There is a small music library in Berlin whose ordering system never ceases to fascinate me. Music theory texts written before 1800 are assigned to broad historical categories, each lumping together several centuries under the general label ‘theory’. There is no category, however, for books after 1800. After that watershed year, all pretensions to historical periods have been dropped. The ordering system suddenly fans out into systematic disciplinary subdivisions of harmony, counterpoint, melody and general composition. It is difficult to miss the implied message that the disciplines of the tonal period are not only ‘common practice’, but they also have a continuous aesthetic presence in music theory that transcends time and evades historical classification. Post-tonal terms follow somewhat awkwardly as an appendage, including categories such as electronic music, twelve-tone music and serialism. Can we—should we—understand this classification system as a comment on the relation between music theory and contemporary composition? Do we really inhabit an endless nineteenth century of tonal music?
The curiously fractured library system reminds me of the fabled Chinese Encyclopedia from Jorge Luis Borges's famous essay, ‘The Analytical Language of John Wilkins’, which divides the animal kingdom into a vast array of diverse, seemingly incoherent, and somehow charming categories:
| a. | those that belong to the Emperor, | ||||
| b. | embalmed ones, | ||||
| c. | those that are trained, | ||||
| d. | suckling pigs, | ||||
| e. | mermaids, | ||||
| f. | fabulous ones, | ||||
| g. | stray dogs, | ||||
| h. | those included in the present classification, | ||||
| i. | those that tremble as if they were mad, | ||||
| j. | innumerable ones, | ||||
| k. | those drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, | ||||
| l. | others, | ||||
| m. | those that have just broken a flower vase, | ||||
| n. | those that from a long way off look like flies. | ||||
The difficulty of approaching recent music with a useful set of categories is the central concern of Catherine Hirata's poetic and intensely analytical contribution to this issue. Each new sound we hear in Morton Feldman's Durations 2, she argues, challenges us to rethink its relation to what has come before. Each new sound takes our listening experience into a radically new direction, opening up ever new dimensions of listening, continually redrawing the boundaries between our understanding of identity and difference, and between continuity and discontinuity. Out of the radical discontinuities of Durations 2, which ask us to question ourselves at every corner, arises a new continuity. What Hirata proposes in her essay is no less than a new mode of perception, one that leaves behind cherished principles of Gestalt psychology and embraces the music's subtle multi-dimensionality in new and productive ways.
Hirata's analysis also highlights concern for a factor that in fact none of the articles in this issue take for granted: there is no abstract ‘work’ that is subjugated to theorization. Hirata makes her analytical observations apropos of a particular realization of the piece by Frances-Marie Uitti and Nils Vigeland. Similarly, Martin Scherzinger's culturally and musically sensitive contribution to this issue analyzes not so much György Ligeti's piano etudes per se as rather a specific instantiation of these pieces: he examines the cultural, political and musical contexts that are unlocked by the juxtaposition of Ligeti's etudes with Steve Reich's music and songs of the Aka pygmies from the Central African Republic. Work and context—figure and background—are inextricably held together in the digital codes of a CD recording on which this meeting of minds is captured—so much so that it may become difficult to say which part was figure and which was background. Commentators noted, always at the peril of cultural or political naivety, how the conventional patterns of hearing break down in this juxtaposition: the bodily music of the Aka highlights the physicality of Ligeti's etudes, while Ligeti's technical intricacies further underscore the rhythmic complexities of the African music. African and European music seem to move closer together, at least momentarily on the iridescent space of the CD. Can we draw strict boundaries between sameness and difference in the musical realm?
Scherzinger probes these perceived African features further, holding the procedures underlying Ligeti's etudes up against polyrhythmic techniques of various African traditions and shows, on the basis of sketch materials and detailed analytical work, how tangible musical features simultaneously underscore and undermine the idea of Africa that is at work in the Ligeti/Reich: African Rhythms project. Scherzinger does not do us the favor of offering facile synthesis, but instead juxtaposes African music with Ligeti's procedures without subjugating one to the other.
If Scherzinger shows that the African context can serve to make the familiar strange, then Robert Hasegawa uses Ligeti to make the strange more familiar. Hasegawa proposes a model of hearing that mediates between the physical givens of the overtone series and the post-tonal languages of Ligeti and Gérard Grisey. He urges us to reconsider a sensual notion of chords based on justly intoned intervals, as opposed to the mathematically derived equal temperament. What was a ‘chord of nature’ in nineteenth-century music theory can now be conceptualized in the psychophysical realm as what might be called a ‘chord of listening’. In detailed analytical observations, Hasegawa approaches passages from Ligeti's Melodien and Gérard Grisey's Vortex Temporum and invites us to hear long expanses of diverse and seemingly disconnected material as types of chords, based on an extended notion of tonal harmonics that stretch into the microtonal realm. With Hasegawa's powerful model of the microtonal chord, the step from tonal to post-tonal music seems small, or even non-existent. Hasegawa connects to models going back to Hindemith and Riemann, but they could easily be pursued back to Rameau in the establishment of what amounts to a microtonal basse fondamentale. In music theory, as well as in composition, it seems, tonality is very much up for debate again. Perhaps the library ordering system in Berlin was making a strong point, after all.
The persistence of tonal structures in contemporary composition is also a starting point of Ian Quinn's thought-provoking reflection on the intriguing problem minimal music poses to music analysis—that it does not, at first sight, seem to offer the slightest resistance to our conventional analytical tools. Is this music even worthy of analysis?—Several critics are worried. As with the Chinese Encyclopedia, however, this curious circumstance should invite reflection on the nature of our toolkit. It is not so much the music that is dull as our blunt analytical tools that need to be honed anew to respond better to the particular features of minimal music. In this, he employs a topical pairing from recent musicological discussion: Quinn counters recent criticisms against formalism as ‘gnostic’ (interpretive) by making a plea for a ‘drastic’—experiential—form of analysis, in real-time, of minimal music. Again, as in the Chinese Encyclopedia, the two categories of ‘drastic’ and ‘gnostic’ reveal themselves not to be mutually exclusive, but overlapping and reconcilable. It is only a matter of perspective, and of rethinking the categories.
Quinn's plea for a renewed, ‘experiential’ kind of formalism sums up the tendencies that underlie all the articles in this issue. All four contributors move away from the classic questions music theory has sought to answer—How does it work? Or, as the late Derrick Puffett would have said: How is it made? Instead, the guiding questions are always formulated around the listening experience, which is thoroughly theorized: How do we hear this music? What do we do with it? Central to all theoretical projects here is the theorist's interactive engagement of music—theoretical models arise at the interstices between theorist-listener and musical experience.
This is a far cry from the stereotyped formula of Schenker-plus-pitch-class-set that supposedly characterized music theory of a former age. (To be fair, this was probably only ever true in the polemical exchanges between Taruskin and Forte in the 1980s.) If there is one common theme within the diversity of these articles, it is a shift from an interest in poetics to an interest in aesthetics—from music-as-written to music-as-heard. This does not necessarily mean an out-and-out embrace of phenomenology or cognitive science, but it might be a step away from the inextricable unity of the composer and theorist that had set the scene for academic music theory in the United States since the 1950s. This is not to say that, as theorists part ways with composers, the two stand in hostile opposition. Rather, the two come together in ever new formations and with fresh complementary interests.
Practicing music theory today, then, seems to mean primarily to theorize the mutual relationship between music and the listener. What this means is no less than that for each theoretical project these fundamental positions are rethought and worked into the analysis. What exactly the listening act entails, and what constitutes the musical object, needs to be decided in each instance and yields such different results, as we see in each of these articles. The theorist interpolates himself or herself: as a listener, as an analyst-in-realtime, as a psychophysicist, or as a conduit between musical cultures. The common thread linking all of the articles is an affirmation of the pleasure of listening as a central concern. It is by no means coincidental that there is a renewed theoretical interest in the sensual aspects of music, as Hasegawa and Quinn stress in their essays. Perhaps the time has come for music theory to heed Susan Sontag's call, in her Against Interpretation, for an erotics of art.
What comes to the fore in all the articles is that we cannot fully extricate ourselves from our previous listening experiences. Nor should we necessarily do that. In this sense, the questions of music since 1800 could still be very much a matter of discussion. If we start with our listening experience, and not some however-conceived force of history, perhaps there is something right about the curious ordering system in the Berlin music library—after all, we are still thoroughly steeped in music since 1800, whether we like it or not. And its lingering aesthetic presence can still determine how we hear music. The library presents one possible order, one way of thinking about music, and it is not necessarily the worst one. The real point, however, is that the music we listen to and care about deserves that we do not solely rely on what is given but that we approach it with categories that may even be specifically designed for it. In the service of the pleasure of music, we should feel empowered to reorder the shelves of the library in a way that helps us and others make sense of it.