The significance of sound

``For twenty-five centuries Western knowledge has tried to look upon the world.
It has failed to understand that the world is not for beholding. It is for hearing.
It is not legible, but audible.''
Attali (1985, page 3)
Sight is the sense that has driven most thinking, theorising, and empirical research in
the social sciences. The consequences of this are enormous, and this is not the place to
list them. What cannot be denied, however, is how very comfortable we are with using
the visual as a route to knowledge and as a medium for experiencing the world.
Questions are `looked at' in a particular way, pilot studies are completed `with a
view' to developing a larger project, things are kept `perspective', events are `seen' in
one way or another, futures are `envisaged', empirical research `sheds light' on theore-
tical concerns, `insights' are gained, problems are `looked into'. The list is endless;
the language of everyday life is peppered with visual allusions and metaphors.
What I want to do in this paper is to imagine a world where the eye is less central.
I want to take up Attali's (1985) concerns, and think about what it would be like to
engage with sound as readily as we engage with sight. ``What we lack'' comments
B Smith (1999) ``is not contact with the sounded world, but a sensitivity to sound, a
curiosity about how it operates, how it affects us'' (page 22). What would happen if we
thought about space in terms of its acoustical properties rather than in terms of its
transparency or its topology? What would happen to the way we think, to the things
we know, to the relationships we enter, to our experience of time and space, if we fully
took on board the idea that the world is for hearing rather than beholding, for listening
to, rather than for looking at?
If sonic knowledges were the same as visual knowledges, the answer would be
`nothing' there would be no need to engage with those tricky terrains beyond the
visible world. But Attali's suggestion, and my contention, is that what can be known
through sound may not be accessible from the visible world. The challenge, then, is to
Performing the (sound)world
Susan J Smith
Department of Geography, University of Edinburgh, Drummond Street, Edinburgh EH8 9XP,
Scotland; e-mail: sjs@geo.ed.ac.uk
Received 12 September 1999; in revised form 9 February 2000
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 2000, volume 18, pages 615 ^ 637
Abstract. This paper explores the possibility of learning through listening; it is about the way space is
made through sound as well as sight. I begin by suggesting that musicprecariously positioned
between the myth of silence and the threat of noiseoffers one means of accessing the soundworld.
Then, in order to develop an approach to music that prioritises its sonic qualities, I turn to ideas
about performance. This also draws attention away from musical texts and towards the physicality
involved in making and listening to music. With reference to some exploratory case studies, I try to
appreciate how musicthrough its embodiment in performanceworks as a powerful way of
knowing and being. Most of the paper is therefore devoted to a discussion of the intersecting political,
economic, and emotional spaces which are made through musical performance (and listening)
practices. Like the performances they draw from, the conclusions are incomplete. But they do confirm
the importance of imaginingof creating, of engaging witha world in the doing, shaped by senses
other than sight.
DOI:10.1068/d225t
find ways of learning through listening that have the same integrity, plausibility, and
legitimacy as are currently afforded to knowledges produced through looking. This is
what I want to help explore.
The first part of the challenge is to find a way to conceptualise sound. The much-
publicised World Soundscape Project ensures there is no shortage of interest in this.
Disciplines from physics through environmental management to theology have some-
thing to say on the topic. However, from a social scientific perspective, perhaps the
most interesting studies of sound have centred on the cultural politics of music.
(1)
For
this we owe a debt to an economist and a composer: to Jacques Attali and John Cage.
Together, they help us recognise that music occupies a particular space in the sound-
world. It lies somewhere between the myth of silence and the threat of noise; and that
position is not fixed, but highly contested.
John Cage has shown, for example, that 4
0
33
00
of `silence' can be thought of, and
experienced, as music (especially if it is performed and listened to in particular spaces
at given times).
(2)
Even the noise of a passing lorry might be musical if a composer or
a listener surrounds it with an appropriate context or attitude (Cage, 1973). Attali's
point in relation to this is that the distinction between silence, noise, and music is not
inherent in the qualities of sounds, but is negotiated in civil society. Music is a cultural
form, but its content is as much the product of material struggles as the embodiment of
aesthetic ideals. All 'silences' are permeated by sounds; all sounds are potentially
music; all music is potentially noise. The distinctions between these elements of the
soundworld are not something to take for granted, but rather something to be heard
critically as the result of a struggle to make a particular idea of what is chaotic, wild,
and untamed (noise) and what is civilised and ordered (music), stick. As McClary (1991)
puts it in her feminist critique of musicology: ``struggles over musical propriety are
themselves political struggles over whose music, whose images of pleasure and beauty,
whose rules of order, shall prevail'' (page 28). The act of appropriating and controlling
noise (the act of making sounds into music, through composition, performance, and/or
listening practices) is, in short, an expression of power.
All this suggests that it might be fruitful to use music as a point of entry into the
soundworld. Music's positioning between silence and noise places it centrally among
those knowledges produced through senses other than sight. In this paper I want to
suggest just one way of appreciating how music as a powerful way of knowing and
being works: through performance. First, though, a short elaboration on ways of
thinking with music.
Musical elaborations
``The closer one looks at the geography of Western culture and at music's place in it,
the more compromised, the more socially involved and active music seems.''
Said (1991, page 58)
Although music was one of the last of the arts to be approached from a critical cultural
perspective, it is now widely recognised that music is not simply an aesthetic experi-
ence; it is also inextricably bound into questions of power and politics. Critical cultural
studies may have discovered the art of music relatively recently, but that art is now
irreversibly wrested from the aesthetic niceties of traditional musicology and placed
(1)
Cultural politics is a research tradition based on the recognition that artworks (paintings,
photographs, and so on) and artistic activities can be interrogated for their political as well as
their aesthetic content.
(2)
Ingham et al (1999) have briefly introduced readers of this journal to Cage's composition 4
0
33
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in which a pianist plays nothing, an audience sits in what seems to be silence, yet the concert hall
is filled with sound.
616 S J Smith
firmly on the messy terrain of politics and power. Geography, sociology, anthropology,
and economics, together with a progressive branch of musicology, have all contributed
to this interdisciplinary effort. Accordingly, the last few years have witnessed a tremen-
dous growth in the literature exploring music as it intersects with place, `race', nation,
gender, age, identity, and so on.
Currently, there are a number of ways of conceptualising the place of music in
society. A good introduction is provided by Leyshon et al (1998). Perhaps the majority
of analysts refer to music as an object to be analysed `in relation' to other things. More
promising, however, are those writings which conceive of music as a medium through
which social life is made and can be known (and without which social life cannot exist).
The challenge for Shepherd (1991), then, is not to specify the place of music in society,
but rather to understand individuals and societies in terms of music. McClary (1991)
similarly conceives of music as a public forum within which models of social organisa-
tion are asserted, adopted, contested, and negotiated. Likewise, Frith (1996) chooses not
to talk about the relationship between music and identity, but rather to refer to identity
as ``an experiential process most vividly grasped as music'' (page 111). All these authors
are arguing that societies and social groups do not have sets of values, ideas, and
experiences which they then express in cultural products and activities, but rather it
is through such products and activities that people get to know about themselves:
``Making music isn't a way of expressing ideas; it is a way of living them'' (Frith,
1996, page 111). Thus it is that Said (1991) places music at the heart of what he calls
the elaboration of civil society: it is ``a mode of thinking through or thinking with the
integral variety of human cultural practices'' (page 105). It is a condition of the existence
of social life; it is a version of history, and a manifestation of geography. It is, says Attali
(1985) ``an activity that is essential for knowledge and social relations'' (page 9).
Building from these ideas I shall, throughout this paper, conceptualise music as a
way of apprehending, experiencing, and creating the world. This requires us to think
critically about the heard environment, to imagine space as a listening, to recognise
that ways of hearing are ways of being and becoming, and so on. And all this does not
come readily to analysts like meor perhaps youwhose education is steeped in a
more visual tradition of social science research. Personally, I have found it difficult to
make the mindshift that this conception of music demands. It seems easier to picture
the world, or to look at it, probably because seeing is our usual route to knowing
(we know what to look for, what to be suspicious of, where to find alternative visions,
and so on).
(3)
Playing, singing, or sounding the world into existence is still the stuff of
novels and fairy tales, rather than the content of scholarly journals.
(4)
Hearing the
world may seem slightly more familiar, but we still have some way to go to grasp
the knowledges the soundworld holds, to appreciate the `now' that music makes. My
suggestion in this paper is that some complex, contested, multifaceted ideas about
`performance' can help us on our way.
Performance matters
``Performance is an exercise of power.'' Poirier (1971, page 2)
``... performance gains many of its effects through the speculative manipulation of
space and time. It is therefore inherently and intimately geographical.''
Thrift (2000a, page 557)
(3)
Nevertheless, we still have some way to go to learn to see in ways envisaged by hooks (1995)
and formalised by Rose (1996).
(4)
Think, for example, of the spaces inhabited by Bruce Chatwin's The Songlines (1987) or of
C S Lewis's Aslan singing the worlds of Narnia into existence at the beginning of The Magician's
Nephew (1978).
Performing the (sound)world 617
One of my interests in writing this paper is to consider how the soundworld might be
known (or, to consider what the world is like when it is heard as well as seen). So, while
I believe that music can usefully be analysed as a `cultural product' in the same way as
painting, film, dance, drama, literature, and so on, and while I am convinced that what
we hear routinely affects how we see, I am also keen to find a way of thinking about
music that prioritises its sonic qualities. ``For the study of music'', argues McClary
(1991), ``music itself remains the best indicator, if only we permit ourselves to listen
self-reflexively and to think'' (page 30). I want to do this thinking, however, without
erasing the physicality involved in making and hearing music. My suggestion is that we
can begin to achieve this by experiencing music as performancea performance of
power (enacted by music-makers and by listeners) that is creative; that brings spaces,
peoples, places `into form'.
The `cultural turn' in the social sciences generally, and in human geography in
particular, has tended until quite recently to treat the world and its contents as texts
to be interpreted. This has led to an enormous and fruitful interest in linguistic models
of analysis as applied to landscapes, to a wide range of documentary evidence, to visual
images, to architectural styles and so on. Music can also be treated in this way, although
not quite as fruitfully from a social scientific perspective as the more visual cultural
forms. Nevertheless, works of music exist as written texts. They consist of arrangements
of notes which are fully worked out, assigned to particular instruments and/or voices,
and written down by composers. Taking these texts as a starting point, some musicol-
ogists have searched for the meaning of music among its formal structures and in the
composer's intent, and have produced scholarly interpretations of music based on a
close study of written scores and of any annotations they may contain.
This text-based approach to music appreciation produces a rather mechanistic
conception of musical performanceone in which performance is always secondary
to the musical text.
(5)
This implies that every performance is an attempt to realise
the written text exactly as the composer intended it to sound. The authenticity
of the performance is thus judged by the accuracy with which the written notes, and
the markings that go with them, are conveyed (see Davies, 1987; Young, 1988), and the
ear of the critic is trained to notice any departures from this goal (which are presumed
to be accidental). Perhaps because this idea about the relationship between perfor-
mances and texts is so pervasive in the musicological imagination, the literature that
exists on musical performance is surprisingly undeveloped. Although this literature
has proved invaluable to performers, it also tends to be rather narrowly targeted on
technical and practical issues (Leech-Wilkinson, 1999).
For the purposes of social research, therefore, we need to find a different way of
interpreting music and a different way of thinking about performance. Adorno (1993)
makes a start, arguing that music, unlike language, is not a system of signs, so that
whereas ``to interpret language means to understand language; to interpret music means
to make music'' (page 403). B Smith (1999) puts it more bluntly, arguing that ``music is
not what is printed on the page, but what is heard in performance ... . The written score
serves no other purpose than to provide cues for what the performers, guided by their
ears, should do with their bodies to produce the required sounds'' (page 112). Barthes
(1996)whose ideas about the `death of the author' encouraged a new approach to
the interpretation of literary textsalso has some interesting things to say about this.
Like Adorno, he argues that, although language is the only semiotic system capable of
interpreting another, it has not been a useful tool in the interpretation of music. And he
(5)
Some philosophersextreme Platonistswould, indeed, argue that both the performance and
the text are secondary to the work, which exists independently of the composer, who merely
selects from a range of pre-existing possibilities. This set of ideas is outlined in Sharpe (1995).
618 S J Smith
goes on to point out that music is a bodily relation concerned with desire, pleasure, and
other emotive experiences. So it is performance (and, I think, also listening) that
interprets music, at least as much as, and probably more than, the acts of reading,
discussing and writing about texts. Grossberg (1984) recognises this in his discussion of
the power of rock and roll. Whether live or recorded, it is, he says, ``a performance whose
`significance' cannot be read off the `text' ''. This is because ``meaning itself functions
in rock and roll affectively, that is, to produce and organise desires and pleasures''
(page 233). If it is experience rather than texts that matter in music, I think we can argue
that the `death' of the composer requires a rather different response than the death of the
author.
This rather different response, and the alternative conception of musical inter-
pretation this implies, seems to me to be squarely located in a recent shift in thinking
among social scientists which is taking them away from conceiving of the world as text,
away from reflecting on how things have been and are represented, towards experi-
encing worlds in the making through performance (Carlson, 1996). There is, I think,
a general argument that by making this shift we may find new ways of knowing.
We could fruitfully become, as Thrift (2000b) puts it ``interested in how events are
shaped as they happen''. Here I want to explore the particular claim that one of these
new knowings may arise through the doing of music.
Interest generally in the world as performance offers an alternative way of knowing
which stresses the unformed, emergent qualities of life and which places emphasis on
active engagement rather than retrospective interpretation. For me this not only deem-
phasises text, but also alerts us to ways of knowing that reach beyond the visual. It is
perhaps because of this that Said regards performance as ``of greater immediate
importmore urgent, more stressed and inflectedfor music than it is for the recep-
tion of either literature or painting'' (Said, 1991, page xv). And when Frith (1996)
argues that identity is a becoming, not a being, he insists that making and listening
to music is an integral part of this: ``Music, like identity, is both performance and story
... identity, like music, is a matter of both ethics and aesthetics'' (page 109).
To consider the way that music works through performance, I shall draw from time to
time from some case studies I am experimenting with on this theme. This research is
organised around music-making in Italy in the late 16th and early 17th centuries.
(6)
``Early
music'' may, on first listening, seem a rather esoteric topic, but this is partly because it is
relatively neglected, despite the facttactfully raised by McClary (1985) in her afterword
to the English translation of Attali's Noisethat such music seems peculiarly central to
any understanding of the contested terrain between silence and sound.
Early music also appeals because it is unsettling to conventional musical classifi-
cations. As a genre, it cannot comfortably be labelled as either `classical' or `popular',
although these labels still denote (for music) the most commonly used analytical
categories. While an initial listening would undoubtedly place early music at the `high
art' end of the aesthetic spectrum, in practicebecause of its unfinished qualities, its
improvisational styles, its contemporary mass appeal, and its recent commercial suc-
cessthis music occupies (perhaps alongside jazz) an interesting, and rather neglected,
middle ground.
(7)
(6)
Musically, this is the late Renaissance and early Baroque. I shall call the genre `early music',
but note that I shall not be dealing with either medieval or late baroque music, both of which
tend to be subsumed in wider parlance under the `early' label.
(7)
This is interesting to me, because, although there is much talk of effacing the boundaries
between high art and popular culture, in practice this has resulted in a lot of new studies at the
(previously neglected) `popular' end of the spectrum. So far, few analysts have seemed curious
about what this collapsing of boundaries has meant for practices previously labelled high culture.
Anyone who is interested might find that early music provides a helpful starting point.
Performing the (sound)world 619
Crucially, though, the making of this musicand therefore its meaning and its
poweris heavily dependent on performance. Like jazz, it is never completely notated,
so it proceeds more through improvisation and inspiration than through formal logic.
This means that, more than any other musical genre (with the possible exceptions of
jazz and rap), early music shifts attention away from musical scores away from the
authority of texts written down by composersand towards music in performance
(Burstyn, 1997; Lawrence-King, 1997).
A final reason for choosing this genre is that I have a personal interest in it, both
as a performer and as a listener.
(8)
I do not suggest that this kind of experience is
necessary for every social scientist who wishes to comment on performance generally
or on musical performance in particular. Indeed I acknowledge that overfamiliarity
can be as methodologically challenging as ignorance. But I have found it helpful to
build from my own experiences, not least because performance is highly personal as
well as political; it is an intensely emotional practice as well as a fully social one.
Performing the (sound) world
``My answer to the question of why we should perform ... music is part of my answer
to the question of how we should live life.''
Page (1997, page 77)
In this section I want to use the example of (early) music to consider more generally
what musical performance is about, what spaces it creates, and what kinds of knowl-
edge it constructs. Performances are wide-ranging sets of practices and knowledges,
and a single article is not sufficient to tease out their many aspects (even if this were a
possible or desirable end). So I shall concentrate on two kinds of performative setting
(civic ceremonial spaces and the space of the concert hall) and just three facets (the
political, the economic, and the emotional) of what are, in practice, much more
complex musical worlds. To this end, the research I shall draw on is based around a
set of case studies concerned with music-making at spectacular ceremonial events.
(9)
These originally took place primarily, though not exclusively, in Venice, but they also
feature prominently in the early music performing repertoire today. In the following
discussion I restrict myself to two of these cases: music for the coronation of a Doge
and soundworlds celebrating the annual `marriage' of Venice with the sea.
Renaissance Venice is best known for what contemporary visual art tells us about
the emergence of a new social order based on the visual representation, and manipula-
tion, of popular world-views. In geography, this approach is best expressed in the
earlier work of Cosgrove (Cosgrove, 1984; 1985; Cosgrove and Daniels, 1988), but it
is a theme that runs equally strongly through the writings of key Renaissance historians.
Burke (1994), for example, claims that ``some societies, like some individuals, take a
particular interest in the visible world ... [and] Renaissance Italy was one of these''
(page 23). One consequence of this (highly fruitful) fascination with the visual is that
geographers and historians alike have surprisingly little to say about the sounds of these
(8)
Because of this experience I hope I have some sense of what performers are trying to
achieveand even what they think about and feel when they interpret this music. I also
know how to read original notations, I am familiar with the basic `rules' of improvisation, and
I am generally aware of what the written music does and does not contain.
(9)
For example: the coronation in 1595 of Doge Marin Grimani whose love of both music and
ceremony went a long way to securing the musical preeminence of Venice in the early 17th
century; the annual Ascension Day celebration of the marriage of Venice with the sea, in tribute
to San Nicolo , the patron saint of sailors; a celebration of San Roch's day on 16 August 1608 (one
of a series of magnificent tributes to the saint thought to protect Venice from the plague); the
marriage in 1589 of the Grand Duke of Tuscany, Ferdinando d'Medici; and various vespers
services, in particular Monteverdi's 1610 vespers.
620 S J Smith
times (Carter, 1999; Smith, 1997). Nevertheless, my emphasis on Venice is a consequence
not of its visual artistry but of the city-state's late 16th and early 17th century
importance as a centre for musical innovation, especially for instrumental works.
(10)
As Allsop (1984) puts it: ``Venice of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries
offered the musician a haven almost as luxurious as that afforded to the artist''
(page 15). Indeed, as time went on, ``the social and political changes which ...
played such havoc with the visual arts tended to favour, rather than restrict, music''
(Koenigsberger, 1986, page 252).
There may be reasonable source materials for exploring the significance of these
soundworlds in the late 16th and early 17th centuries. However, all the case-study events
have been reconstructed into British musical life in recent years, with considerable
commercial success.
(11)
It is therefore possible to study them in both their `original'
and their `present-day' manifestations. This not only engages with two periods (the
Renaissance and the postmodern) which are better known for their visual cultures,
but also lends an ear to two ways in which the performance of music is implicated in the
creation of geographies, histories, and identities. For the purpose of organising this
paper, I have labelled these two ways of music-making `performance as everyday life' and
`performance as an extreme occasion'. The first of these is about music-making in the
public spaces of the street and in associated public buildings (the placing of the original
enactments of the case-study events); the second is about performance in the socially and
economically segregated spaces of the concert hall (the setting for the reenactments).
Together these performances offer a way of knowing, a way of inhabiting, and a
way of making a variety of political, economic, and emotional spaces. I shall consider all
three of these spaces in the remainder of this paper: I begin with a comment on what
musical performance tells us about the political place and power of music in late
16th ^ early 17th-century Italy; I conclude with a more extended discussion of the
economic and emotional spaces which are mediated by musical life today.
Performance as everyday life
As originally performed, the case-study events were public ceremonies and spectacles.
Although they were always special events, they happened so often and so regularly that
they were integral to everyday life in the city. They were part of the rhythm of the
citya landscape and a `soundscape' comprising the repeated bodily comings and
goings, the genderings, the struggles over majesty and magnificence, the categorisa-
tions and identifications that underpinned the fabric (the fabrication) of public and
political life.
(12)
They were, then, popular festive forms of a type which I have already
(10)
I wanted to include instrumental music alongside vocal music in this project, because my aim
is to avoid overengaging with text and (as mentioned earlier) to resist the linguistic model of
analysis which has tended to dominate the cultural turn in social thought.
(11)
Paul McCreesh's recording of ``A Venetian Coronation'' won a number of awards, featured in
the 1992 promenade concerts, and spawned a series of other reconstructions on the Deutsche
Grammophon label, including ``Music from San rocco'' (1996, 449 180-2 AH). Robert King's
``Lo Sposalizio'' the wedding of Venice to the seais a popular recording for Hyperion (1998,
CDA 67048) which featured in the classic fm charts and in the 1998 promenade concerts. Andrew
Parrott's ``Medici wedding'' (``Una `stravanganza' dei Medici'') was filmed by the BBC and
recorded and distributed by EMI records (1988, EL 7 47998 1). Monteverdi's ``1610 Vespers''
have been widely recorded and are frequently performed by musicians of all standards in settings
of all kinds.
(12)
Although studying public events is particularly pertinent to my current argument, this
selection is also pragmatic, reflecting the quality and availability of sources. Relatively little
of the wide-ranging musical activity we know to have infused early baroque urban life is
documented in detail (Cummings, 1992), and the best evidence comes from public spectacles
rather than private performances.
Performing the (sound)world 621
suggested offer an appealing route into the struggles that make local histories,
identities, and geographies (Smith, 1993; 1995; 1996; 1999a). My argument here is
that music is inherent in the performance of these festivities, and that in performance,
this music both expresses and creates a particular kind of political space.
The coronation of Doge Grimani in 1595 was an occasion for extravagant celebra-
tion. Turn-of-the-century Venice was renowned for its opulent festivities, but one-off
events like this were stupendously extravagant, even by contemporary standards. The
coronation itself took place in the Ducal palace, but the whole festival event was
based in and around San Marcoa space which has been described as ``a powerfully
condensed center of political, judicious, religious and ceremonial life'' (Brown, 1997,
page 19). San Marco was also the centre of Venetian musical life. As the private chapel
of the Doge and the principal church of the (city-) state, it epitomised the close inter-
weaving of the sacred and the secular in Venetian public life. The emphasis on (secular)
instrumental music in the (sacred) space of the church testifies to this, and the music
for the coronation included some of the most spectacular instrumental pieces of the
time.
(13)
Quite apart from what this added to the Doge's `magnificence' (a much-sought-after
quality which sprangamongst other thingsfrom the power to mobilise music) it also
engaged in the city's ongoing struggle to assert its independence from Rome (where the
use of instrumental interludes in sacred ceremonies tended to be frowned on). It might,
indeed, be said that the performance of instrumental music during the coronation
politicised the space of the ceremony, making it into a form of resistance against the
(Roman) church whose preoccupation with text tended ``to limit and confine music ...
to control the fearful powers of music over men's [sic] souls by making it the servant
over the much more easily controllable word'' (Koenigsberger, 1986, page 187).
Performing instrumental music may also have helped cement the political order
closer to home. Such music was recognised as a particularly potent means of affecting
`the passions' (a point I shall pick up later); it was judged helpful in mobilising the kind
of emotional sentiments and attachments which could only enhance allegience to the
newly appointed Doge. It was therefore expressly incorporated into lavish celebrations
such as the coronation as a symbol of political harmony (Fenlon, 1984). The music
gave people a sense of their place in the world, of their difference from others, of their
distinction and, crucially, of their own, shared identity. Leppert (1988; 1993), who has
thought particularly careful about the interplay of sight and sound, suggests that
soundsthe sonic qualities of the spectacleare critical to this experience:
``Sight distances us from the world ... the image stands off, separates itself from us ...
Sound, by its enveloping character, brings us closer to everything alive. Hearing
musical sounds makes us especially aware of proximity and thus connectedness''
(Leppert, 1993, page 29).
Likewise, `` `Listening' is centripetal; it pulls you into the world. Looking is centrifugal;
it separates you from the world'' says Handel (1989, page xi). The soundworld of the
coronation may therefore be heard as what Duffy (1999) calls a `rhythmic landscape'
a terrain on which Deleuze and Guattari's (1987) musical metaphors for territory
are embodied in performances which connect people to places and create a sense of
identity. So musical performance is not just any political relationship, it is a political
geographya soundspace which ``evokes and organises collective memories and
(13)
Not least because of the involvement of Giovanni Gabrieli, then one of San Marco's
organists, who wrote much of the instrumental music for the event. He has been described as
``the master of a style embracing both ceremonial grandeur and emotional depth'' (Bartlett, 1984,
page 11), and his ceremonial music is discussed in some detail by Arnold (1979).
622 S J Smith
present experiences of place with an intensity, power and simplicity unmatched by any
other social activity'' (Stokes, 1994, page 3).
Renaissance Venice was, in some senses, peculiarly democratic among the Italian
city-states. However, although the Doge was elected (by a ballot among senior states-
men) the majority of ordinary Venetians were excluded from directly exercising political
power. Instead, there were what Brown (1997) calls ``important arenas of participation
that helped ensure a domestic tranquility for which Venice was acclaimed as the
Serenissima: the most serene republic'' (page 37). Perhaps the most critical of these
arenas were the great processions that formed the cornerstone of Venetian civic ritual.
The majority of these were annual eventssets of repeated performances that embodied
local struggles over social orderings and constructions of identities, and whose repe-
titions helped establish some versionssome genderings, some spatialisations, some
`class'ificationsof the prestige hierarchy as the norm.
(14)
One of these great processions culminated in the annual blessing of the Adriatic in
a `marriage' ceremony between Venice and the sea. This included (alongside public
entertainments and a two-week long fair) a spectacular flotilla of boats and gondolas
accompanying the Doge's ornate ceremonial galley to the mouth of the lagoon. Here,
where the waters of Venice meet the Adriatic, the Doge would drop a gold ring into the
sea before repairing to a lavish Mass at the Church of San Nicolo . All this made
Ascension Day one of the most lavish and important dates in the Venetian calendar.
It was not simply a ceremony to mark Venetians' respect for, and dependence on, the
sea. It was also a statement that Venice and the sea were united in their dominion over
the land; that their `marriage' would bear the fruit of prosperity and power. Like other
civic festivals, this Ascension Day extravaganza was not simply about fun and frivolity;
rather, it ``carried fairly precise and extremely topical political messages as well as
contributing to the general task of celebrating or legitimating a particular regime''
(Burke, 1994, page 138).
What is often forgotten about these annual festivities is their musicality; they were
fundamentally musical occasions. The first signal that a procession was underway
would be the sound of at least six silver trumpets (on occasion up to twenty-four
trumpets and drummers) making space in the crowds for the arrival of the Doge.
And this was just the start. Arnold (1979) tells how the sheer frequency of procession
and ceremony in 17th century Venice kept all musici (composers and performers) in
constant demand and ensured that they were widely regarded as experts in the genre.
This music, though, was not merely embellishment. Civic festivities were shot through
with power, and we know from McClary's (1991) fascinating analysis of the gendering
of this power that music is fully involved. As the essays collected in Fenlon's (1999)
special issue of Early Music show, ``The provision of music and spectacle for a public
audience has always been a social and political matter as much as an aesthetic one''
(page 5).
There are at least two ways of hearing the politicised soundworlds embodied in the
repeated performance of a celebration like Ascension Day's Sposalizio. The first hear-
ing is dominated by the sheer power of music to displace the other soundsand
silenceswhich might challenge the political priorities built into the festive event.
Barthes (1986) suggests that the appropriation of space is a matter of sound; it is a
matter of whose sounds prevail in the struggle to displace (to replace) silence. By taking
music into the streets and onto the lagoon, by filling the space of the city with rhythmic
and harmonious sounds, the festive performance is about establishingfrom the top
(14)
Burke (1994) tells how struggles over precedence and order in many of these festivals were
conducted in deadly earnest, so that the form of the processions represented a materialisationa
contested embodimentof the social hierarchies of the day.
Performing the (sound)world 623
downa sense of order, control, and a sense of common purpose. Effectively, the
musical sounds of festival are set up in opposition to the noisiness of the world beyond.
If noise (after Attali, 1985) is a dangerous, subversive weapon against the established
order, then music is its ritualisation and taming. Noise is violent and disturbing,
whereas music can beand in late Renaissance Venice almost certainly washarnessed
to the ends of social order and political integration. Music, says Attali (1985) ``creates
in festival and ritual an ordering of the noises of the world'' (page 23). The musical
performance of the festive event isby its very musicalitya politicised space.
However, Venice was celebrated as the serene republic. There may therefore be
something more to the politicisation of the soundworld than first meets the ear.
Importantly, a closer listening exposes how pervasive music-making was at these
events. It was not limited to the Doge's trumpets and drums, to the cornetts and
sackbuts of San Marcoit was much more ubiquitous than that. Musical literacy was
probably more widespread than many scholars think (Carter, 1992) and as Kreitner
(1998) so succinctly puts it in his discussion of musical performance in the early
modern world ``Here is what we know about instrumental ensembles. We know that
they were everywhere ...'' (page 329). The soundworld, it seems, is highly participatory,
for performers and for those in earshot. So I want to suggest a second way of hearing
Venice celebrate Ascension Dayone which taps into these participatory aspects of
musical experiences. The most interesting possibility here is one suggested by Duffy
(no date), who (working in a different context) talks about community music festivals
as a framework for the performance and working out of identity. She presents musical
participation as a political process, taking musical performance one step towards
Chantal Mouffe's vision of a democratic politics able to accommodate and incorporate
a multiplicity of interests and aspirations.
As to which listening to subscribe to ... this is both a political question and a
methodological conundrum. Performance is about a world which is always `becoming'
in all its complexity, ambiguity, and paradox. As Carlson (1996) recognises ``whether
performance within a culture serves most importantly to reinforce the assumptions
of that culture or to provide a possible site of alternative assumptions is an ongoing
debate ... [a] clear example of the contested quality of performance analysis'' (page 15).
What we know for sure is that musical spectacles in the 17th century served as sites
for claiming and contesting power. The case studies therefore embody a particular
cultural politics of sound; they are (musical) performances of power which make
particular political geographies heard.
(15)
I have already written briefly on the place and power of music in late Renaissance
Italy, and I do not want to labour the point (Smith, 1997). However, I do think it is
inescapable that in this period music-making was as important as visual media as a
means of defining and controlling the social order. Leppert (1993) claims that no time
or place has escaped ``the deeply self-conscious concern for ordering the world sonor-
ically'' (page 17) and 17th-century Venice is no exception. It hardly seems surprising
that what preoccupied societies of the timethrough art, life, and politicswas
encapsulated by a musical metaphor: the search for harmony, and through harmony, order.
Although late Renaissance societies were aware of, and desperate to harness, the
power of music, what we know of these performances will always be fragmentary.
We have to rely on diaries, paintings, accounts books, a few original instruments,
and a relatively small selection of original compositions. There is an anthropology of
performanceof musical performance as everyday lifeto be gleaned from all this,
(15)
I acknowledge that there is a lot more to these political geographies than I have indicated,
but to explore them more fully would require a paper of its own, with a rather different aim than
the one I am writing now.
624 S J Smith
but we cannot share the bodily presences, the sensory stimulation, the rhythms, or the
emotional content of contemporary musical festivities. We cannot even hear the space
that music makesthe sonic qualities of past performances are always lost for good.
This is why I am particularly keen to consider what happens when these musics are
performed in the present day.
Performance as an extreme occasion
Performance is both about the conduct of everyday life and about the presentation
of artworks. Rooley (1990) thus argues that, while life itself is a performance, the
performing arts ritualise thisthey provide us with a way of representing ourselves
to ourselves. So `` `Official performances' exist to pull us out of our daily dullness and
remind us a little of how intensely rich human experience can be'' (page 3). In a similar
vein Said terms the performance of music an extreme occasiona discontinuity with
the ordinary, regular, normative processes of everyday life. Neither Rooley nor Said
elaborates much on the idea that performances, enacted by skilled musicians, for a
(usually paying) listening public, in set spaces and particular times, has a wider social,
cultural, and political significance. Nevertheless, they agree that it might.
The performances outlined abovea Venetian coronation and the Sposalizio (the
wedding of Venice to the sea)which once played such a prominent role in civic ritual
and everyday life, take a very different form in the social order and political economy
of turn-of-the-century Britain. These performances may, nevertheless, still be concep-
tualised as sets of (power) relationsas `doings' which create various kinds of spaces.
I shall now consider two interrelated dimensions of these spaces, the first concerned
with the economy, the second with the emotions. By taking them separately and
sequentially, I do not want to suggest that they are either clearly distinct from, or
mutually exclusive of, one another. These are, if you like, two different soundings on
the space that music makes.
Music and money
First, I want to engage with literal spacesthe places where performances are mounted.
Johnson (1995, page 3) points out that ``music is never just musical ... . It also implies a
performance space, with its own particular personality and a unique historical
moment, with its styles of expression and political pre-occupations.'' Said (1991) takes
a similar line: ``Concert occasions are always located in a uniquely endowed site, and
what occurs then and there is part of the cultural life of modern society'' (page xv).
Today, the majority of professional early music performance spaces tend to be
concert halls.
(16)
Attali ties the migration of music from street festivity to formalised con-
cert venue to its entanglement with the money economy. Having a space called `concert
hall' is, he notes, a deliberate attempt to organise, contain, and localise particular
sounds, for particular ends. And for the most part those ends are economic. The
concert hall is all about packaging sounds so that people will pay to hear them.
Musical performance in this context is above all about the making of an economic
space (though, as I shall argue later, music is about much more than money).
Concert halls are an interesting topic in their own right, but to the extent that
musicians perform (amongst other things) to make a living, concert spaces are the
enactment of a complex set of economic relationships; they are produced through the
economic relations of musical performance. Rose (1999) talks about space as a `doing'
which is constituted through performative relations. This does not require us to believe
(16)
Concerts (especially in early music) take place in other spaces, of course, including churches
and museums, but on the whole these are economically reorganised for the occasion, so they
work very much like concert halls (there is often extra seating, seats are numbered, zoned into
price bands, policed by ushers, and so on).
Performing the (sound)world 625
that space is infinitely plastic; rather it suggests that ``The persistence of certain forms
of spaces points to the persistence of certain configurations of power'' (page 248).
As the strategies of power that underpin modern musical performances are insistently
economic, I interpret the apparent solidity of the concert hall as an expression of the
way the doing of music today is dominated by economic considerations. When power is
performed in a particular space so routinely, so regularly, so repetitiously, that space
seems less and less mutable; more and more concrete. Hence the persistencethe
solidityof the space of the concert hall.
The musical making of modern society is therefore at least partly about the
repeated marking out of spaces in which performance takes place; and these are, by
and large, the spaces which musicianswho need time and money to acquire the skills
that music demandsare paid to occupy. For Attali (1985) this marking out of
performing spaces for economic ends offers a rather gloomy prospect. He implies
that concert halls are all about containing the harmonious end of the sound spectrum
within a space which regulates the social order and maintains the status quo. Sound
becomes tame, dull, boring, repetitious in the worst kind of way, when it is contained,
with the consequence that ``Music now seems hardly more than a somewhat clumsy
excuse for the self-gratification of musicians and the growth of a new industrial sector''
(page 9).
Drawing on some preliminary interviews and `audio-ethnographies', I want to
suggest a rather different interpretation of how the concert hall works.
(17)
In doing
so, I do not want to deny any relevance to what Attali has to say. In order for the space
of the concert hall to work for the musical economy, it undoubtedly requires other
aspects of the music to be compromised. Very few musicians would dispute this point:
``Music is a business and it's a market-driven economy ... . The public is guided
basically by what's on, so the people we are trying to reach are the promoters.
You find out what they would like, you know what you are trying to do, and then
there's this compromise in the middle which is what you offer them'' (RK).
The problem, however, is that
``the music itself is not enough to make a performance: the context in which it is
performed and heard is crucial. As a consequence, I would rather make a recording
than give a performance in a building which may guarantee a decent audience but
which looks and sounds like a concrete bunker'' (AP).
The implication is that making musical performance into an economic relationship
creates a space which then undermines the musical experience. This is particularly true
(17)
Two of the three referees for this paper requested a fuller statement of methodology at this
point. However, aural methodologies are very much in their infancy and all the work I know in this
areaincluding my ownis highly experimental. Aural methodology is a mix, then, of adapting
more traditional qualitative methods to the demands of the aural environment, of considering
which visual methodologies have some parallel in studying the soundworld, and of developing
entirely new proceduresoften grounded in the practice of performancefor accessing and
documenting the sonic order. In geography some of the most interesting of these experiments
are to be found in current or recently completed PhD research: the work of Michelle Duffy at the
University of Melbourne, James Ingham at the University of East London and Nichola Wood at
the University of Edinburgh springs to mind. In this paper, I am basing most of my comments
(and quotations) on the following: (1) interviews in 1997 and 1998 with three early musical directors
(all involved in reconstructing one or more of the events listed in footnote 8)a partial transcript
of the interviews is published in Smith (1999b); (2) a series of experimental `listenings' to (or
`audio-ethnographies' of ) ``Lo Sposalizio'' and ``A Venetian Coronation'' which were completed
between 1997 and 1999; (3) a variety of conversations with performers over the same time period.
In the text, the musical directors are referred to by initials: Robert King (RK), Paul McCreesh
(PM), and Andrew Parrott (AP); unattributed quotes are from discussions with professional
musicians, all instrumentalists, and specialising in early music as defined in this paper.
626 S J Smith
for early music which, unlike symphonic music, was never designed to engage with
modern concert venues. So:
``One reason I don't do many concerts in Britain is because I am reluctant to put
early music into modern concert halls ... . I find it a positive block to my imagina-
tion to hear a sumptuous piece of Roman church music in the Barbican. It is not
merely neutral; it undermines the experience'' (AP).
There are undoubtedly some pressing intellectual, political, and musical problems
with the concert hall economy. However, this type of performative relationship can be
heard in a different way. Far from lamenting the spatial segregation of musical activity,
Said talks of the importance of marking out the spaces of performance from the space
of everyday life. It is, he suggests, only through the peculiarities of its geography
that musical performance can participate effectively in the elaboration of social life.
Concert events are important to society in `keeping things going' in the same way as
lectures, conferences, graduation ceremonies, and so on. So while Said agrees that
``packaging, commodification, reificationthe whole listhave overtaken much of
what is happiest, most fulfilling about the art of music'' (page xvii), he argues that
the pleasure and emotional intensity of music remain, evenor especiallyin the
commercial space of the concert venue.
This underpins an alternative view of the concert hall. Concert halls exist because
of the (economic) relations of musical performance. These spaces are, moreover, a
necessary condition of the musical occasions which Said has argued are integral to
the elaboration of social life in modern Western societies. But if these spaces are made
by musical performance, if they are always in some senses spaces in the `doing', then
there might be scope to make them work for the music. So Paul McCreesh, for
example, took ``A Venetian Coronation'' to the 1992 Henry Wood Promenade concerts
in London. ``The Albert Hall'', he recognised, ``isn't the most appropriate venue for this
kind of music, but I learned how to live with it''. This meant using more players than
normal (more than the composer intended or the music requires) to fill the perfor-
mance space. ``One simply has to be pragmaticthe Albert Hall is a huge building
and I wanted the music to work for people who had never listened to it before'' (PM).
To consider this idea that musical performance might `work' despite the economic
relations in which it has become entangled, I turn to some listenings. ``Lo Sposalizio''
(a reconstruction of the wedding of Venice to the sea) was also performed at the
`Proms' by the King's Consort in 1998. From the beginning I sensed this performance
might subvert the conventions and constraints of the concert hall. I wrote:
``There is no dramatic entry by the conductor. Actually I don't even notice him at
first. The trumpets blast, the drums exit and the concert begins. Already this is
breaking with the tradition of the concert hall: we have applauded neither con-
ductor nor leader (and given that there is both a violin and a cornett, we wouldn't
anyway know which of these to clap for).''
Then it struck me that, despite its dramatic origins, all this music is smaller in scale
than the concert hall expects. Everything is played or sung one-to-a-part. The biggest
piece is a 22-part sonata, but generally considerably fewer performers than this
were active at any one time. This means there was no massive stage presence of the
kind a symphony orchestra might establish. And what was there was consistently
played down. Indeed I noted several times how understated the visual element of the
performance was:
``The performers disappear into the stage. Everyone is dressed in black shirts and
trousers, including the conductor who looks no different from everyone else. The
musicians make spectacular sounds, but they don't accompany these with dramatic
gestures. We don't have the visual cues we usually rely on to make us gasp at the
Performing the (sound)world 627
virtuosity that enters our ears. ... this performance seems to be a very deliberate
attempt to rouse the aural. The visual is definitely played down.''
I wrote similar comments when listening to ``AVenetian Coronation'' at the Connaught
Rooms in the Festival of London:
``This is an aural spectacle not a visual one. The musicians are all dressed in black ...
The instrumentalists who open the reconstruction are arranged along the sides and
back of the stage, leaving a large open gap in the middle ... . The visual display
is not striking, and the most scene-stealing instrument musically, the cornett, is
the least visually inspiringa thin black wooden tube, known in the business
as `the stick'.''
Although this music was composed for some hugely spectacular events, in the
space of the modern concert hall, the sound of the music was effectively `on its own'.
However, even as visual cues downplayed the role of the eye, the sensual, emotional
content of the heard environment was played upthe more so because performance
practice for early musicians is far more extravagant and dangerous than for rank
and file orchestral players. This is largely because of the improvisational content of
performancespractices which themselves flaunt the conventions of the concert hall.
As Lawrence-King (1997) notes: ``Today we tend to venerate the great written master-
pieces and see music made up by performers as irreverent'' (page 166). But in the
Albert Hall, irreverence was rife. I wrote:
``This is risky music. Perhaps one in three of the notes are not written down. The
cornetts and violins each come out with cascades of ornaments which are different
and considerably more elaborate than they experimented with in rehearsal ... . I find
myself on the edge of my seat.''
Listening to ``A Venetian Coronation'' in a provincial church I noted the same engage-
ment with a performance which again forced the conventions of the concert hall the
presumption of a complete musical text, the centrality of the conductor, the still silence
of the audiencebeyond the limit.
``The audience was rivetted. The man next to me gasped out loud during a partic-
ularly florid set of divisions.
(18)
The temptation to clap [which we had been
instructed not to] and cheer [which we could never do in a space like this] after
one particularly stunning instrumental display was overwhelming.''
Something was happening in these performances to make me doubt Attali's
account of what the concert hall does to music. My own listening experiences (which
I recognise are partial, which I do not intend should exclude other ways of hearing, but
which I do think constitute one way of hearing) bear little resemblance to Attali's
grumblings about self-gratifying musicians. On the contrary, even though I listened
with a paper like this in mind, even though my aim was to experience first-hand the
hard-edged economics of the concert hall in practice, I was consistently thwarted,
recognising, with B Smith (1999) that ``listening does not give us the secure detachment
that vision does'' (page 10). Here are two extracts from the notes I made in some pre-
liminary explorations towards an (as yet only partially successful!) audio-ethnography
of listening to A Venetian Coronation. ``The performance was seemless. I was spell-
bound and assume everyone else was too (the problem being that I was too absorbed to
keep track of what else was happening).'' Then, listening to the same programme a few
weeks later: ``Once again, I found myself so absorbed in the programme that I forgot to
`observe' for much of the concert. Like me, the audience was attendant throughout and
often visibly rivetted.''
(18)
This is a style of playing in which the written notes are `divided' on impulse in a variety of
ways, often around sets of examples recovered from 17th century texts.
628 S J Smith
It seems to me that, if the relations of musical performance are powerful enough to
bring the concert hall into existence, it is hardly likely that these relations will be
wholly contained, wholly constrained, by such a space. This is not to deny that
musicians (like anyone who sells labour and skills to make a living) are preoccupied
with income. I have notes like: Q. ``Tell me about this new Venetian project''; A. ``It's
fabulous. [clasps hand to heart] It's hit me straight in the wallet.'' Or Q. ``Why do you
perform?''; A. ``To make a living??'' And early music is an especially precarious career.
``We can make a living out of it, but there are certainly easier ways of making
money ... . We've made some extremely successful recordings, but we are not the
Spice Girls!'' (PM).
``I may be able to persuade myself that there is no limit to my imagination, but I
know for a fact that there is a severe one on my budget'' (AP).
However, this does not mean that musical performance cannot disrupt the econo-
mics of the concert hall; that it cannot shape or inhabit other spaces of the imagination.
Listening to one of the reconstructions, I noticed
``At each turn [I am referring to the improvisational aspects of the music] the
conductor looks first expectant, then surprised, and then delighted ... at the banter
between the lead instrumentalists. He is no more in charge of this music than
the composer. The atmosphere is electric: I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
I certainly can't put my reaction, or anyone else's into words.''
It is, then, not difficult to believe the musician who says:
``The rewards may be more spiritual than financial but they are important to me ... .
I'm not at all romantic about these things, but you have to force yourself to stand
back and remember what's really important about making music ... . You think you
have heard it all, then another moment of genius, some fabulous feeling for colour
or sonority that you won't get anywhere else in music appears ...'' (PM).
Despite, or because of, the economics of the concert hall many performers clearly
work to create something beyond the material world. The reasons may be pragmatic:
``You have to remember as a performer that you may have done a programme 40 times
before, but the public only come once, and that person in seat B7 has paid their money
to see you'' (RK). But my strong impression is that performance is also about the
meaning that music can add to some people's lives. So my notes continue: Q. ``No, really,
why do you performyou could earn the same money, probably more, as a bank
manager''; A. ``To touch people's lives. If you only reach two or three in an audience
of 500, it's worth going out.'' There is a sense, then, of participating in what Said
might regard as elaborative music: ``music whose pleasures and discoveries are premised
upon letting go, upon not asserting a central authorising identity, upon enlarging the
community of hearers and players beyond the time taken, beyond the extremely
concentrated duration provided by the performance occasion'' (1991, page 105).
A lot can be made of what the concert hall represents, and the economic geography
of music urgently needs writing. Income is important to musicians, and the conditions
in which they work must affect the way they perform. However, I think we can dwell too
much on how these material concerns constrain and damage the music. The space of
music is a most complex `doing'; it both inspires and defies the neat compartments of the
concert hall economy. I want now to consider a further aspect of this complexity.
Music beyond words
One of the musical directors I interviewed had turned down the opportunity to perform
Monteverdi's ``Orfeo'' in the Albert Hall. His experience of performing it overseas, in the
more intimate settings for which it was devised, ``proved to me that performing in
the right context releases all sorts of ideas and emotions that are otherwise lost'' (AP).
Performing the (sound)world 629
This talk of emotion seems to me to be important, because nearly everyone who
writes about the power of music recognises that this power hinges, in ways which
remain to be fully specified, on its emotive qualities. Musical performance, then, might
be conceptualised as a set of social relations whose practices create and shape distinc-
tive emotional spaces. This way of being through music is important because in social
science generally the relevance of the emotions has been underplayed. Emotions tend
to be regarded as irrational and subjective. Emotional behaviour is unpredictable;
it denotes a loss of self-control; it lacks objectivity; it is indulgent, perhaps dangerous.
At any rate emotions are not the stuff of traditional social science, and they have rarely
been highly rated as a way of knowing the world.
This neglect of the emotions is beginning to change, primarily through the work of
feminist writers. Koskela (2000), for example, has written an innovative account of the
various spaces created through the process of video camera surveillance. One of these
is what she calls `emotional space'. This is created through the paradoxical experience
of being simultaneously protected and rendered vulnerable through the act of surveil-
lance. ``Emotional space'', argues Koskela,
``is difficult to comprehend because it cannot be described in static terms; it evades
definitions and remains `untouchable' ... . Emotional space is `elastic'. It is like a
liquid. Its nature changes according to where you are, what you do, who is with you
etc. It feels like one thing then all of a sudden changes to something else. Moreover,
emotional space is essentially ambivalent. It is not logical but internally contra-
dictory by nature. There is no clear dynamic of power and resistance'' (page 17,
emphasis in the original).
All this leaves me wanting to know more about the spaces of the emotions but feeling
that the act of looking and being looked at is only part of the story. For the rest we
might turn to the performance of musicto a genre which ``allows us to communicate
our most intimate emotions without having to talk about or define them in a loose net
of words'' (Ackerman, 1990, page 217).
Even in the world of music, emotional spaces are surprisingly neglected [a problem
discussed in some detail by Wood (2000)]. Frith (1996) makes the general point that
many people are too analytical about how they conceptualise music. They inevitably
focus on structural, formal qualities of the work rather than on ``the qualities of
immediacy, emotion, sweat [which are] suspect terms in both the library and the
classroom'' (page 116). Yet it is these emotive qualities, the qualities that persuade
listeners that what the performer is doing matters, that are important. Powerful
performance ``puts into play an emotional effect, a collusion between the performer
and an audience which is engaged rather than detached'' (page 17). So musical perfor-
mance inhabits a sensual worldone which makes space for passion, arousal, desire,
elation, eroticismfor a whole range of experiences that are felt rather than said,
sensed rather than seen.
Now the senses are not usually thought of as powerful in the way that politics or
economics wield power. Yet, I have argued that performance is always about power
and if this is true, musical performance implies something worth knowing about how
power works through the emotions. It implies that making music may bring the emo-
tional into our understanding of how social and political life works. We need, then, to
consider musical performance as a powerful way of knowing, but one inspired by the
spontaneity and subjectivities of emotion rather than by rationality and reason.
Musicians of the late Renaissance were themselves preoccupied with this matter.
They were fascinated with the power of music to quieten infants, tame wild beasts,
move rocks, calm madmen, and so on (Koenigsberger, 1986). They described their
experience of music-making in terms of the strongest feeling (Donnington, 1977);
630 S J Smith
but they were puzzled that they had not found a way to harness the power of music to
mobilise emotions and passions in ways described by the classical humanists (Walker,
1985). So they struggled with Plato's ideas about a link between the `mode' of the music
and its emotive effects, attempting to conjure up a range of moods from triumphant to
tearful.
(19)
And the more music shifted away from its allegiance to arithmetic, geome-
try, and astronomy and towards rhetoric and the arts, the more preoccupied with
mobilising emotional forces the music-makers became. McKinney (1998), for example,
discusses two influential attempts (by Gioseffo Zarlino and Nicola Vicentino) to link
certain affective qualities to particular melodic and harmonic intervals, and Bryan
(1999) examines the ideas of Sylvestro Ganassi ``who describes various types of vibrato
and trills of all sorts, each signifying different emotions'' (page 22). How well these
worked for contemporary listeners is unclear. However, what we do know is that
precisely because music was at that time recognised as a sensual rather than an
intellectual phenomenon (Carter, 1992) musicians in the early 17th century devised
many of the techniques for emotional inflection which we now take for granted.
But the emotional content of music is not just about modes and techniques. It is
not at all as calculating as this; it is not simply about how the power of music works on
the mind. There is quite an elaborate philosophical debate on meaning and emotion in
music,
(20)
but perhaps some of the most helpful ideas come from Langer's Philosophy
in a New Key (1942). She resists the idea that music causes feelings, and conceptualises
musical involvement rather as the expression of feelings. Musical performance is thus a
way of expressing emotional experienceit is a way of articulating the subtle complex-
ities of emotion that language cannot access. And I want to suggest further that this
happens, at least partly, through the bodily practices the performance relationsthat
produce the sounds we hear as music. The emotional power of music therefore has
something to do with the embodiment of sound; with how, in performance, the whole
bodynot just, or not even, the part that speakscommunicates. ``Rhythms and
sounds'', says Attali (1985), ``are the supreme mode of relationship between bodies''
(page 143).
In some ways, this seems self-evident: think of rap or jazz, salsa, the tango. Yet,
as McClary (1991) has recognised ``Western culturewith its puritanical, idealist,
suspicion of the bodyhas tried throughout much of its history to mask the fact
that actual people usually produce the sounds that constitute music'' (page 136).
Indeed, what I interpreted earlier as a downplaying of the visual in performance
musicians dressed in black and relegated to the back of the stagecan also be seen
as a routinised subversion of the bodily content of the sounds. I wrote ``looking at the
performance, it is as if no one retains their individuality, their personality, their gender
or their complex identity''.
This tendency to use visual devices to displace the body from the centre of things is
certainly a characteristic of much modern orchestral performance (in which, it might
be argued, the economic relations of performances sometimes eclipse their emotional
and bodily content). However, the subversion of the bodily is also something that has
been learned in modern times, and (as I hinted earlier) the practice, if not the appear-
ance, of early music tends to resist it. Actually, I think all musical performances can
resist this, but such resistance comes more readily to some kinds of music-making than
others, and early music is one of them.
(19)
These effects are documented and illustrated musically in ``Giovanni Gabrieli: The canzonas
and sonatas from Sacrae Symphoniae 1597'' (His Majestys Sagbutts and Cornetts 1997, Hyperion
CDA 66908).
(20)
These debates are usefully summarised by Ahlberg (1994).
Performing the (sound)world 631
The way that early music resists disembodiment is through its improvisational
qualities. Improvisational music, argues Lawrence-King (1977), is held together more
by performance than by the qualities of composition. Again, I think this is potentially
true of all live music, but it is easier to hear in a music which has never much relied on
formal structures for its coherence.
(21)
Such music unfolds through an inspirational,
emotional `logic' rather than by formal conventions, and I think it is the performer's
body that supplies this emotional content. To get at the emotional involvement that
comes with these embodiments of music, Barthes (1986) refers to a `quality' in
performancea bringing out of things that cannot be articulated through speech:
``In the unspoken appears pleasure, tenderness, delicacy, fulfilment ... . Music is both
what is expressed and what is implied'' (page 284). Elsewhere he talks about the `grain'
in the music: the `grain' is ``the body in the voice as it sings, the hand as it writes, the
limb as it performs'' (1996, page 50). Working in a way that words cannot grasp,
embodied music creates an emotional space powerful enough to displace (replace) the
speech act as a means of communicationas a means, for example, of experiencing
and negotiating place and identity.
The question remains of whether it is possible or desirable to find a way to talk
or write about the content of this communication and debate it in an academic arena.
I think it is desirable, because ``to the large extent that music can organise our
perceptions of our own bodies and emotions, it can tell us things about history [and,
I would add, geography] that are not accessible through any other medium'' (McClary,
1991, page 53). Whether it is possible to access these histories and geographies remains
to be established. In the meantime, I want at least to suggest some ways of approaching
the problem.
First, we can write about how performers experience their work. We can try to
put some words to how bodies are experienced through music and how music is
experienced through bodies. Duffy's (2000) discussion of the melodic landscapes of
Australia's Top Half folk festival begins to tackle this. Referring to musicians who
improvise, Lawrence-King claims ``They know what sounds right and what sounds
wrong, based on a very subtle and complicated set of style rules that few of them
would want to articulate but that they're all extremely aware of '' (1997, page 169).
One of the challenges for a critical cultural approach to musical performance must
be to unlock these style rules; to understand what performers think and feel; to
have a sense of what they are trying to express, of what the emotional relations of
performance mean in human terms.
A second challenge is to consider how these `rules' work in relation to the wider
social and political contexts which generated them. What we feel emotionally may be
beyond words, but these feelings are not timeless or `essential'. Brecht (1996), for
example argues that ``The emotions always have a quite definite class basis; the form
they take at any time is historical, restricted and limited in specific ways'' (page 108).
What I think this means is that the embodiment of music is, like other embodiments,
``a node in a set of fields variously structured by sets of social relations ranging from
the global to the most intimate scale'' (McDowell, 1996, page 36). Roman-Valazquez
(1999) captures this idea when she talks about the embodiment of salsa. She shows how
the intimacy of the body engagesthrough repeated musical performancewith a
range of pressing social and political issues in the wider listening society. This suggests
that emotional spaces are powerful precisely because they overlap and interweave with
the social, the political, and the economic. Once the extremes of emotionpleasure,
(21)
There is no large-scale structure to most musical works of this periodat least not of
the type that musicologists rely on in the classical repertoire to make deductions about what the
composer meant the music to say.
632 S J Smith
desire, arousal, lust, anger, hatredbreak out of their aesthetic isolation, music and its
embodiment become very dangerous indeed.
Finally, it is through their capacity to tie the personal to the political, the aesthetic
to the material, the emotional to the social, the individual body to the collective
enterprise that performers make their place in the world. Attali (1985) and Said
(1991) have both argued that this place is important. Attali (1985) suggests that
musicians are there to offer an alternative to the status quo. He implies that musical
activity anticipates, rather than simply expresses, changes in political economy so that
the doing of music ``was, and still is, a tremendously privileged site for the analysis and
revelation of new forms in our society'' (1985, page 134). Said (1991) is more guarded,
but nevertheless positions musicians centrally in the fabric of social life. ``Their con-
tribution today is to the maintenance of society, giving it rhetorical, social, inflectional
identity through composition, performance, interpretation, scholarship ...'' (page 70).
Key theorists afford musical performance an important role in the elaboration of
social life. A third challenge, therefore, in accessing the histories and geographies
made through the embodiment of music is to trace out this elaborative style. To do
so, I think, is to contribute to those non-representational styles of thinking which
signal ``the invention of new means of occupying, usurping, and producing spaces
and times'' (Thrift, 2000b, page 216).
Before concluding, I want to note that part of this final challenge is to recognise
that the embodiment of sound, the politically and emotionally powerful practice of
musical performance, does not start or end with the musician. Musical performance is
a whole web of relationships, and these are anchored as much on those who listen as
on those who make the sounds. The importance of listening is implicit in any discus-
sion of music; it is implicit in much of what I have already said. Although there is no
space left to make this explicit in any satisfactory way, I do think it is important to say
something.
Listening practices
``It is not enough for the artist to be well prepared for the public, the public must
also be well prepared for what it is going to hear.''
Pierre Baillot, 19th century violinist (quoted in Bashford, 1999, page 37)
Musical performance rarely takes place without someone to listen. Indeed, the space of
music might best be thought of as a powerful (power-filled) relationship between music
makers and listeners. Performances make up one part of the relation; listening prac-
tices make up the other. Performers and audiences are both engaged in both pursuits.
These are not easy relationships to tap into, but it is through them that the (sound)
world is made.
One conception of listening is that which occurs when audiences `overhear' the
sounds and sentiments expressed by performers. This idea implies that listening is about
gaining access to the emotions inspired in the performer by a work of music (compare
Laszlo, 1967). The performance is therefore something the artist `gives' to the audience.
This implies an unwarranted passivity on the part of audiences, and, for the most part, I
want to dismiss it straight away. However, it does capture one important thing about the
way music is heard. Part of the power of music, argues McClary (1991), is that listeners
often have little rational control over the way it influences them. Music is insistent;
inside soundspace it is impossible not to hear, and once heard, music cannot be ignored.
Music is compelling in this way because it has an uncanny and inexplicable ability ``to
make us experience our bodies in accordance with its gestures and rhythms'' (page 23).
Performing the (sound)world 633
Indeed, ``it can cause listeners to experience their body in new ways'' (page 25)ways
which may be politically potent, yet are almost impossible to account for. There is,
then, something in music that always seems beyond listeners' control, and this element
of compulsion is one of the things that makes music so powerful.
Listening, however, is much more than overhearing sounds that are beyond our
control. A second conception of musical listening is introduced by Barthes (1986) who
talks of listening as an act of deciphering the future and detecting transgression. It is
about `taking soundings', and about knowing the other exists. So it is not just about
passively hearing what the performer has to say; it is also about listening actively and
participating in the musical experience (see Putman, 1990). This implies that what the
music means, what possibilities it contains, are partly determined by the listener.
Just as performing is an embodiment of sound that links the personal to the
political, so listening is a much-mediated practice. Listening happens in context too.
It is something we can experience emotionally at a very personal level as individuals,
but it is also something we have learned to do, and this makes it a social and political
consideration too. How music is heard is, argues Johnson (1995) is ``shaped by domi-
nant aesthetic and social expectations that are themselves historically structured''
(page 2). Musical pleasure then is a matter of judgment as well as a question of feeling,
and we may expect that by studying ways of hearing and experiencing music we can
discover something important about the nature of societies who listen. This, at any
rate, is the line of thinking that has brought research on listening practices so much
into vogue amongst musicologists.
(22)
What I am suggesting here is that the way that listeners themselves `perform' has a
bearing on the political, economic, and emotional spaces of music I have sketched
above. This has to be the subject of another paper, but as an example, take the
economic space of the concert hall. This space is itself constituted by the relations of
musical performance, but these relations are forged by listeners as well as by singers
and players. So the concert hall is also organised to express listening practices which
are rooted in the power relations of listening societies. Both Adorno (1992) and Johnson
(1995) thus comment in detail on how seating is segregated to accommodate different
social groups. The economic relations that solidified into the structure of the concert
hall are partly about listening practices which were inspired by the class-based prestige
order of modern (industrial) societies. As a consequence of this Johnson (1995) shows,
for example, how at the Paris Opera, ``it was most typically the socially powerful not
always the most musically discerning spectatorswho set taste'' (page 34). Even the
practice of listening in silence arose as much from the bourgeois concept of politeness as
from an aesthetic sensibility to the music (Bashford, 1999). So the economic space of the
concert hall is performed as actively by listeners as it is by musicians.
More generally I want to make the point that, although I have concentrated in this
paper on those who play and sing, it is important to recognise that listening, just as
much as singing or playing, is an embodied performance that is powerful, that is
historically constituted, and that changes over time. Listening makes music too. The
manner in which listeners go about deciphering, classifying, and assimilating sound is
also a performanceone that itself provides clues to what listening, performing,
musically saturated societies were and are about.
(22)
The importance of listening has only recently been recognised in academic circles, and has
led to a flurry of activity among musicologists, some of the best of which is contained in
Bashford (1999), Johnson (1995), Page (1997), and Wegman (1998).
634 S J Smith
New sounds, new worlds?
``Performance by its nature resists conclusions, just as it resists the sort of defini-
tions, boundaries and limits so useful to traditional academic writing and academic
structures.''
Carlson (1996, page 189)
In writing this paper I have discovered that it is easier to document what is done than
to appreciate what is happening in the `doings'. It is more appealing to reflect on an
image that is fixed than to experience a segment of sound that is fluid. But I remain
convinced that in the makingthe performanceof a soundspace there is a world of
politics, economics, emotion, and embodiment that may offer a rather different way of
knowing than those we currently rely on. I have tried to tease out some of these
complementary knowings in this paper, but in large part they remain a matter for
further empirical research and conceptual innovation. The theory and practice of
performance seems a good place to start, even though, by its very character, it may
never bring us to a neat conclusion.
Acknowledgements. Thanks to Tim Carter, Michelle Duffy, Lily Kong, Nigel Thrift, Nichola Wood,
three referees, and many musicians.
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2000 a Pion publication printed in Great Britain