Music:

 

Cook, N. (1998).  Analysing Musical multimedia. Oxford University Press

Cook looks at models for analysing the connection between image/film and music/sound. He explores similarity and parallelism; difference; metaphor theory; montage theory and the importance of time and process for establishing context and meaning.

 

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.