This jumped out at me while I was reading "Within a Budding Grove": "... and their words changed in tone, like the lyrics of ancient times, when poetry, still hardly differentiated from music, was declaimed upon the different notes of a scale." So Proust was aware that in history poetry and music had been one.
>>Perhaps neuroscientists, for example, are overreaching and reductionist in their attempts to ‘explain’ music—but no matter what your views on that topic, the efficacy and value of their research will be improved if musicologists engage with them in constructive dialogue.
>>Perhaps neuroscientists, for example, are overreaching and reductionist in their attempts to ‘explain’ music—but no matter what your views on that topic, the efficacy and value of their research will be improved if musicologists engage with them in constructive dialogue.
+10 to that.
>>And the same is probably true of many STEM fields that are now ‘encroaching’ on music studies—just wait and see what damage will be wrought by algorithms and artificial intelligence. Nothing in the music world today will have more impact than these expert systems, created by well-meaning outsiders who will completely change our musical culture, often without actually understanding it.
As a long time dabbler in the dark arts of generative music, I couldn't agree with this more.
Algorithmic music production - when trying to emulate emotional & energentic historical music forms - is like a generic pub cover band that announces they are "going to play a blues" and then launch into a hackneyed 12-bar that demonstrates they might know the form (or one form) but certainly not the soul of the blues. Or perhaps a Smooth Jazz cover of Amy Winehouse's 'Rehab'...
That said, music and its cultural role is evolving right before our eyes and ears.
Algorithmic/Generative Music will only come into its own when it takes us to sonic places that the live music that got us to this point in time never could, and wouldn't want to go anyway. It's a new fork in the continuum of musical development, and should stand on its own merits...or not. It also shouldn't mean the death of any previous music tradition that is part of the rich tapestry of songlines that document the human experience.
I was really excited by this overview of music research and history. Thank you for being such a scrupulous scholar. I imagine you sitting at the loom of human achievement drawing threads from the most generous and curious minds that have sprung up among us. Continue giving us glimpses of your work.
There's a LOT here to talk about, but one topic I wanted to raise was about the STEM (or I'll just say science) takeover of musicology. My own specialty was literary studies, and I've observed a similar sort of attempted takeover in several fields--psychology, literary studies, anthropology, sociology . . . The results of the attempted takeover vary, mostly on the basis of the susceptibility of the subject to scientific methods and the respect generally accorded to the object by scientific writers.
Reading your piece, music seems to have come off rather well. "Outside" scholars really seem to be making positive contributions and finding interesting new angles. This is less true in literary studies, where having little familiarity with (because they have no respect for) what has been written in the past about a piece of literature is a real handicap. So we get long presentations of a "scientific" explanatory aparatus (based on, say, evolutionary psychology, whose status as science I am rather dubious of, but . . . ) whose product is . . . an interpretation that is suspiciously like a well-known interpretation first produced in 1885. Or we get "scientific" interpretations from people who are hard put to recognize irony, or a shift of voice, or even to puzzle out a complex sentence.
You complain about neuroscientists "oversimplifying" music and the perception of music, and part of the reason for this is probably that they don't understand music as such very well. But a big part of it is music (or literature, or psychology) doesn't actually matter to these people very much in themselves. These outside fields are nothing but new frontiers to conquer. There really is little opportunity for "productive dialog" with many of these researchers. They are only interested in demonstrating the power of their field's explanatory mechanisms. Music is just the atoll they're testing it on. Productive dialog will only get you shipped to the next inconsequential islet down. At best.
On the general topic of neuroscience studies of real-time phenomena, have you read the Panksepps?
I once read the book "Why Dylan Matters" (Richard F. Thomas). The author is a classics professor. The book was intriguing, but missed the point. It almost seemed to ignore any and all musical aspects of the performer. I clearly remember only one clear reference to actual music, when Dylan was on stage and "strummed a chord". I immediately wondered- what chord? And how was it strummed? But it's almost as if it didn't matter, or that the author didn't care. So, to Prof Thomas, Dylan "matters" only in the sense of literature - his music is by the by. You have to wonder if the author even enjoys Dylan's music!
I have a controversial opinion about modern folk music. I think it sidelines the music. I don't hear much *inventive* music in folk music anymore (I have a recent exception*, see below), and I can understand why that is. It's because listeners don't really seem to care. A "folk" musician can do quite well and have quite a following just combining their pretty-pretty poetry with very pedestrian musical arrangement. Folk music is ossified into a form, and (I know this topic has been done to death) but it's the same old chords over and over again.
There was a time when it wasn't like that - plenty of examples in the 1960s where you have some outlandish arrangements on folk tunes, varying metres, bar lengths changing all the time - Bert Jansch** coming to mind for that (e.g. his arrangements of Reynardine and Blackwaterside). For these musicians, the music matters. The music was not just providing a vehicle to deliver your poetry.
The most striking example is the 1964 album "Folk Roots, New Roots" - Shirley Collins and Davey Graham. This is chock-full of combinations that would never be attempted anymore. Good examples include a jazz waltz accompaniment to Nottamun Town, a strange highly modal accompaniment to Pretty Saro, DG's arrangement of Blue Monk for solo guitar, and Rif Mountain. This album covers so much musical ground - more musical ground than most modern folk musicians would cover in a career. You just don't hear those sounds anymore, and it seems that people aren't interested in them. Folk music sounds like folk music, and folk think they know how that should sound. So why push it?
Are these two "issues" linked? In both cases, the music is secondary to the lyric. I don't have an overarching idea for why that might be. It could be that coming up with a melody line is harder than coming up with a lyric line. But is that really true? I don't know. It could also be that ear training is hard, and it's also restricted to a smaller set of the population than literacy. It is also harder to talk or write about the effect music has on you, than the effect words have on you. Look at a website like genius.com - it's impossible to imagine something like that for music, rather than lyric.
We are no longer an oral society - literacy is entrenched - but at the risk of sounding facile, we can aurally parse words in a way we cannot music. We can write down exactly what a person just said to us. But play a simple melody and most people cannot even tell you what intervals were being played, and they certainly could not then transcribe*** it.
So perhaps we should not be surprised that lyrics take precedence over music in both cases I mentioned above.
On the topic of improvisation I'll say little. I think you should look into Indian classical music for more on this. Whereas jazz improvisation is very new, ICM has been improvising for centuries, and possibly even milennia. Their version of solfege is much older than the western version as well. I think it makes an interesting study in very long improvisations within a framework that initially seems so rigid as to be completely immutable. Yet you can end up with 90 minute ragas (e.g. Nikhil Banerjee). It takes me a long time to familiarise myself with the ragas and there's really only one that I can easily identify by ear now (Bhairavi) but their depth and expanse appear to be almost endless. Note that apart from the solfege equivalent (Sargam, I think it's called?) there is no musical notation.
"...well-meaning outsiders who will completely change our musical culture, often without actually understanding it."
A similar phenomenon exists between the domains of voice science and singing pedagogy. Modern voice scientists have made enormous leaps in understanding of vocal function, but many of the important studies are conducted within the university, where the most accessible subjects are student singers. Comparatively little research exists on professional level singers.
So, a disconnect pervades the field. Professional singers, teachers of singing, and other practitioners of the art are often unaware of scientific discoveries pertinent to their work, to our detriment.
I'm so happy to see Milman Parry's work come back into focus through the biography on him. His own works can be accessed through the Open Library. A few literary critics seem incredibly threatened by the theory that bards created the epics (The Odyssey and the Iliad), but I think that this theory has been generally accepted. This is from a 2015 National Geographic blog posting BY SIMON WORRALL:
"There are even doubts about when they were composed. The usual date is about 800 B.C. You believe the tradition began much earlier than that. Make your case.
My claim is that the poems, especially The Iliad, have their beginnings around 2000 B.C.—about 1,000 or 1,200 years earlier than most people say Homer existed. The reason I say that has two strands to it. One is that there are large elements of the Homeric stories, particularly The Iliad, that are shared among the Indo-European world as a whole, all the way from north India through Greece to Germanic and Icelandic stories. There are deep elements in Homer that have nothing to do with Greece or the Aegean.
The second thing is that the situation in The Iliad is very clearly not one in which two deeply civilized nations are opposed to each other. The civilized nation in The Iliad is Troy."
Trying to picture Mededjovic’s 7 day concert - and that’s without any bass solos? Amazing stuff here. Thanks for keeping track and making cliff notes for us in the back of the hall. As always, your efforts are enjoyed and appreciated.
This jumped out at me while I was reading "Within a Budding Grove": "... and their words changed in tone, like the lyrics of ancient times, when poetry, still hardly differentiated from music, was declaimed upon the different notes of a scale." So Proust was aware that in history poetry and music had been one.
>>Perhaps neuroscientists, for example, are overreaching and reductionist in their attempts to ‘explain’ music—but no matter what your views on that topic, the efficacy and value of their research will be improved if musicologists engage with them in constructive dialogue.
Just came across this: https://ismir2021.ismir.net/keynotes/ via http://www.jordipons.me/ismir-2021/
I think they could use some help, as you outline.
Again, thank you.
>>Perhaps neuroscientists, for example, are overreaching and reductionist in their attempts to ‘explain’ music—but no matter what your views on that topic, the efficacy and value of their research will be improved if musicologists engage with them in constructive dialogue.
+10 to that.
>>And the same is probably true of many STEM fields that are now ‘encroaching’ on music studies—just wait and see what damage will be wrought by algorithms and artificial intelligence. Nothing in the music world today will have more impact than these expert systems, created by well-meaning outsiders who will completely change our musical culture, often without actually understanding it.
As a long time dabbler in the dark arts of generative music, I couldn't agree with this more.
Algorithmic music production - when trying to emulate emotional & energentic historical music forms - is like a generic pub cover band that announces they are "going to play a blues" and then launch into a hackneyed 12-bar that demonstrates they might know the form (or one form) but certainly not the soul of the blues. Or perhaps a Smooth Jazz cover of Amy Winehouse's 'Rehab'...
That said, music and its cultural role is evolving right before our eyes and ears.
Algorithmic/Generative Music will only come into its own when it takes us to sonic places that the live music that got us to this point in time never could, and wouldn't want to go anyway. It's a new fork in the continuum of musical development, and should stand on its own merits...or not. It also shouldn't mean the death of any previous music tradition that is part of the rich tapestry of songlines that document the human experience.
Great post, thanks.
Have you checked out Joseph Jordania's work? Tangentially related on a lot of levels, I think.
https://joseph-jordania.selz.com/item/5674e67a6edca00e788f798f
I was really excited by this overview of music research and history. Thank you for being such a scrupulous scholar. I imagine you sitting at the loom of human achievement drawing threads from the most generous and curious minds that have sprung up among us. Continue giving us glimpses of your work.
There's a LOT here to talk about, but one topic I wanted to raise was about the STEM (or I'll just say science) takeover of musicology. My own specialty was literary studies, and I've observed a similar sort of attempted takeover in several fields--psychology, literary studies, anthropology, sociology . . . The results of the attempted takeover vary, mostly on the basis of the susceptibility of the subject to scientific methods and the respect generally accorded to the object by scientific writers.
Reading your piece, music seems to have come off rather well. "Outside" scholars really seem to be making positive contributions and finding interesting new angles. This is less true in literary studies, where having little familiarity with (because they have no respect for) what has been written in the past about a piece of literature is a real handicap. So we get long presentations of a "scientific" explanatory aparatus (based on, say, evolutionary psychology, whose status as science I am rather dubious of, but . . . ) whose product is . . . an interpretation that is suspiciously like a well-known interpretation first produced in 1885. Or we get "scientific" interpretations from people who are hard put to recognize irony, or a shift of voice, or even to puzzle out a complex sentence.
You complain about neuroscientists "oversimplifying" music and the perception of music, and part of the reason for this is probably that they don't understand music as such very well. But a big part of it is music (or literature, or psychology) doesn't actually matter to these people very much in themselves. These outside fields are nothing but new frontiers to conquer. There really is little opportunity for "productive dialog" with many of these researchers. They are only interested in demonstrating the power of their field's explanatory mechanisms. Music is just the atoll they're testing it on. Productive dialog will only get you shipped to the next inconsequential islet down. At best.
On the general topic of neuroscience studies of real-time phenomena, have you read the Panksepps?
I once read the book "Why Dylan Matters" (Richard F. Thomas). The author is a classics professor. The book was intriguing, but missed the point. It almost seemed to ignore any and all musical aspects of the performer. I clearly remember only one clear reference to actual music, when Dylan was on stage and "strummed a chord". I immediately wondered- what chord? And how was it strummed? But it's almost as if it didn't matter, or that the author didn't care. So, to Prof Thomas, Dylan "matters" only in the sense of literature - his music is by the by. You have to wonder if the author even enjoys Dylan's music!
I have a controversial opinion about modern folk music. I think it sidelines the music. I don't hear much *inventive* music in folk music anymore (I have a recent exception*, see below), and I can understand why that is. It's because listeners don't really seem to care. A "folk" musician can do quite well and have quite a following just combining their pretty-pretty poetry with very pedestrian musical arrangement. Folk music is ossified into a form, and (I know this topic has been done to death) but it's the same old chords over and over again.
There was a time when it wasn't like that - plenty of examples in the 1960s where you have some outlandish arrangements on folk tunes, varying metres, bar lengths changing all the time - Bert Jansch** coming to mind for that (e.g. his arrangements of Reynardine and Blackwaterside). For these musicians, the music matters. The music was not just providing a vehicle to deliver your poetry.
The most striking example is the 1964 album "Folk Roots, New Roots" - Shirley Collins and Davey Graham. This is chock-full of combinations that would never be attempted anymore. Good examples include a jazz waltz accompaniment to Nottamun Town, a strange highly modal accompaniment to Pretty Saro, DG's arrangement of Blue Monk for solo guitar, and Rif Mountain. This album covers so much musical ground - more musical ground than most modern folk musicians would cover in a career. You just don't hear those sounds anymore, and it seems that people aren't interested in them. Folk music sounds like folk music, and folk think they know how that should sound. So why push it?
Are these two "issues" linked? In both cases, the music is secondary to the lyric. I don't have an overarching idea for why that might be. It could be that coming up with a melody line is harder than coming up with a lyric line. But is that really true? I don't know. It could also be that ear training is hard, and it's also restricted to a smaller set of the population than literacy. It is also harder to talk or write about the effect music has on you, than the effect words have on you. Look at a website like genius.com - it's impossible to imagine something like that for music, rather than lyric.
We are no longer an oral society - literacy is entrenched - but at the risk of sounding facile, we can aurally parse words in a way we cannot music. We can write down exactly what a person just said to us. But play a simple melody and most people cannot even tell you what intervals were being played, and they certainly could not then transcribe*** it.
So perhaps we should not be surprised that lyrics take precedence over music in both cases I mentioned above.
On the topic of improvisation I'll say little. I think you should look into Indian classical music for more on this. Whereas jazz improvisation is very new, ICM has been improvising for centuries, and possibly even milennia. Their version of solfege is much older than the western version as well. I think it makes an interesting study in very long improvisations within a framework that initially seems so rigid as to be completely immutable. Yet you can end up with 90 minute ragas (e.g. Nikhil Banerjee). It takes me a long time to familiarise myself with the ragas and there's really only one that I can easily identify by ear now (Bhairavi) but their depth and expanse appear to be almost endless. Note that apart from the solfege equivalent (Sargam, I think it's called?) there is no musical notation.
* the exception is https://dorantheband.bandcamp.com/album/doran-2
** my favourite idiosyncratic musician in blues (rather than folk) is Robert Pete Williams
*** western music notation is flawed. But despite that, it is less arbitrary than the roman alphabet.
Beautiful text, Ted. Can't wait to read your new book.
"...well-meaning outsiders who will completely change our musical culture, often without actually understanding it."
A similar phenomenon exists between the domains of voice science and singing pedagogy. Modern voice scientists have made enormous leaps in understanding of vocal function, but many of the important studies are conducted within the university, where the most accessible subjects are student singers. Comparatively little research exists on professional level singers.
So, a disconnect pervades the field. Professional singers, teachers of singing, and other practitioners of the art are often unaware of scientific discoveries pertinent to their work, to our detriment.
I'm so happy to see Milman Parry's work come back into focus through the biography on him. His own works can be accessed through the Open Library. A few literary critics seem incredibly threatened by the theory that bards created the epics (The Odyssey and the Iliad), but I think that this theory has been generally accepted. This is from a 2015 National Geographic blog posting BY SIMON WORRALL:
"There are even doubts about when they were composed. The usual date is about 800 B.C. You believe the tradition began much earlier than that. Make your case.
My claim is that the poems, especially The Iliad, have their beginnings around 2000 B.C.—about 1,000 or 1,200 years earlier than most people say Homer existed. The reason I say that has two strands to it. One is that there are large elements of the Homeric stories, particularly The Iliad, that are shared among the Indo-European world as a whole, all the way from north India through Greece to Germanic and Icelandic stories. There are deep elements in Homer that have nothing to do with Greece or the Aegean.
The second thing is that the situation in The Iliad is very clearly not one in which two deeply civilized nations are opposed to each other. The civilized nation in The Iliad is Troy."
SOURCE: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/adventure/article/150104-homer-iliad-odyssey-greece-book-talk-travel-world
Trying to picture Mededjovic’s 7 day concert - and that’s without any bass solos? Amazing stuff here. Thanks for keeping track and making cliff notes for us in the back of the hall. As always, your efforts are enjoyed and appreciated.
Always insightful!! Revealing the complex web that is humanity.