What passes for scholarship these days: Introduction, part two

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.

Here is the second 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).

Enjoy, if you can!

PREVIOUSLY: Introduction, part one

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Decomposition: A Critique of Musical Authorship and Authenticity

Introduction, part two

My discussion of authorship and authenticity is grounded by an audio term that I have taken the liberty of interpreting somewhat widely: the “transducer.” In audio engineering, a transducer is any device that changes energy from one form to another. As David Huber and Robert Runstein point out, for instance, a violin is a transducer: “it will take the vibrations of a bowed string (the medium) and amplify them through a body of wood, converting the vibrations into corresponding sound pressure waves, which are perceived by us as sound” (5-7). One of the byproducts of passing through a transducer is that in the process of changing form, auditory content is also changed; as Huber and Runstein put it, transducers are “often the weak link in the chain of an audio system [. . .] Noise, distortion, and, often, coloration of the sound are introduced to a greater or lesser degree” (5-7). The catch is that sound is impossible without transducers. Schopenhauer was thus wrong when he said that music “is also quite independent of the phenomenal world, positively ignores it, and, to a certain extent, could still exist even if there were no world at all” (qtd. in Eisenberg 242). Although Schopenhauer did not recognize it, music is first a material phenomenon -- what Frank Zappa called “wiggling air molecules.”

Thus, more broadly: a transducer is the context any sound needs to exist -- with the corollary that this context always changes the sound somehow (as Lucy Green put it, “music can never be played outside a situation, and every situation will affect the music’s meaning” (qtd. in Frith 250)). In this sense, the air itself is a kind of transducer: air is a sound’s “environment,” and it changes that sound according to the science of acoustics. The human ear is a transducer as well: it changes sound waves into electrochemical signals that are sent to the brain and interpreted differently according to the listener’s psychology, habits of perception, and so on. The importance of the transducer model is that it suggests that there is no such thing as “pure sound,” and that music always requires a context for its transmission (contrary to the impression given by many a “space opera,” sound cannot exist in a vacuum). In music, the medium always affects the message.

In the seemingly simple matter of attending a concert, then, one’s seating location, the architecture of and construction materials used in the performance space, the means of amplification (if any), the size and arrangement of the audience, the make and model of instruments, the technique of the musicians, and various other details all affect one’s perception of the “original” work, in perhaps subtle but rarely insignificant ways. Other, vaguer factors, such as a listener’s emotional / mental / physical state at the time of the performance, promote an even more individualized perception. Importantly, we should not assume that these psychological and physiological factors only affect those who lack musical expertise or experience; for “[e]ven in people to whom music means a great deal, responses vary with their mood” (Storr 29). Eisenberg provides a nice example of this phenomenon in his chapter on an opera fan who is unable to enjoy going to a live performance “because it comes at the wrong time, because I’m tired, or because I just had dinner and I’m full” (39). Cultural background, musical background (or absence of it), critical framework (and the perception of that framework), and social context also each play a role.

All of these observations, I grant, are fairly commensensical. What I want to stress, however, are the implications that follow; for instance, by using the transduction model it is possible to argue that, during any given performance, whether “live” or “recorded,” there is actually more than one “work” present. Simon Frith describes recent theoretical investigations that support this position:

In his stimulating exploration of the reason why what musicologists say about music appears to bear no relationship to how ordinary people hear it, Nicholas Cook argues that the problem is not the difference between two sorts of listeners, but between two sorts of music. He generalizes, that is to say, from a point Kathryn Bailey makes about a work by Webern: it consists of “two quite different pieces -- a visual, intellectual piece and an aural, immediate piece, one for the analyst and another for the listener.” But what Cook goes on to suggest is that there is a similar difference between the music a composer writes (and a performer plays) and the music a listener hears: “What makes a musician is not that he knows how to play one instrument or another, or that he knows how to read music: it is that he is able to grasp musical structure in a manner appropriate for musical production -- the most obvious (though of course by no means the only) example of such production being performance.” (63)(1)

Actually, I argue that the problem is not simply the difference between music as heard by someone with musical training and music as heard by a non-specialist audience member -- although that is a useful starting point. There are, theoretically, as many “works” present at any performance as there are listeners (with the musicians present counting as listeners, of course). So if there are ten people listening to a solo piano work, there are eleven “quite different” pieces occurring in that performance space (the ten heard by the audience and the one heard by the pianist). Even in listening situations in which audiences appear to be responding as one undifferentiated unit (arena rock concerts, for instance), the transduction model suggests that it is a mistake to assume that everyone is hearing the same thing.

This idea of the relationship between sound and context is particularly useful at this point in musical history because there are now more contexts -- or ways to experience music -- than ever before. Recording technology (e.g. two-inch analog, cassette four-track, DA-88, DAT tape, hard disc systems), dissemination technology (e.g. CDs, cassette tapes, LPs, mini discs, MP3s, private listening devices like walkmans, small portable “boomboxes,” car stereos) and spaces for live performance (e.g., concert halls, bars, clubs, arenas, theaters, festivals) have all proliferated in the last hundred years. As a result, music is mediated in many more ways now than at any time previously.

In the end, the transduction model challenges the easy equation of “the composition” with “what is performed” and / or “what is recorded,” and the equation of either of those with “what is heard.” In fact each of these is a different thing, and each can be broken down into smaller components. The metaphor encourages us to ask: what, after all, is a piece of music? Is it the score? If so, is it the composer’s original copy, the published version, the student’s transcription? Is it the performance? If so, which performance, by which artist, under which conditions? Is it the live or the recorded version? Is it the performance as heard from point A or point B? Transduction demonstrates that there is no music outside perception, which always varies.



The structure of this dissertation is as follows:

In part one, I deal primarily with authorship, arguing against the idea of the singular, romantic artist. Thus I begin chapter one with an investigation of two somewhat randomly chosen figures, each of whom has been granted a considerable amount of “genius cachet” in musical histories: Duke Ellington and Ludwig van Beethoven. Without undercutting the artistic achievements of these men, I demystify the language used to discuss them, looking at the ways it consistently creates the impression that they created “ex nihilo.” I call this language the “rhetoric of genius,” and in examining it, I posit instead a collaborative theory of art, which I divide into three equally important processes: initiating acts (the role of the composer), direct collaboration (the role of co-composers, editors, performers) and indirect collaboration (the role of audiences, contexts, histories).

In the second chapter of part one, I examine the ways in which technology (perhaps now more than ever the sine qua non of art) is a crucial component of artistic production. Thus I complicate the recent assumption that “technology” and “art” are separate fields, arguing instead that they overlap in significant ways. The specific case studies of this chapter involve the self-playing piano (a more obviously mechanical variation on a standard “art” instrument), and the machines and techniques that have been used to make musical recordings (from the wax cylinder to modern hard disk systems). Each functions as a form of indirect collaboration, contributing in often overlooked ways to the artistic process that produces a “composition.”

The second part of the dissertation features two chapters covering the concept of “authenticity,” particularly addressing its current extreme form, or what I refer to as the “authenticist” worldview. Both chapters are informed by the science of acoustics and perception, which I draw upon liberally (without claiming expertise in either field). In chapter three, I focus on music that has been written down, examining both transcriptions and scores in an effort to pursue William Russo’s point that “in one sense, no music can be written. Music notation has always been excruciatingly inadequate” (iii). Scores in particular have often been assumed to be the “authentic” rendering of a composer’s idea, but I hope to show that written music in any form is always mediated.

Chapter four continues with the theme of authenticity by featuring a discussion of recording and live performance. Those who can be convinced by the idea that written music is subject to the mediations that characterize all printed works may have a harder time believing that music in its “realized” state has similar imperfections. But I hope to show that sound itself is never “pure,” drawing for my argument upon such varied sources as the history of recording technology (and social perceptions of that technology), the transducers apparent in various kinds of performance practice, and the mind’s ability to be fooled by acoustic stimuli.

In chapter five I explore the implications of the foregoing, examining how it relates to our current musical situation. In particular I argue that high-profile defenders of the American copyright system (defenders like the Recording Industry Association of America) use the rhetoric of genius and authenticity to rouse support for increasingly strict interpretations of copyright law -- even though that law itself legalizes a corporate view of copyright. These strict interpretations (epitomized by the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act) point toward a “proprietary listening environment” in which the public domain -- an essential context for the collaboration and mediation that has always been necessary for art -- is either being criminalized or is slowly disappearing.

Finally, let me point out that when I refer to the concepts of genius and authenticity throughout this text, I am talking about perceptions of both creation and perception; i.e., what we think about what we play and what we think about what we hear (with “we” defined fairly broadly). When I refer to collaboration and mediation, I am talking about hearing and playing itself. Put more simply, I distinguish between ways of perceiving art (the rhetoric of genius, the authenticist worldview) and artistic processes themselves (collaboration, mediation).

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Notes for this section

1. Consider also Dick Hebdige’s use of the “cultural biography” concept (attributed to Kopytoff), using the example of the motor scooter and “considering it not as a singular object but as several objects existing at distinct ‘moments’: the moment of design/production, mediation (marketing and promotion), and consumption/use” (Theberge 9).

[Photo credits: Abulic Monkey (top), Omar Omar (middle).]