Composition and Analysis

Contents

Opening questions

  1. What's the difference between composition and analysis?
    • What's the difference between this class's composition assignments and its analysis assignments? What do they have in common?
    • Is there a difference between analysis of, say, Baroque music and analysis of experimental music?
  2. Does musical material alone guide the listening experience? Can it? Can the listening experience be the musical material? (Give examples.)
    • Does different musical material guide to different degrees? Consider Mozart/Cage/Oliveros.

Introduction

“Music” might also be defined as anything one listens to.

—La Monte Young (Selected Writings, 43)

Musical notation is, understood most generally, any mark of musical experience. From this perspective, staff notation, chord symbols, and computer code (to name just a few specialized forms of writing) lose their distinction as the privileged vehicles for musical communication. The words of everyday language do just fine. And indeed, it is impossible to unweave words from notes and other symbols in the crazy quilt of musical documentation—whether the composer's documents, or the listener's. Although we tend to think that compositions are first and foremost a matter of notes (or, if you are an experimentalist, squiggly lines, etc.), they may involve words as well. (You know this from personal compositional experience, as well as your reading of Pauline Oliveros' "Sonic Meditations.") And although we think of analyses as primarily word-based, they may also involve notes and other symbols, as you may recall from last week's example of hazy rhythmic explanation:

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Source Readings in Music History, ed. Oliver Strunk, Vol. 2, page 109.

Words and symbols mingle promiscuously in both compositions and analyses. But this means that simply judging by the notation system, by the relative proportion of words, notes, or miscellaneous symbols, we can't distinguish one from the other. How do I know that your compositions aren't analyses, and vice versa? Why distinguish between composition and analysis at all?

If the difference between a compositional document and an analytical one is not a matter of material form, it must be a matter of content. Composition and analysis are two distinct but related activities. Although both notate musical experience, they notate different aspects of this experience. Most simply, whereas compositions archive the production of musical material, analysis archives its reception. Your compositions record lists of musical instruments, instructions for musicians, and recordings that demonstrate certain arrangements of actions and sounds. Your analyses, on the other hand, record what you perceive, what you remember, and how you make sense of the music. Thus, while composition and analysis are two sides of the same coin of musical experience, they appear as two distinct sides nonetheless, their common words and symbols notwithstanding.

Our emphasis on composition and analysis reinforces what is probably already familiar from other musical contexts. In general, we consider musical production and perception as separate, but complementary. Composing or playing a song is not the same as listening to it; writing a Bach chorale is not the same as explaining its harmonic progressions. These distinctions between active and passive musical acts strictly reflect a division of labor–and, I should add, a division of space–that separates active composers and musicians from a passive audience and critics. Musical activity happens on stage, and its passive reception takes place in the house. Of course, the same person can take on active and passive musical roles at different moments, or imagine themselves in the others' position. While writing music, composers often put themselves in the role of a passive listener; likewise, while listening to music, the audience often takes on the role of the composer, weighing her musical decisions. The division of musical experience into composition and analysis therefore reflects of a model of a two-sided musical community: a community of musical makers and observers, held together by technique, mutual understanding, and shared expectations. In short, the community of the concert hall.

This binary structure, which splits the labor of musical production and reception, describes the concert, or simulations of the concert (which we might adopt, for example, when listening to a recording of a band or an orchestra). The division of composition from analysis reinforces the spaces and roles of the concert hall by distinguishing the archive of musical actions—representing the composers and musicians—from the archive of perceptions—representing the audience. While the concert is an important and ubiquitous model of musical experience and community, however, it is not the only one. This lecture will present a couple alternatives, and try to understand what affect they have on music notation and documentation. My thesis is that the division between composition and analysis makes sense only in the context of the musical concert, where musical actions and perceptions must be clear and distinct. Other musical contexts, however, break down the transparent wall separating composition from analysis, by rendering actions and perceptions indistinct. In these contexts, the difference between a score and and its analysis disappears.

First, a methodological warning: given that there was no special notation to distinguish composition from analysis in the first place, we will look in vain for symbols or sign-systems that prove this reconfiguration. Instead, we will focus our attention on the musical documents' content, highlighting the interplay of production and interpretation.

Second, a curricular point: it is no coincidence that in describing these alternative contexts and documents, this lecture will carry us back to the territory of sound art. "Sound art" may be so difficult to define because it has come to stand for an experience of music that takes place outside the concert hall. What these experiences have in common is, above all, the rejection of the concert's division of space, labor, and documentation. Music may take place in a museum gallery or in the middle of a room, rather than on a stage. Such a change of location produces a radical shift of perspective, which forces us to reconsider the distance separating the audience from the composer, which is also the gap between composition and analysis.

On to the documents:

Max Neuhaus: "Southwest Stairwell"

Max Neuhaus's work came up earlier in our discussion of sound art. (As before, I encourage you to visit his Times Square installation if you haven't already, and to check out his work at the Dia Beacon, a museum worth visiting even if you aren't interested in sound installations.) In 1992, he created this drawing, titled "Southwest Stairwell":

From the concert-hall perspective, Max Neuhaus's drawing is unintelligible. The stairway contradicts the basic structure of the concert hall because it is one continuous space. There is no stage and no house, no privileged location of sound-production or reception. There is no allocation of musical roles comparable to those of the concert hall: no distinction between composer, performer, and audience. It is unclear whether Neuhaus is perceiving a musical experience or producing it. Like a composition, the document describes musical material: the architecture of the stairwell itself; the "distant sounds" at its extremes. At the same time, however, this document, like an analysis, describes the perception of material: its "sense of labyrinth" and "feeling of dislocation". The document conflates the activity of musical production with the passivity of musical perception, most apparently in the "succession of timbres" that progresses from landing to landing. The emphasis on sound-color could be a property of the setup, an instruction for listening, or both.

Neuhaus's drawing is perhaps representative of the role of the musical document in a gallery or an installation setting. [. . .]

Pauline Oliveros: "Sonic Meditations"

Pauline Oliveros has abandoned composition/performance practice as it is usually established today for Sonic Explorations which include everyone who wants to participate. She attempts to erase the subject/object or performer/audience relationship by returning to ancient forms which preclude spectators. She is interested in communication among all forms of life, through Sonic Energy. . . .

All societies admit the power of music or sound. Attempts to control what is heard in the community are universal. . . .

Sonic Meditations are an attempt to return the control of sound to the individual alone, and within groups esecially for humanitarian purposes; specifically healing.

(Oliveros, "Sonic Meditations", Introduction II)

Amnon Wolman

[. . .]

Conclusion: Debussy

These documents, different as they are, inscribe three traces of the same reconfiguration of musical space and labor. First, they reflect the dream of a musical community that exists beyond the confines of the concert hall. Second, to realize this dream, they dedicate themselves to the reeducation of listeners, to attune them to what normally goes unheard. Third, as a cause or effect of this reeducation, they confuse the compositional archive of musical actions and the analytic archive of musical perceptions.

To conclude this lecture, we might ask how long such a configuration has been available as an alternative to the concert hall’s. Certainly, since the late sixties and early seventies, when Pauline Oliveros and others started to write instructions for listening. But they were not the first to rethink the divisions that the concert takes for granted. At the turn of the century, Debussy wrote two lines that would not be out of place in Oliveros' work:

Listen to the words of no man,
Listen only to the sound of the winds and the waves of the sea.
(Debussy, quoted in Young, Selected Writings, 29)

Debussy is famous for his concert music—indeed, for producing compositions that are easily recognizable as such: arrangements of sounds and actions for musicians to perform and audiences to interpret. Given that he composed a symphonic poem titled La Mer ("The Sea"), and preludes for piano titled Le vent dans la plaine ("The Wind in the Plain") and Ce qu'a vu le vent d'ouest ("What the West Wind has seen"), we may interpret his two-line instructions in two ways. He may be suggesting to reinvigorate the relations and documents of the concert hall with the sounds of life and nature. But he may also be suggesting the opposite: to step outside the hall, and bring to life and nature the aesthetic consciousness that was once reserved the the musical stage.