ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

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MUSIC:

 

So much of the literature focused on music/sound comes from a psychological perspective. This is understandable given the intangibility of music as an artform compared to the other high arts of painting, sculpture and even film which can visually re-present space and the objects within it. For sound, all tangible objects are reduced to imagination alone. Instead, the 'art' of music has more often been studied as measurements - acoustic vibrations, ratios, structures and sequences.

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As Langer says

"...however recalcitrant painting or poetry may be to scientific treatment, music at least could be comprehended and handled under relatively simple natural laws which might then extend one's understanding, through analogy, to less abstract and less transparent arts. Again and again, attempts have been made to explain musical invention by the physical complexity of tones themselves, and find the laws and limits of composition on a basis of ratios or mathematical sequences to be exemplified." (p105)

 

Studies focused on the psychology of music have proliferated in the last 40 years since the early 1980s, looking at the cognitive, behavioural, emotional and social affects of music and how it can shape our identities through education. These studies come from a psychometric, neuroscientific basis.

 

While I will include some of the more relevant work in this area, I will, in my research, be coming from the assumption as this work has shown, that sound/music is able to convey meaning and emotion and as such, is a relevant and effective tool to use on the digital canvas to portray a subject. More than that, music/sound is able to add an extra dimension to a portrait that I will continue to expose as the research continues. (the ineffible, the unconsumated symbol, the 5th dimension!)

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(Attali, 2004) Noise and Politics

"Listening to music is listening to all noise, realizing that its appropriation and control is a reflection of power, that it is essentially political." 7

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"Everywhere codes analyze, mark, restrain, train, repress, and channel the primitive sounds of language, of the body, of tools, of objects, of the relations to self and others. All music, any organization of sounds is then a tool for the creation or consoli- dation of a community, of a totality. lt is what links a power center to its subjects, and thus, more generally, it is an attribute of power in all of its forms." 7

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"Music and the musician essentially become either objects of consumption like everything else, recuperators of subversion, or meaningless noise.... What is called music today is all too often only a disguise for the monologue of power. " 8

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Bordwell, D. (1980). The Musical Analogy. Yale French Studies, Cinema/Sound(60), 141–156. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/2930009

 

Bordwell explains the tendency for avant-garde filmmakers to draw analogies between film and music. he feels its an attempt to distance cinema from the conception that it is an 'art of the real' and move it closer to high art. Calling a film 'visual music' in some way justifies its existence under a new aesthetic. He quotes early films that were considered 'music for the eye' Schoenberg's Die Gluckliche Hand and Diagonal Symphony, Finschinger's optical poem, Allegretto, Toccata and Fugue etc. Wagner was the first to create a synthesis of music and all the elements that made up his operas. Eisenstein, in his later writings admired Wagner for his synthesis.

 

"What most attracted me in Wagner," he explained while staging Die Walkiire in 1940, "were his opinions on synthetic spectacle . . . Men, music, light, landscape, color, and motion brought into one integral whole by a single piercing emotion, by a single theme and idea-this is the aim of modem cinematography." (4Sergei Eisenstein, "The Embodiment of a Myth," Film Essays and a Lecture, ed. Jay Leyda (New York, 1970), p. 85

Eisenstein aimed to do just the same thing to create a audiovisual totality. (In his earlier writings (Film Form) however, he wished to create a counterpoint and set a a dialectic not an organic whole with sound and film.)

 

Bordwell then talks at length about Noel Burch who in 1967 proposed a theory of film based on atonal music. In tonal music, structure and unity is based on tonality...a horizontal unfolding, expectation of cadencial closures giving shape to music and film. Burch believes that the film form for this music is heirachical - with horizontal narrative line and action dominating. Like tonality, the narrative on the screen dominates via perspective "zero-degree point of cinematic style" (Noel Burch, Theory of Film Practice, tr. Helen R. Lane (New York, 1973), p. XiX.

One effect of using a-tonal music is to break the temporality. Also to give all elements of the music equal dominance; they become a pattern of geometrical figures in sound. They become spatial rather than temporal. Hence the narrative flow is broken in the film just as the tonality is broken in serial music and the represented content becomes only one element in the film. The form becomes open with many alternatives to unify.

This aligns with Stockhausen's 'points' or 'moments' "existing for themselves and in complete freedom and formulated individually and in considerable isolation from each other. " (Quoted in Karl H. Worner, Stockhausen: Life and Work (Berkeley, 1976), 81)

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(Christoph Cox, 2011) Beyond Representation and Signification: Toward a Sonic Materialism

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Representation

Musical/sound has always been recognized to be a peculiarly non-representational art, lacking the two-tiered structure of reference characteristic of words and images; it is not a signifier; it dies not stand in for another thing; it does not convey explicit semantic meaning. As well, unlike images and text, it is immersive - we cannot 'shut our ears' - the sound surrounds us and passes through our bodies. For this reason, music/sound has long eluded analysis in terms of representation and signification and, as a result, has been considered to be purely formal and abstract.

Susanne Langer, sees music as the 'ideal'; the 'absolute'; the one that offers us 'significant form' the un-representational (as opposed to the visual arts and portraiture in particular, which are highly representational) 'unconsummated symbol' that Langer describes.  MORE XXX

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Cox explains that historically, music’s non-representational status has led it to be construed in two distinct ways. The composer and theorist R. Murray Schafer (1994[1977]: 6) traces these to the two Greek myths concerning the origin of music. Thus, Descartes (1961[1618]) could write of music that ‘its aim is to please and to arouse various emotions in us’ (p. 11) while Leibniz (1989[1714]) could claim that the beauty of music ‘consists only in the harmonies of numbers and in a calculation that we are not aware of, but which the soul nevertheless carries out’ (p. 212).; one myth celebrated music as a "subjective eruption of pure emotion" and the other saw it as an "objective representation "of the sonic properties of the universe." (149)

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"Thus, Descartes (1961[1618] Compendium of Music, trans. W. Robert. Middleton, WI: American Institute of Musicology) could write of music that ‘its aim is to please and to arouse various emotions in us’ (p. 11) while Leibniz (1989[1714] Leibniz, G.W. (1989[1714]) ‘Principles of Nature and Grace, Based on Reason’, in R. Ariew and D. Garber (eds) Philosophical Essays. Indianapolis: Hackett.) could claim that the beauty of music ‘consists only in the harmonies of numbers and in a calculation that we are not aware of, but which the soul nevertheless carries out’ (p. 212).

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Cage and Stockhausen bear this out, with this era of music deliberately rejecting the emotions of the high romantic music that went before. Cage often used number series and throws of die to write his music, Stockhausen often used the Fibonacci series in his early works. Evidence of divine proportions of which the Masons were amiliar can also be found in Mozart who was himself a Mason. (Evans, B. 1993. “Number as Form and Content: A Com- posers Path of Inquiry.” In M. Emmer, ed. The Visual Mind. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press)

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As Stravisky said

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"music means nothing outside itself" (1956 The Poetics of Music in the Form of Six Lessons. New York: Vintage Books)

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This was the primary focus of modernism and the high visual arts aesthetics maintained that the purest of the art forms and the one to which all other arts should take their model, was music (See langer, Eisenstein) Some artists took this literally. Kandinsky for instance

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" A painter . . . in his longing to express his inner life cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art." (1914. Concerning the Spiritual in Art. New York: Dover.)

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The one-point perspective of tonality that matches the Cartesian mode of thinking about truth and reality 'out there' and objects that can be represented by the significant form.

(FN: It should be noted that music, while not representational itself, can however be represented in the form of its score. This in itself marks it as a remove from the visual arts which have no equivalent apart from perhaps, the study drawn before a major work is undertaken.)

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However for the past few decades, post structuralism has begun to undermine this thinking. Semiotics, post structuralism, psychoanalysis and deconstruction has rejected the naive idea that images and signs can represent or signify some reality in a pre-existing world out there; they reject a world that manifests fixed concepts and materials to which these signs and images refer.

It was also the proliferation of digital recording, in cohort with post structural thinking, that moved music theorising away from the modernism that went before.

 

Cox says

The invention of the phonograph challenged musical notation as a recording apparatus, replacing the mute, static score with a form of recording that restored the aurality and temporality of sound. It captured not an idealized visual representation but actual musical performances" (154)

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I disagree with Cox's statement. The recording did capture a representation - a representation of a performance. In this way it is not so dissimilar to a painting which captures a representation of a performance of a sitter posing. I'm reminded of CPE Bach's 28 musical portraits of friends created between 1754 and 1757 and revealed to me when I read Walden's article. Bach believed that music could portray portraits analogous to painting and, to my thinking, he was correct - with the caveat if recording had been available at that time. If it had been, his musical portraits would have differed with the painted portrait only in the different representational ability of the two media; a painting can capture a good embodied likeness, music can capture some other, less tangible likeness.

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In music, beginning with the Futurists and later Pierre Schaffer, John Cage begin to see music not in terms of a 'significant form' but rather as discreet sounds separate from their objects and separate from the cultural understanding of tonality; as a material substance external to signification and representation and discursivity. As Pierre Schaffer calls it, the "sonorous object", which has a existence distinct from both its source and the listener. The sonorous object, is not the instrument that produces it, not the medium in which it exists, and not the mind of the listener. Sounds are ontological particulars and individuals rather than qualities of objects or subjects. And this is why works of musique concrète are not re-presentations of objects in the world or of worldly sounds, but presentations of the sonorous object itself. (quoted in Cox p156)

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For Christoph Cox, this creates a problem.

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He believes sound has been neglected because the theoretical models have been developed to account for textural and visual arts and so are inadequate for music.

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He quotes Kim-Cohen's 'In the Blink of an Ear" who attributes this new reframing of sound as being purely material as being the reason for this

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"The suggestion of an unadulterated, untainted purity of experience prior to linguistic capture seeks a return to a never-present, Romanticized, pre- Enlightenment darkness ... if some stimuli actually convey an experiential effect that precedes linguistic processing, what are we to do with such experiences? ... If there is such a strata of experience, we must accept it mutely. It finds no voice in thought or discourse. Since there is nothing we can do with it, it seems wise to put it aside and concern ourselves with that of which we can speak." (p. 112)

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Kim-Cohen goes on to say that because sound does not fall into the realm of discursive and representation therefore no adequate means has been found to theorise it. Cox goes on to suggest that a new type of theoretical analysis should be devised, - not one that is suitable solely to the materiality of sound but rather one that can incorporate both sound and the other arts. He maintains that contemporary cultural theory as it exists now is not thorough enough and instead we need

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" A rigorous critique of representation (that) would altogether eliminate the dual planes of culture/nature, human/non-human, sign/world, text/matter" (148)

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He goes on to explain another way of viewing sound. He says we can experience a sound without experiencing its source, and the source without the sound. So while sources generate or cause sounds, sounds are not bound to their sources as properties. Sounds, then, are distinct individuals or particulars like objects.

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This is precisely what – albeit in the idealist language of phenomenology – Pierre Schaeffer (2004[1966 ‘Acousmatics’, in C. Cox and D. Warner (eds) Audio Culture: Readings in Modern Music, pp. 76–81. New York: Continuum) aimed to show in his analysis of the objet sonore, the sonorous object, which, he maintained, has a peculiar existence distinct from both its source and the listening subject. The sonorous object, Schaeffer insisted, is not the instrument that produces it, not the medium in or on which it exists, and not the mind of the listener. Sounds are ontological particulars and individuals rather than qualities of objects or subjects. And this is why works of musique concrète are not representations – of objects in the world or of worldly sounds – but presentations of sonorous objects.

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Cox concludes that

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"If sounds are particulars or individuals, then, they are so not as static objects but as temporal events." (156)

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"This materialist theory of sound, then, suggests a way of rethinking the arts in general. Sound is not a world apart, a unique domain of non-signification and non-representation. Rather, sound and the sonic arts are firmly rooted in the material world and the powers, forces, intensities, and becomings of which it is composed... On the materialist account I have outlined here, sound is thoroughly immanent, differential, and ever in flux. Indeed, thinking about sound in this way provokes us to conceive difference beyond the domain of ‘culture’, signification, and representation, and to see these as particular manifestations of a broader differential field: the field of nature and matter themselves " (157)

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(C. Cox, 2005) Lost in Translation

"As film theorist Christian Metz pointed out, our syntax and entrenched sensual hierachy hold us in thrall to a metaphysics according to which sight and touch signify being and presence, while sound-spatially vague, materially elusive, and temporally ephemeral-signifies absence and can only have the status of a secondary "attribute" in relation to a primary visual and tactile "substance". (Christian Metz, "Aural Objects," in Film Sound: Theory and Practice, eds. Elisabeth Weis and John Belton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1985), 154-61)

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(Davies, 2011) Musical Understandings and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Music

 

Music, even pure music or music alone (Kivy) that is, music without text, voice, written text or title, is without doubt characterised as the most expressive of emotions of all the arts. How is it possible given it does not represent or have explicit semantic content?

Davies argues for the position he calls 'appearance emotionalism" (p7) which corresponds with Cooks claim that music offers the 'appearance' of emotions much like a man can 'appear' sad. (Cook, 1998) The music does not contain the emotions, nor does it necessarily create emotions (though it can at times) but rather it is music's resemblance to the

"temporally unfolding dynamic structure and configurations of human behaviour associated with the expression of emotion ... it is expressive because we experience it as possessing a dynamic character relating it to humanly expressive behaviour" (p10)

and it is deliberately created to have those attributes. We, as listeners, then tend to resonate or mirror the emotional tenor of the music (p47)

 

He claims, and I might as well quote him as many others including music psychologists, that

"music is capable of expressing a fairly limited number of emotional types, but that it can express these objectively, so that suitable skilled and situated listeners agree highly in attributing them to music." (p11)

 

"The relationship between parts of a musical work are relationships of implication that should not be conflated with the linguistic or semiological notions of reference, denotation or signification" (Davies, 1994, 2011)( p73)

 

 Davies mounts an argument against Raffman's idea of ineffability. He claims that raffman makes no distinction between a Beethoven Symphony or breaking glass and an advertising jingle or a Rembrandt and wallpaper when she talks of the sensory perception of nuances as being ineffable. But by my reading she does draw a distinction by pointing out that music is structurally equal to language and hence

 

"...since music (more than the other nonlinguistic arts) is kin to language in certain important respects, an expressivist conception might account in part for the impulse to tell what we know of a musical work... " (p41)

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Davies, S. (1994).  Musical Meaning and Expression. Ithaca & London: Cornell University Press

A book about meaning in music; his contention is that "music can and should be understood to be appreciated and that it is created to be so" (pg ix) He contends that music is NOT as meaningful as linguistic utterances/language. Music does not assert or describe, nor does it represent or depict. He talks through many philosophical discussions and decides music fails to be analogous; unlike paintings music is not a depictive art form. Yes, we can imagine a form, object or emotion, especially is the music is programmatic, but it is not inherent in the work itself to be depictive. He discusses Kivy, Goodman,N; Robinson, J; Scruton, R; Walton, KL; Langer, S; Pratt, CC;

 

In representational paintings most people would agree about what is represented without knowing the title but music cannot do this - it is entirely open to the listeners interpretation. However we can still understand the music - it is satisfying.

 

Music can 'express' but it can't 'depict'. Musical expression is a type of depiction because it is so immediate - in the same way we can see a subject in a painting when the subject is not actually there in reality. They are both 'make-believe'.

 

Titles are important to a full understanding of music even though the work is satisfying without knowing the title.

 

He talks of art hybrids - where the elements (image, text, music) stand alone or need each other, or one dominates. Music becomes representational when it is paired with an image or text that is representational only because the other element is representational. Music alone is not representational without the wider context.

 

Music and image perform a different function:

Music expresses emotion

Images don't refer to feeling but use symbols to convey meaning.

Music can directly convey emotion (scientific tests), not by symbols.  (Susanne Langer contends the opposite - that music expresses via symbols of the conceptions of emotions. Goodman contends it expresses by metaphor)

Davies says it expresses by constitution or causality.

 

Summary: Davies says music cannot be compared to language with respect to meaning; it is not a symbol aimed at denotation; it is not depictive like painting; it is not expressing the emotions of the composer; its power is not in the ability to move the listener; because all these ideas fall outside the boundaries of the music itself - as something "referred to; denoted, symbolised, depicted, vented or aroused" (p201)

Rather he sees the emotion to be located internally - as intrinsic - as a property of the work.(this is borne out by the scientific studies that show the speed of a N400 response that doesn't allow for the concept to be made linguistic or for cognition  and also non-recognisable sounds elicit a similar N400 response) He sees expression in music to be similar to appearance. Much like a dog looks sad, so too does music sound sad. "These expressive appearances are not emotions that are felt, take objects, involve desires or beliefs, They are not occurrent emotions at all. They are emergent properties of the things to which they are attributed" (p228)

 

Western music is spatial. "high, low, up keyboard' volume, dynamic, full, etc." Musical movement is virtual - it moves but doesn't go anywhere. (Langer) It provides an essence of motion - an essence of space. Time is spatial - a flow of time, a passage of time, it unfolds, things happen in due course. Music is an art of temporal process" (p235) Musical movement happens in time not space. It is held together by tension and release of tonality. Atonal music could be seen as random, chaotic movement (but scientific studies show it still holds meaning)

 

"Emotions are heard in music as belonging to it just as appearances of emotions or moods have the characteristic gait, bearing, deportment of our fellow human beings and other creatures" (p239) It is a property of music itself. Hearing expressiveness in music is like seeing it in a St Bernard's face (Kivy)

 

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(Evans, 2005) Foundations of Visual Music

This article outlines some of the history of visual music in particular the congruences between image and sound.

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The concept of absolute music can be constructed from Igor Stravinsky’s statement, “Music means nothing outside itself” (Stravinsky 1956).

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A musical work desires to create a sonic pattern of "significant form" to create an aesthetic response in the listener. (Langer) This was a primary focus of modernism.

In the 20th century, visual artists sought to express abstract design; that is significant form in visual space. They began to consider seriously their work in a musical way, and the abstract form of the work was the content. (Langer)

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Kandinsky, considered by many to be the father of abstract painting, said:

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"A painter . . . in his longing to express his inner life cannot but envy the ease with which music, the most non-material of the arts today, achieves this end. He naturally seeks to apply the methods of music to his own art"

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 As well, Eisenstein strove to develop a system of film montage, in the model of music using such terms as Rhythmic montage, tonal montage, counterpoint,  etc...

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Cage and Stockhausen, deliberately rejected the emotions of the high romantic music that went before. Cage often used number series and throws of die to write his music, Stockhausen often used the Fibonacci series in his early works. Evidence of divine proportions of which the Masons were amiliar can also be found in Mozart who was himself a Mason. (Evans, B. 1993. “Number as Form and Content: A Com- posers Path of Inquiry.” In M. Emmer, ed. The Visual Mind. Cambridge, Massachusetts: MIT Press)

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He goes on to talk about early visual music - Ken Burns, John Whitney, Norman McClaren, Oscar Fischinger

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He goes on to talk about Eisenstein.

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Folkestad, G (2012) Digital Tools and Discourse in Music: The Ecology of Composition. in Musical Imaginations. Hargreaves, D. Miell, D. MacDonald, R (eds) Oxford NewYork: Oxford University Press

Folkestad has coined the phrase "the personal inner musical library" - a phrase I like because it points to the idea that we all, as individuals, hold within their mind and body, a multitude of past musical experiences that are present and accessible even when they aren't not explicitly in focus. he uses it in relation to the inner library that a composer may draw on to enrich their creativity and imagination, but by inference, we all, even non-musicians - hold within themselves their inner musical library the 'soundtrack of their life' that can be accessed and used in a portrait.

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Hargreaves, D, Meill, D & MacDonald, R. A. R. (2002).  What are musical Identities and why are they Important? in Musical Imaginations. Hargreaves, D. Miell, D. MacDonald, R (eds) Oxford NewYork: Oxford University Press

Collection of essays on the importance music plays in forming our contemporary identities. There has been an explosion of interest in the psychology of musical thinking, behaviour and development since the 1980s. They have an overlap with the disciplines of cognitive science, computing, sociology, medicine, neuroscience. Prior to this the studies tended to fall into the psychometric and acoustic areas with some well known texts being Seashores work in 1938 and later Lundin (1967), Shuter-Dyson & Gabriel ( 1968 & 1981)

 

Susanne Langer comments on the artificial and narrow perspective these studies on music offered in her seminal work on music and art in 195x) Both John Davies (1978) and Diana Deutsch (1982), changed the course of the study of music toward cognitive psychology and this tradition continues into the present day. I will talk briefly about the work as it pertains to my interest however my overall criticism is that this work is still narrowly focused on the minutae of musical experience and its artificial measurement in laboratory settings bears no relation to the context in which I am exploring the ability of music to be a satisfying 'sound brush' directed by the portrait artist's hand. None the less, as it will emerge, there are some interesting findings in the more recent research.

 

These authors believe while the areas of cognitive and emotional aspects of music psychology have been well studied, the social aspects and in particular the role music plays in forming and developing an individual's sense of identity has been neglected.

 

They talk through the development of psychological identity theory (p9) (different to what I deal with in art) in particular the more recent ideas that consider the identity, rather than being a coherant, self contained and pervasive, is instead in constant flux of construction and re-conctruction determined by our social interactions particularly via language. This idea is well expressed by Bahktin (M Bahktin 1981 Discourse in the Novel. in The Dialogic Imagination Holquist, M (ed) Emerson, C & Holquist, M (Trans)Austin TX: University of Texas Press)

 

"I am conscious of myself and become myself only while revealing myself for another, through another, and with the help of another... every internal experience ends up on the boundary ... 'To be' means to communicate ... 'To be' means to be for the other; and through him, for oneself. Man has no internal sovereign territory; he is all and always on the boundary" (p287) (p10 in Hargreaves)

 

Hargreaves goes on to say music is capable of forming identities in the same way as language. Something I don't agree with, none the less, music is in that intermediate place between sensory experience and language - it has a structure even though it has no signs with specific referents, hence it has some power in marking and moving identity.

 

Hargreaves, D. J.  Hargreaves, J. J & North, A. C (2012) Imagination and creativity in music listening. in Musical Imaginations. Hargreaves, D. Miell, D. MacDonald, R (eds) Oxford NewYork: Oxford University Press

Studies by these guys and Sloboda, O'Neill & Ivaldi (2000) show that today's adults typically experience music in one way or another for 40% of their waking lives and another study by Lamont (2006) concluded that children experience it for 80% of their wakeful hours; via multimedia devices in their toys as well as the more obvious devices. Their studies have located different ways people engage in music that amount to a "network of associations" or their "inner musical libraries" and as a consequence, "people's musical identities are determined and influenced by these networks which are based on their accumulated lifetimes experience of different music, all of which are further associated with socially and culturally-situated experience" (p170)

 

In other words, music plays a part in continually constructing a person's identity throughout their lives and as their musical experience changes, so to, it could be expected, their sense of identity will also fluctuate.

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(Jackendoff, 1977) The Unanswered Question

see article in virtual music. Look at this for discussion of atonality rather than tonality as a basis for the grammatical structure.

This article added directly to Lit Review.

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(Kim-Cohen, 2009) In The Blink of an Ear

 

Kim-Cohen discusses McLuhan and Kittler and Schaeffer the silence of academics in the realm of sound art and the reasons.

 

"It is impossible to say precisely when and where the expansion of music began. Satie’s furniture music? Russolo’s intonarumori? Cage’s 4' 33Max Neuhaus’s Listen, first presented in 1966, is certainly an expansion of Cage’s already expanded notion that all sounds can be music." (KC p108)

 

He sees that sound artists themselves have developed a theory, separate from post structuralism of Derrida, that see sound as essentially nature; sound is seen as a direct encounter with waves created by sounding objects, an actual vibration of the body. This model allows sound to escape the dialectic of the visual that places images and words into the realm of the unreal, the signifier that has no thing-in-itself to signify. Because Schaefer's sonorous object can be pure sound that precedes any aural experience of it as a signal that holds meaning.

 

McLuhan's ideas - pure material - closer to the essential than sight - McLuhan and others see the visual as corrupted by its privileged position in alienated society - Sound recordings, then, are instances of encounters with real phenomena. (p92-)

Then Kittler sees the same, but from the technological perspective, that it is pure binary code (see Kittler review) that is neutral and uncorrupted. The real, says Kittler, in order to reach us, must pass through “the bottleneck of the signifer.”  In so doing, it is compressed, reduced, quite likely shorn of its most substantive fleece.

 

But I say, why are sound recordings any different to film recordings? I understand the difference and it seems to come down to the two dimensionality of the captured film which can only ever be a copy, and the lack of dimensionality of the sound recording which matches the original. For me, this is not enough of a distinguishing feature to mark it within a different realm to film. The sound literally has to pass through the 'bottleneck of the signifier" and are literally compressed. Still they pass through the bottleneck of the recording engineer and composer, through the editing process in the same way as film, and still it is marked by absence - what the composer chooses NOT to record, what the engineer chooses to edit out, to overlay, to extend, to cut.

In this respect then, I agree with Cox who wishes to join all the arts into a single context. (see above)

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Kim-Cohen agrees too he says "Though meaning is made in time and as a product of rhythmic and harmonic relations, music as a language seeks to retain its absolute proximity to itself. Any process of differance is thought to occur only within the narrowly proscribed boundaries of music-as-such..." (KC p99)

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"Recoding sound as frequencies and physics does not significantly revise this semantic schemata." (KCp99)

He goes on to explain "that only noise is capable of purity". Even the most abstract thought and the most radical conceptual art must be conveyed by means of a context. Signal, which presumably is what any meaningful recording is, is "a product of traces and differance, is always impure, always shot through with the impurity of the other."(KCp100)

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He then goes on to talk about the economist Jacques Attali, also quoted in Kim-Cohen (who as an economist, has a econo-political approach!) I agree.

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“In fact, it [music] has no usage in itself, but rather a social meaning expressed in a code relating to the sound matter music fashions and the systems of power it serves." (p24) quoted in K-C p105)

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" The musical message has no meaning, even if one artifcially assigns a (necessarily rudimentary) signification to certain sounds. . . . In fact, the signification is far more complex. Although the value of a sound, like that of a phoneme, is determined by its relations with other sounds, it is, more that that, a relation embedded in a specific culture; the “meaning” of the musical message is expressed in a global fashion, in its operationality, and not in the juxtaposed signification of each sound element... What must be constructed, then, is more like a map, a structure of interferences and dependencies between society and its music"  (JA p25 quoted KC 105)

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He goes on to talk about Schaeffer and Cage from the perspective of a young sound artist Francisco Lopez. Then Vitello. (p120 onward) Then more about Cage, Young, Glass (p133)

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"In a 1986 interview with Tim Hodgkinson, Schaeffer says, “It took me 40 years to conclude that nothing is possible outside of DoReMi. . .  In other words, I wasted my life.”   (Hodgkinson, “Interview with Pierre Schaeffer.” ) Try as he might, Schaeffer felt that he could not organize sound in a sensible way with- out recourse to tonality. Much of the recorded music of the last forty years testifies, in various ways, to the contrary," (p11)

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I agree with Schaeffer (and disagree with Kim-Cohen) - tonality will always rear its head as part of the complete vocab of music; to try to dismiss it would be like trying to speak coherently without, for example, nouns.

 

Kramer, J. D. (1998) The Time of Music. New York: Schirmer

The obvious statement Kramer makes in this work “Music unfolds in time” is the centrepiece of my research. Music allows this to happen because “music is meaningful…primarily through time.” (pg 91 1988)

Atonal, nonlinear discontinuous  ‘moment music’ is not determined by what went before it nor what is to come after – it perhaps best describes our shadowy, jumbled, personal interior lives”(pg45 1988)

 

In Western music from the European cultural tradition, tonality was fully developed by 1680. This parallels the developments in portrait painting of the Renaissance. The music was quintessentially an expression of temporal linearity with the tonality of each phrase dependent on what went before and what was to come after, with a beginning, and middle all moving as a process to a strongly defined end. The phrase and harmonic and melodic structure was highly hierarchical with still sounds, climaxes, transition passages. Portrait painting too, while not linear, by its nature being only a moment captured, was highly hierarchical with the central figure in the prominent foreground with the less important background or negative space.

 

Music (and art) from other cultures (Bali and Tobraind islands, Japan eg) have non-linear calendars, a language that is non-goal centric. Their music and often their art is non linear, non-hierarchical. (An aside, Debussy and the other Impressionists were heavily influenced by the Japanese art and music they encountered at the great exhibition in Paris and attempted to make music that was a series of ‘moments’)

 

The atonal music of Berg and Webern is still linear in form, however some 20th and 21th Century music has developed non-linear, non-goal oriented music. Stockhausen, cage, Morton Feldman, Steve Reich some notable examples. Kramer et al call this type of music ‘moment music’ that is expressed in ‘vertical time’. The moments are defined by stasis rather than process; that is they are going nowhere, they just ‘are; they are ‘being’ rather than ‘becoming’; they don’t ‘begin’ they ‘start’; they don’t ‘end’ they ‘stop’.

 

Stockhausen gives a good description of “moment time” “I am speaking about musical forms in which apparently no less is being undertaken than the explosion – yes – even more, the overcoming of the concept of duration”(Texte on Musik Vol 1 , p199)

 

The time evoked when listening to moment music is called ‘vertical time’ “a single present stretched out into an enormous duration, a potentially infinite ‘now”…the music exists between simultaneous layers of sound, not between successive gestures” (pg 55, 1988)

 

Moment forms “verticalise one’s sense of time within sections, render every moment a present, avoid functional implications between moments, and avoid climaxes, they are not beginning middle and end forms” (pg 202, 1988)

 

“Vertical time denies past, present, future in favour of an extended present” (pg 375)

 

Vertical music can be defined by process as well as stasis. The trance or minimal music of Glass or Reich can feel linear because it has strong internal motion however there is no hierarchy of phrase structure, the rate of motion is constant and unceasing. Listening is not a linear experience rather it is so consistent that we lose a point of reference; there is no goal so the experience is static despite the continual motion. These composers saw temporal tonal music as dominating or manipulating the listener, leading them in an enforced  sense of temporal time to an enforced outcome of emotion. The trance music of Reich et al on the other hand, allows the listener to listen within their own subjective sense of time.

 

Moments, however, still occur in temporal time. This is particularly obvious in film. The position of the moment is important – it does affect the meaning. However cumulative listening (ie the memory of the sense of the overall work) is also very powerful.

 

But Kramer says on this point “Moment time may deny the waves of tension and release, of upbeats and downbeats that are the essence of linear musical time. But in their place moment time offers its ultimate paradox : moment time uses the linearity of listening to destroy the linearity of time” (pg 219)

 

Technology has brought about this shift. Technology has given us the ability to EDIT TIME, like film, time can be stopped, extended, reversed, sped up, past, present and future can be presented simultaneously.

 

Kramer believes that the modern age, since Freud discovered and explored the concept and power of the unconscious mind, has used this as its main subject matter. The unconscious, dreams, some mental states induced by drugs or mental illness, are timeless – they are not ordered temporally or linearly.

 

What better way to express the modern mind than with the vertical time of moment music, abstract art and the montage of film.

 

 

Kramer, J. D. (1996) Postmodern Concepts of Musical Time. Indiana Theory Review. 17/2 Fall 1996. 21-62

Kramer here discusses post modern ways of interpreting music; how our postmodern minds can create new ways of listening which enable new meanings to be conveyed to the listener by the sound creator. He talks of “piece time” (start middle and end) and “gestural time” (a perfect cadence) and explains how these can contradict one another in the minds of the listener hence creating another layer of meaning – somewhat like Barthe’s ‘third meaning’. He also talks of the power of quotations in music to provide a rich narrative depending on each listener’s personal associations to the quoted material – clearly culturally determined. There is no doubt different temporal experiences can be had by different listeners on different occasions – nothing is fixed.

 

 

 

Langer, S, K. (1953).  Feeling and Form. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons

Langer offers a philosophy of art in general with a few chapters on music in particular. She sees music's main characteristic (and potential problem) is its marked somatic effect; its relationship to the emotions. (She see painting and sculpture's main area to be the problem of imitation) She says

 

Music is the "tonal analogue of emotive life" (p27) because it bears such a logical similarity to the forms and causes of human feeling - "forms of growth and attenuation, flowing and stowing, conflict and resolution, speed, arrest, terrific excitement...  the greatness and brevity and eternal passing of everything vitally felt" (p27)

 

 

Music can be created at will, emotions not, therefore music is the symbol of emotional life.

Unlike sensory experiences, music is not significant because of its ability to stimulate feeling but because it can express that feeling in symbolic form.  (see cook p 94-97) And yet it is not the same as the ultimate symbol form - language. While it has many elements, like words, that can be perceived and that come together to form a complex whole, like sentences and phrases, those elements are not words that denote a thing, rather the elements have no meaning in themselves - no thing that they as symbols directly refer to.

 

"Just as music is only loosely and inexactly called a language, so its symbolic function is only loosely called meaning, because the factor of conventional reference is missing from it" (p31)

 

But Langer continues to expand on this, offering an explanation as to what gives  music/sound its particular expressive power. She says music, by the fact of its similar form to language, is an important expressive symbol but an 'unconsummated symbol'; that is, it has no conventional 'thing' that the symbol refers to so the symbol remains always unconsummated and open to interpretation. None the less because of its significant form as symbol, it can express emotions and the sentient experiences of life more effectively than language. Music becomes the art-form with the distinction of being able to present itself as a symbol of import able to express concepts without reference to actual 'things' - the perfect non-directed, open communicator of subjective experience.

 

Meyer, L. B (1956) Emotion and Meaning in Music. Chicago & New York: University of Chicago Press

Meyer's book has the single focus of understanding the way in which the feeling-tone or affect of music on the emotions. His ideas formed the basis for many psychological studies that were to come in the following decades.

 

He comes to the conclusion, following John Dewey's conflict theory of emotion, that

 

"Emotion or affect is aroused when a tendency to respond is arrested or inhibited"(p22)

and he applies this theory to music by claiming music can act as the stimulus to activate a tendency and through the course of the work, inhibit the tendency and provide meaningful resolutions, thus triggering emotions.

 

"Affect or emotion-felt is aroused when an expectation - a tendency to respond - activated by the musical stimulus situation, is temporarily inhibited or permanently blocked." (p31)

 

Meyer considers music does not have referential meaning outside itself but rather an embodied meaning; that is

 

"a musical stimulus (be it a tone and phrase or a whole section) has meaning because it points to and makes us expect another musical event." (p35)

If this expectation is interrupted, emotion is provoked. This expectation is entirely culturally designated; that is the listener needs to understand the music being played to be able to expect something will happen musically.

(And, I add, if it is music that the listener has never encountered, the theory should go that it will evoke emotion because it is unexpected. Does it?)

 

He says often music can arouse emotions because it provokes a conscious connotation - a memory or image - in the listener and this provokes an emotion. He claims it is a connotation - that is is culturally understood (like the two notes for jaws perhaps?) even those imaginings that seem quite 'obvious'. This has been the beginnings of many future studies.

 

He goes on to talk about the qualities of music that are relevant to my work.

He says, unlike art and literature, musical experience can be understood without reference to the outside world. They are not explicit in their denotation; it is flexible and hence a virtue of music:

 

"for it enables music to express what might be called the disembodied essence of myth, the essence of experiences which are central and vital to human existence" (p265)

 

And it offers not an explicit metaphor (symbol) but a general metaphor.

 

"Music presents a generic event, a 'connotative complex', which then becomes particularised in the experience of the individual listener" (p265)

 

(Raffman, 1993) Language, Music and Mind

She opens with two quotes worth noting. Both quoted on (p1-2)

 

"It seems particularly difficult for our literal minds to grasp the idea that anything can be known which cannot be named ... but this ...is really the strength of music expressiveness: that music articulates the forms that language cannot set forth ... The imagination that responds to music is personal and associative and logical, tinged with effect, tinged with bodily rhythm, tinged with dream, but concerned with a wealth of formulations for its wealth of wordless knowledge. " (Langer, 1942)198, 207

 

"If all meaning could be adequately expressed by words, the arts of painting and music would not exist. There are values and meanings that can be expressed only by immediately visible and ... audible qualities, and to ask what they mean in the sense of something that can be put into words is to deny their distinctive existence"  (Dewey, 1934)(74)

 

Sums up what Raffman is arguing - that there are aspects of music, especially the emotion meaning content that are ineffable.

 

Music and Emotions

A recurrent theme in the history of music scholarship is that music somehow symbolises human emotions (Langer, Kivy, Cook, Haslick, Scruton etc) but that music does not actually have meaning as language does.

 

"Unlike random noise, or even ordered, periodic sound, music is quasi-syntactical; and where you have something like syntax we have one of the necessary properties of language. That is why music so often gives the strong impression of being meaningful ...but although musical meaning may exist in theory, it does not exist as a reality of listening..." (Kivy, 1990) (quoted in Raffman p 43)

 

She refers to the similarities of music's structure to language.

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Fred Leydahl and Ray Jackendoff (1977, 1983 and 1987) have used basic Chomskian linguistic theory to analyse and propose that the generative grammar for music is very similar to language' structure of syntax, semantics and phonology; a "largely unconscious knowledge which the experienced listener brings to music and which allows him to organise musical sounds into coherent patterns" (Jackendoff, 1977)111) (Quoted p15)

 

Langer observes the same thing:

"we are so deeply impressed with the paragon of symbolic form, namely language, that we naturally carry its characteristics over into our conceptions and expectations of any other mode" (Langer p 28-29)

 

Music is different to the other arts because:

"According to cognitive psychologists, listeners unconsciously absorb and store structural information from the music they hear, thereby establishing longstanding mental representations that shape their subsequent music perception". (p3)

 

But Raffman says

"Music may be intended but it isn't intentional: it isn't about anything ... music does not refer or bear truth... (Rather) what sets music apart, lending it unique kinship to language, is its apparent possession of grammatical structure - or, more properly, the listener's apparent possession of (domain-specific) psychological rules for apprehending that structure" (p41)  SEE SLOBODA

 

But she adds the caveat:

"...our musical feelings are in certain respects precisely comparable to linguistic meanings ... There is doubtless an intimate tie between our musical and affective lives, but the tie is not, in the sense envisioned, a meaningful one" (p44)

 

This seeming contradiction is explained by bringing in the ineffable.

"...since music (more than the other nonlinguistic arts) is kin to language in certain important respects, an expressivist conception might account in part for the impulse to tell what we know of a musical work... " (p41)

 

 

But the problem is, the ineffability of what we know about the music we hear, and particularly the nuance ineffability of both the composition and the performance of the work which gives the work the "evanescent corona shimmering around the structural frame of the piece" (p97)

 

She sees three forms of musical ineffability

Structural: which is the listeners understanding but not being able to put into words, his understanding of the structure of music. This element is important because it is what links music to language. In the same way that language is structured, so too is music

Feeling:  comes from the sensory perception of felt character of musical understanding, that cannot be expressed adequately.

Nuance: is the most ineffable where the listener is consciously aware of nuances heard but cannot put them into words because they are heard at too shallow a level, before representations can be applied. This is the one that carries meaning but which cannot be spoken.

 

Davies mounts an argument against Raffman's idea of ineffability. He claims that Raffman makes no distinction between a Beethoven Symphony or breaking glass and an advertising jingle or a Rembrandt and wallpaper when she talks of the sensory perception of nuances as being ineffable. But by my reading she does draw a distinction by pointing out that music is structurally equal to language and hence

 

"...since music (more than the other nonlinguistic arts) is kin to language in certain important respects, an expressivist conception might account in part for the impulse to tell what we know of a musical work... " (p41)

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(Schedel & Uroskie, 2011) Sonic Arts and Audio Cultures: Writing about Audiovisual Culture

The vast majority of academic departments are bound by the historical legacy and influence of their medium. Music disciplines are either firmly of the teaching of performance and composition and more recently industry recording sound production; and art faculties divided and limited by their art form. Because of the dominance of the visual medium, the historical privileging of sight, sound has suffered particularly in this carve up of disciplines; as a medium it is ignored, except as part of these practical areas. As Schedel and Uroskie say

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" ... a whole phenomenology of experience has been denied us through a framing of the world as a thing to be seen." (139)

Most readers of this journal may not be familiar with the history of sound art, which has been in existence for only 100 years. In his seminal Futurist treatise The Art of Noises (1913), Russolo called for the liberation of music to include all kinds of sounds. He created his own instruments, dubbed howlers, exploders, and hissers. With the invention of magnetic tape in the 1930s came a generation of sampling and electronic modulations of sound by Schaeffer and Stockhausen. The 1940s saw a wholesale transformation of exhibition and spectatorship in the work of John Cage

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Sloboda, J. (2005) Exploring the Musical Mind. Oxford NewYork: Oxford University Press

John Sloboda, has tried to develop a model of music as a language. He argues a case that there are similarities insofar as linguists allow for a division between syntax and semantics.  He writes " it seems to be that one could see the structural description of the music as a form of syntax and the dynamic sensations of flux, tension, expectations fulfilled or violated, as the semantics.  This is because the structural description does not refers to anything outside the music, while the dynamic aspects do so refer." It is the dynamic properties of music that can be seen to most readily embody the physical world of motion and emotion.

 

He writes a comprehensive review of Diana Raffman's book Language , Music and Mind which is more in keeping with my research.

 

The question he asks is "Are there more things about musical experience that we know but cannot say?" He's hit the spot!

 

Raffman agrees as she believes music is a good example of something that involves a level of representation that is necessarily propositional. That is, it can represent but it is not expressible in words; it is 'ineffable'.

 

She outlines three levels of representation in music that correspond to language; the lowest nuance level of pitch, duration and timbres corresponds to the voice, intonation etc of the speaker; the next level is the identification of these nuances into mental score' which corresponds to the phonemes of language; the third is the gathering of these events into hierarchical structure which corresponds with  the grammar of language; and all three representations are available to our consciousness.

It is this similarity to language, this grammatical structure, that gives music its particular quality of 'meaning'; it (mis)leads us into believing that as we listen through a piece of music it is 'saying something' as language would - in fact it is 'saying something to us, however it is something that cannot be expressed because there are no meaningful representations to do it with.

"Music's grammatical structure may mislead us into semantic temptation" (p41)

And

"Whereas the relation of a linguistic string to its meaning is a more or less conventional one, the relation of a musical string to the relevant feelings is unconventional: we are presumable just wired in such a way to have those feelings upon tokening those mental representations." (p55)

 

Hence in this way, the musical meaning is in some way tied up with the emotions and the musical experience;

 

"will always have an "evanescent corona shimmering around the structural frame of the piece" (p96) - an ineffable evanescence.

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(Walden, 2009) Composing Character in musical portraits: C P E Bach and L'Aly Rupalich

A charming article about CPE Bach's musical portraits for keyboard of which he composed 28 between 17541 and 1757. He believed that music could portray portraits analogous to painting.

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How they could be seen to function as portraits is quite simple. much like the Portrait Of Ross, it was the titles and the titles alone that marked them as such.

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" Bach's musical portraits were only identifiable as portraits because they were accompanied by titles that conveyed their genre. In 1807, Heinrich Christoph Koch defined the character piece as "one whose character is expressly illustrated by means of the heading." (rom his Kurzgefasstes Handworterbuch der Musik, quoted in Wollny, Miscellaneous Keyboard Works, xv) As Karol Berger explains in A Theory of Art, "Mimetic music considers language, whether explicitly present or implied, to be the essential component of music."( Karol Berger, A Theory of Art (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000), 139) Far from an expendable element in the score, the title is essential to the work's performance and reception, and to the mimetic function of the musical portrait. When a person's name is prefixed to a musical portrait, the performer and listener imagine the character of the music as belonging to a specific human subject.

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The title of the piece, which mediates between the music and the listener, inspires an imaginative mode of reception: it serves as a lens through which to perceive notes and structures as representations of human characteristics." (383)

 Instrumental music became a plausible medium for characteristic portraiture because, in eighteenth-century Germany, it was commonly considered that music, of all the arts, could best depict the abstract elements of the sitter's persona- the passions and affects- that constitute his character but unfortunately, it is very possible to mistake what is trying to be conveyed because music cannot convey likeness.

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This article also talks about portraiture in the 1700s - Socrates, Le Brun, Hogarth

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