PLAN DE COMUNICACIONES ODS15

Three Continuums

How does new music come into existence? Schubert is said to have composed a song while waiting to be served at a restaurant, quickly writing it on the back of the menu; Mozart turned out some of his serenades and sonatas almost overnight; and Theodore Last Star, a Blackfoot singer and medicine man, had visions in each of which, in the space of a minute or two, he learned from a guardian spirit a new song. But Brahms labored for years on his first sym-phony; Beethoven planned and sketched ideas for his Ninth for over two decades; and William Shakespear, an Arapaho, said that when he took a motif from one song, something from another, and a phrase from a third, thus mak-ing up a new Peyote song, it might take him a good part of an afternoon. The xylophonist of a Chopi orchestra made up music as he went along, but he was constrained by rules articulated by his leader (Tracey 1948: 109). The great North Indian sitarist sits down before his audience and creates a performance of new music on the spot, but he can only do this because for hours every day he practices exercises that he has memorized, and he maintains in his mind a musical vocabulary on which he can draw, and a group of rules that tell him, once he has selected a raga, what he must, may, or cannot do. A Kentucky mountaineer in about 1910 sang “The Two Sisters” in a tavern, his friends admiring a new twist in the refrain but insisting that only he can sing the song correctly. And the overjoyed Bach-lover after the cello recital exclaims, “She’s never played like this before, she makes the Suite live as does no one else.”

In some sense, each of these musicians has created music, but music

schol-ars actually know very little about the way in which music comes about, es-pecially in its innovative aspect, which is what they most admire. They believe that when music is produced (in any sense of the word), something new is being created. There is innovation in the composition of a symphony, the jazz improvisation of a new version of a well-known show tune, the unique ren-dition of a Japanese chamber work that has been handed down with little change for generations, the reading of a string quartet. Ethnomusicologists must deal with what is new, new in a sense generally understood by them and new also within the specific cognitive framework and understanding of its culture.

Speaking cross-culturally, what may be heard as new composition in one culture might be regarded as simple variation of something already extant in another. Judging the degree of innovation is a tricky business. The Persian improvisor who by the standards of European composition gives his audi-ence something different each time he performs may not be, in his own manner of musical thought, doing something really new, but simply “play-ing a particular mode.” By contrast, the Blackfoot s“play-inger who learned a song in a vision may have thought of it as a new song, even if it sounded identi-cal to a song that had been received by one of his friends in another vision.

The South Indian musician with a penchant for giving her audience unex-pectedly strange vocalizations runs the risk of rendering something outside the realm of propriety and being criticized for not knowing her basic mate-rial. The American composer who wrote a piece inspired by Hindemith or Stravinsky might once have been criticized for presenting something be-longing in the past and thus not properly innovative.

Rather than probing the essential nature of musical creation, ethnomusi-cologists ordinarily examine the ways in which various societies conceive of and evaluate musical creation. Considering the lack of terminology in most languages for discussing creativity, and the incompatibility of the con-cepts, comparison is a particularly thorny problem with a large body of rel-evant though not definitive literature, expertly surveyed by Blum (in his ar-ticle “Composition” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians 2001). Surveys of the world’s musics may give examples of concepts and tech-niques known in different societies. Rather than summarizing, I suggest some further ways of examining the problem. It seems convenient, initially, to think of it in terms of three intersecting continuums.

1. To some extent music is inspired, in the sense that we cannot analyze the way in which it finds its way into the thinking of a musician; but perhaps more

important, it is also the result of the manipulation and rearrangement of the units of a given vocabulary, of hard work and concentration. The concepts of inspiration, of genius, and of acquiring music directly from supernatural sources are very widespread among human societies, simple and complex.

Haydn worked regular hours and depended on some kind of inspiration;

when it did not come, he prayed for it (Nohl 1883: 173), rather like the Native American seeking a vision who is also, in effect, praying for songs. At the other end of the line is the concept of composition as an essentially intellectual ac-tivity, in which one consciously manipulates the materials of music, organ-izing them carefully in ways that will make it possible for the listener to com-prehend the structure, or even arranging them in ways that satisfy certain principles not audible and perceived only through careful analysis of a score.

A twentieth-century Western serialist composer is careful to include all units in a predetermined vocabulary, being precise in their manipulation so that they remain intact, following elaborate rules set by himself or herself. The listener may be unaware of all the care that has gone into the preparation of this complex structure. But such an approach is not limited to societies with written notation and music theory texts. Native American composers of Pey-ote songs may be equally careful, using and abiding by general structural prciples that govern the song, musically making clear a number of intricate in-terrelationships, deriving new phrases from earlier ones, all within a rather rigidly defined formal framework. But it seems unlikely that the typical Na-tive American listener understands the details of the structure. These two ends of the continuum merge: Mozart’s music sounds divinely inspired and was often composed quickly yet has incredible consistency and complexity. The songs of the Yahi of California, sung by Ishi, the last “wild” Indian, ten sec-onds long and using only some three or four tones, exhibit considerable so-phistication in their internal interrelationships, with a logic not totally unlike that of Mozart. An Iranian musician says that his improvised performance comes “from the heart,” but analysis shows us highly structured and sophis-ticated patterns unique to the performer. An Indian improvisor learns a vast repertory of melodic and rhythmic units that can and must be interrelated in many ways, exhibiting her skill in showing the multitude of combinations she can control; yet in her culture this music is considered spiritual and may be related to another level of consciousness. Each case confronts us with aspects of both ends of the continuum, obviously in different proportions.

2. Improvisation and composition are frequently regarded as completely sep-arate processes, but they are also two versions of the same (Nettl 1974b; Nettl and Russell 1998). The phenomenally quick though by no means careless way in

which Schubert seems to have composed a sonata may well be comparable to the rapid combination and rearrangement of materials in an Indian im-provisation, and the fact that Schubert used paper and pen could actually be incidental. On the other hand, the gigantic labor involved in the careful com-position of a symphony by nineteenth-century composers, with the use of sketches and planning diagrams, is not totally unrelated to technique of the Yahi Indian composer who, within the strictest possible limits, nevertheless found a large number of ways of relating to each other the two short phrases that make up a song. For that matter, the many readings of a Beethoven sonata by a Horowitz are comparable to the twenty different ways in which an Ara-bic musician may render a maqam in the taqsim form in the period of a year, or in the course of his life. It may be rewarding to consider improvisation and composition as opposite aspects of the same process.

3. The third continuum involves us in the course of events in the creation of a piece of music or of a performance. We can consider a model in which all position shares, in one way or another, in this sequence: precomposition, com-position, and revision. In Western academic practice, what musicians first write down or fix in their minds might be a finished product, but is more likely to be something like a draft or plan. Eventually, a form that the composer con-sidered reasonably satisfactory emerges, but it is subjected to correction and revision. I suggest that this sequence may be played out over months or years in some cases, and in other cases, in a few minutes. While this model is taken by some to be relevant only to formally composed music, distinguishing it from improvisation and from composition in oral/aural tradition, I suggest that it may also apply to all types of musical creation. The role of notation in the process of composition is in any event sometimes misunderstood and over-estimated. There are, to be sure, composers for whom work with pen and paper is an intrinsic part of creation; one can hardly see how The Art of Fugue, Meis-tersinger, or Wozzeck could have been put together otherwise. But there are also Western composers who work things out in their minds (or at the keyboard, as reputedly did Haydn and Stravinsky) and then write down a relatively finished product. While many non-Western societies have musical notation systems (see Ellingson 1992a; Kaufmann 1967), these seem mostly to have or have had an archival or preservative role, perhaps serving as mnemonic de-vices for performers rather than as aids to composers in controlling and ma-nipulating their structural building blocks. (For examples of studies of com-position in so-called oral cultures, see Rice 1994; Tenzer 2000.)

The widespread belief that there is a difference, in essence, between com-posing art music, with its notation or at least a background of theory, and the

music of folk and indigenous societies is probably misplaced. “Folk” compo-sition is often, improperly, labeled as improvisation, as for instance by Knepler (in Brook, Downes, and Van Sokkema 1972: 231), who regarded true compo-sition as the “synthesis” or “the linking together of musical elements stemming from different spheres.” The difference between “art” music and others has been a major paradigm in musicology, and earlier ethnomusicologists insisted on its significance. Thus Bartók: “Whether peasants are individually capable of inventing quite new tunes is open to doubt” (1931: 2). Yet to me there seems no reason to regard composition in cultures with oral and written traditions as different species. The precomposition-composition-revision model, while most readily applied to Western academic composers who depend heavily on notation, also works for those who have none. In classical Indian music, for example, improvisors learn the ragas and the talas, the materials for and ways of dealing with melody and rhythm, and certain kinds of pieces that enable them to internalize techniques for improvisation. In the context of Indian per-formance, this would be the precomposition, and so also is a group of deci-sions as to what raga and what tala to perform on any given occasion, as well as some completely mental but nevertheless specific planning. Composition itself takes place during performance, and only what is performed constitutes the complete work. But revision is also there, the improvisor who sometimes moves away from an intended goal and makes constant accommodation to re-turn to what was in mind in the first place, paralleling the Western composer with his manuscript. Mistakes must be covered up, quick adjustments made, unexpected slips absorbed in the structure that the musician has determined in advance; revising as one goes along. These continuums may be useful for comparative study of the creative processes in music. It seems that in most cul-tures, and perhaps everywhere, there is the interface of inspiration and “per-spiration,” and a decision-making process that involves the kind of thinking that goes into improvisation along with a systematic methodology including preparation, execution, and revision.

The Given and the Added

As already suggested, all kinds of music creation everywhere, including com-position, improvisation, and performance, may have important things in common, but different societies have quite different views of just what con-stitutes musical creation. In many cases, there is the recognition that some-thing already exists, in the most general sense of the word, and that the com-poser has the job of translating this “something” into acceptable musical

sound. There is lots of variation. In Pima tradition, all songs exist already, somewhere in the cosmos, and it is the task of the composer to “untangle”

them (Herzog 1936a: 333). In an Inuit song there’s the text “All songs have been exhausted. He picks up some of all and adds his own and makes a new song”

(Merriam 1964: 177), suggesting all songs already exist, and the singer creates by recombining material from them. In quite a different way traditional West-ern composers learn a basic body of music theory, comprising a kind of vo-cabulary and the rules for its use, and they draw on this for composing new music. Iranian musicians begin their careers by studying and memorizing the radif, a large body of music that they then use as inspiration for improvisa-tion and composiimprovisa-tion, referring to it and avoiding going beyond its bounds.

In each culture the musician is “given” something and then has the job of adding something else, but there are many different kinds of “given” and

“added.”

It may be helpful to look at the balance between them. Innovation itself has received considerable attention from anthropologists, beginning with a clas-sic work by Barnett (1953), but as a concept it is usually treated as helpful in understanding culture change. Historical musicologists deal constantly with innovation; just as Western musicians accord highest value to doing some-thing “new,” music scholars typically concentrate on what is new in each pe-riod, style, and composer’s opus (see, e.g., Meyer 1967: pt. 2). The issues in-herent in identifying what is new have not frequently been touched upon. In their verbal and behavioral responses to music, most other cultures place less value on innovation than does the European-derived West. Given the diffi-culty of distinguishing what is in fact new and what may be perceived as

“new” in any society, it nevertheless seems that there are many societies in which musical innovation is very restricted. For them, in terms of practical music-making, this may be interpreted to mean that what is “given” accounts for a very large proportion of the universe of music, and what is “added” for little.

The older Anglo-American and many European folk music traditions fit the latter model. A song, once composed, remained intact, as indicated for instance by the broad similarity of tunes collected in places and at times far apart (Bronson 1959: 72). People learned songs from their parents and friends and sang them, introducing minor variations and gradually developing vari-ants that were still clearly recognizable as forms of the original. New songs might be composed, but they were cast in the rhythmic, melodic, and for-mal mold of songs already known. The repertory of songs—kritis—of the classical tradition of South India has similar characteristics: New songs are

composed using models developed before the nineteenth century, and each singer develops an easily recognizable personal version. There are lots of songs that are relatively alike, lots of variants of each. There’s more given than added. Still, something new has been made of something old.

Another illustration: It seems likely that in the better old days—before 1850 perhaps—the musical forms of Blackfoot and Arapaho music were quite var-ied, but at that time new songs came into existence rather infrequently. By contrast, in more recent times the forms available for use, the “given” mate-rials, have shrunk in scope, but at the same time the number of new songs constantly appearing has increased, particularly in the powwow repertory.

In European art music of the nineteenth century it would seem that what is given, including the quantity of harmonic materials, modulatory techniques, and forms, is vast. Composers similarly take upon themselves a huge set of vocabulary-like elements and characteristics on which they draw over long periods. Innovation in the sense of departure from these given traits, seen on a worldwide basis, may not really be very great. In nineteenth-century music one can very quickly recognize styles and composers—a few notes or chords may suffice—testifying to the consistency of what is “given.” In each piece the proportion of this seems to me very great, and departure in the course of a piece seems less when viewed in intercultural comparison, even though we extol the value of radical innovation to be found in each compo-sition. And the performer (as creator) is given a score, a blueprint much more detailed than that handed down in oral tradition or in earlier periods of West-ern music history when the available vocabulary was more compact.

It is not only the quantity but also the nature of what is “given” that varies among the world’s cultures. In some Native American societies, it may be sim-ply all music that a composer has already heard. One is not given the ponents in separately packaged form. Elsewhere, the basic materials for com-position may be separated from the music itself. In Western culture this is in part a practical theory of music that one is supposed to learn before being permitted to compose, a vocabulary of materials and analytically derived rules for its use. In the jazz community (see Berliner 1994), it includes audible ma-terials that are not in themselves music but that composers abstract from music they have heard. Native American composers of Peyote songs appear informally to have learned rules for separating a song into its component phrases and then recombining them. In the art music culture of South India, the building blocks for improvising and composing include the nature of ragas and talas, and the exercises that juxtapose the two, etude-like pieces called varnams, which are said to contain the grammar of a raga. In Persian

classical music it is the radif and its constituent components, traditional “old”

classical music it is the radif and its constituent components, traditional “old”