Los lenguajes normalizados en la comunicación profesional

We focused heavily on the importance of imagination in the previous pages but, since its power in sustaining interest cannot be dispelled, we reopen the subject here. This prompts a few words on Eduard Hanslick's 1854 monogram Vom Musikalisch-Schönen (On the Musically Beautiful). In discussing Theodor Adorno and Monroe Beardsley, we had mentioned in passing that Eduard Hanslick was another formalist. Hanslick's valuing of formalism, cognition and 'absolute' music over emotivism, sentiment and 'program' music ignited numerous debates over the years but also gave rise to great reflection from countless authors after him.

3 Rosen, Piano Notes, 230.

4 Ibid.

70 In Vom Musikalisch-Schönen, Hanslick does not refute that listeners can experience a multitude of feelings upon hearing a work of music; however, he insists that, above all, music's aesthetic value should reside in the beauty inherent to the music itself. For Hanslick, appreciation of music consists foremost of intellectual contemplation and deliberation:

[I]f we are to treat music as an art, we must recognize that imagination and not feeling is always the aesthetical authority. . . . Once we grasp that the active imagination is the real organ of the beautiful, feeling will be admitted to be a secondary effect in each of the arts.⁵ Hanslick persists by emphasizing that ―to take pleasure in one's own mental alertness is the worthiest, the wholesomest, and not the easiest manner of listening to music.‖⁶ Instead of attempting to resolve the dispute surrounding aesthetic evaluation of art by arguing for or against formalism and emotivism, we have, from the onset, focused on the communicative properties of the never-ending transfer between artistic and aesthetic object; therefore, intellectual, sensory, emotional and physical arousal, although appearing under different sections, feature in our ponderings as a combined response. Also (and contrary to our approach), although Hanslick recognizes the significance of social and historical situatedness, he considers that such matters belong to art-history and should not pertain to aesthetics.⁷ Moreover, Hanslick contends that, for music to be considered pure art, it cannot serve external functions: ―The most indispensable requirement if we are to hear music aesthetically is, however, that we hear the piece for its own sake, whichever it be and with whatever comprehension we hear it.‖⁸ Charles Rosen, in Piano Notes, views this reverence

5 Eduard Hanslick, Vom Musikalisch-Sch nen: ein Beitrag zur Revision der Ästhetik der Tonkunst (Leipzig, GER: 1854) transl. and ed. by Geoffrey Payzant from the Eighth Edition (1891) as On the Musically

Beautiful:A Contribution towards the Revision of the Aesthetics of Music (Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company, 1986), 5.

6 Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 64.

7 Ibid., 38-39.

8 Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 66.

71 to the 'artistic object' somewhat contemptuously and relates it to the detached objectification that exists in the concert hall setting:

Playing in public not only isolates the pianist: it isolates and objectifies the work of music, and it turns the performance into an object as well. . . . A public performance cannot be withdrawn; it has become an object to be judged. . . . It is for this reason that the performance in public seems like the natural goal of the aesthetic philosophy that has dominated Western art and music since the eighteenth century. A work of art is supposed to have a value independent of its social function.⁹

Amongst the informative pages of Piano Notes, we find a passage where Rosen gives due consideration to the significance of intellectual arousal in listeners, not only from the internal properties of music but through their interpretation. When discussing how to perform Bach in concert, Rosen cautions against belittling the audience and suggests an interpretation that is ―understandable for the listeners in a manner that neither insults their intelligence and the music itself . . . nor leaves them in the dark about the wonderful artistry of the work.‖¹⁰ Christopher Small complements this assertion by positing, ―If everyone is born musical, then everyone's musical experience is valid.‖¹¹ Ensuring that music works tend to the intellectual capacities of participants (performer and listener) acknowledges their presence by giving them a voice, even when this consists entirely of an internalized experience. This leads to increased participation through inclusiveness.

Pianist and composer Igor Stravinsky in his Poétique musicale sous forme de six leçons (delivered as part of the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures on Poetry at Harvard University) explains this phenomenon when he states, ―But, over and beyond this passive enjoyment [of natural sounds] we shall discover music, music that will make us participate

9Rosen, Piano Notes, 123.

10Ibid., 200.

11Small, Musicking, 13.

72 actively in the working of a mind that orders, gives life, and creates.‖¹² Stravinsky emphasizes the ―working of a mind‖ when he defines music as ―a form of speculation in terms of sound and time.‖¹³ Here, we note the word speculation, as this type of intellectual arousal surfaces from an awakened imagination. This process of accessing and stimulating imagination continues to govern our analysis.

To order, to organize, to decipher form, to create relationships, etc., all come from the fundamental desire to comprehend. Stravinsky claims, ―we instinctively prefer coherence and its quiet strength to the restless powers of dispersion─that is, we prefer the realm of order to the realm of dissimilarity.‖¹⁴ Rosen expands this notion when he points out, ―What we perceive, consciously or unconsciously, is pattern, an ordering of sound . . . the will to create order being the condition for the foundation of language or of culture and society.‖¹⁵ Christopher Small, in turn, refers to structural order present in all stories within Western art forms (not only in music):

Behind all Western storytelling for the past three hundred years or more, whether it be novel, play, film or piece of symphonic music, lies a kind of master narrative, a meta-narrative . . . [whereby,] order is established, order is disturbed, order is reestablished.¹⁶ Gustav Freytag's well-known pyramid-shaped model for structure of dramatic works comes to mind since it can be described as an ordered set of events according to: exposition, rising action (tension), tension's climax, falling action (resolution) and dénouement (conclusion).¹⁷

12 Igor Stravinsky, ―Poétique musicale sous forme de six leçons‖ (Harvard University Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, Harvard University, Cambridge, MA, 1939-40), trans. by Arthur Knodel and Ingolf Dahl as Poetics of Music (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1970, 16th reprint 2003), 24.

13 Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, 16.

14 Ibid., 69-70.

15 Charles Rosen, Music and Sentiment (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2010), 14.

16 Small, Musicking, 160.

17 See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dramatic_structure, (accessed 2017-01-07).

73 Moving inwards toward the core role of order, we first had Stravinsky's and Rosen's external perception of order, then Small's construction of order within a work, and now Stravinsky's definition of music as order: ―tonal elements become music only by virtue of their being organized, and that such organization presupposes a conscious human act.‖¹⁸ In other words, music is the human ordering of sounds. In Anthony Seeger's ―Styles of Musical Ethnography,‖ a very similar concept is attributed to John Blacking's ―music as humanly organized sound.‖¹⁹

Rosen's comment tying music perception's ordering of sounds to the overarching primacy of order as foundational to language, culture and society, leads us to a brief excursion into the comparison between language and music. Since complete tomes have been written on the subject,²⁰ we shall turn to the insightful words of Susanne K. Langer in her Philosophy in a New Key:

Many attempts have been made to treat music as a language of emotions . . .Yet it is not, logically speaking, a language, for it has no vocabulary . . . tones lack the very thing that distinguishes a word from a mere vocable: fixed connotation, or ―dictionary meaning.‖²¹ In writing Feeling and Form, Langer further clarifies that music ―lacks one of the basic characteristics of language─fixed association, and therewith a single, unequivocal reference.

. . . it is not a language, because it has no vocabulary.‖²² Without crediting influences, critic and musicologist Deryck Cooke arrives at an oddly commutative verbiage when he claims

18 Stravinsky, Poetics of Music, 23.

19 Anthony Seeger, ―Styles of Musical Ethnography,‖ in Comparative Musicology and Anthropology of Music: Essays on the History of Ethnomusicology, eds. Bruno Nettl and Philip V. Bohlman (Chicago, IL:

University of Chicago Press, 1991), 346.

20 We also suggest a reading of Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983).

21Susanne K. Langer, Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, first ed.1942, 3rd ed. 1957), 218; 228.

22 Susanne K. Langer, Feeling and Form: A Theory of Art Developed from Philosophy in a New Key (New York, NY: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1953), 31.

74 that ―composers have consciously or unconsciously used music as a language, from at least 1400 onwards─a language never formulated in a dictionary, because by its very nature it is incapable of such treatment.‖²³

Even without a detailed quantitative analysis, it is safe to assume that the vast majority of humans communicate through language (spoken, signed, written, etc.) and to also state that, more often than otherwise, people listen to songs in languages that are at least partly familiar to them. When music does not contain words, order serves to quell and settle the brain's restless search for semiotic structure. In previous chapters, we introduced concepts of dialogism; here, we hypothesize that the creation of dialogue between voice-parts not only pacifies the quest for order but also engages via association, appropriation and mimesis. In music, we hear relationships and, when attending a live performance, we also see these as interaction and collaboration. Christopher Small proposes that ―The act of musicking establishes in the place where it is happening a set of relationships, and it is in those relationships that the meaning of the act lies.‖²⁴ We, therefore, experience the dialogue by virtue of witnessing, aurally and/or visually, its interactive and relational motion. We feel included in the conversation when invited to partake and re-author, and this invitation is tended to our mental faculties written on the materials of order, cohesion, familiarity, successful anticipation and, even, surprise. The musicians not only perceive and deliver the above invitation cards, they reword their content through the appropriative authorship of interpretation. Thus, to invite performers and listeners to the table of dialogue, the composer should leave material to the discretion of the performers. Deliberate openness

23 Deryck Cooke, The Language of Music, (New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1959, reprint 2001), 13-14.

24 Small, Musicking, 13.

75 to interpretation and purposeful ambiguity within a score speak of trust, validation, appreciation for 'otherness' and a desire for collaboration. Charles Rosen purports that it is this very ambiguity that has ensured the survival of many of the most esteemed music works.²⁵

In one short paragraph of his influential book, Hanslick summarizes just how intellectual arousal from imagination, order and anticipation does, in fact, invite participation:

The most significant factor in the mental process which accompanies the comprehending of a musical work and makes it enjoyable will most frequently be overlooked. It is the mental satisfaction which the listener finds in continuously following and anticipating the composer's designs, here to be confirmed in his expectations, there to be agreeably led astray. It goes without saying that this mental streaming this way and that, this continual give and take, occurs unconsciously and at the speed of lightning. Only such music as brings about and rewards this mental pursuing, which could quite properly be called a musing (Nachdenken) of the imagination, will provide fully artistic satisfaction. Without mental activity, there can be no aesthetical pleasure whatever.²⁶

Likewise, perusing again through The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, we encounter Alan Goldman's ―Evaluating Art,‖ where Goldman seems to return Hanslick's words to us:

[The] full engrossment of our mental faculties is of intrinsic value simply because we enjoy meeting challenges to our capacities, expanding and exercising them to their fullest extent. . . . And it is of instrumental value in the benefits that such expansion brings and in removing us, however briefly, from the real world of our practical affairs.²⁷

As we now understand and acknowledge the importance of imagination, it seems pertinent and justified to ponder upon the last idea presented above by Goldman: that of absconding. Instead of serving to escape reality, Small sees art as instrumental to effect change─a powerful medium capable of reshaping our world and ourselves. Small affirms:

25 Charles Rosen, Freedom and the Arts: Essays on Music and Literature (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012), 34.

26 Hanslick, On the Musically Beautiful, 64.

27 Alan Goldman, ―Evaluating Art,‖ in The Blackwell Guide to Aesthetics, ed. Peter Kivy (Malden, MA:

Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 102.

76 Musicking is about relationships, not so much about those which actually exist in our lives as about those that we desire to exist and long to experience . . . How we like to music is who we are. . . . In musicking we have a tool by means of which our real concepts of ideal relationships can be articulated . . . and the integrity of the person affirmed, explored and celebrated.²⁸

Our artistic vision of creating participatory and inclusive music through dialogism has this same intent: ameliorating how we relate, communicate, interact and, ultimately, how we treat each other. Additionally, Small gives credence to our objective when he petitions for performances ―that expand our concepts of relationships, that present relationships in new and unfamiliar light, bring us to see our place in the world from a slightly different point of view.‖²⁹ How quickly this recalls concepts of situatedness and Gadamer's fusion of horizons!

Our foray into intellectual arousal and the relationships inherent to music would be incomplete without referring once again to Jean Baudrillard's keen vision. The premise of Baudrillard's impactful Le Système des Objets lies in his conception that all objects behave as signifiers within a system and that their functionality does not refer to a separate goal but, rather, is adapted to an order or a system. Functionality, according to Baudrillard, is the ability to integrate within a system.³⁰ For our purposes, Baudrillard's ideas tie into how musical 'objects' function not of themselves but within the 'system' of interactions both intrinsic and extrinsic to the work. Our conception of music becomes 'functional' when we identify relations within a work and see these as part of a system─that which is comprised of relational dialogue.

28 Small, Musicking, 183; 220; 221.

29 Ibid., 216.

30 See Jean Baudrillard, Le système des objets (Paris, France: Gallimard, 1968), 89-91.

77