Author: brycon
Date: 2016-07-29 02:50
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Yes, one could treat a piece of music, or any other piece of art, as if it were literature, making social an other comments about it, and then have this influence your playing. However, the basis for interpreting it that way is extra-musical, and the audience would have no idea what you were thinking. They just hear the music. Writing about music isn't making music.
That sort of interpretation is extra-musical in that it draws from ideas outside of the music itself; any viable sort of interpretation, however, whether it be feminist or Marxist, will use analysis for support (see Klein's writing, for example). And in that sense it isn't extra-musical: it's using the music to make the point.
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If someone uses Marxist or Feminist critiques (or adopts any other "-ism") they are to that extent a Marxist or Feminist (or whatever), because "-isms" are ways of thinking. When you are writing it matters a great deal what you think about "gender", "class", etc. You will say different things. It doesn't matter when you play music. Wagner thought a great deal about being German, but you don't have to be German to like Wagner! (Or NOT like Wagner!) If someone decided that Mozart was bourgeois, and played him elegantly, the audience wouldn't know the difference. Later, they might say to themselves, "Hmm. Mozart must have been elegant." I doubt they would say, "Hmm. Mozart must have been subversive." You might think Haydn is funny, but he is. If you play Bach like a thundering stampede of buffalo for some reason, you frighten young children!
It may not matter so much when you play music, but these sorts of things may be in the music itself (and we presumably want to be able to understand and interpret music).
I agree that if I apply, say, a Marxist reading to my performance of Mozart (not saying it makes sense--just for the sake of argument), of course no one in the audience will have the slightest idea. But it doesn't matter because music isn't a line of communication whereby a completely intelligible message is sent between the composer and the audience or between the performer and the audience (nor is writing for that matter). Only some of what a composer put into a piece will be realized by the performer. And only some of what the performer put into his/her interpretation will be realized by the audience. Nattiez refers to a piece of music as a "trace" in this respect.
All that is to say, yes, playing music isn't at all like writing about music. But criticism shouldn't be tossed out just because music isn't capable of delivering a clearly worded message. As a performer, criticism may influence the way you play, and certainly, as an audience member, it could change the way you think about music. (I'm attempting--poorly, admittedly--to make a distinction between composer, performer, and audience member as well as the various interpretive strategies applied by each.)
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The harmonic series was understood well by the Ancient Greeks, especially the Pythagoreans. Plato uses the harmonic series in "The Timaeus". Boethius explained the knowledge passed down to him from the Greeks. The ancients constructed a seven step "major" scale by stacking perfect fifths. And of course, people have played trumpets and flutes from time immemorial, so they knew about overtones, even if they didn't analyze them mathematically like the Greeks.
When I said tonality, I didn't mean "Western Tonality", although I understand that was confusing. I meant any music that uses octaves, fourths, fifths, etc. Most forms of music are modal. The reason most of the world's music is some variation on pentatonic scales and 7 step scales is because the overtone series makes it work. The whole step derives from the distance between the fourth and the fifth, the half step the distance between the third and fourth.
The topic of scales is massive. Here's a short version:
In Boethius' treatise, he classifies consonances and dissonances through ratios derived from the monochord, not as discrete units of the overtone series (as Descartes did). Once he had realized the ratios of the various intervals, Boethius then noticed that combinations of the smaller ones, 6 whole steps (ratio of 9:8), for example, failed to equal an octave (2:1). He didn't have a satisfactory solution to the problem. But he wasn't really writing for practicing musicians anyways; he was more concerned with the mathematical issues.
When Boethius' writings were rediscovered around the 9th century, musicians would pay lip service to his classifications but also note that practicing musicians did their own thing. Thirds, for instance, were increasingly treated as a consonant interval, which shows that modal thinking had arisen on its own, outside of the mathematical writings of the Greeks.
(Also, if I remember correctly, the Pythagorean scale was given its name by later theorists, in homage to Pythagoras not because he had derived a scale from fifths.)
Bernstein's lectures are an attempt to apply generative grammar to the history of music. But tonality's origins lie in the tetrachordal scale units of church musicians, not in the overtone series. You can't really apply Chomskyan ur-theories to the whole enterprise of music.
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Atonal music and Free Jazz are usually introduced as the ultimate logical extensions of harmony, etc. I don't think this is true. Atonality (literally "not tonal") is deconstructive because it deconstructs tonality. The purpose of a 12 tone row is to avoid any harmonic center. Free jazz is deconstructive because it deconstructs form.
IMO atonal music isn't really a style. If it all sounds the same it's only because, you can't really write in ANY style using only 12 tone rows.
Free Jazz is a style but depends upon the manner in which they play, and because you can't really improvise 12 tone rows. There is always some harmony.
I see what you mean by deconstruct. But at the same time, any new mode of expression deconstructs something that came before it. Following the same line of thinking, C.P.E. Bach is a deconstruction of his father's polyphony (and Monteverdi is a deconstruction of himself). At a certain point, that way of thinking becomes too broad to be useful.
Post Edited (2016-07-30 01:24)
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