Thursday, September 08, 2005
The Rhetorical Question
Rhetoric in music is perhaps the soul of narrative music – particularly where vocal music and texts are concerned. I believe it’s one of the reasons that much musical evolution takes place in vocal genres.
Musical rhetoric derives originally from the oratorical arts. It was included in the original trivium of the liberal arts. It migrated naturally to music, I think.
Bach, Crumb, and others have indulged in math games in their music. Debussy has his “rain” music in “Il pleure dans mon Coeur.” Britten has his four “Sea Interludes.” Barber, in “The Monk and His Cat” and other composers have incorporated the kitten on the keys idea. Bach used rhetorical devices as a structural element (“Kreuz” forms, four sharps, cross motives, etc.). Schutz used musical rhetoric to illustrate starlight, the rocking of cradles, or whatever. The list goes on.
But rhetoric can reach deep into the human psyche, far beyond references to rain or cats or waves crashing on the shore. And while many composers have used rhetoric as a form of surface text painting in their music, it’s perhaps most effective, if not immediately understood, when it dives beneath the surface of human experience. Debussy’s rain is present and constant in the piano, while the singer explains the metaphor of rain, crying, and sorrow. The device becomes an allegory for the experience. When applied in broader and deeper levels, the affekt of rhetoric can be extraordinary. It quite literally “speaks” to people.
But rhetoric and its use in language and music has changed and adapted through the ages, so Alex’s question speaks to the issue: What is the rhetoric of our time?
Rhetoric and politics go together hand in glove. Rhetoric establishes policy, enthrones and dethrones kings and presidents, and incites revolution. (With this in mind, then yes, music is political. Any art is politically or economically based on some level.)
In the music since 1945, I’ve noticed that the rhetoric of contemporary music, especially instrumental in its conception and construction, has focused on the experience or the sentimentality of despair (there’s another essay in this phrase, later) by people for whom life has been, on the whole, pretty good. I’m glad to see that this particularly strange and morbid sentimentality is disappearing, largely from neglect and disinterest.
In recent times, of course, there have been threnodies to the victims of 9-11, and Katrina pieces will be along soon. It is right that we should honor and remember such tragic events in this way, while at the same time, we should remember in music that which has been lost in them: love, living, light, joy, etc. It's the contrast that enhances the affect, I think.
So what is the rhetoric of our time? Or do the different musical streams of musical thought (post-modernism, minimalism, neo-classicism, pop, jazz, funk) have different rhetorics for our fractious times?
(Be sure to read George Buelow’s excellent article on rhetoric in Groves.)
posted by Cary Boyce
10:28 AM
Tuesday, September 06, 2005
Even in Arcadia there is death
Laws of Thermodynamics
Energy exists in many forms, such as heat, light, chemical energy, and electrical energy. Energy is the ability to bring about change or to do work. Thermodynamics is the study of energy.
First Law of Thermodynamics: Energy can be changed from one form to another, but it cannot be created or destroyed. The total amount of energy and matter in the Universe remains constant, merely changing from one form to another. The First Law of Thermodynamics (Conservation) states that energy is always conserved, it cannot be created or destroyed. In essence, energy can be converted from one form into another.
The Second Law of Thermodynamics states that "in all energy exchanges, if no energy enters or leaves the system, the potential energy of the state will always be less than that of the initial state." This is also commonly referred to as entropy. A watchspring-driven watch will run until the potential energy in the spring is converted, and not again until energy is reapplied to the spring to rewind it. A car that has run out of gas will not run again until you walk 10 miles to a gas station and refuel the car. Once the potential energy locked in carbohydrates is converted into kinetic energy (energy in use or motion), the organism will get no more until energy is input again. In the process of energy transfer, some energy will dissipate as heat. Entropy is a measure of disorder: cells are NOT disordered and so have low entropy. The flow of energy maintains order and life. Entropy wins when organisms cease to take in energy and die.
For the more poetically inclined I reccomend Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia in the highest possible terms.
posted by Tom Myron
9:46 AM
Sunday, September 04, 2005
The Dangers of Liberal Artist Groupthink
(Dammit, David, I was totally going to raise this issue yesterday, but you beat me to it. I was even going to call it "Art and Politics" too!)
Around the time of the 2004 presidential election, some composer friends and I were trying to figure out if we knew ANY politically conservative composers. I know one personally, but though he is a devout Christian and an ideological conservative, he is not a supporter of the current administration (he was even talking about voting Libertarian in protest). The gap becomes even more noticeable when looking for politically active conservative art-music composers (politically active defined as having overtly political themes present in one's music or making public statements of a political nature). As a result, I have been in numerous social (and even work-related) situations with groups of musicians and other artists in which Republican-bashing was not only tolerated, but engaged in with an almost cathartic gusto, almost as if the discussion were taking place amongst a meeting of "Bush-Haters Anonymous."
I worry about this. As a supporter of independent thought, I worry that the absence of opposing opinions and ideas in everyday conversation leads to an atrophy of logical reasoning and prevents subpar ideas from being held in check (since God knows there have been plenty of subpar liberal ideas). More importantly, as a liberal myself, I worry that a hegemony of liberal groupthink in the artist community will hamper that community's ability in the long term to engage in any meaningful way with the other, more conservative sectors of our society. In my conversations with primarily New York-based intellectual artists, I often hear an almost shocking disdain for those less fortunate than ourselves with regard to educational opportunity, and a wholesale prejudice against large swaths of our nation's geography. It is precisely this lack of tolerance for dissenting views, coming from a group of people that supposedly values tolerance above all, that I fear may ultimately turn the moderate-to-right-wing cultural mainstream against the arts once and for all.
Luckily, at the moment I feel that the arts are invisible enough in the larger society that most people are unaware of just how lopsidedly the deck is stacked in the liberals' favor in our community. As the internet and the blogosphere makes the truth more and more widely known, however, with everyone from Kyle Gann to Alex Shapiro offering up their unsolicited, uncensored, and, ultimately, unchallenged political views for all to see, I could easily see the equation "arts = liberal" becoming solidified in the minds of many regular folks. If that happens, the larger artist community will have robbed creators of politically oriented work of a chance to reach the people who most need to hear the message. Art has a powerful ability to convince through example, but people need to experience the art in the first place in order for that to happen, and it won't happen if people are deliberately avoiding the art for political reasons.
(Alex, I apologize for singling out your post on the main page, as I feel that it contained important information that needed to be shared, but I was surprised by the lack of dissent to your suggestion that "Bush and Cheney are evil" and believe that it supports my case.)
posted by Ian Moss
4:00 PM
Art and Politics
How many artists – composers, painters, film makers, etc. – do you know who would identify themselves as either Republican or politically right-wing?
I personally know only one – and he keeps pretty quiet about it. (I hear, however, there’s one very eminent American composer who is as well.) Judging from the tenor of several conversations on S21, I’m guessing this is a pretty liberal bunch. Furthermore, in my graduate program, folks are pretty confident about airing overtly left-wing sentiments; they wouldn’t do so if they thought a fight would ensue: certainly, they’re among friends.
Why are so many artists politically left-wing?
posted by David Salvage
12:05 AM
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