Introduction

DALCROZE THEN AND NOW
Dana Howell


CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION
This paper is designed to relate the life, work and method of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze to problems in music of the present day. In a sense, this is an update to the body of knowledge of the Dalcroze Eurhythmics method, an approach to music education conceived more than a century ago and practiced today in a number of university and children’s programs in Europe, the United States, Australia and Asia. But such an “update” presumes the readers’ familiarity with the subject, either by experience or by encounter. In Marie-Laure Bachmann’s 1991 book Dalcroze Today: An Education through and into Music, the Swiss Dalcrozian goes to considerable ends to articulate how the Dacrloze system of education works, offering an attempt at explaining it to the uninitiated reader. And yet she ultimately holds to the notion that to understand the Dalcroze approach there is no substitute for personal experience. One can know only the standards, framework and outward features of the method without having participated in a class and explored the visceral connection between movement and music, which is the principle promised fruit of this type of guided study.

My objective, however, is not to explain, characterize or define the state of the Dalcroze method as it is now practiced. Rather, it is to build a case for the unique advantages the Dalcroze method offers in understanding and enriching the musical world of today. The impetus for this study is born out of my own personal experience with the Dacrloze method and the sense that something that happened in the late 19th century that spurred Emile Jaques-Dalcroze to work so tirelessly to create his new approach to music education is absolutely linked to my own personal struggles as a performer and composer in 21st century America, I felt this link intuitively through my study of Dalcroze.

Carnegie Mellon University, where I earned undergraduate degrees in both performance and composition, offers one of the most robust Dalcroze Eurhythmics programs for adults (college level music students) anywhere: the program requires a full four semesters of Dalcroze Eurhythmics of all music students. My first two years of Dalcroze study were compulsory, and I was not always so easily convinced of its value. However, through those two years I began to feel something extraordinarily compelling about the use of music both as an ends and a means, realized through liberal and creative use of the body in motion. I then took the four graduate level courses offered in Eurhythmics applications, teaching and improvisation and attended two international workshops held at the university in 2001 and 2006. At the international workshops, I was able to study with renowned European teachers such as Marie-Laure Bachmann and Jean-Marc Aeshermann, American teachers of international stature such as the late Martha Sanchez and Lisa Parker as well as Hiroaki Yoshida of the now well established school in Nagoya and pioneers in the budding Korean and Taiwanese programs. What was so valuable to me personally from this experience was the perspective to be gained from collaborating with this body of practitioners from so many backgrounds and comparing the manifestation of the ideals we held in common in such diverse applications and climates. Jaques-Dalcroze was himself Swiss, and the Geneva school he founded bears his name. Yet the method has been practiced in America for more than 80 years, with a long and rich history dealing with music in a climate that is culturally unique and distinct from Europe. The progress of the East Asian schools provides even more furtile ground for discussing the whys, whats and hows of music in a cultural context in which casual assumptions can not be taken for granted.

TOWARD A WORKING DEFINITION

It was common knowledge among non-music students at Carnegie Mellon University that there was a large, wood-floored classroom in an old building at the center of campus (which also served as an invaluable sheltered corridor during brutal winters) where many hours a week one could peer inside a small square window and see ten to twenty college students performing all sorts of unusual activities. Sometimes they would appear to be dancing joyfully, while at other times they sat on the floor puzzling over some frustrating paperwork. There was often a teacher playing music on the piano, and students would variously engage in partner, group or solo activities to somehow interpret some stimulus given in the piano. On some days an eavesdropper might see all the students take hand-drums, tennis balls or even colored nylon stockings out of the closet and use them in different ways.

Non-participating visitors to a Eurhythmics class tend to be confused about what exactly it is they are watching. Passers-bye will often immediately take the class for some beginning level dance class, the bare feet, piano music and whole body movement giving such an impression. Yet the students do not look like dancers, and likely exhibit considerable sophistication in their approach to their activities (it is certainly not a “beginners” dance class, despite some noticeable physical awkwardness). The confusion that Eurhythmics is Dance has been around since the early days of the work of Jaques-Dalcroze, and teachers have been careful to disambiguate the two disciplines. Dr. Annabelle Joseph often remarks that Eurhythmics “probably looks like a bad dance class” and sternly insists that it is in fact not dance and that the principle difference is that the objective of dance is to show something, while that of Eurhythmics is to work something out internally through movement (and the resulting successful outcome may or may not be something pretty to look at). This distinction is rather helpful in holding off the “bad dance” critique, though Jaques-Dalcroze’s work with dancers as well as his frequent public demonstrations of La Rythmique and performances of plastique anime have rendered an easy distinction between Eurhythmics and dance perpetually problematic.
Bachmann is keenly aware of the failure of Eurhythmics to concisely identify itself and follows the problem from its roots in Jaques-Dalcroze’s stubborn refusal to accept simple classification of his ideas. While acknowledging the inherent “Achilles heal” of such a stance, she maintains that the lack of clear identity is necessary, for “vulnerable it certainly is, for this is inevitable in any person or system which keeps nothing hidden and holds nothing back, and yet, being necessarily unable to reveal all its facets at once to any single observer, cannot be grasped from one point of view without being misunderstood or misrepresented as a whole.” (24). But it would be unfair to engage the reader in a discussion of the formation and utility of a method or movement that has very real participants who engage in very real activities without providing at least some working definition of what this hard-to-know structure is. Vague as they are, there are some features of the method - ideals or “scientific” assumptions held by proponents at its core of that are extremely useful in developing a framework from which familiarity with the method can be developed.

Many Dalcrozian’s refer to “Dalcroze” as an approach or perspective, and avoid whenever they can the term method. There are in the marketplace plenty of examples of how within the notion of “method” there seems to be a diversity in what it really means. A teacher might achieve admirable success teaching students with a book series such as the Bastien piano method but would encounter considerable frustration in using a Suzuki method book in the same way, which is fairly useless unless used as a tool in teaching with Suzuki’s approach - a deeply considered way of teaching which relies on assumptions about child development and a pronounced humanistic perspective. Acknowledging this distinction between method and approach is key to understanding Dalcroze and why easy definition and user-friendly publications are not forthcoming. While I find the use of the words “approach” and “perspective” preferable as they avoid the problematic confusion of “method,” it is impossible to avoid using the term method as it is the primary means of referring to the educational work of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze and has been such in print for over a century.

A working definition for Dalcroze Eurhythmics or, as Jaques-Dalcroze referred to it, “the method that bears my name,” should clearly identify the method’s intentions (the “promises” of what it hopes to accomplish) as well as the basic means by which this goal should be accomplished and the assumptions made about the material used in service of these means. What Jaques-Dalcroze intended to accomplish is quite clear in his many writings about his teaching as well as his recommendations for music education (music in schools and in the conservatory) and dance. Identifying the objectives of Dalcroze-Eurhythmics should also take into account statements of qualified, well-regarded practitioners. Jaques-Dalcroze provides a clear and concise statement of his objectives in forming a new system in the introduction to his 1914 essay, “Rhythmic movement, solfege and improvisation” where he writes:

A special gymnastic system, habituating muscles to contract and relax, and corporal lines to widen and shrink in time and space, should supplement metrical feeling and instinct for rhythm. (115).

And later:

The fact is, that for the precise physical execution of a rhythm, it is not enough to have grasped it intellectually and to possess a muscular system capable of interpreting it; in addition, and before all else, communications should be established between the mind that conceives and analyses, and the body that executes. (116).

Bachmann, nearly eighty years later, writes in very similar language that eurhythmics “facilitates the discovery of the laws governing relations between space, time and energy.” (Bachmann 19). Jaques-Dalcroze also wrote famously that the aim of eurhythmics “is not to enable pupils at the end of their course, to say, not ‘I know,’ but ‘I have experienced,’ a catch-phrase echoed by eurhythmics practitioners to this day.

The means of accomplishing stated goals is a fuzzier matter, since there is no set curriculum (practitioners tend to be directly opposed to the idea) and comparative observation of various teachers’ approaches at a conference will confirm a distinct plurality in course content, sequence and exercises. But the basic notion that the body should be used for its natural capacities in learning music and that the body should also be trained to accommodate the nuances of musical material is apparent across the spectrum of the diverse population of instructors. A class that failed in this general use of means would clearly lie outside what is “Dalcrozian.” Also, while contemporary Dalcroze Eurhythmics courses are not specifically bound to the structured content spelled out in Rhythm, Music and Education (which leans heavily on the ideas of Matthias Lussey and will be explored in the third chapter), such direct documentation of process should be taken into account in determining the means of Eurhythmics as it is frequently used today and also provides a model for creating structure (structure, even as a generality, is an important feature of how the method works).

The assumptions made about the materials used in accomplishing the stated objectives of eurhythmics (namely, the nature of the mind, body, musical rhythm and the space-time-energy relationship) are paramount to describing the identity of the approach. In an era coinciding with huge advances in the field of psychology but predating by nearly a century the discoveries of neuroscience through brain imaging, Jaques-Dalcroze committed to an understanding of the human mind, how it perceives music and how the experience of music is simultaneously both locomotor and intellectual. While apparently taking for granted a mind-body dualism prevalent in earlier psychological and scientific thought, I will show in chapter 3 how Jaques-Dalcroze’s scientific assumptions can be better understood through looking at Matthias Lussey’s remarkable empirical distillation of musical gesture. The notion that layers of musicality can and should be dissociated and reintegrated in education reveals a significant assumption about the nature of musicality, namely that it is not mysterious or unusual (as is frequently held to be an immutable fact).

Finally, to produce a framework for building an understanding of Dalcroze Eurhythmics without impeding on its flexible nature, we can identify it thus: Dalcroze Eurhythmics is an approach to teaching musicality that uses the body’s natural functionality to explore music as well as the existing structure in music to develop the body’s locomotor sensitivity to music through structured exercises based on the assumption that the body’s experience in physical space and time is analogous musical gesture.

THE IMPORTANCE OF DALCROZE TODAY

Why study the life, work and legacy of Emile Jaques-Dalcroze? There are, after all, myriad marketable methods for educating pupils and encouraging interest in the arts. The Dalcroze method at times seems to be at a disadvantage as its enthusiastic proponents struggle to articulate even its basic tenets while clearly defined, trendier methods publish glossy lesson supplements and open pastel colored, profitable enrichment schools for children faster than paint can dry.

A more pertinent question would be, “what is the point of musicians (performers, composers and amateurs) studying Dalcroze today, in America, in the early years of the 21st century?” To begin to answer this question, we must begin by associating the conditions of musical society today with the conditions under which a particular young Swiss composer named Emile Jaques-Dalcroze struggled in his early career in the late 19th century and which led him to make some remarkable discoveries about the nature of musicality - discoveries that eventually materialized into a method that would elicit considerable recognition in its early years and survive more than a century under the collective stewardship of a group of dedicated and talented teachers.

The Dalcroze method is an approach - a proposed solution. And solutions are responses to frustrating problems that gnaw at the consciousness of the perceptive individual until he or she discovers a novel response that breaks through, bypasses or evades the frustrating roadblock that hinders further accomplishment. Emile Jaques-Dalcroze was one such individual who, frustrated as an unconventional student of classical music in Geneva, Paris and Vienna, as a composer and as a proponent of music in education sought to unlock the blockage that perturbed him. In the following chapter, I will relate his experiences, particularly in his early years, for the purpose of identifying these frustrations as a necessary factor in the formation of his method.

Frustrations that antagonize musicians today are abundant, ranging from the complaints of teachers whose pupils render masterpieces without expression to sociologists who apply new modes of social criticism to once sacred Great Works to composers who struggle to be relevant to an ambivalent audience (or scoff at the notion of social consciousness in pursuit of the absolute ). The financial woes of musicians, mundane as they may seem, frequently trigger practically existential crises among performers who feel lost amid a seemingly apocalyptic decline of classical music.

In merely associating our present situation with the conditions at the inception of the curiously effective yet somewhat mysterious Dalcroze method, we gain remarkable perspective on the truth behind many of these frustrations that hinder fluency of performance, satisfaction among audiences and compliance with ethical standards. They can be divided roughly into two groups: one, frustrations that are common with the previous era, and the other, those that seem to have sprung up only in our own era as a result of our unique historical context. For the former group, we need only look to Jaques-Dalcroze's extensive writings on subjects of education, performance, dance and composition, where he complains endlessly about the state of music in schools that could easily be mistaken for an address delivered to a music education conference of the present day.

Frustrations of the latter group - those that seem to be new issues faced only by musicians today - are the reason I believe a new, up-to-date discussion of Jaques-Dalcroze's ideas is so important. The method itself is principally a perspective or an approach, not a set of instructions to accomplish a particular task. The method in practice therefore tends to be at its source the very real struggles and personality of a particular man, and in its dissemination the collaborative and self-correcting effort of a multitude of diverse personalities over the course of a century. Since Jaques-Dalcroze's death in 1950 and even since the most recent significant text written by a Dalcrozian exponent in 1993 (Marie-Laure Bachmann's Dalcroze Today ) a lot has happened. In the last twenty years, feminist and post-colonial critique of music have revolutionized the discipline of Musicology, asking tough questions about the gender and racial codings that apparently exist as a significant layer in the fabric of works once held to be absolute and immutable to criticism. In 1993, the Cold War ended with the collapse of the Soviet Union, ending decades of culture wars and paranoia that had profoundly affected American schools, universities, foundations and symphony orchestras. And in that time, scientists have looked inside the physical reality of the human brain and seen for the first time how music is really produced and listened to on a neurological level.

A PROPOSAL

I hold that these recent events and discoveries are not simply issues of the day but are in fact game-changing phenomena that will shape our perspective on music, classical or otherwise, in the coming years. Jaques-Dalcroze matured as a musician and conceived his method at the end of the Common Practice, an era of roughly two centuries where composers of a particular (though notably international) geographic region used the common language of tonality and a number of assumptions about music to collaboratively develop and evolve a notated body of work that would ultimately collapse under the weight of increasing complexity and its own fundamental undoability. Classical music of the early years of the twentieth century plunged into violent fragmentation and myriad isms as the gigantic cultural and political forces of Europe fought for identity and direction in the wake of catastrophic loss. Yet nearly a century later, the world of classical music is as fragmented as ever with no overall trend or direction - and will most likely remain so forever. However, Emile Jaques-Dalcroze's principle objective was a humanistic and universal one: to advocate the simple enjoyment of music and the freedom for people to be their natural, inherently musical beings. In his life, music and teaching, Jaques-Dalcroze appears to have been rather ambivalent to what was old and what was new, classical or folk, tonal or atonal. His most revolutionary quality was not to assault establishment with some newfangled, fractured style, but rather to embrace musicality as a substance and a human right in preference to objects of cultural or extrinsic value. The results of a study of the formation of the Dalcroze method according to Msgr. Jacques-Dalcroze's historical context, experiences and personality will demonstrate the value of the method in confronting both frustrating issues inherited from the past as well as those unique to the present day.

Leiermann Poem

Leierman:
Now that you’re here, my sad, lonely friend,
And a long winter’s journey has come to an end,

At the edge of a brave new world you now stand,
Just one step across the line drawn in the sand.

I know why you came here, through cold ice and snow
What drove you to press on, what you had to know.

It’s all on the other side waiting for you
To take that step forward. And then when you do,

The phantom companion you saw in your head
Will no longer haunt from the shadows; instead

He will be always with you, not far from your side,
Lost not to the Shadowlands. Nor does he hide

His face among those souls forgotten, erased,
Dead, gone and buried in graves, laid to waste

In Lethean bliss. No, your twin is quite real,
The man whose cold fingers you sometimes can feel

Press soft on your shoulders. So no longer fear
The presence of him whom you saw in the mirror.

The device I have here, a peculiar contraption
Has not yet been tested, nor proven to work in

All situations. But once in a trial,
As I stood waiting for my results to compile

I saw standing next to me there in the room,
My own figure. Surely, my heart filled with doom,

But later I realized his countenance bore
No trace of ill guile; rather he wore

The benevolent smile of one who would bear
Good will, and not the cold empty stare

Of death or lost hope. No, he was my friend.
Born of my own flesh. But then in the end,

I turned the machine off, for my strength had expired.
What would have happened if I hadn’t retired

From my phantom encounter, and took one step t’ward him?
My brain might have melted, or I would have come to some grim

Veg’tative end. But still in my soul
I believe the illusion could have made me whole.

So my boy, I have watched you, from when you were born,
And I know of the brother from which you were torn.

I offer this glorious Thing to your using,
That in sound theory should help you in fusing

Your soul to the lost shadow I have extracted
To relieve the cruel penance that Fate has exacted.

Outline

This is the outline for my current dissertation draft, focusing on the discoveries and method of Swiss composer and educator Emile Jaques-Dalcroze.

Introduction: issues that frustrate contemporary music production (composition, performance and education) and how these issues reflect problems in maintainance of historical traditions and the fragmentation of such tradition in the early 20th century; Concise history of Jaques-Dalcroze's biography; overview of formation and legacy of Dalcroze Eurhythmics method; introduce case for studying the process of the formation of his method as valuable to realizing its utility in the present day.

I. Emile Jaques-Dalcroze: Personal frustrations in forming his musical personality. Emile Jaques-Dalcroze wrestled with norms in the Conservatory both as a student and as a teacher. In his early days of study, particularly in Vienna, he struggled with the lack of "profundity" in his performance and composition. This event can be see both in his personal motivation toward discovery as well as manifestation of historical crisis in the general issue of musicality. As a teacher, he was a notorious reformer and wrote prolifically on issues of education in his time.

II. Interest in empirical and systematic analysis of music. Jaques-Dalcroze found the work of compatriot Mathias Lussy of particular value and shared his opinion that elements musicality can be rationally dissociated and learned, debunking the "mysteries" of expression. This section examines the close relationship to Lussy's 1874 treatise on musical expression with the content of Dalcroze's method as well as how both educators encountered psychological realities through examination of musical literature that would much later be verified in studies in the purely scientific realm.

III. Emile Jaques-Dalcroze's ambivalence to the West and common practice. While exhibiting considerable frustration with conservatory norms and the shortcomings of music education in schools, Jaques-Dalcroze appears to have been rather ambivalent about the disintegration of tonality and the West's struggle to preserve or modernize itself or to define itself against the Eastern Other. There appears to be no conflict in his thinking or methodology between the concept of Musicality in the Common Practice and after, nor between Western music and the non-Western. Although there is only some evidence of his engagement of non-Western sources in his own experience and writing, his successors have made considerable effort to include non-Western and modern material in the application of the method.

IV. Conclusion: Bringing Dalcroze into contemporary America. As I have established that the three dominant features of the formation of the Dalcroze Method are 1. frustration with educational institutions and norms, 2. systematic dissociation and learning of elements of musicality through analysis and movement and 3. ambivalence to trends in Western self-identification. Thus established, these features and their subsequent successful integration into the Method provide remarkable possibilities in upholding the humanistically necessary value and perpetuation of Musicality amid current issues of post-colonial and feminist critique as well as cultural identification in the post-cold war era. Additionally, assessing the ideals and practices of the Dalcroze method against the social sciences of contemporary thought can better facilitate the dialogue between the music and the sciences, giving the discussion socially informed language and meaning in a hitherto problematic collaboration.

Dalcroze: the personal connection

So why is the work of Emile Jacques-Dalcroze important to me personally? This is a critical point in my research, as my motivation to study the work of the Swiss composer/educator hinges on this attachment.

First of all, I have intuitively felt that my own plight as a composer and musician in the late 20th/early 21st century must still be seen in the context of the cultural catastrophe of the late 19th century. Rather than transitioning from one era to the next as composers of the past transitioned in widespread consensus from the ideals of the Baroque to those of the Classical and then the Romantic, there has been no clear trend at all in the century following the collapse of tonality except for the uncomfortable obsession with our relationship to the past, manifested in preservation, imitation, fragmentation, destruction, evasion and purposeful ambivalence. Little seems to have been resolved except for the slow resignation to the fact that the past is indeed gone and that the sun will rise tomorrow and the next day on an uncertain landscape. I look to the twilight moments of the Common Practice in much the way residents of Pompeii must have looked at the rumbling mountain in the distance - my fortunes and frustrations are tied deeply to it.

The life and work of Emile Jacques-Dalcroze coincides precisely with this transitional era. Born in 1865, he stood to inherit the legacy of Brahms and the great Romantics, but reached maturity as a musician just as the whole tonal paradigm unraveled. Furthermore, his Swiss background and personal interests fostered a taste for folk songs which, with their modal vitality, manifested a quiet assault on the Beethovenian tonal archetype from every corner of Europe. Jacques-Dalcroze seemed almost ambivalent to the chaos of early modernism as he created his Rhythmique amid the turbulence of cultural upheaval and the violence of war. His idea of human musicality was to be universal, and the role of the physical body in movement and space as a parallel to and even the source of music would transcend the abrupt difference between the music of the past and the music of the future. The biographical aspects of Jacques-Dalcroze's life in music that contribute directly to the nature of his method are 1.) his ambivalence to the supremacy of the Common Practice, 2.) his relationship to exotic, non-Western ideas and 3.) his theory of time, space and energy which unite the body to music which related directly to scientific ideas of the turn of the century.

But studying the significance of Emile Jacques-Dalcroze's work does not end in simply identifying the sources of his inspiration or even in studying his actual activities in disseminating the method. Dalcroze died in 1950 at the age of 85. By that point the method had already been brought to many other cities and countries including the United States, and a rigorous process of training and certifying teachers was already in place, centralized in the Geneva school. Jacques-Dalcroze's work had therefore already become a large scale collaboration at the time of his death and continued to flourish for the next 59 years until the present day, dealing with every kind of difference in institutions, style, politics, culture and personality it would encounter. Designed for flexibility and self-correction, the 'method' is really an approach in the hands of trained facilitators who have "experienced" how it works to explore the human essence of music, to shape it and be shaped by it.

As a composer in 2009, I struggle with a great many conflicts and uncertainties. In addition to the long disconnection from the canonical past and estrangement to the institutions which conserve the powerful but crushing legacy of the past, I face new challenges as well. "Classical" music has recently become the subject of never before seen criticism, probing its once held to be absolute and apolitical content. Gender signification, ethics of appropriation of ethnic music, class struggles and the wake of the Cold War have all raised serious questions about the music that comes down to me and the music I do and will produce. I could easily look at the dwindling audiences, the mounting criticism, the Quixotic Conservatory and irrelevance of contemporary music and choose to throw up my hands in dismay at the futility of persisting as an exponent of the classical tradition as a useless, shriveled Sybil. But when I put aside the cruel demands of 19th century progressivism for a moment, I feel a simple urgency to engage in some visceral activity so fundamental to the core of being human it seems silly to even imagine its "utility" or purpose. Jaques-Dalcroze's approach was not merely observational, meant to draw remarkable connections and say "look, there it is, isn't that interesting?" Rather, he had a distinct humanistic objective which forms the kernel of his observations, solutions, method and legacy. In Dalcroze I find kinship in frustration, idealism and pragmaticism in confronting the musical reality of today. The formation and development of his method, both during and after his lifetime, is not a panacea to fix everything that is wrong with music and education today with a few drops of a magic cordial, but is for me a useful thread into the labyrinth of understanding music and how I relate to it.

introduction

What does it mean for music to have vitality? What is the significance of its alleged “loss?” Is it possible to analyze and quantify that mysterious ingredient which defies the normalization of theory and yet persists in the casual discourse of musical culture? At first, any investigation into such an obviously overblown and conspicuously subjective topic would seem Quixotic, if not ill-advised. In fact, the subject of vitality is problematic both from a formalist view as well as a social-critical view: for the former, such soft and anecdotal hearsay is not much help in the task of identifying patterns in sets, structures and techniques, and for the latter, the idea that music should even have the capacity to contain or lose a “vital essence” would make it dangerously immutable to skeptical criticism. And yet, it is precisely in this space that I wish to present the problematic yet stubbornly ubiquitous concept of vitality.

The idea that there is, could be or should be vitality in music is not something of my own invention. Rather, it has been a nagging topic throughout documented musical history. This study does not begin with a wishful, laden assumption that vitality either does or does not exist in the music, nor is so simple a conclusion likely to be reached. The germ of this investigation is the very real discussion among composers, performers and audience members over many years where verifiable tension has existed. Hot spots for such remarks are especially prevalent in times of stylistic transition, the self-conscious maintainance of performance practice of historical literature and the inter-generational process of music education.

Outline for discussion of Vitality

Vitality in music has been a contentious issue in areas of composition, performance practice and musicology for more than a century. Evidence of the importance of the issue can be seen in comments made by composers, performers and musicologists throughout the years.

An investigation into what this Vitality is and how it works is important for the following reasons:

1.) It reflects a perceived loss of continuity in a tradition that claims the legacy of the past.

2.) Because of reasons discussed in the second section of this paper, the perception of relative levels of vitality among musics of varying traditions creates an ethical problem.

3.) Besides the perceived loss of vitality, there are ways of describing it objectively, and the creation of various educational methods to reinforce certain practices is testament to a pragmatic approach to improve "lost" or unsatisfactory vitality in music.

Vitality can be studied through several solutions used by composers and performers in re-vitalizing music. These solutions include:

1.) Vitalizing by injection: Material of another tradition is appropriated as it is perceived to be more vital, and reinvigorates the new work.

2.) Supplanting tradition: Historic forms, perceived to be unsustainable in modern context, are abandoned and supplanted with borrowed, exotic forms where greater potential for vitality is assumed to be possible.

3.) Vitalizing by resuscitation: As decades and centuries place contemporary performers further and further from the origin of music preserved in manuscripts, techniques are devised to interpret music through informed guesswork toward the composer's intent. Thus, a work is "brought to life" through the efforts of the scholar-performer. Teachers in today's musical world vary in their approaches, as some prefer to rear young students in a "passed down" tradition while others seek to imbue in students the ability to apply principles of performance pratice as tools in resuscitating older works. Similar techniques are also used in the performance practice of newly composed music, where the composer is often unwilling or unable to communicate his intentions beyond the notated score and a few suggestions.

4.) Removing blockages: Modern music education methods use exercises to increase fluidity in music performance, often by means of associating musical ideas with physical movement of the body through time and against gravity.


Defining what exactly vitality is in music is not quite possible. That is because music is itself a thing that can exist only in the space of the performer and listener and in its means of transmission. However, the discussion of music having or lacking vitality persists, and ranges from highly subjective tastes to very objective, knowable points. Assessing what is "going on" in music that would grant it properties of vitality can be analyzed according to it's affect or appeal.

Music appeals to people in the following ways:

1.) Appeal to intellect

2.) Appeal to emotion

3.) Appeal to visceral sympathy ("can you dance to it?")

Additionally, we must look at the basic ways in which music exists in the service of human activity. Some of this is guesswork, but there are some ways in which scientists believe music may have emerged in our evolutionary history (see Levitan). These include:

1.) Group bonding

2.) Sexual selection

The success or failure of music in appealing to humans in the above ways and fulfilling these functional roles should be some indication of its vitality.

Thus, a basic outline of a paper on vitality should include the following:

I. A case for the study of Vitality (why it's important)

II. An assessment of means to achieving vitality, particularly when it is considered to be deficient

III. A working definition of what vitality is

IV. A proposal for how this knowledge is useful in:
a.) Improving performance practice of historic literature
b.) Improving communication between composers, performers and audiences
c.) Improving the ethical nature of transmission of material between cultures in transnational encounters

redraft proposal

My existing blogs represent ideas that I compiled (after substantial revision) into a draft of my dissertation (which is not posted here). The following is a proposal for redrafting the work as a whole.

In rethinking the structure of my paper (which seems to be the main problem, as the relationship of the content is not too clear in places), I realized that the main error was to separate the theoretical (and objective) discussion of rhythm from the more subjective (and politically volatile) idea of musicality. In the introduction, which was meant to make a pitch for connections between the objective and subjective aspects of music, I hesitated and fell into repeating the same segregation between content and culture I had aimed to relate. Looking back on it (after recovering from quite a bit of lost sleep) I realize this is largely due to structuring the paper before reaching the conclusions.

My proposed solution (toward which I'm curious to know your reaction) is this: Begin the paper directly exposing the issue of vitality. Vitality is a slippery issue for sure, but one with a long history of discussion and controversy. Classical musicians have spent more than a century bemoaning the loss of vitality in the West. This widely held view, that music (composition of new works as well as performance practice of historic literature) has lost something and must be reinvigorated (or else loathed) has contributed to 1) the ethically sticky issue of appropriating exotic material to "inject" vitality into the West's music (to revive a "moribund tradition" (Taylor's Beyond Exoticism, 87), 2) reinforcing the mythology of the past and thus creating an unattainable standard shrouded in the aura of mystery (and in this area, I've found Stephen Jay Gould's work reevaluating the meaning of trends and complete systems in evolution and baseball to be particularly helpful), and 3) developing modern educational methods (such as Dalcroze, Orff, Kodaly, and Suzuki) to compensate for deficiencies in music/talent education.

The last area (education methods) brings us to the very real possibility that something indeed was lost in the transmission of musical culture from past to present, from uncanonized to canonized. I feel, therefore, that confronting vitality in these various ways (defining it, tracing its history, and parsing fantasy from neurological fact) is critical in affirming the relevancy of contemporary music and musicianship and encouraging its future in controversial and uncertain times (the seemingly biased interest in the perpetuation of musical culture is actually a humanistic pitch for the value of music as fundamental human activity, rising out of our evolutionary past and relavent to our present).

Many if not most of my previously written chapters and subsections contribute to what vitality is and how it works. But I think where they fit together loosely along some subconscious frame that I felt intuitively but couldn't really deliver an explanation of, the chapters contribute far more powerfully toward unlocking the very real problem of Vitality. This is a problem that I neither invented nor wished to exist, but one that I've grown up with as a composer, performer and teacher.

Conclusions from Troubadour Recordings

The are as many recorded attempts at reviving the performance practice of the Troubadours as there are scholarly theories in books, and the controversy surrounding live performance is all the more noticeable. Critics of Orientalism cry foul on proponents of Arabic style performance practice of this literature on the grounds that Orientalist fantasy propels them to look too hard for something that must be there. In turn, those proponents hold to the notion that the cultural material that must have been transmitted is fair grounds to expound on the possibility and thus infuse the reconstructed tradition with such Arabic flavor.

Yet in all of the controversy, polarizing arguments take the critics an unhealthy distance from the actual material being presented by performers. Much of the criticism of the work of Binkley and Munrow is directed toward the use of exotic instruments as signifyers of Arabic culture (and thereby meant to capitalize on Orientalist marketability). It doesn't help the case of either of those performers that much of their early work does not in fact offer particularly novel rhythmic theory, relying instead on existing work on the subject. The work of Rene Clemencic, however, drew enormous praise for his use of French folk instruments and native reciters of the Occitan poetry. The "folk" approach is thereby viewed in contrast to the "Orientalist" approach.

The missing observation is that Clemencic's highly nuanced and effective use of ornamentation, by virtue of his deliberate non-use of Orientalist signifyers, flies safely under the radar. Obviously the result of painstaking scholarship combined with an intuitive sense of musicality, the recordings made by Clemencic and his group are exciting and fresh. The critical protest directed toward Orientalist interpretations has probably led to a critical reaming of Arab-sounding ornamentation, resulting in a return to more austere practice [citation needed - see Haines]. And yet ornamentation (and sometimes quite a lot of it) is a critically important part of expressive performance practice not only of Arabic music but also of Classical, Baroque, and Jazz musics. The fact that we don't have a record of what those ornaments or in-between notes actually were is no excuse for not trying to find them, and thus we torture an otherwise well-disposed audience with something antiseptic on the pretense of scholarly ass-guarding. Also, the experimentation with Arabic performance practice (and therefore ornamental practice) is useful as a starting point in trying out rhythmic and ornamental practices on Troubadour melodies. The results of such experimentation don't have to signify anything in particular, though it is up to the scholar-performer to prune the trial data toward plausible ends using his or her own musicianship.

Just Before Dawn

As I mentioned in my introduction, an important and daunting task in deconstructing (or at least loosening) overly essentialized and narrow self-image of the West for the sake of really understanding musicality (and most notably the function of rhythm) it is necessary to factor out the tonal lingua franca of the Common Practice and the canonization of masterworks composed during that time. This does not mean that the more than two centuries of music composed in Europe must be omitted from consideration or that specific masterworks are off limits. Rather, I mean to, as far as is possible, look at variety wherever there seems to be conformity, and to look at the heterogeneous practice of musicianship throughout Europe in its entirety wherever there seems to be a cult of individual genius. I believe that at this point in history, there is good reason to do this. In the last nine decades since the first World War, what was for so long held as a monolithic body of work and tradition that is the West disintegrated in its conformity in the tumultuous and much celebrated death of tonality.

To some, such a seemingly overblown claim would be synonymous with the supplanting of palatable concert music with the grotesque dissonance of the Second Viennese school and the institutionalization of systematic composition that would propel the Academy into half a century of discord. This is not the view I take, nor the type of death I believe came to Tonality. The death of tonality is simply the end to the supremacy of a highly sophisticated language of composition in which form hinges on the prolongation of polar harmonic tension between the tonic and its dominant.

The perfect tonal paradigm was as precarious ever a delicate object was made, and its undoing was rooted as far back as the late 18th century, if not before. The extention of tonality from its tonic to various related keys percipitated the standardization of temperament. Because of the increasing use of all available keys, modally borrowed chords and extended modulations, the resulting equal tempered scale was an inevitable outcome. And with the full use of the twelve keys, the tonal system began to resemble more and more a closed circular system - a system in which the gravity of the tonic was not something that could so easily be taken for granted. The system to which Shoenberg spectacularly nailed the coffin shut was already undone in a number of ways. The flat-VI key area that Schubert used in the early 19th century (and then Berlioz shortly after) opens up a set of circular key relationships far smaller than the full set of twelve. Taken one step further (and there is evidence of this in Schubert's Bb Piano Trio) the flat-VI of flat-VI short circuits the circle of twelve key areas to only three, thus calling into doubt the simple prominence of the tonic. Another way the tonal system was beginning to be undone before the time of Schoenberg was in composers such as Wagner, who would use absolute (and therefore not relative) key areas to underscore dramatic themes. To have a specific key area for the Grail theme is as un-tonal as anything, if the objective were to be prolongation of tension between tonic and dominant. In fact, the tradition of attributing affect to absolute key areas goes back quite a lot earlier than Wagner, and theories were written on the affective use of key areas at least as early as the 18th century. A third way in which tonality was becoming unravelled since the late 19th century also parallels the calling into question of Germanic hegemony in the classicalization of music, namely the use of modal material in nationalistic styles. This was a quiet revolution, but one that would prove critically damaging to the purity of tonality and would also provide a framework for the reorganization of pitch in the twentieth century. Almost all at once, Russian, Hungarian, English, Balkan, and Central Asian composers were using modal folk material in their work. Modality (see my chapter on modality vs. tonality) is a false sister to tonality - a Trojan Horse that can be introduced into a welcoming tonal scheme only to unleash an entirely different world of possibilities, driven by its own modal modus operandus.

The role of tonal harmony as a shaping force persists to the present day, with no signs of ceasing to be relevant and useful. But its supremacy as the driving force in music has been put aside for a very long time. As the twentieth and twenty-first centuries progressed, a great many methods of reorganizing pitch sprang up to fill the vacuum. Ethnic modes, synthetic modes, octatonic sets, dodecaphonic systems, minimalistic processes and tone color were all at work in shaping the pitch landscape of modern times. The long-standard (and under analyzed) norms for rhythm were also dissolved, with notable experiments made with non-metered rhythm, exotic material, manipulations of tempo modulations and the application of novel schemes and systems.

And yet, qualities of truly artistic musicianship persist throughout all these times of change. The sensitive faculties of a performer, the structural and visceral sensitivities of a composer, and the appreciation of the audience have never been abandoned. But it is true that a significant cause for anxiety in the twentieth century was the looming shadow of the nineteenth. Luciano Berio's Recital One demonstrates a bleak view of living under the crushing legacy of the past, while his Sinfonia is cautiously optimistic. And so I look to the rich but elusive hours just before the dawn of the Common Practice era, a mirror to the myriad 'isms' in the heterosylistic era succeeding its twilight. In "our" present insecurity in identifying Self in the demise of Westernness, a task in which "we" must confront the ethical spaces of Orientalism, Exoticism, appropriation and ownership and the inheritance of tradition, the distant past offers insight into what was lost and given up in the coalescence of that which is now undone. That insight can help to affirm the liberal universality of musicianship that makes the music of the present day the human, experiential and beautiful.

The documented evidence of musicality and material of the past is incomplete, and our understanding of music of the past gets foggier the further we delve into it. Admittedly, not all of our findings among the surviving literature of the centuries preceding the well-documented Renaissance will seem to be immediately useful in either reconstructing the past or understanding post-tonal musicality. And rhythm, my own primary interest, is the most elusive of all areas in rediscovering the late Middle Ages. Theories of twelfth and thirteenth century rhythm are highly speculative and controversial, and yet occasionally produce breathtakingly beautiful recreations of evidence peaking out from a buried past. To me, the study of what in spite of being so hard to know and fuzzy in surviving documentation really did happen is a call to adventure rather than cause for anxiety and hesitation. And in speculative reconstruction of Early Music we achieve something far more valuable than simply reviving some material out of old manuscripts. Through the careful use of tools of scholarship and cultural sensitivity, grounded in our visceral, musical intuitions we can, in putting together the incomplete pieces of the puzzle of this bygone era, see inside our musical selves.

Jazz in the Twentieth Century: Conflict of Materials and the Supremacy of Melody

In comparative study of world musics (and particularly those that involve some form of structured improvisation) against Western tradition, it is common to see "American Jazz" given as an example of something in the Western tradition that is analogous to the modal-improvisatory system of the studied music. However, to take such a comparison to be useful at face value is to gloss over the complexities in Jazz that are necessary in understanding it, and to inaccurately make assumptions not only about Jazz but Western tradition as a whole and the studied music itself, rendering the whole discussion uninformative and misleading. Comparisons are often given in introductions to musics such as Arabic and Hindustani, assuming that the reader accepts the degradation of improvisation in the West as fact and that he would be familiar enough with Jazz for the style to be a useful point of reference. Both of these assumptions are problematic however, and we need to take a closer look at both the phenomenon of improvisation in and outside the "West" and the historic (and very well documented) path that has taken the art of Jazz improvisation through several distinct phases, characterized by the novel resolutions in conflict of materials.

On the surface, it would seem safe to surmise that in canonical Western music literature, improvisation is not valued, encouraged, practiced or even allowed. The formal structures in Common Practice music do seem to afford the performer little flexibility, and this view of the literature and performance practice is not really superficial. But it would be wrong to conclude that there is a simple choice made to either improvise or not improvise. In fact, the eclipse of improvisatory practice in European and American classical music is largely due to the choices made by composers, performers and audiences to engage in the project of creating music based on tonal architecture and polyphonic structures where the tonal (and modal) space is in flux to the point of making improvisation impossible (or for the most part impractical, especially in ensemble music). At one point, French Baroque unmetered keyboard preludes allowed considerable freedom to the performer in both rhythm and ornamentation. Mozart's scores are quite bare and ambiguous as well when compared to the highly specific directions given in scores by Mahler and Stravinsky a century later. Parallel to the progression of non-improvised tonal music in classical European-American music is a tradition of improvisation used by organists and educators, and composers have historically used much improvisation in the compositional process. But one would be hard pressed to find a tradition of solo communal improvisation analogous to those found in those world traditions in which improvisation is so common and important.

In a musical culture such as that which is widely viewed as 'Western' in which there is such scant practice of improvisation, Jazz is naturally a likely tradition to turn to for evidence of a Western improvisatory paradigm. However, classical music audiences constantly confound the discourse between classical and Jazz styles (as if both traditions weren't already sufficiently complex as to render such discourse an unavoidable mess) by mixing ambiguous terminology such as rhythm, meter, composition and improvisation. Rhythm is treated as an ingredient ("this or that piece has more rhythm"); meter is called rhythm; improvisation is seen as a substitute for improvisation ("Jazz is spontaneous composition! They just pull melodies out of the air!"). All these statements represent both an ignorance of Jazz among classical musicians and the likely to be perpetuated misunderstanding of the elusive style.

Essentializing Jazz to the point of pinning down exactly how the modal-improvisatory paradigm actually works fails to take into account the century of tumultuous changes in Jazz style and technique, the importance of individual personalities and the co-existence of multiple Jazz styles at any moment in its history.

The vastly different Jazz styles of the twentieth century, all widely preserved and distributed on recordings, ranges from the work of such early artists as Sidney Bechet, the Hot Five, Jelly Roll Morton and Louis Armstrong to popular Big Bands of the swing era such as Ellington, Goodman, Henderson, and Bassie to the be-bop of Charlie Parker and Dizzie Gilespie to the modal experimentations of John Coltraine, Miles Davis and McCoy Tyner. All along the way, there have remained adherents to any given style who practice historical performance styles in the contemporary amalgam of today's Jazz.


The development of Jazz, for the first 60 years at least, seems to be marked in a significant way by various means of reconciling conflicting materials. Although the roots of Jazz go back to West African styles, Church hymns, Spirituals, 19th century popular song and the blues, the birth of Jazz was much more spontaneous and doesn't fit well with any single-track evolutionary model. Some early artists even claim to (or are posthumously claimed to) have "invented" Jazz (and given the popular nature of Jazz in the twentieth century and the new models of dissemination of knowledge, the influence of distinct personalities must be taken seriously). The main two materials which I believe are, as a technical matter, the most significant in spawning such diversity in a style labeled so simply as "Jazz" are the tonality of early 20th century popular song (show tunes, light opera and tin-pan alley songs) and the modality of the blues.

Without attaching any political claim as to authorship or ownership, it is reasonable to say that highly chromatic, tonal popular music of the late 19th and early 20th centuries is a significant material aspect of Jazz before 1950. Considered "Standards" such songs as "I Got Rhythm," "All the Things You Are," and "Body and Soul" have been favorite repertoire for generations of Jazz musicians performing arrangements and improvisations in vastly different styles. These songs are highly chromatic - that is, the represent the full possibilities of key modulation and chromatic shading available in a short form. It is not uncommon for a single song to modulate through three different keys and only confirm the actual tonic at the very end (and not even, if the song in recapping avoids the tonic to propel it into the initial key by means of a turnaround). Emerging from the development of chromatic music throughout the 19th century toward an eventual circularity (as in the circle of 5ths), these songs historically coincide with the dissolution of tonality in the dodecaphonic school of Schoenberg, subverting the gravity of the tonic by means of extreme functionality while the latter subverts it by implosion. Nonetheless, the popular song material used by Jazz musicians is hyper-tonal and completely functional on the micro level.

The blues, as a style, genre and essence, is widely considered to be essential in the formulation of Jazz style. In identifying the blues, there are several ingredients that, while not always necessary, generally collaboratively makes the blues what it is. The blues may or may not be based on a three-part, twelve measure form; the blues is often about complaining or longing; the blues is, at least in simple forms, quite often modal, and not actively exploring various tonal spaces; certain dissonant or expressively tuned intervals evoke the plaintive nature of the music. Of course there are exceptions to each of these points, but more often than not, the importance of expression through mode in blues is superior to the ambitions of the harmony, which serve mostly to underscore the tri-part form of the text. While the twelve measure form is near universal in how common it is in blues music, there are eight measure, sixteen measure and other alternative forms. The harmony as well, involving the three primary triads in a three-part form, can be either elaborated on (specifically in the turnaround) or simplified, even to the point where only one or two chords are used. Therefore, there seems to be a fairly universal aspect of blues that melodic-modal expressivity is favored over tonal expressivity.

These two material aspects of Jazz could hardly be more at odds, yet they coexist in every form of Jazz in the first half of the century. And well-documented experiments with improvisation in various eras by various artists reveal different approaches at reconciling the extreme freedom of modality and the constant flux of tonality (which, as I mentioned earlier seems to have been a deterrent in the use of improvisation in classical music). In describing various approaches throughout history, I want to be clear that I am not looking at the change in styles as an evolution (which would imply that subsequent generations have a superior approach), but that each approach did, for its time and current aesthetic, succeed in reconciling these materials to produce music that is beautiful and valuable.

Early recordings of tune-based Jazz feature improvisation that is largely ornamentation and distortion of the melody. Preserving the melodic integrity of the tune is still valued by many performers today, and reflects both the persistence of this style as well as a backlash to the complete abandonment of the tune in the modal Jazz of the 1960's. Given the early examples, it would almost seem that "free" improvisation is not one of the salient features of Jazz, were Jazz to be defined by a specific style. Even with more personalized, non-tune improvisations, such as those by soloists with the Ellington band, the solo material sounds rehearsed and is not as spontaneous as the improvisations of later generation artists. And yet, some artists, notably Louis Armstrong (credited with the "liberation" of the solo) were compelled to explore a freer personal expression within the tonal framework of the song literature. I should also note that earlier, New Orleans style improvisations (particularly among clarinet players) feature heavy reliance on "vertical" pitch material, that is, chord tones. Extreme linearity was a less common feature, particularly at fast tempos. In larger ensemble music, the hesitancy (or, the artful restraint) served well as a textural contrast to the heavily arranged, highly active arrangements. And players were certainly able to adapt to the hyper-tonal harmonies of the tunes, which despite being difficult to improvise freely over, were remarkably consistent, falling into only a small number of schema categories.

It was not until the late 1940's when Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie revolutionized Jazz improvisation with a whirlwind of technical (and computational) virtuosity. The solo was now fully disembodied from the melody (which itself might be a replacement for an older tune over existing chord changes). The results were polarizing - Parker had his admirers, and yet adherents to the older styles persisted in their taste for less confrontational music more rooted in melody. In fact, Parker's rendition of Standards would coalesce some years later into a technique for dealing with improvisation over rapidly changing nominally functional chord progressions that could be learned and taught. A well-used document explaining the technique now standard in Jazz improvisation over Standards is Mark Levine's The Jazz Piano Book. Rather than rapidly changing tonal spaces with the changing of chords, players look to extend linearity by finding scales (or modes) that can be used commonly over several chords in a row, thereby opening the modal space within a tonal context.

There was certainly a backlash to the aggressive technical fireworks (and arguably unmelodious) of be-bop, which was aesthetically confrontational and cerebral, besides being a departure from earlier styles on technical points. Two movements in Jazz followed Be-bop in the next decade, and the practicing and instigating artists often performed music in all three styles. These movements were Cool Jazz and Hard Bop. Aesthetically, we can see from the names of these new styles as well as hear from their respective sounds along what lines artists reacted against Be-bop. Cool Jazz does indeed evoke a cooler, less aggressive vibe, just as Hard Bop plays up the attitude. These styles also reflect the different angles from which African Americans during the civil rights movement dealt with struggle and identity, though I will limit my discussion to technical points.

Besides the more visible aesthetic features of these new styles we see two new approaches to dealing with the ever-nagging struggle between modality and harmony. A starling innovation to Cool Jazz is the creation of new, non-standard compositions which rather than challenge improvisation, actually facilitate it. The compositions of this style in effect reverse engineered the harmonic system to allow modal modulation to supersede harmonic choices. In Hard-Bop, the antagonistic aspect of more aggressive styles of Jazz is enhanced, and the virtuosity of Be-bop is maintained. However, as in Cool Jazz, the music is recomposed, shedding much of the chromatic excessiveness of the Standards repertoire. And Blues emerges in Hard-bop as a driving force in form and style.

Today, every style of Jazz ever captured on record has adherents, practitioners and fanatic lovers. While there was a progression of ideas that, over 60 years led to the creation of several distinct styles, each era in the constantly changing landscape of Jazz music had his or her own way of dealing with a legacy of modality, tonality and style, and great works were produced with every solution. It is my hope in discussing the rapidly changing, poly-stylistic body of work called Jazz along the lines of the reconciliation of conflicting materials that the casual use of Jazz as an example or counterexample in the comparative study of world music might be a more useful tool in bringing together the polarized, antagonistic, and over-essentialized musical worlds of East and West. Such understanding is beneficial, if not essential, to the translation of culture and the building of an ethical and humane world.

Unwrapping the West's Self-Image

Many books have been written containing the term "Western Music" in their titles, and many courses in colleges have been taught with similar titles. And yet the very idea of such a label passes through a great many different stylistic and political agendas and generations of constantly changing sociological paradigms. The use of this preface, "Western" to describe art, culture, and geography has served the best and worst intentions, yet remains to be problematic. At best, the limit of scope in calling a body of knowledge "Western" effectively makes whatever is "non-Western" hands-off and thereby untainted by the hands of those not able to speak with authority on such material. Claude V. Palisca seems to be keenly aware of the dubious nature of this labeling in his preface to the 5th edition of A History of Western Music. He writes that the limits of Western music were generally agreed on at the time of the book's first publication in the 1950's, and "hardly anyone doubted the value of studying its history." (xi). He admits the importance of non-Western musics, and applauds the inclusion of alternative sources and perspectives in school curricula, though ultimately holds that the limits of a particular view of Western music are necessary to efficiently explain this music chronologically and accurately. At worst, the identification of Western culture serves deliberately diabolical purposes in upholding imperialistic infrastructures and reinforcing the superior centrality of the West and the inferior marginality of the Other. Henry Kissenger's essay "Domestic Structure and Foreign Policy" divides the world into two fundamentally different entities, the West and the non-West according to the notion of whether the Newtonian Revolution has taken place or not, thus characterizing the mind of the other as somehow incapable of some level of rationality known to the West.

The obvious imperialistic projects of England and France in the first half of the century and America more recently tend to overshadow the flaws latent in the better intentioned divisions of East and West. When such inhumane treatment of oppressed and marginalized peoples as we can see so readily in today's media saturated world abound as the result of unequal relationships among nations and peoples, much is at stake. The vilification of the immediate perpetrators polarizes the distinction between good and evil, thus making the large spectrum of unknowingly complicit subjects mistakenly absolved of wrongdoing or responsibility.

The assumption that such a boundary between these two worlds exists is often taken for granted, though historically there are some reasons to make such a division. It is true that for a rather long period of time, East and West in boundaries similar to those in casual usage today, namely between Europe and the Middle East, were ruled Christian and Islamic empires respectively. The Crusades of a thousand years ago marked a period of intense antagonism between these two entities that would persist until the present day. However, as natural and perhaps even necessary it may seem that such a division exist, the act of drawing a line and calling one body East and the other West has enormous repercussions. Whenever two entities are divided from each other in this binary way, each side tend to become consolidated - they become more themselves than they otherwise would without the other. The East becomes more essentially Eastern than it ever would have with out its opposite, and the West becomes more Western than it ever would have on its own. Furthermore, as one side assumes more power than the other, the weaker of the two is unable to speak for itself, defined, enslaved, and even imagined by the stronger power. Much has been written in the last century critiquing the central position of the West and it's domination of the East (which now may as well include the Far East, South Asia, South America and Pacific). In recent decades, minor transnational discussions have emerged to circumvent the futility of the margin's critique of the center (an arrangement that tends to reinforce the binary opposition). Edward Said asks in his book Orientalism, "Can one divide human reality, as indeed human reality seems to be generally divided, into clearly different cultures, histories, traditions, societies, even races, and survive the consequences humanely?" (45).

At this point, I should reveal my own position and agenda in the post-colonial discussion. In trying to discover and articulate fundamental essentials of music such as rhythm, flow, principles of modality and the psychological processes of music cognition, and to operate as a composer and academically trained specialist in the contemporary world of music, I have found that the West's image of itself in opposition to its non-Western Other has created an essentialized, historically inaccurate, Narcissistic and unnuanced reduction of musical culture in Europe and America. At the same time, German and Austrian scholarship such as the work of Heinrich Schenker have had a hegemonic effect on European music in forming the canon of "great works" in the Western repertoire which serves as the legacy of a large region and time of far more diverse and varied characteristics than are apparent in what "comes down to us."

INHERITING THE LEGACY

In making the assumption that there is an "us" and the "we" are the heirs to some legacy rather than discoverers of some vault of sealed treasure, the question arises, who are "we?" That is a truly complex and obviously unanswerable question that I would decline to speculate on. The question of who "I" am is somewhat more reasonable and fruitful, and the reader may freely identify with some aspects of my musical/cultural self and not with others. In either respect, this exercise illustrates the complexity of growing up in the heterosylistic musical climate of today's America.

My earliest musical influences were the songs of Fred Rogers, Jessie Norman's performance of Erwartung, a textbook written in the 1970's including folk songs and a few old standard elementary school songs as well as Japanese children's songs (probably included after the post-war reconstruction transmission of culture), and my father's singing to me at bedtime (Over the Rainbow, Old Black Joe and Me and My Shadow being our favorites). I began training as a clarinetist in school programs, playing forgettable for-band literature, a few pop hits and some classics. In middle school and high school, I joined an orchestra that would play from a repertoire of favorites including Berlioz's Farandole, Saint-Seans Bachanale from Samson and Delilah, Brahms First Symphony (I was shocked when I first heard a "proper" rendition), a healthy dose of Broadway; a general assortment of pieces of music from here and there over the centuries. In college, my school orchestra performed more Revueltas than Mozart, one Beethoven Symphony a year, and more Giacinto Scelsi than any other composer. In a curriculum more designed to bolster the school's academic profile than to provide "meat and potatoes" training to career minded undergraduate performers, I received anything but a typical, thorough exposure to the canon of masterworks.

In reflecting on my own exposure to a great many styles of music as well as the almost embarrassing omission of general core repertoire, I realize that the pattern of exposure to music among young musicians in America is complex and reflects an organization of institutionalized music education and performance that is unique to America. Much of the music performed by American choirs and instrumental ensembles is either arraigned for, written for, or found to be useful for, the ensembles that play it. The utility of music selection in the service of a school or community band or glee club trumps the value of repertoire as a need-to-know standard. The perennial surplus of wind players generated by the American school system (in comparison to string players) may play a serious role in differentiating American repertoire from European, where wind band music is more accessible to the skilled amateur than orchestral music.

Another area in which Americans are systematically exposed to music that may or may not reflect the canon of great German and Austrian masterworks is in the publication of textbooks, for both general compulsory music education and elective instrumental study, particularly the former. I taught for four years in a grade school that used the Silver Burdett and Ginn textbook serious. I found the books to be somewhat frustrating from a teaching standpoint in that the songs selected for inclusion were often chosen for highly political reasons, and the concept of music as serving a utilitarian, technical purpose was noticeably absent. I do not propose to make music apolitical, and fully recognize the reasons for the inclusion of songs that would expose children to the culture of Ghana, Mexico, Japan and Europe. But the failure of the material on technical points (i.e., poorly selected tesuratura, ill-conceived movement exercises, large amount of print devoted to cultural/interdisciplinary studies) makes the selection process for the music that much more apparent. What may come as a surprise to adult teachers and school board members, though, is the profound effect such benign politically motivated decisions have on children. Essentially, we have created, through manipulating exposure of musical material to children through printed media, a synthetic musical environment in which the children thereby become hybrid musical beings, embodying neither the authentic sensibility of the Other nor a traditional image of the West. Children are in this way given mixed signals about Otherness. The separation is made clear by exoticized representations made by adults, while they learn repertoire from exotic sources as their own, free of any culpability in the act of appropriation.

Thus the question of ownership, stewardship and inheritance of Western classical music is no simple one. The would-be heirs themselves (culturally educated citizens of "Western" countries studying in institutions presumably designed to transmit essential cultural material to the younger generation) have complex, non-traditional backgrounds. The institutions offer a variety of perspectives and motivations for inclusion or exclusion of material. And far from a world where the pearls of ancient wisdom are wasted on the ignorant youth, the European and American academy has produced highly motivated, productive graduates who often simultaneously embody and reject the standard conservatory curriculum. On a recent trip to New York I attended a concert featuring performances by ten of New York's lesser funded new music performing groups in a five hour marathon event in Brooklyn. Certainly a "downtown" program, and a very hip young crowd attending, the composers and performers themselves were highly trained conservatory and ivy-league graduates presenting a countercultural. menagerie of electric guitars, Gothic texts, Dada poetry and free improvisation.

POST-COLONIAL CRITIQUE IN MUSIC

Since the mid-twentieth century, emerging trained scholars from around the world have raised their voices in critique of Western imperialism. The great empires of Britain, Spain and France were disassembled, and their colonies returned to domestic rule, often with the guiding ideology put forth by post-colonial native writers. But most post-colonial critique deals with text and not with other forms of culture. Recent writings have been made dealing with music as the subject of critique, including Timothy Taylor's Beyond Exoticism, though the body of work is small. Critique of text is much more immediate because the political leanings of the author and his act of representing the Other are so clear and easy to identify. Also, the readership of such critique is able to read the language and comprehend the issues with minimal initiation. Music, however is a different substance; critique of intent, politics and representation in music are not so immediately apparent. Most writings on music tend to focus on the text of lyrics, the social peripherals to music production (which in pop music are rather immediate) or clear instances of attempted stylistic hybridity and the composer/producer's own words regarding his or her work. Therefore, post-colonial discussion of actual musical material is still painfully sparse. I find it interesting that Edward Said, himself a trained musician, avoided stubbornly the post-colonial critique of musical material in the deconstruction of Orientalism.

Music as a cultural substance, is quite a different thing from text. Sure, there is a textual aspect to music, such as the use of exotic material to represent people and places in film. And there is the hybrid studio project fraught with dubious intentions of sensation-craving record producers who profit from the native being asked to perform himself before an audience more apt to coldly classify him than to be enlightened by any particularly new understanding. But at some level, the music speaks for itself and is what it is. At some point, people are listening to the music, consuming it, engaged with it in an immediate and intimate way. Music is in a way more akin to food than to text. There is a distinct gastronomical reality to food that cannot be ignored no matter how imperialistic or enlightened the eater is. An Orientalist fantasy about the Middle East isn't going to change the chemical nature of a Lebanese dinner or make it taste any better or worse. For certain, interest in a culture or place may make one more likely to try the food or even to develop a taste for it, but at some point you are just eating and will have to confront the reality of the food on a supremely intimate level. The experience of music is the same. Even if one listens to music with the intention of demonstrating some sort of cultural association, it is something that ultimately is consumed, ingested into the human equilibrium and experienced intimately.

[this chapter is incomplete]

Troubadour & Trouvere Songs

DERIVING RHYTHM FROM TROUBADOUR MANUSCRIPTS

The existing manuscripts of troubadour songs of the 12th century typically do not feature mensural notation. According to Fletcher Collins, the application of rhythm to these melodies has historically been problematic, as he writes in his introduction to A Medieval Songbook "Successive mensural transcribers of the medieval songs have gone on the reefs of their theories of transcriptions." He cites the work of Gennrich, whose lifelong work concluded with "another unmelodious compendium of songs" based on transcription of 215 of 262 songs in the third rhythmic mode (x). The third rhythmic mode is the dactylic, i.e., long-short-short. He then cites Ismael Fernandez de la Cuesta who says "the melodies of the Occitan songs do not seem to have been written at all...in a modal rhythm." (from Las Cancons dels Trobadors, Institut d'Estudis Occitans, Toulouse, 1979, p. 31 - note, follow up on this source). Beck's and Gennrich's transcriptions, based on the rhythmic modes, are thereby inherently flawed in forcing such conformity onto the melodies. Again citing de la Cuesta, a song is "left warped and maimed when submitted to the artifice of rhythmical modes."

In criticizing the mechanical application of metrical modes, Collins is, however, unwilling to discard the idea of the use of metrical norms in the music. He feels that composers of medieval monophonic music were quite aware of "metrical units such as iambs, trochees, and dactyls, but also their musical counterparts, and that his compositions may therefore be interpreted mensurally in transcription and performance." (xi). Collins, writing in 1982, calls for a "fresh start" in the mensural notation of medieval songs. Melodious results through experimentation are necessarily to complement any rhythmic theory.

I find the widely published text-only versions of troubadour songs and other medieval poetry analogous to the billboards of Sharp's discovery in early 20th century Appalachia. Sharp notes that ballad poetry has historically been meant to be sung. Following this position, I find the task of mensural transcription of extant song melodies (and the more liberal task of conceiving melodies for text-only survivals) entirely necessary, whether to do so is considered reckless or even unacceptable.

Here is a chronological look at the mensural transcription of troubadour and trouvere songs:

1910: Pierre Aubry's Trouveres et troubadours, 2nd edition (Gennwich follows Aubry's lead on metrical mode transcription)

1958 Gennwich's publication of Der Musikalische Nachlass der Troubadours in three volumes

1982 Collin's publication of The Medieval Songbook and introduction, which I have cited.

1996 Elizabeth Aubrey's The Music of the Troubadours, Indianna UP, also availlable online at http://books.google.com/books?id=1nqgFob3uV0C*

*An interesting note, in her opening acknowledgments, Ms. Aubrey thanks the late Thomas Binkley for his encouragement. Mr. Binkley's recording work was cited in John Haine's critique of early music performance in Early Music Journal, and he also seems to have mentored the group Altramar in preparation for their album Iberian Gardens. Binkley (1932-1995) worked in Europe in the 1950's, founding the early music group Studio fur Alte Musik (later called Studio fur Fruhe Musik) and later founding the Early Music Institute at University of Indiana in 1979. A consise and informative biography of Mr. Binkley can be found at http://www.classicalarchives.com/artist/17176.html#about. (Image from classicalarchives.com, permission pending)

Rhythmic modes, from the anonymous treatise of 1240, De mensurabili musica:

1. Long-short (trochee)
2. Short-long (iamb)
3. Long-short-short (dactyl)
4. Short-short-long (anapest)
5. Long-long (spondee)
6. Short-short (pyrrhic)

OUT OF AQUITAINE
Troubadours were composer-performers of Occitan poetry during the High-middle ages. The tradition supposedly began with William IX of Aquitaine, the "first troubadour." For investigation of the connection between the troubadour songs and Moorish Iberia, the historical position of William IX and his father, William VIII (born Guy-Geoffrey) is extremely interesting. Aquitaine, a region in present day South Western France, was a former Roman province ruled between the 5th and 6th centuries by the Visagoths who were driven out by Aquitaine allaiance with the Franks. From 868 to 1137, the region was ruled by the Dukes of Aquitaine. For a piece of material evidence linking Moorish Iberia to the songs of the troubadours, William VIII's 1064 expedition, the Seige of Barbastro offers a fascinating point of transmission. The military campaign, fought at the bequest of Pope Alexander II and an early battle in the Reconquista, was the Pope's first expedition against a Muslim city, wresting control from the Taifa of Muhammad al-Muzaffar (Bischko, 32?). The Christian occupation of the city proved to be quite brief, and Barbastro was returned to Muslim control a mere two years later. However, an invaluable piece of war booty was brought back to the Aquitaine court, namely a number of Arab singing slave girls.

The coincidence is astonishing: not only did William VIII bring home a number of highly trained musicians, but his son, William IX would initiate one of the most pervasive and influential movements in European music in the end of the 11th century. Furthermore, the younger William would have spent his entire youth in this court, and inherited his father's throne at the age of 15, thus becoming their master. This historical coincidence also finds support in analysis of the troubadour poetry as being reminiscent of or even paralleling thematic material and form of Arabic lyric poetry. There is some disagreement as to how much the troubadour songs really are influenced by the Arabic poetry, as Dwight Reynolds cautions, "whether the troubadour tradition derives from the Arabic lyric tradition is probably one of the most conflicted academic questions of at least the last century." (Reynolds).


(Image public domain, Bibliothèque Nationale, MS cod. fr. 12473)

Thinking Modally

Having both grown up in the Catholic church and been a sensitive musician with a burning desire for authenticity and good taste, I have encountered first hand the layering of the various musical traditions that have risen out of Catholic tradition over the past two millennia. These various traditions, born in vastly different ages and locales tend to persist in the great canon of liturgical music, mixed and matched, juxtaposed, but never quite forgotten. From the ancient origins of chant, Gregorian as well as other styles, to the rise of polyphony, to the chorale hymn, the antiphonal psalm to the modern vernacular ordinary, today's liturgical music is quite poly-stylistic, and the sensibilities of each type are not always wholly compatible. In the late twentieth century alone, American Catholic music has seen rapid change following the second Vatican council with the rapid commissioning of new old-sounding service music, barefoot masses, African American Spirituals, Gospel, pop and neo-Medieval music. What particularly caught my ear as a young student, though, was the friction between the Gregorian chants and their respective modern settings. More often than not, it tended to be the case in the harmonization of chants that the harmony either "went nowhere" or impeded the linear integrity of the melody. Arrangers of these chants could go either way, really, and some tended to come up with more tasteful settings than others.

To exemplify this friction, take for example this setting of the Pange Lingua, one of the most popular old chants still in widespread use in the church. The melody, while clearly in Mode III, or Phrygian, is harmonized as if it were in a major key, with the tonic now figuring as the mediant. Gone are many of the evocative features of Phrygian mode, notably the low second degree, minor third and minor sixth (which happens to be the dominant in this mode, contrary to the universal use of the fifth in tonal music). To be somewhat charitable toward the arranger, the Phrygian mode has its own peculiarities that would make a harmonization at least somewhat perplexing, such as the inherent tritone conflict between the flat-second and fifth degree (the fifth being rather important in a tonal setting). Susan McClary cites J.S. Bach's occasional setting of a Phrygian melody, "which required him to twist his harmonization every which way but loose, often culminating in chromatic meltdowns that simply obscured the fundamental irrationality of the process." (97). While I personally find the harmonization of monophonic chants (which in their authentic setting would have had no harmonization) unnecessary and undesirable, their attempted harmonization in many printed hymnals reveals a conflict in sensibility between the modaly driven melodies and the harmonically driven chord progressions. The forces at work in 11th century modality and 19th century harmony are worlds apart and are compatible only by compromise or occasional coincidence.

[note to self: take a look at Josquin de Prez's Missa Pange Lingua to examine how the Phrygian mode is treated in a polyphonic setting]

What is a mode really? In undergraduate music history and theory classes, students are often introduced to the modes as alternative scales with their respective characteristic whole and half step patterns, the seven named modes being derived from a single diatonic set. While students in a class setting such as that of a Dalcroze solfege class may be encouraged to improvise with some of these modes, exploration of the rich potential and functionality of modes is seldom afforded to busy students with vast amounts of Classical and Romantic literature to learn. Furthermore, the use of modes in monophonic or monodic music in its pure and unadulterated form is rare, and examining the expressive potential of a mode is therefore convoluted. It's not that modality is a thing of the past and doesn't exist, but that as a force it often goes unnoticed and unappreciated.

As "shaping forces" in music (to adopt Earnst Toch's terminology), modality and tonality exhibit some common features. They are, however, not the same thing, and as forces have rather different agendas. In viewing the following chart of analogous features, you can see where these two forces are similar and different.

Modality

• Has a tonic note as a tonal center toward which the melody tends to gravitate
• Has as its characteristic half steps or whole steps in a certain, unchangeable arrangement whereby expressive potential particular to that mode is realized
• Has a dominant, often the fifth tone, but not always
• May have a reciting tone
• Has a penultimate note (below the tonic) which may or may not be a leading tone
• Pitch levels represent modal space rather than harmonic shadings
• Structure is realized through exploration of modal space and through contour

Tonality

• Has a tonic note as a tonal center toward which the melody tends to gravitate AND a harmonic space toward which the music tends to gravitate regardless of pitch level
• Has in a key a set of whole and half steps which resemble those in the modes except that they must be either major or minor; chromatic notes may be borrowed from parallel modes without necessarily disrupting the sense of key
• Has a dominant pitch AND key area which is always the fifth and is always major and has certain structural powers
• Penultimate note is always the leading tone, in both major and minor, a half step below the tonic
• Pitch levels, while important for contour are themselves subject to interpretation based on the concurrent harmonic field
• Structure is realized through tension between the tonic and dominant. Contour and pitch level are subsidiary considerations in determining structure

While it is undeniable that tonality was one of the strongest forces in the tonal music of the 18th and 19th centuries and was responsible for back-boning the massive extended structures that brought the 19th century to a close, modality is a much older force, which has existed in human music as early as anyone can imagine, probably dating as far back as the earliest extant bone flutes of 50,000 years ago (Levitan 250). I believe, based on evidence in the similarities of modes existing in musics around the world and in antiquity that the fundamental principles of modality are inborn, human capacities, related to language faculties.

Even before empirically exploring the limits and preferences of general human cognition it is useful to examine the extant modal structures and tunings already in use in folk music. In articulating the modal features of a given music (Arab, Hindustani, Javanese, Chinese, etc.) it seems to be the habit of critical writers to cite the differences (and therefore "Otherness") of these modes compared to the standard modern European and American practice. Indeed, the now perfectly logarithmic chromatic tuning system provides an attractive blank slate by which to measure the various deviation of exotic modes. Misleading terminology like "micro tonal tunings" and "quarter tones" tend to define these quite traditional and natural systems as complicated derivatives of an obviously rational Western purity. However, traditional world tuning systems are not inherently irrational, and the origin of the modern Western tuning system is far from logarithmic or even standard, having the burgeoning contrapuntal and harmonic adventures to spur its evolution and standardization. Despite the now apparent political pit-falls of explaining various modal structures and tunings as deviations from the logarithmic chromatic system, I will nonetheless measure intervals using cents (hundredths of semitones) as useful and sufficiently precise units considered to be amply smaller than the threshold of human pitch discrimination (Critser).

Most if not all modes in world music consist of steps of unequal size. In European diatonic Church modes, these are called whole steps and half steps, and there are near equivalents to these steps in many other modes. The distribution of these steps over the span of an octave (which seems to be basically "perfect" most of the time) seems to be more or less universal as well (for example, Arab musicians perform in heterophonic "unison" on various instruments in different octaves ignoring octave the displacement) (Racy). In sung music as well as most instrumental music, the upward limit to pitches distributed over (but not including) the octave seems to be seven. There are, as a few examples will show, instances of variations of pitches where in the descending version of the mode (or other special usage) a variant on a pitch level is substituted. But by and large, there are few examples of eight note modes (though the octatonic scale was documented by Arab theorists as early as the eighth century) and fewer if any of larger numbers of pitches in extant modes. But even in the case of a rare exception, the number seven is telling, and hints at a threshold in step perception.

PENTATONIC MODAL THEORIES: THE FIELDWORK OF SHARP AND BARTOK

To say that modes evolved simply from distributing uneven steps over the span of a perfect octave would seem to fall short of explaining the existence of modes containing less than seven pitches to an octave. The pentatonic modes (and hexatonic, as there are many examples of six note modes as well) are so common that they must be viewed not as exceptions from our expectation of evolving modes from steps but as evidence of another basic foundational principle of the emergence of pitch material. Now, while the predominance of the use of pentatonic modes in Chinese music and the extensive use of seven note modes in Arabic and Hindustani music may be viewed as exclusive modal traditions, thereby categorizing pentatonic modes as a really different thing, there are a number of musics where pentatonic and heptatonic modes exist concurrently, evidence that it is not quite out of mind for a performer of pentatonic music to also perform (or at the very least coexist with) heptatonic music.

The work of Cecil Sharp in his collection of English folk songs in Southern Appalachia and his modal theory based on analysis of these songs provides us with a wealth of information regarding the relationship between pentatonic and heptatonic modes as well as valuable insight into the nature of melody through multiple variants of certain songs ("Barbara Allen" for example, #24 in the collection, is recorded in sixteen different versions, varying considerably in mode and rhythm). In Sharp's theory, hexatonic and heptatonic modes are seen as directly related to an underlying pentatonic sensibility. In comparing the various diatonic modes to the pentatonic modes (of which there are five), he sites "weak" notes, where the uses of such non-pentatonic pitches are relagated to axillary function or rhythmically weak placement. Incidentally, Bartok noted an instability in pitch in the second degree of the minor modes in his analysis of Turkish melodies (Bartok, ###).

Maud Karpeles, in his preface to the 1931 edition of Sharp's collection, provides us with the following chart, relating heptatonic modes to pentatonic modes:

Heptatonic. 'Weak Notes.' Pentatonic Mode.
Ionian 3rd and 7th 1
4th and 7th 3
Dorian 3rd and 7th 1
2nd and 6th 2
3rd and 6th 4
Phrygian 2nd and 6th 2
2nd and 5th 5
Lydian 4th and 7th 3
Mixolydian 3rd and 7th 1
4th and 7th 3
3rd and 6th 4
Aolian 2nd and 6th 2
3rd and 6th 4
2nd and 5th 5
(xix)

In Sharp's theory categorizing the diatonic modes, based on the position of the weak notes and the position of the tonic, we see that the skeletal trace of the pentatonic structure in the diatonic modes gives them nuanced character that goes far beyond the idea of a mode as a pitch set or even the idea of mode as a scale. But what is it that makes a note weak? Karpeles acknowledges that such a task as labeling the weak notes is difficult, and is unwilling to provide such an analysis of his own to songs not appearing in the first edition. Sharp admits the problematic nature of tracing the history of the pentatonic scale, that to engage in such an enterprise is "to venture upon controversial ground." (xxxi). His observation though, that the 'two gap' scale is so prevalent in Appalachian folk songs, and that there appears to be a hesitation regarding the occasional incorporation of other diatonic pitches is certainly grounds for further investigation. He goes on to explain a hypothetical evolutionary trajectory of the pentatonic mode toward the free use of the diatonic modes. However, I find his use of a primitive-to-advanced developmental model unsatisfactory in explaining the relationship between gap-scales and step-scales. There is a plurality in surviving modes as well as a gradation to the relative weakness (or absence) of pitches. However, to say that one 'evolved' over a long period of time would imply a sort of social evolution that is highly speculative and is most likely not supportable or socially acceptable. Modes have had tens of thousands of years to evolve in every culture, and the tendency of singers of traditional musics to maintain a pentatonic frame indicates some very deep aspect of human psychology and biology. The 'weak' note in the hexatonic and diatonic modes is always one of the notes that is either the upper or lower note in the minor second interval in the minor third gap. As all notes in a pentatonic mode relate to their neighbors as either steps (whole) or gaps, it stands to reason that there is also a qualitative difference in the meaning of the half-step interval in comparison to the whole step.

Bartok and his research partner A. Adnan Saygun offer a modal theory (in Turkish music) remarkably similar to the theory of Cecil Sharp. And such similar discoveries among such diverse material suggests validity to the intuitions of both ethnomusicologists. Both Sharp's findings in Appalachian music and Bartok's findings in Turkish folk music reveal a pentatonic skeleton beneath the apparent diatonic modes, and both musics existed for centuries in profound isolation (Bartok believes he can date the melodies in the Turkish repertoire to historical eras of cultural transmission between Turky and Hungary through the existance of songs in both cultures). Regarding a structural feature common in Class 1 of his collected melodies, Bartok writes:

"The main caesura (final tone of the second section) is b3 in 4 [instances], 4 in 3, 5 in 7 cases, and 8 in a single case. The secondary caesura (final tone of the 1st and 3rd sections) are 5in 8, 4 in 2 cases, and b6, 7, b10 in a single case. -The position of the section's final tones on the degrees b3, 4, 5, 7 and 8, (with the only exception of b6 in No. 2) i.e. exclusively on the degrees of the pentatonic scale gives a sufficient evidence for the latent pentatonic structure existing in these melodies." (V-VI).

Saygun develops this idea, ascerting that "the pentatonic structure forms the basis of the great majority of Turkish folk music and that the descending scale 'g-f-d-c-Bb-g' forms its skeleton." (224). He goes on to build a decending pentatonic scale from trichords, that is, the intervals of a whole step and a minor third. The other pitches, that is the 2nd and the 6th, are secondary, because of their weak and axillary function in melodies as well as their instability. By filling in the minor third gaps with natural or lowered 6ths and 3rds, several different modes can be constructed, roughly equivalent (that is, with near approximation to the tempered scale) to the ecclesiastic modes, namely Aolean, Dorian, and Phrygian. (225). Saygun goes on to explain the tuning practice in Turkish modal music, opting to define each interval on its on terms in ratios, rather than contrasting them against the even tempered scale in cents. He also notes significant flexibility in tuning of the unstable degrees (2nd and 6th), describing the attractive force of the tonic in pulling down the pitch of the second degree in cadential contexts.

RHYTHM AND MODE

It may seem that such a lengthly account of modal structures is out of place in a discussion that is ostensibly about rhythm and musicality in time. However, it is precicely in its application in modal music that rhythm assumes its function. While there is some music that consists completely of rhythm (and even in percussion rhythm-only music, there is considerable dependance on color and sonority), percussion instruments in most world musics are relagated to reinforcing meter and rhythmic mode. They do make the periodical nature of rhythm in music quite apparent, but rhythm as applied to melodic mode goes beyond meter and repetitive rhythmic mode and functions in ways far beyond reinforcing periodicity, dividing time or even marking steps in a dance setting.

Bartok finds a pentatonic structure revealed in final notes of phrases - these are the notes that the singer gravitates toward, which include the tonic and other "strong" pitches. Sharp finds a pentatonic structure both in an existing scale and a hesitancy in the use of weak notes, which I take to be structural weakness as well as rhythmic and dynamic (accent). In exloring the interplay of text, accent, rhythm (durational values and gestures), and mode we find that the underlying pentatonic structure biases certain pitches (and therefore intervals) toward expressive capacity which is reinforced by the long and short durations in rhythm, thus giving meaning (value) to the activity of the rhythm (were it to be extracted as such). Acting as an initiating (but by no means final) limit to what musical gestures are exectured by the interplay between pitch in mode and duration are text, dance and meter. If, as proposed by Daniel Levitan, music evolutionarily preceeded language and made our capacity for language even possible, then speech may itself be inherently musical, as Dalcroze believes movement also is. In elevating language to the art of song, the musicality of speech is magnified, evolved, and merged with body movement sensibility in ways that both reflect its origin and can pull away from it, exploring the realm of the absolute and the beautiful.

Standing where I am now, at the edge of the Pacific Rim at the end of the first decade of the twentieth century, nearly a hundred have passed since Sharp and Bartok made their invaluable surveys of music in isolated communities. In that time, imperial Europe reached the apex of its influence, followed by two apocolyptic wars, the deconstruction of the European powers, the emergence of the United States and the Soviet Union as world superpowers and the decolonization of Africa, South America and Asia. It is quite difficult to put ourselves in the mindset of these scholars and to understand music as they did emerging from the not yet fully deconstructed world of highly Westernized common practice tonality.

Sharp in particular, while highly concious of the value of folk musicality and posessing nearly faultless respect and appreciation for his subjects, seems oblivious in his distinction of folk musicians from "art-musicians" of the critical role modality and non-canonical sources would play in undermining the previous three centuries of tonal domination in music in the West. And yet, while a veritable tidal wave of cultural revolution was about to crush, reorganize and redefine music in Europe and America, Sharp provides us with this highly nuanced, culturally sensitive document. What Sharp discovered in modality actually has more significant implications and importance than he may have realized.

Precisely where he (in my opinion) errs in assuming that the emergence of full, hesitation-free mode is the evolution of art musicians (and the subtext of art-music being somehow superior to or different from folk music), he unknowingly reveals the strength and significance of his work. While the absence (in gap modes) or severe hesitation caught his attention and he was able to follow such hesitation to a degree, thus revealing gradation in the treatment of weak notes, Sharp is not wholly confident in his apparatus for defining this weakness in a more nuanced setting, conceding that in the "art-music" seven note modal music, such pentatonic structure is no longer applicable. However, there are two significant ways in which the "weak note" theory is applicable and enlightening in even the most egalitarian use of seven notes.

First, even as there is free use of the actual pitches in a seven note mode, the half-step (or "tight," to avoid borrowing too directly from the equal-tempered terminology) interval still bears the mark of a certain sensitivity, and it is treated differently, with a higher degree of affinity toward its neighbors, from other intervals. Second, if there are indeed multiple internal architectures to a given ecclesiastical mode, then that skeletal pentatonic mode should be able to modulate to other pentatonic modes without detection, given the unifying pitch material. Simliar to how major and minor scales behave differently against different harmonies, full modes would behave differently with different skeletons. Borrowing for a moment Sharp's conjecture that the full modes are an "evolution" of pentatonically based modes, it is reasonable to figure that modes in which weakness is not apparent (and analysis by modal-modulation is fruitful) are indeed more complex, and therefore developed beyond simpler modal arraingments is apparent. It is unlikely though, given the continued persistance of simpler modes and the existance of similar plurality in degree of complexity found in diverse isolated cultures, that this more complex arrangement would reflect long term cultural evolution. It may, however, represent difference in preference among contributing individuals, micro-evolutions at certain transitional points in a specific culture's early development or a preference among members of a group for varying levels of complexity in a repertoire.