a variety of key points about the presentation ring false.  After trashing musicologists’ numeracy, Le Roi himself doesn’t go to a lot of trouble to actually explain how the data work.  He talks about how much computer space the data take, and some of Lomax’s general parameters (wide vs. narrow intervals, rhythms and so on, but is not more specific than that).  He puts up some very pretty graphics of migrations and song-types groupings and so on.  Does Lomax specify actual intervals, or specific rhythms, or just generalized categories?  We never know, and we are certainly not introduced to any critiques of these categories, as must certainly have originated in the ethnomusicological community.  (Perhaps by musicologists he means ethnomusicologists.  We’ll never know.)

Then, the proof: some recordings.  Yes, his time is clearly limited (AMS papers get more time), and he has a complex argument to make.  Still, it is skating on rather thin ice to play Zulu, then Swazi music, with its call-and-response antiphony, then to observe that it is entirely characteristic of sub-Saharan Africa (maybe it is; I can’t say), then to it with the Bantu migration of twenty-five hundred or so years ago, and then to play a call-and-response worksong (“Rosie”) by African-American workers on a chain gang in the 1950s as final proof.  There you have it!  The red thread connecting the Bantu descendants throughout myriad histories and lands!

Or not.  Call-and-and response forms are found the world over: the psalmody of the Roman Church, the “lining out” practices of early Anglo-American hymnody, etc.  Is that African, or is it simply practical: I sing a line and you then learn it and repeat it, or I sing a line and you answer because I’m the leader?  One does not necessarily need a complex migratory theory to explain this.  Furthermore, anyone with a modicum of listening experience would be far less confident of “obvious” similarities than Le Roi is.  I remember taking a Romanesque Art course at UCSB with the scholar Larry Ayers.  When a student rather cluelessly blurted out that something on the screen reminded her of eighth-century Japanese art, Ayers lost it: “This is what I hate about interdisciplinary studies!  People don’t know anything about either discipline!  The lines in the two styles are entirely dissimilar!”  A sage warning taken to heart by this music major: know your s--- before you start popping off about how X is “obviously” like Y.  It is far too easy to posit causal relationships when it is not safe to do so. 

A later example involves moaning solo chants by old guys, one an Inuit on an ice floe and one an Indian from somewhere in, if I recall, South America.  So, of course, the Asian migration is the explanation.  In probably every culture, though, we can find old men chanting, whether it’s the American Indians who sing the world into being every morning, the Jews who intone prayers and readings, Hawaiians telling their old lore, or anyone else.  Besides being old guys chanting, I don’t hear all that much similarity.  Out of charity, I won’t belabor his playing of a lovely Scandinavian lullaby, pointing out its resemblance to what we usually associate with Celtic music (maybe or maybe not; real Celtic music is something very different from Celtic pop product), and then saying—I kid you not—“This is what Celtic music is really about.”  Another excerpt: “I don’t know what this sounds like to you, but to me it’s pure Bollywood.  But it isn’t; it’s a Macedonian Gypsy song.”  Ergo…?  So the “argument” runs: A sounds like B, therefore there is a causal relationship.

I hope there is more to this research than meets my ear.  The theory is (to me, at least), of siren-like beauty: imagine having the tools to recover the lost song styles of humanity and protohumanity!  To listen again to the melos of the distant past!  Problem is, the musical conclusions as presented are amateurish in the extreme.  Either that or I’m too hide-bound and unimaginative, just like all those musicologists, to get it. 

I don’t think so, though.  But please, make up your own minds.  I at least applaud the sheer out-of-the-boxness of this kind of project, but I wish there was more musical expertise evident in the musical study about which musical conclusions are drawn.  It is hard to feel all that bad about my undeniable innumeracy, though, because at least I shy away from lecturing mathematicians about their ignorance.

Blinding Us With Science/Rant

Jonathan Bellman

Friend Eric forwards a link to this Scottish study that purports to find correspondences between musical taste and personality characteristics. The short version: only fans of Indie and Rock/Heavy Metal have low self-esteem, fans of Blues, Jazz, Classical Music, Rap, Opera, Reggae, Chart Pop, and Soul have high self-esteem, fans of Country and Western, Reggae, Bollywood, and Indie are all “outgoing”…and on, and on. Prof. Adrian North, who finds the results of his study “significant” and “surprising,” is a professor at Heriot-Watt University. Don’t feel bad; I’ve never heard of it either (I’m sure they’ve not heard of the University of Northern Colorado, to be fair), and you know it’s a good place because in addition to their three Scottish campuses they have one in Dubai. That link is to a BBC story; I would have thought BBC would have pointed out the obvious: Take the characteristics for fans of Classical Music: high self-esteem, creative, introvert, and at ease, and those for Rock/Heavy Metal: Low self-esteem, creative, not hard-working, not outgoing, gentle, at ease. What does that say for me—I like (indeed, play) Classical Music, and Rock? I have high and low self-esteem? How in God’s name does “Indie”—a self-promoting and self-marketing band—mean one particular kind of style? But more importantly, who is this clown from Heriot-Watt to say define what a fan of “classical music” is? Early Music, Beethoven Symphonies, Bartok piano music, Harry Partch, all wrapped up in one? Same for all other genres: Opera, Rock, Indie, all the rest. How can these things be dependably defined? What kind of professor would design this godawfully flawed and meaningless study and then—mirabile dictu!—find it “significant” and “surprising”? North is Director of Psychology. I mean, what? How does this pass for anything? How does this genius, who obviously has not the first idea about how music works or how to think about it, come up with these idiotic, arbitrary, entirely uncodifiable categories and think he can base an actual study on them? Or are the categories defined by the test subjects? Yeah, I pretty much like, y’know, Rock. Guess that means I agree with other Rock fans about what Rock is. And other Classical fans, and so on. For pity’s sake. I don’t often agree with the pseudo-populist, know-nothing hysteria about Those Silly Professors and Their Resource-Devouring, Useless Studies, but…it’s hard to think anything more charitable about this. This is the stupidest, most incompetently conceived, mostly completely pointless study involving music I have ever seen. At least he isn’t a music professor. Better Psychology should take the hit on this one.

The Tone-Deaf Scientist Sings of Love

Jonathan Bellman

I recently finished Steven Mithen’s provocative book, The Singing Neanderthals. Mithen speaks from the outset of his own musical incompetence: “I can neither sing in tune nor clap in rhythm. I am unable to play any musical instrument.” He goes on to praise his wife and children for their musical accomplishments, and to formulate a wide-ranging theory, in large part (and unavoidably) speculative, about why music evolved and why it is so important to our species. He ends with an impassioned call for us to listen, and then to play and sing. My suspicion is that such envoys are atypical in scientific works, even those intended for the lay reader, rare. It would be false for me to pretend to have retained a full comprehension everything from my first reading of this wide-ranging, interdisciplinary book, nor that I did not sometimes find it to be heavy going. Few things are as humbling, for me, as reading books about math or science that are intended for the general reader—the experience often reminds me what a dimwit I can be, in certain areas, how far below the “general educated lay reader” I can fall. Mithen’s hypothesis is that essential primate communication was originally musical, not verbal, and that communication via a variety of pitched vocalizations—laden with emotional content but not the potentially abstract combinatorics of words—is completely consistent with both the long-term survival and cultural stability (hundreds of thousands of years) of the cultures of pre-homo sapiens such at the Neanderthals, a stability and survival that is demonstrated in the fossil record. What is striking about the book, amidst all the summaries of studies in other disciplines, adducing of other scholars’ findings, and piecing together of a broad and complex picture, is the extent to which it seems to be a work of passion, a—well—slapdown of linguist Steven Pinker’s assessment of music as “auditory cheesecake,” something really outside the imperatives of human development. It seems to me that Pinker’s linguacentrism unleashed Mithen’s Poet Within. (I have no informed opinion one way or the other, beyond finding Mithen persuasive.) How does a scholar compose an ode? With explications and marginalia and footnotes. Before you laugh too hard, though, reflect that the eloquence of any utterance depends on sympathy for the idiom. Hiphop or rap will not communicate to people ill-disposed to those characteristic uses of language. Ditto for the Rock song, and even poetry that doesn’t rhyme, to people who insist that it should. I admit that there were points when I wanted to interrupt, though to chime in rather than dispute. In his concluding chapter, for instance, Mithen observes: "It is now apparent, for instance, why even when listening to music made by instruments rather than the human voice, we treat music as a virtual person and attribute to it an emotional state and sometimes a personality and intention. It is also now clear why so much of music is structured as if a conversation is taking place within the music itself, and why we often intuitively feel that a piece of music should have a meaning attached to it even though we cannot grasp what that might be." The entire world of musical rhetoric, topics, formal conventions and generic contracts and so on leapt to mind, as it would to style mavens, film music people, and many others of us. Mithen may not have heard of such explanations for what to him seems to be a deeply alluring mystery, but the reader feels an urge to share, explain, contribute. It’s not our story, though, it’s his. Mithen’s fugue of paleontology, anthropology, neuroscience, child psychology, and so much else amounts to a love song, to music itself—which he loves desperately, but seemingly through a glass, darkly—and to his family. One wonders if they understand that. Scholarly writing with this kind of¬—well, unbridled passion is all too rare, but such a pleasure when discovered.

He Blinded Us With Science!

Jonathan Bellman

An article by Michael D. Lemonick on p. 57 of the 5 February 2007 issue of Time magazine is titled “The Geometry of Music,” with the subhead: “A composer has taken equations from string theory to explain why Bach and bebop aren’t so different.” Hmm. (And the still, small voice within sings Leonard Cohen: “Baby, I’ve been here before…”) Here’s the first sentence: “When you first hear them, a Gregorian chant, a Debussy prelude and John Coltrane improvisation might seem to have almost nothing in common—except that they all include chord progressions and something you could plausibly call a melody.” First off, it is not too geekily musical to observe that Lemonick must not know what either chord progressions or Gregorian chant actually are, since chant is monophonic—a single voice, or several voices singing in unison—and therefore chord progressions are pretty much out of the question. Yes, you find chord progressions realized melodically in, for example, Bach violin sonatas and partitas, but that doesn’t apply—the liturgical chant repertories of the Roman Catholic Church evolved (meaning no offense to those who believe that the music was quite literally dictated to St. Gregory by a dove) before the codification of traditional western tonal grammar. End result of first sentence: the reader knows that the writer is about to spend an entire page talking about something of which he has no understanding. No blame for the journalist’s fumbling attempts to explain what this is about should be borne by Dmitri Tymoczko, the composer/theorist in question. Lemonick does direct us to the composer’s website to understand his plan, and several links to papers and publications are provided there. The opening of the abstract that appeared in Science magazine, titled “The Geometry of Musical Chords,” reads: “A musical chord can be represented as a point in a geometrical space called an orbifold. Line segments represent mappings from the notes of one chord to those of another. Composers in a wide range of styles have exploited the non-Euclidean geometry of these spaces, typically by using short line segments between structurally similar chords.” Links on the website show us different pieces with dancing dots and segments on orbifolds. The first line gives me pause: “A musical chord can be represented as a point in a geometrical space called an orbifold.” OK, but why would one do that? Is there any indication that composers—outside of maybe Skrjabin—would have been thinking of music as somehow being represented in three-dimensional space? Tymoczko is quoted in the Time article as saying “Composers have been exploring these maps without really knowing.” I am skeptical, but that might have more to do with my disciplinary background than with the entire business being a great big larf. A colleague in Music Theory recently told me that he believes all analysis should proceed from the notes themselves, not from historical aesthetic approaches or treatises or anything else. “We tend to leave that to our colleagues in Music History.” Nice dig. We can take it further; theorists might consider themselves the equivalents of modern physician-researchers, pursuing Scientific Truth, while music historians like me are advocating—umm—“historically informed medicine,” practicing analysis in clumsy, wrongheaded ways analagous to having barbers lop off limbs, treating infections with leeches and bloodletting, and treating insanity by seeking to remove the Stone of Folly, etc. (Though I’m willing to try that last in one or two high-profile cases…) Joke’s on music historians; why can’t we simply base results on scientifically derived data? This is how the music works! See, we’ve got data! One remembers, here, Hans Keller’s famous distinction between anatomy and physiology. Music historians might find, in theorists, something of (say) cell-counting (or molecule-counting) in a way that completely obscures the big picture, and how things actually work. Music is not medicine; it is art. One does not explain painters’ aesthetics by studying the chemical compounds of their paints, because that is another kind of research, and one doesn’t explain Shakespeare’s dramatic sense by comparing his uses of “it is” and “’tis.” So I wonder about Tymoczko’s premises and conclusions. Because the chords can be represented visually…so? In western tonal music we’ve got twelve pitches and a tonal structure; those are givens, so a lot of the miraculous correspondences between various tonal musics are built into the system. I do not yet see how coming up with a new way to visually represent a very finite number of aspects about any music, and then comparing various of these newly minted representations, tells us anything. For me, better explanations about composers’ aesthetics and how their music worked will come from period-specific understandings: how music was taught, learned, though about, and heard, not how in can be represented or depicted in some way I dream up…today. If we begin by positing a “system” (look! if we put music on the orbifold, different pieces look similar…), then certain patterns that may or may not be real correspondences look significant, and have the additional attractiveness of Discovery Channel-type graphics to “prove” the case. Look! You can see it right there! Or, being a music historian, maybe I Just Don’t Get It. I invite Dial M readers to do their own prospecting in the Chord Geometries section of “Publications” on Tymoczko’s site and opine on the idea of whether or not great truths are revealed therein. My feeling is that there is less here than what very attractively meets the eye, but am willing to be educated.

Topos Approach to Bach's Music?

I don’t know if there are any other fans of the CBS TV show Numb3rs out there, but I and my family are devotees. There was an odd, throw-off sort of line in last Friday’s episode, in which something (in an otherwise mathematical conversation) was likened to a “topos approach to Bach’s music,” to which another character commented, “See, I told you it was complicated.” This caught me off guard because

1) the idea of musical topic, as Leonard Ratner has formulated it, derives from the Greek word topos;
2) those of us who had the real Ratner treatment at Stanford began with some exercises in Bach preludes, identifying topics etc., before going on to use those tools in other music (Bach cantatas, Viennese classical music etc.); and
3) I believe that “topos approach” means something else in mathematics, something I probably could not even begin to understand, but if so I’m wondering how the devil Bach’s music came into it, in comment that was both unmotivated and un-followed-up.

Any ideas? As a Ratner disciple, I had the odd sense that aliens were trying to communicate with me without being noticed, or something on that order.

On to the City of the Angels! Very appropriate, given the setting of Numb3rs.

Pluto Busted to "Dwarf Planet"; Holst Vindicated

Richard Wattenbarger

Although I'm no fan of Holst's The Planets (1914-1916, premiered 1920), I must confess to a certain amount of glee to learn that the International Astronomical Union has revoked Pluto's planetary status, thus restoring (at least temporarily) the seven movements of the suite to something corresponding to the real solar system. And, yes, I know that Pluto hadn't been discovered when Holst composed the piece.

Does it matter that no one knew of Pluto in the 1910s? At one point, I would have answered, "No."  Yet around 2000, Kent Nagano and the Hallé Orchestra commissioned Colin Matthews to compose a "Pluto" movement.  The movement, entitled "Pluto, the Renewer,"  (a recording of which has been available on the Naxos label) is a pretty good piece, not least because Matthews wisely eschewed any attempt to emulate Holst's style.

Still, I must confess a certain amount of ambivalence about Nagano's, Hallé's, and Matthews's venture.  Does "completing" The Planets dehistoricize the piece?  I'm not convinced that what Matthews has done is in the same category as, for example, Luciano Berio's Rendering, his realization of Schubert's sketches for an unfinished ninth symphony, or Berio's endings for Turandot and the unfinished Contrapunctus from Kunst der Fuge.  It may be that Berio's efforts force us to grapple with some of the historical problems surrounding these pieces in a way that Matthews's doesn't.  I don't know.  I'm going to have to give this more thought.

Planets and jazz, categories for

Phil Ford

Pluto is still a planet. This comforts me, for some reason. The real story here, though, is the difficulty, or maybe impossibility, of coming up with a definition of what is and is not a planet that will satisfy everyone. The  decision for now is to say that a planet is any object that orbits a star instead of another planet and exerts enough gravitational force to form itself into a sphere. This avoids the counterintuitive effect of demoting Pluto, but it also means that Ceres, a large round asteroid, is now a planet, as is Charon, Pluto's biggest moon, because strictly speaking Pluto and Charon both orbit the sun while sharing a gravitational axis -- sort of like two guys in a bar fight with their hands around each other's necks, spinning around each other and knocking over the tables.

Nietzsche says it best: only that which has no history can be defined. Which I've always taken to mean, all complex classes of things come to share a lingustic/conceptual identity only by virtue of a shared history -- historical relationships between the things themselves, and historical relationships between the people talking about them.

Take jazz. In terms of musical style, there is almost nothing in common between Cecil Taylor and Louis Armstrong except improvisation, and even there, their respective ideas of improvisation are so different they might as well belong to two entirely different cultures. But if you asked any jazz fan -- or any competent record-store clerk -- what part of the store to stock "Unit Structures" and a Hot Fives record in, they'll say "jazz." Cecil Taylor is following a certain train of thought put in motion by Louis Armstrong (among others), but, as in a game of "telephone," that thought comes to us having followed a complicated series of transactions and in the process has changed out of recognition. Wittgenstein uses the metaphor of the rope to think about the paradoxical way things can share a categorical identity while having nothing in common with one another. A rope is made up of thousands of strands that are twisted together to make the rope. The rope runs without break from point A to point Z, but there is no one strand within the rope that runs from A to Z. The rope, in the case of jazz, is history or tradition; the strands are the individual practices of artists like Taylor or Armstrong and the arguments of fans and critics. Some of those critics, like Stanley Crouch, simply do not accept this kind of definition-by-contingency. Over the years Crouch has argued that there is or should be a list of stylistic qualities without which music cannot be considered jazz: swing, improvisation, the "Latin tinge," and I forget the others.

In this sense Crouch comes at the problem of definition in much the same way as many of the scientists quoted in the above article. Scientists need to construct categories that are valid as analytical tools for every potential instance of a class of things, including those we haven't encountered yet. (And as time goes on, chances are we'll find more and more planets outside the solar system.)
From this point of view, the historical rule-of-thumb categorization of planets we've collectively evolved to think about our own cosmic neighborhood is unscientific. From point of view accepts the groupings generated from within history, the scientific style of classification seems arbitrary. I guess the point is to think about which style of classification works best for which kind of knowledge, and we could have an argument about that, but for now what's interesting to me is how the planet controversy marks a point where two fundamental ways of classifying the world collide.