10.11-16.2018
Thesis: The trajectory of visual art has been from representational to abstract. Instrumental music is inherently abstract.
From the first cave paintings, visual art has been rooted in reality and most interested in capturing reality. Even after the advent of the Daguerrotype, representational painting still exists. Even if it didn’t, the switch to abstraction would have only been fewer than 200 years ago; if the time between the first cave painting to present day was 24 hours, abstract art would appear after 11:55 pm. Perhaps the first time that an artist acknowledged that visual art is representational and not in fact reality was Magritte’s 1928 “The Treachery of Images” (Ceci n’est pas une pipe)—appearing after 11:58 pm in our day of art.
So what’s the trajectory of instrumental music?
Of course (as always) that depends on our definition of “music”. Let’s take “organized sounds” (attributed to John Cage or Edgard Varese depending on the source) to be not only the broadest definition, but the one most relevant in 2018. Similarly, this answer depends on your definition of “instrumental”. Following the Varese/Cage definition, let’s agree that “an instrument” is something which (a) makes intentional sounds and (b) is not the human voice.
Why the distinction between vocal and instrumental music?
Though they are likely closer to each other than ever—and there exist more than a handful of pieces for “speaking percussionist”—the human voice when used as an instrument is not so different than when it is not used as an instrument i.e. singing and speaking are intrinsically connected. Song is a two-part balance between text, lyrics and pitch, rhythm. Lyrics are poetry set to music and the best songwriters are the ones who are able to most closely recreate some sort of speech-like patterns and rhythms in their songs. Song and vocal music are reliant on text, on lyrics, on the communication of spoken word. Instrumental music is not something tied to anything else, it exists within its own context. If song no longer existed, we could still communicate with spoken word; if instrumental music no longer existed, the entire context in which it exists is gone. This is not to ignore the lockstep progress of vocal and instrumental music as they march through the course of history and the reality that the harmonic language used in instrumental music is the same as the harmonic language in vocal music. It is merely to say that I am interested in discussing the way pitches and rhythms and sounds not based in a spoken language convey information.
Instrumental music is inherently abstract
Pitch and rhythm are based in human experiences; the rhythm and pitch of speech, the rhythms of city life, the pitches of nature. But these are not literal translations, they are not representational. The bird calls of Mahler and Messiaen are not actual bird sounds. The pastoral of Beethoven is not the actual sounds of a placid natural scene. Respighi’s nightingale on the Janiculum hill is a recording—a musical photograph. Record players undoubtedly fit into our wide description of “an instrument” but this raises a new question. If painting:live music::photographs:recordings, then record players are a viable artistic tool, but not the same as live music (which perhaps would be a better description of what I’m interested in here).
I should pause to mention that Jim Culley thinks that using visual art to inform musical progress is problematic and only reinforces the idea that music is always behind visual art, ex. Degas and Monet had to come before Debussy. He argues that music historians are too quick to adopt the language of art historians after the fact to describe music and don’t look for the converse scenario. Surely there is no real connection between using a larger brush & “blurry” images and extended tertian harmonies & planing. **Aside within an aside** The more I think about this, the odder it becomes. Debussy was (arguably) inspired by the gamelan music of the east at the Paris World’s Fair and that informed his harmony/use of the pentatonic scale. Why would these Eastern sounds be likened to a group of French painters even if the composer himself is French? He conceded that there are movements that are at least concurrent in recent times especially when artists from different media interact in their lives, ex. Marcel Duchamp and John Cage working with chance operations as an outgrowth of the dada movement. Luckily for me, this is my blog and I will continue to describe music in the context of visual art at least for the time being.
Back to instruments.
Actually, would it be appropriate to classify Pines of Rome as a mixed media collage? A painting with a photograph in it would be. (I was hoping to link some sounds but let it be known that at 10:05 pm on Tuesday, October 16th, 2018 YouTube is down)
Now, back to instruments.
When Jackson Pollock wanted to paint smooth lines with vast quantities of paint, he changed “instruments”. He didn’t use oil paints and palette knives, he used paint stirrers and epoxy paint. Rather than painstakingly painting the same result with traditional methods, he used new methods informed by the end goal. So let’s do the same. Instead of using traditional instruments to sound like birds, let’s make new instruments which sound actually like birds. Let’s not break down sounds and try to mimic them with the instruments we have, let’s break them down and find things which sound like those sounds. Let’s not develop extended techniques for common instruments and then write music for them, let’s write sounds and then develop instruments which satisfy that demand.
We’re in luck—this has already been done, we just don’t call it music.
I was at a live recording of A Prairie Home Companion several years ago (back when we liked Garrison Keillor) and they had the usual band and voice actors but the character relevant to this discussion is Fred Newman. He had a table of props in front of him which he used to add sound to the dialogue. These sounds were the sounds of reality. To a point. The horns and whistles and prop doors he used (and continues to use) are caricatures of reality. Definitely more realistic than most instruments, but not real. We as listeners of radio broadcasts understand the context and agree that this heightened reality that he portrays is effective over this means of transmission.
But can we do better? Again, this already exists.
Foley artists produce upwards of 90% of all non-dialogue, non-soundtrack sounds in large budget movies. They are responsible for everything from the movement of their clothing to the sounds of bones breaking in fights to tire screeches in a car chase. Some of these sounds are made very similarly in a recording studio to the way they are made in reality… others are not. This past weekend, I was obsessed with this idea. Foley artists are making representational music for movies every day. Of course, the great irony here is that Foley is always recorded and played back to an audience and never performed live. We get a photograph of a painting instead of the painting. We get a recording of the music instead of the performance.
The idea of representational music is so foreign to us, that we would never call Foley music without careful consideration. Is it not organized sound? Is it not made with things which produce intentional sounds? If we have agreed to the premise of this, then it logically follows that Foley is representational music. Is it a cave painting? Is it one-point perspective? Is it a technical drawing? At the moment, I don’t have an answer. And even so, answering that is only a useful intellectual exercise, what matters is that for the past 100 years, this has been happening. As visual art was flourishing into abstraction, music was quietly exploring the most real sounds that could be made live (and then recorded).