On Sonic Art

Trevor Wishart, Simon Emmerson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 1996
• eBook ISBN: 9781134373338
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

In this newly revised book On Sonic Art, Trevor Wishart takes a wide-ranging look at the new developments in music-making and musical aesthetics made possible by the advent of the computer and digital information processing. His emphasis is on musical rather than technical matters. Beginning with a critical analysis of the assumptions underlying the Western musical tradition and the traditional acoustic theories of Pythagoras and Helmholtz, he goes on to look in detail at such topics as the musical organization of complex sound-objects, using and manipulating representational sounds and the various dimensions of human and non-human utterance. In so doing, he seeks to learn lessons from areas (poetry and sound-poetry, film, sound effects and animal communication) not traditionally associated with the field of music.

Part 1

The Sonic Continuum

Chapter 2

BEYOND THE PITCH/DURATION PARADIGM

This chapter is an expansion and development of ideas first put forward in my contribution to the book Whose Music? A Sociology of Musical Languages (Shepherd, Virden, Vulliamy and Wishart (1977)). The principal point I am going to develop is that the priorities of notation do not merely reflect musical priorities—they actually create them. It is fundamentally important to grasp this point if we are to understand an approach to music based on our listening experience. In order to develop this particular point, we shall begin with a digression into media sociology. Our aim will be to draw a distinction between what our notation system puts an emphasis upon and what truly contributes to sound experience.

Three fundamental perspectives will be developed in this chapter. The first of these is that notation is lattice-oriented; there are fundamental aspects of sound experience even in the most highly notation-structured music, which are not conventionally notatable and therefore are not in the score. In fact music does not need to be lattice-based at all. Secondly, pitch and duration do not need to be the primary parameters in musical organisation. Thirdly, a perception and conception of music focused through notation can lead to an abstract formalist approach. What I am looking for are experientially verifiable criteria for making music. A preoccupation with conventional notation can lead us into formalism, a situation where there is no longer any experiential verification of our theories about how to compose music.

Writing, speaking

Since very ancient times, human thought and communication has been inextricably bound up with the use of the written word. So much so that it becomes almost impossible for us to disentangle ourselves for a moment from the web of written wisdom and consider the problems of meaning and communication in vitro, so to speak. Ever since the ancient Egyptians developed pictures into a viable form of hieroglyphic notation, our world has been dominated by a class of scribes, capable of mastering and hence capable, or deemed capable, of controlling what was to be written down and stored in the historical record. Although this function was often delimited or occasionally usurped by illiterate or semi-literate political supremos, such tyrants have usually succumbed to the literate scribehood's cultural web as evidenced by the ‘barbarian’ invasions of the Roman and Chinese empires and to some extent by the Moslem conquest of Persia and Byzantium which generated a novel cultural epoch by throwing together the divergent scribehoods of these two long-established cultures under the unifying banner of Islam.

In the long era of scribery, all people regarding themselves as ‘cultured’ or ‘civilised’, as opposed to illiterate peasants or craftsmen, have lived within the confines of an enormous library whose volumes have laid down what was socially acceptable and, in effect, possible to know and to mean. Whilst those lying on the margins of ‘civilisations’ retain some subcultural independence—variously labelled as ‘ignorance’, ‘backwardness’, ‘superstition’, ‘folklore’ or ‘folkculture’—they equally had no access to the pages of history, and hence whatever the significance of their cultural world, it was devalued by default. The vast growth in literacy in the last century, with its numerous undoubted social advantages, has, however, further increased the dominance of our conception and perception of the world through that which can be written down.

So here we are in a library, and I would like to convey to you what I mean. If, for a moment, we could put all these volumes of words on one side, if we could face each other across a table and engage in the immediate dialectic of facial and bodily gestures which accompany face-to-face speech communication, perhaps you could appreciate that what I intend to mean is not necessarily reducible to the apparent meanings of the words I employ during the interchange; perhaps you could reach through my words to my meanings.

Writing, originally a clever mnemonic device for recording the verbal part of important speech communications between real individuals, soon grew to such a degree as to dominate, to become normative upon, what might properly be said. Divorced from the immediate reality of face-to-face communication, it became objectified, generalised, and above all, permitted the new class of scribes (whether priests, bureaucrats or academics) to define and control what might ‘objectively’ be meant. Max Weber's conception of the advance of Western civilisation, spearheaded by a specialist rational bureaucracy, is a natural outgrowth of this simple development. In fact, Weber devoted a small volume to a discussion of the ‘rationalisation’ of musical systems embodied in the Western European tempered scale (Weber 1958).

For Plato, the idea of the object, which took on a new historical permanence in its notation in the written word, came to have more ‘reality’ than the object-as-experienced. The commonplace tables and chairs which we experience in the course of our everyday life were mere pale reflections of the ideal table and chair existing in some Platonic heaven. (This heaven in fact was to be found between the covers of books.) This radically new stance reflects a permanent tendency of scribe-dominated cultures towards the reification of ideas and the undervaluing of immediate non-verbal experience, which has special relevance to the history of music. Even for the average literate individual it might at first sight appear that what we can think is commensurate with what we can say, and hence to appear verbally confused or elliptical is easily interpreted as a failure of clear thought, rather than a difficulty of verbal formulation of a perfectly clear non-verbal idea. For example, the idea of a good ‘break’ in improvised musical performance is clearly understood by any practitioner but has never been adequately reduced to a verbal description.

I am going to propose that words never ‘mean’ anything at all. Only people ‘mean’ and words merely contribute towards signifying peoples’ meanings. For the scribe meaning appears to result as the product of a combinatorial process; broadly speaking, various words with more or less clearly defined reference or function are strung together in a linear combination to form sentences, paragraphs, etc., which have a resultant clearly specified meaning. For the individual speaker, however, meaning is a synthetic activity. She or he means. Not merely the combination of words but a choice from an infinitude of possible inflections, tones of voice and accents for their delivery, together with possibilities of movement, gesture and even song, enter into the synthesis of the speech-act which attempts to convey what he or she means. In this way a speech act may uniquely convey quantities of information about the state of mind of the speaker and his relationship to what is said (for example irony and so on) which would be entirely lost if merely the words used were transcribed, but is certainly not lost on the person spoken to. It is clear that not meaning, but signification, resides in the words and that the mode and context of use of these significations all contribute towards the speaker's meaning. These two quite different conceptions of the meaning of words contribute differently to our experience. The idea of meaning as a synthetic activity is most significant in direct communications with other human beings, which might be mediated through musical instruments or recording. The idea of meaning as a structural property of written words governed by rules of combination is the basis for the operation of our system of law. Law codes are in a sense seen as existing transcendentally and having a meaning independent of the original creators of the legal documents—though of course this does in time lead to difficulties of interpretation.

Now immediately we become aware of a problem, for all that remains of what we or anyone else ever meant, once committed to parchment or print, is these marks on the paper. Here in the library, we see love, tragedy, joy, despair, lying silently on the shelves, the entire history of the word. Occasionally, a gifted scholar does appear to question the very basis of a writing-dominated world-view. Lao Tse, the Chinese philosopher, resorted to extreme verbal ellipsis in a late attempt to notate his philosophical stance. At the other extreme, Marx, whose principal commitment lay outside the scholarly profession, still felt impelled to justify his world-view before the international scribehood and committed to paper the astonishing theory that the world is shaped by human activity, whilst talking, writing and the resulting development of ideas, constitute only one particular type of human activity, and this of secondary importance to materially productive economic activity. What had usually been regarded as history-as-such was, in his view, merely one particular reified result of human activity. The enscribed verbalisations of certain mortals with certain preconceptions, economic interests and systems of relevance.

Unfortunately, Marx's great scholarly erudition won for his radical works a more or less permanent place on the library shelves, but in so doing it delivered his work into the hands of the scribehood, who would promulgate his writings, but not very often their significance. The up-and-coming would-be radical scholar would learn about ‘praxis’ as a concept in ‘Marxist epistemology’, his understanding of alienation or class-consciousness would be understood by its verbal competence.

Music and social control

At the other extreme, we have music! Ever since the world library opened, there have been problems in this department. Somehow it seemed that music could mean something to people, judging by their reactions, but this something rarely seemed reducible to any definite verbal equivalent. Music as an alternative mode of communication, however, has always threatened the hegemony of writing and the resultant dominance of the scribehood's world-view. Therefore, from the earliest times, attempts have been made to lay down what could and could not be accepted as ‘correct’ musical practice. Both Plato and Confucius recognised the threat posed by uncontrolled musical experience to the ‘moral fibre’ of the rationalistic scribe state, and advised the exclusive adoption of forms of music which seemed to them to be orderly in some kind of verbally explicable way. As, for the moment, there was no way of capturing music in the same way as speech—no notation procedure—it seemed safest to adhere absolutely to previous musical practice, while often ensuring that the music itself was subservient to an approved text. The codification and standardisation of church chant by Pope Gregory in post-Roman Europe may be seen as but one example of a tendency which is exemplified by the Chinese emperor's great concern for the ‘correct’ tuning of the imperial pitch-pipes at the beginning of his reign, the execution of performers who made mistakes during ceremonial performances in the Aztec world and in many other cultures, and so on.

With the appearance of musical notation, new factors came into play. However, a rapid glance at the syllabuses of most Western universities (centres of writing dominated culture) will reveal the tremendous emphasis placed upon the study of composers who employed a clearly, rationally codifiable (verbalisable) musical praxis, in particular the work of Palestrina (the champion of the Council of Trent), J. S. Bach and, of course, Schoenberg and his ‘12-tone technique’. Even so, music continued to convey its alternative messages and holy men (like St. Augustin) were obliged to admonish themselves before God for being seduced by the ‘mere sensuous quality of musical sounds’. This feeling that attention to aspects of sound beyond those which are capable of description, and hence prescription, in writing (and later in musical notation), is lascivious or morally harmful is a recurring theme of scribe-dominated societies.

Committed verbalists will not be convinced by anything I have to say about the separation between ‘meaning’ and ‘signification’. For the linguistic philosopher all problems are reducible to problems of signification within language and such a philosopher will merely deny the validity of our problem. However, if you are capable of imagining that talking to your lover is not merely an exchange of syntactically-related arbitrary signs and bodily gestures, but an essentially non-verbal communion between two people, mediated and articulated through word and gesture, but not constituted by them, then you may understand what I have to say.

Firstly, if this communion exists, surely it can be named. This is perfectly true; however, the point remains that its articulation is not the articulation of signs. We must not assume that we can notate its articulation by attaching signs to different parts of it and then articulating the signs. Written language constitutes what I will call a discrete/combinatorial system. Written words are strictly delimited, distinct and repeatable entities which form t...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Introduction to the Series
• Editor's Introduction
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Prelude
• Part 1: The Sonic Continuum
• Part 2: Landscape
• Part 3: Utterance
• Coda
• Bibliography
• Music Examples
• Music References
• Index