A Philosophy of Song and Singing

An Introduction

Jeanette Bicknell

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781138790674
• eBook ISBN: 9781317653127
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

In Philosophy of Song and Singing: An Introduction, Jeanette Bicknell explores key aesthetic, ethical, and other philosophical questions that have not yet been thoroughly researched by philosophers, musicologists, or scientists. Issues addressed include:

• The relationship between the meaning of a song's words and its music
• The performer's role and the ensuing gender complications, social ontology, and personal identity
• The performer's ethical obligations to audiences, composers, lyricists, and those for whom the material holds particular significance
• The metaphysical status of isolated solo performances compared to the continuous singing of opera or the interrupted singing of stage and screen musicals

Each chapter focuses on one major musical example and includes several shorter discussions of other selections. All have been chosen for their illustrative power and their accessibility for any interested reader and are readily available.

1 Words

Words set songs apart from other musical forms, and the requirement to communicate words sets singers apart from other musicians. So we will start with words.

There was singing before there were musical instruments, before there was writing, and before there was musical notation. There may even have been singing before there was speech. We do not know what the first “songs” sounded like. Did they originate in threats howled in imitation of an animal’s cadence? Or perhaps in a mother’s reassuring syllables, crooned and repeated until a lilting melody took shape? Despite how little we know about the origins of singing, it seems plausible that one early function of singing was oral communication. Song texts continue to be shaped by the burdens and limitations of oral communication, and this makes them different from other kinds of texts that do not assume oral communication.

Songs as Oral Communication

The function of oral communication has shaped song texts in many ways. We can most readily see how if we focus on traditional songs (including children’s songs, lullabies, spirituals, ballads, work songs and blues songs). The oldest of these songs pre-date the development of mass media publication and recording. They were distributed in pre-literate cultures, by being taught by one singer to another and by one generation of singers to the next. Although the marks of oral communication can be seen most obviously in traditional songs, the traces of oral communication remain evident in songs composed since the advent of mass communication, recording technology, and near-universal literacy.

Perhaps the most obvious legacy of song’s function as oral communication is in the use of repetition. A glance at a traditional songbook makes it clear that such song texts are often highly repetitive. Single words are repeated and the same line (or very close variations) are repeated. The same chorus is typically sung after every verse, and the verses and choruses themselves may be highly repetitive. A traditional song’s verses and chorus may consist of the same line (or very close variations) repeated a number of times.

A few examples: in the traditional Scottish folk song “My Bonnie Lies over the Ocean” each verse consists of one line (or a close variation) repeated three times:

My bonnie lies over the ocean

My bonnie lies over the sea

My bonnie lives over the ocean

Oh bring back my bonnie to me

In the four lines of the chorus the phrase “Bring back” is repeated six times:

Bring back, bring back, bring back my bonnie to me, to me

Bring back, bring back, oh bring back my bonnie to me

The American spiritual “He’s Got the Whole World in His Hands” repeats the words of the title four times in each chorus and again as the last line of each verse. Each verse itself consists of a line repeated three times, followed by “He’s got the whole world in His hands.”

In the children’s song “She’ll be Coming Round the Mountain” each verse is four lines long, a single line is repeated for three of the four, and the one contrasting line is simply a shorter variation of the repeated line:

She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes

She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes

She’ll be coming round the mountain, she’ll be coming round the mountain

She’ll be coming round the mountain when she comes

To make the song even more repetitive every line ends with the words “when she comes.”

Repetition is not limited to children’s songs or folk songs. Consider Handel’s “Hallelujah Chorus” from his oratorio Messiah:

And He shall reign forever and ever,

King of kings! and Lord of lords!

And He shall reign forever and ever,

King of kings! and Lord of lords!

Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah! Hallelujah!

Next, song texts are redundant. This means that a song’s lyrics will convey the same information a number of times in a number of different ways. “My bonnie lies over the ocean” and “My bonnie lies over the sea” convey essentially the same information. In the gospel song “Down by the Riverside,” the lines of the chorus (“Ain’t gonna study war no more”) are reinforced by other lines with similar declarations of personal pacifism: “I’m gonna lay down my sword and shield,” “Gonna stick my sword in the golden sand,” and “Gonna walk with the Prince of Peace.” Similarly, if we already know that He’s got “the whole world” in his hands then any further elaboration (“the wind and the rain,” “you and me”) is redundant.

Traditional songs often exist in numerous versions. The song I learned as “Go Tell Aunt Rhody” is known elsewhere as “Go Tell Aunt Nancy” and “Go Tell Aunt Tempie.” Cecil Sharp’s Collection of English Folk Songs records eight different versions of a song called “The Foggy Dew” (not to be confused with several traditional Irish ballads with the same title). And dozens of versions of the traditional English song “Scarborough Fair” existed by the end of the eighteenth century.¹ Even when there is a widely accepted “standard” version of a traditional song, it may be altered in performance. Verses may be dropped or sung out of order, and lyrics may be changed to accommodate a change of narrator from male to female or vice versa.

How greatly a song’s lyrics may be changed in performance is often a cultural, music-cultural, or stylistic matter. Not all genres allow for as much variation as do traditional songs. Not a word of Schumann’s Dichterliebe or a Mozart duet may be changed at the singer’s whim. Generally speaking, the more a song is considered a work of “classical” or “art” music, the more rigid is its text. The great American songwriter and composer Cole Porter was said to become upset if singers embellished or altered his lyrics. (There is a story that he refused to shake Frank Sinatra’s hand when the latter added the line “You give me a boot” to Porter’s song “I Get a Kick out of You”). Yet Porter was compelled to change a line in the same song when the stage musical for which it was written was made into a film in 1936. “Some get a kick from cocaine” became “Some like the perfume in Spain” to comply with Hollywood’s 1930 Production Code.

“I Get a Kick out of You” is only one example of how social factors and changing cultural norms and attitudes influence how song texts are conveyed in performance. Another example is found in the Rolling Stones’ classic “Brown Sugar.” One of the most elusive and ambiguous texts in rock music, the song is often interpreted as celebrating black women and has also been criticized for what are taken to be insensitive references to slavery. In the original, 1971 recording, Mick Jagger sings the last line of the first verse as “Hear him whip the women just around midnight.” Today casual remarks about the brutality of slavery are not heard in the same way and society is less accepting of violence against women. So that is presumably why when the Stones have performed the song more recently (as seen in many live versions on the internet) Jagger omits the reference to whipping and sings instead “You should have heard me just around midnight.”

Trivially, traditional songs were cognitively and musically accessible to the people who composed and sang them. This accessibility goes hand-inhand with a reliance on familiar forms, which is shared by more recent songs as well. The distinction between traditional songs and art songs, composed and performed by musical elites or professionals, emerges only with the development of musical notation. One reason for repetition and the use of familiar forms is that it makes songs easier to remember. Along with this reliance on widely known musical forms, traditional songs take as their subjects topics that would have been of interest to most or all of the community, or their singing performs functions that would have been important to many. The subjects of traditional songs include the vagaries of love, personal salvation, the hardship of life, and important historical or cultural events. Some of the functions performed or assisted by singing traditional songs, whether alone or in groups, include calming or entertaining children, facilitating the rhythms of shared work, marking important occasions, and aiding in the retention of important information.

What of the merit or value (whether literary, philosophical, or aesthetic) of song texts? Many if not most traditional and popular songs do not fare well if judged by literary standards, although there are exceptions. Traditional and popular songs rarely ask either listeners or singers to depart from their intellectual or musical comfort zones. Guitarist, songwriter, and Rolling Stones co-founder Keith Richards put this well when he was asked about the meaning of his song “Wild Horses”: “Once you’ve got the vision in your mind of wild horses, I mean, what’s the next phrase you’re going to use? It’s got to be ‘couldn’t drag me away.’”²

In Britain, when folk song collecting began in earnest in the late nineteenth century, sneers at the “quality” of song texts were combined with admiration for traditional tunes.³ Indeed, the primary focus of many of these and other folk song collectors in different areas was music, not words. A tendency to denigrate song texts – especially those of traditional or popular songs – often combined with a patronizing attitude to those who sang them, is found frequently in music and cultural criticism. Then, as now, simply quoting the text of a song may be presented as sufficient for anyone to recognize its banality. Discomfort with the “coarseness” or vulgarity of traditional songs also hampered their collection. Editors of folk song collections expurgated without qualms. “The coarseness of the original words obliged me to re-write the song,” one editor tells us. The charge of vulgarity is, of course, still made of popular song texts today.

A condescending attitude to the music and songs that one takes to be alien is, I feel, more complex than may be generally realized. A patronizing stance is likely to be bound up with issues of social privilege, norms, and fear of cultural and societal change more generally. And traditional and popular song texts can become the focal point for a wide variety of dissatisfactions and forms of nostalgia.

Of course there are counter-examples to the general point that the song texts tend to be repetitive, redundant, to rely on well-known forms, and to reflect familiar concerns. Many great poems have been set to music, and the best work of some songwriters can be compared without embarrassment to the work of poets who are their contemporaries. But while it is important to remember such exceptions and to be mindful of them in thinking about songs and singing more generally, these exceptions do not invalidate the general claims. I do not think that a “duel” between examples of banal and exceptional song texts will get us very far. The relatively low literary, aesthetic, and philosophical merit of many song texts simply underscores the facts that songs are music and texts are not. Hence evaluating the words of a song without reference to the music is to evaluate only part of a whole. It would be like judging a full-color painting on the basis of a black-and-white reproduction, or evaluating a film without reference to its soundtrack. While some limited judgments can be made in these kinds of cases, there is no way we could evaluate the whole work with any confidence.

Some Ontological Issues

Ontology is the branch of philosophy that examines the nature of existence and being. There are two main types of ontological questions we can ask about songs. First, what are a particular song’s identity conditions. That is, what kind of changes can we make to a song and still maintain that it is the “same” song that we started with? Second, what manner of existence do songs have? Are they mental objects like ideas? Do they exist apart from their expression in performances and musical scores? Now we can ask ontological questions about anything in the world: the coffee cup on my desk, the Eiffel tower, the text of War and Peace, Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony, Leonardo da Vinci’s painting the Mona Lisa, the Rolling Stones’ 1971 recording of “Brown Sugar” and so on.

Some of the objects on this list are generally considered to be artworks, and this status may or may not influence our thinking about their ontology. The ontology of art is a lively branch of philosophy with a variety of well-argued positions on offer. As with any philosophical question, before exploring ontological issues it is a good idea to first reflect upon our methodology and aspirations. What are we doing when we ask about the ontology of artworks and why are we doing it? What would a successful or plausible answer to an ontological question look like? So a few words about that before we go much further. Fortunately, there has been a good deal of reflection on these matters as well.

Amie Thomasson has written forcefully about the desiderata for an ontology of art. According to her view, answers to ontological questions about art are to be found in our practices or, more concretely, in the practices of those whose words and actions ground the terms.⁴ Hence the ontological facts about artworks are not mind-independent. Instead they are determined by the grounders of art-terms. We learn about the ontology of the work of art through analysis of the concepts of those people who ground and reground the terms. So if we want to know about the ontology of songs we should pay attention to how singers, composers, songwriters, music producers, etc. use words like “song,” “accompaniment,” “cover version,” and so on. Competent grounders cannot (as a whole) be massively ignorant of or in error about the ontological nature of the art kind they refer to, since their concepts are determinative of this. Philosophers can make slight adjustments in these conceptions – remove any seeming inconsistencies, make them more explicit, put them in a context – but that is all. Hence revisionary views about the ontology of art, if not false, are most charitably taken as proposals for how we might reform our existing practices.

A very different view of the ontology of art can be found in the work of Nelson Goodman.⁵ Goodman is notorious in the philosophy of music for his counter-intuitive views about the identity conditions of musical works in performance. Goodman focused on notated works. Musical notation has two important qualities. First, it is finitely differentiated with respect to syntax. The shape and position of a note on the staff tells us its pitch and relative duration. In a neatly written score, we do not confuse one note for another, the way we might confuse a hand-written numeral “1” with a numeral “7.” Second, musical notation is also finitely differentiated semantically. That is, a trained listener will be able to determine the symbol for a given musical tone and relative duration.

Goodman thought that these two qualities of musical notation held some serious implications for the identity conditions of musical works in performance. If a performance of a musical work departed in the smallest way from any of the notated features of its score, then that event, whatever its musical value and interest, did not count as a performance of that particular work. If one of the performers played a B flat when she should have played B natural, then the ensemble has not performed the work they intended to perform.

Critics were quick to point out that scores do not function in music in the way that Goodman seems to assume they do. Others rejected Goodman’s position on the grounds that its implications were deeply implausible, not to say absurd. No one, listeners and musicians alike, accepts that one incorrect note is enough to disqualify a performance! Goodman had already anticipated some of these criticisms in Languages of Art:

The practicing musician or composer usually bristles at the idea that a performance with one wrong note is not a performance of the given work at all; and ordinary usage surely sanctions overlooking a few wrong notes. But this is one of th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• 1. Words
• 2. Music and Words
• 3. Giving Voice (What Do Singers Do?)
• 4. Singers and Audiences
• 5. Three Ways to Think about Authenticity in Performance
• 6. Authenticity, Value, and Technology
• 7. Performance: Ethical Considerations
• 8. Song and Drama
• 9. Meaning: Songs in Performance
• 10. Why Sing?
• Index