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1932 - 2016

UC san diego department of music, 1967 - 1981

deep listening

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professor of musicology, UCLA

cellist, performance/scholarship

boccherini's body (2005), "carnal musicology"

musical performance as method

the body as method or data

you cannot make a claim about a body based on a note on a page

"... add to this the physical experience of playing this passage, which is a kind of drawing-in toward a centre" from its initial extension, the left arm moves steadily inward toward the chest, and, psychologically, toward home, the familiar pastures of the tenor and b ass ranges. simultaneously... welcoming, grateful."

"the first norm we encounter here...tactile."

"i propose performance and analysis as two faces of interpretation, an act which is both art and science. if we accept this (and doing so is fundamental to the epistemology of a carnal musicology) the whole simplistic and ultimately rather boring notion of an authoritative reading simply auto-digests, leaving us with its compost: that complex layering of interpretations that builds up around any work of art, and, culturally speaking, constitutes the nourishment it must have in order to survive."

historically, performers were not composers. however, improvisation was the bedrock of composition in the baroque period (eg, figured bass, etc)

now, in modern day musicology, we have arrived at the notion that the performance is secondary to the score, which acts as the foundation of musicology.

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professor of africana studies, brown university

phd, american studies, brown university

black noise (1994), hip hop wars (2008)

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"i make no claims to offer a complete history of rap music, nor have I attempted to explain every facet of rap's effects on contemporary american culture and cultures around the world. instead, i describe, theorise, and critique elements of rap, including rap's lyrics, music, culture and style, as well as the social context within which rap music takes place."

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knudsen's research led him to argue in 1926 that the best environment for listening was the reverberation-free outdoors. (254)

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"the result was that listeners at home heard a reproduced but "live" signal that offered a currency and connectedness to other listeners that even the most up-to-date phonograph record was perceived to lack" (239)

"the result was a concert hall that provided a sound similar to that beginning to be heard via electroacoustic technologies in the home" (251)

what happened between the radio and the concert hall?

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"telephone engineers modified their circuits to eradicate the electrical noise; spatial noise was eliminated by the construction of the soundproof and nonreverberant space of the telephone booth" (235)

phonograph: "the act of listening to reproductions was implicitly accepted as culturally equivalent to the act of listening to live performers" (238)

how do these circumstances differ? why might that matter?

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"thomas edison's earliest ideas for creating moving pictures had been stimulated by his invention of the phonograph, and he had intended from the very start to synchronise his images with recorded sounds" (242)

synchronised sound

music in the early vita phone

blackface and sound/image technology

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archival research

acoustics

architectural history

economic history

criticism

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phd, history, princeton

professor of history, princeton

the soundscapes of modernity

sound, architecture, and technology in the early 20th-century

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II: listening to loudspeakers: the electroacoustic soundscape

discusses sound quality

projection & audiences

beginning - pg 242

telephone, phonograph

closing space and time

spacial modification/technical

sound quality

pg 242 - 248

sound manipulation, capturing sounds for picture/film

rapid run-through of different permutations in which people could listen to recorded sound

III: the modern auditorium

material

clarity

pg 248 - 252

auditoriums + how acoustics for auditoriums were made; "unintentional"

pg 252 - end

hollywood bowl echoes

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1893

vintage

grainy/texture/fuzz

what thompson refers to as "noise"

nostalgic

in 3/4 - waltz

warble of the recording/"out of tune" effect that was reproduced primarily from the recording technology of the time

1925

balance is better between the instruments

foxtrot/uptempo feel

more instruments -> improvement of recording technology, able to capture more instruments/sonic input

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structurally, the introduction/non-improvised section follows an overarching AABA structure that features the displacement of the melody to demarcate the different sections. in the improvised section, a lot of the harmonic language utilised in the 7-note motif featured in the introduction is used. much of allen's improvisation is cellular in nature, and repeats, either with rhythmic displacements, tonal displacements or. both. the improvised section also alternates between larger patterns of lyrical, scalic passages and rhythmic, chordal clusters.

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structure, harmony

form

how music "works"

what is music analysis as a method?

an area of focus that you can take for analysing music through formal elements

looking at the patterns in the music to draw connections to the genre/time period/etc surrounding the piece

establishing a set of rules to be able to break them

reverse-engineering how music is made

what does a music theorist do?

analysis - looking at chords, harmony, melod

what things sound like?

how do we describe them?

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"although both jazz chord and set class nomenclature are used in the discussion below, the following commentary is not meant to be an analysis per se. rather, my goal is to use this analytic vocabulary to provide a method of descriptive commentary to the music" (132)

allen's musical signature:

four- and eight-bar structures despite meter

collective improvisation

jazz lexicon

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analysis:

harmonic analysis

"moments"

set class analysis

(personal) narrative

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"geri allen's rich and textured musical language is the result of an equally rich gestation of musical, cultural, religious and intellectual heritages. the comments presented here represent an attempt to embrace that multiplicity of influences, to encourage a hybrid analytic model that acknowledges that diversity, and to urge future conversations that will take jazz out of the margin and into the centre of the conversation about twentieth- and twenty-first-century music studies" (169-170)

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"repetition is common in many forms of indigenous music, and allen is well versed in how it functions within african american folk and vernacular traditions. most significant to this understanding is the notion that repetitions are rarely literal" (137)

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gunther schuller in early jazz

transcribing recordings "in order to bring improvised jazz into the realm of written scores, notated musical examples, and stylistic analysis.

schuller: early jazz combines "the objective research of the historian-musicologist with the subjectivism of an engaged listener and performer-composer" (ix)

ramsey: "the listener, performer, and composer is not historically, culturally, or socially situated vis-a-vis the musical materials under discussion"

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"... the study of the structure of music" (grove)

".... the investigation of what makes music 'work'" (13)

"the formation of scales and chords to procedures for the distribution of pitches in time... to principles of musical form and even semiology"

"while theory clearly is an indispensable part of the study of any one of the world's music systems, musicians who call themselves theorists nearly always confine themselves to western art music, past and present."

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"cyborgs in the real...world tend to use some technology to push and overcome the limits of individual human bodies. I am thinking of interventions like pacemakers that regulate the heart, or laser surgery to fix eyes."

"cyborg theory depends on the basic assumption that all matter, whether created by humans or not, exists on a continuum."

"the castrati's voice exemplifies the notion of cyborg as haraway famously defines it: 'a fusion of the organic and the technical forged in particular historical, cultural practices.'"

donna haraway - famous figure in music and technological research

spectators of these events lived in a world in which mechanical philosophy was emerging but earlier magical sensibilities still echoed. they experienced the castrato as a kind of human machine, a variation among other wondrous objects created by technological attempts to manipulate and supplement natural materials. castrati were "mechanised" to produce sounds in ways that "unmechanised" bodies could not... castrati and machines did not register as identical; everyone could tell the difference between a mechanical singing bird and an altered man singing an aria. likewise, we in the twenty-first century can distinguish between the terminator and the former governor of California. but the distinction between constructed singers and machines was by no means absolute in the seventeenth century. the shared quality of quasi-magical instrumentality between our time and theirs can help us understand how and why castrati functioned in the seventeenth century and how, more generally, their liminality challenges some of our current conceptions of early modern thought.

to consider the castrato's constructed voice in the context of an early modern cyborg and machine culture is to insist that the voice is not only mediated, but that it is materially constructed. it is once again to assert the voice as a kind of expression that emerges from real flesh and blood. and perhaps more importantly, to see the early modern castrato as a special effect and as a cyborg is to defamiliarise our own moment as well as that of the seventeenth century. it forces us to see both the astonishing virtual realities constructed by early moderns and the all-too-barbaric mutilations of and traffic in human bodies that characterise our world today.

what is cyborgian about the castrato?

a "fusion of the organic and the technical" within a historical context

how does gordon use cyborg theory to make the past familiar?

the chapter opens with talking about rome and the barbarini family; the barbarinis were the figure head of catholic religious practices -> the family uses the castrati to augment their success

"castrati and the surgeons who created them worked with the raw materials of the malleable human body" (112)

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situating music within the social and political

make the past familiar, make the present strange

place this dialogue with a history of ideas

"its important in attempting to understand the castrato to escape from our contemporary insistence that these extraordinary men were only victims of a barbaric practice... recall that mutilation was not uncommon in the early modern period, nor is it now. stories of castrati wounded at young ages for the sake of their art are hard for us to take. they make the singers seem so disempowered, so without agency - objects traded about with little or no regard for their individual human subjectivity. to put this in perspective, the seventeenth century was an age in which bodies of all sorts were trafficked and mutilated. fathers regularly gave away daughters in marriage to men older than themselves, and the italians had their own active slave trade and culture of human bondage. indeed, we ought not to be so smug about our own raised consciousness; we have our own mutilation and traffic in bodies. i am thinking of both the global trade in human bodies and of athletes, models and musicians who work their bodies to the point of mutilation every day. "

gordon tries to prove that any moral superiority we might feel in the present should be carefully examined. we often use our modern minds to examine issues of the past without trying to put ourselves in the shoes of those in the past, and it is easy to misjudge with so much contextual distance between the two time periods.

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instruments

cyborg theory (theoretical orientation/part of her methodological toolkit)

visual art

archival sources

contemporaneous publications

(music) history

theory and criticism

description

analysis

criticism

analogies

discussion of other musicologists/historians/sources

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high-voiced male singer, castrated before puberty

17th century - c.1920

spain, germany, italy

high voice without women

lead part in 17th/18th-century

(potentially) viewed as the superstars/pop stars of that time. they were the most important singers in the repertoire; the stars of the show.

"although byzantine, greek, roman, chinese and islamic traditions employed men with altered genitals in sacred and secular rituals, only italians developed and refined the process of training castrato voices, placing these "made" performances at the centre of their music making."

"italian courts and churches hired the earliest castrati because they came with high voices without problematic female bodies and because their power and longevity made them more practical than boy sopranos"

ultimately this was the logic of economics; it would be too expensive/"unsustainable" to constantly invest into boy sopranos that would age, and the logic of sexism; because of the stigma that women had at the time.

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historical musicologist

phd, university of pennsylvania

associate professor, university of virginia

montiverdi's unruly women (2004)

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methods of existing research (17-19)

"a criticism of black music, which i distinguish from much of the work discussed in the first part of this essay, attempts to explain the cultural work the music performs in the social world. this musicocultural criticism ultimately seeks to explain what these various styles and gestures mean and how they generate and achieve their signifying affect. it exposes some of the critical spaces left by earlier models and analytical methods, first by identifying a work's significant musical gestures and then by positioning those gestures within a broader field of musical rhetoric and conventions."

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"if one could sum up baraka's concerns into one research problem, it would be to trace the political economy of african american music from slavery to freedom." (15, referring to amiri baraka's blues people)

"baraka distinguished 'criticism' from the research of historians, whose work he praised. he argued that class and race in the American context should be central to jazz criticism and that writers on black music need to 'set up standards of judgement and aesthetic excellence that depend on. our [black] native knowledge and understanding of the underlying philosophies and local cultural referents that produced blues and jazz in order to produce valid critical writing or commentary about it" (16)

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"in a 1987 interview southern explained that attitudes expressed by her colleagues as she prepared to offer a course in black music fuelled her resolve. some of them contended that there was nothing to learn about the subject because it constituted 'just jazz and spirituals'" (14)

"... her research 'seems benign' because, methodologically speaking, 'she works squarely within the musicological tradition, cherishing its modes of inquiry and its scholarly products, with no desire to undermine or reject the accepted tenets and practices of the profession'". (15, quoting samuel floyd)

didn't seek to revise the tenets of musicology, but merely sought to implement approaches taken with western music onto black music.

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look at the perspective of black scholars and their positions on black music

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-> music theory; analysis

-> musicology ("western art music"); history

-> ethnomusicology (everything outside of western art music); ethnography

tells the story that the eurocentric way of making music should be the standard for every way of music making.

the paradigm of history and anthropology -> the west has history and value, everywhere else has culture.

there was no investment in delving into the historic of music everywhere else, nor towards the culture of western musics.

eg, it would be difficult to find ethnography on string quartets. string quartets have been examined historically and analytically, but rarely ethnographically, bc the way that music departments are structured sometimes still demand the division of history + analysis and culture

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"musicology has come to mean the study of the history of western music in the high-art tradition” (11)

“musicology is perceived as dealing essentially with the factual, the documentary, the verifiable, the analysable, the positivic. musicologists are respected for the facts they know about music. they are not admired for their insight into music as aesthetic experience.” (12)

“there are no generally accepted names for students of western popular musics such as jazz, rock or reggae” (13)

all genres whose origins lie with black folks

saying that there is no space in musicology for non-white genres

charting the music subdisciplines (12-15)

“history, anthropology, the analysis of structure…” and criticism, “the study of the meaning and value of art works” (16)

criticism and analysis:

"qua (wrt) criticism, musical analysis is limited and limiting; yet it is also capable of more rigorous and powerful determinations in its own sphere than are available to formalistic criticism in any of the other arts. that is why the serious critic cannot help being both fascinated and exasperated by analysis. the potential of analysis is formidable, if it can only be taken out of the hothouse of theory and brought out into the real world." (18)

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new musicology - transformation of music studies where people started thinking more critically (socially) about music and music studies

shift towards music as a social phenomenon

(old) musicology can only speak to certain people, and its function is only to speak within this small world of music theory.