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Ways of Listening: Aesthetics, Metaphors, and Quotations in Music – Part V

引言:

真的很久沒有寫新的文章了。教學越來越忙，雖然這表示我的收入多了，生活穩定了，但，這並不是我最喜歡的情況。不過，我已前也確實寫了不少文章，當然以英文寫的佔多，因為我的中文打字很慢。所以，我也只好出版多一些英文寫的文章了。以下的是一篇絕對有實力的學術文章，也是我往後開拓現代音樂美學，意義研究的啟蒙文章。以自己寫的文章作為自己的啟蒙老師，怕是由我開始的了。以下的文章也有數千字，所以會分期刋載。如讀者是喜歡音樂分析的，必能從這篇文章得益。

Part V:

Whether the borrowed tune and the last fading sound is an experience of mourning for the nostalgic loss, or acclaim of the past, a preserved value of the childhood or any other kind is no longer the matter. What is most important is that the series of quotations juxtaposed in this song is a perception of the sonic world which denies interconnectedness, continuity, but which confers on each moment the character of a mystery, leaving a space for us to search what happened and what was there. The Quotations in the form of song, therefore, is as evocative as the photo images in a private album. They can always be capable of linking our distant past with that of the present, bringing us a sense of emotional responses in that particular moment.

If the different quotations in The Things My Father Loved are like the “photos” collected in an private sonic album, Ives’ another piece, Country Band March, which comprises a hotchpotch of borrowed tunes of March, Folk and Pop, will somewhat resembles a “photo” or “painting” which contains many other sonic photos or paintings. This comes to the discussion of the second metaphor of quotation.

Quotation: “Paintings” inside a Sonic Painting

Paintings/photos often depict things. Things depicted, albeit an image, often have values. To have things painted and pout on a canvas or recorded down on a photo is unlike buying it and putting it in your house. If you have a painting/photo, you obtain also the sense of the value of the “thing” it represents.”[1] An art lover is possible to possess all the paintings he liked by owning a painting painted with his all beloved, just like the following painting, Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in His Private Picture Gallery by David Teniers (1582-1649, see example 1).

Example 1: Archduke Leopold Wilhelm in His Private Picture Gallery by David Teniers

Numbers of paintings inside a painting can show Archduke Leopold Wilhelm’s sights: sights of what he may possess and want to possess. This painting of private picture gallery could be a symbol of his wealth, fame, taste, and contribution. But these quotes might have more values that they actually acquired. When we appreciate such painting, we also appreciate the value of the entire collection bestowed upon it. It is not necessary for a viewer to identify all paintings, but more important is the emotional responses aroused from such perceptive experiences.

Similarly, all quotations collected in Ives’ private sonic album, the piece Country Band March, are “things,” and thus possess values. Country Band March, in fact, is a vivid sonic picture of an amateur band playing with beats dropped and added, parts of step, miscues, mistranspositions, spontaneous solos and general high spirits. Interestingly, Wiley Hitchcock calls it “an American equivalent of Mozart’s Musical Joke.”[1] The borrowed fragments consist of various styles of tune: London Bridge, The Girl Left Behind Me, The Battle Cry of Freedom, Arkansas Traveler, Semper Fideles March, Yankee Doodle, British Grenadiers and at least two popular songs, Violets and My Old Kentucky Home.[2] Some of the quotes are patriotic and celebrative, while others are nostalgic, folk and popular. To Ives, capturing all sonic elements of the past in this piece could be a way of preserving the most valued “things.” These sonic “things” belong to the past, for example, a sense of remembrance and love, or nostalgia of a beloved person, and place, or an experience of past life. By appearing in form of quotations, these “past” things become present, become values. When listeners are invited to search what were there inside this collection of sonic photos, what values could we find?

To Be Continued………

David Leung (theorudavid0

2012-01-11 (published)

[1] Hitchcock, Ives, 73.

[2] James Sinclair lists all borrowed tunes in the program notes of the full score of Country Band March (Bryn Mawr, Pennsylvania: Merion Music Inc, 1976).

[1] John Berger, Ways of Seeing (London: Biritish Broadcast Corporation and Penguin Books, 1972), 83.

Ways of Listening: Aesthetics, Metaphors, and Quotations in Music – Part IV

Part IV:

Not only does the first quotation in the song The Things Our Father Loved work like a sonic photo that invites us to share the experience with Ives, all the rest of the quoted tunes function similarly. After the “Kentukcy” tune of “long ago” brings us to Ives’ imagined “home,” the borrowed old folk song of On the Banks of the Wabash comes next. The piano sonority becomes more and more dissonant. Perhaps, it is a kind of appassionate dissonance. The music of “aunt Sarah’s humming from the organ on the main street”[1] is another sonic photo that we can experience. While the sense of religious faith emanated from the borrowed Gospel of Nettleton is still haunting us, the patriotic song of The Battle Cry of Freedom suddenly intrudes into our muse of devout. The block chord accompaniment in the right hand and the swing-like skipping bass in the left hand seem to raise listener’s spirit courageously higher and higher. The effect of the quoted songs now is no longer the halcyon remembrance or pious meditation, but is changed to a kind of patriotic bravey. But how does this effect influence our sensation and experience?

To listeners, the march-like music stepping restlessly forward until reaching the climax is particularly a high spirited moment. We can hear the highest sounding of the piano chords, contrasting with the inexorable descending low bass, to reinforce the voice singing, “all red, white and blue, now!” This is a moment that Ives attains his “liberty,” or more directly, Ives’s “liberty” in terms of ours, that is, a moment of all made of memorable tunes! Not for a second, a sweet quoted family folk, In the Sweet Bye and Bye, furtively emerges from the biosterious climatic reverberation. When the running semiquaver arpeggios are still keeping their rapid chromatic motion, listeners’ sensations are caught up again in this conclusive time. What are the “things” our father loved? It is an out-of-key, even distorted, nearly unrecognized fragmental tune from the Sweet Bye and Bye, singing, “in my soul of the things our Fathers loved.” The unresolved G# dominant ninth chord in the piano suspends softly in the open air, seeming to call listeners to search what was there once again. It is the final sonic photo in Ives’ private collection.

To be Continued…..

David Leung (theorydavid)

2012/01/07 (published)

[1] The text of the second phrase of this song is, “I hear the organ on the

Main Street

corner, Aunt Sarah humming Gospels.”

Ways of Listening: Aesthetics, Metaphors, and Quotations in Music – Part III

Part III:

Quotation: “Photos” in a Sonic Album

It is the barely audible C major piano sound, despite a little mediocre, that unnoticeably sets off a sonic journey at the very beginning of Ives’s song The Things Our Father Loved. This C major chord not only serves to prepare the incoming of the singer’s weak, and nearly murmured utterance, but also to offer an imagined space for the listener to contemplate, to experience. The prologue of the song is somewhat anticipatory, seeming to call you to wait for what is to come next. Music, in this sense, is an adventure – it advances, it arrives. But what will be followed after the opening C major sonority? It is a three-note melodic figure 3^{^} – 2^{^} – 1^{^}, singing the lyrical words “I think,” which is also confirmed by the piano C major triad once again. This is the right time for both Ives, the composer, and us, the listeners, to think what are these “things” that “our father” loved.

The familiar quoted tune, My Old Kentucky Home, albeit with different text setting, is one of the fruits from such process of thinking. The occurrence of quotation here is a privileged moment in unfolding that juxtaposes different moments of past experiences. On the one hand, to Ives, it could be a moment to mediate and also to seek his nostalgic restlessness and the never fulfilled sense of childhood loss. Just as David Metzer has commented, “quotation becomes the means by which the composer participated in that cultural scene. Through the gesture, he could represent the figure of the lost child and the growing gap between past and present in which that figure was caught.”[1] On the other hand, it could be a moment that all senses of childhood loss could be redeemed. Larry Starr has once showed his agreement to this view by warning against the common “widespread misconception of Ives as a nostalgic composer.”[2] Also, Burkholder has concluded in the discussion of The Things Our Father Loved with a saying that, “……this is not an exercise in nostalgia for the songs and scenes of the past.”[3] Doubtless for both scholars, Ives has not mourned the past with quotations. On the contrary, he did prize the past as a trove of values that need to be, and can be, reclaimed by himself.[4] All the quoted tunes in this song, including My Old Kentucky Home, are all “things” that represent all values – the natural beauty of Ives’s homeland, the religious faith, the patriotism, the group feeling and the hope for a future reunion with those he loved, in Heaven if not on earth. As such, this particular moment could probably be the beginning of Ives’s search for his “liberty,”[5] in which all things of value in the past that his father, or whom he loved could be contained. Ives is extolling the past and its values through the use of quotations.

For listeners, the recognized tune of Stephen Foster’s My Old Kentucky Home could be a retrospective moment that invites a search for what happened, and what was there. Unlike any other parts of the music, a quotation occurred in a particular moment is not merely a rendering, an imitation or an interpretation of its subject, but actually a trace, like a footprint or a death mask. Simply put, it works like a private photo-album containing many precious, memorable photos. From this sense, Ives here is the collector while we, the listeners, are the viewers. When displaying a private photo-album before our eyes, the collector is inviting us to share with his/her past experiences. Similarly, the first sonic photo of Stephen Foster’s quoted tune is just a trace, a footprint in this particular moment. The moment the quotes are heard is the moment we are invited to search for what was there. But whether listeners can identify the borrowed songs or think of their words is not crucial; what is most important is the character or the style of the songs, each of which represents a type of song that played a distinctive role in our experiences and is endowed with a particular emotional resonance.

While some listeners are conjured up with the similar emotion of Ives’ nostalgic loss when hearing the rather slow and sustained, even distorted appearance of the quoted tune, others, perhaps, can sense the “liberty” values that the tune represented. However, to audiences who cannot recognize the quotation, perhaps, a scene of idyll and lyricism may be evoked. The folk-like melody of Foster’s song is not difficult to express such pastoral aura of a typical American small town in countryside. However, if we remember the text of the first phrase of My Old Kentucky Home, “the sun shines bright in the old Kentucky home,” our experience of Ives’ “old home” may link to an imagined “place in the soul” that contains “all made of tunes.”[6] This “home” is definitely a bright and sunny lovely place, which comes from our private experiences, our imaginiation, not very much from Ives. We, in fact, experience Ives’ experiences in terms of our experiences.

[1] David Metzer, Quotation and Cultural Meaning in 20^th Century, 16.

[2] Larry Starr, A Union of Diversities: Style in the Music of Charles Ives (New York: G. Schirmer, 1992), 52.

[3] Burkholder, All Made of Tunes, 311.

[4] Ibid., 311

[5] The subtitle of this song is “and the greatest of these was Liberty.”

[6] The text of the first phrase of The Things Our Father Loved is, “ I think there must be a place in the soul all made of tunes.”

David Leung (theorydavid)

2011-12-12 (published)

Ways of Listening: Aesthetics, Metaphors, and Quotations in Music – Part II

The important role of metaphor in shaping our thinking and affecting our daily lives have been discussed by Lakoff and Johnson in the book, Metaphors We Live By. About metaphor, Lakoff has stated: “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another.”[1] Metaphor is not a mere rhetorical device in linguistics. It is in fact the one that governs not only our actions and activities, but also our thinking processes and ways of understanding. We always seek out personal metaphors to highlight and make coherent our own pasts, our present activities, and our dreams, hopes, and goals as well. A large part of understanding is the search for appropriate personal metaphors that make sense to us. It involves unending negotiation and renegotiation of the meaning of our past experiences. As a result, the process of understanding can lead to a continual development of new stories, as well as a creation of new realities in our daily lives. As metaphors exist in a person’s conceptual system, therefore, in this paper, all metaphors created for understanding of musical quotation are to be understood as metaphorical concepts.

It is, however, nothing new for one to understand music in terms of metaphor in the western music history. For example, in the Cours complet d’ harmonie et de composition musicale (1803-05) by Jerome-Joseph Momigny, there are extensive analyses of movements by Mozart and by Haydn alternating technical description with narrative or dramatic readings. From Powers’ description on Momigny’s writing of Haydn’s symphony no.103, movement one, we can see that Momigny’s understanding of the music was no doubt governed by the metaphorical concepts he made. In fact, Powers stated, “ Momigny’s reading of Haydn Symphony 103 / I, ……the movement is read as a scene in the countryside, with a storm, villagers taking refuge in a temple, elders and grown men, women trembling for their children, and so on, with occasional fragments of text supplied to musical motives to enliven the narrative.”[2] Clearly, Powers’ words, such as storm, temple, elders, men, women, are related to a pictorial images consisting of the weather, temple and people, which are important metaphors to structure Momigny’s thinking. But it was not a unique privilege for Momigny to read music with metaphors, many other philosophers and music critics did so in the 19th century, such as Hanslick’s use of personification to conceptualize his idea on music as a living form,[3] which could animate beauty from the projection of sound, Schopenhauer’s view on music as a representation of human’s will,[4] the Berlin critic Heinrich Hermann’s description on Beethoven’s symphony no. 3 as an almost Shakespearean world of magic, or the Russian critic Oulibicheff Marx’s review on the same work as a military “drama” for delineating a battle and victory of a hero, which the battle is fought for the human freedom.[5] In the recent musicological scholarship, Susan McClary, also used the metaphor of “sexual intercourse” to explain the western tonal system and the musical phenomenon of Beethoven’s symphony no. 9.[6] As such, music in general, and quotations in particular, can be understood in terms of metaphor. This reading is capable of creating a new way of listening, which is capable of offering different perspectives for us to muse, to recall, and to search what happened and what was there.

[1] Lakoff, Metaphors, 5.

[2] Harold Powers, “Reading Mozart’s Music: Text and Topic, Syntax and Sense,” in Current Musicology 57, (1995): 5-44.

[3] We can refer to Mark Evan Bonds’ discussion on this topic in his book, A History of Music in Western Culture ( UpperSaddleRiver, H.J. : Prentice Hall, 2003), 366.

[4] Ibid., 361.

[5] Thomas Sipe, Beethoven: Eroica Symphony (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 54-62.

[6] Susan McClary, Feminie Endings: Music, Gender, and Sexuality (London, Minneapolis: University Minnesota Press, 2002)53-79.

To be continued…..

David Leung (theorydavid)

2011-12-01 (published)

Ways of Listening: Aesthetics, Metaphors, and Quotations in Music – Part I

引言:

真的很久沒有寫新的文章了。教學越來越忙，雖然這表示我的收入多了，生活穩定了，但，這並不是我最喜歡的情況。不過，我已前也確實寫了不少文章，當然以英文寫的佔多，因為我的中文打字很慢。所以，我也只好出版多一些英文寫的文章了。以下的是一篇絕對有實力的學術文章，也是我往後開拓現代音樂美學，意義研究的啟蒙文章。以自己寫的文章作為自己的啟蒙老師，怕是由我開始的了。以下的文章也有數千字，所以會分期刋載。如讀者是喜歡音樂分析的，必能從這篇文章得益。

Introduction:

For some listeners, the response is almost instantaneous. A mistuned March parade easily sparks the most spectacular sound picture in Ives’ orchestral set. A hurdy-gurdy waltz furtively occasions in the movement of the most ambitious Mahler’s symphonic music. The ability in both to weave banalities into wonders, with the mundane – whether it be the band music in one or the street waltz in the other – being transmuted into the stuff of marvels, reconfirms us a saying, that, “in music, nothing seems impossible.” Would it be a singer’s voice, a familiar tune, a sonic gesture or a rhythmic pattern or any other musical device that can exert such tremendous impact on listeners? I would suggest that musical quotation is able to do it.

Musical borrowings have long occupied an important place in western music. For centuries, composers have incorporated materials from existing music or earlier works into their compositions.[1] From the parodic masses of Dufay’s or the use of Lutheran hymns by J.S. Bach to the “re-composition” of earlier music in Stravinsky, borrowing as a compositional procedure constantly presents itself as a challenge to the composer’s imagination. Yet there has never been such an epoch as the 20^th century in which quotations and references feature so extensively in works of numerous composers. And it is in the music of Charles Ives, an American native composer that one discovers, perhaps for the first time in history, some missed opportunities and unrealized potential in western music.

One of the first tasks that confront Ives’ scholars who undertake research into his music has always been to go through the labyrinth of quotations in the composer’s works. Peter J. Burkholder, who identifies different kinds of “quotations” in Ives’ music, focuses on exploring the complex musical, psychological and philosophical motivations behind the borrowings, and shows the purpose, techniques and effects that characterize each one. Wiley Hitchcock offers a general but succinct survey of Ives’ music in his Ives: A Survey of the Music, providing analyses of some important pieces and tracing the sources of the quotations. Philip Lambert’s studies apply set theory analysis to music, revealing the pitch organization and structural coherence of the works. Larry Starr adopts Lambert’s approach but offers analyses that relate Ives’ musical settings to the composer’s philosophical ideas and biographical background. Other scholars also advocate research on Ives’ uses of quotations in relation to the European musical tradition, American patriotism, the early 20^th century socio-cultural background of New England and other European masters such as Stravinsky, Mahler and Schoenberg. Doubtless the above-mentioned research takes place in the domain of either the compositional dimension or the biographical terrain of Ives. As such, the issues of quotation, if any, are viewed mainly from the composer’s scope.

Despite the multifarious approaches, however, few regard it an issue of aesthetics or attempt to address quotations from the perspective of the audience. How does a listener experience, feel or respond when facing the network of quotations in Ives’ music? In what way do listeners respond to these quotations in relation to their own socio-cultural surroundings? Referring to the functions of music, Tia DeNora remarks that music “is not merely a ‘meaningful’ or ‘communicative’ medium. It does much more than convey signification through non-verbal means. At the level of daily life, music…may influence how people compose their bodies, how they conduct themselves, how they experience the passage of time, how they feel – in terms of energy and emotion – about themselves, about others, and about situations.”[2] Music in general, and quotations in particular, can be read as a force of social life, a medium of social relation, a technology of self, or a device of social ordering.[3] Furthermore, if music, just as what Nora has claimed, consists of an interlacing of experience (feeling, action) and the materials that are accessed as the referents for experience and its metaphoric and temporal parameters,[4] it may thus be seen to serve as an operating platform for the temporal structure of one’s past events, as well as the emotional responses.

This article attempts to explore different ways of listening to Ives’ quotations by offering a critical survey of some of his music. Quotations, as I would like to argue, can and ought to be read and understood in terms of metaphor. In fact, just as Lakoff has claimed, “metaphor permits an understanding of one kind of experience in terms of another, creating coherences by virtue of imposing gestalts that are structured by natural dimensions of experience.”[5] From this sense, metaphor is not only a matter of imaginative rationality, but also aesthetic experience. It is created from our daily surroundings and cultural experiences, and is able to conceptualize our cognitive minds and to induce our emotional sensations. New metaphors are capable of creating new understandings and new realities, involving all the natural dimensions of our sense experiences, especially that of sound. Analysis, therefore, is no mere counting of quotes or characterization in terms of compositional techniques. It rather evokes the totality of the sonic world of a specific time, place and event, operating in every dimension of the listeners’ psychological and aesthetical states. Be it a tune, a rhythmic pattern or a specific sonority, a reference to a style or genre, a quotation is a tangible link between the sonic and cultural reality of the past and those of the present, as well as a metaphorical representation in one’s own imagination. Applying ideas and concepts borrowed from paintings and literature, it is hoped that an intertextual reading of the quotations will open up new areas of scholarship on the subject.

To Be Continued…..

David Leung (theorydavid)

2011-11-18 (published)

[1] Peter Burkholder, “Borrowing: Types of Borrowing,” in New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, 2^nd ed., 1 [computer music Library], cited on 2006/5/1, available from www.Grovemusic.com/data/articles/music/5/529/52918.xml?section=52918.1