Music, Mind and the Serious Zappa the Passions of a Virtual Listener
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Music, Mind and the Serious Zappa The Passions of a Virtual Listener Ulrik Volgsten Stockholm University • Studies in Musicology 9 1999/2009 Akademisk avhandling för filosofie doktorsexamen Musikvetenskapliga institutionen Stockholms universitet www.music.su.se © Ulrik Volgsten ISBN 91-7265-020-6 Preamble ’This is a hard one to play’, Frank Zappa once remarked about one of his pieces. The piece in question, the Be-bop Tango, is a rhythmically complex miniature to which he brought people from the audience up on stage to (try to) dance. Of course they failed, which Zappa was soon to point out in the same wry manner that he publicly blamed his musicians when they did not play ’all the right notes’. However, Zappa’s music was hard to pull off for another reason as well. More often than not he would juxtapose musical material and stylistic patterns that according to normal standards doesn’t blend very well. Zappa’s music was (and still is) something of a stylistic chaos. Perhaps one can say something similar about this thesis. On the one hand, the particular themes that are dealt with are rather complex, and on the other, the way they are brought together is unconventional. In other words, this is a “multidisciplinary” work. Now, in contrast to Zappa, I am not a specialist in all the fields that I deal with, which means that a professional philosopher, psychologist or ethnomusicologist is quite likely to find some “wrong notes” here and there. For instance, it may in the end turn out that the argument in part one about the role of language for music fails because I have failed to pay attention to some crucial aspects of the theories, which I call upon as support. But whether the hypotheses prove successful or not, I still hope that my bringing together of some rather odd gloves will point in a fruitful direction for further discussion. While working with this thesis I have benefited from helpful comments and received a lot of helpful material from many persons. Not all have agreed with me, forcing me to try to improve and clarify my claims. Whatever their contribution, I would hereby like to express my thanks to: Per-Erik Adamsson, Owe Ander, Arved Ashby, Bobby Aynsley, Daisy Benson, Jonathan Bernard, Per-Erik Brolinson, Steven Brown, Sten Dahlstedt, Jacob Derkert, Chris Ekman, Katarina Elam, Johanna Ethnersson, Marta Grabocz, Katrin Hauger, Holger Larsen (supervisor), Richard Littlefield, Susan Long, Dan Lundberg, Henrik Lundgren, Colin Martindale, José Luiz Martinez, Björn Merker, Magnus Michaeli, Ruth Millikan, Multi Kulti, Jon Naurin, Hans-Åke Ohlsson, Henrik Román, Göran Rossholm, David Rothenberg, Per Sandberg, Chris Smith, Ingrid Svensson, Göran Sörbom, Eero Tarasti, Pontus von Tell, Folke Tersman, Joakim Tillman, Torbjörn Tännsjö, Anita and Gunnar Volgsten, Kendall Walton, Nils Wallin, Johan Wikberg, Åsa Winther, Malcolm Woodward, Lars-Olof Åhlberg, the staffs at SMB, KB and SPPB. Stockholm, October 21, 1999 Ulrik Volgsten Foreword to the second edition Looking back after ten years I still find my thesis valid. Recent research on “mirror neurons” could probably strengthen it further (on this matter, check out Björn Vickhoff’s doctoral thesis from 2008, “A Perspective Theory of Music Perception and Emotion”, University of Gothenburg). In this second and slightly revised edition I haven’t added any new findings or arguments. Changes are limited to minor corrections and some new chapter headings. A bunch of darlings have been sentenced to footnotes, others have been cold heartedly killed. A couple of chapters in part one have changed place in order to clarify the logic of my argument. But mostly this is the same book as the one I presented as my doctoral thesis in 1999. Hope You enjoy it! Stockholm, summer 2009 Ulrik Volgsten Contents Part I 1. Music is always a commentary on society p. 1 2. Three levels of ideological significance p. 6 3. Opposition and subversion p. 10 4. Ideology in music—a matter of languae or affect (or both)? p. 13 5. Can subjective content be analysed objectively? p. 17 6. Music and scepticism of the senses p. 21 7. Ideology and the webs of scientific belief p. 22 8. A third dogma of empiricism—the ethnomusicologist’s rebuttal p. 25 9. Sympathy and subjection p. 30 10. Belief, desire and the explanation of action p. 33 11. Emotion and the motivation of action p. 35 12. Music as a language of emotions p. 38 13. Music and metaphor p. 41 14. Two structural metaphors: music as oration and as organic structure p. 44 15. Formal structure—is language really necessary? p. 47 16. Cultural innovation as radical change p. 50 17. Music as ontic commitment p. 53 18. Music as superordinate category p. 55 19. What is human about music (and why is language necessary for music as a human cultural artefact)? p. 60 20. An ethological parenthesis p. 63 PART II 21. Cognitive sedimentation—the making-basic of sub- and superordinate categories p. 66 22. Functional explanation and analysis—epistemological benchmarks p. 70 23. A generative theory of music p. 75 24. Affect—the embodied morphology of feeling p. 78 25.Toward a functionalist theory of basic level categorization p. 82 26. In the beginning was the voice—the mother’s voice p. 86 27. Dissipative structures and the musical brain p. 88 28. Aversion, reward and the inverted U-curve p. 91 29. Pleasure, pain and reality p. 94 30. Attention p. 98 31. Attuning to music p. 100 32. Self, other and affect attunement p. 103 33. Affect attunement and the expressiveness of contours p. 107 34. Moods, music and activation p. 109 35. Emotions in imagination p. 113 36. Affect attunement, music and identity p. 118 37. Discursive content and censorship p. 124 PART III 38. Music as an internal world theater: from types of listener to modes of listening p. 130 39. Introducing the Serious Zappa p. 132 40. Orchestral favorites p. 134 41. Playing with “the real guys” p. 137 42. Is the music any good? p. 140 43. Music as air sculpture—from pastiche to guitar derivate p. 143 44. Piano Introduction to Little House I used to Live in (album version) p. 146 45. Piano Introduction to Little House I used to Live in (revised version) p. 149 46. Shut up’n play yer guitar p. 157 47. Sinister Footwear p. 161 48. Pornography to Practical Conservatism p. 165 49. Zappa the cynic p. 168 50. Postmodernism, convention and irony p. 171 51. Little House as paradigm scenario p. 175 52. The Sublime p. 179 53. Sinister Footwear and the birth of the subject p. 183 54. Does humor belong in music? p. 187 55. Project/object: the serious Zappa p. 189 Part I Chapter One Music is always a commentary on society ccording to Frank Zappa, ‘Music always is a commentary on society’.1 What does it, or could it possibly, mean that music is Asuch a commentary—and is it true? That art mirrors society is a common Marxist doctrine, but Zappa certainly was no Marxist, and although there was often an anarchist touch to his work, he became more of a self-made libertarian, even aiming to run for the United States presidency (though he turned down an offer to run for the Libertarian Party). 2 Against this background the statement might seem rather ambiguous. Particularly since its context offers no further clue about what Zappa had in mind. Therefore, and despite the risk of contradicting Zappa’s own view of music (he spoke of his music as being sociological rather than political),3 I will provide some novel sense to the statement and turn it into a thesis of my own.4 For this thesis I suggest two lines of argument, which I hope will be both original and suggestive. The thesis states that music is always ideological. Although there may be many ways by which music is ideological, I will argue first that it is always so because of language and interpretation. More specifically, I claim that language—verbal communication—is a necessary condition for music, and, further, that language is always ideological. A possible counterargument will be examined. This is the claim that the aesthetic properties of music can be analyzed objectively with regard to their perceptual and cognitive conditions, without reference to the subjective reports of any listener. Against this counterargument I argue that for any 1 Quoted from J. Hopkins. “Frank Zappa”, in The Rolling Stone Interviews, vol 1. p.83. Warner Paperback Library, New York 1971. 2 See M. Davis. “Frank Zappa The Blunt Way”, in Creem, July 1988. 3 See P.W. Salvo and B. Salvo. Interview in Melody Maker, January 4, 1974. 4 Although the main hypotheses of this thesis can be found in some form or other in more contemporary work (such as J. Shepherd and P. Wicke. Music and Cultural Theory. Polity Press, Cambridge 1997), the constellation of arguments that I present is, as far as I know, original. scientific analysis of music with such pretentions, verbal reports of listening experiences always have epistemological priority over more technical observations, lest we accept what philosophers call scepticism of the senses. Trivial as it may seem (though its consequences are not, as we shall see), what listeners say they hear is the ultimate evidence we can have as to what they in fact do hear. No reference to acoustics, formal analysis, or whatever, will ever provide stronger evidential support than verbal reports for what a listener hears, what music he or she experiences. But this does not entail that what somebody says about the character or properties of a piece of music cannot be disputed.