the "limited" art of music :-(
Roger Lustig
>Good day, r.m.c'ers! This post arises out of a discussion
>group held in Washington D.C. by a group of violists and
>chamber musicians, but might have general interest.
>All who read this are presumably enamoured in some way of
>classical music and most will feel that certain pieces speak to
>them in a direct way unattainable by any other art; i.e. music
>is capable of "pressing emotional buttons" more immediately
>than any other art. For many people, including many people
>reading this, this is I am sure true.
>With this as preamble I raise the following dismal hypothesis:
>that music is in a certain sense the most parochial, the most
>limited, the most "culture-bound" of arts. :-( One asks: where
>are the great musical creations of Japan, India, China,
>Nigeria?(I am referring to _indigenous_ creations, not to e.g.
>how good the Shanghai or Lagos Philharmonics are) Similarly in
>time: where are the great musical creations of the ancient
>Indians, Egyptians, ancient Greeks, ancient Romans, ancient
>Persians, Arabs of 500-1000 A.D.? If they exist, I for one
>have not heard of them.
Is this supposed to be a paraphrase of "Where is the Tolstoy of
the Zulus? I would like to read him." (Saul Bellow)
In any case, the situation is actually pretty good with music,
as long as you don't expect a canon of labeled works that sound
about the same each time you play them. Japan, Java, Northern
India, and other places on earth have highly developed "classical"
musics. These include traditions of song, instrumental performance,
staged musical drama, etc.; in some cases they include pieces
"composed" very much like Western ones.
As for the past, keep in mind that many of *our* great musical
creations of the past have disappeared, and for two central
reasons:
--nobody cared about them anymore (as with Renaissance music,
much of which had no performances for centuries)
--the notated music was lost (partly as a result of nobody
caring...)
That said, when a culture that doesn't notate its music disappears,
the music disappears. That doesn't mean that the music wasn't
good, though.
We *do* have some examples of Greek musical notation. There
may be some Egyptian or Mesopotamian sources, too, but we can't
be sure how to decipher them. As far as Rome goes, some
"Gregorian" chant is probably as old as the 5thC, i.e., the
later Empire; Byzantine chant has early origins, too. Curt
Sachs wrote a famous book about music in antique cultures;
since then, much more has been discovered.
As for the great works of the ancient world, keep in mind
that some of the works for which we only know the words
were originally sung: I mean the Homeric epics, the
tragedies of Sophocles, etc. These were musical works,
and I doubt one would hesitate to call them "great."
>Now I and my friends _have_ heard of e.g. Hung Lou Meng, Li Po,
>Chinese scroll paintings, Lady Murasaki, Horace, Hafiz, Benin,
>Aeschylus, Kalidasa, and many others that could be mentioned,
>even by me and my friends, none especially learned in
>non-Western or ancient cultures. But music seems to be a
>"ghetto", confined to Europe from, say, 1500 to 1900, from
>Monteverdi and Tallis to Bartok and Berg. Is this true? if so,
>why is it? Where are the Bminormasses, the Op131s, of other
>cultures, other times?
I see a non-sequitur here. Why must music have a named
composer to be great?
Of course, we *do* know the names of composers from far
earlier than 1500; Leonin and Perotin, whose works are
the foundation of Notre Dame polyphony, lived before
and after 1200; and chant composers from centuries earlier ar
known to us as well. "Monteverdi and Tallis" seems to me
an oddly arbitrary cutoff; why not Josquin, whome everyone
from Martin Luther on down adored as the PRince of Music,
or Machaut, whose complete works were compiled in the
1370's at the French court? Why not mention the
Troubadours and Trouveres and Minnesinger?
But so what? What if we *don't* know who the composers
were, or even how the music goes anymore? Funny that you
should mention Aeschylus: during two of the great musical
revolutions, namely the Florentine Camerata around 1600
and the Wagnerian development of music-drama, it was
precisely Aeschylus whose impact on Classical (really,
this time) audiences was referred to as an ideal of
integrated musical art. The song, so the progressive
musicians said, combined text and music (and motion)
to move audiences as the music of the newer era no
longer could. Note that they didn't even know the
names of most of the composers of Aeschylus' music;
but they were convinced it was great and moving in
just the ways your query is based on.
Your idea seems to be that great music is music that
is written down in a way that we in the 20thC can
read it, and that we in the 20thC are moved by it.
Alas, this latter aspect is highly problematic: most
people *aren't* moved by it. It involves a great deal
of familiarity with Western cultures of the past before
it makes sense. (Not necxessarily book-larnin', mind you;
growing up around such music helps, and not many people
do.) Why do we want to define "great music" in
that way?
>This is perhaps the time to emphasize that this post is
>submitted in the search for knowledge, not as a statement of
>position. And with this in mind, and in the interest of saving
>bandwidth, let me anticipate some possible rejoinders.
>1) You are flat wrong, there were great masterpieces of music
>in e.g. ancient Greece, ancient Japan. My question: where are
>they, why aren't they performed? Answer: they're lost, musical
>notation wasn't developed. And I reply: we have the text of
>Aeschylus, of Kenko, surely any culture that could produce
>great musical masterpieces would have developed a notation to
>preserve them.
Stop calling me Shirley. 8-) Why didn't *our* culture develop
a musical notation until around 1000 years ago? Answer: because
local traditions were slow-moving enough, and oral transmission
reliable enough (if most people don't read, and books are rare,
people learn to memorize). This is true of a lot of art; it
took a few centuries for Homer to be written down. (Heck,
it took centuries for the *Talmud* to be written down; do
you suppose people wrote down Genesis the moment they considered
the story important?)
Let's extend this a little further. Do we have no great dance?
No tradition of dance at court? If we do, where's the notation?
Dance notation of any complexity was only developed in *this*
century. That doesn't mean that there were no masterpieces
before.
All of which is to say that, no, cultures that had masterpieces
would *not* necessarily develop a notation for them. Notation
did not always carry the central meaning it has for us.
>2) Indeed music is special to Westerners and
>Western-influenced, as you say. And I reply: I simply cannot
>believe that I am moved to the depths as I directly am, by the
>music of BachBeethovenBrahmsBritten, simply because of the
>chance of my environment.
That's your problem. Note that people from other parts of
the world, e.g., Japan, and who have a Western education,
*are* moved by this music; people without such acculturation
generally are not. Note that people from Northern India are
indeed greatly moved by Carnatic music, which is in many
cases a more central part of their lives than the music
of any amateur in our part of the world is; and there is no
denying that this music is "classical," highly developed,
and even notated, not to mention written about in endless
detail. Why does it not interest more Westerners? Why
are you not moved by *it*?
>I hope I have made my problem clear -- and I hope that the
>learned and cultured r.m.c'ers out there will weigh in to help
>me in my puzzlement. Thanks in advance.
Here's a suggestion. Read a book on world music. I mentioned
Sachs:
Curt Sachs, _The Rise of Music in the Ancient World, East and
West_ (Norton, 1943)
Also try Bruno Nettl's surveys (Prentice-Hall), and perhaps the
articles on other musics in the New Grove.
Finally, ask yourself why you mentioned Monteverdi above. Is
he so universal in our culture? Since when? (Answer: since
the 1930's, when Leo Schrade, Nadia Boulanger, and Malipiero
brought his music to everyone's attention. Our current
culture is a historicist one; in fact, the idea of "Great"
and "timeless" art music is itself rather new; it doesn't
go back much before Beethoven.)
Roger
>Alan McConnell Why don't we treat the Haitians the way we treat
>Pixel Analysis the Cubans? why don't we treat Haiti the way we
>(al...@clark.net) treat Cuba?
Uh, because Haiti isn't Cuba?
Alan McConnell
group held in Washington D.C. by a group of violists and
chamber musicians, but might have general interest.
All who read this are presumably enamoured in some way of
classical music and most will feel that certain pieces speak to
them in a direct way unattainable by any other art; i.e. music
is capable of "pressing emotional buttons" more immediately
than any other art. For many people, including many people
reading this, this is I am sure true.
With this as preamble I raise the following dismal hypothesis:
that music is in a certain sense the most parochial, the most
limited, the most "culture-bound" of arts. :-( One asks: where
are the great musical creations of Japan, India, China,
Nigeria?(I am referring to _indigenous_ creations, not to e.g.
how good the Shanghai or Lagos Philharmonics are) Similarly in
time: where are the great musical creations of the ancient
Indians, Egyptians, ancient Greeks, ancient Romans, ancient
Persians, Arabs of 500-1000 A.D.? If they exist, I for one
have not heard of them.
Now I and my friends _have_ heard of e.g. Hung Lou Meng, Li Po,
Chinese scroll paintings, Lady Murasaki, Horace, Hafiz, Benin,
Aeschylus, Kalidasa, and many others that could be mentioned,
even by me and my friends, none especially learned in
non-Western or ancient cultures. But music seems to be a
"ghetto", confined to Europe from, say, 1500 to 1900, from
Monteverdi and Tallis to Bartok and Berg. Is this true? if so,
why is it? Where are the Bminormasses, the Op131s, of other
cultures, other times?
This is perhaps the time to emphasize that this post is
submitted in the search for knowledge, not as a statement of
position. And with this in mind, and in the interest of saving
bandwidth, let me anticipate some possible rejoinders.
1) You are flat wrong, there were great masterpieces of music
in e.g. ancient Greece, ancient Japan. My question: where are
they, why aren't they performed? Answer: they're lost, musical
notation wasn't developed. And I reply: we have the text of
Aeschylus, of Kenko, surely any culture that could produce
great musical masterpieces would have developed a notation to
preserve them.
2) Indeed music is special to Westerners and
Western-influenced, as you say. And I reply: I simply cannot
believe that I am moved to the depths as I directly am, by the
music of BachBeethovenBrahmsBritten, simply because of the
chance of my environment.
I hope I have made my problem clear -- and I hope that the
learned and cultured r.m.c'ers out there will weigh in to help
me in my puzzlement. Thanks in advance.
Best wishes, Alan McConnell
--
Roger Lustig
>mave...@cork.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Vance Maverick) writes:
>>In article <2j0b6q$c...@explorer.clark.net> al...@clark.net (Alan McConnell) writes:
>> One asks: where
>> are the great musical creations of Japan, India, China,
>> Nigeria?
>>On record.
>> If they exist, I for one have not heard of them.
> Good, thank you. I am willing to be enlightened and would sincerely
> like your recommendations for "equivalents" of Bminormass and Op131,
> in the indigenous music of Japan, China, and Africa. And I shall
> certainly "lurk" on rec.music.indian.classical.
The idea of "equivalents" is an odd one. Why do you *need* such equivalents?
For that matter, what *is* the "masterpiece" status of those two works?
Keep in mind that one of them was essentially lost to the world for
about a century, and required a historicist revival before it received
any support at all. When it was written, it was never performed, and
would have been of little interest to about 99% of the "Classical"
musical world of the time.
The other one was *rejected* for half a century after it appeared. there
were only ten performances or so *anywhere* of this published piece; not
until another composer wrote an essay that used it to glorify both
Beethoven and himself, and included an approach to its exegesis, did
the musical world begin, slowly, to appreciate it.
Most listeners to "classical" music don't pay much attention to the
work even today. Only a few intellectual currents within music
consider it to be a towering masterpiece; to many, it's simply
irrelevant.
At any rate, note that "equivalents" such as you're looking for
would seem to have to pass a special test: they must be central
to their culture *and* speak to you! Do we require that of
Beethoven and Bach--that their masterpieces speak to cultures
other than our own?
>> Now I and my friends _have_ heard of e.g. Hung Lou Meng, Li Po,
>> Chinese scroll paintings, Lady Murasaki, Horace, Hafiz, Benin,
>> Aeschylus, Kalidasa, and many others that could be mentioned,
>> even by me and my friends, none especially learned in
>> non-Western or ancient cultures.
>>If you had worked even half this hard on the music of non-Western
>>cultures, you'd be posting answers to this question instead of asking
>>it.
> I submit: not fair<g>. I haven't had to "work" to learn about
> The Dream of the Red Chamber, Hiroshige, Odes of Horace, Hafiz,
> etc etc.
Right; you know them all by 8th grade. If you'd gone to vo-tech, you'd
have gotten to know them too. Even the engineers at your college kneww
them all. (No slur intended...)
>We have Chartres, we have Taj Mahal, we have Angkor
> Wat. Anyone who's been to college knows this.
Not. You been to college lately? I've taught music appreciation;
I've found I can't assume *anything*.
>But I was a
> music major in college(_many_ years ago, to be sure :-( ) and
> have been reasonably diligent in following musical trends since,
> and I have never seen a chance to be exposed to a musical art
> work from, say, Japan, or even India, that matches say Op 131
> in the way that, say, The Tale of Genji matches War and Peace.
a) Isn't it a scandal how music departments don't cover all the bases?
b) In what way *do* those two works match?
>> But music seems to be a
>> "ghetto", confined to Europe from, say, 1500 to 1900, from
>> Monteverdi and Tallis to Bartok and Berg. Is this true?
>>Well, it's true in the sense that Western-classical heads behave as if
>>it were so. But even slight effort would show you, first, that the
>>boundaries of the ghetto are actually open on either end in time
>>(where are Perotin, Machaut, Nancarrow and Xenakis on your spectrum?),
>>and, second, that music from other cultures is entirely accessible,
>>and well worth the effort.
> You may be right that Western _musicians_ . . . in contrast
> to Western artists, architects, poets, novelists, who cherish
> and applaud the corresponding arts of other cultures . . .
> are close-minded and ignorant. Why should this be so? And
Because, starting in the 19th C, they fed the audience and themselves
and each other the line that their music was timeless, classical,
progressive, etc.
Actually, that's only one half of it; the other half has to do with
your music-major training. Unlike other arts, musicianship requires
a great deal of technical skill--not only chops but harmony,
counterpoint, analysis, etc. All this takes a lot of time to learn
and integrate; and of course music itself takes *time*; unlike
a painting, music *exists* in time only. It takes a good deal of
time to "get into" the ways of musical thinking that other cultures
use; think of the changes you have to make (not to mention the ones
you have to learn!) when you go from "Classical" to jazz. Notation
becomes only a small part of the story; great jazz players and
singers learn from hearing one another, not from studying scores.
Knowing the ins and outs of Ellington or Gil Evans charts is only
a tiny portion of jazz; learning to swing, to improvise, to follow,
to "talk" -- that's a great deal of jazz, and you won't find more than
one percent of it in your book.
Jazz has great masterpieces, too. THink of West End Blues.
> why are the musicians of Japan, Korea, India, Africa so much
> the other way, so open to Beethoven, Bach, Mozart? I am
Which ones? The ones who go to Western schools?
Keep in mind that the politics and economics of the last two centuries
have meant that Western culture has spread in ways that other cultures
have not. Where are the Chinese language classes in all our schools?
> eagerly open to donning sack-cloth, covering my head with
> ashes . . . yet, I submit, there are still questions.
Well, my questions are: what's your yardstick? What makes your
"masterpieces" so absolute and unquestioned? How did they get
that way?
>> Where are the Bminormasses, the Op131s, of other cultures, other times?
>>To some extent this is an ill-formed question: it assumes a musical
>>tradition built on written 'masterpieces', for one thing, which few
>>cultures other than ours have developed for music.
> Yes! Just exactly! You have penetrated to the essence of my
> perhaps murky first post. Why has _only_ the Western culture
> developed this kind of musical culture?
Why has only Indian culture developed *its* type of musical culture?
For that matter, note that some of your other examples are Western-
based, too. The novel is primarily a Western form; epics exist from
various cultures, but not novels. Where is the Mahabharata of
Europe, if you will? What happened to our oral traditions? Why
has court dance dissapeared in our society--after all, it was
very important in the past.
>> And I reply: we have the text of
>> Aeschylus, of Kenko, surely any culture that could produce
>> great musical masterpieces would have developed a notation to
>> preserve them.
>>Sorry, this isn't so. The most interesting aspects of great jazz
>>(which I assure you exists) are well beyond the notation jazz
>>musicians use. Charlie Parker's enormous influence spread by
>>recording, not by sheet music.
> I used to play lots of jazz in college(piano, bass, drums).
> I agree that "normal"(=classical) music notation must be
> severely augmented to capture jazz improvisations. But if
> there were jazz masterpieces, this would be done. And
Now you're getting circular. And still missing the point. Would
jazz masterpieces be *written* that way, or just transcribed?
Why *isn't* Charlie Parker's solo on Ko-Ko a masterpiece?
Let's see; if something isn't written down, it's not a masterpiece.
That means that the _Odyssey_ wasn't a masterpiece until someone
thought of writing it down...no, that can't be right.
Alas, the reasons why things get written down are only partly
connected to judgments of their quality. Now, if you wish
to attach the term "masterpiece" strictly to musical works
of a type that is primarily notated, go ahead; but most of
us find the term too general to be accurate.
> quickly before you accuse me of putting down Bird<g>, let
> me speak to the topic of improvisation. Bach and Beethoven
> were according to their contemporaries supreme improvisors,
> but when they got down to real work they sat down with music
> paper and wrote e.g. Bminormass and Op131. Improvisation
Bullshit. Improvising was real work, too; and most composers
composed *by* improvising. Haydn was a supreme example. Beethoven
was unusual in that he did his improvising in his head and in sketch-
books; but he also worked at the piano.
> can be fine and dandy, let's say even wonderful, but it does
> not produce masterworks(see etymology of this word)
a) etymology does not determine meaning; often the two are only
coincidentally related.
b) I looked up "masterpiece" and found that it came from craftsmen's
guilds. A masterpiece was originally the thing one made to prove one
was a master. Jazz musicians could well have a guild; as it is,
performers at conservatories of all kinds perform before juries,
their performances (incl. improvisations at times) being judged
by the masters in the guild. Later, the term came to mean any
work of art or craft of conummate quality.
c) Masterwork isn't in OED2.
d) Why not? Why isn't a fine improvisation--and note that
things like jazz improvisations are in fact worked out--composed
over long periods of time, in some cases; they are simply
not-written-down compositions with some degree of latitude for
the spur of the moment. Parker's Ko-Ko is a fine example;
there are several tracks, and they all have a fair amount in
common.
>>To me, the fact that educated people can believe other cultures are
>>musically bereft gives strong support to the idea that one's hearing
>>is based on cultural environment.
> Yes, I can understand how you can say this and you may even be
> right. But what are you going to do about the _masses_ of
> non-Westerners who flock to Western classical music?
Sell them tickets. What are we going to do about *you* is
moreto the point. 8-) Think of the history of the last
century or two. Note how Western culture has spread on the heels
of economic and political expansion, not to say colonialism.
Now look at *which* non-Western folks throng to these concerts:
middle- and upper-class folks from the industrialized parts of the
non-western world, folks who have had a Western-style education.
>A general comment: I take no pleasure in even _seeming_ to be a
>narrow-minded "Western-centric" provincial. I submit these questions
>to r.m.c. because they seem to me to cry out for serious comment.
Well, then, let's *have* some serious comment. I'm not sure where
your facile arguments about "masterpieces" are geting us; instead
of telling us what one *isn't*, tell us what one is, and why good
or great music must necessarily consist of such.
>Music seems to occupy a _different_ position from other arts, looked at
>from the man-from-Mars perspective; only in the Western culture has the
>masterwork concept arisen _in music_. Or so it seems to me.
To some extent, that's true of other arts, too. On the other hand,
the "masterpiece" idea is fairly new in its present form; what was
it like in Bach's day?
>Mr Maverick,
>in his learned and intelligent post, has expressed strong disagreement,
>but I regret to say that I still see problems with his position.
That's OK; he and I see major problems with yours, from the definitions
on up.
Roger
Vance Maverick
are the great musical creations of Japan, India, China,
Nigeria?
On record.
If they exist, I for one have not heard of them.
For Japan, China, and Nigeria, you'll have to try series like
Lyrichord and Nonesuch Explorer, but for India the recorded output is
vast. Try reading rec.music.indian.classical. On this newsgroup,
Todd McComb has several times posted helpful recommendations in the
Indian classical literature.
Now I and my friends _have_ heard of e.g. Hung Lou Meng, Li Po,
Chinese scroll paintings, Lady Murasaki, Horace, Hafiz, Benin,
Aeschylus, Kalidasa, and many others that could be mentioned,
even by me and my friends, none especially learned in
non-Western or ancient cultures.
If you had worked even half this hard on the music of non-Western
cultures, you'd be posting answers to this question instead of asking
it.
But music seems to be a
"ghetto", confined to Europe from, say, 1500 to 1900, from
Monteverdi and Tallis to Bartok and Berg. Is this true?
Well, it's true in the sense that Western-classical heads behave as if
it were so. But even slight effort would show you, first, that the
boundaries of the ghetto are actually open on either end in time
(where are Perotin, Machaut, Nancarrow and Xenakis on your spectrum?),
and, second, that music from other cultures is entirely accessible,
and well worth the effort.
Where are the Bminormasses, the Op131s, of other cultures, other times?
To some extent this is an ill-formed question: it assumes a musical
tradition built on written 'masterpieces', for one thing, which few
cultures other than ours have developed for music. Written pieces by
dead people are part of the Japanese and Indian classical traditions,
though. The real answer, though, is: "Waiting for you to find them by
stepping into the appropriate section of your local record store."
And I reply: we have the text of
Aeschylus, of Kenko, surely any culture that could produce
great musical masterpieces would have developed a notation to
preserve them.
Sorry, this isn't so. The most interesting aspects of great jazz
(which I assure you exists) are well beyond the notation jazz
musicians use. Charlie Parker's enormous influence spread by
recording, not by sheet music.
And I reply: I simply cannot
believe that I am moved to the depths as I directly am, by the
music of BachBeethovenBrahmsBritten, simply because of the
chance of my environment.
To me, the fact that educated people can believe other cultures are
musically bereft gives strong support to the idea that one's hearing
is based on cultural environment.
Vance
Vance Maverick
> You may be right that Western _musicians_ . . . in contrast to Western
> artists, architects, poets, novelists, who cherish and applaud the
> corresponding arts of other cultures . . . are close-minded and
> ignorant. Why should this be so?
You got me there. It's their loss. (Actually, the interest of
Western musicians in other cultures has been growing throughout this
century -- vide Scelsi, Cage, etc.)
> And why are the musicians of Japan, Korea, India, Africa so much the
> other way, so open to Beethoven, Bach, Mozart?
Less arrogant, perhaps? Or maybe it has something to do with the
widespread effort at general Westernization within those cultures.
> I used to play lots of jazz in college(piano, bass, drums).
> I agree that "normal"(=classical) music notation must be
> severely augmented to capture jazz improvisations. But if
> there were jazz masterpieces, this would be done.
Right, and there can't have been great acting or dance, since nobody
wrote it down. Why are you obsessed with notation?
It seems to me there are two ways cultures preserve: by hanging on to
artifacts, and by continuing development of their art practice. Why
is the first better?
> Bach and Beethoven were according to their contemporaries supreme
> improvisors, but when they got down to real work they sat down with
> music paper and wrote e.g. Bminormass and Op131. Improvisation can be
> fine and dandy, let's say even wonderful, but it does not produce
> masterworks(see etymology of this word)
I'd say improvisation has produced music which is a match for any
notated 'masterpiece' -- not all of it, of course, was recorded, but
enough for us to be sure.
> But what are you going to do about the _masses_ of
> non-Westerners who flock to Western classical music?
Trust my ears, and hope something of the musical traditions of those
cultures remains.
> [...] only in the Western culture has the
> masterwork concept arisen _in music_. Or so it seems to me.
> Mr Maverick [...] has expressed strong disagreement,
No, I agree with this statement: just not with the claim that the
masterpiece way is the best way.
Vance
Vance Maverick
> like your recommendations for "equivalents" of Bminormass and Op131,
> in the indigenous music of Japan, China, and Africa.
I'm no expert, so the records I can name are only the first wettings
of a toe in the many pools. But I've been strongly impressed by
* Bali: the Kecak (Monkey Chant); there are several recordings, but
the best is the long one, a whole side of a Nonesuch disk called
_Golden Rain_. I'm not wild about gamelan, so I'll leave those
recommendations to others.
* Japan: _A Bell Ringing in the Empty Sky_ and one of the Nonesuch
disks of Japanese koto music
* North America: _Songs and Dances of the Flathead Indians_, Folkways
* India!: but others can tell you better where to begin
You might also try some of the world music sampler discs that are
becoming popular, though the concept tends to flatten the music into
postcards: there's one with a series of titles _Celebrations_,
_Passages_, etc, including some striking "chants polyphoniques" from I
think Benin.
Good luck,
Vance (who doesn't consider comparisons to Op. 131
to be very flattering)
jetset
Vance Maverick <mave...@cork.CS.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
>I'm no expert, so the records I can name are only the first wettings
>of a toe in the many pools. But I've been strongly impressed by
>
>* Bali: the Kecak (Monkey Chant); there are several recordings, but
>the best is the long one, a whole side of a Nonesuch disk called
>_Golden Rain_. I'm not wild about gamelan, so I'll leave those
>recommendations to others.
Ok, I guess I'll jump in here. There's a companion disk on Nonesuch
for the Gamelan called Music from the Morning of the World which is also
excellent. The sound on CD is a bit jarring (the equalization is kinda
bass heavy which makes the gamelan sound kinda buzzier than normal but
is still well worth the effort to own).
>* North America: _Songs and Dances of the Flathead Indians_, Folkways
For North American Native music, my favourite disc here is still a drum
and chant one, the title of which escapes my mind for the moment. It's on
Rykodisc though.
>* India!: but others can tell you better where to begin
Here's a wealth of recordings of non-western classical music,
all easy to find.
Good places to start would be Ustad Ali Akbar Khan or Ustad
Alla Rakha Khan (I hope I got this right, I'm not at home right now)
If there is interest, I'll follow up with a more complete list. There's
a great tradition of Indian classical music, folks, don't pass it up.
Anybody with any recommendations, please post em, I'm always on the lookout
for new stuff. Thanks.
Later.
Alan McConnell
>In article <2j0b6q$c...@explorer.clark.net> al...@clark.net (Alan McConnell) writes:
> One asks: where
> are the great musical creations of Japan, India, China,
> Nigeria?
>On record.
> If they exist, I for one have not heard of them.
Good, thank you. I am willing to be enlightened and would sincerely
like your recommendations for "equivalents" of Bminormass and Op131,
in the indigenous music of Japan, China, and Africa. And I shall
certainly "lurk" on rec.music.indian.classical.
> Now I and my friends _have_ heard of e.g. Hung Lou Meng, Li Po,
> Chinese scroll paintings, Lady Murasaki, Horace, Hafiz, Benin,
> Aeschylus, Kalidasa, and many others that could be mentioned,
> even by me and my friends, none especially learned in
> non-Western or ancient cultures.
>If you had worked even half this hard on the music of non-Western
>cultures, you'd be posting answers to this question instead of asking
>it.
I submit: not fair<g>. I haven't had to "work" to learn about
The Dream of the Red Chamber, Hiroshige, Odes of Horace, Hafiz,
etc etc. We have Chartres, we have Taj Mahal, we have Angkor
Wat. Anyone who's been to college knows this. But I was a
music major in college(_many_ years ago, to be sure :-( ) and
have been reasonably diligent in following musical trends since,
and I have never seen a chance to be exposed to a musical art
work from, say, Japan, or even India, that matches say Op 131
in the way that, say, The Tale of Genji matches War and Peace.
> But music seems to be a
> "ghetto", confined to Europe from, say, 1500 to 1900, from
> Monteverdi and Tallis to Bartok and Berg. Is this true?
>Well, it's true in the sense that Western-classical heads behave as if
>it were so. But even slight effort would show you, first, that the
>boundaries of the ghetto are actually open on either end in time
>(where are Perotin, Machaut, Nancarrow and Xenakis on your spectrum?),
>and, second, that music from other cultures is entirely accessible,
>and well worth the effort.
You may be right that Western _musicians_ . . . in contrast
to Western artists, architects, poets, novelists, who cherish
and applaud the corresponding arts of other cultures . . .
are close-minded and ignorant. Why should this be so? And
why are the musicians of Japan, Korea, India, Africa so much
the other way, so open to Beethoven, Bach, Mozart? I am
eagerly open to donning sack-cloth, covering my head with
ashes . . . yet, I submit, there are still questions.
> Where are the Bminormasses, the Op131s, of other cultures, other times?
>To some extent this is an ill-formed question: it assumes a musical
>tradition built on written 'masterpieces', for one thing, which few
>cultures other than ours have developed for music.
Yes! Just exactly! You have penetrated to the essence of my
perhaps murky first post. Why has _only_ the Western culture
developed this kind of musical culture?
> And I reply: we have the text of
> Aeschylus, of Kenko, surely any culture that could produce
> great musical masterpieces would have developed a notation to
> preserve them.
>Sorry, this isn't so. The most interesting aspects of great jazz
>(which I assure you exists) are well beyond the notation jazz
>musicians use. Charlie Parker's enormous influence spread by
>recording, not by sheet music.
I used to play lots of jazz in college(piano, bass, drums).
I agree that "normal"(=classical) music notation must be
severely augmented to capture jazz improvisations. But if
there were jazz masterpieces, this would be done. And
quickly before you accuse me of putting down Bird<g>, let
me speak to the topic of improvisation. Bach and Beethoven
were according to their contemporaries supreme improvisors,
but when they got down to real work they sat down with music
paper and wrote e.g. Bminormass and Op131. Improvisation
can be fine and dandy, let's say even wonderful, but it does
not produce masterworks(see etymology of this word)
>To me, the fact that educated people can believe other cultures are
>musically bereft gives strong support to the idea that one's hearing
>is based on cultural environment.
Yes, I can understand how you can say this and you may even be
right. But what are you going to do about the _masses_ of
non-Westerners who flock to Western classical music?
A general comment: I take no pleasure in even _seeming_ to be a
narrow-minded "Western-centric" provincial. I submit these questions
to r.m.c. because they seem to me to cry out for serious comment.
Music seems to occupy a _different_ position from other arts, looked at
from the man-from-Mars perspective; only in the Western culture has the
masterwork concept arisen _in music_. Or so it seems to me. Mr Maverick,
in his learned and intelligent post, has expressed strong disagreement,
but I regret to say that I still see problems with his position.
I look forward to comment from others. Best wishes, Alan McConnell
Gavin Steyn
>So why do we Westerners generally know next to nothing about non-Western
>music, whereas most of us have at least heard of a number of non-Western
>literary works?
>I'd like to suggest that this is because we can read literary works in
>translation, so we don't have to learn the original language in order to
>get something out of them. True, translations are often a pale reflection
>of the original, but they're better than nothing. With music, on the
>other hand, we have to become comfortable with the "language" it's written
>in, before we can appreciate it; otherwise it's just a puzzling jumble of
>sounds.
I really agree with this.
Even a translation of a literary work doesn't necessarily help us feel why
the work is great.
For example, I recently read _The Tale of the Heike_, which is a Japanese
epic about the fall of the clan of the Heike. It's a very famous work,
but I don't think it's as well known to Westerners as _Tale of the Genji_,
because a lot of the cultural references are too different from what we're
used to. (You have to keep stopping, and saying "Why are these people acting
this way?" :-) ).
However, even in a case like that, we've got the language as a hook to draw
us into the work. When we listen to traditional Japanese music, we don't
even have a common language--the chord progressions that are the basis of
much Western music just aren't the same. So we have to study the language
a bit before we start.
Just to pick an example clsoer to home: take aa fugue from the _ARt of the
Fugue_. If you know what a fugue is, and are willing to sit through the
work, it can be wonderful to hear. However, even a listener who is used to
Western harmonies, but has no interest in the fugue, will be thoroughly
bored by the experience. So there's an example of a monumental work that
fails to move even people from our own culture.
(Heck, the B minor mass mentioned earlier in this thread is the same--it'll
bore a lot of people who just associate it with "church music.")
Gavin Steyn
st...@ll.mit.edu
Jon Bell
cultures have produced "great" music, some notated, some not.
So why do we Westerners generally know next to nothing about non-Western
music, whereas most of us have at least heard of a number of non-Western
literary works?
I'd like to suggest that this is because we can read literary works in
translation, so we don't have to learn the original language in order to
get something out of them. True, translations are often a pale reflection
of the original, but they're better than nothing. With music, on the
other hand, we have to become comfortable with the "language" it's written
in, before we can appreciate it; otherwise it's just a puzzling jumble of
sounds.
--
Jon Bell <jtb...@presby.edu> Presbyterian College
Dept. of Physics and Computer Science Clinton, South Carolina USA
Roger Lustig
>cultures have produced "great" music, some notated, some not.
>So why do we Westerners generally know next to nothing about non-Western
>music, whereas most of us have at least heard of a number of non-Western
>literary works?
>I'd like to suggest that this is because we can read literary works in
>translation, so we don't have to learn the original language in order to
>get something out of them. True, translations are often a pale reflection
>of the original, but they're better than nothing. With music, on the
>other hand, we have to become comfortable with the "language" it's written
>in, before we can appreciate it; otherwise it's just a puzzling jumble of
>sounds.
Quite right, and since most music is vocal anyway, you *do* have to learn
the language or fit a translation to the music, which often has to do
with speech-rhythms, intonations, etc.
That said, note that literary texts are by their nature portable in a
way that music is not. Even scores require a performance tradition
to interpret them; and learning that kind of tradition from without
is nearly impossible.
Now remember that non-Western philology has been practiced at fairly
high levels for well over 200 years, and that missionaries, traders, etc.
learned non-European languages long before that. Schopenhauer was
well-acquainted with basic Buddhist texts; did he ever hear a note
of raga?
Roger
Roger Lustig
>Why am I not surprised that the original poster was pounced on, if
>not flamed, in response to a most reasonable and interesting question?
>That question was, in essence, why is music of other cultures less
>appreciated here in the west than is the case with other art forms?
No, that was *not* the essence. The original question made some
pretty drastic assumptions, both about the status of non-western
musics and the nature of Western "masterpieces." These assumptions
set a few of us off, since they are not hard to research, and since
the original poster claimed to have done some thought/discussion on
the subject. Also, basic issues such as the significance of notation
were addressed in a fairly condescending way from the git-go.
>To respond by saying (1) There are many great works of music
>from other cultures; (2) Why don't you go learn something about
>music of other cultures; (3) There are many works of art in other forms
>from other cultures that we also don't appreciate; and so on,
>completely misses the point. The point is that the music of other
>cultures has not penetrated the consciousness of the average Westerner
>to the same degree that, say, visual art and literature (including poetry)
>has.
Well, we disagree on the point. Note that the original poster said
just what you're saying about penetration, and then explained it
by saying:
a) There don't seem to be any worthy masterpieces to stand beside
the 3 B's, etc.
b) this is obvious because if there were, those other cultures
would have developed notational systems that we can read.
>I think this is an accurate observation. Some observations to back this up:
[cross-medium comparisons deleted]
Of course this is so. But note that our friend led with *explanations*
instead of trying to determine the lie of the land more clearly.
>Jon Bell said with regard to literature that perhaps its availability
>in translation makes a difference. But visual arts do not seem to
>need "translation" to the same degree that music does. And is it
>not interesting that music, which one hears referred to as the
>"universal language", should appear to require such "translation"?
One only hears the "universal language" bosh about Western music,
and far too much of that. That's a 20thC bit of propaganda based
on the idea that people with Western schooling don't need to know
any spoken languag in common beyond the few obvious words of
Italian in order to form a symphony orchestra or a string quartet.
>Some possible explanations come to mind:
>- Serious music is more difficult to appreciate (and less widely appreciated)
> even within a culture than other art forms, hence it is not so
> surprising that music of other cultures fares even less well.
That's a *very* good point. Even most music-lovers in our culture
don't choose Op.131 as their favorite, or their paradigm of great
music.
>- Music just is more culturally determined or conditioned, less universal.
> It is my sense (though I'd be happy to hear from someone more
> knowledgeable of these countries) that as countries such as Japan
> and Taiwan have become more highly developed economically, and
> and (consequently?) more Western in other ways, Western music
> has made great inroads there.
Quite right, and consciously so. Japan's great Westernization drive
in the late 19th/early 20thC included Westernizing education, etc.
>Also relevant here is the original
> poster's point that music from other historical eras--
> to the extent we have it (which is naturally more limited because
> of the nature of the medium)--is less appreciated than other
> art forms. Medieval and Renaissance culture produced painting and
> literature that stands side-by-side with that of later eras in
> terms of general appreciation and awareness. I don't think
True enough, but our original poster claimed that there *were*
no masterpieces outside this range; which begged the question
of what makes (or unmakes) a masterpiece? The masterpiece model
of art was a central sticking-point in the discussion.
> same can be said for music (my observations 1 and 3 above apply
> here as well, though probably not 2).
>Flame away if you will, but stick to the point. No one is belittling
>the music of other cultures or eras, just pointing out an interesting
>phenomenon.
Well, I think we *were* sticking to the point. And you may have
missed some parts of it; such as, what is the relationship between
art, artistic behavior, and "masterpieces"?
And since there were more than a few echoes of Bellow's notorious
"Tolstoy of the Zulus" line in there, the matter of belittling
did indeed come to mind.
Roger
Roger Lustig
>al...@clark.net (Alan McConnell) writes:
>|And now Alan has a thought. Western music is the predominant(only?)
>|example of music based on polyphony(i.e. different people doing
>|different things, but coordinatedly, at the same time). To get a good
>|performance of this kind of music, it's probably best to have the
>|individual voices written down.
>There are examples of polyphonic traditions that went without notation
>for centuries, including within the Catholic Church.
To hear one today, head on over to a church with a good gospel choir.
Roger
Gregory Taylor
>All who read this are presumably enamoured in some way of
>classical music and most will feel that certain pieces speak to
>them in a direct way unattainable by any other art; i.e. music
>is capable of "pressing emotional buttons" more immediately
>than any other art. For many people, including many people
>reading this, this is I am sure true.
I don't find this specific type of approach to dividing and privileging forms
of creative activity to be a promising start; the assumptional baggage is
already edging into the red zone, and we've not even cleared customs [why
presume that a given art's effect relies on "pressing emotional buttons", for
example, or that one might value the ability of a given form to do so "more
immediately"?].
>With this as preamble I raise the following dismal hypothesis:
>that music is in a certain sense the most parochial, the most
>limited, the most "culture-bound" of arts. :-(
Bzzt! I'm sorry sir - we'll have to open these bags for some closer
inspection. You'll have to repack to avoid the weight limit anyway.
>...One asks: where
>are the great musical creations of Japan, India, China,
>Nigeria?(I am referring to _indigenous_ creations, not to e.g.
>how good the Shanghai or Lagos Philharmonics are) Similarly in
>time: where are the great musical creations of the ancient
>Indians, Egyptians, ancient Greeks, ancient Romans, ancient
>Persians, Arabs of 500-1000 A.D.? If they exist, I for one
>have not heard of them.
>
>Now I and my friends _have_ heard of e.g. Hung Lou Meng, Li Po,
>Chinese scroll paintings, Lady Murasaki, Horace, Hafiz, Benin,
>Aeschylus, Kalidasa, and many others that could be mentioned,
>even by me and my friends, none especially learned in
>non-Western or ancient cultures. But music seems to be a
>"ghetto", confined to Europe from, say, 1500 to 1900, from
>Monteverdi and Tallis to Bartok and Berg. Is this true? if so,
>why is it? Where are the Bminormasses, the Op131s, of other
>cultures, other times?
The easy answer here would be to ask you if the simple fact of access to
an English translation of the analects of Confucius is sufficient to allow
you to entertain the notion that your, as an individual reader, are in any
position to claim to "understand" it, let stand to "recognize" its greatness.
But given this list, I hope you'll be forgiven if one might assmue you're
dissembling a bit: Or, if you claim even a passing knowledge of Javanese
culture and have read, say, Pramoedja Ananta Toer and *still* claim
to know no court gamelan music, your cultural purview is subjective at best;
it may be simple ignorance - or, as I suspect, a tendency to be find music
a parochial and limited form because the terms of your interrogation are
sufficiently ethnocentric to produce only the answer you suggest.
In an age when standard reference materials on the structure of almost *any*
non-western music is often as close as your Grove and the record stores are
stocked with such marvelous examples of the Carnatic or Thai or Gagaku
repertoire, I don't think you've looked very hard.
But more to the point, you may be inviting trouble the moment you start
looking for direct, mappable equivalents of the "great" moments of western
classical cultural output; such an approach will do you little good in a
culture where, for example, an individual composer isn't recognized or credited
in the way that you're accustomed to; ditto for those traditions which eschew
the fabled "yardsticks" of the art you practice so assiduously [notation as
document and instantiation of a composer's "intent"].
But I would imagine that, were you to interrogate your *own* cultural past
using some of these same yardsticks, you'd turn up plenty in the history of our
culture's *own* output [musics forgotten simply because no one plays them,
work granted a different status in a different generation because it comes to
value some different aspect of the work (while claiming that it's "the same
Bach" all along)]. I'd imagine that one could argue that there are plenty of
cases of intracultural parochiality to nearly take an axe to the root of the
tree whose blossoms are the Objective Greatness and Universal Musical Value
of the Genius [fill in anyone you want here].
o>This is perhaps the time to emphasize that this post is
>submitted in the search for knowledge, not as a statement of
>position. And with this in mind, and in the interest of saving
>bandwidth, let me anticipate some possible rejoinders.
>
>1) You are flat wrong, there were great masterpieces of music
>in e.g. ancient Greece, ancient Japan. My question: where are
>they, why aren't they performed? Answer: they're lost, musical
>notation wasn't developed. And I reply: we have the text of
>Aeschylus, of Kenko, surely any culture that could produce
>great musical masterpieces would have developed a notation to
>preserve them.
First, I think the problem lies here with this hangup on "masterpieces."
Such a formulation might simply make no sense at all in the mind/mouth
of any number of non-Europeans. Heck, the word for "art" in Indonesian
is a loan from the Dutch. It's not that there wasn't any art in Java - but
rather that no one ever thought of such a crazy set of conceptual categories
for the notion. The obliging Javanese simply borrowed the Dutch word to
apply to the equally foreign conceptualizations the Dutch kept pestering
them about. Some cultures do quite well without masterpieces, virtuosi,
"high culture", "genius", and all kinds of things. In fact, that's one of
the things that really interests me about non-western traditions of musical
practice.
And the development of notation could simply be said to be the result of a
number of sociohistorical forces that never happened somewhere else. What
little Greek and Roman musical notation we have survives in many cases in
the form of inscriptions on stelae [funeral markers], and isn't there because
the pieces were great. The tradition was simply oral; it's not that only
really cool and smart cultures make the obvious choice to notate their music.
Now that I think of it, where are all those blueprints and details of the
early cathedrals?
2) Indeed music is special to Westerners and
>Western-influenced, as you say. And I reply: I simply cannot
>believe that I am moved to the depths as I directly am, by the
>music of BachBeethovenBrahmsBritten, simply because of the
>chance of my environment.
I'll avoid the broadband whiff of cultural superiority that some might
imagine emanates from this and simply point out that musical behaviour -
even if it's not conceived of in the terms you would recognize or describe
and even if it's not separated into the "high" and "low" forms we use for it -
moves all kinds of people all over the world. Are you in a position to make
judgements of relative depth or describe the "rules" by which you drop a
plumb line to mark the depths of your soul [while that poor Baku mother
singin her Yelli to guarantee the good hunt and charm the forest survives
without the knowledge of her shallowness]? The reason for it lies, I think,
in its shared quality - and the set of assumptions which surround that sharing
are what [to quote Madge in the Palmolive commercials] you're soaking in.
But the problem is that you're saddled with an aesthetic position which seems
to rather uncritically suggest that "the chance of your environment" is
somehow not enough. I think that it's *all* there is, and that you could
blissfully spend the rest of your life coming to terms with the "chance" of
your environment and never even miss all those Universals you'd be deprived of.
>I hope I have made my problem clear -- and I hope that the
>learned and cultured r.m.c'ers out there will weigh in to help
>me in my puzzlement. Thanks in advance.
Tell you what; There's a fine CD on CMP of the music of K.R.T. Wasitodiningrat,
a 20th century "composer" of some pieces which are widely played, heard, and
enjoyed among folks who claim to know and like central Javanese gamelan. The
World Music Library series on King features two fine CDs of Iranian music,
a nice disc which showcases the three basic styles of Gagaku [the "classical"
music of the Japanese courts], and some fine Burmese [or, as we say now, "The
Music of Myanmar"] and Thai discs. To say *nothing* of way too many Carnatic
discs to even try classifying. Maybe listening to "Etenraku" may make your
image of Murasaki as a comfortable cultural point of familiarity recede, but
hey. You've got to start somewhere.
Let a hundred flowers bloom [really.],
Gregory
--
In the desert I prayed only for mercy, not happiness, not vindication,
willing to settle. No price can be too high, no cruelty excessive if the
end finds cruelty exhausted and mercy audible as a hammer's sound in rain.
Gregory Taylor/email: gta...@heurikon.com/voice 608-828-3385 or 608-246-9621
Bradford Kellogg
In article <1994Feb6.1...@presby.edu>, jtb...@cs1.presby.edu (Jon Bell) writes:
|> OK, so far several people have reminded us that yes indeed, non-Western
|> cultures have produced "great" music, some notated, some not.
|>
|> So why do we Westerners generally know next to nothing about non-Western
|> music, whereas most of us have at least heard of a number of non-Western
|> literary works?
|>
|> I'd like to suggest that this is because we can read literary works in
|> translation, so we don't have to learn the original language in order to
|> get something out of them. True, translations are often a pale reflection
|> of the original, but they're better than nothing. With music, on the
|> other hand, we have to become comfortable with the "language" it's written
|> in, before we can appreciate it; otherwise it's just a puzzling jumble of
|> sounds.
I think it is the opposite - music is a universal language, which needs no
translation. I have heard music from India, Japan, China, Java, north/central/
south Africa, southwest Asia, native north and south American, etc., and none
of it is the least bit puzzling to me. I have heard both old and new music from
these places, and it is all highly accessible to my ears. I find it much more
difficult to get access to literature from these places. Much of it has not
been translated or made available in any form in the West. How much of the
body of literature from Persia has been translated into English? I have never
seen any. But I have heard traditional Persian music, performed live in
New York City. It was mesmerizing. It needed no translation.
I would suggest that the puzzling jumble of sounds appears in popular
western music. Guns & Roses comes to mind. But please don't translate!
- BK
Margaret Mikulska
>In article <1994Feb7.2...@galileo.cc.rochester.edu> ka...@troi.cc.rochester.edu (James Kahn) writes:
> In <MAVERICK.9...@cork.CS.Berkeley.EDU> mave...@cork.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Vance Maverick) writes:
> >What happens when you read Shakespeare out loud?
> [I]f you mean from a play, something is clearly missing compared
> to experiencing a performance. From the sonnets, or thinking of
> the plays as poetry, perhaps it's a little closer to the experience
> of playing music, but I still feel much more an outsider or an observer
> with respect to poetry than to music. Not to get too philosophical
> here, but it seems to me that the essence of music is in the playing of it.
> Reading poetry is more like looking at a painting. That could be
> just my subjective experience, of course.
>
>Of course; and mine is that reading words someone else has written,
>especially out loud, is exactly analogous to playing someone else's
>score. (Reading a play out loud is like playing a quartet at the
>piano.) [...]
I'm with Vance on this one. If I really like the poem, when I read it,
I'm just as much "in it" as I am when I play music.
-Margaret ("Nel mezzo del camin di nostra vita ...")
Francois Velde
>There *were* no lasting
>masterpieces in Bach's time. (Francois will point to Parisian
>opera; note that this was an institutionalized repertoire
>specific to a court and its related institutions.)
And to church music, in France and elsewhere (Palestrina). The
18th century is already a turning point in this respect. But
that detracts little from your main point.
>No question here. My point is that "masterpiece" status is a
>fragile thing. [...] Likewise, things like Rossini's
>_Semiramide_ were central to operatic life -- until they weren't
>anymore; and they were certainly called masterpieces in their time.
And where is Meyerbeer today?
Masterpiece status comes and go. Take Parisian opera again:
Lully and Rameau where masterpieces for a whole century;
Lully went into hibernation for 200 years. Rameau popped up
in 1900, disappeared again for a while. Gluck is perhaps
another example.
>Anyway, I *will* take a historicist position and say that
>"ahead of its time" isn't accurate, because it implies the
>inevitability of a future in which the work is understood.
And, unless one takes a deterministic view of the history of arts,
"ahead of its time" is a quality which can only be conferred
retroactively. It therefore appears as a label, manufactured
in some posterior era, and subject to the same precariousness as the
values of that era.
--
Francois Velde
James Kahn
>In article <MAVERICK.9...@cork.CS.Berkeley.EDU> mave...@cork.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Vance Maverick) writes:
>>In article <1994Feb7.2...@galileo.cc.rochester.edu> ka...@troi.cc.rochester.edu (James Kahn) writes:
>> . . . I still feel much more an outsider or an observer
>> with respect to poetry than to music. Not to get too philosophical
>> here, but it seems to me that the essence of music is in the playing of it.
>> Reading poetry is more like looking at a painting. That could be
>> just my subjective experience, of course.
>>
>>Of course; and mine is that reading words someone else has written,
>>especially out loud, is exactly analogous to playing someone else's
>>score. (Reading a play out loud is like playing a quartet at the
>>piano.) [...]
>I'm with Vance on this one. If I really like the poem, when I read it,
>I'm just as much "in it" as I am when I play music.
I can appreciate that, but for me the intimacy level is much greater
for music. The complexity of music is such that I find there are "secrets"
that one discovers in playing music as compared to hearing it performed
that aren't analogous to the experience of reading versus listening to
poetry. (I don't know whether this would be equally the case if I played
an instrument capable only of one line of music as compared to the piano.)
I do know that one common experience I've had is diminished interest in
a piece, especially in hearing performances of it, after I've
worked on it myself. I don't think it's just boredom. Even
when I retain interest, hearing a performance of a piece is _never_
the same experience again after I've played it myself--even if I haven't
played or listened to it for ten years. Nothing like that has
happened for me with poetry (which may only reveal the limits of my
appreciation of poetry, or for that matter the limits of my ear for music
performed by someone else).
Roger Lustig
>ro...@astro.princeton.edu (Roger Lustig) writes:
>>There *were* no lasting
>>masterpieces in Bach's time. (Francois will point to Parisian
>>opera; note that this was an institutionalized repertoire
>>specific to a court and its related institutions.)
>And to church music, in France and elsewhere (Palestrina). The
>18th century is already a turning point in this respect. But
>that detracts little from your main point.
OK, fine. Let's sharpen this a bit; there *were* pieces and
repertories that lasted, but no cases of entire composers being
called "Classics" as we do with Mozart today, say or Bach.
There was a set of Palestrina pieces, and this or that piece
by Allegri, Charpentier, etc. But if one wanted something
different, one got oneself a composer to write something
new; one didn't dust off a piece by Palestrina that wasn't
in the core repertory, jsut because it was by a "Classic"
composer.
Which brings us to the next aspect of "masterpiece" thinking,
namely the overtly historical aspect. Composers before
Beethoven wrote pieces that we
a) nowadays consider masterpieces
and
b) had to rescue from obscurity and absence from the rep.
This includes: all of Bach's vocal music and about 80% of
the instrumental music (imagine: Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert,
Chopin, Schumann, Berlioz--none of them ever heard the
Brandenburgs, which weren't *discovered* until 1865);
pre-Viennese Mozart; most of Haydn's symphonies (hello, Ted!);
Handel's operas (not staged between 1754 and 1920); and just
about all of Monteverdi, Schuetz, and all the composers before
them.
>>No question here. My point is that "masterpiece" status is a
>>fragile thing. [...] Likewise, things like Rossini's
>>_Semiramide_ were central to operatic life -- until they weren't
>>anymore; and they were certainly called masterpieces in their time.
>And where is Meyerbeer today?
I think I saw him over at the deli...on the other hand, the
bel canto composers have been objects of rescue jobs lately;
who would have dreamed of doing Rossini's _Stabat MAter_ in
concert 50 years ago? (I heard a fine performance of it on the
radio last night; just sent the conductor email...)
For that matter, look how Mahler's stature has changed--and look
how a composer like Korngold, oroginally expected to be the
next of the great greats, is basically outtahere despite valiant
efforts at revival.
>Masterpiece status comes and go. Take Parisian opera again:
>Lully and Rameau where masterpieces for a whole century;
>Lully went into hibernation for 200 years. Rameau popped up
>in 1900, disappeared again for a while. Gluck is perhaps
>another example.
Right. Gluck's a *weird* but important example. Berlioz
revived Gluck, whom he considered a central genius. Others
disagreed violently. Gluck has had *several* revivals,
most of which end with sincere admiration for his genius
coupled with a nagging irritation at the lapses of his talent...
(half-smiley...)
>>Anyway, I *will* take a historicist position and say that
>>"ahead of its time" isn't accurate, because it implies the
>>inevitability of a future in which the work is understood.
>And, unless one takes a deterministic view of the history of arts,
>"ahead of its time" is a quality which can only be conferred
>retroactively. It therefore appears as a label, manufactured
>in some posterior era, and subject to the same precariousness as the
>values of that era.
Nay, *identical with* the values of that era.
That's what I'm driving at: "masterpiece" is a relationship
between an art-object and a group of those who contemplate
it. The B Minor Mass is a masterpiece -- because we, and
several generations of the PLU (People Like Us), are blown
away by it. Take away our admiration, and is it still a
masterpiece? Was it a masterpiece in the almost-century
*before* anyone admired it? Have we made it *retroactively*
a masterpiece during that time?
Roger
AD...@psuvm.psu.edu
As I'm willing to accept most of his expanded positions, I only
retain here what remain points of contention.
In article <1994Feb7.2...@Princeton.EDU>, ro...@faust.Princeton.EDU
(Roger Lustig) says:
>
>
>You say that it takes time for the significance of a work to
>be recognized. What about the B minor mass? Was it
>*recognized*? Or did opinions simply change due to a change
>in the context of musical performance? The piece, after all,
>*could* not be heard so long as church music was the special
>province of churches; who had the forces or the time to put
>on this mammoth, liturgically problematic work? Not until
>masses were deemed appropriate items for (worshipful)
>concert hall listening -- a condition that came about via
>historical forces that had nothing to do with J S Bach,
>or music itself, for that matter -- was it possible for the
>B minor mass to be *considered* as a masterpiece. And
>a major change in attitude was also required: old music
>was now available for consideration for retroactive
>inclusion into a canon based on *later* music (Beethoven).
>This had never been the case in the past.
Interestingly enough, a Swiss scholar, Hans-Georg Nageli, in
1817--right about in the autumn of Beethoven's career--opined
that the Mass in B minor was the greatest musical work ever
written. Perhaps this was an isolated instance; perhaps
only a philological pedant of the period could have held the
opinion; but the *possibility* was there, and it seems to
me it has a lot to do with the work itself. I can't imagine
so knowledgable an authority would have chosen from more than
a handful of works. Sure, the standards for selecting such a
handful are cultural--but what that *doesn't* mean is that such
standards are merely arbitrary, since they develop parallel to
what works artists of that culture produce & out of profound
study of them. The whole process is comparative & experiential
(i. e. not absolute--as it could not hope to be), but is based
on lively discussion and the relative consensus that emerges from
disparate viewpoints. Converging lines of probability: that's
sufficient.
>Only when music stopped growing old -- as Mozart's and
>then Beethoven's refused to do -- was Bach even in the
>running for "masterpiece" status.
Why do you think, though, that this music in particular refused
to grow old and does the reason have anything to do with its
quality? Perhaps the history of music was ripe for such a
canonical turn, its resources having been developed over so
many centuries.
>Anyway, I *will* take a historicist position and say that
>"ahead of its time" isn't accurate, because it implies the
>inevitability of a future in which the work is understood.
>Why did that time have to come? Was it something intrinsic in
>the work itself that forced the advent of the "time"?
>
>I think not. Times changed, and after a certain point the
>work fit into the understanding of music, and of the
>musical past, that was current at *that* time. Only then
>did the work itself begin to shape future understanding
>of music and music history and the possibilities of
>musical composition.
Obviously the future is not dicatated or wholly determined by
the past. But I don't think that's what's implied by the
phrase "ahead of its time." Paradoxically, a work can only
be seen as ahead of its time long after its time. I would
say, though, that when things have turned out as they have,
and a particular work has begun, as you say, "to shape . . .
the possibilities of musical composition," then it deserves
to be called ahead of its time--not because the future it is
now shaping was predetermined, but simply because there it
is, not something else. I don't believe in alternate
universes, so what's in this one will do to justify a given
work's status. That's a pragmatic, not an absolutist line.
>>>Now look at *which* non-Western folks throng to these concerts:
>>>middle- and upper-class folks from the industrialized parts of the
>>>non-western world, folks who have had a Western-style education.
>
>>You might ask yourself if there is a difference between education
>>and indoctrination and in what that difference subsists.
>
>Irrelevant here, it strikes me. Either will do. I'm referring
>to what's necessary, not to what's sufficient.
This I don't quite understand. Either will not do from my
perspective. A little clarification as to what's meant by
necessity & sufficiency?
-------------------------------------------------------------------------
--Allan Burns
FUSINA GIOVANNI
Roger Lustig
>I have very much enjoyed Roger's patient & informative post.
>As I'm willing to accept most of his expanded positions, I only
>retain here what remain points of contention.
OK--glad we're back on the same wavelength.
The question in my mind is: had he heard it? So far as I
know, Zelter's 1815 rehearsal in Leipzig would have been
his only opportunity. Naegeli was a publisher (he was one
of the first to produce an edition of the WTC in the Bach
revival); accordingly we must ask ourselves two questions:
how did he know, and was he trying to sell something?
Maynard Solomon has documented the hype around Mozart's
works that Rochlitz and others undertook in the AMZ, which,
after all, was published by Breitkopf u. Haertel; in the
same magazine, Beethoven was praised to the skies -- while
he was having his muci published by B&H. Naegeli was
hardly a pedant; he was a composer of songs, incl. some
for Pestalozzi-based education. Anyway, he may have been
planning an edition of the Mass in B minor; and, if one
was going to choose a "greatest work," what would one
select? Beethoven was alive and controversial (when
not somewhat passe'); Haydn's _Creation_ might have
been a candidate. Don Giovanni and Magic Flute were
probably not considered exalted enough; and, when you
get right down to it, a piece that's obviously great
in at least one sense, by a composer who's not only
revered by musicians, but a national hero (the epitome
of German-ness, the composer who *didn't* get corrupted
in Italy, but stayed at home and in the church)--since
such pronouncements were themselves a new phenomenon,
such a choice could be made without knowing *anything* of
the effect of the work on an audience, even an audience of
music-lovers.
>Sure, the standards for selecting such a
>handful are cultural--but what that *doesn't* mean is that such
>standards are merely arbitrary, since they develop parallel to
>what works artists of that culture produce & out of profound
>study of them.
On the other hand, it doesn't match our working definition
of "masterpiece" -- one that moves audiences in times and/or
places otehr than its own. This was quite literally a timeless
piece, insofar as music exists in time. (OK, Naegeli may have
played it at home, 4-hands and some singers [Rifkin before
his time? 8-)]--but the work as we know it was not known to him.)
What Naegeli was probably saying, giving him the benefit of the
doubt, is that he considered Bach the greatest of composers, and
this the epitome of his work. (That it *was* a Mass helps too;
that puts it closer to absolute music, the words of the Mass
being second nature to the listener, something one could not
say of the equally enormous, equally unperformed St. MAtthew
Passion. In short, Naegeli probably viewed the B Minor Mass
as a sort of symphony.)
>The whole process is comparative & experiential
>(i. e. not absolute--as it could not hope to be), but is based
>on lively discussion and the relative consensus that emerges from
>disparate viewpoints. Converging lines of probability: that's
>sufficient.
Yes, indeed. (I started to write "Absolutely"...) But note that
when we do this we immediately find ourselves in a much more
fragmented world than we thought--"Western Culture" is suddenly
very hard to pin down. The Italian take is not the English one,
insofar as there *is* only one of each; and the consensus, viewed
over time, is often quite a rocking boat.
>>Only when music stopped growing old -- as Mozart's and
>>then Beethoven's refused to do -- was Bach even in the
>>running for "masterpiece" status.
>Why do you think, though, that this music in particular refused
>to grow old and does the reason have anything to do with its
>quality? Perhaps the history of music was ripe for such a
>canonical turn, its resources having been developed over so
>many centuries.
Well, it took a cult of the past, such as first developed in
England and then infected Germany, for this to happen, or rather,
for it to stick and then expand backwards. But why should
Mozart's work refuse to grow old, when Bach and Handel hadn't
been able to pull it off? After all, the development of
resources had been accelerating for centuries, and had *made*
music grow old, too. There was an operatic reform movement
every twenty years or so.
At any rate, why look only in the hstory of music? This
canonical turn coincides neatly with Romanticism and its
new approach to the classics, its view of Genius (note that
the original definition of "masterpiece" in this discussion
was closely related to Great Man theory), of inspiration,
of creativity and organicism, and of the role of the
individual artist. In the Enlightenment, music was generally
held to be a social phenomenon, edifying and uniting the
people, a metaphor for human harmony. This meant that, to some
extent, music was interchangeable. And it was--consider the
many different settings of Metastasian libretti, and the complete
lack of interest in the settings that Metastasio himself had
supervised (those of Caldara, for the most part).
To sum up: yes, the music changed, and that made the "masterpiece"
label possible; but the music changed *because* other things
changed as well, namely the mentality surrounding music and
other arts. Now the composer could be a hero: first the
prodigy and tragic figure that was Mozart, then the national
hero Haydn, then (myths that grew up together) the deaf
Kapellmeister of Vienna and the blind Cantor of Leipzig. That
Beethoven had dramatically dissed the French tyrant in a
crucial, breakthrough moment of his career certainly didn't
hurt; and *all* these images became possible because the
idea of a heroic composer, an artist as individual doing
battle with the world, had been born. Only when the
composer was seen as one who wrestled with the material,
as opposed to a craftsman plying his trade, could there
really be musical masterpieces, could there be any sense
to a musical canon.
>>Anyway, I *will* take a historicist position and say that
>>"ahead of its time" isn't accurate, because it implies the
>>inevitability of a future in which the work is understood.
>>Why did that time have to come? Was it something intrinsic in
>>the work itself that forced the advent of the "time"?
>>I think not. Times changed, and after a certain point the
>>work fit into the understanding of music, and of the
>>musical past, that was current at *that* time. Only then
>>did the work itself begin to shape future understanding
>>of music and music history and the possibilities of
>>musical composition.
>Obviously the future is not dicatated or wholly determined by
>the past. But I don't think that's what's implied by the
>phrase "ahead of its time." Paradoxically, a work can only
>be seen as ahead of its time long after its time. I would
>say, though, that when things have turned out as they have,
>and a particular work has begun, as you say, "to shape . . .
>the possibilities of musical composition," then it deserves
>to be called ahead of its time--not because the future it is
>now shaping was predetermined, but simply because there it
>is, not something else. I don't believe in alternate
>universes, so what's in this one will do to justify a given
>work's status. That's a pragmatic, not an absolutist line.
Right; I just wanted to take a moment to unpack (I've never
used that word before, probably won't again; just wanted to
take it for a spin) the expression a bit. "Ahead of its
time" means "Important to *our* time, if not to its own."
>>>>Now look at *which* non-Western folks throng to these concerts:
>>>>middle- and upper-class folks from the industrialized parts of the
>>>>non-western world, folks who have had a Western-style education.
>>>You might ask yourself if there is a difference between education
>>>and indoctrination and in what that difference subsists.
>>Irrelevant here, it strikes me. Either will do. I'm referring
>>to what's necessary, not to what's sufficient.
>This I don't quite understand. Either will not do from my
>perspective. A little clarification as to what's meant by
>necessity & sufficiency?
OK. Education/indoctrination are two kinds of exposure to
cultural materials and practices. Where one ends and the other
picks up isn't of all that much interest to me right now;
I doubt one ever really gets much of one without at least
a little of the other. (I mean, aren't piano lessons one
part indoctrination into the importance of the enterprise?)
What's *necessary* for people to appreciate these concerts
is the exposure, plus or minus the baggage of indoctrination
that comes with. Again, it's not sufficient; many of those
educated or indoctrinated even here don't get it, from
Charles Lamb on down. No amount ofschooling will fix a
tin ear.
Roger
Margaret Mikulska
>In <1994Feb8.1...@Princeton.EDU> miku...@faust.Princeton.EDU (Margaret Mikulska) writes:
>
>>In article <MAVERICK.9...@cork.CS.Berkeley.EDU> mave...@cork.CS.Berkeley.EDU (Vance Maverick) writes:
>>>In article <1994Feb7.2...@galileo.cc.rochester.edu> ka...@troi.cc.rochester.edu (James Kahn) writes:
>>> . . . I still feel much more an outsider or an observer
>>> with respect to poetry than to music. Not to get too philosophical
>>> here, but it seems to me that the essence of music is in the playing of it.
>>> Reading poetry is more like looking at a painting. That could be
>>> just my subjective experience, of course.
>>>
>>>Of course; and mine is that reading words someone else has written,
>>>especially out loud, is exactly analogous to playing someone else's
>>>score. (Reading a play out loud is like playing a quartet at the
>>>piano.) [...]
>
>>I'm with Vance on this one. If I really like the poem, when I read it,
>>I'm just as much "in it" as I am when I play music.
>
>I can appreciate that, but for me the intimacy level is much greater
>for music. The complexity of music is such that I find there are "secrets"
>that one discovers in playing music as compared to hearing it performed
>that aren't analogous to the experience of reading versus listening to
>poetry.
But poetry can be quite complex, too. Besides, while in music, you may
have the complexity, in literature you have a wealth of connotations and
associations about which you can ponder as you read it. For me it *is*
similar to playing music. I think, however, that we reached the point
of very subjective impressions - so I can't really say much more than
"that's the way I hear and feel it".
>(I don't know whether this would be equally the case if I played
>an instrument capable only of one line of music as compared to the piano.)
I don't think this really matters.
>I do know that one common experience I've had is diminished interest in
>a piece, especially in hearing performances of it, after I've
>worked on it myself.
I can hardly say that "working on piece" applies to my piano-playing,
but I do play the piano (strictly for myself; I wouldn't inflict it on
anybody else), but I notice either the opposite or at least no change in
my interest in the work. I certainly personally butchered all of Mozart
piano sonatas, and yet I still want to listen to them more and more.
Same with easier Beethoven. Or Chopin.
>I don't think it's just boredom. Even
>when I retain interest, hearing a performance of a piece is _never_
>the same experience again after I've played it myself--even if I haven't
>played or listened to it for ten years.
Well, yes, it's not always the same, but I'm still interested. I can
even listen to Bach 2-part Inventions, and there was probably not a
piano novice who didn't have to go through those several times over.
>Nothing like that has
>happened for me with poetry (which may only reveal the limits of my
>appreciation of poetry, or for that matter the limits of my ear for music
>performed by someone else).
I have no idea what it reveals. No conjecture whatsoever :-)
-Margaret
Margaret Mikulska
>With this as preamble I raise the following dismal hypothesis:
>that music is in a certain sense the most parochial, the most
>limited, the most "culture-bound" of arts. :-( One asks: where
>are the great musical creations of Japan, India, China,
>Nigeria?
1. In Japan, India, China, Nigeria.
2. On CDs, LPs, and cassettes available in America, Europe, and
elsewhere.
>Similarly in
>time: where are the great musical creations of the ancient
>Indians, Egyptians, ancient Greeks, ancient Romans, ancient
>Persians, Arabs of 500-1000 A.D.?
Most are lost, some are impossible or very difficult to decipher, let
alone perform.
>Now I and my friends _have_ heard of e.g. [list of works deleted]
>[...] even by me and my friends, none especially learned in
>non-Western or ancient cultures. But music seems to be a
>"ghetto", confined to Europe from, say, 1500 to 1900, from
>Monteverdi and Tallis to Bartok and Berg. Is this true?
Depends whom you ask. The most commonly played and recorded works come
from Europe ca.1700 to ca.1900 or slightly later. However, the early
music movement is very active, and the contemporary music scene
(certainly not limited to Europe) is very much alive, too.
With the recordings of Western music ranging from plainchant to computer
music, you don't have to be confined to the mainstream repertoire of big
orchestras and great soloists. I, for one, listen mainly to "canned
music", so the fact that Beethoven, Brahms, and a few other composers
dominate the concerts doesn't affect me *very* much. True, recordings
of early and modern music are more difficult to find, but there are more
and more of them. Also, recordings of non-European music, although not
as numerous as I would like to see them, are available.
But basically, you're right that a canon of European works from two
centuries dominates our musical culture.
>if so, why is it? Where are the Bminormasses, the Op131s, of other
>cultures, other times?
>
>This is perhaps the time to emphasize that this post is
>submitted in the search for knowledge, not as a statement of
>position. And with this in mind, and in the interest of saving
>bandwidth, let me anticipate some possible rejoinders.
To be honest, this statement had an exactly opposite result, and not
surprisingly. No flame intended, but it seems that you came with a
question, bringing your own answer just in case you don't like ours.
>1) You are flat wrong, there were great masterpieces of music
>in e.g. ancient Greece, ancient Japan. My question: where are
>they, why aren't they performed? Answer: they're lost, musical
>notation wasn't developed.
1. Mostly true. 2. Mostly false.
>And I reply: we have the text of
>Aeschylus, of Kenko, surely any culture that could produce
>great musical masterpieces would have developed a notation to
>preserve them.
And indeed they have, although a lot of it may not satisfy your criteria
of musical notation.
It is true that most of ancient music from non-Western cultures is lost.
It is false that musical notation has not been developed in non-Western
cultures.
(Of course, some cultures - African cultures south of Sahara, for
instance - have not developed even a writing system for their languages.
Written musical notation comes after writing systems for languages. So
there are, admittedly, cultures with no written musical notation and
with a very limited systems of non-written signs.)
More developed cultures have had (or did have) systems of musical
notations: some were more accurate (from the Western point of view),
some were less accurate, for reasons I will try to describe later.
Moreover, some cultures used mostly cheironomy rather than a written
musical notation.
Musical notation of a kind - probably both written and cheironomic -
existed in ancient Egypt, ca. 4,000 or 5,000 years ago, and probably
also, slightly later, in Palestine and Syria. Cheironomy, by its very
nature, is not sufficient to reconstruct music for which it was used:
it is a system of hand (and, in some cultures, head) movements
indicating mainly the shape of the melodic line (rhythmic signs also
existed). Cheironomy is clearly an aid to memory, not a full
representation of a piece of music. We can see such movements frozen
in time in Egyptian art and, amazingly enough, we find out that modern
Coptic and Egyptian cantors use very similar hand movements in the
liturgy. On this basis, some hypotheses regarding the meaning of the
ancient Egyptian cheironomy have been suggested. Similarly, the
tradition of cheironomy in Jewish chant seems to have been preserved
to our days.
Classical Greece had a *written* musical notation for pitches and
(less frequently used) for rhythms. However, very few examples of
Greek music have been preserved.
Fairly elaborate systems of written musical notation have been
developed in China, Japan, and Korea; less elaborate systems exist
in south and south-east Asia (India, Java, Bali, etc.).
Now, why would highly developed cultures use a musical notation "less
accurate" than our Western culture? Why didn't they care to preserve
their "Bminormasses" to posterity? Mostly, it's the question of what a
given musical culture values most and how it approaches music.
Our Western model of music is, at least in this century, based on a set
of "static" masterpieces. Static in the sense that once a work is
written down, what we value is its faithful reproduction (with a certain
margin for "interpretation"). For this purpose, we need an accurate
notation, allowing us to preserve all the most relevant features in
consecutive performances. It is also static in the sense that once a
work enters the canon of Great Works of Music, we believe that it will
stay there forever. Our masterpieces are "immortal" and "timeless".
Many non-Western cultures have a different model: one based on
improvisation and on constant introduction of new elements to a piece of
music. It's a dynamic model, in the sense that the given musical work -
and actually, we can't even call it "the" given work - changes with
each performance. Faithful reproduction is _not_ valued. What is
valued is the art of the performer who brings new elements to the work.
Far more new elements than a Western performer brings to a performance
of a Western masterpiece. Of course, there is a certain "core" which
doesn't change, but each performance is so different from others that
we can't talk about one piece being performed several times: each
performance is effectively a new work.
In such model, the notion of the "Bminormass of the <culture> music" is, to
a large extent, meaningless. All you can have are musical _events_, but
not musical _objects_. And you can listen to such events from recordings.
Moreover, in such model, music education and, in general, handing down
of the musical tradition, is oral rather than written. Therefore, a
notation system that does no more than jog the memory is sufficient.
Note that the Western culture had a less static model in the past
centuries (up to 19th C). First, works, especially instrumental music,
were played on different instruments, re-written by other composers,
transcribed, modified - there was little of this "worship of the
masterpieces" that we have now. Second, musical compositions were not
written for posterity or meant to be preserved forever. And the closer we
are to the 20th C with its canon of "cast-in-stone-masterpieces", the
more accurate and precise the our notation becomes. Note, too, that in
the modern music - especially post-WWII - the idea of an event- rather
than object-oriented music, of a dynamic rather than static model, has
been revived by some composers.
>2) Indeed music is special to Westerners and
>Western-influenced, as you say. And I reply: I simply cannot
>believe that I am moved to the depths as I directly am, by the
>music of BachBeethovenBrahmsBritten, simply because of the
>chance of my environment.
Too much for one posting ...
-Margaret
Marc San Soucie
> We have Chartres, we have Taj Mahal, we have Angkor
> Wat. Anyone who's been to college knows this. But I was a
> music major in college(_many_ years ago, to be sure :-( ) and
> have been reasonably diligent in following musical trends since,
> and I have never seen a chance to be exposed to a musical art
> work from, say, Japan, or even India, that matches say Op 131
> in the way that, say, The Tale of Genji matches War and Peace.
We obviously went to different colleges. I was never briefed on the existence
of Angkor Wat in all my time there, but I *was* given a good dose of
Balinese gamelan and Ketcak, African drumming, Indian ragas, Persian shawms,
and a host of others.
And I'll put Ketcak up against Op 131 anytime. MUCH more enjoyable.
Marc San Soucie
Portland, Oregon
ma...@netcom.com
Marc San Soucie
> al...@clark.net (Alan McConnell) writes:
> |And now Alan has a thought. Western music is the predominant(only?)
> |example of music based on polyphony(i.e. different people doing
> |different things, but coordinatedly, at the same time). To get a good
> |performance of this kind of music, it's probably best to have the
> |individual voices written down.
> There are examples of polyphonic traditions that went without notation
> for centuries, including within the Catholic Church.
Balinese gamelan music can be quite polyphonic. Traditionally the music was
passed along from musician to musician by the time-honored oral technique.
Richard Wang
Roger Lustig <ro...@astro.princeton.edu> wrote:
>In article <1994Feb6.2...@galileo.cc.rochester.edu>
ka...@troi.cc.rochester.edu (James Kahn) writes:
>>That question was, in essence, why is music of other cultures less
>>appreciated here in the west than is the case with other art forms?
Because it sounds funny? Quarter-tone scales tend to wreak havoc on
Eurocentricized ears. Deliberate dissonance didn't enter Western music
until fairly recent times.
>Well, we disagree on the point. Note that the original poster said
>just what you're saying about penetration, and then explained it
>by saying:
>a) There don't seem to be any worthy masterpieces to stand beside
>the 3 B's, etc.
>b) this is obvious because if there were, those other cultures
>would have developed notational systems that we can read.
I can't presume to speak for anything else, but most Chinese music was
improvisational; the performer adapted it in the process to reflect the
prevailing mood. What notational system would tell us "improvise here"
or "play whatever you're feeling"?
>>- Music just is more culturally determined or conditioned, less universal.
>> It is my sense (though I'd be happy to hear from someone more
>> knowledgeable of these countries) that as countries such as Japan
>> and Taiwan have become more highly developed economically, and
>> and (consequently?) more Western in other ways, Western music
>> has made great inroads there.
Of course. Haven't you noticed a rather disquieting trend in recent
years? All second-generation Asian Americans must have at some point in
their childhood played an instrument... although whether this reflects
Asian strictness or increasing Westernization, I'll leave up to you.
Vance Maverick
[why is music of other cultures less appreciated
here in the west than other art forms?]
Because it sounds funny? Quarter-tone scales tend to wreak havoc on
Eurocentricized ears.
How would you compare this with the funniness of e.g. traditional
Chinese perspective? I found this at least as alienating as different
pitch gamuts.
> Deliberate dissonance didn't enter Western music
> until fairly recent times.
"These dull notes we sing / Discords need for helps to grace them":
Thomas Campion (composer and poet), pub. 1602.
Vance
Richard Wang
Roger Lustig <ro...@astro.princeton.edu> wrote:
>In article <2j137t$9...@explorer.clark.net> al...@clark.net (Alan McConnell) writes:
>>>In article <2j0b6q$c...@explorer.clark.net> al...@clark.net (Alan McConnell) writes:
>At any rate, note that "equivalents" such as you're looking for
>would seem to have to pass a special test: they must be central
>to their culture *and* speak to you! Do we require that of
>Beethoven and Bach--that their masterpieces speak to cultures
>other than our own?
Reminds me of a story I heard about British explorers meeting African
tribes and showing them a photograph of the Queen. The natives had no
idea what it was supposed to represent, and finally hazarded a guess
that it was a battleship!
It's a sad fact of life that cultures usually DON'T mix very well; after
all, it can be argued that different cultures developed in the first
place as a way to justify mankind's natural tendencies towards
parochialism, family loyalty, and distrust of outsiders (note that all
these tendencies are present in most animal societies...). And before
you start in on me with couterexamples about the medieval myths of the
fabulously rich Orient, or the North American "Golden Man," keep in mind
that these are not myths that imply equivalency of culture. The Orient
was believed to be deficient in war technology, (as they indeed were);
the Native Americans were regarded as unspoiled PRIMITIVES--virtuous,
maybe, but still inferior to Europeans.
>>We have Chartres, we have Taj Mahal, we have Angkor
>> Wat. Anyone who's been to college knows this.
>Not. You been to college lately? I've taught music appreciation;
>I've found I can't assume *anything*.
Good call. The tradition-bound institution I have the dubious pleasure
of attending insists that a single course on Beethoven can impart enough
knowledge of the arts to make us culturally aware. What BS. They also
assume that we know lots of stuff before we get here. Again, what BS. I
was recently able to convince a fellow student that jet lag is a
permanent phenomenon, and could readily explain my strange sleeping habits.
Come ON.
>> work from, say, Japan, or even India, that matches say Op 131
>> in the way that, say, The Tale of Genji matches War and Peace.
>
>a) Isn't it a scandal how music departments don't cover all the bases?
>
>b) In what way *do* those two works match?
Again, good call. The Tale of Genji isn't even a novel! It's a
collection of often unrelated anecdotes about assignations with various
women. No unity of purpose except that they are all intended to
entertain. The Western novel, on the other hand, is a process, a
directional literature that moves from exposition to climax.
Maybe a more apt analogy for the first poster would be between Hokusai
and John Constable?
>> You may be right that Western _musicians_ . . . in contrast
>> to Western artists, architects, poets, novelists, who cherish
>> and applaud the corresponding arts of other cultures . . .
>> are close-minded and ignorant. Why should this be so? And
>
>Because, starting in the 19th C, they fed the audience and themselves
>and each other the line that their music was timeless, classical,
>progressive, etc.
Ouch! But I agree. :-)
>> why are the musicians of Japan, Korea, India, Africa so much
>> the other way, so open to Beethoven, Bach, Mozart? I am
>Which ones? The ones who go to Western schools?
Indeed. They didn't just take Western music and adapt it to their own
culture; they adopted our culture wholesale and accepted our music in OUR
context. (Yo Yo Ma...?)
>> Yes! Just exactly! You have penetrated to the essence of my
>> perhaps murky first post. Why has _only_ the Western culture
>> developed this kind of musical culture?
[to the original poster]
All cultures have unique reasons for their unique decisions and
developments. The Chinese had the printing press long before Gutenburg,
but preferred carved woodblocks to movable type, even though the latter
method is "more advanced." Why? Because Chinese is a character
language, and no simple alphabet exists; because the emphasis was on
quality, ease of use, and low capital costs (European printed books
SUCKED for a long time until the technology got up to snuff--and they
were expensive, too); because cheap labor (i.e. women and children)
could do everything but the carving. We can only assume there was some
similar reason that Chinese music didn't "advance" to notational form;
unless you'd care to postulate that Europeans are simply more gifted at
music...?
Richard Wang
rw...@husc.harvard.edu
Joanne Bogart
too late now.
In article <1994Feb7.2...@Princeton.EDU>,
ro...@faust.Princeton.EDU (Roger Lustig) writes:
>
[lots of stuff on other topics deleted. I think I've got the
correct participants. If not, I apologize]
[Alan McConnel says:]
> >>> quickly before you accuse me of putting down Bird<g>, let
> >>> me speak to the topic of improvisation. Bach and Beethoven
> >>> were according to their contemporaries supreme improvisors,
> >>> but when they got down to real work they sat down with music
> >>> paper and wrote e.g. Bminormass and Op131. Improvisation
>
[Roger Lustig says:]
> >>Bullshit. Improvising was real work, too; and most composers
> >>composed *by* improvising. Haydn was a supreme example. Beethoven
> >>was unusual in that he did his improvising in his head and in sketch-
> >>books; but he also worked at the piano.
>
[Alan McConnel]
> >The chinks in the armor of erudition show when one resorts to
> >peremptory profanity under the pretense of exasperation. Why
> >muck together composition & extemporization this way? The sense
> >in which a composition is an improvisation is trivial and
> >doesn't address the real question, which is what has been valued
> >more through the years, the improvisational or compositional powers
> >of these composers and why. One can answer, in sophistical
> >fashion, that no distinction exists between these powers, or, in
> >cynical fashion, that the compositions owe their perpetuation only
> >to existing power structures; but neither fashionable answer will
> >take one very far toward assessing what distinguishes the
> >composition of Haydn or Beethoven.
>
[Roger Lustig]
> And yet...and yet...none other than Heinich Schenker, the ultimate
> structuralist in music theory, who invented a transformational
> grammar of music avant la lettre, claimed that what distinguished
> the sonata form/style/texture, i.e., the thing for which we most
> clearly respect and revere Haydn and Beethoven, was *precisely*
> its origin in improvisation. (_Vom organischen in der Sonate_
> in _Das Meisterwerk in der Musik_, translated as "Organic
> Structure in Sonata Form_ [!!!], in Yeston, _REadings in
> Schenker Analysis..._ Yale.) That the rhetoric of improvisatory
> play is what informs such a work and makes it different from,
> and progressive over, earlier music. Bach's great organ
> and harpsichord music owes much to the tradition of the toccata,
> which is explicitly a written-out improvisation, or a simulacrum
> of one. Diminution, which leads to the structural layers as
> Schenker saw them, is yet another gift from improvisation to
> composition. IN taking the historical view, we *must* consider
> the two together--though not "muck" them together--to understand
> what composers did and listeners heard. No great composer,
> I suspect, was *not* a great improviser, and play (funny how we
> use that word in music), rather than goal-directed work, strikes
> me as far more likely to be the core of the musically creative
> process (or at least, a better metaphor for it).
>
[more stuff on other topics deleted]
> Roger
>
Roger, I'm curious to know how you (and others) define
"improvisation." I would say two critical features, stated
in extreme terms, are
1. at no time can the improviser go back in time and change
what has been done and
2. there is a limited amount of time in which to decide what
to do next
Of course these are just requirements of musical performance,
or any other real-time activity. Now I don't think they should
really be so black and white for a useful definition. Whether
the time is limited or not in an absolute sense tells you nothing
about whether it is limited for a particular improviser; that is,
whether s/he would do anything different if more time were
available. And I would change 1. to "the improviser doesn't go
back in time and change what has been done (even though it is
possible, as in a written-out score). [ If I scrap 2. and use the
second version of 1. I end up concluding the Ring is somewhat
improvisatory. ]
There is another aspect which you seem to be getting at with
the phrase "improvisatory play" which I don't see as being
especially the province of improvisation over composition.
Any composition will include some new, even quirky, elements or
combination of elements (else why write it?); they might be
arrived at by noodling on a keyboard for a while or by some
totally different means. What distinguishes composition (for me)
is the opportunity to re-work these elements (also a form of play)
in any time order you wish.
Joanne Bogart
Disclaimer: These ideas are my own.
Vance Maverick
> The tradition-bound institution I have the dubious pleasure
> of attending insists that a single course on Beethoven can impart enough
> knowledge of the arts to make us culturally aware.
You know, I declined this flamebait the first time you offered it, but
now I'm in the late stages of a cold, so I can pretend my usual
restraint ;-) has worn thin.
Do you figure that the framers of your curriculum thought it would be
the end of your education?
Further, the idea that students can take a narrowly focused course
without a broad introduction first is not especially traditionalist.
It could even be seen (with only a little mental acrobatics) as an
acknowledgment that there isn't just one way to become "culturally
aware", and that the purposes of a liberal education (tm) might be
better served by classes offered as examples rather than foundations.
Vance
Roger Lustig
>> the sonata form/style/texture, i.e., the thing for which we most
>> clearly respect and revere Haydn and Beethoven, was *precisely*
>> its origin in improvisation. (_Vom organischen in der Sonate_
>> in _Das Meisterwerk in der Musik_, translated as "Organic
>> Structure in Sonata Form_ [!!!], in Yeston, _REadings in
>> Schenker Analysis..._ Yale.) That the rhetoric of improvisatory
>> play is what informs such a work and makes it different from,
>> and progressive over, earlier music. Bach's great organ
>> and harpsichord music owes much to the tradition of the toccata,
>> which is explicitly a written-out improvisation, or a simulacrum
>> of one. Diminution, which leads to the structural layers as
>> Schenker saw them, is yet another gift from improvisation to
>> composition. IN taking the historical view, we *must* consider
>> the two together--though not "muck" them together--to understand
>> what composers did and listeners heard. No great composer,
>> I suspect, was *not* a great improviser, and play (funny how we
>> use that word in music), rather than goal-directed work, strikes
>> me as far more likely to be the core of the musically creative
>> process (or at least, a better metaphor for it).
>Roger, I'm curious to know how you (and others) define
>"improvisation." I would say two critical features, stated
>in extreme terms, are
> 1. at no time can the improviser go back in time and change
> what has been done and
> 2. there is a limited amount of time in which to decide what
> to do next
That's extemporization. Improvisation has other features, in
actual practice.
--In things like jazz improvisation, the typical solo, although
extemporized in its smallest details, comes from a long process
of working-out, of reworking, of building a general framework
for performance. In some cases, *group* improvisation can
happen; consider things like the Count Basie Orchestra's
"One O'Clock Jump", which was worked out by the band from
a riff that someone -- who knows who? -- played.
--There are traditions, patterns, cliches, and so on
underlying most improvisations. In the case of Mozart,
there was common-practice tonality, the style of his day,
standard techniques of ornamentation, and so on. In the
case of Basie, there was the blues.
--Where does improvisation leave off and composition begin?
Hard to tell. But your extreme definition above misses the
point that improvisers/extemporizers who are any good
do that sort of thing *often*. they *learn* to improvise,
and improvise from a "bag" (ever wonder where that jazz
term came from--"That's not my bag"?--well, it's from a
"bag of tricks," of musical devices and snatches and
patterns.), and relate that bag to the musical "language"
around them.
> Of course these are just requirements of musical performance,
>or any other real-time activity. Now I don't think they should
>really be so black and white for a useful definition. Whether
>the time is limited or not in an absolute sense tells you nothing
>about whether it is limited for a particular improviser; that is,
>whether s/he would do anything different if more time were
>available. And I would change 1. to "the improviser doesn't go
>back in time and change what has been done (even though it is
>possible, as in a written-out score). [ If I scrap 2. and use the
>second version of 1. I end up concluding the Ring is somewhat
>improvisatory. ]
As it is! After all, the conductor can decide to take Waldweben
a bit slower tonight, or to hold back the brass.
>There is another aspect which you seem to be getting at with
>the phrase "improvisatory play" which I don't see as being
>especially the province of improvisation over composition.
>Any composition will include some new, even quirky, elements or
>combination of elements (else why write it?); they might be
>arrived at by noodling on a keyboard for a while or by some
>totally different means. What distinguishes composition (for me)
> is the opportunity to re-work these elements (also a form of play)
>in any time order you wish.
Sure--but improvisation is where the elements tend to come from.
That's all.
Roger
Charles Packer
Alan McConnell <al...@clark.net> wrote:
>With this as preamble I raise the following dismal hypothesis:
>that music is in a certain sense the most parochial, the most
>limited, the most "culture-bound" of arts. :-( One asks: where
>are the great musical creations of Japan, India, China,
Actually, India has a musical tradition almost as rich as the
West. Those of Japan and China are relatively impoverished. Why?
And music is, potentially at least, the =least= culture-
bound of artistic modalities because it doesn't carry
the extra baggage of ideological or political symbols.
A crucifix in a painting has to be =explained= by putting
the work into a context. Likewise, a poem that alludes to
"the Cross" has to have a footnote to tell non-Westerners
about Christianity. Wordless music has no such cross to
bear.
Alan's question can be decomposed into two separate
questions: First, why haven't non-Western cultures created
well-known musical masterpieces? This has been disposed
of already by others who noted that, basically, non-Western
music isn't done that way. Indian music, for example, is
improvisational.
The second question is somewhat latent in Alan's formulation,
but more interesting: Why do cultures differ in the degree to
which they have a =classical= music tradition? I mean
"classical" to refer to a tradition of exploring the
expressive capabilities of music to its limits, for its own
sake. I named four high cultures as examples, two with such a
tradition and two without it. I don't have an answer to the
question.
I recalled that William McNeill had some remarks about the
history of European music in "The Rise of the West." Looking
them up, I found that he holds that the tremendous development
of music in the 17th and 18th centuries was influenced by
technology -- the invention of new musical instruments
combined with new knowledge about the physics of sound.
Steve Berman
--There are traditions, patterns, cliches, and so on
underlying most improvisations. In the case of Mozart,
there was common-practice tonality, the style of his day,
standard techniques of ornamentation, and so on. In the
case of Basie, there was the blues.
This is what Derek Bailey calls idiomatic improvisation (see
_Improvisation. Its Nature and Practice in Music_, 2nd ed., Da Capo 1993),
as distinct from nonidiomatic improvisation, which precisely aims to
avoid the traditions, patterns, and cliches (and for this reason doesn't
sound like anything familiar!). But even nonidiomatic improvisation relies
on processes of working out, "bags of tricks", and so on, as you describe
below (I've reordered your paragraphs)--that is, it's not musical anarchy.
--Steve
--In things like jazz improvisation, the typical solo, although
extemporized in its smallest details, comes from a long process
of working-out, of reworking, of building a general framework
for performance. In some cases, *group* improvisation can
happen; consider things like the Count Basie Orchestra's
"One O'Clock Jump", which was worked out by the band from
a riff that someone -- who knows who? -- played.
--Where does improvisation leave off and composition begin?
Roger Lustig
>In article <2j0b6q$c...@explorer.clark.net>,
>Alan McConnell <al...@clark.net> wrote:
>>With this as preamble I raise the following dismal hypothesis:
>>that music is in a certain sense the most parochial, the most
>>limited, the most "culture-bound" of arts. :-( One asks: where
>>are the great musical creations of Japan, India, China,
>Actually, India has a musical tradition almost as rich as the
>West. Those of Japan and China are relatively impoverished. Why?
>And music is, potentially at least, the =least= culture-
>bound of artistic modalities because it doesn't carry
>the extra baggage of ideological or political symbols.
>A crucifix in a painting has to be =explained= by putting
>the work into a context. Likewise, a poem that alludes to
>"the Cross" has to have a footnote to tell non-Westerners
>about Christianity. Wordless music has no such cross to
>bear.
Careful now. Ragas *do* carry a great deal of affective and
circumstantial baggage, whether soneone's singing or just
playing. Also, note that the Western attitude that privileges
wordless music is only about two centuries old...
>Alan's question can be decomposed into two separate
>questions: First, why haven't non-Western cultures created
>well-known musical masterpieces? This has been disposed
>of already by others who noted that, basically, non-Western
>music isn't done that way. Indian music, for example, is
>improvisational.
Which is to say that the *performances* are in some cases
masterpieces. (Also, what would one say of someone who
composes a new raga and explores its possibilities?
>The second question is somewhat latent in Alan's formulation,
>but more interesting: Why do cultures differ in the degree to
>which they have a =classical= music tradition? I mean
>"classical" to refer to a tradition of exploring the
>expressive capabilities of music to its limits, for its own
>sake. I named four high cultures as examples, two with such a
>tradition and two without it. I don't have an answer to the
>question.
>I recalled that William McNeill had some remarks about the
>history of European music in "The Rise of the West." Looking
>them up, I found that he holds that the tremendous development
>of music in the 17th and 18th centuries was influenced by
>technology -- the invention of new musical instruments
>combined with new knowledge about the physics of sound.
Influenced, yes. Determined--probably not. The biggest
revolution in sound came at tehe beginning of that period,
when people were taking new approaches to all sorts of
things--including science. But the instruments that made the
continuo, say, were all among those that existed before:
lute, harpsichord, organ.
At any rate, I agree completely: the question requires that
it be framed in terms of familiarity with other musics, not
in terms of one's own unfamiliarity.
Roger
Todd Michel McComb
>>[China, India, Japan]
>Indeed. They didn't just take Western music and adapt it to their own
>culture; they adopted our culture wholesale and accepted our music in OUR
>context. (Yo Yo Ma...?)
As well as keeping their own....
Regarding your Beethoven-class comments (which I've deleted already), when
my wife was attending your fine institution, the music class she took was
"Turn of the Century Vienna" (the version for those who could read orchestral
scores). It's nice to have choices, isn't it?
>We can only assume there was some
>similar reason that Chinese music didn't "advance" to notational form;
>unless you'd care to postulate that Europeans are simply more gifted at
>music...?
Your efforts to provide legitimate reasons for not notating are well-taken,
but in this case your example is incorrect. There are usable instrumental
tablature manuscripts dating from at least as early as the 10th century in
Chinese sources; 15th century pieces are even common; several pieces are
said to have been notated in the 6th century or earlier. To turn this
thread around, where are the comparable *western* sources for instrumental
music?
BTW, the Ocora series of Chinese music is excellent, as well as providing
some of these dates of composition.
T. M. McComb
Todd Michel McComb
>Actually, India has a musical tradition almost as rich as the
>West. Those of Japan and China are relatively impoverished. Why?
While it is certainly true that direct comparison between musical traditions
of different cultures is a hazardous enterprise -- since the entire context
is different, and the meaning of "composition" may vary, as well as what it
requires to perform -- the above statement is simply unfair. First, Indian
musical tradition is at least as rich as that of Western Europe; the vigor
of the classical spirit and the volume of music performed & discussed is
at least as large: there is no "almost" by any legitimate yardstick. In
China, there are a large number of different traditions, some of which might
be more in keeping with what we call "classical" than others; that these
"highest" arts may or may not have been suppressed by the communist
government (depending on one's political views, and whom one talks to) is
a recent phenomenon, and either way it would not be accurate to call
Chinese music "impoverished." Japan is a younger culture than the other
three, yet there are still repertories to which one could apply the term
"classical." It is fine to introduce some cultural relativism to this
discussion, but not only do all these places have long-lived traditions
of performance, they have *compositions* which have more than withstood
the test of time.
>Alan's question can be decomposed into two separate
>questions: First, why haven't non-Western cultures created
>well-known musical masterpieces? This has been disposed
>of already by others who noted that, basically, non-Western
>music isn't done that way. Indian music, for example, is
>improvisational.
While others have disposed of the idea that direct comparisons can or
should be made, it is still the case that there are compositions in these
cultures whose performance traditions date back many years -- this is the
most straight-forward cross-cultural definition of "masterpiece" of which
I can conceive.
Indian music contains a large improvisational element, yes. And in fact
a musician is not considered a true master without this skill in abundance.
However, South Indian music has a *huge* repertory of compositions, as well
as a number of revered composers, and these are always performed in serious
concerts. North Indian music also has a large repertory of compositions,
those in the dhrupad genre being especially close to the way in which we
would undertand the term.
>The second question is somewhat latent in Alan's formulation,
>but more interesting: Why do cultures differ in the degree to
>which they have a =classical= music tradition? I mean
>"classical" to refer to a tradition of exploring the
>expressive capabilities of music to its limits, for its own
>sake. I named four high cultures as examples, two with such a
>tradition and two without it. I don't have an answer to the
>question.
That is because your examples are incorrect. I suggest you acquaint
yourself with the Chinese guqin repertory (considered the main instrument
of the scholar) which stretches back centuries, and the Japanese Gagaku
repertory with its carefully constructed ensemble compositions. These
are only the primary examples in my mind -- there are others.
>I recalled that William McNeill had some remarks about the
>history of European music in "The Rise of the West." Looking
>them up, I found that he holds that the tremendous development
>of music in the 17th and 18th centuries was influenced by
>technology -- the invention of new musical instruments
>combined with new knowledge about the physics of sound.
And as I have remarked before, I believe that this prominent musical
canon was also conditioned by the contemporaneous rise of a substantial
middle class. To suggest that Chinese or Indian scholars did not
understand the physics of sound is quite inflammatory -- Chinese
discussions of such things (dating back at least to the middle ages)
are substantially similar to our own, while Indian discussions are
informed by a larger spiritual element alongside the basic acoustic
facts. One would have difficulty doubting the western development of
*large quantities* of high quality musical instruments, however.
T. M. McComb
William Tsun-Yuk Hsu
>Alan McConnell <al...@clark.net> wrote:
>>With this as preamble I raise the following dismal hypothesis:
>>that music is in a certain sense the most parochial, the most
>>limited, the most "culture-bound" of arts. :-( One asks: where
>>are the great musical creations of Japan, India, China,
>
>Actually, India has a musical tradition almost as rich as the
>West. Those of Japan and China are relatively impoverished. Why?
And how do you measure the "relative richness" of musical traditions?
How much do you know about the traditional musics of Japan and China?
For instance, there are several regional styles of Chinese opera,
each with its own distinct repertoire, vocal and instrumental styles,
and staging conventions.
Bill
Richard Wang
Richard Wang
Vance Maverick <mave...@beech.CS.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
>In article <2jbbbj$4...@scunix2.harvard.edu> rw...@husc8.harvard.edu (Richard Wang) writes:
> here in the west than other art forms?]
>
> Because it sounds funny? Quarter-tone scales tend to wreak havoc on
> Eurocentricized ears.
>
>Chinese perspective? I found this at least as alienating as different
>pitch gamuts.
Traditional Chinese perspective on WHAT? On music? life? bagel slicers?
>> Deliberate dissonance didn't enter Western music
>> until fairly recent times.
>
>"These dull notes we sing / Discords need for helps to grace them":
>Thomas Campion (composer and poet), pub. 1602.
Oh, and we've all heard so many recordings of the great Campion. :-)
Bach's various dissonances were not the norm; they were surprises,
variations on melodies built primarily with harmonious intervals.
Richard Wang
rw...@husc.harvard.edu
Vance Maverick
In article <MAVERICK.9...@beech.cs.berkeley.edu>,
Vance Maverick <mave...@beech.CS.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
>In article <2jbbbj$4...@scunix2.harvard.edu> rw...@husc8.harvard.edu (Richard Wang) writes:
>
>How would you compare this with the funniness of e.g. traditional
>Chinese perspective? I found this at least as alienating as different
>pitch gamuts.
Traditional Chinese perspective on WHAT?
"Perspective" is a technical term in the visual arts, referring to the
representation of distance. The Chinese version is quite different
from the Western one.
In any case, your explanation (which may have been facetious) begs the
question. We're curious about why many Westerners are alienated by
music of other cultures; to say that it sounds funny merely repeats
the observation. After all, Chinese painting can be said to "look
funny", for reasons just as specific as differences in tuning systems,
yet it's well represented in e.g. the Met.
>> Deliberate dissonance didn't enter Western music
>> until fairly recent times.
>
>"These dull notes we sing / Discords need for helps to grace them":
>Thomas Campion (composer and poet), pub. 1602.
Oh, and we've all heard so many recordings of the great Campion. :-)
Well, he's not on the top 40, but he's certainly well recorded, and
his genre is growing more popular -- Emma Kirkby is a star. In any
case, his music is sufficient at least to establish his competence in
the musical style of his day; and if these lines (from "Rose-cheeked
Laura, come") aren't testimony to the use of "deliberate dissonance",
I don't know what is.
Bach's various dissonances were not the norm; they were surprises,
variations on melodies built primarily with harmonious intervals.
It's possible you're thinking of a definition of "dissonance"
different from the one Bach (and Campion) knew. I have the C-major
prelude from WTC-I before me; it has a steady harmonic rhythm of one
chord to the bar. Of its 35 bars, 24 are dissonant (if you don't
count a 6/4 as a dissonance). True, the *kinds* of dissonances he
uses, and the way he uses them, are somewhat constrained....
Vance
Richard Wang
Alan McConnell <al...@clark.net> wrote:
>(Roger)
>That said, when a culture that doesn't notate its music disappears,
>the music disappears. That doesn't mean that the music wasn't
>good, though.
> Dunno. It certainly means it wasn't valued -- sufficiently
> valued -- by its culture.
Ahem. Who are you to judge how much they valued their music by simply
observing whether or not it was faithfully preserved? As someone on this
thread has astutely pointed out, only Western music has the "static
masterpiece" tradition where the emphasis is on the piece rather than the
performance.
>(Roger)
>Here's a suggestion. Read a book on world music. I mentioned
> Don't want to _read_. I want to _listen_ to it - and enjoy
> it - and maybe even _play_ it. But thanks for your
> recommendations anyway.
And yet a little bit of reading can banish the shadows of ignorance...
>At any rate, note that "equivalents" such as you're looking for
>would seem to have to pass a special test: they must be central
>to their culture *and* speak to you! Do we require that of
>Beethoven and Bach--that their masterpieces speak to cultures
>other than our own?
> I require nothing. I note that Bach and Beethoven have universal
> appeal, to Japanese, Indians, Africans. Not to _everyone_, alas;
> see my above threnody.
They have universal appeal to those Japanese, Indians, and Africans who
have accepted other large portions of our culture as well. This would
seem to say more about our willingness to appreciate other cultures than
about the relative virtues of Western and non-Western music.
> Roger will like that, but I don't. My vision is: the cultured ear
> should appreciate everything(while of course liking some things
> better than others). This happens in the visual arts and poetry
> (altho your point about translation is well taken). But not in
> music. At least that's how I see it.
Are you QUITE certain that you have "the cultured ear" ...? No offense,
but it sounds to me like you listened to some stuff, decided it was bad,
and decided to complain about it on this newsgroup.
Richard Wang
rw...@husc.harvard.edu
Eric Chang ~{VY;T~}
>Charles Packer:
>>Alan McConnell <al...@clark.net> wrote:
>>Actually, India has a musical tradition almost as rich as the
>>West. Those of Japan and China are relatively impoverished. Why?
>And how do you measure the "relative richness" of musical traditions?
How about polyphony?
>How much do you know about the traditional musics of Japan and China?
>For instance, there are several regional styles of Chinese opera,
>each with its own distinct repertoire, vocal and instrumental styles,
>and staging conventions.
>
>Bill
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..
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Eric
Roger Lustig
>Vance Maverick <mave...@beech.CS.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
>>In article <2jbbbj$4...@scunix2.harvard.edu> rw...@husc8.harvard.edu (Richard Wang) writes:
>>> Deliberate dissonance didn't enter Western music
>>> until fairly recent times.
Like, ancient Greece. The concept of dissonance has been around for
millennia, and all the music we know of used it. What *constitutes*
dissonance is something else again; that's changed often. But there
are pieces of, say, 14thC music that strike modern listeners as very
dissonant and deliberately so.
>>"These dull notes we sing / Discords need for helps to grace them":
>>Thomas Campion (composer and poet), pub. 1602.
>Oh, and we've all heard so many recordings of the great Campion. :-)
Well, yes! He's a rather important figure in English music.
>Bach's various dissonances were not the norm; they were surprises,
>variations on melodies built primarily with harmonious intervals.
Huh? His dissonances were *variations* on something? They were
part and parcel of his musical idiom, and that of all his
contemporaries, is what they were. They were certainly not
"surprises," for the most part.
Roger
Margaret Mikulska
The *beginnings* of Chinese notation for pitches might be going back to
the 4th century BC, and certainly to the 2nd century BC, which would
correspond, roughly, to the Classical Greece or at least to the
Hellenistic period.
-Margaret
William Tsun-Yuk Hsu
>>And how do you measure the "relative richness" of musical traditions?
Eric Chang:
>How about polyphony?
How about rhythmic complexity? How do you compare a "musical tradition"
that stresses polyphony and a "musical tradition" that stresses rhythmic
complexity?
Bill
John Gillespie
: Me:
: Bill
As a for-instance, what about heterophony? Japanese sankyoku for
koto, shamisen, voice, and shakuhachi initially sounds, well,
awful, to western ears. There is no harmonic relationship between
separate lines which often seem to be going there own way. I have
played along on a shakuhachi with recordings of sankyoku and occassionally
the music suddenly has meaning and becomes as moving as any late
late Beethoven quartet. For me, it has taken a lot of listening
and playing to appreciate this music. The message is that cross-
cultural comparisons are only meaningful if you take the time
to learn and play each music. Certainly, Japanese music is every
bit as 'complex' and 'developed' as is Western Music.
John
Richard Wang
Vance Maverick <mave...@cork.CS.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
>In article <2je5fn$2...@scunix2.harvard.edu> rw...@husc7.harvard.edu
>(Richard Wang) writes:
>representation of distance. The Chinese version is quite different
>from the Western one.
Ah, thanks for specifying. That's true, Chinese paintings tend not to
have the vanishing points and various other visual cues that Western
painting employs to translate the 2-D picture into a 3-D image. But do
you mean to say that Chinese paintings lack any sense of depth for you,
or that their strangeness keeps you from appreciating them? Chinese
music is no more strange to our ears, yet it's not popular at all in
Western culture.
>In any case, your explanation (which may have been facetious) begs the
>question. We're curious about why many Westerners are alienated by
>music of other cultures; to say that it sounds funny merely repeats
>the observation. After all, Chinese painting can be said to "look
>funny", for reasons just as specific as differences in tuning systems,
>yet it's well represented in e.g. the Met.
Conceded. And, yes, I was being facetious. The answer that springs
immediately to mind is that music isn't something you can copy and
distribute without a) high technology or b) good training in oral
traditions and rote memorization. Both of these were lacking during the
historical era during which most of the Oriental-Occidental cultural
assimilation was taking place. Note how easy Japanese woodcuts are to
reproduce; Noh theater, on the other hand, requires a professional troupe
and lots of practice. Music is harder to disseminate. I probably
wouldn't be too moved by someone singing a Japanese folk song to me,
unless he or she had a good voice; on the other hand, I might well be
able to appreciate many of the artistic qualities of even a poor
reproduction of a Hokusai print.
Richard Wang
rw...@husc.harvard.edu
clovis lark
>Roger
Just to address "deliberate" dissonance: I can't imagine any dissonance
not being deliberate, whatever that dissonance might be. An arbitrary
device incorporated into a piece, either written or improvised, whatever
it might be can only be deliberate. I will accept true chance as an
exception, but that's that. So after that tantrum, what is being referred
to as "deliberate".
Ed Price
>[...] Music is harder to disseminate. I probably
>wouldn't be too moved by someone singing a Japanese folk song to me,
>unless he or she had a good voice; on the other hand, I might well be
>able to appreciate many of the artistic qualities of even a poor
>reproduction of a Hokusai print.
Hmm, maybe... But I'm not convinced they're so different. I'm certainly
not convinced that a bad reproduction (I assume you mean sketch) of visual
art is necessarily any better than, say, a transcription of music (sonic
art). Unless you mean reproduction as in photograph, but that's cheating,
the equivalent in music would be a recording! And if the person making the
sketch of the visual art spends time making a really good sketch, well, I
think that's equivalent to a musician spending time learning to play the
music (ie reproduce the sounds).
This isn't the greatest piece of anecdotal evidence but my brother bought
the soundtrack to "Green Snake", a recent Tsui Hark movie (from Hong Kong).
It has a very nice Indian tune on it. Recently we jammed a bit, I was
playing bass, my brother was playing guitar, and he played the melody of
that tune. At first I didn't even really notice what it was, I just
accompanied it as usual, with various reharmonizations and stuff, like I
would do for anything he improvised. (In fact he's always quoting stuff
and I frequently don't realize it.) Maybe it would be harder to imitate a
typical shakahuchi melody or something, I suppose, but still, I'm an
American, with "western ears", and yet I have heard a certain small amount
of Chinese and Japanese (and Indian) music, and much of it has sounded
great to me.
Some African music I've heard has been impressive. FWIW, I even compared
it with Bach's "Art of Fugue" on rec.music.bluenote a while back:
But as usual, it is the interlocking of all the parts that really makes
this cadence rock. Each part by itself is fairly boring, but they combine
beautifully. It reminds me of that African drumming concert I saw at the
New School last semester, where the rhythms one person might be playing
were not anything complicated but the combined effect of the group was
amazing. (And I think that's interesting, since African drumming and
Baroque counterpoint are not usually considered as anything but opposites
from what I can tell. Fuck that! IMHO polyrhythm can be look at just like
polyphony or whatever, ie there is rhythmic consonance and rhythmic
dissonance, etc. Playing the piano and playing the drums are not very
different really if you think of things this way, which IMHO is a good
idea.)
Ciao,
-Ed
Todd Michel McComb
>[I wrote:]
>>Your efforts to provide legitimate reasons for not notating are well-taken,
>>but in this case your example is incorrect. There are usable instrumental
>>tablature manuscripts dating from at least as early as the 10th century in
>>Chinese sources; 15th century pieces are even common; several pieces are
>>said to have been notated in the 6th century or earlier. To turn this
>>thread around, where are the comparable *western* sources for instrumental
>>music?
>The *beginnings* of Chinese notation for pitches might be going back to
>the 4th century BC, and certainly to the 2nd century BC, which would
>correspond, roughly, to the Classical Greece or at least to the
>Hellenistic period.
But what about the performable instrumental sources? We have nothing like
that for the classical period, barring elaborate reconstructions. The
medieval Chinese sources are very specifically notated tablatures which
modern musicians can play without guessing games. This seems significant
only if we want to draw fine distinctions about who is actually "preserving"
what.
T. M. McComb
Richard Wang
Vance Maverick <mave...@cork.CS.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
>In article <2jboeq$r...@scunix2.harvard.edu> rw...@husc7.harvard.edu (Richard Wang) writes:
>> of attending insists that a single course on Beethoven can impart enough
>> knowledge of the arts to make us culturally aware.
>
>now I'm in the late stages of a cold, so I can pretend my usual
>restraint ;-) has worn thin.
>
>Do you figure that the framers of your curriculum thought it would be
>the end of your education?
In fact, I think they might, considering that there's very little time to
do anything but take courses for your major and for your "core" (quotes
used sarcastically, since many core classes are in no way central to a
liberal education) requirements. My rapidly vanishing free time is all I
get to further my knowledge of music; and credit isn't usually awarded for
performance here, so practicing (especially for serious musicians, i.e.
not me) becomes yet another drain on time.
>Further, the idea that students can take a narrowly focused course
>without a broad introduction first is not especially traditionalist.
>It could even be seen (with only a little mental acrobatics) as an
>acknowledgment that there isn't just one way to become "culturally
>aware", and that the purposes of a liberal education (tm) might be
>better served by classes offered as examples rather than foundations.
It could be if the general tendency of students wasn't to say, "Oh, I've
taken a course on Beethoven, now I know lots and lots about classical
music and am a cultured person." Ditto for other artsy courses.
Richard Wang
rw...@husc.harvard.edu
Richard Wang
Todd Michel McComb <mcco...@netcom.com> wrote:
>Your efforts to provide legitimate reasons for not notating are well-taken,
>but in this case your example is incorrect. There are usable instrumental
>tablature manuscripts dating from at least as early as the 10th century in
>Chinese sources; 15th century pieces are even common; several pieces are
>said to have been notated in the 6th century or earlier. To turn this
>thread around, where are the comparable *western* sources for instrumental
>music?
Thanks for the clarification; what motivated me to post was the fact that
musical training was one of the Six Aptitudes of the Confucian gentlemen,
and Confucianism of course dates from at least the 5th century BC; yet we
have no surviving manuscripts from this period, despite numerous
references to the potency and cosmic significance of music in _The
Analects_. I guess we don't have too many surviving manuscripts of
Western music from that time, either; but the Chinese wrote down so many
things you'd THINK they'd take the time to copy down some songs...
Richard Wang
rw...@husc.harvard.edu
William Tsun-Yuk Hsu
>>> The tradition-bound institution I have the dubious pleasure
>>> of attending insists that a single course on Beethoven can impart enough
>>> knowledge of the arts to make us culturally aware.
Vance Maverick:
>>Further, the idea that students can take a narrowly focused course
>>without a broad introduction first is not especially traditionalist.
>>It could even be seen (with only a little mental acrobatics) as an
>>acknowledgment that there isn't just one way to become "culturally
>>aware", and that the purposes of a liberal education (tm) might be
>>better served by classes offered as examples rather than foundations.
Richard Wang:
>It could be if the general tendency of students wasn't to say, "Oh, I've
>taken a course on Beethoven, now I know lots and lots about classical
>music and am a cultured person."
Well that's at least as much the fault of lame, lazy and arrogant
students as the curriculum planners.
When I teach, I always beat to death the idea that "there are other
ways to do things", where appropriate.
Bill
Vance Maverick
In article <MAVERICK.9...@cork.cs.berkeley.edu>,
Vance Maverick <mave...@cork.CS.Berkeley.EDU> wrote:
>Do you figure that the framers of your curriculum thought it would be
>the end of your education?
In fact, I think they might, considering that there's very little time to
do anything but take courses for your major and for your "core" (quotes
used sarcastically, since many core classes are in no way central to a
liberal education) requirements. My rapidly vanishing free time is all I
get to further my knowledge of music; and credit isn't usually awarded for
performance here, so practicing (especially for serious musicians, i.e.
not me) becomes yet another drain on time.
My point was that your education will continue *after you graduate*.
It would be very unusual for a university to tell its students their
education was complete.
> [maybe the class on Beethoven is intended as an example]
It could be if the general tendency of students wasn't to say, "Oh, I've
taken a course on Beethoven, now I know lots and lots about classical
music and am a cultured person."
First, I don't believe you; I went to a similar institution not so
long ago, and while my classmates and I were not the humblest of
mortals, arrogance of this water was rare. Second, why are you
irritated at your university, if you blame your fellow students? I
trust *you* don't share in this supposed "general tendency"....
Vance
Margaret Mikulska
>OK, so far several people have reminded us that yes indeed, non-Western
>cultures have produced "great" music, some notated, some not.
>
>So why do we Westerners generally know next to nothing about non-Western
>music, whereas most of us have at least heard of a number of non-Western
>literary works?
>
>I'd like to suggest that this is because we can read literary works in
>translation, so we don't have to learn the original language in order to
>get something out of them. True, translations are often a pale reflection
>of the original, but they're better than nothing. With music, on the
>other hand, we have to become comfortable with the "language" it's written
>in, before we can appreciate it; otherwise it's just a puzzling jumble of
>sounds.
It's true that we can read literary works in translation, but I'm not
sure that a translation is always better than nothing. Plot-oriented
literature can be translated, but a lot of poetry is completely
untranslatable: we get "something" out of it, but does this something
have much to do with the original? Sometimes it becomes a new work.
Also, I believe that it is not always (and not for everybody) necessary
to become comfortable with the exotic musical "language". It doesn't
have to be a puzzling jumble of sounds.
Nonetheless:
I would say that the notion of a work of literature is somewhat similar
in the West and in non-Western cultures with _written_ literary
traditions. In both cases, there is a fairly fixed work, copied in one
way or another from generation to generation; at least some of it can
indeed be translated.
The notion of a work of music, however, is often different in various
cultures. In the cultures where the emphasis is on performance and
improvisation (even if the notion of composition exists, too), you have
to reproduce a _performance_ to get something out of that musical
culture. First, this is different from our emphasis on the composers and
their "fixed" compositions. Here, when we consider various perfomances,
we always keep in mind that they are performances of a particular
musical work; the work is at the center, the performances are
peripheral. "There" this is not always the case, and it takes a while
to get used to this different model (rather than to a different musical
language). Second, performances are less "portable" than translations.
Only now, when we have recordings, is non-Western music becoming known
in the West.
-Margaret
Vance Maverick
Plot-oriented
literature can be translated, but a lot of poetry is completely
untranslatable: we get "something" out of it, but does this something
have much to do with the original? Sometimes it becomes a new work.
There's a great example of this in Guy Davenport's translations from
the fragments of Archilochos, which happens to be on my desk. 255:
Sons scythed down
By the governor.
And 266:
I've worn out
My pizzle.
The note to 255 says, "The same as 266. [...] The reading here was
arrived at torturously and I let it stand as a signpost to all the
pitfalls of translation. Plutarch remarks of the man who threw a rock
at a dog and hit his mother-in-law that there's something to be said
for most failures."
Vance
PS. _Archilochos Sappho Alkman_, University of California Press, 1980.
Vevek Ram
>Subject: Re: the "limited" art of music :-(
>Date: Thu, 10 Feb 1994 18:35:42 GMT
>In article <2jdaan$o...@paperboy.gsfc.nasa.gov> Charles Packer writes:
>>Actually, India has a musical tradition almost as rich as the
>>West. Those of Japan and China are relatively impoverished. Why?
>While it is certainly true that direct comparison between musical traditions
>of different cultures is a hazardous enterprise -- since the entire context
>is different, and the meaning of "composition" may vary, as well as what it
>requires to perform -- the above statement is simply unfair.
Right on Todd; not only is it unfair, it is irresponsible. Music is
appreciated by the heart as well as the brain (for those that have it..)
Inspite of my biased training and indoctrination (we can go into that later)
in Indian Classical Music, I have had heavenly moments while listening to
Japanese, Turkish, Chinese, Greek and even Bach, Rachmaninoff etcetc
Let us not let RMIC degenerate for the nth time by encouraging such comments
" I know not how thy singest, my master! I ever listen in silent amazement.
The light of thy music illumines the world. The life breath of thy music
runs from sky to sky. The holy stream of thy music breaks through all
stony obstacles and rushes on......." Rabindranath Tagore
Vevek
Ken Nakata
In article <CL2Gz...@ucdavis.edu>,
To me, This thread is the only interesting thread posted on
soc.culture.japan in these several months. I've loved compositional
complexity of Frank Zappa's music for several years. But
unfortunately, NJIT does not provide any musical educational programs,
so where do I get started? I mean I appreciate any pointers to study
materials in theory of music or any programs in theory of music at
universities/colleges near Newark, NJ, in which I can be enrolled with
minimal cost.
Thanks in advance.
Ken Nakata
--
[ "For my taste, these solos (of some 50s blues guitarists) are ]
[ exemplary because what is being played seems honest and, in a ]
[ musical way, a direct extension of the personality of the men ]
[ who played them." - Frank Zappa (1/77) ]