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International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music.
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ABSTRACT
the sender of a musical message, the performer or, finally, the receiver?
In this latter case one might, accordingly, speak of music history as a par-
ticular experience, emerging at a given phase in musical communication,
at a certain moment (as when a style changes abruptly and a former move-
ment with its intonations is denied, or when one consciously and de-
liberately returns to an older style: see, for example, the influences of
Bach and Handel in Mozart and Beethoven, or Stravinsky's neoclassicism).
Nevertheless, the problem stil] remains of whether this view of music
history as an experience is, in the first place, too limiting. Would we really
be justified in speaking of music history solely at the moments when we
feel the presence of history, for example when Musik ilber Musik is com-
posed, or when we evidently consider that we have at a concert, say,
listened to some epoch-making work or, in the worst case, have recognized
some work as faded, as having only historical interest, but without anything
to say to modern times? It seems that music history as an experience
would easily become degraded into a sort of subcategory of musico-aesthetic
experience, where the aesthetic Gegenwdrtigkeit (Dahlhaus 1977:13) is not
fully realized.
According to Carl Dahlhaus, the essential tension between musical
history and aesthetics lies in the fact that a musical work, when belonging
to history, forms a document from a previous age; while as an aesthetic
phenomenon it is experienced by a listener as fresh, expressive and
meaningful in the present. Thus it may seem that music history as an
experience would merge into its exactly opposite pole, aesthetics, and
would consequently lose its own inherent characteristics. The only con-
clusion to be drawn is that music history as a musical and operational
lived-in-model seems to be too restricted.
Evidently music history is also a thought-of-model, a sort of inter-
pretational scheme by which we organize the events of our musical past
according to certain criteria. In this case, we are faced with new types of
problems: is there in the musical events, the data (it is not yet necessary
to define more closely what is here understood by a musical datum)
something like 'a musical development'? Does the concept of progress,
used by Charles Burney in his musical. history (1789, 1935), have any em-
pirical justification? Or is this kind of order always and exclusively a
function of an organizing consciousness, do we bring this order always
with us? If so, music history is something rather arbitrary and depends
on the musical model assumed by each era, in order to articulate its musical
past. There would not exist any music history in an objective sense. In this
way we would finally elevate the aesthetic principle of Gegenwdrtigkeit
above everything else. Accordingly, when we read a music history written
by Sir John Hawkins, Fetis or Ambros, what we do, in fact, is only read
certain interpretations, aesthetic views, which try to legitimate by dis-
guising their discourse as an objective and impartial narrative of historical
data, composers and their music.
period, and which persist even in the present century. The whole of XXth
century modernism has sought to destroy and sweep away the narrative
model from people's consciousness, but without any convincing success.
If modernism in this century has any common denominator, it is un-
doubtedly precisely anti-narrativity (or 'anti-illusionism', to use a term
from Brecht; or 'ostranenie', alienation, to refer to the Russian formalists).
The same holds true, by and large, for any musical research which
declares itself to be an 'objective' science dealing only with facts. First,
one has to remember that a scientific discourse which claims to be objective,
universal and non-subjective, is itself based upon the usage of certain
discourse mechanisms (see: Greimas: Semantique structurale, p. 153-154),
by which it creates an illusion of realism, the fiction of a language telling
us about reality 'just as ilt is'.
Obviously, this way in which a discourse pretends to be objective
corresponds to deep epistemes of our cultural era. However, the structur-
alists have just discovered that we are guided by certain systems of
thinking which rule over all our actions, oblige us to say certain things
according to the automatisms of certain codes, and determine what reality
is. Lotman's view of Freud was that he did not discover the unconscious
but that the unconscious is a creation of our own culture, and not a discov-
ery in the sense that some new continent, island or planet can be found
and charted (Uspenski & al. 1973:3-4). All this holds true also for music:
when Hildesheimer tells us that he reveals to us the real Mozart (Hildes-
heimer 1980) and his view is transmitted to millions of theatre- and cin-
ema-goers, via Schaffer's and Forman's Amadeus, he refers to Freud as
his scientific authority without noticing himself the interpretational nature
of the whole doctrine (this is not to be understood as an objection to Freud-
inspired art theories as such). In fact, Hildesheimer organizes Mozart's life
according to classical narrative principles - following the general actantial
model which was fiound by the Russian formalists lat the beginning of this
century and later formulated by Greimas in its currently known form
with six factors: sender, receiver, subject, object, helper and opponent.
(How naively well this model fits Schaffer's interpretation of Mozart's life:
sender - Leopold Mozart, receiver - humanity, subject - Amadeus,
object - music, helper - Paron wan Swieten, opponent - Salieri). It is
very difficult to get rid of the narrative model!
It is not possible, either, to find any satisfactory continuity for the
delineating of music history by pointing out the usual genetic relations
between different works of a composer, or the works of different compos-
ers. Mostly, what is involved is only a new variant of the narrative model,
particularly regarding the relationship sender-subject. For example Erik
Tawaststjerna's Sibelius biography tells of the composer's strong emotional
reaction to a performance of Bruckner's Third d-minor symphony in
Vienna. Moreover, there is an evident structural connection between the
main themes of the Kullervo Symphony and Bruckner's Third Symphony
reference of the study is not the relation to a reality conceived as being out-
side the discourse, but the relation to the model which the study has of its
cbject.<< (Ahonen 1984:155). Consequently, the comparison of different
models taken from music history - from Al Farabi and Kircher to Romain
Rolland or Arnold Schering, Luigi Russolo and John Cage - is possible
precisely in the context of this theoretical model. On the other hand, what
is essential in all semiotical study is the idea, already consistently expressed
by Louis Hjelmslev, that research must make its implicit commitments and
presuppositions explicitly manifest (as Jean-Jacques Nattiez, 1985:89-106,
has emphasized in his musical semiotics). This is necessary in order that the
way in which the research forms its own referential illusion, its own
discourse, should not be concealed, and that the study should not acquire,
because of this kind of concealment, ideological and dogmatic features.
The elaborated theoretical model must therefore be set face to face with
the music models under examination, so that it can be thereafter corrected,
if needed.
In the first place, it is evident that on this level of examination our
'universal model' does not yet need to include the whole generative proc-
ess of music, but we may concentrate on some level of it (for the concept
of 'generative process' see Greimas-Courtes: 1979). As a sort of implicit
background hypothesis one could refer to Greimas' general model of the
generative process, from which, however, I only choose some parts as the
basis of my examination without pondering the applicability of the model
in its entirety to the musical field.
In fact, in a somewhat similar way to certain phenomenological
aestheticians, Greimas distinguishes in every formation of meaning three
processual phases: virtual, actual and real levels. (Greimas 1979). He
supposes that the direction of the process goes precisely from the virtual
to the real, from the immanent to the manifest. This can be well taken
as a background for what we understand, in fact, by music. Carl Dahlhaus'
ideas about musico-historical facts may also be interpreted in this light;
he asks: what do we mean when we say that 'a work' is a musico-histor-
ical fact? Where do we ultimately find its historical character: in the
intention of the composer, which the historiographer attempts to recon-
struct; or in the musical structure of a work, which is then analyzed by
formal and genre-historical criteria; or in the consciousness of the contem-
porary audience of a musical work, for whom the work was an 'event', a
consciousness which cannot be grasped in its individuality and uniqueness,
but lonly in its general features and determined as a period, generation
or social class with all their characteristic traits (Dahlhaus 1977:58-59)?
In other words, music does not perhaps only begin in the notation, neither
in the performed, played or sung, i.e. acoustic form - in fact no more
than it ends with them. Music already exists before it crystallizes in the
brain of a composer into a work, and it still exists after it has been per-
formed - in other words, music continues to live in the consciousness of
real
actual A
%,,
virtual
There is naturaly much music in which the narrative level is not attained:
one may say that this level is created through three kinds of structures
and processes, called in the Greimasian model discursivization, i.e. three
possible embrayages/d6brayages (for which Roman Jakobson used the
term shifter) (Greimas 1979: 119-121). What is involved here is the working
of temporal, spatial and actantial categories in musical discourse. For
example, the aforementioned Dante sonata by Liszt represents music where
the narrative model functions and where 'despair' and the powers of hell
at the beginning are later replaced by the principle of 'hope' and the light
of paradise. This simple narrative program in music could be described
using the categories mentioned above: the actantial category of 'personage'
appears in the way how Liszt's theme serves as a sort of musical fictive
subject, a musical actant, personage and hero with which the listener can
identify himself; the temporal category contributes to the time-shape of
this actant-theme: first, in the restless, jerking a'nd panting alternation
of pairs of sixteenth notes in the 'despair' section, and particularly in the
absence of a clearly-marked verse boundary (the performer is expected to
add it as a sort of suppressed respiration - this is not an ordinary theme
with a clear-cut melodic, song-like structure, but something which de-
liberately goes against this expectation) in the 'despair' section, and again
in the rhythmic expansion when it expresses 'hope'; the spatial category
is manifested by the way the 'despair' motif dwells in a low register, erring
back and forth chromatically with minor harmonies; in the 'hope' motif
the music moves into the luminous upper register and a major key.
The way musical narrativity precisely emerges from a series of emo-
tions (caused by the music itself) forms a principle also used by several
applied techniques of music, such as musical therapy. According to the
state of mind of the person under therapy, and also the level of his musical
culture, a series of works or passages from works are selected for him,
leading him through certain emotional states according to a certain pro-
gram (Guilhot-Jost-Lecourt 1979:48). This is manifestly music being
organized in accordance with the narrative principle - it is, in fact, exactly
the same process as is used in many compositions based on narrativity. If
one asks, for example, why Beethoven did not take as the slow movement
of his Waldstein sonata the piece he originally planned to use there, namely
Andante favori, but composed a new movement titled Introduzione, the
answer surely is that he attempted to subordinate the whole sonata to one
narrative program, which necessarily required a kind of 'bridge' between
the rhythmically energetic character of the first movement and the Klang-
farben-theme with its pedal effects in the last movement. The influence
of a similar type of integrating narrative principle is to be felt also in Schu-
bert's Wanderer-fantasy, where different movements are articulated, it is
true, according to classical musico-syntactical genres - sonata and variation
forms, scherzo and fugue - but where the movements are temporally
united under one dominant narrative program in such a way that the
boundaries of the movements are weakened and actantially there is only
one main theme, which is varied.
d'Alembert remarked of the purely instrumental music of his time
that it was on the threshold of narrativity when it expressed certain emo-
tional series. When discussing Muzio Clementi's sonata Didone abbandonata
in his essay De la liberte de la musique he says (d'Alembert 1821:554).
>,All that purely instrumental music without form and object does not
speak to the spirit neither to the soul, and well deserves to be faced with
In principle, music models can be divided in this way into two main
classes: narrative and non-narrative, where non-narrative models are those
in which the afore-mentioned generative course has stopped at some phase
or where various elements of the generative course are 'negated', annulled,
resulting in anti-narrativity as represented e.g. by the Brechtian reaction
to the culinaristic opera or John Cage's philosophy of silence. The term
non-narrative is not after all, sufficient for these models, since what is
involved is precisely an anti-narrative phenomenon.
Finally, we still have to specify one further aspect in our concept of
a music model: In all music models, roughly speaking, two different levels
can be distinguished: the level of the signifier or of the music to be listened
to, the physical stimuli, musical material; and the level of the signified,
the concepts, thoughts and emotions aroused by music, in a word the
content (whether it be the level described above of modal processes prior
to music, or the level of its decoding, de-modalizations, the articulation of
the emotional content by the music listener after a musical event). Music
models can also give value to and emphasize either of these aspects, and
in an extreme case even entirely deny the existence of either of them. On
the other hand, in the same way as composers search for new ideas, new
contents to be expressed by their music, so journeys towards the unknown
can be made by seeking for new signifiers, by enlarging the musical ma-
terial. Then music models determine what, at the level of the material, is
music and what is not (for example, excluding/including bird song, noises
etc.). Moreover, within the limits of what is then considered music on the
purely material sense there is a constant oscillation between two spheres,
one representing 'order', redundancy - and at the level of signified,
pleasure, harmony - and the other non-order, disorganization, chaos and
enthropy, displeasure. This may be illustrated by the concepts of disso-
nance and consonance, and the gradual enlarging of the sphere of conso-
nance during music history until it has totally included the sphere reserved
for dissonances and transformed everything into musical order. If we now
speak of the distinction and dialectic between music and anti-music (with
reference to Juri Lotman's cultural theory), we are still moving within
music, while the previously mentioned more radical distinction means a
separation between music and non-music. (Uspenski & al. 1973:2)
music
non-music
music anti-music
Kircher
The whole study starts with very 'anatomical' terms, since Kircher
analyzes how a tone is produced and (already!) what different affects,
passions of the soul, music can arouse in us (love, hatred, fear, pity, shame,
joy, stupidity, contempt, fidelity, anger, despair etc.). He also examines
the auditive and vocal organs from the anatomical point of view, com-
paring, for example, the human larynx with that of animals and insects
(and explaining also why the voice of eunuchs is reminiscent of that of
females). He supposes that wind instruments have been constructed by
analogy with the structure of the vocal organs. Special attention is given
to the fact that even animals are able to produce 'music' i. e. musical
signifiers: he introduces a quadruped found in America and called Pigritia,
whose voice has been testified by several witnesses to be miraculous, and
which sings according to a diatonic scale (Kircher 1650:27). After these
mainly zoo-semiotical observations Kircher presents both mythical and
historical information about the invention and origins of music - accord-
ingly, his music model has a historical dimension. Nevertheless, what
matters most is how music became a speculative science dealing with
numerical relations: consequently music has its place beside arithmetic,
geometry and physics. Thereafter Kircher introduces new methods of
composing with various kinds of charts, speaks of the phisiology of con-
sonances and dissonances, the sympathy and antipathy of tone relations
or the power and influence of music - and again, not only in humans
but in animals as well. He has a variety of empirical evidence concerning
this, such as experiments in which tones make animals (e.g. wolf cubs)
frightened or pleased (zoo-semiotics again!). Advice is given about how
the bites of the tarantula spider can be cured by music, and there are also
general reflections on the medical use of music, based upon the fact that
music has a direct influence upon the nerves and muscles. In this sense,
Kircher's model anticipates modern musical therapy and neurophysiolog-
ical studies (cf. later John Cage's music model, in which there are cases
where music is transmitted directly to the human nerve system). Kircher
deals largely with the class of sonus prodigiosus; it consists of three
subclasses: natural, unnatural and supernatural. To the first class belong
the inexplicable sounds met in Finland (!) which are heard especially in
the mountaineous areas (Kircher quotes the chronicle by Olaus Magnus),
but which can be explained as being produced by the internal structure
of the mountains, where the sound is multiplied - like in the mountains
of Switzerland (Kircher 1650:234). The next chapter considers echo effects
and musical acoustics with many diagrams and results of empirical exper-
iments. For example, Kircher asks how a church can be built in such a
way that three singers can produce as much sound as a hundred. The
chapter presents experiments providing that sound is carried more power-
fully through a curved tube than a straight one; there are comments on
theaters built by Vitruvius, and various proposals for artificial acoustical
spaces under the title Magia echotectonica (Kircher 1650:283).
Burney
Our next music model is from an entirely different age and cultural
area: two competing music histories appeared in England in 1776: A Gen-
eral History of Music from the Earliest Ages to the Present Period by
Charles Burney (1776-1789, 1935) and A General History of the Science
and Practice of Music by Sir John Hawkins (1776). They both clearly rep-
resent a linear model of musical development and its phases. The alter-
native model in the 18th century was, as we know, in the form of a diction-
-
ary, as used by Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Sebastien de Brossard
not to mention the musical thought of the baroque era, exemplified by
Kircher's wholly paradigmatic and achronic model (above), where the
paradigm of various dimensions in music is not yet closed and restricted
to the model of a linear, syntagmatic unfolding, which in the next century
gave birth to the narrative model of music history.
Romanticism
Russolo
As we come to the 20th century, where the narrative model of roman-
ticism persistently survives, with modernism a need appears to enlarge the
sphere of music both at the level of signifier and that of the signified. To
a great extent this was a reaction against the previous music model and
had its roots in the radical change of the acoustical code in modern technol-
ogy-dominated life. The view presented by Luigi Russolo in his manifesto
The Art of Noises (Russolo 1975), represents precisely this kind of exten-
sion of the musical field. Russolo sees the historical development of music
in the following, condensed way: Musical art first searched for the soft
and bright clearness of sound. Then it started to combine various sounds
with the aim of obtaining sweet harmonies. However, nowadays more and
more dissonant and strange sound combinations are sought. In this way
one is approaching noise sounds. Russolo considers this development to
be simultaneous with the quantitative increase in the number of machines
participating in work. In the milieu of great cities, as well as in the
otherwise silent environment of the countryside, machines produce sounds
in such an abundance and variety that pure tone no longer arouses any
emotion, being so weak and monotonous. In order to excite our senses
music too has looked for more and more complex polyphony and varied
timbres and dissonant chords, having musical noise as its ultimate goal
(Russolo 1975:36).
A man from the 18th century could never have endured the disso-
nant intensity of our modern orchestras: on the contrary, in Russolo's
opinion, our ears enjoy it since they are acquainted with all the noises of
modern life. Musical sound is, in other words, too limited in the quality
and variety of its timbre. Even our most complicated orchestras can always
be reduced to four or five categories of sound, i.e. string instruments,
plucked instruments, brass, woodwind and percussion instruments. This
vicious circle, however, has to be broken at any price, and the endless
multitude of noise sounds has to be conquered. Is there anything so
ridiculous in the world as twenty people multiplying the plaintive mewing
of violins? That is why it is infinitely more pleasant to listen to the noises
of tramways, cars etc., than the Eroica or Pastorale symphonies (Russolo
1975:37).
Russolo (1975:40), nevertheless, denies that this new music should
borrow its elements from the sphere of non-music: noises must not only
be imitated but they have to be created and invented, and precisely such
as to affect the emotions through a particular acoustic pleasure, when the
artist can, in turn, combine them according to his artistic will. Russolo
(1975:40-41) presents six classes of noises, which a futurist orchestra
should be able to produce:
1) Grondements, Eclats, Bruits d'eau tombante. Bruits de plongenon,
Mugissements
2) Sifflements, Ronflements, Renaclements
3) Murmures, Marmonnements, Bruissements, Grommellements, Gro-
gnements, Glouglous
4) Stridences, Craquements, Bourdonnements, Cliquetis, Pi6tinements
Cage
That is why Cage does not accept, for example, melody at all, since
as soon as there is melody there is a will and a desire to bend sounds to
that will. He particularly sets within parentheses the modality of 'will' and
everything related to its energetic thought. His principle is detachment
or, to quote Charles Morris, letting things happen (Morris 1956). As a com-
poser he is not interested in the will to subordinate the tones to some nar-
rative program, which the listener would be persuaded to follow. x>They
bend sounds to what composers want. But for the sounds to obey, they
have to already exist. They do exist. I am interested in the fact that they
are there, rather than in the will of the composer. A 'correct understanding'
doesn't interest me. With a music-process, there is no 'correct understand-
ing' anywhere. And consequently, no all-pervasive 'misunderstanding'
either.^ (Charles 1981: 150)
Accordingly, Cage also rejects the idea of music as communication: in
his view the very concept of communication presupposes that there is
something to be communicated. Communication always means imposing
something, determining something. Instead, in a conversation, a dialogue,
this does not hold true, but the participants remain what they are. Cage,
as Kircher did in his time, notices that music is in direct contact with the
human nerve system. But whereas usually the nerve system is influenced
by music, the situation can in fact be reversed: one can produce music
with the nerve system. Cage tells about a work by Alvin Lucier where
electrodes were attached to the composer's scalp, he closed his eyes and
performed other movements, and the performance consisted of alpha-
-waves which were transmitted through several loudspeakers situated
around a kettledrum, a gong or a trash can. The same waves sounded
differently through the different resonators, and the audience was hugely
delighted by the aspect of 'mystic' participation in the work, since the
electrodes could just as well have been attached to anyone's skull. What
fascinated Cage in this kind of performance or 'bio'-music was the fact
that the performer didn't have to have any particular skill at all, he was
no longer needed in the traditional sense as a transmitter on musical
communication. (Charles 1981:221)
In fact, Cage gives up the whole concept of a structure in the Grei-
masian sense as an entity based upon two contrary elements. Our thought-
-of-models are considerably rougher than the lived-in-models of our ex-
perience. When we think in opposed pairs, like sound and silence, being
and nothingness, we simplify our experience, which is extremely com-
plicated and not reducible to the number two. In Cage's view even when
we hear a periodic, repetitive rhythm, we hear something other than the
tones themselves. We do not hear the tones as such but the fact that they
have been organized. Consequently, he ends with a negation of structure
itself. Cage thus excludes from his musical model the contract between
composer and listener and everything that can be determined with
unchangeable units. In fact, what he accepts is the temporality of music
in its broadest sense. However, it seems that his music model would lead
us most decisively out of music history.
In reality, the historicity of music disappears in this last model
entirely and merges into the aesthetic Gegenwartigkeit. One may perhaps
assume - and this may be stated in conclusion - that music history itself
is a phenomenon which emerges in connection with musical change. There
is a certain 'normal' speed of events. If music models or intonation stores
change more slowly than this ordinary speed, the change remains unnoticed
and music models adopt the achronic paradigmatic form. If again change
occurs too quickly it is not observed either, and the result is rather the
experience of a sort of 'stasis'. This is John Cage's case, since according
to him each work and each sound experience must provide its own music
model which is different from the previous 'models'. Not without reason,
Cage has remarked that all necessary music has already been composed,
and all we need is to open ourselves to the 'music' surrounding us.
Music history would thus be a phenomenon of a certain speed of
change, and accordingly definable as a certain articulation of temporality.
To paraphrase McLuhan's words: neither cold nor hot societes have a
history, only 'mild' societies possess one.
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