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Committee Chair signature: The Nature and Value of Accessibility in Western Art-Music, 1950–1970

A Thesis Submitted to the

Division of Graduate Studies and Research of the University of Cincinnati

in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of

Master of Music

in the Division of Composition, Musicology, and Theory of the College-Conservatory of Music

2009

Rachel Hands

B. M., University of Massachusetts, 2006

Committee Chair: Dr. Edward Nowacki

ABSTRACT

It often happens that a composer or performer of contemporary music, in preparing for a performance, asks the question: “Will my audience get it?” When the answer is “probably not,” a second question may arise: “Should I care?” This study takes up the latter question in detail.

Put more specifically, the question at hand is: Should we take accessibility into consideration when we compose, perform, and criticize music? This, in turn, raises at least two other broad questions, both of which will be explored in this thesis. The first is “What is the nature of accessibility in music?” The second is “Should we consider accessibility a desirable quality of music?” To answer these questions, I use music cognition research and philosophical studies on musical understanding to characterize accessibility, and draw from that characterization to arrive at a way of determining its value.

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank, first and foremost, Dr. Edward Nowacki for his guidance and support throughout my work on this thesis. His insights and challenges contributed a great deal to the formation of my ideas and to their expression. Additionally, I wish to express my gratitude to my readers, Dr. Jeongwon Joe and Professor Randy Gardner, for their valuable contributions to the writing process. Finally, I would be remiss if I did not thank Dr. Jenefer Robinson of the

University of Cincinnati Department of Philosophy for her work with me on this topic and others in the philosophy of music.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Abstract…………………………………………………………………………………………….i

Acknowledgments………………………………………………………………………………..iii

Table of Contents…………………………………………………………………………………iv

List of Musical Examples…………………………………………………………………………v

Chapter One: Introduction……………………………………………………………………...…1

Chapter Two: The Nature of Accessibility………………………………………………………15

Chapter Three: The Value of Accessibility……………………………………………………...58

Chapter Four: A Habitus of Musicking………………………………………………………….75

Bibliography……………………………………………………………………………………..85

Philosophy/Musicology Resources…………………………………………………...….85

Music Theory/Cognition Resources……………………………………………………..90

LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES

Aaron Copland, Down a Country Lane, mm. 1–8……………………………………………….30

Pierre Boulez, Le Marteau sans Maître, mm. 1–11……………………………………………...31

Pierre Boulez, Structures 1b, mm. 1–10...……………………………………………………….38

Igor Stravinsky, In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, mm. 1–8………………………………………..39

Chapter 1: Introduction

The time is past when music was written for a handful of aesthetes. . . . The masses want great music, the music of great events, great love, and lively dances. They understand far more than some composers think and they want to deepen their understanding. –Sergei Prokofiev, “Autobiography, Articles, Reminiscences”

It often happens that a composer or performer of contemporary music (or, for that matter, of a good deal of music that is no longer contemporary), in preparing for a performance, asks the question: “Will my audience get it?” That is to say, “Will this piece be accessible to the lay listening public at the time of my performance?” When the answer is “probably not,” a second question may arise: “Should I care?”1 These and other such questions arise so frequently as to point to a pervasive problem in the music world—and, it might be argued, in the larger art world—that has yet to be addressed with focus and specificity in musicological, music- theoretical, or philosophical literature. They are not idle questions, especially the latter; for some, the way in which they are addressed can account for an abundance or scarcity of material support and public acceptance. For this reason, heated polemics have grown around the subject of accessibility in public discourse, though not usually in academic circles.

To take one recent instance, James Levine came under fire for programming

“inaccessible” works by Arnold Schoenberg, Elliott Carter, and Milton Babbitt during his first season as music director of the Boston Symphony Orchestra, in 2004–2005. The complaints, it should be noted, came from ticketholders and professional critics alike; in a 2005 article, Boston

Globe critic Ed Siegel chides Levine for programming such works to the exclusion of music by

1 This is not intended as a reference to Milton Babbitt’s infamous essay, titled “Who Cares If You Listen?” by an editor, rather as the simplest way of putting the question of value outlined below. 1

“composers who have re-established a tie with contemporary audiences.”2 (Levine apparently took these criticisms to heart: he has since programmed music by several of the composers referred and alluded to in Siegel’s article, including John Adams, Osvaldo Golijov, and Arvo

Pärt.)3 At the same time, Levine also had an ardent supporter in another Globe critic, Richard

Dyer. Interestingly, Dyer’s reviews focus on the inclusion, rather than the exclusion, in Levine’s programming, noting that “What is new in Levine’s programming is an emphasis on the whole

20th century, not just the first third.”4 He also puts faith in Levine’s ability to “overcome some of [the] inertia” of concertgoers uninterested in difficult works.5 These debates were perhaps the most public discussions of the issue of musical accessibility in Boston for several years, though similar debates could be cited wherever music deemed “inaccessible” is programmed.

In musicological literature, by contrast, there is little thorough discussion of the issue.

Such discussion as exists is usually to be found in the writings and lectures of composers, who have a direct stake in the issue.6 In the writings of musicologists, there is sometimes mention that X’s or Y’s music is inaccessible, but there is rarely any indication of exactly why that work is considered as such; what indications exist generally appear in reception histories, and are

2 Ed Siegel, “Getting an Earful,” The Boston Globe, 6 March 2005, http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ living/articles/2005/03/06/getting_an_earful/?page=1 (accessed 2 April 2008).

3 Boston Symphony Orchestra Online Archival Collection, http://bso.org/bso/mods/toc_01_gen_ images.jsp;jsessionid=H0M4L2TU45EUECTFQMGCFEQ?id=bcat5220061 (accessed 2 April 2008).

4 Richard Dyer, “Levine is Set to Lead BSO in a New Direction,” The Boston Globe, 16 January 2004, http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2004/01/16/levine_is_set_to_lead_bso_in_new_direction/?p1 (accessed 12 April 2008).

5 Richard Dyer, “Levine’s Three Challenges with the BSO,” The Boston Globe, 17 October 2004, http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2004/10/17/levines_three_challenges_with_the_bso/?page=3 (accessed 12 April 2008).

6 See, e.g., John Harbison, “Accessibility,” in Composers on Modern Musical Culture: An Anthology of Readings on Twentieth-Century Music (Schirmer Books, 1999), 201–5. 2 frequently limited to complaints of excessive dissonance or lack of melody.7 Perhaps the most direct treatment of the subject by a musicologist, Susan McClary’s 1989 article “Terminal

Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition,” does not address what it actually means to be a difficult composer, or to compose difficult music.8 Likewise, within the philosophical literature on music, there is little in the way of direct discussion of musical accessibility in the sense I intend, either in ontological or evaluative studies of music. Instead, current philosophical literature on musical understanding consists almost exclusively of discussions of what music can mean or signify, frequently couched in extramusical terms.9

This thesis, then, takes up in detail the question that seems to spark these debates,

“Should I care?”—or, more specifically, “Should we take accessibility into account when we compose, perform, and critically listen to music?”—and attempts to bring it within the scope of musicological and philosophical discussion. To make this discussion possible, it is necessary first to sketch out a working definition for a few main concepts. First, the word “accessibility” as it pertains to this study needs to be limited, as it is quite vague in common usage. Here, it refers to the degree to which a piece can be easily understood, usually by the lay listening public,

7 See, e.g., reviews of Arnold Schoenberg’s early atonal works in Walter Bailey, Programmatic Elements in the Works of Schoenberg (Ann Arbor: UMI Research Press, 1984). For a more extreme example, see also Henry Pleasants, The Agony of Modern Music (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1955).

8 Susan McClary, “Terminal Prestige: The Case of Avant-Garde Music Composition,” Cultural Critique 12 (1989): 57–81.

9 A notable exception is the work of Peter Kivy, who asserts that music does not generally bear extramusical meaning. I do not deny the possibility of meaningful extramusical associations, but I cannot deal adequately with such meanings here.

3 at the particular time and place of the piece’s performance.10 We must include the modifier “at the particular time and place of performance” to indicate that accessibility is a historically contingent property; when we examine a given work, it is crucial to remember that the level of its accessibility as we perceive it obtains only at a particular time and place.11

In everyday speech, the word “accessibility” often refers to the enjoyability of a given piece of music—for instance, a professional musician might use the word “accessible” as a euphemism for “something that will please the audience but is not necessarily good music.”

However, enjoyability is something separate from and perhaps even more subjective and idiosyncratic than comprehensibility, although the two are often conflated when describing the effect of musical works on the listener. (For instance, Siegel’s previously mentioned article in the Boston Globe focuses almost entirely on enjoyability.)12 Significantly, some have argued that we cannot conflate enjoyability with comprehensibility because, while we can enjoy a passage of music before it has ended, we cannot properly understand it until we have heard it in its entirety.13 For these reasons, enjoyability will not be considered in this study. In excluding enjoyability from my inquiry, I do not mean to imply that enjoyment and understanding are unrelated; as Peter Kivy notes in Music Alone, there is certainly a “general tendency . . . for

10 A note about the centrality of the activity of listening to my definition of accessibility: Although the experiences of composing, performing, and listening are vastly different in nature, the act of comprehension involves basically the same processes across all three modes of interacting with music. John Sloboda has shown this in The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985).

11 My discussion of the historical contingence of accessibility draws heavily on the work of Jerrold Levinson, especially his essays “Defining Art Historically” and “Refining Art Historically,” both in Music, Art and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).

12 Siegel, “Getting an Earful.”

13 See, e.g., Barry Smith, ed., Foundations of Gestalt Theory (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1988), 26. 4 increase in understanding to bring increase in enjoyment.”14 Conversely, enjoyment of a work that is not thoroughly understood can lead one to pursue a deeper understanding of that work.

However, such relations are more idiosyncratic and complex than can be explored in this context.

It should also be noted that the word “accessible” will not be used here in the sense of “easily

(physically) obtained.”15

Second, a “paradigm listener” for this study needs to be clearly defined. This listener is one such as Aaron Ridley has so neatly described:

Such a listener goes to concerts, buys or borrows recordings, listens to them even when there are no domestic chores to be done at the same time, reads the odd book about music, likes to talk about music, plays an instrument, perhaps, and is perfectly convinced that a life without music would be hardly a life at all.16

This is, admittedly, a fairly narrow definition. As Ridley does, I take it to have the casual music lover or amateur musician at its core. It necessarily excludes the totally untrained listener; in this respect, the definition of the paradigm listener is similar to Arthur Danto’s definition of the

“artworld public.”17 The audience, in order to fall into this category, must be involved in the activities of the artworld (or Western-classical-music world) in more than a passive way; their actions and support must have an effect on some part of the art-music world at large. Although it is, by nature, an exclusive view of the audience—since it implies that some audience members

14 Peter Kivy, Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1989), 117.

15 Accessibility in this sense is discussed in Evan Ziporyn, “Who Listens if You Care?” in Source Readings in Music History, Vol. VII, rev. ed., ed. Leo Treitler (New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1998): 41–48.

16 Aaron Ridley, Music, Value and the Passions (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 5.

17 Arthur Danto, “The Artworld,” in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition, ed. Peter LaMarque and Stein Haugom Olsen (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2006): 27-34. Jerrold Levinson criticizes this aspect of Danto’s theory in Music, Art, and Metaphysics: Essays in Philosophical Aesthetics (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 4–6. 5

“matter” more than others, while some do not matter at all—the exclusivity is not arbitrary, and is necessary to maintain a workable scope for this study.

The primary reason for this view, with its particular limitations, is its focus on those listeners for whom the question of musical comprehensibility is the most significant and problematic. For the sake of demonstration, let us say that Joe is one of our paradigm listeners, and Max is completely musically untrained, not in the habit of listening to Western art-music at all. In order for the comprehensibility of a piece to Joe or Max to be of interest to anyone but himself, it seems that his comprehension should contribute to the shaping of the musical activity surrounding the piece in question—for instance, through moral or material support of that activity (performance, composition, et cetera). In other words, since Joe is in the habit of going to Western art-music concerts and may have at least some training in that area, his degree of comprehension of a work may have an effect on that genre’s musical activity; he is providing his material support in the form of ticket-buying and his moral support in the form of attentiveness and (one hopes) appreciation. His support can be offered or withdrawn at any time, depending in part on his degree of comprehension of the style of works performed. By contrast, because of

Max’s general unfamiliarity with Western art-music, it is not likely that any given work in that style will be accessible to him, whether it is conventionally considered to be accessible within that idiom or not. For this reason, the relative accessibility of that work for Max is not likely to have an effect on any other musical activity in that style. To be more specific, we can make the assumption that his moral and material support are not directed toward the idiom in question, regardless of any quality of the individual piece. (As a contrastive thought experiment, consider a person whose musical experience is wholly in the Western classical tradition listening to North

Indian classical music for the first time, without any explanation of the workings of the unfamiliar music. Would it matter for his understanding if listeners more accustomed to that music found the given work inaccessible?) The question of comprehensibility is, in this case, an empty one; reasons for this will be explored further in the part of the thesis dealing with the nature of accessibility. For these reasons, the definition of the “paradigm listener” used here excludes the completely untrained listener. (Of course, in this country at this time, it is difficult to find a listener who is utterly unfamiliar with any and all Western classical music.)

If our definition has the amateur musician or music lover at its center and ignores the untrained listener, what of the highly trained listener (we’ll call him Jack)? Such a listener—a professional musician or advanced music student—is certainly within the musical artworld, and both his moral and material support are assumed to be directed within the idiom of Western classical music. Thus, as opposed to the case of Max, the untrained listener, the accessibility of a given work for Jack may have a significant effect on the musical activity of the style. It seems, therefore, that Jack should play a part in our definition, especially insofar as he acts as a guide for less-trained music lovers (e.g., in the role of critic).

However, this is not a simple or direct relation, where what is accessible for one audience will be so for the other. We can presume that Jack is likely to understand a given work in more depth than the amateur musician or music lover (Joe). Jack is also more likely to attempt to further his understanding of a given work that may be relatively inaccessible to him at first (or at least to be more capable of doing so), since his training has provided him with more tools with which to accomplish such an endeavor. Therefore, it seems less plausible to take the opinions of highly trained listeners such as Jack as an indication of what would be accessible to

Joe. The matter is further complicated by the fact that not all trained musicians agree on issues of accessibility, including the ones who are in a position to have an effect on the opinions and understanding of other listeners. (Witness the differing opinions of the Boston Globe critics cited above on Levine’s programming of Schoenberg and Carter at the Boston Symphony

Orchestra.) As a way of dealing with these complicated concerns, I will take the highly trained listener to play an attenuated role in my definition of the paradigm listener. His perceptions of accessibility are important to the larger music-world insofar as his support is directed within that music-world, and he can have an effect on other listeners’ perceptions through critical writing and lectures; however, we cannot assume that what will be accessible for him will be accessible for the larger concert-going public.

With their competent yet limited background, our paradigm listeners might be considered

“swing voters” on the issue of accessibility. Such listeners are the ones that a composer can— and needs to—“win over” if his goal is to write a work that will be heard and understood beyond the realm of music professionals and specialists. The support of these listeners is both counted on and somewhat tenuous (unlike that of untrained and highly trained listeners, respectively).

Since the various problems of accessibility tend to center on this sector of the classical-music audience, it seems right to place such listeners at the core of my definition of the concept at hand.18

Perhaps the most important term that needs to be defined for this study is “music” itself.

In my view, a coherent concept of musical understanding should have a firm basis in musical ontology; that is to say, one must first establish what is being understood in order to demonstrate

18 In the concluding section of this thesis, I will challenge this notion of the paradigm listener; however, for the sake of simplicity and clarity, this is the definition that I will rely upon throughout the thesis. 8 how it is being understood. Probably the most common definition of a musical work is

“organized sound,” a phrase usually attributed to Edgard Varèse, but which appears frequently throughout the philosophical literature on music. However, this definition bears few, if any, implications for a theory of musical understanding; in this context, it is too broad to be useful.

After all, as Roger Scruton points out, “poetry too is organized sound.”19

What this definition does have to offer, however, is the idea that human agency is central to the definition of the musical work: for sound to be organized requires a human agent to organize it. It should be noted that this definition is not at all unique to musical ontology; it has a very close parallel with the concept of “the artifact” in general ontologies of art. It is true that the notion of artifactual art—the idea that being human-created and thus artifactual is a necessary condition for arthood—has been challenged by the idea of “found art,” according to which natural objects may be considered art if they are displayed as such.20 Despite this controversy, though, the notion of the artifact remains central to many contemporary ontological studies of art;21 following the example of these studies, I take it to be central to a useful ontology of music.

A musical work, in this sense, can be considered an artifact by virtue of having been created by a human agent. This idea of music-as-artifact does not necessarily imply that the work must be a physical object (such as a score), nor do I mean it as such. Rather, I construe the idea of the

19 Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (New York: Clarendon Press, 1997), 16.

20 See, e.g., Morris Weitz, “The Role of Theory in Aesthetics (1956), reprinted in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition, ed. Peter Lamarque and Stein Haugom Olsen (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 12–18.

21 See, e.g., George Dickie, “The New Institutional Theory of Art,” in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, 47–49; Stephen Davies, “Weitz’s Anti-Essentialism,” in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art, 63–65; David Davies, Art As Performance (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). 9 artifact broadly, to mean that the (physical or non-physical) object in question has origins in an act of human agency.22

Drawing from the ideas of “organized sound” and “artifactual art,” I take the notion of agency to be of critical importance both to the ontology of music and to that of accessibility.

However, the characterization of music-as-artifact tells us little about how we should actually go about understanding the artifact. A more precise definition seems necessary if we are to ground a theory of musical understanding in a theory of what music is.

The system of musical ontology I have found the most convincing and the most useful for my study is the theory presented by Christopher Small in his book Musicking: The Meanings of

Performing and Listening. In general, Small’s work is concerned with the social meanings of and surrounding music, which in his view, stem from “the entire set of relationships that constitutes a performance.”23 While these meanings are intriguing, and probably have a bearing on the accessibility of individual works (as will be discussed later), I am most concerned with the idea expressed in this passage:

Until [sounds] are placed into relationship with one another, they do not yield even a melody, let alone a whole musical work, whose identity lies in the relationships that exist between the sounds. . . . Relationships are mental, not physical, events. They are made in our minds. . . . It is in our minds also that we learn to attribute meaning to them.24 [Italics mine]

22 In Art as Performance (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), David Davies argues that it is the act of human agency involved in the work—the work’s “history of making”—in which we are interested, when we are interested in a work of art. This idea, whether strictly true or not, lends support to the idea that agency is a key component to artistic ontology.

23 Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998), 8.

24 Ibid., 112. 10

Here, Small locates the identity of the individual musical work in the relationships that are constructed between its constituent sounds in the mind of the person perceiving the work. It should be pointed out that the notion of “organized sound” or “music-as-artifact” is also implicit in Small’s definition; for him, musical sounds “are placed into relationship with one another,” an action that presumably requires a (presumably human) agent to do the placing. It should also be noted that neither the conventional definition of “music-as-organized-sound” nor Small’s definition specify with certainty what roles the listener, composer, and performer play in the organization. Although the usual implication for the conventional definition is that the sole organizer is the composer, and Small’s definition lends itself to the idea that the listener plays a more significant role in the organization (i.e., that the listener must organize or re-organize the sounds in order for the process to be complete), there is nothing inherent in either definition to make those distinctions plain. This fact brings up one problematic aspect of accessibility: namely, that it is unclear who is responsible for its creation.

Building on Small’s definition, I consider a basic understanding of a musical work to mean comprehension of, at minimum, the most basic relations between sounds that constitute the work—for instance, recurring or contrasting themes, motivic development, harmonic progressions, shifting timbres, and so forth. Issues of semantic, symbolic, or narrative meaning cannot figure into this definition, as not all Western classical music can be said to bear these kinds of meanings. (This, in part, distinguishes the “organized sound” of music from that of poetry, where such meanings generally obtain.) Of course, I do not wish to claim that such a basic understanding is all that is possible or meaningful in our experience of music. I only mean to indicate that questions of what specific works mean—or of what kinds of meaning or

11 significance, both semantic and personal, can be had by musical works—would take me too far afield from this study, although such questions are undeniably of vital importance in the study of music.

We can now offer a thorough working definition for accessibility: Accessibility is an attribute of the sonic relations constructed in the mind of the paradigm listener when hearing a piece of music that has been perceptibly and intentionally organized at a particular time and place. To return to our original question: Should we take this concept into account when we compose, perform, and listen to music? This, in turn, raises at least two other broad questions, both of which will be explored in this thesis. The first is “What is the nature of accessibility in music?” What exactly are we saying about a work when we call it “accessible?” The second is

“Should we consider accessibility a desirable quality of music?” In asking this second question,

I want to establish whether we, as composers, performers, and critical listeners, are justified in considering accessibility to contribute—positively or negatively—to the overall value of a musical work. The answer to this will depend on several social, political, and philosophical factors; I propose to examine the implications of this question in relation to two of the most prominent socio-philosophical viewpoints on music. Roughly stated, these are “music as a means of communication”25 and “music as autonomous art-object.” Implied in each of these two views of music’s function in society are opposing views on musical value; these differences, I posit, have a great deal to do with the role of accessibility within each view.

The focus of this study is accessibility as it relates to the music of American composers between 1950 and 1970, especially those who expressly espoused a version of one of the views I

25 The idea of “music as communication” does not necessarily imply that the communication must be semantic, and it is unclear whether Copland and his like-minded colleagues meant it as such. The question of this distinction, though certainly important, does not have any immediate or significant effect on my study. 12 outline above, although I believe there are significant implications for other musics. The body of the thesis consists of two main sections. The first focuses on the nature of accessibility. Here, I define specific properties of accessibility, including attributes of musical works that contribute to its creation.26 Part of the aim of this section is to emphasize the role of musical qualities other than dissonance and consonance in determining a work’s accessibility. In my discussion of each attribute, I provide support from music cognition studies. I posit that the most significant of these attributes are pitch (melody/tonality); rhythm/meter; timbre; formal structure; and text, where applicable. This section also includes a discussion of socio-political factors that contribute to the accessibility of a work, including the notions of agency, authenticity, and historical contingency, as well as the social meanings surrounding a work’s performance. Issues surrounding the concept of expressiveness are also addressed in this section. My methodologies in this section are partially drawn from studies of popular music, though they are applied to the art-music repertoire delineated above.

The second part examines two questions: “Is accessibility a desirable quality, and if so, who is responsible for bringing it about?” I claim that the answers to both questions depend heavily on the view of music’s function in society espoused by the asker. Thus, I examine these issues in the context of the two views described above.

In the concluding section of the thesis, I return to the question: Should we take accessibility into account when we compose, perform, or criticize music? There are several possible answers for each of these questions. For instance, if we believe that music’s primary function is as a means of communication, then the answer to all three will seem to be a

26 My discussion of the aspects of music that contribute to accessibility follows a methodology used by Aaron Ridley in his characterization of musical expressiveness. See Aaron Ridley, Music, Value and the Passions (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995), 73. 13 resounding “yes.” However, those who regard musical works as autonomous art-objects will be less likely to arrive at such a decisive answer. One may answer that composers should not be tied down or limited by considerations of accessibility while composing; others (including Aaron

Copland) may retort that the inaccessible composer has failed at his goal.27 Similar considerations and contradictions follow for performing and listening. Performance arguably presents the thorniest issue: even if we deny the value of accessibility on principle, it is another matter to keep financially afloat without it. It is my hope that my clarifications of the various responses to this question will shed thought-provoking light on the ways in which we do and should think about contemporary and other musics. It is not my intention, however, to espouse any particular response as “the solution”; rather, it is to encourage consideration of these issues in the academic community.

27 Aaron Copland, “The Creative Mind and the Interpretive Mind” (1952), in Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, ed. Elliott Schwartz and Barney Childs (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998): 151-52.

Chapter 2: The Nature of Accessibility

Pleasure does not preclude effort. Minds need to reach, not simply grasp. . . . If the arts are to achieve all that can be achieved, it would be wrongheaded to focus on the limitations of human minds. But neither is [it] the case that anything is possible. –David Huron, Sweet Anticipation

In Chapter 1, I established a rough definition of accessibility: “the sonic relations constructed in the mind of the paradigm listener when hearing a piece of music that has been perceptibly and intentionally organized, at a particular time and place.” The ultimate aim of this definition is to arrive at a way of characterizing the value of accessibility. However, in order to make judgments of value about accessibility and its role in musical experience, we need more specific information. First, we need to know what kind of sonic relations we are to be concerned with, and how those relations are formed in the mind. As mentioned in Chapter 1, I assert that the sonic relations that contribute the most to accessibility are pitch (melody, harmony, and tonality); rhythm and meter; formal structure; timbre; and text.1 We can also construe these types of relationships as the domains in which it is easiest for the paradigm listener to construct relations between sounds; following this idea, I will refer to pitch, rhythm/meter, timbre, form, and text as musical “domains” throughout this study. Principles of Gestalt psychology are beneficial here in demonstrating the ways in which these relations are made. Second, we need to know whether those sonic relations will account entirely for the accessibility of a given work.

1 It should be noted that the order in which these domains are presented does not reflect any ranking of their significance to accessibility. While issues of melody, harmony and tonality have received the most attention in writings about accessibility, I argue that rhythm and meter are at least as important, and that text, form, and timbre all play a slightly more attenuated role in the construction of musical understanding.

Third, if they do not entirely account for the work’s accessibility, we need to examine what other factors might contribute to it, and how they might do so.

Before I begin a detailed discussion of each of the musical qualities that contribute to accessibility, some general remarks must be made as to the nature of these qualities and how they are constructed. Earlier, I described the sonic relations of pitch, rhythm/meter, form, timbre, and text as intrinsic “attributes of musical works.” This description, at first glance, appears to rely on the premise that there is an objective, universal entity—the work—that can be said to bear intrinsic properties at all. This premise may seem at odds with the stated ontology of music used in this thesis, of music as a network of relations constructed between sounds in the mind of the listener. However, we must keep in mind that the listener is not creating relationships out of nothing. He must be listening to something—there must be a particular succession of sounds to be heard—in order for those relations to be constructed. The distinction is that the sounds are not properly considered musical until they have been placed into relationships by one or more listeners. (The counterexample of imagined music is somewhat problematic, though it does require that such sounds have been heard at a previous time in the imaginer’s experience. Whether or not the sounds between which the listener is creating relations must be produced at the precise time of music-making is a question for another study.)

Further detail must be given regarding the construction of our musical domains. In the domains of pitch, rhythm, meter, tonality, and form, there has been general agreement among writers on music cognition that mental relationships are formed through processes of “grouping” individual musical elements. Indeed, this concept, derived from Gestalt psychology, appears with striking regularity throughout the music cognition literature; despite the fact that Gestalt

16 psychotherapy is no longer in favor, the foundational principles of Gestalt psychology continue to be useful for studies of cognition in many areas.2 Following these writers, this study treats the understanding of music as fundamentally tied to the principles established by Gestalt theory.

The principles of this system have particular value to my study, as they provide an empirical basis for the creation of relationships between sounds in the mind of a listener. However, it has been slightly more problematic to establish firm conclusions about the nature of perception of timbre and text using Gestalt principles; thus, I will treat those domains in a slightly different way, concerning my study more with the audience’s familiarity with certain timbres and processing of texts than with the cognitive ways in which those domains are processed. Because this study relies heavily on principles of Gestalt theory as support for its premises, an outline of those basic principles and their relevance to music cognition studies is necessary at this point.

Basic Gestalt Principles

Early Gestalt psychologists, particularly Carl Stumpf, put forth views on musical understanding and ontology that closely coincide with those advanced here. In his Foundations of Gestalt Theory, Barry Smith writes that in Stumpf’s view,

[The Gestalt] is a relational attribute, a whole or network of relations between sense contents (1939/40, p.229). This network is somehow unitary; when we hear a chord or a melody we hear a relational whole. . . . A Gestalt is a whole of relations, but in certain

2 See, e.g.: David Butler, The Musician’s Guide to Perception and Cognition (New York: Schirmer Books, 1992); Irène Deliège and John Sloboda, eds., Perception and Cognition of Music (East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press, Ltd., 1997); Jay Dowling and Dane Harwood, Music Cognition (Orlando, FL: Academic Press, 1986); Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1993); John Sloboda, The Musical Mind: The Cognitive Psychology of Music (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985); Ibid., Exploring the Musical Mind: Cognition, Emotion, Ability, Function (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Bob Snyder, Music and Memory: An Introduction (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000); David Temperley, The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2001). 17

circumstances only part of this whole may be perceived—and this part may be a Gestalt in its own right.3

The Gestalt is essentially a way of organizing perceived information, and can be applied both in spatial (visual) and temporal (aural) dimensions. As Smith indicates in the passage quoted above, the Gestalt can be either an entire work or smaller units; the distinction may depend on the mode of apprehension. For instance, a perceiver who is listening to a piece of music, with no other information given—e.g., a score—will likely perceive the Gestalt in smaller units than someone who is looking at a large-scale formal diagram of the work. Smith explains this phenomenon by claiming that the construction of the Gestalt is dependent on our intellectual capacity to perceive it as such:

We can grasp the Gestalt only if we are somehow able, by a cumulative process involving the operations of memory, to unify everything in one intellectual glance, and a discursive process of this sort is indeed indispensible if we are to grasp a melody or any other Gestalt involving any sort of temporal succession.4

Clearly, this theory emphasizes the role of the perceiver in constructing the Gestalt. It does not, however, deny the existence of an independent stimulus on which the Gestalt is based. Indeed, the Gestalt as constructed by the perceiver is separate from and should not be confused with the set of stimuli being perceived, although there is reason to believe that there are significant parallels between the object as it is perceived and the stimuli from which it is derived.

According to Smith, some Gestaltists, including James Jerome Gibson, Max Wertheimer, and

Kurt Koffka, posit that the Gestalten as we perceive them “are to different degrees transparent:

They do not block out all autonomous properties of the objective structures on which they depend, but rather overlap materially with these objects (or indeed in some cases include them as

3 Barry Smith, ed., Foundations of Gestalt Theory (Munich: Philosophia Verlag, 1988), 23–25.

4 Ibid., 25. 18 parts.”5 (The tendency of human perceivers to perceive their surroundings as organized—to see or hear certain objects as more regular or balanced than they are—may contribute to the opacity of the Gestalt.6 This means that the perceived Gestalt may be more organized than the perceptual stimulus, in which case the Gestalt is not transparent to the stimulus insofar as there are differences between the two.) Thus, it is possible to retain the idea that there is an independently extant musical stimulus—the melody, for instance—against which our experience can be measured, and simultaneously emphasize the role of the listener in determining the perceptual nature of that stimulus.

Although the earliest Gestalt theorists were highly concerned with melody as an example of temporal Gestalt perception, music theorists Fred Lerdahl and Ray Jackendoff are frequently cited as the first to apply principles of Gestalt theory to music-theoretical models of musical understanding. In A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, Lerdahl and Jackendoff present Gestalt principles as the basis for their account of musical perception and understanding, particularly in the domains of rhythm, meter, and phrase structure.7 Other writers following them have expanded the application of Gestalt principles to harmony and larger-scale formal structures.8

The concept of the Gestalt as an overarching network of relations that is of primary importance in the study of perception has not been unproblematic. One objection that has been raised against this idea, in a 1994 article by Gaetano Kanizsa, is that its reliance on “the

5 Ibid. 47.

6 Ibid., 61.

7 Lerdahl and Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1983).

8 See especially Temperley, The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures. 19 existence of a tendency to singularity [is] untenable.”9 By “a tendency to singularity,” Kanizsa means the Gestalt principle that when we perceive an object, we necessarily perceive it as a singular whole, even if we also perceive it as comprising a number of smaller-scale “wholes.”

He cites instances in which perceptual tendencies are toward disunity rather than singularity.

However, his examples are concerned with spatial/visual, rather than temporal/aural, perception, so this objection does not seem to present a problem for the use of Gestalt methodologies in the study of musical understanding. Additionally, it seems reasonable to posit that when we attempt to understand a musical work, we are interested in the relationships that obtain within that work, rather than with the individual sounds that constitute it. (Some obvious exceptions, such as certain extremely minimalist compositions by John Cage and LaMonte Young, serve to prove the rule.)

An additional problem presented in Kanizsa’s article is that “[according] to the

Gestaltists, the process of formation of the object is an autonomous process that does not depend either on the knowledge acquired through past experience or on expectations.”10 If we are to take musical understanding to be both contextually and historically contingent—a stated position of this study—we must make a careful distinction between the formation of the perceptual object and understanding per se. The formation of the object may occur independently of prior experience—in other words, some Gestalt tendencies are innate rather than gained through experience—but understanding requires a synthesis of the object in relation to one’s experiences.

In other words, the perceived object is not properly understood until it has been compared with

9 Gaetano Kanizsa, “Gestalt theory has been misinterpreted, but has also had some real conceptual difficulties,” Philosophical Psychology 7 (Sept. 1994): 154.

10 Ibid., 155. 20 one’s prior experiences. Following this distinction, both the historical contingency of our musical understanding and the autonomy of our perceptual processes remain valid.

In sum, I believe that the benefits to my study provided by Gestalt theory sufficiently outweigh the objections cited above. The applications of Gestalt principles in this study vary with the individual musical domains listed above. In the sections that follow, I present a discussion of each of these domains, the way they are perceived in terms of Gestalt theory and other music cognition methodologies, and their roles in the construction of musical understanding.

Pitch—Melody, Harmony, and the Effect of Tonality

The domain that receives the most attention in cognition and musicological literature on musical comprehension is that of pitch, comprising melody and harmony as well as individual pitches (in cognition studies). Definitions of melody tend to emphasize the role of the listener’s perception in determining melodic quality. For instance, the Harvard Dictionary of Music defines a melody as “a coherent succession of pitches”; the word “coherent” here implies that a succession of pitches is not melodic if it is incoherent to the perceiver.11 Similarly, according to Smith, Stumpf defines a melody as “‘an intelligible, discrete-successive, non-decomposable aural Gestalt having a determinate rhythmic structure and capable of existing on its own’ (p. 270),” where intelligibility is defined as “not only surveyability of rhythm, but also recognition of dominant,

11 “Melody,” The Harvard Dictionary of Music, Don Michael Randel, ed. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 499. 21 tonic, leading note, etc., in a process parallel to the recognition of the different parts of speech in a spoken sentence.”12 The New Grove Dictionary of Music defines melody as “pitched sounds arranged in musical time in accordance with given cultural conventions and constraints,” emphasizing the need for a melody to align with listeners’ expectations of that domain.13

Generalizing from these examples, we can infer that melody is conceived as fundamentally listener-dependent; it needs the listener to perceive it as melodic in order for it to exist as such.

(For the moment, we can set aside Stumpf’s emphasis on tonal function in the formation of a coherent melody, as he was writing in the late nineteenth century.)

What, then, are the factors that contribute to a perceiver’s understanding of a particular succession of pitches as melodic? For one, the listener must impart an organizational structure onto what he hears; this implies a direct action on the part of the perceiver, and indeed requires some amount of cognitive and attentive activity. The importance of the listener’s memory to the perception of melody is also stressed by many writers on music cognition; as John Sloboda puts it,

The way one hears music is crucially dependent upon what one can remember of past events in the music. . . . A theme is heard as transformed only if one can remember the original version of which it is a transformation. And so on. A note or chord has no musical significance other than in relation to preceding or following events.14

A related factor is the listener’s system of expectations regarding the musical work. This aspect is practically impossible to quantify, but it does seem that we can reasonably infer the average listener’s expectations from the frequency with which certain elements of music appear in the

12 Smith, “On the Foundations of Gestalt Theory,” 26. The emphasis on rhythm in this definition will be discussed further in the next section.

13 Alexander R. Ringer, “Melody,” Grove Music Online, ed. L. Macy, http://www.grovemusic.com (accessed 14 May 2008).

14 Sloboda, The Musical Mind, 174–75. 22 repertory to which such a listener has been exposed. This is the method adopted by David Huron for much of his book Sweet Anticipation.15

All of these factors focus on the role of the listener in melodic perception. However, the burden of melodic perception cannot be placed solely on that listener—recall Huron’s statement in the epigraph of this chapter: “. . . it would be wrongheaded to focus on the limitations of human minds. But neither is the case that anything is possible.”16 Certain factors in the succession of sounds presented to the listener have a bearing on the ease with which that listener can organize the music into a coherent Gestalt. Some important and related aspects of pitch succession that aid in coherence are pitch proximity,17 contour, and pitch centricity.

Pitch proximity and contour are very closely tied to one another and collectively have a very significant bearing on the Western listener’s perception of melody. David Huron has analyzed several prominent “cultural conventions and constraints” that appear in Western art- music, one of which is pitch proximity.18 According to Huron, passages perceived as melodic primarily use small intervals between successive pitches; he concludes “that small pitch intervals are a common feature of real [Western] music, and that listeners familiar with Western music process small intervals more easily than large intervals.”19 This concept is corroborated by the

Gestalt principles of proximity and good continuation, which hold that a Gestalt is more easily

15 David Huron, Sweet Anticipation: Music and the Psychology of Expectation (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006).

16 Ibid., ix.

17 The notion of pitch proximity relies on the metaphor of musical space. While the use this metaphor has been contested in music-philosophical literature—see, e.g., Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (New York: Clarendon Press, 1997)—it is pervasive and useful enough for my purposes to justify reliance on it.

18 Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 73—74.

19 Ibid. 23 formed in the mind of a perceiver when its constituent elements are either in close proximity or follow a logical pattern of continuation. To take an experimental example, studies have shown that listeners exposed to two simultaneous disjunct melodies will mentally combine those melodies into their most conjunct alternatives. Example 1 below shows the result of such an experiment, from David Butler’s The Musician’s Guide to Perception and Cognition.20

Example 1. Butler, Figure 7-5: (a) pitches presented through headphones; (b) perceived pitches.

Although this information was obtained through experiments with fairly experienced, trained listeners of Western art-music—since they had to be able to transcribe what they heard in order for the experiment to work—the experiment nonetheless sheds light on our paradigm listener’s expectations. We can infer that someone accustomed to listening to Western art-music is likely to have learned to expect melodies with primarily small intervals, and that when possible, he will use this experience to impart a particular kind of organizational structure on those melodies.

It is significant that the listeners in Butler’s experiment create patterns that are scalar in contour from the disjunct melodies with which they are presented. There appears to be a certain expectation on the part of the listener that stepwise intervals will be followed by intervals in the

20 Butler, The Musician’s Guide to Perception and Cognition, 108. In this experiment, the subjects hear the two disjunct melodies and are asked to transcribe what they hear. 24 same direction; Huron presents findings that confirm this.21 Perhaps not surprisingly for listeners accustomed to hearing works that follow the basic rules of counterpoint, his research also shows that we tend to expect a large interval—more than a major third—to be followed by motion in the opposite direction, regardless of previous melodic context.22 It should be noted that the data

Huron presents were obtained in experiments using twelve-tone rows without any implication of a tonal center, although the listeners’ expectations were likely influenced by their experience with Western tonal music.23

The influence of tonality on a listener’s perception of pitch—melodic and harmonic—is particularly striking and psychologically complex. Most writers on music cognition characterize tonality as a means of organizing sonic information, a means that requires and invites several kinds of mental processing simultaneously. Lola Cuddy writes:

When musical elements as simple as scales and chord progressions engage a sense of tonality, we have evidence for many processes—the detection of raw acoustic attributes, detection of intervallic relationships, classification and categorization, abstraction of a hierarchy of functions, and the application of knowledge.24

In particular, it is these last three processes—classification and categorization, the abstraction of a hierarchy of functions, and the application of knowledge—with which I am concerned here.

The last of these functions, the application of knowledge, will be dealt with more thoroughly later in this chapter. To construe tonality as a hierarchy of functions is also to construe it as a means of classification and categorization, since hierarchies are manifestations of classifications.

21 Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 77–78.

22 Ibid., 80–85.

23 Ibid.

24 Lola Cuddy, “Tonal Relations,” in Perception and Cognition of Music, ed. Irène Deliège and John Sloboda (East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press, Ltd., 1997), 330. 25

To characterize it as simply a means of classification implies, rightly, that other methods of categorization can serve the same essential function: organizing sonic data. The necessity of having some kind of hierarchical classification system for listening has been demonstrated, among others, by Fred Lerdahl. In particular, he emphasizes this point in his essay “Cognitive

Constraints on Compositional Systems,” which aims to provide psychologically based guidelines for composers who wish their music to be understood by its audience. His second constraint states the point bluntly: “The musical surface must be available for hierarchical structuring by the listening grammar.”25 His focus on the “listening grammar” reflects the idea that the music must be audibly structured in a hierarchical manner—that the listener must be able to perceive the structural hierarchy; in other words, it is not sufficient for the piece to be structured hierarchically if it cannot be heard as such.

The prevalence of tonality as the primary organizing device in Western classical music of the common-practice period makes it the standard by which we evaluate other organizational systems and their harmonic language, whether or not tonality is itself present in the music to which we are currently listening. That is to say, the existence (and analysis) of atonal systems necessarily presupposes the existence of tonality. However, the use of serial compositional techniques as a means of circumventing the tonal hierarchy while retaining some means of logically organizing sonic data also has far-reaching consequences for the musical time period under consideration here. A brief comparison of the ways in which tonality and serialism function as organizing principles will help to illuminate some reasons behind the relative perceptual difficulty of serial music.

25 Fred Lerdahl, “Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems,” in Generative Processes in Music: The Psychology of Performance, Improvisation, and Composition, ed. John Sloboda (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1988), 239. 26

Tonality serves as an organizing device in several ways. Most obviously, the hierarchy of melodic and harmonic pitch associated with common-practice tonality allows the listener to relate pitches to one another according to levels of importance. Further, tonality provides a means of determining relative harmonic stability in ways that are, ostensibly, lost in atonal music. Lerdahl and Jackendoff argue that this system provides the listener with a grouping mechanism that aids in the perception not only of individual melodies and chords, but also of longer, more complex phrase structures.26 Elsewhere, Lerdahl writes that the hierarchical structure inherent in tonality contains two types of “preference rules” that govern the listener’s interpretation of a musical work: “those that refer to stability conditions and those that refer to contextual salience.” For Lerdahl, “given that two events connect, the more stable is the one that is more consonant or spatially closer to the (local) tonic; the more salient is the one that is in a strong metrical position, at a registral extreme, or more significant motivically.”27 In tonal music, then, the listener is given multiple ways of perceiving and creating musical Gestalten in terms of pitch—consonance, proximity to the tonic, register, and motivic importance—but he is also given ways of structuring what he hears in terms of meter, rightly implying an intimate connection between harmonic and rhythmic structure. This connection will be further explored in the next section of this chapter.

Equally importantly, the tonal system helps to establish recognizable patterns of closure—specifically, through cadences. In Gestalt theory, one of the markers of difference between enjoyment and understanding is that we cannot fully understand a temporal Gestalt until

26 Lerdahl and Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music.

27 Fred Lerdahl, “Atonal Prolongational Structure,” Contemporary Music Review 4 (1989): 73.

27 it has ended; therefore, recognizable gestures of closure are essential in the listener’s perception of a musical unit. Smith writes of early Gestalt theorist Carl Stumpf:

Stumpf distinguishes also however between understanding or apprehending a melody and the somewhat different processes which are involved in its aesthetic enjoyment. . . . One can apprehend the Gestalt of a melody only when one has heard the entire sequence of tones in such a way that a total impression has been gained through a discursive process. But the effect of the melody on our feelings does not begin only after it has been completed.28

If we take Stumpf at his word, then the markers of musical closure that are associated with the tonal system are key elements in the formation of the listener’s musical understanding. In other words, in order for the listener to gain a sense of understanding, he must first be able to perceive that the musical thought is complete, and tonal indicators of closure aid in that perception.29

Scruton corroborates this idea in his book The Aesthetics of Music, in which he posits that perceptible temporal boundaries are crucial to a listener’s perception of melodic quality.30

In what ways, then, do the structuring devices provided by serial techniques differ from those provided by functional tonality? One major difference, as Lerdahl argues, is that while functional tonality projects both stability and salience conditions, atonal music works solely with the latter. According to Lerdahl, “The absence of stability conditions makes salience cognitively all the more important. . . . [Atonal] music collapses the distinction between salience and structural importance.”31 He then enumerates several preference rules by which to determine if a

28 Smith, Foundations of Gestalt Theory, 26.

29 I would posit that this manner of thinking about musical comprehension is, in Western culture, singular to the generic category of art music, and to the performative environment unique to that category.

30 Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music (New York: Clarendon Press, 1997), 40–42.

31 Lerdahl, “Atonal Prolongational Structure,” 73. 28 given musical event is more “salient” than another.32 This provides a means for the listener to perceptually organize the musical surface as he listens; however, these rules do not allow for a means of establishing recognizable patterns of closure.

It should be noted that tonality and twelve-tone serialism, as organizational devices, have in common a limitation of pitch availability. By keeping the pitch language within the standard twelve-note division of the octave, both systems limit the amount of information the listener is required to process by a significant amount. The use of microtonal intervals, such as quarter- tones, increases this amount of pitch-related information the listener must process by at least a factor of two, resulting in a significant decrease in accessibility. This effect is strengthened by the fact that microtonal intervals occur relatively rarely in Western repertoire; because of this, following Huron, we might infer that when such intervals do appear, they are likely to be in conflict with the listener’s expectations about the work.

To see more concretely how tonality and melodic structure affect the accessibility of a musical work, let us consider two diametrically opposed pieces: Down a Country Lane by Aaron

Copland (1962), and Le Marteau sans Maître by Pierre Boulez (1954). I chose these works because they exemplify the openly held—and opposing—beliefs of their respective composers regarding the ideal state of musical accessibility. Examples 2 and 3 show a melodic (or at least, single-voice, linear) phrase from each of these pieces. Both works are limited to the twelve-note octave division and fairly standard instrumental techniques, but their similarities do not go much farther. As we can see in Example 2, the melody from Copland’s work adheres to the standard melodic devices that the paradigm listener has come to expect: a tendency toward small intervals and a scalar contour; where leaps larger than a third occur, they are always followed by motion

32 Ibid., 73–74. 29 in the opposite direction (with the exception of the top voice in measure 1), though that motion is not always stepwise. As we might expect, the melody is harmonized with consonant sonorities, whose tonally directed motion aligns with the motion of the melodic phrase.

Example 2. Copland, "Down a Country Lane," mm. 1–8.

By contrast, the segment of Le Marteau sans Maître shown in Example 3—the flute line from the opening, chosen arbitrarily—follows none of these expectational “rules.” The smallest consecutive melodic interval is a minor third, and that occurs only twice (in measures 1 and 9).

Large leaps are sometimes followed with leaps in the same direction (as in measures 3–4). As a result, the contour is extremely disjunct, making it more difficult for the listener to hear the relations between consecutive pitches. The atonal, contrapuntal harmony (not shown here) makes it difficult for the listener to identify tonal direction; since the individual lines are almost always moving in contrary motion, there are conflicting ideas of where the melodic idea should 30 go. Closure of the phrase is reached not because of any property (or properties) of the musical sounds, but by virtue of a held silence at the end of measure 10.

Example 3. Boulez, Le Marteau Sans Maître, alto flute in G, mm. 1–10.

Of course, aspects of pitch are not the only variables between these two examples; there are many other variables contributing to the disparity in musical accessibility between them, including rhythm and timbre. The next section will explore the effects of rhythmic and metrical issues on accessibility.

The Cognitive and Visceral Effects of Rhythm and Meter

Issues of rhythm and meter figure about as prominently in writings on music cognition as issues of melody, harmony, and tonality; however, the effects of rhythmic and metrical aspects of music are almost never discussed in what little musicological literature exists on the issue of accessibility. In this section, I will argue that rhythm and meter are two of the most important properties in determining musical accessibility, at least as significant as the properties relating to 31 pitch. As some have pointed out, the perceptibility of other elements in a musical work—most prominently, melody—are contingent on the perceptibility of rhythm. Alf Gabrielsson writes that “there is no melody without rhythm. . . . [Rhythmic timing], in one way or another, influences practically every aspect of the music.”33 The reader will recall, as well, that Gestalt theorist Carl Stumpf’s definition of melody was dependent on rhythm—according to Stumpf, a melody must have “an intelligible . . . determinate rhythmic structure.”34

A problematic aspect of this domain is that definitions of the term “rhythm” are varied and sometimes laden with evaluative implications. Some attempts to characterize “rhythm,” like definitions of “melody,” have in common a reference to the listener’s perception of the property; others focus on the standard metaphor of musical movement. Grove Music Online lists several definitions of the term, noting one of its evaluative undertones:

[Rhythm] is concerned with the description and understanding of [musical notes’] duration and durational patternings. . . . Claims that a particular piece “lacks rhythm” may be taken to mean that the piece or performance lacks rhythmic regularity and/or a coherent sense of motion. . . . [It] would be strange, for example, to say that a piece was bad because it was very rhythmic.35

Elsewhere rhythm is defined as “two or more events [that] take place within the length of short- term memory”; “the pattern of movement in time”; “that feature of musical composition which

33 Alf Gabrielsson, “Timing in Music Performance,” in Generative Processes in Music, ed. John Sloboda (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 29–30

34 Smith, Foundations of Gestalt Theory, 26.

35 Justin London, “Rhythm,” Grove Music Online, http://grovemusic.com (accessed 7 June 2008).

32 depends on the systematic grouping of notes according to their duration.”36 To avoid any implications of evaluation in my discussion of the domain of rhythm, I will rely on Snyder’s definition, of multiple events that “take place within the length of short-term memory.” As he argues, “The length of short-term memory is important in the definition of rhythm because to form a pattern, the component events of a rhythm must seem directly connected.”37 The listener, in other words, must perceive the connectedness of two musical events in order for them to be properly construed as comprising a rhythm or rhythmic structure.38 It is also worth noting that under this definition, one of the musical events that comprise a rhythmic structure could be silence—as long as that silence is articulated by sound, both preceding and following.

The ease with which a listener perceives and understands a given rhythmic structure is contingent on several variables. One of these is the relative complexity of the rhythm, or the variety of ways in which the beat is subdivided. For instance, a rhythmic structure that moves between duple and triple subdivision of equidistant beats would be somewhat more difficult to apprehend than one that stays consistent in its subdivision. Similarly, if two rhythmic structures are presented simultaneously, the consistency or disparity between their subdivisions will help to determine the ease or difficulty with which the listener perceives the rhythmic structure. Thus, the following two rhythms would be relatively simple (Example 4), and relatively difficult

(Example 5) for the listener to perceive, though neither is particularly complex:

36 Robert Snyder, Music and Memory: An Introduction (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000), 159; “Rhythm,” The Harvard Dictionary of Music, Don Michael Randel, ed. (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2003), 723; “Rhythm,” Oxford English Dictionary, second edition (1989), http://dictionary.oed.com/cgi/entry/50206179?query_type=word&queryword=rhythm&first=1&max_to_show=10& sort_type=alpha&result_place=3&search_id=g5p3-IyfwVt-3440&hilite=50206179 (accessed 7 June 2008).

37 Snyder, Music and Memory, 161.

38 I avoid the use of the term “rhythmic pattern” because of its extraneous connotations of cyclic repetition. 33

Example 4. Unequivocally accessible rhythmic structure.

Example 5. Simple but less accessible rhythmic structure.

Another variable, as in the domain of pitch, is the music’s alignment with or deviation from the listener’s rhythmic expectations. David Huron has shown, through a survey of “several thousand musical works from the Western classical tradition . . . [that] simple meters are roughly six times more common than compound meters. In other words, in Western classical music there exists … a marked preference for binary beat subdivisions.”39 As we will see, this preference carries through to larger levels, showing a Western-classical preference for binary beat groupings as well. David Temperley also notes this phenomenon, expressing it in terms of a preference rule: “MPR [Metrical Preference Rule] 5 (Duple Bias Rule). Prefer duple over triple relationships between levels.”40

39 Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 195.

40 Temperley, The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures, 39. 34

“Meter” is a slightly less elusive term; various definitions include “the organization of the beats of a pulse into a cyclically repeating accent pattern”; “the pattern in which a steady succession of rhythmic pulses is organized”; “the grouping of beats . . . into a recurring pattern

(the bar) defined by accentuation.”41 In all cases, the presence of meter is contingent on the existence of a succession of beats or perceptible time-points, grouped by means of accent patterns. These accent patterns can be determined and reinforced in a variety of ways, including volume, sharpness of attack, rhythmic duration, and melodic or harmonic motion. That meter acts as an organizational device for the temporal aspect of music is well-recognized; as Lerdahl notes, “Most music is metrical, and the immediate location of events is established largely in relation to this or that strong or weak beat. An inability to assign a metrical grid weakens the precision of location of events, resulting in a quality of suspended rhythm.”42

As in the domain of rhythm, the listener’s expectations of meter tend toward the binary;

David Huron’s research, cited above, has shown that duple and quadruple meters are almost twice as common as triple and irregular meters.43 Other research has demonstrated that even when a series of identical sounds—with equal emphasis on volume and duration throughout—is presented to a Western listener in a steady pulse, the listener will often automatically impart a duple meter onto the sequence of sounds.44

41 Snyder, Music and Memory, 160; “Meter,” The Harvard Dictionary of Music, 506; “Meter,” Grove Music Online, http://grovemusic.com (accessed 7 June 2008).

42 Fred Lerdahl, “Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems,” in Generative Processes in Music: The Psychology of Performance, Improvisation, and Composition, ed. John Sloboda (New York: Oxford University Press, 1988), 241.

43 Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 195.

44 Ibid. 35

One of the most striking aspects of the domains of rhythm and meter is the intimate association of both with physical motion; to say that a piece is “rhythmic” is often to imply that it invites sympathetic physical motion in the listener—in other words, dancing. The rhythmic pulse of a piece of music (or any repeating temporal event) is most easily perceived by a listener when its tempo falls between 80 and 100 beats per minute—demonstrating a parallel with the average human heartbeat.45 This physical connection with the rhythmic domain, via a steady musical pulse, contributes significantly to the overall comprehensibility of a work of music. It is this visceral effect that allows a listener like E. M. Forster’s character Mrs. Munt, in Howards

End, to exhibit a most basic type of musical understanding by subtly tapping her foot in time with the main themes. For this reason, the steadiness of the underlying pulse of a passage of music is of vital importance to the listener’s perception of its meter. The steadier the pulse at metric and sub-metric levels, the easier it is for the listener to perceive the meter and pulse as organizational structures. Confirming this, David Temperley points out that the list of preference rules for meter should include “Prefer beats at each level to be maximally evenly spaced,” building on Lerdahl and Jackendoff’s theory as presented in A Generative Theory of Tonal

Music.46 This, however, should not be taken as a universal rule; it may be easier to intuitively understand a work with a metronomic pulse, but such a work may lose its sense of artifactuality, of having been created by a human agent; this idea will be further explored in the section on

“external” influences on musical comprehension.

45 See Huron, Sweet Anticipation, 176. The correlation with the human heartbeat has been established in Makoto Iwanaga, “Relationship between heart rate and preference for tempo of music,” Perceptual and Motor Skills 81, no. 2 (Oct 1995): 435–40.

46 Temperley, The Cognition of Basic Musical Structures, 35. 36

So, the aspects of rhythm that contribute the most significantly to a work’s level of accessibility are the degree of rhythmic complexity, metrical regularity, and the relative steadiness of the underlying pulse. To illustrate some of the ways in which these aspects of the rhythmic and metrical domain contribute to accessibility, I will turn again to Boulez, this time for his Structures 1b for two pianos (1952); and to Stravinsky’s prelude to In Memoriam Dylan

Thomas (1955). (See Examples 6 and 7.) Both are serial works, though Stravinsky’s is only serial melodically, and the row is only five notes long, while Boulez’s is in his total-serialist style. As with the examples above relating to melody and tonality, I do not wish to posit that the only factor contributing to the relative inaccessibility of Structures 1b as compared to In

Memoriam Dylan Thomas is its lack of a perceptible, steady beat; indeed, it is nearly impossible to isolate individual elements of a given work with such certainty. Rather, I ask the reader to consider the influence of rhythm, among all the other factors, on the relative comprehensibility of these two excerpts.

Example 6. Boulez, Structures 1b, mm. 1–10.

Example 7. Stravinsky, Prelude to In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, mm. 1–8.

In Structures 1b, there is a steady “pulse,” but it is not audibly perceptible by the listener; shifting meters across held long tones and isolated shorter events on offbeats serve to weaken the audience’s perception of rhythm, meter, and pulse. Further, the tempo of the pulse, though perceptible only to the performer, is well outside the range of greatest perceptual sensitivity (80–

100 beats per minute). In the prelude to In Memoriam Dylan Thomas, however, there is a constant underlying pulse; even where the meter shifts, at rehearsal A, the underlying pulse stays constant and perceptible. The tempo, additionally, lies within the range that is most easily perceptible by a listener.

In providing a visceral grasping point for the listener, the rhythmic domain thus has the potential to significantly affect the accessibility of a musical work. I posit that this domain should be as critical as that of pitch and tonality for music critics, composers, and musicologists,

39 in discussing the good-making aspects of a work. Of less note, but still bearing significance, are the remaining domains: form, timbre, and text; these can be sufficiently dealt with in brief.

Form and Understanding

The domain of formal structure may seem to be one of the lesser contributors to musical accessibility, since our paradigm listener may not have been trained in the recognition of standard forms. However, regardless of whether the listener can predict the structure or attach a name to it, structural devices such as the degree of repetition and the prominence of distinctive changes in melody, harmony, and/or texture (marking structural divisions) in any given piece have a significant bearing on the ease with which the listener comprehends that work.

In a 1997 essay, Irène Deliège and Marc Mélen present research describing the factors that contribute to a listener’s perception of large-scale formal structure.47 They write that the basis for their study is

in the perception of qualitative changes, which is the basic principle of segmentation of the musical information. . . . The organisation of the segmentations, reiterated at different hierarchical levels, permits the structure of the musical piece to be grasped. Two types of hierarchical organisation are postulated according to the perceptual salience of the changes encountered: when changes are few but very clear, they lead to a strong hierarchy; when segmentations are numerous and easily perceptible but are all of similar salience, they result in a weak hierarchy.48

47 Irène Deliège and Marc Mélen, “Cue Abstraction in the Representation of Musical Form,” in Perception and Cognition of Music, ed. Irène Deliège and John Sloboda, 387–412 (East Sussex, UK: Psychology Press, Ltd., 1997).

48 Ibid., 388. 40

According to Deliège and Mélen, the listener perceives similarity and difference between structural segments based on a process of “cue abstraction”; he “selects salient cues that are themselves incorporated in [rhythmic or pitched] groups. Because of their special temporal and/or acoustic features, these cues are picked up from the musical surface and stored by the listener in working memory.”49 The perception of form relies on the segmentation process, which in turn hinges on the recognition of these cues as they recur and are transformed in the music. Thus, for a work to be readily comprehensible in terms of formal structure, it must be conducive to the creation of such cues and it must bring those cues back to the musical surface at salient moments in the piece. It is interesting to note that in their study, the formal structures perceived by the listener did not always coincide with the “actual,” or theoretical structure.50

Based on this, it could be argued that formal structures with a high degree of thematic repetition, such as rondo form or theme-and-variations-form, are more accessible to the paradigm listener than structures with a lower incidence of repetition or less clear segmentations, such as the through-composed forms favored by some serialists.

The Role of Timbre

Timbre affects musical comprehension in ways that are not entirely understood, in part because the definition of timbre is not entirely clear or uniform. It has been variously defined as simply

“tone color”; as “the term covering all ways that two sounds of the same pitch, loudness, and

49 Ibid., 392.

50 Ibid., 390. 41 apparent duration may differ”; and, most vexingly, as “more than a catalogue of instrumental and vocal sounds, and . . . more than the sonic characteristics left over when differences in loudness and pitch are removed.”51 Most of the research on timbre in the music cognition field has focused on ways to reproduce tone colors.52 There has not been a great deal of scientific research regarding the effects of timbre on musical comprehension, or on the way we comprehend timbre itself, in part because it is a highly complex domain, and a difficult variable to isolate in experiments. (One significant problem is that there is no timbre without pitch, so it is difficult to isolate cognitive aspects of the former from those of the latter.) However, it does seem that timbre plays at least some role in the way we understand music, even if only in ways related to the listener’s expectations.

To generalize, when the sounds produced by the instruments performing a work are ones we are accustomed to hearing from those instruments (here including the human voice in the term “instruments”), the work is much more likely to be considered accessible than if the sounds are in some way distorted or unusual. To take two examples, the electronically distorted timbres in George Crumb’s Black Angels: Thirteen Images from the Dark Lands contribute to a listener’s perception of that work as less accessible than John Cage’s String Quartet in Four Parts, which uses “standard,” acoustic instrumental techniques. Though Cage’s quartet is significantly less rhythmically complex than Crumb’s, both works are atonal and are in sectional forms. Unusual timbres, especially when performed on conventional instruments, are also significantly more

51 “Timbre,” The Harvard Dictionary of Music, 893; Wayne Slawson, Sound Color (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1985, 19; Butler, Musician’s Guide to Perception, 129.

52 See, e.g., Slawson, Sound Color. 42 difficult for the performer to comprehend and execute, since such timbres frequently require the invention of a new notation system (as in Black Angels).

Our understanding of timbre is also strongly affected by our perception of artifactuality in the work and in its performance medium, which is discussed more thoroughly below. Overall, the timbral domain seems to have a relatively minor influence on our understanding; as cognition research develops, a more significant role may be discovered for it.

The Influence of Verbal Texts

The final aspect of a musical work that can have an affect on accessibility, I posit, is the presence of a verbal text. Where such texts occur, I include them as integral part of the works in which they appear, rather than as “extramusical” afterthoughts, as some analysts do. In the present state of research on music cognition, there has been no consideration of the influence of verbal text on the understanding of music, whether the text is sung, spoken, or written as an accompanying program. This is to be expected, since the variables that are introduced with a text are not at all conducive to objective experimentation. Most notably, the presence of a text introduces the need to interpret semantic meaning, which is ostensibly absent in the case of purely instrumental music.

It seems fair to say that the influence that a given text has on the accessibility of its

(literal or programmatic) musical setting depends greatly on the comprehensibility of the text itself. This is due, in part, to the fact that when a text is sung or spoken in any given piece, it

43 tends to occupy the foremost position on the musical surface, making the semantic interpretation of the text a primary concern for the listener. One might argue that a major part of the comprehension of texted music is an understanding of the ways in which the text and its musical setting relate or interact. In order to make any connections between the semantic meaning of the text and the expressive (or inexpressive) qualities of the musical setting, it seems fairly obvious that the listener must first be able to understand the text—meaning, at minimum, to understand either the language in which the it is written or a given translation, and the surface-level meaning of the text. As a general rule, if it is relatively difficult to find the surface-level meaning (if any) of the text being set—for instance, the text of John Cage’s Aria (1958), which, as Cage writes,

“employs vowels and consonants and words from 5 languages: Armenian, Russian, Italian,

French, and English”—the listener will likely have difficulty getting past the attempt to interpret the text to an understanding of the piece as a whole.53 However, if the text has a readily understood surface-level meaning—such as the Dylan Thomas poems Stravinsky chose for In memoriam Dylan Thomas—the listener is more likely to be able to make connections between the semantic (and possibly metaphorical) meanings in the text and the formal devices used in the musical setting.

An additional factor in the way a text affects the comprehensibility of music is whether the text is given visually, as a written accompaniment, or appears aurally, spoken or sung, as part of the piece. In general, it is more difficult for the listener to make connections between a text and music if he is trying to guess at which part of the text is being represented by which part of the music. This creates many of the difficulties in the study of program music. Additionally, if

53 John Cage, Aria [1958] (New York: Henmar Press, C. F. Peters Corporation, 1960), preface to the score. 44 the programmatic text itself is not easily understood, it is all the more difficult to determine whether the musical setting is appropriate to any given part of the text.

On the surface, it might seem that the addition of an extra element for the listener to process would complicate matters, unequivocally decreasing a work’s accessibility. However, the influence of verbal texts on musical comprehensibility is complex and not reducible to a simple formula. If the text being used, whether present aurally or visually, has an easily comprehensible semantic meaning, it may instead serve the listener as something on which to grasp. It may be useful here to make a parallel with American popular music, where music without text is anomalous. Within popular music, the lyrics are often the primary focus of a listener’s interest in a song, and the odd instrumental track on a pop album might be perceived as less accessible than its texted counterparts. In this context, as well as in art-music, the accessibility of the lyrics is a large determinant—often the only determinant—of that of the song.

The presence of a verbal text in a musical work, then, will have an effect on the accessibility of the work as a whole. The domain of text is no different from any of the others discussed to this point: its effect on the work’s accessibility will be commensurate with the relative comprehensibility of the text itself, just as the relative difficulty of perception of pitch, rhythm, form, and timbre each contribute to the comprehensibility of the work as a whole.

Socio-political, or “Extramusical,” Aspects of Accessibility

Although the aspects of musical works and the music cognition literature discussed thus far are enlightening in many ways, we must remember that, in the words of ethnomusicologist Judith

Becker, “All perspectives are partial perspectives and the neuroscience of the brain leaves aside ultimate questions.”54 The cognitive processes by which we come to understand collections of sounds (and words, as applicable) as music are, to be sure, vital; but they do not give us the whole picture. Factors that seemingly have nothing to do with the way we process sounds per se also contribute a great deal to the way we understand those sounds as music. I posit that for our paradigm listeners, such factors include the agency, authenticity, and socio-historical context of making that are associated with a given work; the social and generic meanings entailed in the environment in which that work is performed; and the personal background, training, and individual “habitus of listening” of each audience member.55 I do not mean to imply that this list is comprehensive; I wish only to underline the idea that our understanding of music is not simply determined by the ways in which our brains process sound.

This claim is supported by the notion that accessibility per se is not an intrinsic property of music, but an extrinsic one. Music exhibits or fails to exhibit this property not “purely in virtue of the way [it is],” but rather “in virtue of the way [it interacts] with the world.”56 In order

54 Judith Becker, Deep Listeners: Music, Emotion, and Trancing (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 2004), 9–10.

55 I borrow the phrase “habitus of listening” from Judith Becker, Deep Listening, 69–74; she attributes the phrase to Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, trans. Richard Nice (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1977). A more thorough discussion of the phrase appears in a later chapter of this thesis. 56 Brian Weatherson, “Intrinsic vs. Extrinsic Properties,” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2007 edition), ed. Edward N. Zalta, http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2007/entries/intrinsic-extrinsic/ (accessed 8 June 2008). I have altered only the person of Weatherson’s definition, from first to third. 46 for accessibility to properly be considered an intrinsic property, it would have to exist in the music, the way pitch and rhythm do, and be readily perceptible as such. If this were the case,

Lerdahl’s “cognitive constraints” would suffice to make any work that followed all of them universally comprehensible—not a likely situation.57 Multiple listeners, even those with similar musical training, will rarely find the same piece of music equally accessible. The fact that a piece of music may become more accessible to an individual listener through multiple hearings also attests to the extrinsic quality of accessibility; likewise, a work may become more accessible to the general public over time (think, for example, of Le Sacre du Printemps, which started riots in 1913 and now packs concert halls).

Building on these ideas, I posit that the nonmusical issues discussed below have influence on the accessibility of musical works by virtue of their connections with the way listeners interact with those works. They are likely not the only such influences on accessibility; however, they do present us with a starting point.

57 Lerdahl, “Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems.” 47

Agency and Authenticity

I have already touched on the issue of agency and its relevance to musical comprehension, but a more thorough discussion, in light of the idea of authenticity, will be fruitful. The issue of authenticity is generally given more consideration in popular music studies than in traditional musicology—since it is perceived as a key good-making feature of much popular music—but it has relevance here also. In popular music, a performer is typically seen as “authentic” if his offstage persona is perceived by the audience to match the persona established in his music.58 It is generally also the case that the audience is more accepting of a performer’s perceived authenticity if the audience and performer espouse the same kinds of values. For instance, the

Beatles achieved a certain level of authenticity in the eyes of their fans by visibly representing both the personas that appeared in their songs and the social values held by many of their fans; this was perhaps particularly notable in the mid- to late 1960s, when their public and musical image shifted toward a representation of the 1960s counterculture. To take a specific example,

John Lennon’s social activism and criticism of America’s involvement in the Vietnam War allowed young, liberal Americans to identify with him through his public persona, as they identified with the collective musical persona portrayed by the Beatles.59

By contrast, the art-music public (even when it comprises the same people that listen to popular music) tends to struggle with the concept of authenticity, at least in the sense of drawing

58 For an enlightening discussion of the audience’s perception of authenticity in popular music, specifically, country music—see Robert Brackett, “When You’re Looking at Hank (You’re Looking at Country,” Interpreting Popular Music, 75–107 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

59 Anthony DeCurtis, “John Lennon—Biography,” John Lennon: The Official Site, Apple Corps, Ltd., http://www.johnlennon.com/html/biography.aspx (accessed June 1, 2008). 48 parallels between a musician’s personal and artistic life. Part of this struggle stems from the tendency of art-music to be more composer-centric than performer-centric, and from the nature of the large-scale musical work (for instance, a Beethoven symphony) as expressive of multiple emotions. In the art-music world, it is (rightly) considered a fallacy to imagine that a composer must write music that reflects his state of mind, opinions, or emotions at the time of composition, and we are given various counterexamples, from certain works of Mozart through those of

Michael Torke.

However, authenticity—albeit construed somewhat differently—is significant to art- music evaluation and comprehension as well. We will recall that part of our definition of the word “accessibility” was that the work of music in question must consist in “perceptibly and intentionally organized” sound. The audience, in other words, must be able to perceive that the work has been organized by the act of a human agent in order for the work to be considered musical. David Davies’s idea that we are interested primarily in the “history of making” of any given artwork holds significance here; it is relevant to our understanding of a work whether or not we view it as having been created through human agency.60 The sense of agency, or artifactuality, that is associated with a work has influence over our perception of some of the formal aspects of the music, in that it often affects the degree to which we are willing to exert cognitive effort toward the aim of perceiving those formal properties.

This has particularly significant consequences for the avant-garde art-music of the 1950s and 1960s, as the influence of chance music, electronic music, tape music, and musique concrète gained prominence, as noted above in the section on timbre. When a work has been generated by an apparently random procedure, as in chance music, or has no visible performer, as in purely

60 David Davies, Art as Performance (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004). 49 electronic music, the audience may lose the sense that the work is the artifactual product of a human agent and thus readily comprehensible as music (if, again, we take “music” to properly be considered an artifactual medium). In particular, the formal properties that most often reflect this sense of artifactuality are rhythm and timbre.

Snyder writes that “Rhythmical nuances are a powerful tool for giving a ‘human’ feel to rhythms. It is important to realize that in actual musical performances, this kind of temporal nuance is occurring constantly.”61 Gabrielsson has conducted studies of variance of tempo with various colleagues; he writes that

If you measure the performance of a phrase and calculate its average tempo, you may find that this average tempo in fact never appears at any position in the phrase—it is an average of a continuous variation. But as a listener you find it quite natural and adequate. You would, rather, react (negatively) if the tempo was perfectly constant.62

This negative reaction is, arguably, the result of a failure on the part of either the listener, the performer, or the composer to confer a sense of artifactuality on a given work through its tempo.

If a listener does not get this sense of artifactuality from a piece of music, he is likely to lose the impression that the work is properly understood as music, and the accessibility of the work is reduced (or even eliminated) by virtue of this loss.

As with rhythm, the issue of artifactuality also bears significance for the listener’s perception of timbre. In this case, however, the listener’s impression of human agency behind the work is more closely related to the performance medium of the work than to its strictly formal properties. Heavy or exclusive reliance on tape or electronics, such as in Milton Babbitt’s

Philomel (1964) or Steve Reich’s It’s Gonna Rain (1965), tends to act as a distancing device

61 Snyder, Music and Memory, 166.

62 Gabrielsson, “Timing in Music Performance,” 33. 50 within a piece, especially in a performance setting; the audience is denied (at least in part) the sense of agency that comes with live human performance. Some listeners, in describing their aversion to purely electronic music, will cite the “awkward feeling” of sitting in a concert hall looking at an empty stage; I would argue that this feeling results from the absent sense of agency in performance. Timbres that are created acoustically reinstate at least part of this sense for the listener. If this is correct, timbres affect musical comprehension both by coinciding or contrasting with our expectations, and by instilling (or not) in the listener an impression of human agency through the performance medium.

The issue of authenticity, then, seen as fundamentally based in the listener’s perception of agency in a work’s history of making, exerts considerable influence over the way in which we understand that work. Arguably, the particular aspects of that history—the social and historical context in which the work was produced—hold sway over this perception as well; therefore, we can infer that the knowledge of a work’s history of making and socio-historial context provides the listener with additional tools by which to properly understand the work qua music. I would further speculate that as in popular music, the more closely a listener can identify with the social and historical contexts of a the history of making of the work, the easier it will be to form an understanding of the work as music.

The Environment of Performance

In Musicking, Christopher Small argues for the significance of the environment in which musical performance takes place to the meanings of musical activity.63 I would argue that qualities of this environment have a significant bearing on the listener’s general mindset during a performance of a work, and that this, in turn, affects the way the listener understands the work in question. The standard performance environment of Western classical music is one of its most unique features; with few exceptions (for instance, North Indian classical music) the performance of music is rarely the sole reason for and focus of a social event. A contrast between the performance environments of Western classical and popular musics may prove fruitful here to demonstrate my point.

In the social context in which popular music is performed, the physical expression of musical appreciation—at the time of music-making rather than after—is in part, an expression of musical understanding. Whether a given popular song is intended for dancing or not, its most likely performative environment is one in which dancing is encouraged. Conversely, the most likely performance environment for even the most rhythmic, “danceable” art-music is one in which physical motion is discouraged, and may even get one escorted out of the concert.

Stephen Davies writes in an essay rejecting the necessity of separate evaluative systems for rock and classical music, “Anyway, does no one ever dance to Mozart in the privacy of her home?”64

He is right in that a listener may have a visceral response to Mozart. That he had to qualify his

63 Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening (Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press, 1998). See especially chapters 1 through 3, 19–49.

64 Stephen Davies, “Rock versus Classical Music,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57, no. 2 (Spring 1999): 509. 52 question with “in the privacy of her home,” though, is not insignificant: if dancing to Mozart is an appropriate response at all, it is only appropriate when the dancer is sure not to disturb the quiet, introspective aesthetic experience of any other listeners. (Arguably, this applies to much of the American art-music of the 1950s and 1960s as well.)

I would argue that one of the distinctions between the two performative environments is that in Western popular music, understanding is partially expressed—and expected to be so expressed—through physical motion, through an internalization of the most visceral (usually rhythmic) aspects of the music. That such expression is discouraged or suppressed in the public performance of Western classical music, I believe, has implications for the way we in fact understand the music in question. I do not wish to assert, as Peter Kivy does in Music Alone, that the expression of musical understanding is the same as the understanding itself.65 However, I do believe that the suppression of certain modes of expressing understanding can lead to different ways of listening, or, more generally, of attending to musical performances. In other words, a way of attending to performance that produces a socially undesirable mode of expression is likely to be suppressed in favor of other, more socially acceptable ways.

The modes of attending to performance to which we are accustomed act as our habitual methods of establishing a connective understanding with the work being performed. When we are presented with a work that is performed in a way that is not conducive to those habits— perhaps because it conflates performative genres in unusual ways, or creates one that is entirely new—it is more difficult for us to form an understanding of the work in question, often rendering the work relatively inaccessible. The 1950s and 1960s saw the development of a variety of

65 Peter Kivy, Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990). 53 performance environments that challenged the listeners’ conception of musical performance in ways that affected their general understanding of the works performed. Among these were the theatrical works by the composers in the Fluxus group in New York City; Cagean “happenings”; and performances of purely electronic music. The issues with the latter are grounded in those of authenticity and agency discussed above; with the former two, modes of interacting with the performance and performers had to be modified in order for the works in question to be comprehended by their audiences.

The combination of musical performance and theater was, of course, not new with Cage or Fluxus, but the centrality of the theatrics to the identity of the work, and the use of theatrics to raise questions about artistic identity, were new and puzzled their audiences. I posit that the primary reason such performances were inaccessible to their audiences, rather than being theatricality per se, was that the listeners were being presented with works with which they did not know how to interact. Their habitual modes of attending to performances, in other words, left them unable to make the necessary relations between the elements of the work to produce a sense of coherence. This is not necessarily to be viewed as a fault of the listeners or of the composer/performers; rather, it was simply a situation that needed to be corrected if the works involved were to be comprehended by anyone other than their creators.

What the Listener Brings

The last element under consideration here is the influence of the listener himself. It is practically a cliché to point out that every listener brings something different to a piece of music, but clichés have that status for a reason. Personal variables that affect a listener’s musical comprehension can vary with the degree and kind of one’s musical and nonmusical training; one’s emotional response, due either to the music itself or to associations with external objects, circumstances, or ideas; and with the degree of familiarity one already has with the work. For this last, let us assume for our purposes that we are concerned with a first or second hearing of the work, so that familiarity is essentially a non-issue. However, the first three deserve additional focus.

There can be no doubt of the effect of one’s musical training on one’s musical comprehension, and the implications of this were partially established during my characterization of the “paradigm listener.” It is also worth noting, however, that the kinds of nonmusical training one brings to a work of music can also bear significance for musical understanding. For instance (to give some gross generalizations), people with a strong background in literature may find it easier to follow a musical formal structure if there is a narrative connection attached to it, while those with a background in mathematics may eschew the idea of narrative in favor of abstract form. There is, as yet, no study that I know of that treats such differences in a comprehensive way. Additionally, the informal experience one has had with music informs the way we listen, even if one has had no formal training at all; for instance, a listener who has the kind of experience with Western classical music that is common to most filmgoers will likely

55 listen to classical music informed with an intuitive sense of the tonal and rhythmic systems that inform that particular genre of art-music.

The idiosyncratic associations listeners sometimes form with works of music are often closely tied with their emotional reactions to those works, and can have significant impacts on the way they understand—or fail to understand—those works. Peter Kivy, in his book Sound

Sentiment, uses a personal example (toward the aim of denying that a musical work is expressive by virtue of the emotion it arouses in the listener): Mahler’s song cycle Des Knaben Wunderhorn reminds Kivy of an unhappy time in his life, and so makes him unhappy, although he is aware that the cycle itself is not “unhappy” in emotional character.66 Kivy’s failure to experience the emotional character of the music can be construed as an indication of a sort of misunderstanding of the work (even though he consciously acknowledges that Des Knabens Wunderhorn does not have the emotional affect he derives from it). As Jenefer Robinson argues in her book Deeper than Reason, the listener’s emotional response to a work of art—visual, literary, or musical—has a great deal to contribute to the way he understands that work.67 (As an idiosyncratic emotional response, she uses the example of someone who cries at hearing “Jingle Bells” because he is reminded of “the vanished Christmases of yesteryear.”)68 James O. Young corroborates this idea in asserting that cognitive value can be associated with music in that it can teach us about an object by making us feel a particular way about it.69 The effect of musical expressiveness and emotion on accessibility is highly complex and, unfortunately, cannot be fully explored here, as

66 Peter Kivy, Sound Sentiment (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989), 30.

67 Jenefer Robinson, Deeper than Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 2006).

68 Ibid., 348.

69 James O. Young, “The Cognitive Value of Music,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57, no. 1 (Winter 1999): 41–54. 56 it would require the statement of a complete theory of musical expression. However, it is worth noting that emotion and expressiveness do have a significant effect on a listener’s musical comprehension; at present Robinson’s study is the only comprehensive treatment of that effect, and I recommend it to the reader for a more thorough discussion.

Conclusions

In this chapter we have seen how individual elements of a musical work and aspects of its socio- historial and performative contexts can contribute to the accessibility of that work. I do not claim to have presented a full explanation of the nature of accessibility; other aspects, such as the listener’s emotional response, have a strong effect that I am unable to discuss within the scope of this study. In the next chapter I will use the theory presented here on the nature of accessibility to inform my discussion of its value to the activities of composition, performance, and critical listening.

Chapter 3: The Value of Accessibility

[It] is definitive of a work of art that it can be understood; and I mean by “the experience a work of art offers” an experience of the work in which it is understood. So the experience a work offers is an experience of interacting with it in whatever way it demands if it is to be understood. –Malcolm Budd, “Artistic Value”

Having characterized in detail what sort of property accessibility is, and what kinds of conditions contribute to our perception of that property, we can now return to the question of its value for musical activity. It may seem an odd thing even to ask whether accessibility is a valuable attribute of a musical work. Intuitively, we want to give a privileged position in any theory of musical aesthetics to musical understanding, and we want that understanding to be a valuable activity. Indeed, as Budd puts it, “Philosophical reflection on art would be idle unless art were valuable to us, and the significance of any question that arises in philosophical reflection on art derives directly or ultimately from the light that its answer throws upon the value of art.” By extension, in embarking on a discussion of the nature of accessibility, I have tacitly assumed that it is valuable to us.1 In so doing, I join the many music scholars, philosophers, and other writers who have engaged in the study of musical understanding. Thus, Budd’s assertion quoted above—that we should take the experience offered by an artwork to be an experience in which that work is understood—is a perfectly reasonable one. If we accept this, we would naturally take accessibility per se to be a valuable property. This seems plausible, since few would argue that it is of no importance whether a work of art is ever understood by anyone. (Even the author

1 Malcolm Budd, “Artistic Value” (1995), in Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2004), 263. 58 of the infamous essay “Who Cares if You Listen?” has an audience in mind for his music, even if it is a very small audience.)2

The question of the value of accessibility as such, then, is apparently not problematic.

Yet debates surrounding the issue still occur in popular discourse and discussions of compositional methods, so it seems that the problem persists in another form. I propose that the question with which this debate is really concerned is a slightly different one: Is accessibility necessarily a valuable attribute of the musical work at the time and place of the work’s performance? Will the audience of this performance, here, tonight, understand this work of music? This question entails another: If accessibility is to be valued, who is responsible for creating it? Some have maintained that this burden should fall on the composer, others on the listener; the performer is usually neglected in this debate.

Interestingly, the writers who have asserted that the responsibility for creating accessibility lies with the composer, particularly in and around the time period under discussion, have tended to comprise philosophers of art, musicologists, and a few composers—mainly those whose primary mode of musicking is listening; those who have placed the responsibility on the shoulders of the listeners have tended to be professional composers. (Here too, performers have been a nonentity, at least in written scholarship.) I posit that this is not necessarily due to a simple reluctance to accept responsibility on behalf of one’s own principal mode of musical activity, but to fundamental differences in the views on the ontology and societal function of

2 Milton Babbitt, “Who Cares if You Listen?” The title is somewhat unfortunate, since Babbitt is not arguing that it is irrelevant if music is understood at all; rather, he simply states that it does not matter if lay listeners, such as our paradigm listeners, understand “advanced” music. 59 music that are espoused by the participants of the debate.3 Such views exist, of course, along a continuum; I have here selected two views that fall at opposite ends of the spectrum. Like political views, there are points at which the two extremes agree and overlap, even as their differences appear irreconcilable. The first is of music as a direct, immediate form of communication, sometimes (though not always) semantic in nature, intended primarily as a social tool; the second is of music as an independent, aesthetic art-object, intended primarily for solitary contemplation of its strictly formal properties. Although I will cite several composers and other music scholars in my characterization of these two modes of thought, I do not intend to imply that any of them actually held the views I put forth here. Rather, I wish to use each of their statements as a basis for describing a mostly hypothetical point of view. In my discussion of these two perspectives, I would like to focus on their conceptions of the interaction between composer, performer, and listener, as it is these attitudes by which they differ the most and which hold the most significance for questions surrounding accessibility. With this in mind, let us now turn to a more thorough discussion of the implications of each of these points of view.

Music as direct communication

The broad conception of music as a direct form of communication entails a number of narrower claims. The first is the idea that art-music is to be understood at the time and place of its presentation. The second idea, music as communication, often entails the idea that the function of music is primarily social; under this view, music is intended as a medium for the

3 This argument admittedly depends heavily on the premise that value and function are closely connected concepts, which cannot be defended thoroughly here. 60 exchange of ideas or mental states between disparate individuals. This implies that three distinct sets of people are necessarily involved: the composer, the performer, and the listener. As we will see, this perspective allows that the composer and the performer may be the same person or people, or the performer and the listener may be identical; however, the composer and listener cannot be conflated if music-making is to occur properly. The notion of musical value that most closely connects with this view is tied to the idea of music as having a primarily social function; the value of music is determined not just by the value of the potential social experience it offers, but by the actual experiences had by particular listeners at a particular time. The writers who espouse this view tend to focus on the responsibility of the composer in ensuring that comprehension takes place, and on the necessity of the listener to the completion of the musical process. Among others, they have included Copland, Roy Harris, Ayn Rand (an extreme case), and Virgil Thomson.

Composer, critic, and musicologist Virgil Thomson expresses the idea that the listener is integral—even essential—to the process of music-making:

A musical page must be translated into sound and, yes, interpreted, before it is much good to anybody. At this point criticism enters. It used to amuse me in Spain that it should take three children to play bullfight. One plays bull and another plays torero, while the third stands on the side-lines and cries ‘ole!’ Music is like that. It takes three people to make music properly, one man to write it, another to play it, and a third to criticize it. Anything else is just a rehearsal.4

In Thomson’s vignette, it seems plausible that the composer and performer may be the same person, but the critical listener must be an independent entity. The importance of the listener to an integrated musical process is typical of the view of musical ontology and function that

4 Virgil Thomson, “The State of Music” (1939), excerpted in Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 172. 61 emphasizes immediate, direct communication: The listener must not only be present, but must be capable of criticizing the music at hand, an activity that (one hopes) presumes a reasonably thorough understanding of the thing criticized. Under this view, musicking does not properly take place unless all three roles are accounted for. Additionally, his emphasis on the act of interpretation highlights the need for the listener to re-create the sonic relations of the work in his own mind, in his own way; for Thomson, an active listener is as fundamental to the essential function of music as the composer or performer.

The significance Thomson gives to criticism and interpretation arguably places the

(critical) audience at an equal level of importance to the composer and performer, at least as concerns the fulfillment of the function he considers music to have. Copland shares Thomson’s emphasis on the connection between the acts of composition and interpretation, writing that “[in] the art of Music, creation and interpretation are indissolubly linked, more so than in any of the other arts. . . .”5 We can understand “interpretation,” here and in Thomson’s essay, to comprise both the activities of performing and listening; the performer interprets the score, while the listener interprets the sounding music. Interestingly, we might also understand the word

“creation” to include both the composer and the performer (though “re-creation” is sometimes used for the act of performance). If we take both the concepts of “creation” and “interpretation” to include the activity of performance, we may have a view into the nature of the “indissoluble link” to which Copland refers. This connection further signifies the importance of all three forms of musical activity to the proper creation of the work.

5 Aaron Copland, “The Creative Mind and the Interpretive Mind” (1952), in Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, expanded ed., ed. Elliott Schwartz and Barney Childs (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 147. 62

For Copland, there is also a perceived necessity for the composer to write music that falls within the audience’s cognitive abilities, in order to fulfill that music’s function as a mode of communication. He writes:

There is always the question of how successfully one is communicating with an audience. A composer who cannot in advance calculate to some extent the effect of his piece on the listening public is in for some rude awakenings. . . . Whether or not contemporary composers think about this matter of communication with their audience, they haven't been signally successful at it.6

The concept that composers ought to be able to know to what extent the listening public will understand their work is crucial for the notion that they are responsible for establishing comprehensibility in their own work; these ideas are central to the distinction between the two views under discussion. It is significant to this distinction that Copland observes the failure of some “contemporary composers” to communicate with their audiences, as we will see. Roy

Harris expressed the idea slightly differently; for him, music was a language—“not a word- language, but a time-space language.”7 For Harris, music acts as a mode of communication— more specifically, of non-semantic communication. (Though Copland, our paradigmatic representative of this view, did not indicate what kind of communication would make a composer “successful,” I will assume here that he meant communication of ideas, whether semantic or abstract in nature.)

An extreme version of this perspective, which is rarely posited by musicians but which may give us some insight into the possible views of our paradigm listeners, is represented by the writings of philosopher/writer Ayn Rand. According to Rand, the comprehensibility of a work

6 Ibid., 151–52

7 Roy Harris, cited in Beth E. Levy, “‘The White Hope of American Music;’ or, How Roy Harris Became Western,” American Music 19, no. 2 (Summer 2001): 133. 63 of art determines its status as art; if a work is not comprehensible on a first encounter with it, it is not properly considered art. In her essay “Art and Cognition,” she asserts that in order for a given work to be considered “music”—let alone “good music”—it must be written in such a way that a listener can “integrate” it easily; in other words, it must be organized in such a way that the listener can easily pick up on the organization and thereby make sense of the work.8 Under her theory, the listener is absolved of nearly all responsibility for the comprehension of the work, and nearly all of the burden of accessibility is placed on the composer. That this attitude is more pervasive than the scholarly literature would indicate can be confirmed through more anecdotal evidence: Many listeners have had the experience, upon the performance of a difficult work, of hearing other audience members say (or perhaps saying themselves) “That wasn’t music—that was just noise.” Rand’s is the view that is often reflected in such statements.

One problem faced by those who consider music to be a form of direct communication between composer and audience is that of the fluidity of musical interpretation. As Stephen

Davies has pointed out, Western notation underspecifies many aspects of the work, so that there may be a range of possible “correct” interpretations (if we define “correct interpretations,” as

Davies does, as ones that “capture the composer’s directives and appreciate their relative weight”) for any given work.9 Thus, insofar as the notation of a work underspecifies its salient features, the ideas communicated by even a “faithful” or “correct” performance of the work will be affected by the means of performance. It seems somewhat strange to designate this as a

“problem,” since this concept has much to do with listeners’ fascination with live performance, but it does present a puzzle to composers who are trying to communicate a particular idea to their

8 Ayn Rand, “Art and Cognition,” in The Romantic Manifesto (New York: Signet Books 1975), 78–79.

9 Stephen Davies, Themes in the Philosophy of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 248. 64 listeners. Even if the listener gains a sense of comprehension from the work, the ideas he has perceived as existing in the work may not have been the ones the composer wished to communicate. That musical works, particularly instrumental works, can be interpreted in multiple and equally valid ways remains a difficult one for composers.

A second problem that may arise for this view has to do with the distinction between semantic and abstract modes of communication. Up to this point I have grouped both as the communication of “ideas”; however, depending on whether or not the ideas in question are semantically meaningful, the proponent of this view could have some serious objections to address. If the ideas being communicated are thought to have semantic content, it is certain that formalists such as Peter Kivy will argue that this communication has nothing to do with the music itself.10 A great deal has been written in the past several years refuting the idea that music is a language (much of it by Kivy himself); almost all of it has been based on the notion that music cannot have semantic content without an accompanying text (written, spoken, or sung).11

For proponents of the music-as-communication view, this problem is avoidable by allowing that the communicative properties of music are abstract rather than semantic, but it is a concern of which they must be mindful, since semantic communication is often the first type that comes to mind when considering communication per se.

10 See Peter Kivy, Music Alone: Philosophical Reflections on the Purely Musical Experience (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990).

11 See, e.g., Kivy, Music Alone, op. cit.; Kivy, Introduction to a Philosophy of Music; Ibid., Sound and Semblance: Reflections on Musical Representation (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1984). 65

Music as Independent Art-object

The view that music should be viewed as an independent art-object takes as its basic premise the idea that musical works (once notated or otherwise fixed) are entities unto themselves, and will exist regardless of whether they are ever actually performed or listened to.

Under this view, the “value” of the musical work is generally considered to be its “ultimate” aesthetic value, which may not be recognized at the time of its composition. The ultimate value may manifest itself in a variety of ways, but the one most frequently cited is the “staying power” of a work, its ability to reach and affect audiences generations after its composition (even if it baffles its first audiences). Recall Budd’s description of “the experience a work offers,” cited in the epigraph of this chapter, as “an experience of the work in which it is understood.”12 In the view under consideration, music is evaluated on the basis of the potential experience it offers, rather than on the basis of any actual experience a given listener may have of the work at a given time. As a consequence, those who espouse this view tend to make the claim that art-music need not be understood by any particular audience—particularly an audience of our paradigm listeners—at the time of its composition, since the existence and ultimate value of the work itself are not affected by any musical activity that surrounds it; the immediate accessibility of a work is thus considered inconsequential. There are several premises that are often used to support this claim. One of the most common is the assignment of the responsibility of generating musical comprehension to the listener. This often coincides with a counterargument to Copland’s insistence that the successful composer should be able to predict the reaction of his listeners to his music; some composers argue that the response of the listener tends to be too unpredictable,

12 Budd, “Artistic Value,” 262. 66 as well as socially and historically contingent, to be a reliable point of reference during composition. Finally, and perhaps most pervasively, those who hold this view often use what I call the “argument from progress,” or the argument that composers should not be constrained by the current cognitive abilities of the paradigm listener.

First, let us examine the assertion that the listener is responsible for his or her own understanding. John Cage says of the individual roles played by the composer, performer, and listener:

We normally think that the composer makes something, the performer is faithful to it, and that the business of the listener is to understand it. Yet the act of listening is clearly not the same as the act of performing, nor is either one of them the same as the act of composing. I have found that by saying that they have nothing to do with one another, that each one of those activities can become more centered in itself, and so more open to its natural experience. . . . [When people] listen, they think that the composer, through the performer, has done something to them, forgetting that they are doing it themselves.13

What I wish to emphasize in this passage is Cage’s insistence that the listeners are “doing it themselves,” that they are creating their own understanding of the work, independently of any act on the part of the composer or performer. He also posits here that the activities of composing, performing, and listening are not only entirely separate, but each alone, “centered in itself,” is sufficient for musicking to take place. Under this view, it is possible but not necessary for there to be any interaction between the composer, performer, and/or listener during the process of music-making. The music simply is what it is, and each person experiences the music in a

13 John Cage, “Interview with Roger Reynolds” (1962), in Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, 341.

67 different way. The extent to which Cage separates these three modes of musical activity is perhaps extreme, but he is not alone in holding that the separation is unavoidable.14

Karlheinz Stockhausen has expressed a similar sentiment in perhaps its most blunt form:

“He that hath ears to hear, let him hear.” Today one must add: Get hold of some new ears, or else you will soon no longer hear what is new, but merely the records of your leaky, centuries-old memory.15

The implications of Stockhausen’s claim are clear. It is not the concern of the composer if the listener fails to “hear,” or understand, the music under consideration. Rather, comprehension is solely the concern of the listener if he or she wants to engage in new musical activity. Thus, it is not the responsibility of the composer to ensure that his music is accessible; the listener must fend for himself. In this we can see a parallel with Cage’s statement to the effect that listeners

“think that the composer . . . has done something to them, forgetting that they are doing it themselves.”16

This assertion coincides with the idea that composers may not always be able to predict how or if their listeners will understand their work. Regarding Copland’s position that the composer should be able to anticipate, at least to some extent, the effect that his or her work will have on an audience, some composers have pointed out difficulties. Elliott Carter says of his notoriously difficult music,

You know, one thing I can’t understand . . . is why people have such trouble with modern music. It seems to me to be perfectly intelligible. When I hear one of my pieces again, or listen to the record, I don’t see how people could find this perplexing in any

14 See, e.g., Babbitt, “Who Cares if You Listen?;” Karlheinz Stockhausen, “Five Revolutions since 1950” (1988), in Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, 379–83 (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998).

15 Stockhausen, “Five Revolutions since 1950,” 383.

16 Cage, “Interview with Roger Reynolds,” 341. 68

way. Yet audiences can’t make head or tail of it.17

Similarly, John Harbison has expressed frustration with the idea that composers are evaluated on the basis of the accessibility of their music, “as if composers really have a choice in these matters.”18 His argument rests partly on compositional method—the idea that music, once begun, takes on a life of its own, almost independent of the will of the composer—and partly on the unpredictability of the audience. He is not alone in perceiving these difficulties, especially the latter. In an interview with Arnold Jay Smith, Cage noted, “If I thought about the listeners, I wouldn’t know which ones to think about.”19 The notion of the composer’s ability to anticipate the listener’s reaction to his music, then, is perhaps more complex than Copland would allow

(although this makes his prediction about composers without this ability being “in for some rude awakenings” no less true).

One consequence of such difficulty with anticipating listeners’ reactions is the effective removal of difficult works from the public sphere, and the restriction of their composition and performance to a particular setting: academic institutions. Some, like Babbitt, believe that the phenomenon of the withdrawal of “advanced” music into academic institutions, where it is heard only by a small audience of specialists, is beneficial for the development of that music:

Towards this condition of musical and societal “isolation,” a variety of attitudes has been expressed, usually with the purpose of assigning blame. . . . But to assign blame is to imply that this isolation is unnecessary and undesirable. It is my contention that, on the contrary, this condition is not only inevitable, but potentially advantageous for the

17 Elliott Carter, interview with Jonathan Bernard, Perspectives of New Music 28, no. 2 (Summer 1990), 189.

18 John Harbison, “Two Tanglewood Talks” (1984), in Composers on Modern Musical Culture, 201.

19 John Cage, interview with Arnold Jay Smith, reprinted in Conversing with Cage, second ed., ed. Richard Kostelanetz (New York: Routlege, 2003), 85.

composer and his music.20

According to this argument, which we may call the argument from progress, the “societal isolation” experienced by music that would be inaccessible to the lay listening public allows composers freedom to write as they choose without being constrained by the needs of their audience. In other words, the premise is that this isolation allows—and ought to allow—music to change or progress in ways that it might not were it constrained by the tastes and capabilities of a broader public. It is interesting to note that some years earlier, Alban Berg made a similar argument in relation to the work of his teacher, for the development of the listener’s comprehension to include new compositional techniques, rather than the tempering of compositions to meet the listener’s current needs. Berg writes that, at least in Schoenberg’s music, the beauty of the work lies in exactly those elements that make it inaccessible: “[Its] riches—the thematic, contrapuntal, and rhythmic beauties—have created these very difficulties.”21

While the argument from progress may be compelling, it is also prone to a particular difficulty: the promotion of new music as valuable, simply by virtue of being new. Richard

Maxfield writes in an essay in the style of a prose-poem:

An audience is best served by presenting a challenging occasion suitable to the most sophisticated connoisseur. The more special and atypical the fare the more it offers by virtue of being extraordinary.22

20 Babbitt, “Who Cares if You Listen?” 244.

21 Alban Berg, “Why is Schoenberg’s Music so Hard to Understand?” (1924), in Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 65.

22 Richard Maxfield, “Composers, Performance and Publication” (1963), in Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 353. 70

To be certain, proponents of the argument from progress must be careful to avoid the argument that a new work offers more to a listener than a more established work, simply by virtue of its novelty. Most would agree that there is more than enough new music of poor quality to refute this claim.

Another problem with the argument from progress, especially when used to defend the removal of difficult works from the public sphere, is that any “progress” made has little to no effect on the paradigm listener. If the works in question are restricted solely to the academic institution, the only listeners that can develop the capabilities necessary for comprehension of those works will be those specialists who have (physical) access to their performances. To this objection, Babbitt has argued that “advanced music” should be no more comprehensible to the layman than “the most advanced work in, for example, mathematics, philosophy, and physics.”23

The argument that the layman should understand advanced music no more readily than he would advanced physics, philosophy, or mathematics, however, misses a significant point about the respective functions of those disciplines. Technical advances made in the latter fields may be used to contribute to other developments (for instance, advances in physics may be used for developments in engineering), and thus have an effect on ideas and activities beyond the narrow realm of their discovery; those in music can be used only for writing, performing, and listening to music. There is a distinction, in other words, between advancements in specialized fields that can be used to affect the activities of the lay person (whether they actually are used in that way or not) and advancements in a field that cannot possibly affect the activities of anyone but the involved specialists. Because the nature of music involves a very limited range of application, if technical advances are made in music that are not physically accessible to our paradigm listeners,

23 Babbitt, “Who Cares if You Listen?,” 246. 71 the level of difficulty that is cognitively accessible to them will not progress. If the restriction of

“advanced” music to academic institutions is maintained, that music is thus obliged to exist simultaneously with music that can be effectively performed for our paradigm listeners.

Ironically, it can thus be argued that the prevalence of Babbitt’s attitude toward isolated musical progress is perhaps a primary cause of the current stagnancy of the common-practice canon.

The issue of the composer’s control over accessibility brings up another significant argument for proponents of this view. This is the issue that comprehension, insofar as it is connected with the listener’s expectations, is both historically and culturally dependent. As Kivy points out, “the famous chord in Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, which succeeding generations have found so fascinatingly beautiful, would have been an ugly dissonance to the eighteenth- century ear.”24 That Kivy is concerned here with beauty and not with understanding per se is unproblematic, since both issues arguably deal with the listener’s expectations regarding a musical work. The point is that although a work may not meet an audience’s expectations, cognitively or aesthetically, at the time of composition, musical style and taste may change over time in such a way that the work meets some future audience’s expectations. The social and historical contingency of musical understanding is one of the strongest arguments for this view.

Complexities, Overlaps, and Other Possibilities

It is important to keep in mind that the two views under discussion are hypothetical segments of a complex continuum, and are not always easily distinguished. For instance, Roger

24 Peter Kivy, Introduction to a Philosophy of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002), 85. 72

Sessions, despite the relative inaccessibility of his music, conceives of the musical process as a collaboration between composer, performer, and listener. He writes: “What [the reader of a poem] does in fact is to ‘perform’ it in imagination, imaginatively to re-create and re-experience it. The ‘listener’ to music does fundamentally the same thing. In ‘following’ a performance, he recreates it and makes it his own.”25 For Sessions, although the listener plays a highly active role in the creation of a musical work (demonstrating a parallel with Thomson’s ideology), he also bears a large part of the responsibility for his understanding of the work (showing a parallel with

Cage and Stockhausen).

Another moderate view is that while a work should ultimately be understood, it need not be understood easily by its audience at the time of its creation. In an article focusing on the difficulties surrounding the interpretation of poetry, Oswald Hanfling presents the possibility that

“the difficulties that the poet puts in our way seem to be essential to the enjoyment of poetry. We want, it seems, to grasp what the poet is saying, but to do so only with difficulty.”26 As with

Babbitt’s theory and Berg’s evaluation of his teacher’s work, the implication for us is that the cognitive difficulties presented by an inaccessible piece of music can be said to contribute positively, rather than negatively, to the overall experience of the work. This idea offers some interesting possibilities for the positive value of inaccessibility, but it also seems to reflect David

Huron’s comment cited in the epigraph of Chapter 2: regarding the aesthetic qualities of difficult

25 Roger Sessions, “The Musical Impulse” (1950), in Contemporary Composers on Contemporary Music, expanded ed., ed. Elliott Schwartz and Barney Childs (New York: Da Capo Press, 1998), 186.

26 Oswald Hanfling, “Paradoxes of Aesthetic Distance,” British Journal of Aesthetics 43, no. 2 (April 2003): 176.

73 works, “it would be wrongheaded to focus on the limitations of human minds. But neither is [it] the case that anything is possible.”27

It is, of course, also possible for a composer to value accessibility without believing music to be a form of communication. There is nothing irrational about wishing one’s audience to understand one’s work in purely musical terms, without wishing to communicate or express something beyond or outside the music itself. This attitude could be said to be the one held by

Stravinsky—if, of course, we can take Stravinsky at his word on any issue.

These represent, of course, only a small fraction of the possible responses to the question

“Is accessibility necessarily a desirable quality at the time and place of a work’s performance?”

Indeed, there are bound to be as many answers to this question as ways of thinking about musical ontology and function. While most would agree that accessibility, when created, is almost never a negative attribute of a work, whether or not it is an important attribute of that work is debatable. Again, it is not my intent here to promote any one of these positions as “correct,” but rather to provide the reader with an opportunity to reflect on them in ways that may affect how he or she thinks about music and musical understanding. In the concluding chapter of this thesis,

I return to the question “Should we take accessibility into account when we compose, perform, and listen to music?”

27 Huron, Sweet Anticipation, ix.

Chapter 4: A Habitus of Musicking

Our “habitus of listening” is tacit, unexamined, seemingly completely “natural.” We listen in a particular way without thinking about it, and without realizing that it is even a particular way of listening. . . . A “habitus of listening” suggests, not a necessity nor a rule, but an inclination, a disposition to listen with a particular kind of focus. . . . The stance of the listener is not a given, not natural, but necessarily influenced by place, time, the shared context of culture, and the intricate and irreducible details of one’s personal biography. –Judith Becker, Deep Listeners

With all this in mind, we can now return to the question that sparked this inquiry. Should we, after all, take accessibility into account when we compose, perform, and listen to music? This is, to be sure, a complex question, and the answer is equally complex. The answer depends not only on the ontology of music assumed by the asker, but also on the particular musical objectives of the composer, performer, and listener involved. In pursuing an answer, we must also return to the question of whether we are logically justified in considering accessibility a property that is really under the control of the composer, performer, or listener. It should be noted that although the question “Should we?” implies a prescriptive response, the answers given here are not meant to be taken as such. I merely intend to present them as a range of possibilities.

For the composer, the answer to our main question depends heavily on one’s individual goals. If a composer’s aim is to communicate with his audience—semantically or abstractly—at the time of his work’s first (or second) performance, the current cognitive abilities of that audience should probably be taken into consideration. Likewise, if his conception of music is as an interaction or collaboration with the performers and listeners, the cognitive abilities and conventional expectations of each group must be considered (even if they are then discarded or

75 subordinated to other concerns). If the goal is to advance the possibilities of musical sound within a given work, the particular needs of the current audience may have to be discarded. If the goal is to create something of lasting aesthetic value, the contemporary composer may have some trouble, since that sort of thing is difficult to predict; however, it is likely that the work would need to be accessible in at least some respects in order to stay in the canon beyond one or two performances. The argument that it is impossible for a composer to predict what aspects of his music will be accessible to the paradigm listener is, as we have seen, no longer entirely valid, since the rapid development of music cognition as a field of research. (To be fair, I have not read, much less cited, any composers who have made that argument since that field began its development.) That there are specific musical qualities—at least within a particular tradition— that contribute to accessibility certainly has been and continues to be demonstrated by the research in this area. However, there are still variables—the extramusical aspects discussed in

Chapter 2—and a composer who wishes his work to be directly accessible must be cognizant of those factors as well.

Another possibility for composers who wish their compositions to be understood, but not to adhere strictly to the conventions that are familiar to listeners of Western art-music, is to rethink their conception of the paradigm listener. Composer David Lang has pointed out that it is often not true that the audience for common-practice Western classical music is the same as the audience for new music, as evidenced by audience reactions to symphony concerts on which one new work is programmed (such as those presented by Levine and the Boston Symphony

Orchestra). Instead, Lang and other contemporary composers have chosen to look to the

76 audiences for new visual art, new film, or new dance as the most likely audience for themselves, because, as Lang put it, these audiences “are used to having their ideas challenged by art.”1

Additionally, I have thus far discussed only those variables that contribute to the listener’s perception of works that lies squarely within the tradition of Western art-music.

However, composers that incorporate musics of other cultures into their works, such as the

Balinese gamelan ensemble that has grown popular among Western composers in recent years, or Indian classical music in Western minimalism, will have a great deal of other musical and cultural variables to consider. It will likely be the case for any given composer that his goals shift over time, between different works, and in different settings; this is, I would argue, not only a positive but sometimes a necessary shift. For this reason, considerations of accessibility are, for the composer, often highly sensitive and dynamic, and most will find the need to consider current cognitive limits during at least part of their compositional careers. Even the most hardened avant-garde composers do occasionally find cause to give some significance to accessibility—if not to the paradigm listener, then at least to the performer.

As we have seen, the performer has been largely neglected in previous studies of musical understanding to this point. It is my contention, however, that the performer has more to do with the development of the listener’s understanding than has previously been explored. Let us assume for the moment that at any given performance, the highest possible degree of accessibility is desirable. In this case, it is the performer’s responsibility in creating that quality to emphasize musical qualities that contribute to a sense of organization within the work, so that

1 David Lang, composer forum presented at the Bang on a Can Summer Music Festival at the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, North Adams, Massachusetts, 9 July 2008. Lang further notes that “I actually think that we concentrate too much on the danger of having our art made by specialists, but not enough on the danger of having our art consumed by specialists.” Personal e-mail, 15 September 2008. 77 the listener can more easily extract that organizational structure. I would further assert that this requires a certain degree of understanding of that organizational structure on the part of the performer, even if that understanding is intuitive rather than expressed verbally.2 Although it is certainly possible for a listener to gain a perspective on a work of music that the performer has not presented, it is quite difficult for the listener to do so if the performer displays no understanding of the work at all. The listener’s understanding, then, is at least somewhat contingent on that of the performer. Elliott Carter says of his music, “Many of the things I depended on [in the 1960s], such as the frequent use of septuplets, especially for metric modulation, I have gradually abandoned because I found that players did not play them accurately, even good players.”3 If an aspect of the music is beyond the cognitive ability of the performer—who is meant to have a higher degree of musical training than our paradigm listener—then the listener will have no chance at comprehension of that element.

Some of the musical aspects that can contribute to a listener’s understanding, including rhythm and meter, tempo, melody, and text, are often (at least to some extent) under the control of the performer, although some composers certainly specify the details of their works more thickly than others. Specifically, the performer generally has control over the particular emphasis given to accent patterns within a meter, so that the performance can determine whether or not a particular meter is readily accessible or not. The performer also has control over particular qualities of melodic design (in other words, over melodic phrasing). This is particularly important when considering the idea of melodic closure; it is possible for the

2 This runs counter to the theory of musical understanding that Peter Kivy presents in Music Alone, under which musical understanding both is expressed by and consists in the ability to describe the music verbally.

3 Elliott Carter, interview with Jonathan Bernard, 183. 78 performer to play a particular passage of music in such a way that it sounds “complete” or

“incomplete” as a melody. The performer can also help the listener group particular musical events by providing phrase-direction within a given passage. When the music in question has a spoken or sung text, the vocalist has a responsibility to help the audience comprehend the text through his or her delivery of it. This, as any good vocalist knows, can be accomplished not only through clear diction but also through physical, gestural commentary.

What, then, of the responsibility of the listener? If the role of the critical listener is to understand and evaluate the work of music presented to him, it is all but impossible to avoid considerations of the accessibility of the work in an attempt to fulfill that role. I would argue that the listener’s understanding should precede evaluation, rather than be used as grounds for evaluation. In other words, if a work is inaccessible to the listener, particularly on a first hearing, the inaccessibility of the work should not necessarily be considered grounds for a poor evaluation of the work; evaluation should be suspended until the listener is in a position to better understand the work. A possible exception to this is when it is a stated goal of the composer for that work to be directly accessible for the kind of listener doing the evaluating, in which case a poor evaluation of the piece may be necessary for the composer to realize that he has failed at that goal.

One issue connected with accessibility involves all three kinds of musical activity. The question of whether or not to program a work deemed inaccessible is perhaps the most tangible problem associated with accessibility, and is likely the one most often confronted by professional musicians. For the listener, this question translates to the decision between attending and not attending a concert on which an inaccessible work is to be performed. In this case, purely

79 aesthetic concerns are often not the driving force behind the decision, or at least not the sole impetus; financial issues play a significant role as well, particularly in this country at this time.

This was a concern, for instance, in the debate over Levine’s programming of inaccessible works at the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 2004 and 2005; however noble Levine’s aesthetic goals, such aspirations cannot be fulfilled by a bankrupt orchestra.

Because accessibility is so heavily contingent on these varying conditions, we would do well to ask whether we, as composers, performers, and critical listeners, are justified in considering accessibility to contribute—positively or negatively—to the overall value of a musical work. There are, of course, as many answers to this question as there are kinds of value for a musical work, though here we are primarily concerned with the “aesthetic” value of music, or the value of music as music. Still, within this category there are significant distinctions. In particular, if one views the value of a musical work as an objective (or at least intersubjective), fixed, abstract ideal, it seems that such a volatile characteristic as accessibility cannot factor into the ultimate value of the work. However, if what is valued is the individual, personal experience each person has with a work, it is likely that the accessibility of the work at the time of each experience will have a great deal to do with the determination of the work’s value. Differences in evaluative systems of music per se, in other words, will have a significant effect on the determination of the relative value of accessibility.

Habitus of Musicking

We can see, then, that how we take accessibility into consideration depends heavily on various conditions of the work, the people involved in its realization, and the goals those people have for that work. I posit that we can, without contradiction, maintain multiple viewpoints on the necessity or value of accessibility, and that these relate to what I will call our “habitus of musicking.” Following Becker’s description of the “habitus of listening,” I posit that we can and do maintain multiple habitus when we engage in musical activity, in any capacity, and that we actually expect that (even if not consciously). As Becker observes:

Listeners can shift modes in different contexts, such as the ways in which one listens to music at a chamber music recital, or at a rock concert, or a jazz club, or a movie, or at a salsa club. . . . To sit quietly focused on musical structure at a salsa concert is as inappropriate as break dancing to a Schubert quintet.4

We expect that the listener will behave appropriately to the kind and style of music being performed at any given time; it is my contention that we also expect the listener to listen appropriately, even when the codes of expected behavior are the same across genres. The mode of listening in which we engage at a given time has much to do with our expectations of the work, particularly expectations about its style. When confronted with a work by Carter, our paradigm listeners are likely to listen in a different way than with a work by Cherubini. Along these lines, Stephen Davies has argued that when we listen to music of the past, the ideal mode of listening is to actively suppress the listening habits accumulated by our exposure to other musics; for instance, when listening to Baroque music, we listen in such a way that a diminished seventh chord sounds dissonant, whereas in a work of the 1960s a diminished seventh chord may

4 Becker, Deep Listeners, 69–70. 81 be the most consonant, stable sonority in that work’s harmonic language.5 I would extend the argument further: in addition to harmonic language, we also listen for other musical aspects in different ways depending on the stylistic and socio-historial context of the individual work, particularly meter, form, timbre, and melody. Such shifts in listening habits are both conducive to a contextualized understanding of the work and to a broader understanding of historic-stylistic changes. The listener does not necessarily think actively about switching from one listening habitus to another; however, such a switch can be consciously made—for instance, during a first hearing of an unfamiliar work—with the effect of increasing the listener’s understanding.

We expect these kinds of shifts of habitus from performers as well, as evidenced by the generally high value placed on stylistically “accurate” or informed performance practice.

Composers, too, are expected to simultaneously maintain originality and a personal style, which arguably requires a slight shift of habitus with each piece. I would argue that the habitus of the performers and composers of musical works have a great deal to do with the creation of those of the listener. The habitus of listening of any given listener is, in large measure, formed by their expectations concerning a given piece of music; these expectations are shaped by what the listener hears and has heard; and what he hears is shaped by the habitus of performance and composition displayed by the people involved in those activities. For this reason, I would extend

Becker’s concept of the habitus of listening to a more inclusive habitus of musicking.

The habitus of musicking, like Becker’s habitus of listening, is fundamentally dynamic; each person who engages in musical activity is likely to have several modes of musicking,

5 Stephen Davies, Themes in the Philosophy of Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003), 44. Davies argues that listening to a work of the past with our accumulated, twenty-first-century habits precludes attention to the work’s historical significance in a way that is essentially disrespectful; whether this is true or not, the point remains that we are able to listen in both of these ways if we so choose. 82 between which he can and does shift consciously or unconsciously. Each habitus is associated with a different way of attending to music, such that different aspects of the music may be considered salient for each mode of attention. This has significance for the study of accessibility in particular to the question of its value: each habitus of musicking is likely to have its own way of evaluating music itself, and thus of evaluating the characteristic of accessibility.6 The issue will thus demand attention for each individual case, with consideration given to the particular goals of those involved in the musical activity surrounding the work in question.

In positing the existence and necessity of multiple habitus of musicking, which will tend to lead to multiple systems of evaluation for those habitus, I do not wish to undermine the importance of the value judgment per se. It is not the case that we should withhold evaluation altogether; such judgments are necessary not only to help us make the most of the limited time we are given to experience artworks, but also to help the composer and performer reach their particular goals in the creation of those works. I should also note that the high degree of contingency that I associate with evaluation, both of musical works per se and of their levels of accessibility, is not meant to be an avoidance of taking one particular side or another on the question “Should we care about accessibility?” Rather, it is my view that music serves, at different times and in different contexts, all of the functions and evaluative systems discussed here and more. It is for the participants in a given musical activity, in whatever capacity, to determine the function that applies to the music with which they are dealing at the time, and thus the importance of accessibility to the proper fulfillment of that function. Although there will be strong similarities between many such situations, no single answer will be unequivocally correct

6 This idea contrasts with that put forth by Stephen Davies in his essay “Rock versus Classical Music,” Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 57, no. 2 (Spring 1999), in which he argues that the fact that we attend to different musical features between those two generic categories does not merit separate evaluation systems for them. 83 for all—or, indeed, for any one in particular. And this is as it should be: it is in part the constantly developing nature of musical understanding that drives us to engage in all of our habitus of musicking.

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