Eau de music criticism

I've been re-reading Nicolas Slonimsky's infamous text, The Lexicon of Musical Invective, and was tickled when I came across this passage in the droll but perceptive Peter Schickele foreword that graces the edition I own:

As a serious composer and also as the sole discoverer of the putative music of PDQ Bach, I have been on the receiving end of both pans and raves, and, everything else being equal, I prefer raves. Any highly flattering review I get is, of course, humbly accepted and appreciated, but one stands out, head and shoulders above the rest. It appeared in a respected magazine, and it can only be described as an artist's wet dream: 'Having banished Mr. Schickele some time ago from my conscious mental life as being a fellow whose spoofs of Baroque music, both on records and television, struck me as labored, clumsy, and utterly sophomoric, it was not with alacrity that I reached for the latest sample of his wares. Mr. Schickele, I recant! I grovel before your genius, an abject idolater. Obtuse and inattentive, I have grossly misunderstood your methods and your motives. You are the most.'

Now that's what I call music criticism.

Hell yeah!

Here's to 2010. May we all suddenly and inexplicably graduate from "labored, clumsy, and utterly sophomoric" to "the most."

[photo credit: "The Future of Rock 'n Roll," by fmgbain]

The reproducer

If you've never seen or heard a reproducing piano, mentioned in that last post, here's a useful vid. (Holy crap, is there anything that can't be found on YouTube?)

What passes for scholarship these days: Chapter two, 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 sixth 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
Introduction, part two
Chapter one, part one
Chapter one, part two
Chapter two, part one

* * * * *

Decomposition: A Critique of Musical Authorship and Authenticity

Chapter Two: Music and Technology (part two)

The Player Piano as a Site for Collaboration

In 1896 Edwin S. Votey invented the “Pianola,” an early form of player piano which soon entered mass production by the Aeolian Company. The industry expanded so rapidly that by 1904, “there were more than forty different kinds of automatic pianos on the American market” (RCHM 90). While even the least “sophisticated” of these were costly, a number of factors, including piano industry innovations in installment buying (Douglas 365), and the fall in prices that came after the 1893 depression (Curtis 67), ensured that they were not necessarily limited to the rich. Furthermore, shortly after 1898 coin-operated player pianos became a common sight in public spaces like restaurants, bowling alleys, railroad depots, skating rinks, ocean liners, grocery stores, brothels, movie theaters, and other commercialized contexts (Roell 49).

The player piano’s position on the cutting edge of a new industry 1 earned it a number of enemies. Opponents argued that “[t]he ‘silent piano’ was being rendered almost obsolete [...] [I]ncreasingly music, like clothing, was ‘consumed,’ not ‘made’; the experience was becoming instantaneous and easy, requiring no investment of time” (Roell 52-3). For these critics, in other words, the instrument neither involved nor promoted creativity. John Philip Sousa (who coined the term “canned music” (MMQF 139)), seemed to speak for many of his contemporaries when he warned in a 1906 essay called “The Menace of Mechanical Music” (Gelatt 146) that by replacing human musicians, the player piano (and the phonograph) would cause “a marked deterioration in American music and musical taste [...] [reducing] the expression of music to a mathematical system of megaphones, wheels, cogs, disks, cylinders, and all manner of revolving things” (Roell 54). Sousa felt that the new forms of mass dissemination would atrophy the typical listener’s attention span, and more importantly, replace the nineteenth century’s vibrant amateur musical culture with a class of elite audio-technophiles (MMQF 139). (Ironically, Sousa himself was a popular phonographic recording artist at the turn of the century, appearing with his band on both the Columbia (Gelatt 45) and Victor labels, and even uttering endorsements of the latter -- famously telling company head Eldridge Johnson, “Your Victor Talking Machines are all right” (Gelatt 136). 2)

On one level, the pessimism of this view of mechanically reproduced music is well-founded. Some manufacturers actually stressed the idea that the instruments were childishly simple to operate, hardly requiring any artistry. For instance, the Gulbransen company had as their trademark the image of a baby crawling up to the pedals of their player piano, accompanied by the tag: “Easy to Play” (Roell 117). Similarly, a 1901 ad for the Pianola stresses the obviation of all the hard work formerly associated with the production of good music. The copy runs:

The amount of practice necessarily required to become a finished, artistic pianist is discouraging. Before Paderewski could attain the high position which he occupies today in the musical world, and accomplish what now comes to him with ease, he was obliged to toil unceasingly day after day in practice. He is said to have spent six to eight hours out of every twenty-four at the piano (Roell 111).

Such advertising capitalized on an attitudinal shift from the Victorian “producer” ethic of individual creativity and hard work to the modernist “consumer” ethic of relaxed consumption.

But this shift was not unidirectional or conclusive; instead it existed as a tension, reinforcing patterns of both relaxation and creativity. The above-cited Pianola ad, for example, in referring to the pumping action that drives the paper roll, makes a distinction between the purely physical accomplishment of music, on the one hand, and its necessary artistic mindset, on the other: “Practice gives digital dexterity alone. It makes capable and obedient machines of the fingers. The artistic and esthetic is a matter of taste and temperament. [. . .] The Pianola is a substitute for the human fingers. The brain remains unfettered and is still the controlling influence” (Roell 111) 3. Echoing this sentiment, an advertisement for a Baldwin Manualo Player Piano states that “You do not operate the Manualo -- you play it” (Roell 115, emphasis in original). Thus musical creativity, according to these ads, has not been eliminated, but rather freed from its corporal limitations.

In other words, the distinction between “playing” and “operating” depended on exactly how the machine was used (note again my earlier point about broadening both technological and musical definitions). In this vein L. Douglas Henderson points out that those who sat down at the controls of a player piano were often referred to as “player pianists,” “playerists,” or “pianolists.” Addressing some of the skills required in this role, Eric Townley writes that “[i]t is no good anybody sitting at the instrument and just pumping the pedals up and down”; the pianolist “must know both the instrument and the music intimately” (Townley 20). Artis Wodehouse, who “realized” (her term) the popular Gershwin piano roll CD series put out by Nonesuch (starting in 1993), adds that “the pianolist can play with expression by skillful foot-pumping and manipulating the expression levers” (Wodehouse 6). And according to Ord-Hume, much practice is necessary to master the crucial art of foot-pumping; in the first place, as it is a physical act that must be sustained for the duration of the piece, a “too-lengthy first attempt will give you sore ankles and tender calf muscles and, if you have an unpadded stool, you could get a sore accompaniment section” (PHSPP 257). The key is to provide only enough air to control the suction power of the player action; this goes against the beginner’s tendency to pump in a “regular” or “metronymic” pattern, alternating the right and left foot in sync with the beat of the music. Ord-Hume indicates that what is really required is to

[l]et the feet caress the pedals and make a conscious effort to break any semblance of rhythm. Use the feet to sense the resistance of the bellows [...] Give short dabs with one foot if you like, and long, languorous presses with the other, give the occasional double-dab in mid-stroke, put one foot on the floor and pedal adroitly with the other during soft passages -- do anything but pedal metronymically (259).

Once one has mastered this technique on a given player, it should not be assumed that one is ready to play any player piano (and here the individual manufacturing styles of player pianos directly affect artistic performance). Ord-Hume tells a story about one performance in which the pianolist, who knew the music well on one machine, was unable at first to successfully “translate” it to another. “The lesson,” he writes,

Is that when you sit down at a strange player, accept that you must play it for half an hour or more to get the feel of it. Whereas many a garage mechanic can with confidence drive just about any car that comes in for servicing, pianos with paper rolls are a different matter (255).

In preparation for her performances of Gershwin on a 1911 Pianola, Wodehouse indicates that she “played the rolls over and over again, maybe a hundred times” (Walsh 113). Practice rolls have been manufactured to allow the student to learn the requisite techniques (PHSPP 260).

Still, despite the existence of direct collaboration in the form of the pianolist, historical evidence does seem to indicate that from the late nineteenth century until the late 1930s, live players were often replaced by “automatic” instruments (just as, more recently, musicians have often been replaced by drum machines, synthesizers, samplers, and DJs). This was because certain models of player piano did not require pianolists. For instance, the Link Piano Co. made a “photoplayer” (i.e., a player piano designed for film accompaniment) that, according to an advertisement, “REQUIRES NO MUSICIAN” (Roell 51). One theater manager glibly reported how easy it was to use: “We simply turn on the current in the morning and shut it off at night and the instrument does the rest [...] We have used [a human] operator a few weeks, but we find that we get as much satisfaction from the automatic operation” (52). And indeed, many manufacturers eventually produced models with sleek interiorized (and thus “invisible”) mechanisms that functioned with the flip of a switch, after which the “operator” could walk away. These so-called “reproducing pianos” were electrically powered instruments that were designed to play rolls with added “marginal perforations to imitate in a generalized manner the SAME DYNAMICS which a human interpreter would add to the Player-Piano’s performance. It’s not unlike the automatic transmission of an automobile, such as Hydra-Matic, which ‘does the shifting of gears’ as one operates the accelerator pedal” (Henderson, emphases in original) 4. Advertisers played up the expressiveness of the reproducing piano, claiming that it was capable of capturing “the full virtuosity of the artist -- the nuances, the phrasing, and all the shadings” (Roell 42). They exploited this notion in various publicity stunts, as when “pianist Harold Bauer was ‘heard’ on the Ampico [reproducing piano] with the New York Symphony in November 1917 while he performed live in Chicago” (Roell 44) 5. We can surmise that such things often occurred on a smaller scale as well. For instance, an ad for the Welte-Mignon Autograph Piano seemed to suggest how you could fool your friends by pretending to play along with the instrument’s performance, and then suddenly (and mischievously) getting up and walking away as it continued (PHSPP 262).

I will come back to these “reproducing pianos” in a moment, but for now I want to stress that even when the pianolist was dispensed with altogether, other forms of direct collaboration remained important. In fact, one really cannot talk about player piano rolls without addressing the participation of roll arrangers / editors, who were significant to each of the three ways in which piano rolls were created. In the first technique, an arranger would create a master roll by strategically cutting holes in a long sheet of paper, often freehand. Importantly, these arrangers were not limited to slavishly copying the sheet music from which they were working; rather, “the notes were merely a starting point” (RHCM 94). Liberties were often taken, involving the addition of octaves, contrapuntal right-hand melodies or other embellishments that eventually rendered the piece humanly impossible to play. Such densely reworked pieces -- which seem to have influenced the pyrotechnics of the “novelty piano” style that developed in the 1920s, and which might also be seen as setting a (more popularly oriented) precedent for Nancarrow’s work -- were known as “orchestral arrangements” (RHCM 94).

The second and third techniques of producing piano rolls involved the presence of an actual piano player, whose performance would either notate (via a series of pencil markings made by the depression of the keys during a performance) where the holes were to be cut into the paper, or actually do that cutting (RHCM 94). But even these techniques required the assistance of arrangers and editors. For instance, whatever the skill level of the “actual player,” recordings often contained “mistakes” that had to be dealt with before the rolls could be issued. An editor could simply tape up the holes that represented wrong notes, and correctly re-punch them. The degree to which this was truly direct collaboration is demonstrated by the following anecdote: “In a Paderewski master roll is a revealing comment written on the margin in the Polish pianist’s own hand: ‘I do not play these passages evenly; can you even them out for me?’” (quoted in Husarik 48). As with Nancarrow’s collaborators, the unnamed “you” here is interesting -- particularly in light of Paderewski’s massive fame, which was built of course upon his prowess as a “live” act. 6 In any case, James M. Edwards indicates how deeply involved all the participants in a piano roll project could be: an Ampico roll of the “Blue Danube Waltz” “consisted of 7,915 notes and took technicians 71,235 operations and five days to complete -- all this for about eight minutes of music” (Edwards 36). In the end, many rolls that were advertised as “handplayed” were actually produced by a combination of sources: hand playing, edited mistakes, and arranged embellishments.

In addition to making “real” piano playing sound “better” (by getting rid of the “mistakes” in a player roll), the most skilled piano roll arranger / editor could make an entirely “artificial” performance (that is, one created entirely by the arranger / editor) sound -- at least to some ears -- “real.” In this sense, many supposedly “handplayed” rolls were not produced on any level by “real” piano players at all. Frank Milne was one of the arranger / editors who became most skilled in this sense; employed at the Aeolian Company, one of the largest manufacturers of self-playing pianos, Milne was the only technician kept on after the 1929 stock market crash. He was then the company’s single source of new piano rolls, for not only were the other arranger / editors let go, but the company stopped using performance artists as well. Milne’s arrangement of Gershwin’s An American in Paris is sophisticated enough that in order to justify advertising it as “handplayed,” the company had to refer to it as “played by Milne and Leith” (i.e., since the arrangement seemed to require four hands Milne created a pseudonym for his “partner”) (Wodehouse 4-5).



At the same time, however, the “artificiality” of the player piano, even during the height of its popularity, was often its most salient and interesting feature. Zez Confrey (pictured above), for instance, who worked as an arranger for another manufacturer of piano rolls (the QRS company), and who was one of the most visible practitioners of the “novelty piano” genre (Confrey is best known for his composition “Kitten on the Keys”), occasionally incorporated the obvious mechanical qualities of the player piano -- i.e., those moments when the illusion of “real human performance” began to break down -- into his own “live” style. In this sense, some of Confrey’s compositions seem to be expressions of a human imitating a machine which is in turn imitating a human (poorly). David A. Jasen discusses a featured component of an early musical show that Confrey and his brother had organized in the late teens:

Automated player pianos were in vogue during this time, and Twaify’s, a favorite hang-out in La Salle [Ottowa, where the group was then playing], had an especially out of tune and partially broken, coin-operated machine. Zez heard this piano so many times that he was able to imitate it exactly on a regular piano [...] He would start by pumping the pedals, dropping a coin and then going into his imitation of that broken-down nickelodeon. This version of “TWAIFY’S PIANO,” unfortunately never published, became a standard part of his performing repertoire. (Confrey [2])

Of course, Jasen’s assessment that Confrey “was able to imitate [Twaifey’s piano] exactly on a regular piano” is interesting, given the admitted absence of any extant version of this piece. But I cite this anecdote here because it complicates easy distinctions between technological and musical authorship, suggesting that “Twaifey’s Piano” has a complex provenance that includes the contributions of both Confrey and the various individuals who (like Confrey) arranged and edited piano rolls (not to mention those who worked on player piano technology; I will return to this latter group in a moment).

Faced with the threat such works presented to traditional notions of authorship, marketers for the player piano industry often reasserted the rhetoric of genius. Again, one of the purposes of such rhetoric is to simplify the perception of music, allowing for its commodification. It is perhaps not surprising then that such reassertions emerged when the player piano industry moved into a period of economic crisis, faced with challenges from the phonograph, the radio, and the Depression. In any case, Henderson explains that the rhetoric of genius was expressed through an exaggeration of the reproducing piano as an instrument that offered high fidelity “recording” of a pianist’s performance, thereby capturing the “Living Soul of the Artist.” Photographs and logotypes of famous artists were used to hype the instruments, and these famous artists in turn “rented out” their names, providing endorsements; thus, as Roell points out, “[p]ractically all the great artists of the day recorded for Welte [one of the best known of the reproducing piano companies], including Grieg, Debussy, Strauss, Respighi, Bartok, Leschetitzky, and Paderewski” (42-3). And according to a manual produced by Ampico [another well-known reproducing piano manufacturer], sales personnel were never to refer to the Ampico as an “electric piano. It is a REPRODUCING PIANO, an instrument which reproduces so faultlessly the playing of eminent concert pianists that the artist seems to play again. The reproduction is not distinguishable from the public performance of the artist himself.” These salespeople were never to forget that “the Ampico’s reproduction of a great artist’s playing is nothing less than a twentieth century miracle and should be treated as such. If you ever feel yourself [in danger of forgetting this] we suggest that you read the newspaper clippings in the folio already supplied to you.” Such advertising techniques introduced the trope of the ghostlike, “uncanny reality” of reproducing piano performances. Sustained by various player piano revivals, this trope, and the rhetoric of genius it supports, has persisted to the present day. For instance, in her description of the final stages in putting together the Nonesuch recordings of Gershwin rolls, Wodehouse writes: “Finally, the nine-foot Disklavier was taken to the auditorium of The Academy of Arts and Letters in New York City where it played Gershwin’s rolls from a floppy disk for the microphone, as if Gershwin’s ghost were present at the session” (Wodehouse 7). The ghost trope here reasserts the rhetoric of genius by positing Gershwin as a presiding figure at the session.

Ironically, reproducing pianos hardly offered an “exact reproduction” of a pianist’s performance. We have already seen how “handplayed” was a misleading term, but even if arrangers / editors had been cut out of the production process, certain technical issues prevented the kind of high fidelity recording that was claimed for this instrument. As Loesser points out, in order to “record,” performers merely “complete[d] an electrical circuit by means of contacts situated beneath each key. In this way, a set of lead pencils could be activated to make longer and shorter marks on an actual player piano paper roll.” As a result, dynamics were difficult, “if not impossible to reproduce, because of the force of the key stroke -- since it merely made a connection -- could not affect the action of the recording pencils” (583). 7

Despite these qualifications, the reproducing piano continued to be touted in terms of accurate individualistic expression (and continues to be discussed in these terms even to the present day). In the face of such a reassertion of the rhetoric of genius, not all direct collaborators were able to obtain even pseudonymous status as artists involved with the piano roll process. A good example is the 1987 Biograph CD, SCOTT JOPLIN: “Elite Syncopations” (BCD 102), a compilation that claims to feature “Classic Ragtime from Rare Piano Rolls.” “SCOTT JOPLIN,” the textual focus of the cover, seems in that sense to be the author of the CD -- a sense underscored by the fact that his name is written in all capital letters. And yet the credits that appear on the back of the CD indicate that while the first three rags are “Played by Scott Joplin” (an assertion that can only be partially true), the thirteen remaining rags have no listed performers -- suggesting that these pieces must either have been created by arranger / editors either entirely or in conjunction with the handplaying of anonymous piano players. It is only by carefully reading through the liner notes that we are able to discover the origins of the non-Joplin-played piano rolls. Michael Montgomery, who wrote these notes, informs us that all but two of the remaining rolls were produced by Hal Boulware, a private collector, in the 1960s. Boulware had been unable to find many of Joplin’s best rags issued in roll form, and so he “made rolls of Joplin compositions to fill the gaps” (SJ 2) (whether by arranging them, or playing / arranging them, is unclear). One of the other rolls was made “recently” by Ralph Mullen, a piano roll maker from California. Even more ambiguous is the final piece, “Silver Swan.” Never published or copyrighted by Joplin (it had been lost until 1970, when two copies were found), it is considered “his” nonetheless. It is the only piece on the CD which has an ultimately uncredited source (either performer or arranger / editor); it is attributed only to QRS, the roll company involved in its production. Many rolls in fact were presented in this authorially ambiguous fashion. For instance, in a contextless piano roll listing like Supertone 10013, listed as “Dill Pickles / Rag / by Chas Johnson,” the word “by” might mean as in “composed by,” “performed by,” arranged by,” or “edited by” -- or some combination of all of these. The information we are given indicates that at the very least Johnson was the composer, but that doesn’t mean he might not have participated in other capacities as well. 8

The complexity of authorship in Elite Syncopations is obscured by the way the CD advertises itself. The cover strives for “ragtime era” authenticity, featuring art-deco bordering and Joplin’s name emblazoned in a kind of “saloon” font, inferring that the “Rare” in “Classic Ragtime from Rare Piano Rolls” means “from the appropriate historical period” or at least “old.” By placing the three Joplin-played rags first in the program, a quick glance at the back cover credits might lead one to believe that all of the rags on the CD were simply “played” by the composer, when in fact they were constructed in more complicated ways -- most of them half a century after his death.

Finally, in addition to the direct collaboration of roll arrangers / editors, there is the question of contextual collaboration in player piano music -- the idea that artworks are understood through and therefore shaped by ostensibly “passive” entities like (in this case) technology. I will develop this question more in the following section, but I want to introduce the idea here by referring to another Biograph disc. BCD 103 is entitled The Greatest Ragtime of the Century and consists entirely of “handplayed” rolls by such well-known figures as Fats Waller, Jelly Roll Morton, and James P. Johnson (figures often identified in traditional “genius” terms). Also included on the recording are two rolls whose performance is credited to Jimmy Blythe, a Chicago-based pianist who died in the early 1930s. In the booklet Montgomery (who again wrote the notes for this CD) gives an overview of the mechanisms involved in a player piano performance. His remarks quickly begin to sound less like an explanation and more like a defense: “All of these movements -- of pedals pumping, of paper unrolling, of air rushing in and of notes being activated from within -- represent a different kind of ambient ‘noise’ than you may be used to on other CDs” (GRC 2). Rather than allowing this description of the unfamiliar sounds of player pianos to turn a potential listener away, Montgomery attempts to claim romantic artistry for the recording, arguing that “we felt you would want to experience these almost-live performances as if you were personally sitting at the controls pumping the rolls and watching the notes play. It’s the next best thing to having been there, watching and hearing these giants of the keyboard while they performed live” (2). I suspect that few listeners will hear The Greatest Ragtime of the Century in this way, but the machine noises Montgomery refers to do provide aural evidence of contextual collaboration -- i.e., the work of inventors and artisans who contributed to the player piano’s development -- embedded in the instrument itself. The evidence is in fact fairly obvious to twenty-first century ears, given that mechanical reproduction is now designed to eliminate noise as much as possible (more on this in chapter four).

* * * * *

Notes for this section

1. The popularity of the player piano arguably predated that of the phonograph, another early form of “mechanical reproduction.” Technically, both of these instruments emerged at roughly the same time. Thomas Edison patented the phonograph in 1877, but did not immediately find a profitable use for it. The device was originally marketed as a business aid (i.e., dictation machine), then as a way to preserve important moments (e.g. the “family album of sound”). Arguably, it was not until 1902, when the first “Red Label” catalog was released by the Gramophone Company (later RCA Victor), that the phonograph’s potential as a source of “canned music” became clear (Gelatt 117). But even then, the phonograph was still an inchoate (if exciting) technology; the electrical recording techniques that would help establish its modern reputation did not become commercially available until the 1920s.

2. Even more ironically, the above criticisms had earlier been leveled at the (traditional) piano itself. In the 1880s Louis Pagnerre had written a book entitled On the Evil Influence of the Piano upon the Art of Music, in which he claimed that “[t]he piano exempts a pupil from learning music. [. . .] A pupil, be he the most refractory toward any artistic feeling, be he the least apt to understand differences of pitch, their blend or their combinations, will succeed by a more or less obstinate mechanical labor in acquiring what is called ‘a pretty talent on the piano’” (qtd. in Loesser 414).

3. Indeed, some composers have argued that they are at their most creative when they avoid the piano altogether. According to Hector Berlioz (who was no pianist), “[w]hen I consider the appalling number of miserable platitudes to which the piano has given birth, which would never have seen the light [of day] had their authors been limited to pen and paper, I feel grateful to the happy chance that forced me to compose freely and in silence, and this has delivered me from the tyranny of the fingers, so dangerous to thought, and from the fascination which the ordinary sonorities always exercise on a composer” (qtd. in Jourdain 176).

4. Incidentally, in the case of another keyboard instrument -- the organ -- the same process of electrification helped to obscure the influence of collaboration. Pre-electric organs were obviously collaborative in that they required the additional “manpower” of a person to operate the bellows (Rosen, Critical Entertainments, 27).

5. In other promotional scenarios reproducing pianos “appeared as unmanned soloists with many of the leading orchestras of the day, including the Philadelphia Orchestra under Stokowski, the New York Symphony under Damrosch, and the San Francisco Symphony under Hertz” (Roell 44).

6. Joseph Horowitz notes how Ignace Paderewski “inspired far-flung merchandising ploys: Paderewski wigs, shampoos based on the ‘Paderewski formula,’ candy, soap, and mechanical toys shaped in his image. Like Gottschalk, he hypnotized the ladies: they fainted, they shrieked, they hung by their chins on the lip of the stage. Like Rubinstein, he melted into folklore, familiar, as ‘Paddy,’ to legions of schoolboys and farmers. His appeal began with his chrysanthemum of pale red hair, his dreamy countenance, his lordly bearing, all affirmed by trappings -- he traveled in his own railroad carriage, attended by a valet, a tuner, a manager, a chef, and two porters -- befitting foreign royalty. [. . .] His first American tour, in 1891-92, netted $95,000 -- unheard of for a pianist” (Understanding Toscanini 25).

7. Henderson argues that the “Pianola [reproducing or otherwise] can never be a record/playback device, as often advertised in the past. Old audio recordings reveal ‘how’ the legendary artists really played [...] and many times these same compositions were simultaneously being assembled in roll factories by musical hacks in names of specific musicians. (Josef Hofmann received $1000.00 per roll created by W. Creary Woods at Aeolian. The results sounded good even though not authentic, and with that kind of money in the ‘Twenties, why should he complain?)” (emphases in original)

Although this point about the authorial “authenticity” of recordings can be strongly qualified (I will address this question of authenticity in recorded music in chapter four), the larger point here, that reproducing pianos were not technically capable of capturing the “full virtuosity of the artist -- the nuances, the phrasing, and all the shadings” (as Roell put it), is important. Defenders of reproducing rolls explain away the differences in 78 recordings and piano rolls by the same performer (“a ‘Fats’ Waller 78 -- and there were many! -- had a capricious ‘vamping’ Harlem stride accompaniment set against an imaginative staccato treble [...] but the old QRS Rolls -- though ‘pleasant-sounding’ -- suffered from connected melody notes and a formula Fox Trot bass, differing little from any commercial rolls of the day”) by arguing that pianists who recorded in both media developed a different style for each -- a “78 style” and a “piano roll style.” And yet differences in piano roll styles of individual performers (whose rolls may have been arranged by different people), and similarities in different artists’ rolls known to have been arranged by the same person (the aforementioned Frank Milne “often used the same formula for several artists, so the Edythe Baker rolls by Aeolian had exactly the same musical ‘tricks’ which were used in the Gershwin rolls listed above”) suggest certain flaws in this argument about “piano roll style.”

8. George Gershwin, for instance, performed multiple functions on many piano rolls of his own compositions. Artis Wodehouse has noted that Gershwin’s rolls were often characterized by “an amalgam of his hand playing, his own arranging ideas about scoring, and the arranging style of the editor with whom he was working at the time the roll was made” (Wodehouse 3). But Gershwin also played and arranged piano rolls of compositions by other musicians; these works in fact constitute the largest portion of his piano roll output (SJ 3). Similarly, one of the Joplin-played rags on the Biograph CD (“Ole Miss Rag”) was composed by W.C. Handy. The inclusion of this performance on a CD entitled SCOTT JOPLIN: “Elite Syncopations” raises further questions about authorship. I.e., if composition is the criteria by which authorship is defined, why isn’t Handy an “author” of this CD?

[Photo credit: AlphaTangoBravo and infrogmation]

Lumpy Monday morning

I have no good reason for posting this video, other than the fact that it has a criminally teeny number of YouTube views.



Just doing my part.

You can't catch me

(Apologies to Mr. Berry.)

Happy holidays to all.

A list you can actually abuse

Since I've been throwing darts at the idea of the best-of list, why not a best-of list you can throw darts at?

Here, according to the elves that run google analytics, are my top ten blog posts from the past year, measured strictly in terms of page views. (Obviously, there are all sorts of problems with this list as a metric of "quality." But as a general introduction to JTMoU, or as a reminder of some things you may have missed, it ain't half bad.)

10. What Passes for Scholarship These Days: Introduction, part one (The first installment in my seemingly endless dissertation-posting series.)

9. We are the world, and we suck (Commentary on the death of Michael Jackson.)

8. The Impossibility of the Avant-Garde (On the pointlessness of trying to be "subversive" in art.)

7. Jazz: the Music of Un-enjoyment (Actually that's an older post, but it was popular this year because of a twitter hashtag. A catalog of shite gigs I have experienced.)

6. No One Dances in New York (My response to Nate Chinen's NYT review of the IJG's Bell House show this past October.)

5. The Funmaker (Lots of pictures of a vintage organ I acquired over the summer.)

4. The Watts Ensemble (The only interview I have done so far: composer/drummer Brian Watson.)

3. Jazz Populi (A response to the Jazz Now project initiated by a consortium of youngish jazz bloggers this past year.)

2. Research & Development (A focus group on the Jazz Now project.)

And the number one JTMoU post of 2009:

1. RIAA breaks guitars, and music in general (An essay on the Joel Tenenbaum case, and the copyright fight as it stands in 2009.)

Many thanks, everyone, for reading, commenting, linking, tweeting, and referencing this year. It's been fun.

[photo credit: Alex Ford]

Speaking of English literature

I know it may seem curious for "Dr. Frank C. Baxter, Professor of English, University of Southern California" to be introducing a film as lovably kooky as 1956's The Mole People. (By the way, you know that a film is "lovably kooky" when it never inspires a remake.)

But he was a real guy, and a real professor, with real experience in the entertainment biz!

And here's a real sun, and a real moon, and then a rather shadowy and formless mass of electric potentiality with little bright sparks in it, and they give us the sense of our stars.

You may in fact remember Professor Baxter from such edutainment classics as "Hemo the Magnificent," directed by Frank Capra. (I sure do. Third grade science class, if I recall correctly.)



Unfortunately, the good doctor passed on long before my tenure at USC -- but I'd like to think that something of his goofy irreverent academic spirit lived on in those hallowed halls, and eventually made its way into an IJG tune or two.

Now you know why I was an English major

Via Big Think, Lea Carpenter's writeup of a writeup on Peter Ackroyd's particularly bawdy translation of Canterbury Tales. What can I say? Carpenter had me at the title ("Fucking up Chaucer").

It's easy to avoid Chaucer. Or rather, easy to attempt avoiding him even when electing English as a major, or as a passion. Nothing about the academic marketing of Chaucer would lead one to believe he is sexy, or current. Yet he was both.

Actually, when I was first exposed to Chaucer, in the early nineties, it was under the tutelage of a flaxen-haired, husky-voiced associate professor on whom I had a ridiculous, intense, and fleeting crush. And when she read the Tales, aloud, and in the original Middle English (which even on the page always seemed beautifully eerie to me)... well... it left no doubt that this was a poetry that spoke to the soul through the body.

I graunte thee lif if thou canst tellen me
What thing it is that wommen most desiren;
Be war and keep thy nekke boon from iren.

(from the Wife of Bath's Tale)

Anyway, Carpenter goes on to quote Joan Acocella, author of the New Yorker essay on Ackroyd's text:

When Chaucer has the Wife of Bath saying, in defense of love, "For what purpose was a body made?," Ackroyd translates, "Cunts are not made for nothing, are they?" She also cites King Solomon, with his many wives. "On his wedding nights," she says (in Chaucer's original) "he had many a merry bout with each of them, so lively a man was he." Ackroyd translates, "What about all those wedding nights? I bet that he did you-know-what as hard as a hammer with a nail. I bet he gave them a right pounding." When, in the Miller's Tale, Alison says to her swain, "Love me at once or I will die," Ackroyd gives us "Fuck me or I am finished."

And glosses it accordingly:

This is literary history: a loving "fucking up" of English Literature. Wouldn't we rather spend afternoons reading lines like "fuck me or I am finished" than deconstructing the latest evolution of the Kindle's hegemonic rise?

Yes! Or the latest essay on "The Stasis of Language: Social realism in the works of Smith"? (That's a random title spewed out by the delightfully spot-on Postmodernism Generator. But it's not unlike much of the stuff written about literature in the last twenty years.)

What passes for scholarship these days: Chapter two, 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.

Here is the fifth 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
Introduction, part two
Chapter one, part one
Chapter one, part two

* * * * *

Decomposition: A Critique of Musical Authorship and Authenticity

Chapter Two: Music and Technology (part one)

...ever since I’d been writing music I was dreaming of getting rid of the performers.

Conlon Nancarrow (qtd. in Carlson 2)

The American-born composer Conlon Nancarrow (1912-1997) is probably best known for his player piano works. A collection of over sixty pieces, these “studies,” as Nancarrow called them, employ the instrument -- originally intended as a turn-of-the-century source of popular entertainment -- to execute compositions so complex that they are beyond the technical abilities of even the best “live” pianist. According to James Tenney, these complexities include “rapidly changing meters,” “simultaneous different meters in two or more voices,” “changing tempos,” “simultaneous different tempos -- including independently varying tempos in two or more voices,” and so on (3-4, emphases in original). In "Study no. 42," for instance, there are ten voices that “appear to be in different tempos, and these tempos increase in the course of the piece, until -- at the end -- they are all moving very fast. The five voices comprising the bass resultant seem to be approximately in the tempo relations 7/8/9/10/12, although it is very difficult to determine these relations exactly, even from a score” (Tenney 7).

Describing how Nancarrow came to work with the player piano, Philip Carlsen writes of the “extreme musical isolation” that the composer found in Mexico City after he moved there in the early 1940s (a socialist, Nancarrow left the United States to escape a politically hostile environment) (2). More important, however, was Nancarrow’s “long-standing frustration at the inability of musicians to deal with even moderately difficult rhythms” (Carlsen 2) -- a view expressed nicely in the above epigraph, and more than likely informed by a series of concert mishaps early in the composer’s career. In the case of a 1941 performance of his septet, for instance, Nancarrow explained that “[t]here were two rehearsals. For one rehearsal, four [musicians] came. The second rehearsal, three, and one of the original four. So there wasn’t one session with the whole group. And when they played it, a couple of instruments lost their place right at the beginning. All through the piece, they were playing in some other place” (Carlsen 3). 1 Of course, western music has always been marked by these sorts of tensions between composers and performers. According to Robert Jourdain, “Bach would fly into a rage upon hearing wrong notes” (188), “Handel once lobbed a whole kettledrum across the stage,” and “Mahler railed from the conductor’s podium so fiercely that he repeatedly had to turn down duel challenges from players” (192). Composer / inventor Raymond Scott was described by singer Anita O’Day as “a martinet” who “reduced [musicians] to something like wind-up toys” (qtd. in Chusid 11). And more recently, jazz composer / bassist Charles Mingus would develop a reputation as a difficult bandleader who in one instance “actually reduced a promising young saxophonist to tears, before an audience, with his running commentary of ‘Play something different, man; play something different. This is jazz, man. You played that last night and the night before’” (Berliner 271).

Nancarrow was one of the first (and certainly the most dedicated) to turn to the player piano as a more productive response to such problems. 2 He had become interested in the instrument as a child (as he would later put it: “I was fascinated by this thing that would play all of these fantastic things by itself” (Carlsen 3)), but the idea of composing for it may have been inspired in part by Henry Cowell’s influential book New Musical Resources (1930). Cowell suggested that the player piano -- which had already been used by such composers as Stravinsky and Hindemith to record transcriptions of pieces originally written for other instruments, including the “conventional” piano -- invited the creation of a new kind of work, one that could “not be played by any living performer” (Carlsen 3). In a separate essay written a year later (“Music of and for the Records”), Cowell again anticipated “the possibilities of writing music specially for a recorded form [such as the phonograph or player piano], music which deliberately utilizes some of the advantages gained by removing the personality of performers from the performance” (Cowell 254).

This view of the player piano -- that it “remov[ed] the personality of performers from the performance,” that it was “this thing that would play all these fantastic things by itself” -- deserves closer scrutiny. Note that it is not a view in which technology negates the human influence in art altogether (though critics of the player piano would often assume as much); in this case an individual artist -- Nancarrow -- is still assumed to be in control of the machine, though “performers” have become irrelevant. The fact that technology has not been disavowed here is not surprising; historically, the perception of an interrelationship between music and technology is not new. Even in the pre-industrial era, it was recognized that skills in both of these areas could exist in the same individual. Chanan notes that in the early years of organized instrument building, “[t]he typical instrument-maker was often a musically gifted artisan,” and very often was a professional musician (Musica Practica 167). “Great composers” too have typically been involved in various aspects of music technology. We have already seen Beethoven’s interest in heavier, louder pianos. And Albert Schweitzer tells us that Bach

had [...] the open mind of the self-taught man for inventions. He was not interested in scientific and aesthetic theories upon music; whatever related to practice, however, seemed to him -- even if it were concerned with the smallest detail -- important enough to be worthy of his serious attention. He was particularly interested in instrument-making. As one of the leading experts of his epoch, he witnessed the transition from the old to the modern instruments, though he saw only the beginnings of the new era, and still clung to the old with some tenacity (198-9). 3

Mozart shared Bach’s interest in these areas. Despite the fact that he referred to the playing of his great keyboard rival, Muzio Clementi, as “mere mechanicus” (Einstein 237), Mozart would also note of the piano manufacturer Stein that “[h]is instruments have this splendid advantage over others, that they are made with escape action [...] without an escapement it is impossible to avoid jangling and vibration after the note is struck. When you touch the keys, the hammers fall back again the moment after they have struck the strings, whether you hold down the keys or release them” (238). These comments demonstrate a fairly sophisticated understanding of the machinery of the piano. Further, Mozart evinced what Alfred Einstein called a “pleasure in playing with figures,” and in particular a fondness for the eighteenth century fad 4 of “composing minuets ‘mechanically,’ by putting two-measure melodic fragments together in any order” (25). 5

Taking this relationship to one extreme, however, twentieth-century critics have often perceived a danger that technology would, on its own, end up dominating the creation of music. For some, this perception has informed any work whose connection to technology is obvious. Consider, for instance, audience reactions to the musical productions of the EMI (Experiments in Musical Intelligence) computer program created by David Cope. This program has the ability to create original music in the style of various classical composers, and “when not informed that the works were composed by machine, listeners spoke of being moved by the pieces as if they were ‘real.’ Yet, when informed that the music was composed by machine, they denied their own responses” (Edgerton 56). Such denial speaks volumes about a contemporary mistrust of technology. Perhaps a better example is the pervasive influence of muzak, the name for environmental music created by the company of the same name. Given that the purpose of muzak is “not to instill a love of music in those who hear its products, nor to improve listeners’ minds, nor to elevate their thoughts, but simply to create certain psychological and physiological states,” usually for some corporate end (Day 214-5), it is not surprising that many have perceived it as a form of pernicious machine-driven mind control.

Yet, as if responding to this perceived threat of machines “taking over” music, discourse on music and technology often attempts to tilt the scales in the other direction, arguing for a uni-directional flow of control in which technology, no matter how advanced, is entirely manipulated by composers or performers. In the process, such discourses end up reaffirming the idea of the solitary artist, who in this case controls not other musicians but machines. To return to the case of Nancarrow, the rhetoric of genius is clearly intact, as is demonstrated by Tenny’s comment that “Nancarrow does not need the help of other musicians in order to make his music, and thus the whole ‘politics’ of musical performance is happily avoided” (3). Consider too Charles Amirkhanian’s depiction of Nancarrow as a godlike figure: “What the computer now is beginning to make possible for ordinary mortal composers, Nancarrow has been able to accomplish with his bare hands, guided by an innate musicality and intelligence as well as an ornery persistence which would make Sisyphus blush” (13). In such comments, technology is defined quite narrowly as a lifeless machine. Like the reification of music addressed in the introduction, technology in this conception “becomes a thing” -- an end product that can be acted upon, but nothing more. This view also suggests that technology follows art. Charles Rosen, for instance, argues that in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries piano technology evolved to “meet the demands of the music,” adding that “[i]t is a familiar mistake to think that a composer writes only for the instruments available to him” (209, Critical Entertainments). The implication here is that composers write for whatever instruments they can imagine, and technology simply has to keep up with compositional desire.

But this argument would fail to explain Nancarrow, who not only wrote “only for the instruments available to him,” but wrote mostly for an instrument that was, for all intents and purposes, “obsolete” (the popularity of the player piano began to decline during the Depression; Nancarrow’s first studies began appearing in the late 1940s). Thus it might be more accurate to posit a mutually reinforcing relationship between technological and musical imagination. As Michael Chanan argues, “technology is both agent and symptom of change” (Musica Practica 166). Paul Theberge also indicates that the relationship between musicians and “manufacturers is [. . .] one of mutual dependency: Technological innovation is, in this sense, not only a response to musicians’ needs but also a driving force with which musicians must contend” (4). Thus, it is not that artists manipulate “inert” technology for their own ends, nor that they are controlled by such technology, but rather that “[m]aterial culture and abstract systems of musical thought and organization [. . .] form a dialectical relationship of the utmost importance in music-making” (166).

Perhaps more importantly, the “inert technology” view overlooks that technology is a conduit for both direct and indirect (i.e., contextual) collaboration. Thus when a composer like Nancarrow (or, later, Frank Zappa, whose work with the Synclavier synthesizer is important in this sense as well 6) claims to have surmounted the “problem” of using “real” musicians by turning to technology, what has actually happened is that they have replaced one set of collaborative artists (performers) with another (inventors, artisans, etc.). All too often such collaborative figures are anonymous or given oblique recognition in “official” music histories, and thus their significance remains unexamined. For instance, in describing Nancarrow’s methods, Carlsen notes that the composer originally punched all of his rolls by hand, but that “[t]hat extremely laborious way of working impelled him to return briefly to New York in 1947 in search of a punching machine. Having located one, he hired a Greenwich Village machinist to duplicate it for him” (4). Note that the machinist in this account goes unnamed; we can surmise that he or she had a fairly significant task, given the fact that the technology in question must be “duplicated” (presumably from scratch) -- but that is all we know. Later, Carlsen mentions another collaborative figure -- the (again anonymous) individual who altered Nancarrow’s player so that it would advance the roll paper continuously, allowing for more finely-tuned rhythms and tempi -- thus making possible an additional aesthetic dimension in Nancarrow’s work. Again, little is said about this unnamed individual. One collaborative figure is identified by Amirkhanian in the liner notes to the Nancarrow CD series released by Wergo: Octavio Santibanez, “a second generation piano tuner and player piano restorer,” whose assistance, Amirkhanian admits, was both “invaluable” and “indispensable” (13). Despite these striking adjectives, Santibanez gets three sentences out of seventeen pages of liner notes, which are primarily devoted to explaining the theoretical underpinnings of Nancarrow’s work.

It may be that one of the reasons this kind of contextual collaboration through technology is typically overlooked is that it is assumed that since instruments are mechanical, that the processes that produce them must also be. This is perhaps especially true of instruments like the player piano, which clearly obviated the need for traditional performers; it may have been easier to assume (however illogical such an assumption would be) that the player piano also obviated the need for people to build it. And yet the long history of mechanized instruments in Western culture has been dependent upon labor-intensive craftsmanship traditions associated with clock- and watch-making, and the manufacture of all manner of automata. 7 Consider these examples of such devices: Arthur W. J. G. Ord-Hume describes a barrel piano of the early nineteenth century which features a movable tableau of “musicians, magicians and conjurers” all controlled by barrel pins; this scene moves as the music plays (PHSSP plate 26). Evan Eisenberg traces this tradition back even farther, from the (probably apocryphal) story of the “talking” statue of Memnon at Thebes. He writes:

Until records and radio shut them up, music boxes were everywhere, in scent bottles, beer tankards, fans, chairs that sang when sat on, even bustles like Queen Victoria’s which played “God Save the Queen” when she sat down. They were very large, like the coach Kuznetsov and Dubasnikov built in 1785 whose wheels powered a barrel organ, or the Gavioli Orchestrion of 1908 with its 112 notes and its dozen stops. And they were very small, like the pocket watches from which birds or dogs emerged to chirp or bark the hours (229).

The custom nature of these instruments -- one presumes that the market for bustles that played “God Save the Queen” was quite small -- suggests that they were created with small-scale manufacturing, and that they involved artisanal techniques.



Of course, unlike these curiosities, player pianos were mass produced. And yet even after the piano industry began incorporating machine production techniques at the turn of the twentieth century (Roell 72), the manufacture of player pianos did not exploit key characteristics of mass production. For instance, each company used a distinctly different hole punch system to code its piano roll performances (some of these methods have since been lost), claiming theirs was the most “accurate” or “life-like.” As a result, James Edwards writes, often “one company’s rolls would not play properly on another company’s piano” (Edwards 36). Such variation ensures that nowadays the restoration of these instruments requires highly skilled enthusiasts, conversant with original companies’ idiosyncratic methods, and able to replace and refit thousands of tiny parts. In the introduction to his handbook on the subject, Ord-Hume explains how this artisan aesthetic is then necessarily replicated by modern users of these instruments: “Proper restoration is a job demanding skilled man-hours and is thus very expensive. Player piano engineers do not really exist today because few owners would be able to pay an economic price for their labours. This means that the player piano owner must fall back on his own abilities to bring an instrument back to life” (RPOSPP xiii).

Andre Millard points out that the early years of the recording industry were propelled by a similar manufacturing aesthetic centering on “the ideas and ambitions of independent inventors” (156). Despite charges of dehumanized, mechanized mass production, Millard implies that the industry has been characterized by a cyclical relationship in which important advances are generated by artisanship / independent invention, which is then moved to a corporate environment until a new idea comes along. Thus, while “organized research programs in company laboratories” took control of the technological direction of the industry in the 1930s, two decades later, the

crusade for higher fidelity was [...] the work of an army of amateur phonograph builders. In the 1950s building amplifiers and loudspeakers became a very popular hobby. Stores which sold radio components began to stock parts which could be assembled into home players. Their customers were often servicemen who had been trained to operate electronic equipment during World War II and had maintained an interest in it. Some of the engineers who had also worked in wartime electronics founded small companies to provide the components. After the decimation of the Depression, there were only about thirty concerns producing audio equipment, but in the 1950s this number increased dramatically as new companies entered the business, many with the aid of GI loans. These were start-up companies established by inventors and entrepreneurs -- the same kind of people who had founded the industry of recorded sound in the 1880s and 1890s. (Millard 209)

Of course, to the extent that technology has been recognized as a conduit for contextual collaboration, its defenders often overcompensate by romanticizing the inventors or artisans involved. Theberge, in discussing “accounts of electronic music,” writes that “[s]uch accounts remain firmly within a tradition of histories of ‘great men’ and their accomplishments in technology and art. Indeed, there is a kind of symmetry in these accounts where inventors and their machines share a certain (though subsidiary) glory with avant-garde composers and their music” (6). We can see evidence of this sort of romanticization during the online “factory tour” of Martin guitars; readers learn that “[t]he art of making quality instruments has been handed down across generations of craftsmen and lives in the many mothers, daughters, fathers and sons who skillfully craft our beautiful guitars. Our prestigious guitars and the craftsmen who build them are the stars of the tour [...] In many areas of the plant you will see guitarmaking skills that go beyond craftsmanship to art in its purest form.” Note the excessive emphasis on “craft” in not only every sentence, but every clause. This romanticization is similar to that often expressed about famous inventors like Edison (in marketing descriptions of Edison’s cylinder-manufacturing process, for instance, copywriters would emphasize the mystery and power of the inventor, writing about how at a certain point “Mr. Edison would emerge from his private laboratory carrying a small paper bag filled with [a] critical secret ingredient, whereupon he would walk to the vat of molten wax, dump the contents of the bag therein, and wait until he had seen it thoroughly amalgamated with the other ingredients” (163)). These examples demonstrate that, like the collaborative theory of art, whose positions (initiating acts, direct and contextual collaboration) can be defined in different ways, the rhetoric of genius is adaptable, even cropping up in discussions unrelated to art per se. And yet using this rhetoric in relation to technology is no less problematic than using it in relation to music.

Of course, one can avoid such traps by defining “technology” more broadly -- it becomes harder to impose the rhetoric of genius on either technology or music when the distinction between these things is blurred. Clearly even “traditional instruments” are not only examples of technology, but function technologically -- like player pianos, phonographs, and compact discs, they have served as tools of musical propagation (Albert Schweitzer makes this point when he paraphrases Liszt’s comment that the piano “is to music what engraving is to painting; it serves to multiply and disseminate works of art” (319)). And this semantic broadening can also be taken in the other direction, technologically redefining words that are typically associated with music only. Consider for instance Frank Zappa’s habit of referring to the guitar as a “machine,” or the potentially wide application of the word “play,” which can be used to describe the action of operating anything from a bassoon to a stereo system.

* * * * *

Notes for this section

1. Note the hostility suggested when Nancarrow refers to musicians as “instruments” -- in contrast, Ellington would label instrumental parts with the names of specific players.

2. The composer Henry Cowell, writing in 1931, long before Nancarrow’s own explorations of the compositional potential of the player piano, also mentions Nicolai Lopatnikoff, who “experimented in works for all kinds of recordings, such as mechanical orchestras, organs, violins, and pianos.” The pieces he wrote for such instruments “can only be performed mechanically, making the mechanism necessary to the composition. He has player piano passages which are impossibly fast, and combinations impractical for the hands of players, no matter how many should take part in a performance.” Lopatnikoff also had an interest in making “phonograph records of various factory and street noises, synchronizing and amplifying them as a percussion background for music written for keyboard recordings” (Cowell 255).

3. It is interesting in this context to consider Bach’s use of the term Inventions to describe some of his piano pieces, as well as the argument, advanced by Schweitzer and others, that his music is “architectonic.”

4. This fad obviously predated (by two hundred years) the similar but more celebrated “chance composition” techniques of John Cage. Haydn is also known to have displayed an interested in the relationship between randomness and composition.

5. Consider for instance various games in which a random number generator (typically a pair of dice) could be used by “any amateur to compose music without having to know the techniques or rules of composition” (Peterson). The best known of these games, attributed to Mozart and published the year after his death, is Musikalisches Wurfelspiel (Musical Dice Game), in which players create a sixteen measure waltz by rolling dice to select individual measures from sixteen columns of eleven choices each. Of course, although the resulting tunes “have a recognizable Mozartean flavor,” many scholars have rejected the idea that Mozart actually had anything to do with this particular game (Peterson). And yet there is other evidence of Mozart’s pursuits in this realm: in K. 516f (Noguchi), he “wrote down long strings of measures, grouped into two-bar melodies, each labeled with a letter of the alphabet and a number (1 or 2)” (Peterson) -- an apparent puzzle that scholars have only recently begun to figure out (See Noguchi). Einstein also refers to “a page of musical sketches on which [Mozart] had begun to figure out the sum which the chessplayer would have received from the King, in the famous Oriental story” (25).

6. In his autobiography, The Real Frank Zappa Book, Zappa revealed that his admiration for the Synclavier was based on the idea that it could do for him what conventional musicians could not: “Anything you can dream up can be typed or played into the Synclavier [. . .] With the Synclavier, any group of imaginary instruments can be invited to play the most difficult passages, and the ‘little guys inside the machine’ play them with one-millisecond accuracy -- every time. [. . .] The Synclavier allows the composer not only to have his piece performed with precision, but to style the performance as well -- he can be his own conductor, controlling the dynamics or any other performance parameters. He can bring his idea to the audience in a pure form, allowing them to hear the music, rather than the ego problems of a group of players who don’t give a shit about the composition” (172-3, emphases in original). For Zappa, then, the Synclavier became a tool for the “purest” possible expression of the mind’s ear.

7. In the case of player pianos, many intriguing mechanical problems were only solved over long periods of time and with the input of many minds. How, for instance, to power the music roll drive (PHSSP 107)? How to make sure the paper roll stayed in perfect alignment with the tracker-bar holes that allowed it to be read (110)? How to get the instrument to play musical accents (116)?




[photo credit: hyrck. and PharPhoto]

Too small to fail

A few weeks ago I came across a very smart comment appended by Alex Rodriguez to a post that appeared on NPR's excellent in-house jazz blog. The issue was NPR's "The Decade's 50 Most Important Recordings" list, and the relevance or irrelevance of jazz to same. Alex wrote:

I'll go ahead and say it: jazz doesn't belong on the "50 most important albums" list. Sorry, jazz fans, but we're too small and culturally irrelevant to be taking spots from the real musical trends in modern music. I suppose there's a case to be made if "important" doesn't measure overall cultural impact, but more along the lines of "artistic merit" or some equally-vague concept, but a few jazz fans typing around on the internet about their favorite records does not equal relevance.

It's a sentiment I tend to agree with, but it made me wonder: in 2009, does anything really belong on a hypothetical "most important albums" list? Or have we finally passed the moment in which one could sustain the fiction of the macrocosmically relevant (which of course is the assumption behind such lists)?

Most musicians I know are pretty ambivalent about the ritual of listmaking, and are simultaneously inclined to complain about and participate in it.

For instance, one would be hard-pressed to find a musician who was unhappy to have their work featured as one of the year-end critical picks in a given rag, or who would go so far as to punch the hierarchical gift horse in the mouth. And in terms of creating such lists, what true music fan is going to be shy about sharing his or her opinions? Especially when asked?

But does anyone really believe that these lists are not prone to at least some degree of silliness, and particularly the silliness of the self-serving? Almost invisibly, the (self-appointed) right to bestow a label like "important" confers upon its giver an aura of... importance. Talk about a conflict of interest!

Of course, the potential for silliness is directly proportional to the grandness of the claims being made. (The 50 most important albums of 2000-2009? Really? You can actually see, from the future, their historical and "game-changing" impact?) So the best such lists are always the ones that go out of their way to qualify themselves:

It’s customary at the end of any period of time like this for people to put together their lists of greatest/best/most significant/blah-blah-blah music of the decade. Most such lists end up being fairly cynical ploys to bait readers into agreeing/disagreeing, and the hagiographic consensus that gets built up around so much banal, tedious music always leaves me baffled.

So I shan’t attempt to speak for anyone else, or to put a stamp of importance or significance on the following list. Instead, I’ll just list the albums that meant most to me that were released during the last ten years. For a whole mess of reasons. Some trivial, some far deeper.

It's a cliche by now, but the last 10-15 years have provided copious evidence that the old (top-down) music business is dying, and being replaced by something less centralized, more dispersed, more DIY, and more directly controlled by musicians themselves. And this (slow, incomplete, but ineluctable) democratization of the music business, which puts more music into the world than ever before, consequently undercuts unselfconscious and uncritical notions of macrocosmic relevance.

Set aside the issue of aesthetic justice (the usual response to any "best of" list is to point to all the deserving artists who were overlooked). This is actually a practical question. It has to do with the fact that the unimaginably huge cultural bounty that is the Internet has become impossible to track accurately. (Does anyone even know how many recordings were released last year?) And because of the limits of the human capacity for cultural consumption, ultimately there will be a time (and maybe it's already here) when the "best" art produced in any period, by any criteria whatsoever, will surpass the listening audience's capacity to perceive it. Your desire to support the arts, your passion for good music, will be beside the point. There will be more good music than you can reasonably expect to be able to enjoy in a single lifetime, let alone in a single year or decade.

Powerful media entities like NPR will, understandably, but out of habit, continue to assert the notion of a broad-yet-manageable view of the entire field. But we can't have it both ways, can we? Unless we consciously and collectively choose to go backwards, to undo the zeitgeist of DIY, the technological shape of the new music business is pushing us hard towards a hopelessly complex and detailed ecology of musical microcosms. And assuming we cannot surgically expand the perceptual capabilities of the human mind, going forward we will each have to be satisfied with a tinier fragment of the overall musical pie.

And that's fine with me.

* * * * *



Addendum

I suppose the deeper question is whether the impulse to pursue and propound macrocosmic relevance fulfills some psychological need. Is it just a habit? Or does it serve a more religious purpose by giving music fans a sense of plugging into something bigger than themselves?

[photo credit: ...Tim and 27147]

This one goes out to Senator Joe Lieberman

What a disgrace.

How saving a farming village from bandits in feudal Japan is like being in a big band circa 2009

Because good musicians playing in a big band are like samurai deigning to fight without hope of glory, of course. They have to really love what they do, and they have to be willing to be paid in rice if need be.

Kambei Shimada, pondering the prospect:

First of all, it's not easy to find trustworthy samurai. What's more, all you have to offer is food. Only those out to fight for the hell of it will agree. Besides, I'm sick of fighting. Age, I suppose.

Kambei Shimada, attempting to convince another samurai to join the cause:

Kambei Shimada: It pains me to tell you, but we're fighting for farmers.

Potential comrade: Farmers?

Kambei Shimada: That's right. This job offers no stipend and no reward. But we can eat our fill as long as we fight.

Potential comrade: This is absurd! My ambitions are greater than that.

Kambei Shimada: That's a shame. Won't you reconsider?

Potential comrade: I will not.

Katsushirō Okamoto: Sir, we lost a good man there. Such a fine swordsman.

The few and the proud.

[photo credit: jetalone]

A list you can actually use

I feel some commentary on "end of the year lists" coming on, though I suspect I can't really improve upon the words that are found here or here.

In the meantime, how about this: "10 of the Dumbest Inventions of the 20th Century"?

Now that's a list I can truly enjoy!

Why? Well, if necessity is the mother of invention, failure is its father. In some twisted way, without the "phone answering robot" (pictured above), modern-day voicemail systems would have beeen just a little less possible. Not impossible, mind you. Just a little farther away on the horizon by... oh, I don't know, a few miles?

Particularly hilarious are the gadgets designed to help you care for your kids. E.g.:

Humans in the 1930s had a much higher infant mortality rate than the one we experience today, and we think we’ve found the reason: inventions like this insane baby cage that suspends your precious bundle of joy out of the window, high above the very hard pavement below.

Gadzooks!

And this is equally precious:

The cigarette holder for two: for when you really want to share your lung cancer with the one you love.

Go read / view!

Good cheer

As the year winds down, and the decade winds down, and the "best of" lists appear, and the Grammy lists appear, and the momentous political issues of our day acquire a screaming white-hot intensity, and I embark upon my forty-first year on this planet, and the first frost arrives, and my kid really hits her stride with the whole kindergarten thing, and the scent of grand fir fills the house, and I madly plan for the next phase of my "career," and another stack of B-movies arrives in the mail, and...

And, and, and. As all this is going on, here I am, just trying to relax and savor the experience of being alive. It's a struggle sometimes.

Other times, it's not. Last night, as I was goofing off at the piano, Thandie brought over a book of Christmas carols (donated by one of the well-meaning grandparents, no doubt, because neither of her parents are huge fans of Christmas carols) and demanded I play. Before I knew it, all three of us were singing "Silent Night" and other such dreck. It was like a friggin' Irving Berlin musical come to life -- except that it was real, and my usual defenses against sentimentality were all but annihilated. I just went with the energy.

And it was remarkable. And then... it was wonderful.

It's interesting that we were singing, though, because the incident reminded me one of my favorite lines in the history of songwriting, c/o Paul Simon:

Sometimes even music cannot substitute for tears.

Yes. I hear that as a nod toward the "music is everything / music is nothing" idea, but it's also another way of saying art only attains its "importance" experientially. Making art is itself an experience, of course, but so are a lot of other things. And only making art never makes for good art. In my own case, I know that sometimes I forget to put my own obsessive creativity in the context of, you know, the rest of the cosmos. Over the last five years I have discovered that that sort of narrow-mindedness is particularly irrelevant when you have a kid. It's a discovery for which I am grateful.

* * * * *

The public perception of the modern musician-Dad has generally been negative. Male musicians, according to this general view, just aren't involved in their kids' lives, because of the demands of touring, or for worse reasons. Historically, this perception is probably grounded in a certain amount of truth.

I won't say we've fixed whatever the underlying problem is, but I have noticed that, in this era of digital communication and the technologies of DIY music production, and undoubtedly because of the hard work of generations of feminists, there is now a noticeable contingent of dude musicians who, if the internets are to be believed, are downright wrapped up in raising their own offspring, while simultaneously continuing to define themselves as musicians. Off the top of my head, that list would include folks like Chris Schlarb, Kris Tiner, Chris Kelsey, Ward Baxter, Tim DuRoche, Rob Mader, Josh Sinton, Nate Trier, Gary Lawrence Murphy. And so on.

That too, seems remarkable.

I am not offering a New Age-y paean to fatherhood here. Raising kids in general is not for everyone, and if you're opposed to or offended by it, you'll never have to sit through a boostery lecture from the likes of me. To each his or her own, I say. But whatever your feelings on the subject, "dude musicians who are downright wrapped up in the lives of their offspring" seems to bode well, in some small way, for art and life now, and art and life in the future.

Contest mania

(This image has nothing to do with this post. I just liked it.)

A friendly reminder that we currently have two Industrial Jazz Group contests running, both of which feature a cash prize:

1. The Howl Remix Contest. $50 prize. Deadline: January 31, 2010.

2. The Job Song Video Contest. $250 prize. Deadline: January 31, 2010.

All details are at the links above. Contestants, start yer engines!

And speaking of contests, check out this awesome "name that genre" contest (H/T: Tom D'Antoni). It concerns some of my very favorite Portland-area bands, including 3 Leg Torso, March Fourth Marching Band, and the Portland Cello Project. Prize: a night for two in a Chinook Winds Casino ocean-view suite and dinner! Well, hot damn!

And speaking of my very favorite Portland-area bands... hmmm, actually, I'm going to hold off on that bit of news for a few days. Suffice it to say I have a very exciting project in the works.

(I know, I know, I'm always saying that.)

[Photo credit: Lamerie]

What passes for scholarship these days: Chapter one, 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 fourth 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
Introduction, part two
Chapter one, part one

* * * * *

Decomposition: A Critique of Musical Authorship and Authenticity

Chapter One: Ellington, Beethoven, and the Rhetoric of Genius (part two)

ii. Collaborating with Beethoven

Although initially hesitant to embrace the foregoing critique, many scholars and musicians, once taken through it, respond that though the argument may be at least somewhat compelling, Ellington is a unique case in the history of music. The reason Ellington fits the argument, in this view, is that he was a jazz composer, and as even the most casual jazz listener probably knows, that genre as it is most frequently defined involves some form of improvisation -- a creative technique that because of its spontaneous nature is necessarily collaborative (in that jazz musicians are always responding to each other, and to their surroundings, during a given performance). Additionally, jazz is usually seen as an “oral art”; as opposed to classical music, in which the score is considered the primary means for the transmission of works, jazz is (ostensibly) practiced by musicians who play by ear and are unable to read traditional notation. This circumvention of the score suggests an art that is produced collectively. Of course, whether jazz is truly an oral art (particularly now) is another issue altogether, but what is important for our purposes is that such a notion is influential, and that it might lend credence to the collaborative theory as applied to Ellington.

Recall the words of John Zorn, cited earlier in this chapter, to the effect that Ellington was a “new kind of composer,” one whose aesthetic guaranteed the creative participation of others. Such an interpretation of the collaborative theory of art is often presented with an air of relief (though it is not presented that way by Zorn himself), as if the jazz loophole preserves for classical music the notion of traditional genius. It is my goal in the remainder of this chapter to demonstrate that music of any sort necessarily involves collaboration of some kind. Indeed, I will be examining the collaborative theory of art as it can be applied to that most venerable of classical music composers -- by some accounts the man who defined (or who was used to define) -- the image of the traditional genius: Ludwig van Beethoven.

As I have already mentioned, Beethoven is the subject of Tia DeNora’s recent book, Beethoven and the Construction of Genius: Musical Politics in Vienna, 1792-1803. The first thing to observe about this work is that it is clearly not driven by musical analyses -- a fact that has led to a great deal of criticism. Charles Rosen, for instance, insists in his New York Review of Books piece on DeNora’s book that “[o]ne cannot explore ‘music’s social meaning’ with no reference to the music” (9). Critics from the lay audience (at least those found on the Amazon.com page that sells this book) express similar misgivings: John Grabowski writes that “[t]here is no analysis of the music itself in this book, because she has decided it is irrelevant. I'm not kidding”; Steven Moll adds, “[a]s the other reviewer of this book exclaimed, listen to the music!” and an unnamed reviewer drives the point home (and then some) with “[a]re we really to believe that the music of this man does not speak for itself? [...] how about a serious listen to what he actually wrote down! What I am suggesting is a serious listen.”

These objections are worth considering further. Why fault a book that is not about aesthetics... for its failure to address the issue of aesthetics? One explanation comes through in the writing of philosopher Peter Kivy, another of DeNora’s critics: “[I]f one were to come to believe, as does DeNora, that genius is a political construct, Beethoven a political put-up job […] then one perforce cannot experience the music of Beethoven with the sense of wonder and fervor one had when one believed in the traditional concept of genius” (Possessor and Possessed, 250). Aside from its exaggeration of DeNora’s point of view (an exaggeration I will explore in more detail below), this is an interesting comment that Kivy unfortunately does not develop. But it is clear that for him (and presumably for Rosen and the others cited above), musical pleasure and the traditional notion of genius are strongly linked somehow, and that interrogating that notion is more than just an intellectual activity: it actually threatens the enjoyment of music.

In any case, the argument that DeNora’s work is flawed because it overlooks aesthetics is but one example of how she has been misread. There are others: for instance, DeNora does not argue that anyone else, when plugged into Beethoven’s context, would have produced the same body of work. She does not argue that Beethoven had no agency in his own artistry, or that he was a puppet manipulated by the political machinations of those more powerful than him. Neither does she argue that we’ve been duped into placing Beethoven in the western musical canon.

She does, however, address the collaborative model of art -- though not in the language I have introduced -- and it is for this reason that she is useful to me here. Consider, for instance, how DeNora highlights the issue of direct collaboration when she points out that Beethoven had access to talented musicians through which to realize his works. In fact, in this regard, Beethoven is very similar to Ellington: “Not all Viennese-based composers had the good fortune to work intimately with respected and highly skilled performers” (118), just as not all jazz composers had the luxury of year-round access to a big band stocked with world-class performers and improvisers. There is even some indication that “Beethoven [...] benefited from the suggestions these musicians offered for improving his works”; for instance, DeNora cites a contemporary observation that “Kraft, the famous cellist, pointed out to [Beethoven] that he should mark a passage in the finale of the third trio, Opus I, with sulla corda G and that in the second of these trios the finale, which Beethoven had marked 4/4, should be changed to 2/4” (118). 13

Yet while the issue of direct collaboration in Beethoven’s career could be explored in greater detail, what DeNora is really after, it seems to me, is an examination of various forms of contextual (or indirect) collaboration that informed his work -- in other words, a reconsideration of Beethoven’s creativity in terms of the social forces (and in particular the context of late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth century Vienna) that helped his music attain its current canonical status. Providing a theoretical stepping-off point, DeNora cites sociologist of science Michael Mulkay’s argument that “[t]he apparent temporal priority of discovery [or artistic innovation] is something of an illusion.” In actuality, Mulkay continues, discoveries or innovations are “socially accumulated over time” and “interpretively projected backwards upon earlier events” (qtd. in DeNora 5). Building from this model, DeNora posits a interactive relationship between an artist and his or her social context (which includes audiences, cultural gatekeepers, technical facilitators, and others); instead of fully-fledged great works emerging suddenly and dramatically from the mind of an innately talented individual, DeNora argues in terms of cumulative progress, adding that art “is understood as emerging from and constantly renewed through the reflexive interplay, bit by bit, between perception and its object” (7).

In the case of Beethoven, DeNora argues that contemporary perception was tempered by certain shifts simultaneously occurring within Viennese culture: most notably a reorientation of musical taste among certain segments of the aristocracy, who (to put it simply) used a notion of “high art” (and their own support of same) to bastion a social separation both from other classes, and, perhaps more importantly, from lesser aristocrats. This reorientation, according to DeNora, produced a system of patronage in which key figures wielded a great degree of social influence, to the point that “in Vienna it was virtually impossible for a local musician to build a successful concert career without the patronage of individual aristocratic concert hosts” (55). Aside from the issue of his talent, then, Beethoven was a prime candidate for the category of musical greatness because “[a]t a time when aristocratic connections were still crucial to a musician’s economic survival, Beethoven was exceptionally well-placed. The aristocrats with whom he was associated were already receptive to the notion of musical greatness. In terms of his connections and position within the musical field, Beethoven was perhaps unique among the composers of his day” (61).

This point is clarified by a comparison between Beethoven’s career and that of his contemporary Jan Ladislav Dussek, a composer-pianist who worked in much the same style and whose music is sometimes viewed as an anticipation of Beethoven’s. During the decade DeNora focuses on (1792-1802), Dussek was based in London, having recently fled the French court (his previous employer) in the wake of that country’s revolution. According to DeNora, the structure of musical life in London was remarkably different from other areas of Europe, and particularly Vienna; more receptive to entrepreneurship, London was a city in which musicians could actually make a living fending for themselves -- in other words, it was possible to survive economically without relying on the imprimatur of a patron. At the same time, however, the “open market” of London musical life meant that musicians had to be more attuned to the popular tastes of the “general public.” Most composers in London earned money by teaching, selling sheet music designed for amateurs, giving lessons, or performing for audiences who valued musical traits of showmanship, virtuosity, and accessibility (as opposed to aesthetic innovation and difficulty) (54).

DeNora argues that the contextual collaboration provided by these different environments (London vs. Vienna) contributed to the difference between the careers of Beethoven and Dussek. In Vienna, Beethoven was more economically dependent on the patronage of select members of the aristocracy, but he was (ironically) freer to create works that were artistically experimental and challenging (at least according to certain standards), because these were the sorts of works that were required by those who supported him. The support of patrons not only provided Beethoven with a degree of economic stability but gave him access to the resources necessary to create works in those genres (e.g. string quartets, symphonies) that came to exemplify great art, particularly in the nineteenth century (71).

In contrast, Dussek lacked these resources, and was constrained to the production of primarily piano literature (a genre that contemporary critics considered less “artistic” than string quartets or symphonies). Beethoven’s social connections were clearly superior. A sample:

Dussek’s father, a primary school teacher in a small provincial town, was hardly in a position from which he could have arranged for his son the exposure to visitors and teachers or the concentrated attention that Beethoven received. Nor was the younger Dussek, without ties to a court, able to get practical experience with larger instrumental ensembles, as Beethoven could. But perhaps most important, as the grandson of the previous Bonn court kapellmeister, Beethoven was positioned from the start for, at least potentially, a very different type of career. Unlike Dussek, Beethoven did not have to follow the route of boy soprano in a cathedral choir (the typical early path to a music career), or otherwise prolong his formal education in order to gain exposure to potential patrons. Consequently, he could afford to devote less energy to the search for patrons (his existing patrons did that work for him) and instead conserved his time and energy for creative work. (66)

DeNora addresses many other examples of these sorts of contextual factors, including the the promotional effect of the “Haydn’s hands” story (a recurrent trope in which Beethoven is seen as the musical heir to the genius of Haydn) and the role played by patrons like Prince Karl Lichnowsky and Baron Gottfried van Swieten. 14



Charles Rosen offers important qualifications of DeNora’s analysis, arguing that “DeNora’s concept of an identifiable and isolatable aristocratic taste and ideology [i.e., the aristocratic penchant for high art] is a constructed fiction” (4). Rosen uses this observation as the basis for an alternate reading of the Beethoven / Dussek comparison:

We could try a different slant with the two biographies: we might note the insulting snubbing of Beethoven in front of his colleagues by Prince Esterhazy, and recall Beethoven’s notorious revolutionary republican principles, his ostentatious refusal to take off his hat at the passage of royalty. Dussek, on the other hand, worked for William V of Holland, and was a salaried musician at the courts of Catherine II of Russia and Marie Antoinette of France, becoming a favorite composer of both these queens; he was also employed for two years by Prince Radziwill. We might speculate that the coddling by royalty sapped Dussek’s ambition, condemning him to be a minor composer of piano music, while Beethoven’s struggle to obtain financial support stimulated him to greater efforts. (4)

For Rosen, the advancement of art music (and Beethoven’s career) at the expense of more popular forms was stimulated primarily by musicians themselves, not by the aristocracy (even though Rosen recognizes that the latter participated in cultural development to varying degrees).

Of course, whether Beethoven’s success was attained with the assistance of an aristocracy or with the assistance of other musicians is no matter to the collaborative theory of art: both are examples of contextual collaboration, and both support the idea that great works are not produced in isolation. Rosen ultimately reveals his affinity with this view as well:

DeNora and other sociologists are right: the status of Beethoven as a great composer is not a fact of nature but the result of a system of values and an ideology in which we have been educated and by which we continue to judge, think, and behave. They are wrong, however, to believe that this system of values was imposed by a single class, even a class with political authority and a lot of money. It has been elaborated over a long history, and one in which a highly specialized and complex technical musical language was developed and continuously changed as a part of a larger and more general cultural environment. Neither the more general culture nor the musical language, however, could be simply altered at will, either by a class or by an exceptional individual: both of them could only be inflected and partially reshaped. (11)

For Rosen, however, this argument is not particularly remarkable. As he later put it in a rebuttal to DeNora’s response to his review (in which she had qualified her own position by stating that “Beethoven’s talent was a necessary but not sufficient cause of his subsequent acclaim”): “Put that way, the thesis is acceptable and even bland. Who would deny it?” (2)

But as with the expansive view of composition suggested by Collier’s Duke Ellington, there have been a number of critics who have denied it. One of the most notable counterarguments comes from Kivy, in a chapter included in his survey of western musical genius, The Possessor and the Possessed. An analysis of Kivy’s critique suggests that one of the issues at stake in the genius debate -- one of the reasons it is still relevant -- is its connection to the notion of “self.” In other words, by staking out positions in the genius debate, we are also making distinctions between the Cartesian premise that selfhood is a discrete, separate and consistent entity -- a view that dovetails with genius as traditionally understood -- and a more ambiguous, amorphous concept of self as unbounded.

Consider, for instance, Kivy’s response to DeNora’s statement that “Beethoven’s recognition [...] is often explained in ways that overemphasize his ‘own’ talent at the expense of the social basis of his acceptance and celebration.” Kivy writes:
[W]hat does DeNora mean to suggest by putting “own” in scare quotes? [...] It suggests that there is talent, alright, but it is not Beethoven’s. What that could mean I can scarcely imagine, and so I am inclined to think that the scare quotes around “own” are meant to convey the same meaning as if they were put around “talent.” That Beethoven had talent is (astoundingly) being placed in doubt [...] That he had no talent of his own I take to be equivalent to his having no talent, at least as it is construed by common sense -- which is to say, an inborn gift that he possesses and that most others do not, albeit an inborn gift that requires all the resources of a certain cultural and institutional structure to nurture and to realize appropriately (185).

Note that the qualification here (“albeit an inborn gift that [...]”) is nearly overwhelmed by the intensity of the rest of this passage. In any case, DeNora’s tactic of putting “own” in scare quotes does not exactly indicate that “there is talent, alright, but it is not Beethoven’s” -- rather, it suggests that it is not only Beethoven’s. To argue otherwise (i.e., the Beethoven possesses all of the talent, all of the genius) depends on an unambiguous notion of self as a self-contained and discrete entity -- a concept that goes hand in hand with a mechanistic, dependable, predictable (and, I submit, inaccurate) view of human nature. Such a view allows Kivy to make the following observation:

On the commonsense view [of genius], Beethoven would not have written great musical works (or any musical works at all) if he had been transported as an infant to Australia and had lived out his life in a community of aborigines. But common sense, I dare say, also holds that he would have produced musical masterpieces of the highest order even though he had remained in Bonn all his life and never moved to Vienna. (179)

While we might assume that Kivy is attempting to establish a certain degree of common ground with DeNora here (by making reference to the importance of context), in the process he forces the issue of genius into a simplistic formula. Pursuing the question of whether Beethoven would or would not have produced musical masterpieces in Australia as compared with Bonn or Vienna is (Kivy himself probably recognizes) an empty exercise. Aside from the problematic assumption that the music of Australian aborigine groups cannot be of high artistic value, “Beethoven,” “Bonn,” “Australia” and “Vienna” are not constants that need only to be mixed and matched in the proper way to produce works of genius. Leave aside the question of Australia; the interaction of human nature and context is complex enough that even if (somehow) Beethoven had been given the opportunity to relive his life in his original historical and geographical circumstances, we cannot assume that things would have turned out the same. This is because talent—Beethoven’s contribution to the genius equation—is not a static property, like an ingredient in a recipe. It is, rather, both a natural state and an ongoing series of choices, constantly evolving according to its surroundings.

Kivy’s inability to consider this issue in other than absolute terms leads him to some serious misreadings of DeNora. He asks:

Is it true that if, per impossibile, Dussek and Beethoven were to change places, Dussek would have been the genius and Beethoven the mediocrity? DeNora confidently answers in the affirmative. She says: ‘of course Beethoven was musically competent and musically interesting. The point is rather that there were numerous other musicians who, under different circumstances, could have ended up as celebrities.’ (187).

Note first the use of “per impossibile” here -- an interesting phrase given Kivy’s previously cited comments on Beethoven in Australia. More importantly, note the small but crucial linguistic switch. Kivy characterizes DeNora’s statement by framing it as a “confident” answer in the “affirmative”: “Dussek would have been the genius” (emphasis mine). DeNora’s actual statement: “there were numerous other musicians who [...] could have ended up as celebrities” (emphasis mine). Nor is Kivy the only one to introduce this kind of subtle shift in critical language. Though Rosen is closer than Kivy to seeing genius as a “social achievement,” he argues that DeNora takes the idea to absurd lengths; in his view “[DeNora] astonishingly and literally insists that if the Viennese aristocracy had backed a more conventional composer like Johannes Wolffl, then Woffl and not Beethoven would have become the great genius acclaimed by the next two centuries” (2, emphasis mine). DeNora’s actual comments? “This is not to say, however, that there were not composers who might have been capable of garnering a similar sort of reputation. Some, I think, were better suited for the part than others (Gelinek less so than Dussek or Wolffl, for instance)” (142).

In the distinction between “would” and “could” / “might have” we have in essence the difference between DeNora and her critics. The former focuses on process and possibility; the latter on objects and certainty. Kivy in particular sees genius as an all-or-nothing proposition: a person either is or isn’t a genius, period: in his view, “[i]t is a fact, a hard fact, an objective fact that someone is a musical genius and someone else is not” (178) (note the incantatory tone). For DeNora, genius is contingent, dependent upon context. And though she doesn’t use the word collaboration, her reading fits with what I have been describing as the collaborative model of art.

* * * * *

Notes for this section

13. And here is further evidence that, like Ellington, classical composers depended upon the collaboration of specific players: writing about Mozart, Alfred Einstein notes that “[o]pera was always composed for a special occasion and for particular singers; the choice of singers influenced the vocal style and other characteristics as well” (109).

14. Of van Swieten, Einstein writes: “He played an important part in the lives of all three of the musicians who comprise what is called ‘the Vienna Classical School’: it was through him that Beethoven became acquainted with Handel’s oratorios [...] if it had not been for van Swieten Haydn would never have written The Creation or The Seasons. But contact with this controversial figure […] was even more important for Mozart than for the others [...] [Through him] Mozart came to know, from English scores that van Swieten had acquired during his stay in England in 1769, Judas Maccabaeus, Joseph, Samson, The Messiah, Alexander’s Feast, Acis and Galathea, the Ode to St. Cecilia, Athalia, the Funeral Anthem, the Utrecht Te Deum, and smaller works of Handel; much of this music, of course, he may have heard when he was a boy” (148-9).



[photo credits: zachflanders, jessicafm]