Author: brycon
Date: 2016-07-28 22:22
Very interesting post Matthew!
Just a few points to keep the thread going:
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Musicians don't deconstruct music. You can't perform postmodern literary criticism on music. You couldn't very well play Beethoven as a feminist or Marxist. Beethoven is Beethoven. Music is simply human. It doesn't matter what color you are or what your political beliefs are, Mozart sounds the same. People might have widely differing interpretations, but interpretation isn't "criticism". Music can be intellectual as well, but it must have greatness and sensitivity of soul.
1. Music criticism can, and often does, borrow strategies from poststructuralist literary criticism. Michael Klein from Temple University, for example, has some very interesting essays drawing on the work of Jacques Lacan. And Kofi Agawu has several books on semiotics and music. (Just to name a few.)
2. Feminist and Marxist theories don't posit that a particular writer is/was a feminist or a Marxist; they show the ways in which underlying factors, such as gender, class, etc., may have shaped a writer or text. And this sort of criticism could influence how a performer interprets a piece: is Mozart's music a confirmation of enlightenment bourgeoisie rationality, or is its grace ironic and therefore subversive? Do you play it with absolute refinement, with a bit of edge (maybe faster tempos, more drastic color and dynamic changes, etc.), or do you not worry about it and let the audience make of it what they will?
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Musicians might do a lot of analysis of a work, but that's studying it's harmony and form. The literary equivalent would be something like "New Criticism". It's asking why a piece sounds the way it does, not trying to deconstruct what it is. When you play the notes, it is what it is. Harmony and form are like the matter of music. They are like colored bricks in a wall. You can rearrange the bricks into all sorts of patterns, but you can't rearrange them without re-writing the piece. (You would end up with PDQ Bach instead of J.S. Bach.)
Analysis is simply a tool; in music, however, it is also a form of criticism (see Joseph Kerman's famous article "How We Got Into Analysis"). But music isn't simply a case of "it is what it is." I could give you a half dozen analyses of a Schumann song, all of which are viable and all of which would affect the way you interpret the song. In this sense, music is even more difficult to get at than literature (and you see how many critical methods they've employed) because at least the building block of writing--the word (or the sign, in the lingo)--stands in for some thing. But music lacks that level of referential grounding; its comparatively high degree of abstraction therefore allows it to be analyzed and interpreted in a multitude of ways.
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The equivalent of musical deconstruction was atonal music, avant garde free Jazz, and things like that. It didn't go over well. It doesn't work because the laws of harmony are physical laws. Different kinds of music can use harmony in different ways (like Western Classical and Chinese Classical), but both rely on the natural overtone series at their core. Even "atonal" music has it's origin in the natural tonality the overtone series. It is literally inescapable.
This paragraph bothered me a little bit.
1. Atonal music and free jazz are styles of music, not a deconstruction of it.
2. Modal scales (the forerunners of tonality) were set in place before widespread knowledge of the overtone series (Descartes's treatise is the earliest writing on the overtone series that I know of). I'd therefore argue that tonality is much more nurture than nature. Otherwise, how would you account for the simultaneous rise of the major and minor modes when the minor third appears so late in the overtone series?
3. As a result, I find that critiques of atonal music on the basis of the overtone series don't hold up. It's like saying "abstract expressionist paintings don't work because pictorial representation is inescapable." Jean-Jacques Nattiez, in his book Music and Discourse, has an interesting discussion on music vs. noise, which seems to be what you're getting at (if you're interested).
Post Edited (2016-07-28 23:57)
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