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]
Sunday, April 26, 2009
Wednesday, April 22, 2009
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:
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)
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:
- Long-short (trochee)
- Short-long (iamb)
- Long-short-short (dactyl)
- Short-short-long (anapest)
- Long-long (spondee)
- Short-short (pyrrhic)
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)
Thursday, April 16, 2009
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
Tonality
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.
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
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.
I. Msr. Jacques, Brain Scans and Me (and You)
This is the first chapter of my dissertation, dealing with the work of Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, other pedagogues and more recent developments in our understanding of human cognition and music/time experience.
The importance of Emile Jacques-Dalcroze in understanding rhythm and musicality is threefold. First and most personally, his method figured prominently in my own formative music education while at Carnegie Mellon University. Second, his legacy has directly affected the course of music education in Europe and America throughout the 20th century, with many institutions offering courses in Dalcroze-Eurhythmics by certified instructors. Third, his visionary intuitive approach to connecting music with physical movement was conceived precisely during the major upheaval of "Western" musical assumptions at the dawn of the 20th century and provided a framework for education of the musical human body and mind that would persist throughout the tumultuous century and prove remarkably consistant with empiracally verified, biologically sound discoveries by present day scientists.
Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, born in 1865, was a Swiss composer and pedagogue, with a background in mime performance as well. As an educator early in his career, he took note of the movements of his more sucessful students and derived the basis of his theory that music must be learned experientially, and that the locomotor activities of the human body are inseparable from the natural and unburdened expression of musical gesture. Founding a school in Hellerau in 1910, Dalcroze had already publicly articulated his method of music education, including training in Solfege (which for Dalcroze uses a somewhat different approach to the already institutionalized French system), Eurhyhtmics and Imrovisation. The primary text written by Emile Jacques-Dalcroze consists of a series of articles composed between the years of 1898 and 1919, published in a single volume entitled "Rhythm, Music and Education." Most refered to among present day Eurhythmics teachers is the 6th chapter, "Rhythmic Movement, Solfege, and Improvisation" in which he gives the most specific guidlines for exercises and curriculum. In general, certified teachers cite the experiential neccessity of the program as reaason for the lack of formal standardized curriculum or "lesson plans" as such standardization would allow uninitiated to believe the program was more mechanical than it is. One rather useful compilation of Dalcroze's ideas is presented in Stephen Moore's doctoral dissertation in which he expounds on the somewhat unstructured documents by the founder and explains in detail how the method works, drawing from nearly a century of practical application of the method by generations of instructors. Moore holds a Liscence certificate from the American Dalcroze association and is himself a seasoned teacher. Several other teachers both in Europe and America have written various texts expounding on the ideas of Dalcroze. There is no "Bible" of Dalcroze method, however, and likely will not be. There is also journal regularly published though, and the certification process for teachers is relatively rigorous.
Although the most perscriptive explaination of Eurhythmics pedagogy is given in "Rhythm, Movement and Education," Dalcroze reveals some of his most fundamental assertions about the nature of rhythm, movement and the human faculty for music in the chapter entitled "The Initiation into Rhythm." Sumarizing his own observations, he produces the following list of conclusions, which I quote from the article:
1. Rhythm is movement.
2. Rhythm is essentially physical.
3. Every movement involves time and space.
4. Musical consciousness is the result of physical experience.
5. The perfecting of physical resources results in clarity of perception.
6. The perfecting of movements in time assures consciousness of musical rhythm.
7. The perfecting of movements in space assures consciousness of plastic rhythm.
8. The perfecting of movements in time and space can only be accomplished by exercises in rhythmic movement. (Dalcroze, 83-84)
From this summary Dalcroze reveals both his intuitive sense of the neurological reality of the human brain that links music with movement as well as the foundation of his principles of education. We can also see from these observations how rhythm figures into a somewhat circular process of learning musicality, that by means of the synonymity of physical movement with rhythm, outwardly practiced movement can be used to enhance both perception and production of music.
As i mentioned before, the timing of Jacques-Dalcroze's study of the fundamentals of musicality and subsequent formation of a pedagogical method could hardly have been more timely. Not only was the turning of the 20th century an important time of transition for classical music and a period of great and far-reaching technological developments, it was also a time of great activity in the early field of Psychology, Sigmund Freud having published his Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, innitiating more than a century of continuity in the discipline. Charles Darwin was dead only a few years, having published his Origin of Species in 1859 and The Expressions of Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872. These works, concurrent with European music's act of undoing itself and Dalcroze's remarkable observations are cornerstones in the scientific inquiry into the nature of mankind. For the next century, the disciplines of psychology, anatomy, philosophy and the arts would constantly rub up against each other, feeding one another with insights gained both intuitively and empirically.
The human mind has long been a subject of great interest to all the above-mentioned disciplines, largely unknowable in its physical reality before the advent of brain imaging, modern surgical procedures and other means of investigating the biology and functions of the human brain have allowed more concrete insight into the reality of the mind and brain. The fairly new field of cognitive neuroscience has emerged in recent years to put to rest some long-nagging questions about the mind in philosophy and psychology, as well as to confirm the domain of some myseries which are likely to remain elusive for some time yet. A recent book by Daniel Levitan, "This is your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession" is a very popular and remarkable explanation of the latest breakthroughs in cognitive neuroscience particularly related to music. Levitan himself is uniquely poised as both a knowledgeable musician and researcher in the cutting-edge field.
Levitan builds a case for status of music as a fundamentally human activity. Music may be an important factor in sexual selection, and may contribute to social bonding necessary for the survival of the species. Regarding the relationship of music to language, he proposes that "music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans." (254). Indeed the case for a neurological connection between language and music is quite strong, as he indicates that music "evokes some of the same neural regions that language does, but far more than language, music taps into primitive brain structures involved with motivation, reward and emotion." It is this simultaneous use of both the primitive, reptilian brain (the cerebellum is considered the oldest part of the brain, evolutionarily) and the cerebral cortex in coordinated effort that allows us to experience music as we do. (187). The coming together of rhythm and melody "bridges our cerebellum...and our cerebral cortex..." (257).
While I find Levitan's fieldwork immensely helpful in explaining much of the biological nature of music cognition and his arguments for the evolutionary adaptation to music quite compelling, I feel his conclusions in the final chapter to be a bit far reaching and problematic, mainly for their failure to present a more complex, nuanced view of the sociological context of music. Having presented highly informative and convincing evidence of how music works in our brains, he proceeds to attempt an explaination of why the works of contemporary "classical" composers are "rarely performed by our symphony orchestras" and that "when Copeandand Bernstein were composing, orchestrasplayed their works and the public enjoyed them." (257). Music, in this view, is "listened to by almost no one," and is "a purely intellectual exercise." While contemporary music certainly does struggle for recognition and patronage and composers' tendencey to write music rather out of touch with more visceral, cerebellular sensibility is undoubtedly a factor, there are two significant features of the contemporary music paradigm being left out. For one, the choices made by composers throughout the twentieth century reflected both reaction against existing conformities and motivation to explore new procedures, sounds and structures. Second, the lack of audience enthusiasm and patronage has multiple contributing factors, including the overall evolution of patronage models, the heterostylistic meihem of twentieth century "isms" (which, no doubt, would contribute to confusion and apathy among a mainstream audience) and a simplistic view of 18th and 19th century Europe (where many modern concert-goers may be surprised to discover that the seemingly eternal institution of the orchestra was in fact not a sustainable enterprise for long stretches of time). Levitan's work, though, does have significant merit in bringing to light this formidable body of contemporary empiracle research on the human brain for so many musicians. My critique of his far reaching conclusions, therefore, represents not a diminution of the value of the work, but rather a point of jumping off into the realm of sociology, politics and style, where neurologically informed discussion is much needed.
This new empirical support for the relationship between the movement of the body and the experience of music offers a helpful boost of confidence for proponents of movement in education. What Emile Jacques-Dalcroze intuitively knew at the dawn of the twentieth century is largely confirmed to be true at the dawn of the twenty-first. While Dalcroze's own texts are fairly ancient (written before 1920) his legacy has lived on with continuity throughout the entire twentieth century and to the present. More recent texts have been written by contemporary teachers, including Moore, Mead, and Bachman. These later texts serve to document and disseminate later evolutions of the Dalcroze method in practice, affirming the fruits of the system in usage and exploring new possibilities in an ever-changing music world. Modern teachers, particularly in America, such as Herbe Henke, the late Marta Sanchez and Anabelle Joseph have successfully incorporated such various musical styles as the music of Piazolla, Messian and Bartok. Exercises incorporate these styles both to enhance performance of the often problematic repertoire and to teach new principles in music using examples that stretch the imagination of the more conservatively trained classical musician.
Alexandria Pierce, while not herself a member of the Dalcroze camp, recently published a significant work describing in rare detail the use of movement in music education. Drawing from decades of personal experience, her Deepening Musical Performance through Movement: The Theory and Pracice of Embodied Interpretation maps out a step by step process for engagine the body at various structural levels, refining movement and balance and touching subjects such as shaping phrase, reverberation, juncture, character, and tone. While lying outside the largely melodic, modal focus of this present work, Pierce brings us through a rigourous description of the use of Schenkerian anaylsis (which is based heavily on harmonic progression) in movement, exlporing the differentiation (and assimilation) of structural levels that ring of Cooper and Meyer's theory of archtatechtonic levels. Pierce's insights into the usefullness of movement in teaching musicality often stems from deficiencies and problems exhibited by her students (not unlike Dalcroze's account of the state of the concervatory in the late 19th century). The book is rich with anecdotes where such and such a student's problem was successfully treated with an exploration of movement in exercises devised by the teacher. Such anecdotal evidence abounds in documents of the Dalcroze school, although large scale experimental data has been harder coming. Proponents of the Dalcroze method maintain that the personal experiential nature of Dalcroze education rely on the individual wisdom and experience of the teacher, and widespread mechanical application of Dalcroze principles is unlikely to yield as fruitful results.
The importance of Emile Jacques-Dalcroze in understanding rhythm and musicality is threefold. First and most personally, his method figured prominently in my own formative music education while at Carnegie Mellon University. Second, his legacy has directly affected the course of music education in Europe and America throughout the 20th century, with many institutions offering courses in Dalcroze-Eurhythmics by certified instructors. Third, his visionary intuitive approach to connecting music with physical movement was conceived precisely during the major upheaval of "Western" musical assumptions at the dawn of the 20th century and provided a framework for education of the musical human body and mind that would persist throughout the tumultuous century and prove remarkably consistant with empiracally verified, biologically sound discoveries by present day scientists.
Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, born in 1865, was a Swiss composer and pedagogue, with a background in mime performance as well. As an educator early in his career, he took note of the movements of his more sucessful students and derived the basis of his theory that music must be learned experientially, and that the locomotor activities of the human body are inseparable from the natural and unburdened expression of musical gesture. Founding a school in Hellerau in 1910, Dalcroze had already publicly articulated his method of music education, including training in Solfege (which for Dalcroze uses a somewhat different approach to the already institutionalized French system), Eurhyhtmics and Imrovisation. The primary text written by Emile Jacques-Dalcroze consists of a series of articles composed between the years of 1898 and 1919, published in a single volume entitled "Rhythm, Music and Education." Most refered to among present day Eurhythmics teachers is the 6th chapter, "Rhythmic Movement, Solfege, and Improvisation" in which he gives the most specific guidlines for exercises and curriculum. In general, certified teachers cite the experiential neccessity of the program as reaason for the lack of formal standardized curriculum or "lesson plans" as such standardization would allow uninitiated to believe the program was more mechanical than it is. One rather useful compilation of Dalcroze's ideas is presented in Stephen Moore's doctoral dissertation in which he expounds on the somewhat unstructured documents by the founder and explains in detail how the method works, drawing from nearly a century of practical application of the method by generations of instructors. Moore holds a Liscence certificate from the American Dalcroze association and is himself a seasoned teacher. Several other teachers both in Europe and America have written various texts expounding on the ideas of Dalcroze. There is no "Bible" of Dalcroze method, however, and likely will not be. There is also journal regularly published though, and the certification process for teachers is relatively rigorous.
Although the most perscriptive explaination of Eurhythmics pedagogy is given in "Rhythm, Movement and Education," Dalcroze reveals some of his most fundamental assertions about the nature of rhythm, movement and the human faculty for music in the chapter entitled "The Initiation into Rhythm." Sumarizing his own observations, he produces the following list of conclusions, which I quote from the article:
1. Rhythm is movement.
2. Rhythm is essentially physical.
3. Every movement involves time and space.
4. Musical consciousness is the result of physical experience.
5. The perfecting of physical resources results in clarity of perception.
6. The perfecting of movements in time assures consciousness of musical rhythm.
7. The perfecting of movements in space assures consciousness of plastic rhythm.
8. The perfecting of movements in time and space can only be accomplished by exercises in rhythmic movement. (Dalcroze, 83-84)
From this summary Dalcroze reveals both his intuitive sense of the neurological reality of the human brain that links music with movement as well as the foundation of his principles of education. We can also see from these observations how rhythm figures into a somewhat circular process of learning musicality, that by means of the synonymity of physical movement with rhythm, outwardly practiced movement can be used to enhance both perception and production of music.
As i mentioned before, the timing of Jacques-Dalcroze's study of the fundamentals of musicality and subsequent formation of a pedagogical method could hardly have been more timely. Not only was the turning of the 20th century an important time of transition for classical music and a period of great and far-reaching technological developments, it was also a time of great activity in the early field of Psychology, Sigmund Freud having published his Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, innitiating more than a century of continuity in the discipline. Charles Darwin was dead only a few years, having published his Origin of Species in 1859 and The Expressions of Emotions in Man and Animals in 1872. These works, concurrent with European music's act of undoing itself and Dalcroze's remarkable observations are cornerstones in the scientific inquiry into the nature of mankind. For the next century, the disciplines of psychology, anatomy, philosophy and the arts would constantly rub up against each other, feeding one another with insights gained both intuitively and empirically.
The human mind has long been a subject of great interest to all the above-mentioned disciplines, largely unknowable in its physical reality before the advent of brain imaging, modern surgical procedures and other means of investigating the biology and functions of the human brain have allowed more concrete insight into the reality of the mind and brain. The fairly new field of cognitive neuroscience has emerged in recent years to put to rest some long-nagging questions about the mind in philosophy and psychology, as well as to confirm the domain of some myseries which are likely to remain elusive for some time yet. A recent book by Daniel Levitan, "This is your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession" is a very popular and remarkable explanation of the latest breakthroughs in cognitive neuroscience particularly related to music. Levitan himself is uniquely poised as both a knowledgeable musician and researcher in the cutting-edge field.
Levitan builds a case for status of music as a fundamentally human activity. Music may be an important factor in sexual selection, and may contribute to social bonding necessary for the survival of the species. Regarding the relationship of music to language, he proposes that "music may be the activity that prepared our pre-human ancestors for speech communication and for the very cognitive, representational flexibility necessary to become humans." (254). Indeed the case for a neurological connection between language and music is quite strong, as he indicates that music "evokes some of the same neural regions that language does, but far more than language, music taps into primitive brain structures involved with motivation, reward and emotion." It is this simultaneous use of both the primitive, reptilian brain (the cerebellum is considered the oldest part of the brain, evolutionarily) and the cerebral cortex in coordinated effort that allows us to experience music as we do. (187). The coming together of rhythm and melody "bridges our cerebellum...and our cerebral cortex..." (257).
While I find Levitan's fieldwork immensely helpful in explaining much of the biological nature of music cognition and his arguments for the evolutionary adaptation to music quite compelling, I feel his conclusions in the final chapter to be a bit far reaching and problematic, mainly for their failure to present a more complex, nuanced view of the sociological context of music. Having presented highly informative and convincing evidence of how music works in our brains, he proceeds to attempt an explaination of why the works of contemporary "classical" composers are "rarely performed by our symphony orchestras" and that "when Copeandand Bernstein were composing, orchestrasplayed their works and the public enjoyed them." (257). Music, in this view, is "listened to by almost no one," and is "a purely intellectual exercise." While contemporary music certainly does struggle for recognition and patronage and composers' tendencey to write music rather out of touch with more visceral, cerebellular sensibility is undoubtedly a factor, there are two significant features of the contemporary music paradigm being left out. For one, the choices made by composers throughout the twentieth century reflected both reaction against existing conformities and motivation to explore new procedures, sounds and structures. Second, the lack of audience enthusiasm and patronage has multiple contributing factors, including the overall evolution of patronage models, the heterostylistic meihem of twentieth century "isms" (which, no doubt, would contribute to confusion and apathy among a mainstream audience) and a simplistic view of 18th and 19th century Europe (where many modern concert-goers may be surprised to discover that the seemingly eternal institution of the orchestra was in fact not a sustainable enterprise for long stretches of time). Levitan's work, though, does have significant merit in bringing to light this formidable body of contemporary empiracle research on the human brain for so many musicians. My critique of his far reaching conclusions, therefore, represents not a diminution of the value of the work, but rather a point of jumping off into the realm of sociology, politics and style, where neurologically informed discussion is much needed.
This new empirical support for the relationship between the movement of the body and the experience of music offers a helpful boost of confidence for proponents of movement in education. What Emile Jacques-Dalcroze intuitively knew at the dawn of the twentieth century is largely confirmed to be true at the dawn of the twenty-first. While Dalcroze's own texts are fairly ancient (written before 1920) his legacy has lived on with continuity throughout the entire twentieth century and to the present. More recent texts have been written by contemporary teachers, including Moore, Mead, and Bachman. These later texts serve to document and disseminate later evolutions of the Dalcroze method in practice, affirming the fruits of the system in usage and exploring new possibilities in an ever-changing music world. Modern teachers, particularly in America, such as Herbe Henke, the late Marta Sanchez and Anabelle Joseph have successfully incorporated such various musical styles as the music of Piazolla, Messian and Bartok. Exercises incorporate these styles both to enhance performance of the often problematic repertoire and to teach new principles in music using examples that stretch the imagination of the more conservatively trained classical musician.
Alexandria Pierce, while not herself a member of the Dalcroze camp, recently published a significant work describing in rare detail the use of movement in music education. Drawing from decades of personal experience, her Deepening Musical Performance through Movement: The Theory and Pracice of Embodied Interpretation maps out a step by step process for engagine the body at various structural levels, refining movement and balance and touching subjects such as shaping phrase, reverberation, juncture, character, and tone. While lying outside the largely melodic, modal focus of this present work, Pierce brings us through a rigourous description of the use of Schenkerian anaylsis (which is based heavily on harmonic progression) in movement, exlporing the differentiation (and assimilation) of structural levels that ring of Cooper and Meyer's theory of archtatechtonic levels. Pierce's insights into the usefullness of movement in teaching musicality often stems from deficiencies and problems exhibited by her students (not unlike Dalcroze's account of the state of the concervatory in the late 19th century). The book is rich with anecdotes where such and such a student's problem was successfully treated with an exploration of movement in exercises devised by the teacher. Such anecdotal evidence abounds in documents of the Dalcroze school, although large scale experimental data has been harder coming. Proponents of the Dalcroze method maintain that the personal experiential nature of Dalcroze education rely on the individual wisdom and experience of the teacher, and widespread mechanical application of Dalcroze principles is unlikely to yield as fruitful results.
Wednesday, April 15, 2009
Introduction, revised
The following is the current draft of the introduction to my dissertation, revised 4-15-09. The previously posted version has been retracted.
In 1999 I was twenty years old and a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon University, studying both composition and clarinet performance. I had done quite well in all my aural skills courses up to that point, performing all my pitch and rhythm exercises accurately with high marks. And yet, my third semester Dalcroze-Eurhythmics grade was not what I had hoped it to be. Thinking I ought to have been scored higher given my accuracy at rhythm performance and taking dictation, I asked my teacher if she would explain my grade and where I had fallen short. "You need to learn how to flow," she said. "That's the most important thing." I was not immediately convinced, and persisted through the next year of study wondering why while through all sorts of exercises, tests, discussions and projects, the primary rubric for gauging my accomplishment in this class was something so unscientific and elusive as flow. What was this thing that I wasn't getting, and what business did it have showing up in a graded course? Of course I was barely more than a year into my college study and more likely to find such a nagging issue rather irritating than to accept it, much less understand it. And yet, I can look back to that moment as the beginning of a decade long search for satisfaction in understanding rhythm beyond the obvious durations and patterns which are so often the beginning and the end of theoretical discussions of rhythm. Even exhaustive discussions of micro and macro structural levels of rhythmic activity failed to convince me of what it really is. While I could easily put rhythm and flow into the category of softer science and focus my analytical efforts toward more clearly fruitful ends. Yet it is my lifelong tendency to find this sort of area (the elusive, the contradictory and the irritating) to be the most interesting and enticing. In unlocking rhythm, we unlock the essence of musicality, the tiny germ by which the whole human project of music and dance is born.
While the scope of this paper seems like it would be so broad as to resemble Casaubon's "The Key to All Mythologies" it is in fact a work of an entirely different kind. In this paper, I will pull together perspectives of sources across ten centuries and around the globe who I hold to be my mentors and sources of epiphany. The array of sources, ranging from Medieval Europe to the present Middle East and from late 19th century Switzerland to the laboratories of cutting edge 21st century neuroscientists is to me entirely logical, concise and necessary, and the important connections among these sources follow my own personal adventure in satisfying those questions which pull at the very center of my experience as a musician and human being. It is, therefore, my objective in writing this document to share what I have found about the undocumented and elusive nature of rhythm from a variety of sources, and to explain my reasoning that coordinating such diverse areas of tradition, thought and expertise is critical in understanding at least the domain of rhythm, vitality and musicianship.
There are two principal directions from which I will approach the subject of rhythm and musicality. First, I will approach music as a fundamentally human enterprise: something for which we are, through the design of our brains and bodies gifted with the capacity, propensity and even need. From this direction, I will examine the intuitive remarks of historical pedagogues as well as contemporary studies of the brain and cognition as well as the anecdotal accounts of educators and musicians. One extremely important figure in music education to whom my own education is indebted is Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, the early 20th century Swiss educator who founded the Dalcroze method, which has spread prolifically through Europe, America and East Asia throughout the last century. The primary text written by the master teacher are a series of articles, published in a collection entitled "Rhythm, Music and Education," and his legacy includes several generations of teachers dedicated to teaching musicianship in the forms of solfege, eurhythmics and improvisation with Msr. Dalcroze's guiding principles of learning music experientially through physical movement. Several of his successors have founded institutions around the world and written their own contributions to the textual documentation of this method as it has grown and developed throughout the years. In linking the body's natural sense of space, intensity, time and flow, this method has aided students in externalizing, understanding and internalizing music toward deeper, more effective and more human performances. While this method and others are often taught as a supporting course for children learning music at a young age in a "proper" curriculum, the Dalcroze method is equally useful in educating adults (perhaps even more useful, in my experience), both as advanced music students or as amatuers. The basic principles guiding the coordination of musicular effort, perambulatory exercises and exploration of the body's freedom within the force of gravity with music literature, musical exercises and improvisation (both free and structured) are generally taken intuitively by teachers to naturally "make sense," though a body of imperical data verifying the efficacy of the program is growing. Now more than a century after the founding of the Dalcroze method recent developments in cognitive neuroscience, particularly the discoveries of Daniel J. Levitan and his colleages, suggest that the brain's facilities for music are remarkably linked to its facilities for language and movement. The "brain as limit" has put to rest a number of nagging issues in philosophy as well as provided an understanding of the domain of some of the elusive mysteries of the human experience.
The second direction from which I will approach the subject of rhythm and musicality is through the literature itself, and through current and historical performance practice. While rhythm itself is a huge topic, including such aspects as melodic rhythm, harmonic rhythm, polyphonic counterpoint, time in form and many others, I will focus on monophonic music. The reason for this emphasis is that I want to explore the principles of how rhythm functions as it is applied to melodic modes. I should be clear about my somewhat liberal usage of the term monophony, which in its most pure and literal sense describes a singularly bare linear texture reserved for unharmonized melodies and chant - something existing only at the earliest fringe of the canonical Western tradition. For my usage, monophony is more of a general principle than a definite textural category. This idea of monophonic essence becomes clearer when modality is contrasted directly against tonality. My aim is to examine principles of rhythm in melody, and truly any music with linear integrity can be analyzed to some extent to this end, the significant influence of harmony as a potentially dominating "shaping force" makes some music more or less useful for examining melodic principles. Monophonic music is also a point of intersection between European and Middle Eastern music both historically and in material content. Out of this use of monophonic music arise two important and controversial political issues. First, it involves the ethical issues related to a comparative study of musics of different cultures which share a rich though troubled history. Second, it involves a reorganized look at European musics and cultures, calling into question the canonization of the immense project of tonal music throughout the Common Practice, a process by which I will assert that German-Austrian hegemony in late 19th century European musicology reductively consolidated the tradition of European music that has been handed down to the present generation. To these political issues I will devote a small chapter explaining the importance of such concerns as well as how they affect my discussion of rhythm, which is the principle subject of this paper. In focusing on monophony and melodic aspects of music, I propose to explain the underlying musical sensibilities in performance practice, and the power of rhythm to harness the musical potential of pitch and mode. I will not, therefore, give preference to individual works of particularly genius musical architecture. The greatness of music in this discussion is measured in the freedom of expressivity as experienced by performer and listener-participant. The distinction, then, between performer, composer, improviser and passive (or active) participant are admittedly blurred. This slippery nature of musical material is not actually problematic, and after relaxing the boundaries of Common Practice self-identity such blurry distinctions may well be more the norm in human music experience rather than the exception.
Finally I should explain the implications of this present work, and the potential interest and value it would have to those who share in this lifelong journey of curiosity and discovery. As I mentioned earlier, my own motivation for asking these questions about the essence, origin and function of rhythm is personal, spawned in my dissatisfaction with duration-structural analysis as theory to explain such an important, fundamental aspect of music. Now in 2009, we stand a full 88 years since the materialization of Schoenberg's dodecaphonic system and at least a century since various modal systems from the fringes of Europe, octatonic scales and a plethora of novel non-tonal pitch arrangements began to supplant the dominance of common practice tonality. Concurrent with the rise and fall of tonality (not as a force but as a universal paradigm) is the normalization and rethinking of rhythm. The past century saw no less than four generations of composers struggling through decades frought with myriad "isms," evidence of a world struggling to reidentify itself in the wake of the undoing of one of the most ambitious intellectual projects in human history. In examining principles of rhythmic (and melodic) principles at the dawn and twilight of such a massive and yet relatively brief period of pan-European collective musical activity I believe a new and fruitful perspective can be reached regarding the often convoluted yet endlessly fascinating hetero-stylistic period of 20th century European-American-World art music as well as an optimistic, healthy and relavent musical future. There is, in my opinion, no heavier burden to dampen the richness of our cultural and human future than fear of irrelavence and lack of conviction in the value of our own enterprises, nor is there any greater source of inspiration and hope than sharing the musical delight of expressing ourselves as musical creatures by design and sharing of ourselves in commonalities and differences through the internal-external-internal trajectory of shared musical material.
CHAPTERS
I. Msr. Jacques, Brain Scans and Me (and You)
II. Thinking Modaly
III. Not Your Grandma's Europe: Linguistic and Musical Geography in the 13th Century
IV. The Arab Connection: Booty from Barbastro, Things the Crusader's Picked Up, and Edward Said
V. Unraveling the self-image of the West and how it's already been done
VI. Implications for the "classical" musician of the 21st century
Conclusion
In 1999 I was twenty years old and a sophomore at Carnegie Mellon University, studying both composition and clarinet performance. I had done quite well in all my aural skills courses up to that point, performing all my pitch and rhythm exercises accurately with high marks. And yet, my third semester Dalcroze-Eurhythmics grade was not what I had hoped it to be. Thinking I ought to have been scored higher given my accuracy at rhythm performance and taking dictation, I asked my teacher if she would explain my grade and where I had fallen short. "You need to learn how to flow," she said. "That's the most important thing." I was not immediately convinced, and persisted through the next year of study wondering why while through all sorts of exercises, tests, discussions and projects, the primary rubric for gauging my accomplishment in this class was something so unscientific and elusive as flow. What was this thing that I wasn't getting, and what business did it have showing up in a graded course? Of course I was barely more than a year into my college study and more likely to find such a nagging issue rather irritating than to accept it, much less understand it. And yet, I can look back to that moment as the beginning of a decade long search for satisfaction in understanding rhythm beyond the obvious durations and patterns which are so often the beginning and the end of theoretical discussions of rhythm. Even exhaustive discussions of micro and macro structural levels of rhythmic activity failed to convince me of what it really is. While I could easily put rhythm and flow into the category of softer science and focus my analytical efforts toward more clearly fruitful ends. Yet it is my lifelong tendency to find this sort of area (the elusive, the contradictory and the irritating) to be the most interesting and enticing. In unlocking rhythm, we unlock the essence of musicality, the tiny germ by which the whole human project of music and dance is born.
While the scope of this paper seems like it would be so broad as to resemble Casaubon's "The Key to All Mythologies" it is in fact a work of an entirely different kind. In this paper, I will pull together perspectives of sources across ten centuries and around the globe who I hold to be my mentors and sources of epiphany. The array of sources, ranging from Medieval Europe to the present Middle East and from late 19th century Switzerland to the laboratories of cutting edge 21st century neuroscientists is to me entirely logical, concise and necessary, and the important connections among these sources follow my own personal adventure in satisfying those questions which pull at the very center of my experience as a musician and human being. It is, therefore, my objective in writing this document to share what I have found about the undocumented and elusive nature of rhythm from a variety of sources, and to explain my reasoning that coordinating such diverse areas of tradition, thought and expertise is critical in understanding at least the domain of rhythm, vitality and musicianship.
There are two principal directions from which I will approach the subject of rhythm and musicality. First, I will approach music as a fundamentally human enterprise: something for which we are, through the design of our brains and bodies gifted with the capacity, propensity and even need. From this direction, I will examine the intuitive remarks of historical pedagogues as well as contemporary studies of the brain and cognition as well as the anecdotal accounts of educators and musicians. One extremely important figure in music education to whom my own education is indebted is Emile Jacques-Dalcroze, the early 20th century Swiss educator who founded the Dalcroze method, which has spread prolifically through Europe, America and East Asia throughout the last century. The primary text written by the master teacher are a series of articles, published in a collection entitled "Rhythm, Music and Education," and his legacy includes several generations of teachers dedicated to teaching musicianship in the forms of solfege, eurhythmics and improvisation with Msr. Dalcroze's guiding principles of learning music experientially through physical movement. Several of his successors have founded institutions around the world and written their own contributions to the textual documentation of this method as it has grown and developed throughout the years. In linking the body's natural sense of space, intensity, time and flow, this method has aided students in externalizing, understanding and internalizing music toward deeper, more effective and more human performances. While this method and others are often taught as a supporting course for children learning music at a young age in a "proper" curriculum, the Dalcroze method is equally useful in educating adults (perhaps even more useful, in my experience), both as advanced music students or as amatuers. The basic principles guiding the coordination of musicular effort, perambulatory exercises and exploration of the body's freedom within the force of gravity with music literature, musical exercises and improvisation (both free and structured) are generally taken intuitively by teachers to naturally "make sense," though a body of imperical data verifying the efficacy of the program is growing. Now more than a century after the founding of the Dalcroze method recent developments in cognitive neuroscience, particularly the discoveries of Daniel J. Levitan and his colleages, suggest that the brain's facilities for music are remarkably linked to its facilities for language and movement. The "brain as limit" has put to rest a number of nagging issues in philosophy as well as provided an understanding of the domain of some of the elusive mysteries of the human experience.
The second direction from which I will approach the subject of rhythm and musicality is through the literature itself, and through current and historical performance practice. While rhythm itself is a huge topic, including such aspects as melodic rhythm, harmonic rhythm, polyphonic counterpoint, time in form and many others, I will focus on monophonic music. The reason for this emphasis is that I want to explore the principles of how rhythm functions as it is applied to melodic modes. I should be clear about my somewhat liberal usage of the term monophony, which in its most pure and literal sense describes a singularly bare linear texture reserved for unharmonized melodies and chant - something existing only at the earliest fringe of the canonical Western tradition. For my usage, monophony is more of a general principle than a definite textural category. This idea of monophonic essence becomes clearer when modality is contrasted directly against tonality. My aim is to examine principles of rhythm in melody, and truly any music with linear integrity can be analyzed to some extent to this end, the significant influence of harmony as a potentially dominating "shaping force" makes some music more or less useful for examining melodic principles. Monophonic music is also a point of intersection between European and Middle Eastern music both historically and in material content. Out of this use of monophonic music arise two important and controversial political issues. First, it involves the ethical issues related to a comparative study of musics of different cultures which share a rich though troubled history. Second, it involves a reorganized look at European musics and cultures, calling into question the canonization of the immense project of tonal music throughout the Common Practice, a process by which I will assert that German-Austrian hegemony in late 19th century European musicology reductively consolidated the tradition of European music that has been handed down to the present generation. To these political issues I will devote a small chapter explaining the importance of such concerns as well as how they affect my discussion of rhythm, which is the principle subject of this paper. In focusing on monophony and melodic aspects of music, I propose to explain the underlying musical sensibilities in performance practice, and the power of rhythm to harness the musical potential of pitch and mode. I will not, therefore, give preference to individual works of particularly genius musical architecture. The greatness of music in this discussion is measured in the freedom of expressivity as experienced by performer and listener-participant. The distinction, then, between performer, composer, improviser and passive (or active) participant are admittedly blurred. This slippery nature of musical material is not actually problematic, and after relaxing the boundaries of Common Practice self-identity such blurry distinctions may well be more the norm in human music experience rather than the exception.
Finally I should explain the implications of this present work, and the potential interest and value it would have to those who share in this lifelong journey of curiosity and discovery. As I mentioned earlier, my own motivation for asking these questions about the essence, origin and function of rhythm is personal, spawned in my dissatisfaction with duration-structural analysis as theory to explain such an important, fundamental aspect of music. Now in 2009, we stand a full 88 years since the materialization of Schoenberg's dodecaphonic system and at least a century since various modal systems from the fringes of Europe, octatonic scales and a plethora of novel non-tonal pitch arrangements began to supplant the dominance of common practice tonality. Concurrent with the rise and fall of tonality (not as a force but as a universal paradigm) is the normalization and rethinking of rhythm. The past century saw no less than four generations of composers struggling through decades frought with myriad "isms," evidence of a world struggling to reidentify itself in the wake of the undoing of one of the most ambitious intellectual projects in human history. In examining principles of rhythmic (and melodic) principles at the dawn and twilight of such a massive and yet relatively brief period of pan-European collective musical activity I believe a new and fruitful perspective can be reached regarding the often convoluted yet endlessly fascinating hetero-stylistic period of 20th century European-American-World art music as well as an optimistic, healthy and relavent musical future. There is, in my opinion, no heavier burden to dampen the richness of our cultural and human future than fear of irrelavence and lack of conviction in the value of our own enterprises, nor is there any greater source of inspiration and hope than sharing the musical delight of expressing ourselves as musical creatures by design and sharing of ourselves in commonalities and differences through the internal-external-internal trajectory of shared musical material.
CHAPTERS
I. Msr. Jacques, Brain Scans and Me (and You)
II. Thinking Modaly
III. Not Your Grandma's Europe: Linguistic and Musical Geography in the 13th Century
IV. The Arab Connection: Booty from Barbastro, Things the Crusader's Picked Up, and Edward Said
V. Unraveling the self-image of the West and how it's already been done
VI. Implications for the "classical" musician of the 21st century
Conclusion
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