Theory of music or theory of musical creation?

Transcription

1 Theory of music or theory of musical creation? NICHOLAS COOK University of Southampton

2 2 There is one point in his writings where Heinrich Schenker starts telling the reader exactly how Beethoven himself played a particular passage in the first movement of Beethoven's Op. 14, No. 2 (Rothstein, 1984, p. 19). The effect is strange: how, you want to ask, does Schenker know? And yet there is a literary device in the analysis and criticism of music that is even stranger, but so familiar that we hardly notice it: it takes the form of the statement that 'Mozart (Beethoven, Brahms, Schoenberg) writes (decides, adds, changes) ', usually coupled to an explanation of what he intended in doing so. Conjuring up through its present tense the image of the composer working before you, this device represents just the tip of a submerged discourse of creative activity that underlies everyday analytical descriptions of music. And it is found not only in the context of explicit, though perforce rarely unsubstantiated, accounts of the compositional process, but also in the very vocabulary of analytical description: the term 'motive', for instance, constructs the image either of a composer who wills the music, or more extravagantly of the music willing itself (as in Schenker's frequent references to the 'will of tones'). To be sure, such terminology is cognate with the more neutral 'motif' of the visual arts, but its psychological implications will escape nobody who has read the work of Rudoph Réti, Hans Keller, or Anton Ehrenzweig and it is perhaps no coincidence that all of these writers, like Schenker, were long-term residents of the same city as Sigmund Freud. Today, Schenker's analytical system is the most familiar in which an implicit creative orientation plays a foundational role. This orientation explains the basic direction of Schenkerian theory, which is not analytical at all: that is, it does not work through a process of reduction from music to underlying principles. Rather, Schenker begins with the underlying principles, or at least with their concretion in the shape of the Ursatz, and follows the shape of their elaboration (or 'prolongation') into specific pieces of music; the theory is not one of analysis but of synthesis. In other words, it is predicated on a 'composer's-eye' view, however idealized, and this explains not only Schenker's then unusual interest in sketch studies but also his insistence on the creative vision, the moment of authority in which great works of music come into being: as early as 1894 he wrote that In the literature of music there are works that came about in such a way that within the endless chaos of fantasy the lightning flash of a thought suddenly crashed down, at once illuminating and creating the entire work in the most dazzling light. Such works were conceived and received in one stroke, and the whole fate of their creation, life, growth, and end already designated in the first seed. (1) Such accounts of the creative process in music, for many years mistakenly attributed to Mozart and Beethoven (Solomon 1988), resonate throughout the analytical literature, and link it with the eighteenth-century concept of the creative 'genius', itself modelled largely on traditional theological accounts of divine Creation (Kivy 1993). For theologians, God transcended time and so grasped synoptically what humans can experience only as a temporal succession. This is the model of Schenker's genius-composer,

3 3 the authentically creative individual who directly grasps the 'tonal space' of the musical background and so transmutes it through the compositional devices of prolongation into perceptible sound and who is thereby distinguished from the non-genius, the perhaps talented but fundamentally uncreative individual who remains bound to the musical surface, plodding on from one note to another. When Schenker said that 'there are works' conceived instantaneously, his purpose was to draw a line between these the works of genius and all others, and he was quite clear that his theory was not a theory of music as such: it was a theory of musical masterworks, or perhaps more accurately expressed, a theory of creative mastery in music. As in other respects, then, Schenker's approach drew on the complex convergence of ideas that gave rise, around 1800, to the modern concept of the musical work, (2) and with it a basic aesthetic attitude borrowed from the literary and fine arts: to understand music is (in Stephen Davies's (2001) phrase) to understand it as the work of its creator. Analysis contributes to such understanding by helping the music-lover towards a reexperiencing of the creative act, albeit at second hand; it is no surprise that the first serious steps in sketch study, taken by Gustav Nottebohm in the second half of the nineteenth century, coincide with the high point of this Romantic aesthetic. (3) And again the religious metaphor is telling: Schenker sometimes compared the analyst's role to that of a priest, making accessible to the wider community a truth otherwise reserved in the one case to composers, and in the other to mystics. This intimate link between musical creation and analysis is complicated by a reaction against the biographical and even anecdotal shape which Romantic interest in composers frequently took a reaction in fact spearheaded by Schenker (whose later thinking was an unstable blend of Romanticism and neue Sachlichkeit). Animating Schenker's work as a whole is an insistence on the autonomy of music, the need for understanding it in its own terms; where a modern reader of Schenker may be struck by the vestiges of Romantic metaphysics in his thought, many contemporary readers were struck by the almost mathematical jargon of his writing, and to this extent the 'objectivist' approaches of such post theorists as Milton Babbitt and Allen Forte follow in the same tradition. There is an obvious parallel with the anti-contextualism of the 'New Criticism' in literary studies, and the associated attack on the 'genetic fallacy'; the controversial claim advanced by the Beethoven scholar Douglas Johnson (1978), that reconstructing the creative process tells you nothing about the music, was an explicit attempt to cut away the alliance that had been forged between analysis and the study of musical creation. There is an obvious sense in which all this represents a turn away from an aesthetic interest in musical works as the works of their creators, in favour of understanding them as simply what they are, that is, texts. My argument, however, is that such appearances are deceptive. As shown by the very success of Schenker's own method in North America, as well as by attempts (for instance by Forte and by William Drabkin) to link it specifically with the compositional process as revealed by Beethoven's sketches, analysis remained wedded not only to the values epitomized by the postulate of creative genius vision, innovation, personal authenticity but also to an essentially compositional conception of music. In other words, it was still assumed

4 4 that an adequate understanding of music meant embracing the underlying conceptual framework of its creation, and it was analysis that revealed that framework. One might say that the idea of compositional intentionality remained in place even after attention had shifted from composer to text. Some thirty years ago, in his inaugural lecture at the University of Cambridge, the composer Alexander Goehr likened the idea of muzak to composing 'backwards'. By this he meant that you start with an intended effect (in the case of muzak, a temporal profile of excitation associated with high levels of productivity), and work backwards to the musical organization through which this may be achieved. The relationship between music and muzak is worth pursuing in a little more detail. For one thing, just as there is a theory of music so there is a theory of muzak, an explicitly psychological literature (much of it commissioned by Planned Music Inc, the inventors of Muzak) to set against the multiplicity of epistemologies that underpin the theory of music. On the other hand, a culture of muzak (and this applies equally to popular, classical, and early muzak) would be less like the cultures of literature or the fine arts than those of scents, wines, or other examples of material culture: not an art as traditionally defined but, in essence, a technology for the creation of certain predetermined effects. Hanslick, after all, advanced the claim of music to be an art precisely on the difference between the aesthetic understanding it elicits and such basic attitudinal states as inebriation, and a wide range of twentieth-century writers ranging from T. W. Adorno to Roger Sessions to Stuart Hampshire defined responsible musical listening in terms of an active engagement with the compositional values of music values, that is, which work 'forward' from compositional organization to resultant effect. But can so clear a line really be drawn between music and muzak, between composing forwards and backwards, or is there perhaps an element of muzak in all music? In my book Music, Imagination, and Culture (1990), I brought forward a range of evidence that many listeners listen to much music most of the time in what Walter Benjamin called a 'distracted' state, that is to say one of passive and predominantly moment-to-moment reception rather than active and purposive engagement, and that one of the reasons people value music is the all-encompassing, oceanic, even coercive quality that this gives to the listening experience. And Rose Subotnik's (1988) brilliant study of 'structural listening' has complemented this with an analysis of the ideological underpinnings of the attitude of active aesthetic engagement with which musical analysis has been identified ever since its emergence in a recognizably modern form at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In effect the result has been a mismatch between academic representations of music and its everyday consumption, which the project of 'structural listening' attempted to rectify by making listening habits conform to academic prescriptions. Nowadays the position advocated by Adorno, Sessions and Hampshire may well look old-fashioned and elitist, perpetuating outmoded and undesirable distinctions between the creativity of the few and the non-creativity of the many, (4) but there is a prominent contemporary theorist whose work forms an instructive parallel. Fred Lerdahl (1988) has advocated a similar convergence between compositional and perceptual categories,

5 5 but via a different route: instead of trying to align habits of listening with academic prescriptions, he has argued that 'compositional grammar' should conform to 'listening grammar' and analysis is now identified with the latter. (It is telling that in either case it is analysis towards which convergence should take place.) There is also a second complication about drawing a clear line between music and muzak, which I can explain through a comparison with the culture of wine. While there is only a very marginal interest in wine as the work of its creator, its everyday enjoyment is certainly not limited to what Hanslick termed the 'pathological' level. If the enjoyment of wine (and scents, and car design, and fashion) is not to be called 'aesthetic', that is because of a prevailingly narrow definition of that term rather than because of any limitation in the contribution of such enjoyment to quality of life. And whereas the idea of a 'theory of wine' parallel to that of music may seem strange or pretentious, there is certainly a discursive language through which the enjoyment of wine may be shared, interrogated, or critiqued. I am referring for instance to the language of the newspaper wine critics, who evoke the qualities of a particular grape, blend, or product through an extravagantly metaphorical vocabulary. When critics refer to lashings of gooseberry or chocolatey undernotes, nobody thinks they are saying that the wine-maker has adulterated the product: they are describing attributes of taste and aroma, and in a highly stylized manner. In formal terms their discourse sets out causes from which effects are derived, but we understand it in metaphorical or fictive terms and it is worth pointing out that this critical language has at best an extremely indirect relationship to the technical discourses of wine-making (particularly among those who treat it as more a science than an art, notably the Australians). In saying this I mean, of course, to suggest that much the same applies to music. The kind of hermeneutic commentary that seeks to understand music as the work of its composer as speaking, so to speak, with its composer's voice is most closely associated with the nineteenth century, and in particular the reception of Beethoven's 'heroic' style (the values of which, as Scott Burnham (1995, p. 288) has claimed, became seen as the values of music in general). But, as I have already indicated, it continued underground in twentiethcentury analytical commentaries that bracketed the composer but retained the idea of compositional intentionality. Such commentaries are vulnerable to the standard critique of intentionality: that we cannot know intentions except by deducing them from actions, so that the appeal intentions is an empty rhetorical device. Or to put it another way, the language of compositional intentions is a fictive one, part and parcel of what Shibuya Masako (2000) calls the 'compositional persona' a metaphorical construction that may be closely or less closely aligned with the historical composer. but that in either case regulates and coordinates the understanding of music by constituting it as an entity with which listeners engage almost in the manner of an interpersonal transaction. I draw two conclusions from this. First, it has for at least two centuries been normative within the culture of Western 'art' music that we seek to understand it in terms of its creation and motivation, but this interest is not in essence a factual or historical one: it is rather a fictive means of regulating and representing our responses to the music's phenomenal

6 6 qualities and the meaning that we discover in (or project into) it. (5) Second, to say that we seek to understand music in this way is no justification for erecting an impermeable barrier between the aesthetic enjoyment of art (including music) on the one side, and the hedonism of material culture on the other. As social beings we seek to represent our experiences to one another (and even to ourselves), and I have invoked the culture of wine as an example of the discursive web within which such forms of enjoyment are situated. The radically metaphorical discourse of the wine critic, constructing a kind of fictive, parallel universe to the essentially ineffable experiences of taste and smell, is perhaps a representation in miniature of the epistemological convolutions through which the fundamentally physical and affective experience of music has been accommodated within a logocentric culture. And at this point I return, by way of a third and final conclusion, to the positions advocated by Adorno, Sessions and Hampshire on the one hand, and Lerdahl on the other. In essence the former want listening, and the latter composition, to conform with analysis because they all see analysis as embodying the real 'causes' of musical 'effects'. (Lerdahl's use of the term 'grammar' makes this particularly clear.) If instead we see analysis as a form of metaphorical discourse, then the telling distinction is between those times and places where compositional and theoretical conceptions have coincided, as was generally the case during the so called common-practice period, and those where they have not. After all, the very question as to how far we have a theory of music or a theory of musical creation is one that can only arise when there is a generally perceived divergence between the two, and that divergence is a basic component in the culture of 'art' music today.

7 7 Addres for correspondence: NICHOLAS COOK Research Professor of Music Music Department University of Southampton Highfield Southampton SO17 1BJ UK

8 8 Notes (1) Translated from Schenker's 'Eugen d'albert' (Die Zukunft, 9, 6 October 1894, p. 33) in Keiler (1989), p (2) See Goehr (1992), but note that subsequent commentators have traced essential features of the work concept back as far as the sixteenth century. (3) While for purposes of this paper I concentrate on Schenker, because of the currency that his approach still enjoys, a fuller account would emphasize the way in which his creative orientation drew on nineteenth-century theorists and composition teachers (for the pedagogy of composition is also part of the story) from A. B. Marx on. (4) Although I do not have space to explore this in the present context, I would link this socially divisive approach to creativity with the textualist orientation of traditional musicology, according to which music's meaning is inherent in the score, simply waiting to be reproduced by performers and received by listeners. One of the great advantages of reception- and interpretation-based historiographies is that they articulate the creativity of all participants in musical culture. (5) Of course it is a premise of social constructionism that socially agreed fictions become themselves a species of social fact, but there is still a difference between such social facts and historical ones; this is essentially the argument that Alasdair MacIntyre, following Wittgenstein, advanced in relation to Freudian psychotherapy (MacIntyre, 1958). A musical parallel might be the distinction between the lack of perceptual underpinning for the phenomenon of large-scale tonal closure and its undoubted importance as a 'social fact' of common-pracice musical culture.

9 9 References Burnham, S. (1995). Beethoven Hero. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Cook, N. (1990). Music, Imagination, and Culture. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Davies, S. (2001). Musical Works and Performances. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Goehr, L. (1992). The Imaginary Museum of Musical Works: An Essay in the Philosophy of Music. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Johnson, D. (1978). Beethoven scholars and Beethoven's sketches. 19th-Century Music, 2, Keiler, A. (1989). The origins of Schenker's thought: how man is musical. Journal of Music Theory, 33, Kivy, P. (1993). Mozart and monotheism: an essay in spurious aesthetics. In Kivy, P., The Fine Art of Repetition: Essays in the Philosophy of Music (pp ). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Lerdahl, F. (1988). Cognitive constraints on compositional systems. In Sloboda, J. (ed.), Generative Processes in Music: The Psychology of Performance, Improvisation, and Composition (pp ). Oxford: Clarendon Press. MacIntyre, A. (1958). The Unconscious: A Conceptual Analysis, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Rothstein, W. (1984). Heinrich Schenker as an interpreter of Beethoven's piano sonatas. 19th- Century Music, 8, Shibuya, M. (2000). Construction of the compositional persona in modern musical cultures. MPhil thesis, University of Southampton. Solomon, M. (1988). On Beethoven's creative process: a two-part invention. Beethoven Essays. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, Subotnik, R. (1988). Toward a deconstruction of structural listening: a critique of Schoenberg, Adorno, and Stravinsky. In Narmour, E. and Solie, R. (eds.), Explorations in Music, the Arts, and Ideas: Essays in Honor of Leonard B. Meyer (pp ). New York: Pendragon.