ROGER MOSELEY Luminos Is the Open Access Monograph Publishing Program from UC Press
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ROGER MOSELEY Luminos is the open access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.org Keys to Play The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University, the Cornell Open Access Publication Fund, and the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Keys to Play Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo Roger Moseley UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advanc- ing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2016 by Roger Moseley This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses. Suggested citation: Moseley, Roger. Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo. Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. doi: http://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.16 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Moseley, Roger, 1974- author. Title: Keys to Play : Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo / Roger Moseley. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016013674 (print) | LCCN 2016015714 (ebook) | ISB 9780520291249 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520965096 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Music—Performance—History. | Keyboards (Music)—History. | Play—Cross-cultural studies. | Electronic games. Classification: LCC ML457 .M67 2016 (print) | LCC ML457 (ebook) | DD 786—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016013674 Manufactured in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To my family, with love and gratitude, and for Verity, my song of songs. keys to play: music as a ludic medium from apollo to nintendo contents Acknowledgments xi Prelude: Press Any Key to Start 1 Part I. Fields and Interfaces of Musical Play Key 1. Ludomusicality 15 1–1 Orders of Play 23 1–2 Beyond Work and Play 33 1–3 The Sound of Gunplay 43 1–4 Bits and Beats 49 1–5 Playing Undead 58 Key 2. Digital Analogies 67 2–1 Apollo 1, Marsyas 0 72 2–2 Notes on Keys 78 2–3 Interface Values 90 2–4 (Key)board Games and Temperamental Tactics 99 2–5 Tristan’s Chord, Schoenberg’s Voice 109 Part II. Play by Play: Improvisation, Performance, Recreation Key 3. The Emergence of Musical Play 121 3–1 Unforeheard Circumstances 127 3–2 Pantomimes and Partimenti 140 3–3 From Black Box to Glassy Shell 151 3–4 The Case of Winkel’s Componium 159 3–5 The Invisible Thumb on the Scale 167 Key 4. High Scores: WAM vs. LVB 178 4–1 Unsettled Scores 181 4–2 Mozart’s Two-Player Games 188 4–3 Concerted Action 200 4–4 Mozart and Mario Play the Field 212 4–5 Beethoven’s Recursive Feedback Loops 219 Key 5. Play Again? 236 5–1 Nintendo’s Brand of Ludomusicality 243 5–2 Analogous Digitalities 250 5–3 The Ludomusical Emergence of Toshio Iwai 258 5–4 High Scores: Nodame Cantabile 263 5–5 Replay: A Cento 271 Notes 275 Bibliography 365 Ludography 419 Index 423 Acknowledgments As my digits near the end of this protracted tap dance over my computer keyboard, it is a pleasure to reflect on the choreographers, partners, and fellow players—new and old, close and distant, willing and oblivious—whom I am lucky enough to have encountered along the way. To start with the most recent, I am grateful to my editor Raina Polivka, her predecessor Mary Francis, project editor Francisco Reinking, eagle-eyed copyeditor Robert Demke, and editorial assistant Zuha Khan at the University of California Press for the faith they have shown in this project and their hard work in bringing it to fruition. I am particularly appreciative of the feedback from William Cheng, Emily Dolan, Alexander Rehding, Benjamin Walton, and the anonymous readers for the press: their thoughtful observations proved invaluable. From the outset, UC Press encouraged me to explore the exciting possibilities offered by Luminos, its new open access publication program. Since this book deals with the materiality of mediation, it is fitting that its appearance on this platform has involved getting to grips with the affordances and constraints of multiple analog and digital formats, from the venerable PDF scroll and the random access of the print-on-demand tome to the ePub document’s wherewithal for rich multimedia content. While it has presented challenges, devising a book about musical play con - taining elements that can be set in audible and visible motion has been a transfor- mative experience, allowing me to realize ideas that would previously have been unimaginable. As an admirer of the vision on which Luminos has been founded as well as the expertise of Paige MacKay, her colleagues at Ubiquity Press, and the production team at diacriTech who have helped to realize it, I am delighted that this book appears under its imprimatur. xi xii Acknowledgments At Cornell, where I have been happily ensconced for the last six years, it has been a pleasure to admire at close hand the mental, manual, and podial virtuosity of historian-keyboardists extraordinaires Annette Richards and David Yearsley. The playful musicality of pianist Xak Bjerken has been a source of delight in and out of the concert hall: playing selections from Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants with him and joining forces to concoct a graduate seminar on “keyboarding” were pivotal events in this book’s gestation. Neal Zaslaw generously shared his encyclopedic knowledge of Mozartian matters, which was complemented by James Webster’s comprehensive command of Haydn’s humorous strategies. The quick-witted Ben Piekut has kindly allowed me to bounce endless ideas (and the occasional squash ball) off him, while Annie Lewandowski’s subtle artistry has led me to appreciate the play of sound in new ways. Judith Peraino, Alejandro Madrid, and Andrew Hicks lent their expertise in fields ranging from rock music and micro- tonal maneuvers to medieval theory; Steve Pond and Roberto Sierra have been supportive departmental chairs and lively interlocutors. I am especially grateful to Cornell’s professor of violin Ariana Kim, to gradu- ate students Shin Hwang and Matthew Hall, and above all to professor emeritus Malcolm Bilson for lending their unique talents to the recording of the book’s audio components. Malcolm’s musicianship has been more than an inspiration to me: his showing, telling, and playing have opened up new historical vistas, modes of physical engagement, and ways of reimagining familiar music. I feel inexplica- bly fortunate to have crossed his path. As reflected by the book’s (inter)disciplinary orientation, many of its ideas started to take shape while I was a fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities in 2011–12. Among innumerable stimulating conversations on and around the focal theme of “sound,” interactions with Tim Murray, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Brían Hanrahan, Damien Keane, Nicholas Knouf, Tom McEnaney, Trevor Pinch, and Jennifer Stoever were particularly memorable. While there, I offered a class on digital games and techniques of sonic recreation that fed into subsequent teaching as well as research. At the seminar table, I have benefited a great deal from the sharp minds and adventurous spirits of Niccolo Athens, David Friend, Dietmar Friesenegger, George Karalis, Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, Ryan MacEvoy McCullough, Jillian Marshall, Jordan Musser, Sergio Ospina-Romero, Mackenzie Pierce, Jonathan Schakel, Mia Tootill, Morton Wan, Maxwell Williams, Andrew Zhou, and many others. Carlos Ramírez provided valuable research assistance, and special mention must go to Aya Saiki, who has not only devoted an inordinate amount of thought and care to this project, but also taught me much about ludomusicality in Japa- nese contexts. For their knowledge, expertise, and technical skills, I am grateful to Cornell’s music librarians Bonna Boettcher, Bill Cowdery, Lenora Schneller, and Eric Feinstein; music department manager Chris Riley; music typesetter and image- wrangler Evan Cortens; keyboard technician Ken Walkup; recording engineer Cass Acknowledgments xiii Barbour; graphic designer Katherine Jarriel, who produced the keyboard imagery throughout the book; and general miracle worker Laure Conklin Kamp. Before moving to Ithaca, I spent three years at the University of Chicago, where I made my first forays into the ludomusicological field. I am grateful for both the personal warmth and the critical rigor of Thomas Christensen, Martha Feldman, Berthold Hoeckner, Kaley Mason, Steven Rings, and Lawrence Zbikowski. In particular, I cherish the joyous sense of adventure that suffused the Historically Inspired Musical Improvisation workshop I facilitated there: alongside Martha and Larry, Majel Connery, Daniel Gough, Shawn Keener, Emily Mackevicius, Alyssa Matthias, Emily Norton, Peter Shultz, Jonathan De Souza, and (from a dis- tance) Bettina Varwig made signal contributions toward our improvised staging of Mozart’s “Musik zu einer Faschingspantomime,” K. 446/416d, the impact of which is registered in Key 3–2. Such activities owed much to the groundbreaking work of Robert Gjerdingen, whose revelatory framing of the cognitive, social, and aes- thetic circumstances under which eighteenth-century music was conceived and played has transformed my outlook on the presentability of the improvised past.