European Vs. American in the Context of Post-Modern

EUROPEAN VS. AMERICAN IN THE CONTEXT OF POST-MODERN JAZZ, ROCK AND POP MUSIC Yvetta KAJANOVÁ Európske versus americké v kontexte postmoderného jazzu, rocku a pop music Abstract: In the context of different aesthetic approaches, the specifics of European aesthetic thinking appear very vaguely. However, if we look at the terms as aesthetic ideal, aesthetic experience and aesthetic consciousness, the subject of aesthetics begins to be elucidated in the historical development of classical, modernist, and postmodern art. If disciplines such as psychology or sociology will take over the areas of aesthetic research, then the subject of aesthetic research will be narrow. The same problem also arises in jazz and rock music, where the “object” of the research disappears and becomes equally vague in current development of music. Theorists talk about death of jazz and rock music. The preference of a high culture and a direction towards complicated performances have been recognised as typically European features in both music and art. This was particularly evident in the dominance of European classical music until the beginning of the postmodern era (Tery Riley: In C, 1964). In the second half of the 20th century, the typical European music features the sophistication of musical form and harmony was replaced by another non-European presentation – for example, by the sophistication of jazz harmony in American jazz; or the experiments of the modern European music of the 20th Century were substituted by electronic dance music (Brooklin). Keywords: classical art, jazz, modernism, postmodernism, rock, subject of research In order to encompass the vast and diverse range of contemporary artistic expressions, the aesthetics of the new millennium builds upon well-established approaches, including the phenomenological, semiotic, structural, and formal (i.e. Gestalt theory). However, it is not possible to reconcile these methods as they provide their own explanations on aesthetic phenomena, such as the aesthetic ideal, experience and consciousness. This difficulty renders relative the existence of aesthetic constructs, or they become irrelevant in the context of the approaches' immanent theories. In the 20th and 21st centuries, the aesthetic ideal, experience and consciousness are explained in close regard to psychology and sociology. Aesthetic phenomena also extend to other disciplines, such as pedagogy, musical interpretation, artistic management, or ethics. Some examples follow. According to Nick Riggle, not only is sensibility, that is the sensitivity to perceive works of art, essential to the appreciation of aesthetic values, but the recipient must strive for a “motivating encounter with beauty” as beauty embraces a “wider world of aesthetic values”. Nevertheless, the existence of a vast number of styles, each representing a different aesthetic ideal, complicates the matter. At present, “to have a style” means one has to find their own aesthetic ideal. (Riggle, 2015, p. 435) A large number of styles means having many aesthetic ideals and reflects a pluralistic approach. The aesthetic ideal has even been introduced into such disciplines as ethics and management, which gave it scant recognition in the past. Ethics speaks of “the ideal of aesthetic life” and management theory uses the term “aesthetic leadership”. 20 When, in ethics, moral philosophy deals with the ideal of “aesthetic life” and “lifestyle”, it cannot be devoid of aesthetics and philosophy. “Aesthetic leadership” (referring to “organisational aesthetics”) in any kind of management emphasises the leader‘s personal qualities such as charisma and authenticity, which enable them to influence social and artistic relationships. The category of “aesthetic leadership” (Hansen & Ropo & Sauer, 2007, p. 544-560; Patrick, 2012) was introduced in the mid-1980s and, in music, it manifests itself in the leadership style of a conductor or an ensemble's artistic leader. For example, in regard to the relationship between conductors and musicians, a number of processes is being studied: relational listening, aesthetic judgement (of how something is viewed, e.g. ugly, beautiful, funny, distasteful, etc.), and kinaesthetic empathy, which incorporates, for instance, the conductor‘s gestures and their comprehension by the musicians. The topic of “aesthetic leadership” has been examined applying the knowledge of aesthetics together with the interpretation of psychology and sociology, with regard to the extent that aesthetic, psychological, and social relations are really effective. Terms such as aesthetic elements, aesthetic processes, aesthetic qualities, embodied cognition, and work practices are used to refer to aesthetic phenomena. (Koivunen – Wennes, 2011, p. 51-74) Nomenclature of aesthetics and art studies is even applied to analyses of non-aesthetic phenomena. For instance, David M. Kleinberg-Levin borrows terms, such as “capacity for listening” (Levin, 1989, p. 48), from other disciplines in order to explain an individual‘s growth through self-development which shapes their social and moral character. Levin maintains that listening to oneself is an abstract psychological process figuratively transferred from music, that is a search for analogues (“silence”, “noise”) (Levin, 1989, p. 79) which exist in the real listening and social interactions in our lives. According to Levin (1989, p. 48) aesthetics is a refined cultivation of sensibility, which depends on one‘s sensory capacity and an affective evaluation. Therefore, everybody is capable of making aesthetic judgements, the differences are only in such qualities as extent, depth, and intensity. Hence, Levin also links the general development of personality to sensibility, thus connecting purely psychological and sociological processes with aesthetics. Sensibility, in Nick Riggle‘s terminology, extends into psychology and is related to the ability to concentrate and acquire aesthetic consciousness, thus resulting in an aesthetic experience. However, the fact that perception leads to various types of aesthetic experience means that phenomena and experiences differ from one another. While aesthetic, that is artistic experiences, are typical of classical music audiences, attendees to new, contemporary music 21 concerts are characterised by a preference for cognition and rationality in music: therefore they are seeking cognitive experiences. Listeners to jazz, rock, or electronic dance music, on the other hand, seek out an ecstatic experience; however, this type of experience incorporates also that one which is dominated by synesthesia or kinaesthesia, irrespective of the style and genre. Pragmatic aesthetics explains the 3 types of experience fairly well, emphasising functionality and practical benefits for the listener. At present, it is unimaginable to speak of aesthetic experiences without also taking into consideration their psychological and sociological aspects although, on the other hand, this often obfuscates the topic. Recent works in cognitive psychology (Annammama & Sherry, 2003, p. 259-282) relate aesthetic experiences to the subject‘s embodiment and embodied cognition, the awareness of their feelings and actions (the phenomenological approach), and to senso-motoric and subconscious bodily inputs during abstract thinking (the cognitive subconsciousness). Nevertheless, in the approaches of recent studies, the differentiation between the categorical types of experience is often absent, as they do not distinguish between the aesthetic experience of classical music and the ecstatic one in jazz, rock and pop music. While the aesthetic experience, directed towards inner emotional processes, is especially typical of European classical music of the 17th to 19th centuries, its opposite, the ecstatic experience, is characteristic for jazz, rock, and pop music, since these genres are associated with the recipient‘s bodily behaviour and subconscious body functions (such as breathing, pulse or heartbeat, goose bumps, and sensory motor responses). Neither do contemporary aesthetic theories discriminate between the types of aesthetic experience, but they tend to state that, at present, any style or genre can arouse all kinds of experience, from the artistic one through to cognitive, ecstatic, kinesthetic, and up to synaesthetic. In phenomenology, taking Roman Ingarden‘s views, (Casey & Anderson & Domingo & Jacobson, 2016) the aesthetic ideal is inherent in the object of perception, whereas in semiotics (the theory of sign systems and their meanings), it becomes irrelevant1. According to many semioticians, music phenomena are relatively the same, although there is a difference between cultural communication in the “first world” (for instance, North America and Western Europe) and the “second world” (e.g. Chinese opera is dissimilar to German opera), (Nöth, 1990, p. 30) while the first world itself is highly diverse both culturally and semiotically. To appreciate the distinctiveness of the two worlds, a multi-modal socio-semiotic approach is 1 Semioticians speak of the aesthetic ideal indirectly, e.g. in connection with iconicity in literature, which needs to be reconciled with semiotics. (Nöth, 1990, p. 30) 22 needed. The classic notion of the aesthetic ideal as being both aesthetic perfection and the aesthetic norm for art in its particular time and space (Mistrík, 2013) is likewise unclear even in Gestalt psychology‘s theory of hearing. Since the aesthetic ideal is a specific and classic phenomenon of aesthetics, its explanations by disciplines

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