What passes for scholarship these days: Introduction, part one

So in another life, ages ago, I wrote this thing called a dissertation, in support of a doctoral degree that I currently get approximately zero material use out of.

Truth be told, I almost dropped out of grad school after a few years. Mostly I became tired of the sort of political maneuvering that seems to afflict all big institutions -- in my naivete I had pursued grad school in the first place because my undergrad experience had suggested that higher education was a way out of the backstabbing pettiness of everyday life. I thought that if a career in academia could help me to escape that drama, well, then, that was something I could devote myself to. The problem, I soon discovered, was that it couldn't. And so I couldn't.

Of course, it didn't help that grad school, with its impossible workload, also forced the first real "break" I have ever had from music, in the sense that I didn't have time for a band, let alone for composition. I had just survived the very disorienting breakup of the Evelyn Situation -- another reason I was willing to even attempt an academic career in the first place -- but what I thought was a third degree burn turned out to be just a mild suntan. I soon found myself longing to be back in a band environment, surrounded by the kind of people I could relate to most directly.

Instead of quitting grad school, however, I ended up accidentally writing a paper on player pianos, which led me by chance to meet a completely laid-back, supportive, and irreverent professor, who became a completely laid-back, supportive, and irreverent advisor -- the "laid-back," "supportive, and "irreverent" parts were key -- and who encouraged me to explore, in academic terms, the very subject that most of the rest of the faculty had threatened to stifle in me. I was, to be sure, in an English department, and so I suppose I had no business writing about music. But this professor -- himself a musician and music fan -- thought otherwise. And before long I found myself ABD -- but even more importantly, I found myself writing music and leading a band again. Yet another example of how "it's all about who you know" -- cuz if I hadn't found the prof in question, I really would have just quit. Instead I ended up making music, thinking about music, reading about music, and writing about music all the time: not a bad place to be.

Anyway, I have recently had several requests to share the resulting intellectual mess, and since I'm fairly sure I'll never publish it any other way, I figured, why not the blog? The online format may not be ideally suited to the long form at hand, but I think I can make a go of it. I'll try, anyway.

So this here is the first installment of a series that will finally get the whole damned thing out there for public consumption. I'm going to more or less present it verbatim, though I'm sure my thinking has changed in some ways since I originally wrote it (between 1998 and 2004). I'm going to resist the urge to edit anything, cuz if I started doing that -- well, I'd end up writing a whole new book, and I don't want to do that right now.

Enjoy, if you can!

* * * * *

Decomposition: A Critique of Musical Authorship and Authenticity

Introduction

There are so many approaches to listening to music, and music has been designed in so many ways to meet these approaches, that some ethnomusicologists have declared that there is no universal phenomenon of music. (Jourdain 239)

The title of this book comes from the old joke about what Beethoven is doing these days. It’s a cheap laugh, to be sure, but the punchline (“decomposing!”) provides a nice summary of my purpose here. For it is my contention that the valorization of musical composition so typically associated with a figure like Beethoven has a way of drawing attention away from the processes that produce music—not the creative processes of the individual composer (most composers are only too happy to talk about how they work) but the deeper, less obvious contributions of more ambiguous and complex actors like society and technology. As a social construct, “composition” encourages listeners to focus on the end result of the musical experience without getting too far into an important question: what exactly is music?

Decomposition, then, is an attempt to respond to this problem. In particular, my method is to critique two of the key concepts that underpin the social construction of composition: authorship and authenticity. The former concept, also known as the myth of the romantic author, is the idea that an artwork is entirely the creation of a solitary genius (1). The latter is the ideal belief in an “aesthetically true” experience of music, whether that be through a recording, performance, score, or transcription.

In modern times these concepts have helped transform the cultural perception of music from an amorphous, complex process into a concrete and clearly defined commodity. This objectification of music—looking at a composition as if it were a chair, a doorknob, a pizza—is in fact a vital aspect of the modern music industry. And it may be a distinctly western phenomenon as well (2). As Christopher Small puts it in Music of the Common Tongue, westerners (Small focuses on Europeans but his comments could apply equally to most Americans) tend “to think of music primarily in terms of entities, which are composed by one person and performed to listeners by another” (qtd. in Frith 137). Compare that with the African view (for instance), in which music is “action” or “process” (137).

The idea that music—traditionally considered, along with poetry, to be the most ethereal and least “material” of the arts—has been reified in modern times is not new. (I am here using the definition of reification as “the reduction in capitalist society of, for example, a human being, a work of art, or even an idea to a material object” (Rosen).) Evan Eisenberg, in his provocative The Recording Angel (the first chapter of which is called “Music Becomes a Thing”), argues that before recording technology, music resisted commodification. While, depending on his or her means, a music fan could purchase a piano, a concert ticket, a score, these things did not signal the “acquisition” of music as directly as a 78 rpm record or a compact disc later would. But while Eisenberg seems to place the responsibility for this process squarely with the invention of recording itself, I argue that authorship and authenticity—concepts predating recording technology, though eventually exacerbated by it—are equally, if not more responsible. These concepts, in my view, have more to do with the aforementioned “reification” of music than the mere fact that nowadays music predominantly takes the form of recordings that are bought and sold in a commercial network.

Granted, there are a number of practical reasons for the process of commodifying or objectifying music. First, it makes talking about music easier (also one of the functions of the “canon” principle in western art). Being able to pinpoint an individual author to whom a work can be “entirely” attributed (i.e., the romantic author) or being able to isolate a single, clearly-defined and “true” work (i.e., an authentic work) is certainly more linguistically efficient and elegant than having to talk about music as an ongoing negotiation between artists, producers, audiences and contexts. And this is particularly true now. Despite the oft-lamented disappearance of Victorian amateur musical culture, in late-twentieth-century America the combined factors of population growth, greater access to the technological means through which music is created and disseminated, and an industry devoted to helping incipient artists launch a “music career” have flooded the market with more “product” than ever before. And as music history proceeds, the overall body of musical works continues to grow, making it increasingly difficult for an individual listener to grasp the contours of even a single genre—or the output of even a single composer (Anthony Storr suggests that even a Mozart scholar would be hard pressed to “claim familiarity with everything which Mozart composed” (50)). Together, these trends toward profusion present the listener with a fundamental critical-aesthetic predicament—how to choose what to listen to? (3) The concepts of authenticity and romantic authorship rush in to allay the confusion; they are discriminating by nature, and like the professional critic, they help audiences to navigate a dizzying array of artistic productions, eliminating many and organizing what is left.

Similarly, it would be difficult to imagine the system of financial compensation that could accommodate the broad definition of the author that has, in theory at least, become recognized (if not entirely accepted) in academic circles; and, byzantine as copyright law is, it would be infinitely more complex if it had to protect the rights of everyone who could claim a role in a given artwork once the traditional notion of the author had at last been fully deconstructed. The same simplifying impulse is true for the assumption of authenticity: the very notion that a work is “authentic” immediately provides a built-in critical context, a frame that somehow makes the work more intelligible. (4) One need not explain or analyze a work that has been labeled “authentic”—that label is its meaning, the reason it is supposed to “move” us. This has implications for the economics of music: it is easier to sell a record that people assume they can understand, and there are few terms more seemingly self-evident (although actually ambiguous) than “authenticity.”

What I am describing is a set of aesthetic synecdoches—assumptions about authorship and authenticity that become placeholders, facilitating musical discourse by providing a shorthand lexicon. Thus, the simplified term “composer” comes to stand in for (and eventually replace) a complex notion of composition that incorporates the person who initiates or supervises the creation of a musical work as well as the music-copyist, the recording engineer, the performer, the audience member, the instrument manufacturer, the record label executive, and anyone else who participated in the production of that work. (Mark Twain once wrote that “[i]t takes a thousand men to invent a telegraph, or a steam engine, or a phonograph, or a photograph, or a telephone, or any other important thing—and the last man gets the credit and we forget the others” (qtd. in Vaidhyanathan 65); his point is equally relevant for authorship in the arts.) And in a similarly reductionist way, the concept of musical authenticity generally stands in for a set of complex and unresolved issues concerning the supposed “anxiety” of modern life. Both serve the useful but ultimately problematic function of simplifying and organizing aesthetic experience.

Michel de Certeau provides a helpful analogy for this kind of conflation in The Practice of Everyday Life. De Certeau describes the immeasurability of experience when he refers to the actions of people walking in a city, writing that the resulting footsteps “are myriad [. . .] They cannot be counted because each unit has a qualitative character [. . .] Their swarming mass is an innumerable collection of singularities” (97). And though maps are important to someone who wants to get around a city—they provide the shorthand necessary to plan a physical journey—they are technically incomplete; a map “allow[s] us to grasp only a relic set in the nowhen of a surface of projection. Itself visible, it has the effect of making invisible the operation that made it possible. These fixations constitute procedures for forgetting. The trace left behind is substituted for the practice” (97). In a similar way, the assumptions about authorship and authenticity persist largely because they help us focus on the “trace left behind”; in other words, on what is immediately visible about an artwork: the author’s name, the work itself, the copyright information, the work’s “authentic” or “inauthentic” status. What are frequently left out are the trajectories of influence that led to that end result—which is itself the “starting point” for a flow of influence which may or may not already be manifest. Decomposition is an attempt to resurrect these trajectories, and to unpack the synecdoches that buried them. (5)

This dissertation also attempts to address the fact that music is a system, a complex ecology of deeply interrelated actors and contexts. Although some of those who write about music have undertaken broad readings of the modern situation (Michael Chanan and Evan Eisenberg are exemplary in this regard), simultaneously addressing issues of genre, technology, acoustics, psychoacoustics, philosophy, music history, and musicology (or even more ambitiously, linguistics, anthropology, and semiotics), this approach is more the exception than the rule in writing about music. (6) For instance: writing about jazz does not generally recognize what technological insights can add to our understanding of the genre; indeed, for many writers on jazz, technology is a distasteful concept (explicitly or implicitly) because of its supposed opposition to the “purity” of individual human expression (a concept traditional jazz aesthetics thrives on). Such bias obscures the fact that like even the most formulaic, “mechanically”-produced pop music, jazz relies on technology for its existence: recording machinery, audio media, and instrument design (for instance) are all important factors in its creation, as are the broader workings of the recording industry. Consequently the ways this relationship affects our reception and understanding of jazz have gone largely unexplored.

I hope to respond to this deficiency by addressing several seemingly disparate discourses in a single dissertation. In my view, an artist like Duke Ellington or Ludwig van Beethoven, a philosophical issue like music’s relationship to technology, musical practices like transcription or creating a score, or legal issues like music copyright (to name a few of the focal points of my investigation) all generate discourses that embody similar conceptions of authorship and authenticity, and thus all provide fruitful topics for my critique. Interestingly, this embodiment occurs in both the scholarly literature (e.g., the writings of musicologists, music historians, biographers, acousticians, ethnographers, etc.) and the work of more popular writers / commentators (music critics, music industry people, musicians themselves and fans). Like morphic resonance, such broadly recurring references to authorship and authenticity are often taken as evidence of some naturalized truth—as if authorship and authenticity are actually basic axioms that need not be considered further. After all, if they aren’t axiomatic, why do they persist?

* * * * *



Anyone familiar with the last century’s scholarship on authorship and authenticity will recognize that the impulse to problematize these concepts is not radically new. And yet despite all the work that has been done, the concepts persist, even within the academy itself. In the end, authorship and authenticity seem capable of peaceful coexistence with the critiques made against them. Thus, for instance, the scholarly debunking of romantic authorship has in turn produced a rhetoric that ostensibly recognizes the problems inherent in traditional views of creativity, and yet simultaneously reinvests those traditional views (albeit sometimes unintentionally) with new power. For instance, in a pedagogical essay on Michel Foucault’s “What is An Author?”, Mary Klages asks

why does Foucault say the author is “dead”? It’s his way of saying that the author is decentered, shown to be only a part of the structure, a subject position, and not the center. In the humanist view, remember, authors were the source and origin of texts (and perhaps of language itself, like Derrida’s engineer), and were also thus beyond texts—hence authors were “centers.” In declaring the author dead, Foucault follows Nietzsche’s declaration (at the end of the nineteenth century) that “God is dead,” a statement which Derrida then reads as meaning that God is no longer the center of the system of philosophy which Nietzsche is rejecting. By declaring the death of the author, Foucault is “deconstructing” the idea that the author is the origin of something original, and replacing it with the idea that the “author” is the product or function of writing, of the text.

All of Klages’ observations here help to explain how Foucault’s essay undercuts traditional conceptions of authorship. And yet, if she herself finds these ideas convincing, she does not demonstrate that in her own work. She begins her essay with the following observation:

Michel Foucault is not a Freudian, a Marxist, a structuralist, a phenomenologist, a sociologist, or a historian, but his work draws on ideas and assumptions and methods from all of these areas or disciplines. Rather, think of Foucault, like Derrida and like Freud, as the founder of his own “school” of thought. He is a poststructuralist thinker, with affinities to most all the other theorists we’ve read so far, but he is enough unlike them that we should think of him in a category all his own.

Referring to Foucault as the founder of his own school of thought, “in a category all his own,” seems remarkably like referring to him as the “center” of a discourse, as if he is an “author” outside of the text in the traditional sense. Yet ostensibly this is the notion of authorship that Foucault has effectively deconstructed. And in fact much deconstruction-oriented discourse—whether it addresses the question of authorship directly or merely contributes to the context in which the “death of the author” is possible—falls back on itself in the same way, as the cult of celebrity ironically grows up around thinkers who thenceforth become known primarily by their last names: among others, Foucault, Barthes, and of course Derrida, who has recently inspired not one but two film documentaries about his life and work. The advertising copy for the second of these describes Derrida as “a man who single-handedly altered the way many of us look at history, language, art, and, ultimately, ourselves” (emphasis mine)—another remarkable demonstration of the irony inherent in centering a man whose work undercuts the idea of centers. It is an irony that is mirrored in an LA Weekly writeup on the film, in which Derrida comes across as a kind of cerebral Don Juan (“When French philosopher Jacques Derrida visited a USC classroom several years ago, his erudite arguments, charming accent and wavy white hair elicited a series of soft sighs” (Willis)).

A better understanding of this contradictory stance has been obscured somewhat by the view that the battles against traditional conceptions of artistry have already been “won” (at least in the academy), and that continuing to pursue them now is irrelevant and impractical. In Copyrights and Copywrongs, Siva Vaidyhanathan makes this point as he outlines the various well-known critiques of romantic authorship, including those by Foucault and Roland Barthes. He identifies these critiques as “metaphysical” and “esoteric” and asks:

What do we do about “authorship” once we have labeled it “constructed”? How does such a label help us build a more democratic system for the exchange of cultural production? How does it help us encourage new and emerging artists against the overwhelming forces of companies like Microsoft, Time Warner, and Walt Disney? We can deconstruct the author for six more decades and still fail to prevent the impending concentration of the content, ownership, control and delivery of literature, music, and data [. . .] A seventeen-year-old mixing rap music in her garage does not care whether the romantic author is dead or alive. She cares whether she is going to get sued if she borrows a three-second string of a long-forgotten disco song (10).

But how irrelevant are discussions of romantic authorship really? I agree with Vaidhyanathan that practicality is important—and his practical argument against the onerous effects of current copyright law, which I shall examine in chapter five, is recommended. But Vaidhyanathan himself admits that “[f]or most people and in most usages, an ‘author’ is an obvious concept” (8-9); in other words, the traditional, romanticized author has been naturalized, made “commonsensical.” From that it follows, I take it, that work still remains to be done in the deconstruction of authorship and authenticity. The problem I think Vaidyhanathan recognizes but does not articulate is that the critique of these assumptions needs to be translated into the vernacular, taken more explicitly and methodically outside of the narrow confines of the academy. After all, Foucault and Barthes’ cultural references in the essays Vaidhyanathan refers to are limited, with few exceptions, to figures like Balzac, Baudelaire, de Quincy, Proust, Brecht, Shakespeare, St. Jerome, and others in the European high art tradition. Granted, Vaidhyanathan’s “seventeen-year-old mixing rap music in her garage” (who may herself be something of a romantic construction) might not care very much about these figures and their relationship to the “death of the author.” Does that mean she has no use for arguments about the collaborative nature of creativity? Hardly.

One example of how the debate over authorship and authenticity is still relevant outside of the academy appeared in the pages of Gig magazine (now defunct, Gig was a publication aimed primarily at semi-professional and professional pop musicians). In the November 2000 issue, editor Bill Evans, in an apparent bid to keep his publication current with all aspects of popular music, introduced a new columnist—Mike Salamida, an Oakland DJ—whose first column laid out an artistic defense of the turntable. Salamida’s basic argument was that the turntable is an instrument, but his underlying point was greater, in that he attempted to demonstrate that a “turntablist” ought to be considered a kind of musician. Salamida’s negative response to Bill Maher’s Politically Incorrect comment that “If I put together a highlight film, does that make me a professional athlete?” demonstrates that what was at stake in his piece was a new definition of artistry.

The readers who wrote letters in response to Salamida were not convinced. One in particular employed a rather maudlin rendition of the romantic authorship myth to express disapproval of Salamida’s piece:

If a turntable is a musical instrument, I’ll eat my Strat! I was left cold by this to say the least. As a long-time player (35 years) and gigger, I think about all the time I spent learning to play picking up chops, sharpening my licks, playing for peanuts in sleazy dives—paying my dues so to speak—so I could call myself a musician and earn at least part of my living doing what I love [. . .] Any kid with a hundred bucks can buy a turntable and call himself a DJ. But not just anybody can pick up an instrument and make music, real music, not scratching a record or hooking up a groove box to an amp (6).

This description of the lonely, noble starving artist, coupled with the sense that “not just anybody” can play music (magnified by a thinly-veiled yearning for rags-to-riches rock stardom), suggests that the romantic author is still a concept that many find convincing. Nowhere in this letter is there a sense that art is—as DJing demonstrates only more palpably than other forms of music—a collaborative endeavor, one that constantly builds upon and is indebted to previous accomplishments.

In fact it is possible to argue that music is the one area where the academic dismantling of the romantic author has penetrated the least. Peter Kivy makes exactly this point:

We have heard some proclamations in recent years (mostly in French) about the death of the author and of the author’s text (in favor of the reader’s). Perhaps that might be a good thing if it happened, perhaps not; that is not the point. Rather, this is just another case of exaggerated demise, particularly so in the world of music and musicology, where the cult of author and text is alive, well, and flourishing as never before, thank you very much. (187)

Timothy Day echoes Kivy when he notes that “[t]he dominant aesthetic of the twentieth century may have been formalist and anti-Romantic but the image of the artist as hero, the re-creative artist as well as the creative artist as prophet, priest and king, of conductors—especially conductors—as men of ‘energy, self-confidence, and personal power’ [. . .] has continued to capture the popular imagination” (110). Kivy and Day are writing about western classical music, but as the exchange in Gig magazine demonstrates, their comments are relevant to other genres as well. Again, those who employ the myth of the romantic author seem fully capable of recognizing—and ignoring—its critique.

This, then, is my primary intended audience: musicians themselves, and fans of music (of any genre). Note that I am aware that some academics might take issue with my assertion that the battles over authorship and authenticity have not really been “won” within the academy; while I am interested in pursuing this question further, however, such a pursuit is not meant to be the focal point of the present study. Rather, it is my hope that this work will act as a “bridge” between academic theorizing about authorship and authenticity, on the one hand, and the world of practicing musicians and audiences, on the other. For it is in that world that these concepts certainly do persist. And by the end of this work, I hope to at least provide some suggestions for why that might be.

* * * * *

Notes for this section

1. Note that when I refer to “romantic authorship” throughout this book, I am speaking of a complex, multifaceted notion. In other words, while the myth of romantic authorship has the effect of simplifying perceptions of art (as we will see), it is not in and of itself a simple phenomenon, but one derived from a number of sources (e.g., German romanticism and English romanticism were not exactly the same, and, as we will see in chapter two, the romanticization of genius can be applied in the sciences just as it can in the arts). Further, these individual sources are not necessarily coherent or consistent within themselves. But in the end they can be and often are all grouped under the heading “romanticism.”

2. Though some have suggested otherwise. Robert Jourdain, for instance, writes that “Anthropologists have long been acquainted with traditional cultures in which songs are privately owned, traded, bequeathed, or bestowed as gifts (Pacific Northwest Indians are one example). In these societies, to sing a song illicitly is to invite the severe punishments due to thieves. This is robbery not of mere money but of the magical powers that songs confer” (59). Yet one wonders if it is possible to compare this phenomenon with kind of reification that occurs in western culture (described in the next paragraph)—particularly since the material value of the songs in this scenario seems irrelevant (“robbery not of mere money”).

3. In a recent exchange on the “Music Thoughts” email list, an L.A. based singer songwriter (Jimi Yamagishi) wrote “I have EXACTLY one hour a day @ the gym at 5 am to listen critically during my workout. That’s a CD a day, no repeats. With listening to referrals online from people on these lists, hearing & seeing artists live, I don’t have TIME to search XM or Sirius [satellite radio stations] for good stuff [. . .] Most of my friends also multitask in real life, & have little time to hear new stuff. Sometimes, if I put a CD in their hands or give ‘em a referral, they’ll listen ‘cuz they want to see what I’m talkin’ about. Usually, it takes a trip to the store or a gig with ‘em in the car to get ‘em to listen. They mostly prefer the comfort of what they already know, & actually get upset when a favorite artist goes off rotation on their favorite radio station, & that’s when they might do a Kazaa or Mp3 or even seek out the CD to buy it.” (Thursday, Oct. 30, 2003)

4. Of course a commercial frame like this is always forced to out-do its predecessor, as Charles Rosen points out regarding the Early Music movement: “In order to sell the authenticity, to make it commercially attractive, it has been only too tempting to claim with each new interpretation that the unique true method of performance has at last been resuscitated” (Critical Entertainments 300).

5. For another version of this idea of the trajectory of influence, see Chanan on Bakhtin and Kristeva (Musica Practica pp. 41-43). The difference may be that where these scholars focus on work(s), I’m interested in the works and creative actors, arguing that the latter category is not limited to those we conventionally consider “authors” (as we will see in chapter one).

6. See Chanan pp. 8-9 (Musica Practica) for a great description of the failings of modern musicology and broader academia’s failure to take up questions of music.

* * * * *

Still here? Cool! The Industrial Jazz Group needs your help! We're having a fall fundraiser, in support of our October tour. You can find out more, and contribute to the cause (for as little as $1!), here.

Also! Contest insanity! With cash prizes! Check out the remix contest, and the IJG "The Job Song" video contest.

* * * * *

[Photo credit: cliff1066™, ecastro; diorama credit: Laverne Kelley]