"PARADIGMS" . . . ugh

Trevor Wishart's chapter "Beyond the Pitch/Duration Paradigm" is an incredibly frustrating piece of writing to read. Nearly every time an interesting point was made it was followed by something that either does not follow from the previous good point or develops one of the many bad points in his writing instead. I found it interesting but thoroughly misguided on an number of counts and even pernicious to some extent as, like nearly every essay with the word "paradigm" in the title, it poses as "problem solving".

His basic conception of music seems incredibly narrow (as are those of most people, especially those who congratulate themselves on their catholicity of taste): like most theories of music this essay is primarily linked to the tastes and practices of the author. Given the necessarily subjective character of musical cognition and the massive variety of musical forms throughout the world and through history it makes no sense to me to talk about "music" or "listening" as if they were the one thing in the world that was identical to itself. Given that no one can hear with the ears of another I find this universalisation of taste highly problematic. There is no such thing as "music" there are only "musics".

He is critical of the "lattice" that structures most Western music because it is clearly implied by the notation and in fact is built into the design of most musical technologies devoted to dance music for example: there are entire nights in clubs around the world devoted to the fetishisation of that "lattice", in its rawest and most brutal form and yet it seems to cause no lasting damage. He is critical of Plato (and gets the meaning of "idea" in the theory of mimesis completely wrong by thinking Socrates was a "Platonist") but is almost as much of an idealist as Lyndon La Rouche.

Beyond calling it "formalist" he can't really say what exactly is "wrong" with highly intricate abstract constructions such as those of the late 14th and 20th centuries, both made possible and demanding in turn highly sophisticated new forms of notation. Perhaps, given his age and the generation he grew up in, "formalism" is enough of a death sentence to warrant no further content.

Later on Wishart's argument becomes an elaborately superb example of what Jacques Derrida calls "logocentrism", the longstanding set of concepts and practices (broadly identifiable with "Western metaphysics") that presupposes the primacy of "living" voice (or "spirit") over the "dead" character of writing or inscription (we might as well call it technology as well). It is a way of thinking that often goes along with some kind of naturalism or universalism: the fact that in the first paragraph he refers to "our listening experience" is instructive here. Either he is correctly using the Royal "we" or simply assuming that "listening experience" is something that would be universal. Such a universal could not at all be "experientially verified" (whatever that might mean).

I find the setting of "An die Freude" in the Beethoven Ninth simultaneously horrifying and tragic and I could write another essay beginning to explain why perhaps I find it so: if even such a canonically "communicative" work can be so terribly "misunderstood" (but my reading of it makes perfect sense to me) then what does this mean to thinking about "communication" in music?

He rightly points out that music is non-verbal but the way it is described in the essay pushes it close to telepathy by insisting repeatedly that notation stands in the way of a presumably "natural" immediacy. On page 15 he writes that only those capable of imagining that talking to a partner involves more than verbal exchange could understand what he means here. What he is attempting to demonstrate is that music is a "communion" of people (Welcome back transcendental signified it's been a while!): but if this were so then musical "misunderstanding" ought to be impossible, we ought to all agree that the finale of the Mahler Fourth Symphony is sunny, light and lyrical but "we" don't agree at all.

And when he says that it "is music's intrinsic irrefutability, its going behind the back of language, which has caused it to be viewed with so much suspicion and disdain by guardians of socially approved order" it is clear that he is only talking about music he likes (and quite possibly his own). In a move as old as music itself all this talk about "music" ignores the fact that "music" includes all the stuff the writer doesn't really like.

People who pontificate about "music" tend to forget that it necessarily includes Katy Perry as well as gagaku, includes all of us who count ourselves "musicians" as well as the writers of jingles for laxatives. For me personally "music" also includes all ambient sound and "silence", birdsong and the song of cicadas. There is no concept of "music" other than "sounds to which we can pay attention" that unifies these and I doubt such a broad and effectively meaningless concept would be of much interest to Wishart. I might add that I can think of hardly any music that has actually been viewed with suspicion and disdain by the ruling classes except for some experimental and avant-garde works.

The characterisation of notation on later pages (after p. 18 especially) is hampered by thinking of notation as transparent representation of orally-transmitted practice that then, in this just-so story, gets taken over by the big bad wolf of music that is written without coming from performance. Music that is god forbid not at all "spontaneously invented" but instead is put together over time: there are things that could be improvised but I doubt anyone could improvise even one of the simpler Ockeghem motets, nor could it be transmitted any other way than in writing.

In a move that Richard Taruskin also repeatedly makes, the invention and especially the inventiveness of "literate" music ends up seeming like the expulsion from the Garden of Eden. I'm as big a fan of improvisation and various "ethnic" musics from around the world (Japan, Bali, Burma and Sub-Saharan Africa in particular) as anyone but I don't see the point of making a critique of "Western notation" some 1,000 years after that horse has bolted and left the door open for Solage and Ligeti.

I certainly don't see "oral" music as better or worse than "literate" music because for me all that counts is the experience of the work in that particular performance. I don't care if you can't sight read "Unity Capsule" because that failure produces something in performance that could not happen otherwise: it also means that each successive failure transforms the work and allows a great deal of personal "interpretation". The Ardittis almost rewrite the works Ferneyhough writes for them but if he gave them a work identical to the re-written version it would sound and feel different yet again.

The later sections of the essay are better perhaps but still hampered by his reliance on a personal utopian mythology of communication/immediacy that for me merely adds yet more words to the pile of bad words written about music.

As for the Smalley article it's a great piece of writing that has helped me a lot over the past few years: one of those rare articles you read and think "yes this describes what I've been after and the way I've been thinking but much better than I could do".