El autocuidado como metaparadigma

3.1. Introduction

In speaking of music's importance, Alan P. Merriam in The Anthropology of Music claims, ―There is probably no other human cultural activity which is so all-pervasive and which reaches into, shapes, and often controls so much of human behaviour.‖¹ These words make us ponder on how to evaluate music's value, effectiveness and scope. In his monogram, Merriam lists a range of uses and functions of music² but fails to detect that fundamental and essential to all of these is music's ability to communicate. We posit that music's communicative properties govern all of its functions since these will fail to materialize without successful communication. Furthermore, from our previous discussions, we know of the significance of inclusiveness for participative communication. This chapter endeavours to show how dialogism offers a framework to support our compositional goals of inclusiveness.

We begin by introducing aesthetic theory and the aesthetics of 'good' communication (i.e., rendering it engaging and inclusive). The chapter then offers an overview of main philosophies leading up to dialogism, followed by a presentation of dialogism's main tenets and their application to music. Lastly, we argue that imagination, interpretation and appropriative authorship can be viewed as active forms of participation.

1 Alan, P. Merriam, The Anthropology of Music (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1964), 218.

2 Ibid., 218-227. Merriam lists the functions of: emotional expression, aesthetic enjoyment, entertainment, communication, symbolic representation, physical response, enforcing conformity to social norms, validation of social institutions and religious rituals, contribution to the continuity and stability of culture, and

contribution to the integration of society.

38 3.2. Discussion

In his essay "What is Good Music?", the composer Ernst Toch responds to his personal questioning with an answer that resonates as if sounded against the timpani of Earth:

Nearness to life, nearness to nature and humanity─who has it? I think the one who contains in himself an irrational, unconquerable bastion, untouched, for which I have no other word but religiousness. To be sure, this quality does not refer to any specific creed. . . . It has nothing to do with a man's interests and activities, nothing to do even with the conduct of a man's life. The word 'religion' derives from the Latin 'religare'-to tie, to tie fast, to tie back.

Tie what to what? Tie man to the oneness of the Universe, to the creation of which he feels himself a part, to the will that willed his existence, to the law he can only divine. It is a fundamental human experience, dim in some, shining in others, rare in some, frequent in others, conscious in some, unconscious in others. But there is no great creation in either art or science which is not ultimately rooted in this climate of the soul, whatever the means of translation and substantiation.³

If, as eloquently phrased by Toch, the ability to tie humans to life, to nature and to humanity within a greater oneness defines 'good music', then examining how we create such ties is certainly not futile. As expressed in the previous chapter, communication occurs in the intersection between the parties involved; as such, it relies heavily on perception and reception.

Robert Francès, author of La perception de la musique (1958) describes the inseparable relationships subtending music, as follows:

Lalo (1939) who did so much to illuminate music with convergent light of all the sciences, concluded by according sociology the ultimate explanation of the aesthetic qualification of the facts of art. Physics, physiology, and psychology, he said, teach us what a chord or a progression is; but sociology teaches us which chords and progressions are preferred to others at some moment in the history of art. Only society confers aesthetic qualifications on a fact.⁴

3 See Lawrence Weschler quoting Toch in the Preface to Ernst Toch, The Shaping Forces in Music: An Inquiry into the Nature of Harmony, Melody, Counterpoint, Form (New York, NY: Criterion Music Corp, 1948). Reprint (New York, NY: Dover Publications, Inc., 1977), xii-xiii.

4 Robert, Francès, La perception de la musique (Paris: Université de Paris, Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1958), trans. W. Jay Dowling as The Perception of Music (Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates Publishers 1988), 344-45.

39 Again, in turning to The Anthropology of Music, we read that Merriam equally suggests that ―the listener responds socially in different ways to music, depending both upon the situation and his role in it.‖⁵

Musicology, music sociology and other fields of enquiry have come a long way since Merriam, Toch and Francès put their words to page. Increasingly, we see the benefits of our interdisciplinary approach. For example, Georgina Born's ―For a Relational Musicology‖ suggests a 'new critical method' whereby 'value communities' are created.⁶ In the same article, Born refers to Gary Tomlinson's neocomparativism as a means to study music within human experience of history and culture. Born sees the impact of 'relational musicology' as social, technological, temporal and ontological.

If, increasingly, it is thought that music and society cannot be dissociated, then valuation and evaluation of subjective response provide the music composer with avenues to enhance musical communication. Literature and music critic Peter J. Rabinowitz who self-describes as ―a narrative theorist with a strong interest in music‖⁷ pre-empts our research, as he sees the need to re-evaluate the musical experience as follows:

In order to understand the music of our times fully, then, we are going to need a new theory of how we listen─one which takes account of both programmatic and stylistic elements, but which is, in addition, alert to the relationship between the knowledge and experience of the audience.⁸

The contents of our chapter on music as communication and the observations above impart on us the need to query perception, reception and interpretation along with their

5 Merriam, The Anthropology of Music, 144.

6 Georgina Born, ―For a Relational Musicology: Music and Interdisciplinary, Beyond the Practice Turn,‖

Journal of the Royal Musical Association, 135:2 (2010): 205-43.

7 http://www.hamilton.edu/academics/departments/faculty?dept=Comparative%20Literature (accessed 2016-11-16)

8 Peter J., Rabinowitz, ―Fictional Music: Toward a Theory of Listening,‖ in Theories of Reading, Looking and Listening, ed. Harry R. Garvin, Bucknell Review (Bucknell University Press, Associated University Presses, N.J., 1981), 196.

40 inherent subjectivity. Dialogism, put forward by the Russian literary critic and philosopher Mikhail Mikhaǐlovich Bakhtin (1895-1975), centres on subjectivity and the multitude of relationships with the 'other'. Accordingly, dialogism informs our research, but prior to revealing its main constituents, earlier philosophies having contributed to its inception deserve a few pages.