EFTA01103597.pdf

The Musical Quarterly Summer 2004 Volume 87. Number 2 Notes from the Editor 177 Why Musk Matters Leon Botstein American Musics 188 Duets for One: Louts Armstrong's Vocal Recordings Benjamin Given The Twentieth Century and Beyond and Music and Culture 219 Ashville, Winter of 1943-44: [lea BaruSk and North Carolina Carl Learstedt Institutions, Technology, and Economics 259 Messiaen, Joiivet, and the Soldier—Composers of Wartime France Leslie A. Sprout 305 Oarecki's Musics geometries Danuta Mirka Texts and Contexts 333 Becoming Original: Haydn and the Qdt of Genius Thomas Bauman 358 Contributors to This Issue EFTA01103597  Notes from Information for Subscribers The Musical Quarterly (ISSN 0027.4631) is published cpartedy by Oxford University Press. 2001 Evans Road, Cary, NC 27513.2009. 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Pe Disclaimer hu Statements of fleet and opinion in the articles in me Muskat Quarterly re those of the respective authors and contributors and nor tithe editess Of Ordord University Press Neither Oxford University Press nor the editors make any representation, express or implied, in respect of the accuracy of the material in this journal and cannot accept any legal responsibility a liability for any errors or Th omissions I hat may be mode. The reader should make her or his own evaluation as to the appropri• 20( arenas or otherwise of any experimental technique described. Copyright C Oxford University Press 2005 All rights reserved; no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or doi:10.1093/mu transmitted in any form or by any means. electronic, mainlined, photocopying, recording, or 0 The Author otherwise without prior written permission of the publisher or a license permitting restricted copying tuned in the UK by the Copyright Licensing Agency lad, 90 Tottenham Court ROM, London W IP please emsall: 911E, or in the USA by the Copyright Clearance Center. 222 Rosewood Drive, Danvers, MA 01923. EFTA01103598  Notes from the Editor Why Music Matters $ Leon Botstein I wish to thank the Secretary-General for his kind invitation. It is humbling for any private citizen to address this organization—the United Nations. This is particularly so for an American. We as a nation are the hosts of the UN, yet we have not always been its staunchest defenders or most vigorous admirers. One of the privileges of being an American is the right to dissent, particularly in these dark times; there are many of us who would like to see the day when the promise of the UN is realized with American cooperation and enthusiasm. Early in its history, the UN inspired composers and music. In 1949 the eminent American composer Aaron Copland wrote his Preamble for a Solemn Occasion for narrator and orchestra. It was performed here, with Laurence Olivier narrating and Leonard Bernstein conducting. Copland used the words of the United Nations Charter—about half of its preamble— 55 to honor the first anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. The style of the work was prophetic, rhetorical, and imposing: befitting, as some noted, the voice of an Old Testament prophet. Copland sought to use music to preach an ideal that in 1949 had become clouded by domestic American anxiety about Communism, the Cold War, and tli fear of an atomic bomb. The world was free of Hider but not of Stalin, nor ly of the legacy of nineteenth-century colonialism. Ethnic strife in India, 2; conflict in the Middle East, and war in Indochina were present dangers and grim realities. ' I cite Copland's 1949 work because while we would like to think and believe that music matters, explaining why is not easy; for in truth, if "nuntering" is measured by the extent of harmony, beauty, peace, van- (milky, tolerance, and understanding it generates, musk no more than language has mattered in the practical, utilitarian sense. There is no evi- dence that music has encouraged people to become more civil or more peaceful, or helped to make the world a safer, more livable, and more humane place. Copland's use of music with the text of the UN Charter ty This text is the formal version of a talk delivered at the United Nations on 8 November 2004, at the Invitation of Secretary.Oeneml Kal Annan. doi:10.1093/musgtUgdh008 87:177-187 O The Author 2005. Published by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved. For permissions, P please e-mail: joumals.pertnissionseoupjournals.orz 3. EFTA01103599 178 The Musieeu Quarterly had no impact. Perhaps this can be explained by saying it was a poor work. But on the same program, the most celebrated piece of Western music was performed, one that is understood as explicitly utilizing music to evoke a sense of human solidarity and harmony—the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, written in 1824. Yet it, too, has not brought us peace and harmony, despite its constant repetition. It was chosen again in 1989, with Leonard Bernstein conducting, to celebrate the fall of the Berlin Wall. It had been used nearly a half century earlier, in 1941, to celebrate Hitler's birthday. The conceit behind setting words to music, as in opera, musical theater, secular choral music, and certainly sacred choral music, is that music can reach where ordinary language cannot. Music, used in these settings, seeks to transcend the bounds of language and exploit its limita- tions. Consider, for example, the closing scene of Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, where the countess's words suggest forgiveness of her husband's infidelity, but the musk communicates her inner sensibility, her recogni- tion that love is lost and that betrayal and loneliness are assured as part of her lot in life. This is done wordlessly by the transformation of musical materials set against overt linguistic claims. Furthermore, the genuine appreciation and love for music, including some generous assumptions regarding its communicative powers, are not indications of heightened ethical sensibilities and standards. Consider, for example, the music of Mozart. Stalin loved Mozart. Did that refined taste rein in his capacity for brutality/ My own grandfather recalled hiding in a closet in an overcrowded living space in the Warsaw Ghetto where, like him, others, particularly mothers with children, were desperately trying to elude capture, knowing that the result of discovery was deportation to Auschwitz. The SS officer in charge of that particular raid noticed an upright piano in the room, a rarity in the cthetta While people were hiding, and after having sent dozens to death, he sat down and began to play, gloriously, the music of Schumann, Chopin, and Mozart. Elias Canetti, the Nobel Laureate author, once observed that of all the cliches we repeat, the cruelest is that language fosters communication and understanding. Next in line should be that music is universal and can generate harmony and solidarity across the divides of region, class, reli- gion, ethnicity, and nationality. Consider the case of language. We all have the capacity for language. It defines a unique aspect of our common humanity. So, too, might this be said of music, for which we all may also possess an inherent capacity. Yet though we all speak and have means for translation, neither in public nor in private does language itself— • notwithstanding its universality and our capacity to identify shared elements of syntax, grammar, semantics, and rhetoric that cut across all EFTA01103600  Notes from the Editor 179 • work. languages—necessarily increase the prospects sic was of peace, prosperity, and harmony. Ifindeed speech is action, and if deba oke a te, dialogue, and negotia- tion, not violence and force, can become the central instruments ofpolitics, then language can matter only if we can agree, in ad speech, on shared mean- ings, rules, and procedures. Take, for example, 1, with notions of the principles behind law. At stake is not language per se, all. It but particular languages, used in particular ways, with agreed-upon correspondenc tier's es between meanings and words. Generating these correspondences constitute s an elusive philoso- phical and political task. Reaching human agre rI ement worldwide on such principles has not yet been possible except as hat mere rhetoric Sustaining a shated discount in language —forget . ese music for the time being—has become ever more difficult here in mita- the United States, where words and notions of law, procedure, and lof rights have ceased to reveal basic shared principles and agreements. Ironicall y, at the same time we have witnessed the ever more clever distortion and Vni• manipulation of language, the crafting of euphemisms, jargon, and reductive art of slogans that erode the tenuous connections among language and logic al , clarity, argument, and truth. The dream dour eighteenth-century foun ders of a rational system, in which deliberation, consent, and compromise 'ding along with toleration replace force, is in danger ofbreaking down, not the oft-repeated universality of language notwithstanding. Perhaps language r, for can matter ifconnected with thought and meaning along specific rules taste . Indeed we have little choice but to wish and make it so.'At stake, ther • in a efore, is a special kind of language use, not language as such. ike ag to if Indeed, then, music may not matter, we spea universal phenomenon that is found everywh k only of music as a 0 ere and is enjoyed by all. - There are two forms of music that are today ubiq uitous, or nearly so. John Blacking, the eminent social anthropologis t who spent most of his career teaching at Queen's University (ironically in Belf to ast, a locus ciassicus of how difficult it is, despite a common language , to promote human under- standing) made the argument through emp irical 'all be a universal definitional, perhaps biologica research that music may tion l characteristic of all human beings, and therefore genuinely a "form of life, can " as the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein once put it. Blacking did his field work not in Europe, but in South Africa, among the Venda. What Blacking defined as music was the universa 1011 structures, rhythmic patterns, and rules by whic l creation of pitch F;(1 h these can he changed, organized, and adapted into units of sound that are perceived as meaningful. In short, all humans create an artificial tem poral space, an acoustic realm in which they arrange sounds with duration, ther eby altering the sense of time for themselves and others, away from a dl standard perception of time through measurement, whether by the cloc k or the sun and shifts in light EFTA01103601 180 The Minkal Qumterly and dark. The universal impulse, need, and cognitive capacity for music an that Blacking found to be inherent in all humans to varying degrees can l‘k engage the participation of all in a given society. By this logic, no one is th' unmusical. The specific rules for generating music and for extracting or no changing meaning in response to the sounds that make up the musical Pa= experience are shared by communities and evolve over time, like lan- ha guage. There is, however, no audible universal grammar or pitch struc- str ture, just as there is no universal language. In music, as in language, there me may be shared underlying rules and structures, but no shared content or specific resolutions of the use of pitch and rhythm. And there is no objec- an tive parallelism between sound and image or sound and word signifying tio fixed meanings for music. is This universal phenomenon of and capacity for music are what in me the nineteenth century came to be associated with so-called folk music. Co There is no human conununity without it. In the early 1900s the Hungarian of composer Bela Bart6k studied and documented this tradition in the pre- rat modern rural areas of modern-day Hungary, Slovakia, Romania, and UR' Moldova. Traveling later in his career, after World War I, to northern do Africa, he concluded that perhaps all such folk music shared similar pitch cet structures and rhythmic patterns, and that much of seemingly distinct folk Sn music was interrelated. By the mid-1930s Bart6k, an avowed anti-fascist, the was determined to prove fraudulent the use of folk music to justify chau- sue vinism and invidious European national distinctions. He infuriated right- mil wing Hungarians, still angry at the Treaty of Trianon, by suggesting that mu "their" authentic folk music in logic, sound, and character was no differ- ine ent from and was perhaps derived from Romanian and Slovakian folk mu patterns: they were all migrations, as music, from north Africa. Yet there were those, like the Czech or rather Moravian composer ant Leaf Janacek, who sought a way around Bart6k's argument of a shared me transnational folk music. He developed a specific musical logic for his own prc compositions that derived from the distinctive character of the Czech oni language—what he called speech melodies—to help defend a unique local bet realization of the natural impulse for music through its dependence on the Th variegated character of a particular language usage. In each individual's apj speech and in each dialect there was a palpable music. He was not only a par virulent Czech patriot, but also an enthusiast for pan-Slavism. rep However constructed, this basic, so-called folk musicality has found she its modern mirror image in the second aspect of music that is ubiquitous, if pre not universal—popular commercial music. Its origins are in towns and cities; ties today's popular music is largely an urban extension of rural folk music. mu Popular commercial music is a comparatively recent phenomenon and an as early example of cultural globalization. With the introduction of a stable me EFTA01103602  Notes from the &hear 181 or music and easily distributable means of reproduction of music in Europ a'ees can e and o one is North America at the end of the nineteenth century—first the piano , cting or then the radio arid gramophone, and now the CD and computer—there is now a broad international style, part white American, part African nusical American, e Ian- part Lain American, African, and European. A mthnge of shared elements has emerged in popular songs, dance music, Muzak in airports, and struc- urban street music, and there is a dominant element of Americaniz age, there ation in this modern popular music the world over. ntent or no objec- This has troubled many nationalists. Just as Esperanto never took hold and died a natural death only to cede to English the role of an intern mifying a- tional language, resistance to the perceived loss of authentic local culture is great, whether in France or Iran. In music the enemies of shat in popular com- mercial culture see a sort of global standardization, a musical McDonalds music. or Coca-Cola effect, by which people with access to the communication ungarian systems of modernity acquire by imitation the formulas for musical experi the pre- ences, much as they purchase ready-made food or clothing. Such standa and rdized units of music seem to satisfy their basic need S music. Local communities :them do not alter and change this music decisively. It is controlled by Oar pitch a highly centralized, global, and international music industry located in tinct folk the United States, Germany, and Japan. The industry and its artists sell i-fascist, millions of • these units of music. Each recorded, identical, packaged piece of music fy chim- has succeeded in becoming part of the fabric of emotional self-ex ed right- pression for millions of individuals all over the world. Although this music is ing that more for- mulaic, circumscribed, and uniform than we might like to acknowledg o differ- e, individuals manage to appropriate it and personalize it for themselves, , folk much as they do other consumer products. The question of whether music matters might be more easily [lipase. answered in the affirmative if the power and universality of popular com- hared mercial music could be construed as forces for enlightenment and • his own human progress. But they have not been. In the folk tradition, to create Zech music by oneself was necessary and customary. In its commercialized form, music me local has been reduced to far more passive listening with far less active participation eon the - This essentially twentieth-century form of universal music, . idual's despite its appropriation by individuals as an emotional vehicle, is like fast food: ,t only a pre- pared by others, limited in scope, admirable, safe, easily forgettable and replaceable, and without much transformative power. It is structured is found in short forms, dependent on lyrics and therefore on language• iitous, if Perhaps in premodern times musk making helped define and sustain local comm el cities; uni- ties, but despite the commonality and wide appropriation of commercial .usic. music, we do not have a way to use this widely shared purchase of t and an music as a basis for a new human understanding. The spread of popul stable ar com- mercial music—from pop and dance tunes to varieties of rock, rap, and EFTA01103603 182 The MinicalQuanerly hip-hop—should not be derided either. The criticism of popular commer- nv cial music as somehow inferior or morally troubling seems nonsensical. in The music is of limited duration, it depends on words, and it is subject to as rapid shifts in fashion. Music matters here primarily as commerce, fashion, of and entertainment, no mean achievement, and requires very little active th engagement beyond pushing a button on a piece of technology and ex perhaps kareoke and dancing. It does no great good but by the same T1 token cannot be said to do much harm. ta This is not to say that there are not great, better and lesser, and ar quite poor examples ofpopular music. The observations about commercial e) music are not aesthetic condemnations. It is hard to write good music in in any genre; there is genius in popular commercial music, as in all fields of Sc music. But as to the question of whether music matters in terms of ethics tit and politics and bettering human understanding, neither folk nor com- et mercial music—the most widespread music—has mattered, just as little T as our witnessing someone speaking a language not our own (and ironic- ally, even our own) creates a sense of solidarity and empathy. Music, of like language, seems to fail to evoke a version of Jean-Jacques Rousseau's al pre-moral awareness of compassion based on the natural empathy that Pt should derive from the observation of our common human capacities and ct vulnerabilities. T So, if these two most common and popular forms ofmusic do not matter, is there a music that does, and, if so, why? Indeed, there may be. In each civilization—in China, in India, and in the West—just as in tl speech and language, humans have developed a counterintuitive dimen- si sion of music. That counterintuitive dimension goes beyond the folk, the it popular, the easy, the evident, and the natural. It goes beyond short forms, ri beyond entertainment and commerce. Much like science and mathematics, v. this music extends beyond the obvious and often contradicts what we IT think of as straightforward, self-evident, and true. The earth is, after all, p not flat, and objects of different masses fall at the same rate, as Galileo v proved. Our planet revolves around the sun, not the other way around, c though we might be led by common sense to think otherwise. Our DNA u shows that we are more similar to one another than we are different, 0 despite our notions of race and our obsessions with skin color and the p geometry of a face. There are negative numbers but no absolute numbers It in nature. The music that may matter may sound different from the folk and the commercial; its materials and rules might seem, on the surface, to contradict the commonplace. The world of science and mathematics is often arcane and seemingly abstract. In the case of mathematics, the questions and answers frequently have no practical application. In music in all cultures, systems of making EFTA01103604  Notes from the Editor 183 music designed for long stretches of time, measured in minutes, hours, and in some cases days, using the human voice, instruments alone or in groups as in the gamelan or the Western orchestra, have extended the complexity of musical expectations, syntax, and semantics. In each civilization this music is expressive but artificial. It extends well beyond natural experience, beyond any obvious correspondence with external reality. These extended systems of music may use basic elements from the folk tradition, just as philosophy and literature derive from ordinary speech, and confront simple, essential issues. The elaborate systems of music exhibit debts to folk origins in terms of pitch relations, definitions of tim- ing and tuning, and the determination of microtonalities. They are, in some cases, notated. These musics may have no clear relationship to, dependence on, or correspondence with language. They are not always easily understandable, but they are enjoyable on many levels of response. This is the same in science. So, too, in language. When one gravitates beyond everyday speech (to poetry, for instance), one becomes less reliant on common experiences of language. Yet philosophy and poetry exist for all, even though plumbing their depths becomes the province of a few. Poetry and philosophy are experienced in language that requires literacy, contemplation, a puzzle solving-like skill, and discipline to engage it fully. The music of this sort contains a capacity to sustain its allure and mystery despite close, constant analysis and regular revisits over generations. Complex musical systems are not only intricate and sophisticated; they, more than visual art or literature, have practically no evident corre- spondence or parallelism with nature. These systems actually create new imaginary worlds that we could not have anticipated, a new kind of expe- rience that is absolutely meaningless and has no practical purpose. It is a world full of mystery and entirely unpredictable. It has no fixed and locatable meaning. Artificiality in this arena of music is extreme, well beyond the province of mathematics and science. This sort of music has no truth- value. It can never be judged to do something right (e.g., expressing a concrete proposition of fact or value) or say something true. This music is utterly without meaning in the ordinary sense of the word. The ascription of meaning requires an active leap of interpretation by the individual participant and listener, even if that leap is guided by inherited and learned cultural habits. What is important about this category of music is that its attraction is transferable beyond linguistic and religious enclaves. Composers have used this kind of music across cultural barriers. The American composer Colin McPhee appropriated Indonesian music, and today composers Bright Sheng and Tan Dun seek to integrate the traditions of the Far East with the West. But precisely because this music has no fixed meaning or EFTA01103605 184 The Musical Quarterly significance, it has no authenticity. In recent decades what we call Western classical music has been enjoyed, played, studied, and produced in Korea a and Japan. We may consider it Western, but this is only a conceit. The a music played belongs only to the makers and listeners in the time and space of realization. History does not stick to music as it does to painting 1 and literature. By the same token, fine American gamelan ensembles are ii American phenomena, not Indonesian. Complex systems of music as ii objects of performance and listening have no stable meanings, cannot be owned, and permit of no permanent national identifies. Despite the intricate nature of these noncommercial forms of music—what some call art music—something in them frequently turns out to be connected to a folk tradition or a commercial pattern. The con- stituent ideas that make up the complex fabric of music often come from simple models. Johannes Brahms, the great nineteenth-century German composer living in Vienna, once observed that his proteg4 and friend, the Czech Antonin Dvorak, had the greatest talent for inventing melodies, and that those melodies actually sounded like folk music. The hardest thing in nineteenth-century instrumental composition was to write a great melody; in Brahms's view, composers had every reason to envy the ideas Dvotak discarded. Furthermore, because it lacks truth-value and fixed meaning, this sort ofmusic, divorced from language and image and of long duration (as in the symphonies of Haydn or Bruckner or the instrumental works of Chopin or Sessions), is not better or worse, right or wrong, in the ordinary senses. Aesthetic judgments can be justified within a system, but to extend the aesthetic debate to the ethical and the political, from the beautiful to the good, is wishful thinking except on the most speculative level, despite the 5 pleadings of eighteenth-century British and German philosophers. This form ofmusic is, as will come as no surprise, the sort that occupies me here in the United States and in Israel, both nations mired in conflict, internal tension, and violence, and both the objects of worldwide criticism. Does this third type of music—the elaborate, extended, artificial expres- sions spun out of a basic human capacity to create music—matter in these troubled contexts? Ironically, it does. Why? Because of its essentially opaque, elusive, and dense nature and its absence of meaning. Nothing else in human activity is quite like it. Unlike science, music is useless and cannot lead to any concrete end. It can compel and engage both the few and the many, whether in India, Indonesia, China, or Europe and North America. But it cannot be appropriated by power or ideology. Therefore, this music can inadvertently bring people otherwise in conflict together at the sante time and place without conflict. "IeractalellIONNINIIIIMICIIIINneerez=temt , EFTA01103606  Notts from the Editor 185 U Western in Korea One of the great things about this music is that it is entirely imaginary ,it. The and divorced from the quotidian. It is boundless, unpredictable, untam- to and able. What meanings ft assumes are contained in a particular mome nt in time. On the one hand, it is emotional and intense; on the other, it painting is neutral. bles are The writing or improvising of such music reminds one of the gift of one's is as individuality, the importance of time defined exclusively in terms of individual life and therefore the specter of mortality. Musicians can innot be enlarge or reduce the experience of time and intensify it. For those ofus who of reproduce it, we remake it, creating moments with meaning that never return but can be emulated. We retain only what we remember of the passin f CUTS g experience. In music there is no precise repetition, for it is the sequence The con- of events that counts; in practice, in what sounds the same, sameness me from disap- pears as the sequence occurs. The first and the last repetitions will never Ionian be or sound the same. In notated music we use a shorthand that signifi end, the es a so-called repetition, but there is really none. In nonwtitten forms, impro lodies, - visation and ornamentation can never be entirely duplicated. And when it iciest comes to the realization of notated music in performance, in Western en great music there is no such thing as the complete, right, or perfect interp .e ideas reta- tion of a score. The transaction is always with a specific community that plays and hears the music at a single time and place. Judgments arc subjec this sort - tive and temporary. The residue ofmusic sustains itself as personal Is in the memory. Indeed, music creates an arena of memory that is individual and insula opin or ted from political power and reaches beyond language and image. ses. the This leads me finally to what matters with respect to this type of imaginary, complex, and counterintuitive music. For the listeners, :o the the creator, and the performers, this music sustains the wonderment and te the sanctity of every human agency and existence. We each experience some- thing unimaginable and inexpressible that we make our own. The more ccupies complex and refined the music seems, the more diverse the ascription onflict, of its significance. There is no right way to listen and understand. Under cism. periods of dictatorship, art music has been one of the few provinces of xpres- freedom inherently protected from governments and the willful use of a these .power. Under Hitler and Stalin, public gatherings to listen to music reminded audiences of that which tyranny could not steal—one's private sive, world—that from which no torture could elicit a confession and where an there were no lies or truths. In the period ofMetternich's rule after the ead to fall ofNapoleon, the public performance ofmusic was one of the few arenas of nay, activity where the public could gather without coming under suspicion, But it where people could show emotion and response without betraying so-called can meaning in public that was within the reach of censorship. The mean e time ing- lessness, the lack of utility, the instability, and yet the complexity and significance of the extended complex musical experience are its virtue s EFTA01103607  186 The Musical Quarterly and powers in a peri