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11. Valence of Structure:
Narrative

Music is a fleeting phenomenon. After it has sounded it is gone, and the question is if it can create a coherent narrative through only the unfolding of its structure? Compare music to the representational arts like theatre, film or literature. There the content of each scene and event passes through the viewer or reader but the meaning of it gets stored in memory of something that happened, and can easily be recalled by remembering actual persons, actions, locations and objects involved. Music has none of these and it is therefore much harder to recall what happened in the musical domain since we can’t use our associations anchored in physical reality. However, it is possible to discern a large-scale narrative through a musical structure, based on the order and development of the content and its expression. This is, I believe, what the music philosopher Edward Hanslick saw as the main source of beauty in his famous formalist description of musical content as “tonally moving forms” (Hanslick 1854) (although scholars have argued about exactly what it means ever since!).

Discursiveness in Music-as-art

This is also where classical music takes on a very different role than popular music. Classical music is meant to be followed closely and attentively by a listener, because the meaning resides in changes of musical character as it develops. If the music is only in the background while the listener is concentrating on something else, he has no chance of gaining the kind of musical experience that is otherwise possible. Listening actively on the other hand is aptly described as engaging with music-as-art by Julian Johnson in his modern classic “Who needs classical music?” (2002) This endeavor does require more effort but has the potential to reap richer rewards. Johnson spends a big portion of the book to argue against popular music for this reason, claiming that it is only concerned with an immediate, bodily pleasure of listening and never succeeds in going further than a surface level. For example:

“Contemporary pop music demonstrates the same disparity: its computer technology exhibits an unprecedented capacity for the manipulation of sound, and yet the vast majority of the music it serves insists on a primitive, repetitive simplicity. Rock music is rhythmically some of the most impoverished music the world has ever heard …” (59)

As should be apparent in this framework, I still leave plenty of room for popular music to be effective and attractive, but I agree with Johnson about the higher realm of music-as-art. In theory such music is not restrained to classical instruments or formal concert halls. But it requires freedom of expression in enough directions to be able to say something meaningful -as-art. A rhythmic component of never-ending drum set keeping the same regular beat is a restriction on that freedom that bounds expressive freedom firmly to the ground. Changing the harmony on only the same rhythmic cells of one bar is another one. The Guitar and the Bass are instruments designed to produce a strong, electrically amplified sound, and dynamic and articulatory variation is consequently not prioritized. The sung melody in popular music is generally the most expressive component, but the melodies are still bound to the underlying simple and predictable musical structure. In contrast, classical instruments are designed to produce a very dynamic and expressive tone within the range of the human ear in a suitable acoustic venue (un-amplified). The whole classical tradition actually includes the freedom in all directions from a musical perspective. It can have a steady, groovy rhythmic beat, but it can also completely leave the beat on the ground and levitate in the air. It can produce just as strong dynamic climaxes as rock riffs, but it can also contrast that with extremely sensitive and tender reactions. In total, the reason classical music function as music-as-art is its Discursive nature (Johnson 2002: 64-65). By presenting material that is not just one thing over and over but are several different things in sequence or at once, discursive music tells us something meaningful beyond the immediate expression on the perceptual level. That is, if we just make the time to listen to it.

“To reject classical music as elitist or irrelevant is to sell humanity short; it is to deny our own tension between immediacy and potential for self-development that is its driving force. To side instead with immediacy, with the facticity of the given, without acknowledging the potential for change, transformation, growth, or elaboration, is to opt for an impoverished kind of being. It is to choose a musical culture that celebrates a resistance to transcendence and a refusal of our definitive inner freedom.” (Johnson 2002: 113)

As we have seen, all this meaning emanates from the way music is put together with units and sections with their character or charge, and their relation to each other. But we still need to look further into how we can perceive and handle that, even when applying a more focused, cognitive mindset.

Interpretation

Listening successfully provides the grounds for what we call a proper Interpretation of a musical work. It is possible to infer specific extra-musical meaning to create an elaborate and imaginative interpretation which we will see in chapter 13, but prior to that there exists a general musical meaning which is compatible with, but not exclusively constituted by, such a specific extra-musical meaning. This is why different people may summon different images of the same piece of music – the music is compatible with several different interpretations. However, they also have something in common, which is the musical expression and narrative in itself. Here we need to revisit Meyer and the theory of musical expectancy from chapter 9. The structural level in discursive music, and especially reactionary phrase structures like antecedent-consequent or question-response, present a clear example of his way of conceptualizing meaning in music. Meyer presents three types of meaning emanating from the musical structure (Meyer 1956: 37-38):

• Hypothetical meaning: arises from our expectations of how the music should continue (during antecedent part)

• Evident meaning: a direct response to the actual continuation (after the consequent part)

• Determinate meaning: an a posteriori reflective evaluation of the music after all parts as well as their relation to previous and following material have all been heard.

The meaning of these “meanings” can be discussed, but I think Meyer captures something fundamental about the act of listening to music. Every musical development inevitably grows from what was before. It can either be a continuation of the same or different degrees of variation, novelty or return, and this development is a major source of meaning in music. When we listen, we follow it with appropriate response, and great music allows us to go on a great journey through our matching responses.

Let’s take for example the return of a theme in a symphony, stated in the recapitulation as triumphant and stable after a stormy and unstable development section. This contrast provides a general narrative: somehow the instability gives way to the theme, which overcomes it. (The theme here is nothing more than the musical expression of a particular set of units and can only be identified musically.) Another example is a piece in minor that switches to the major mode towards the end. The simple narrative here is a change of all negative valence of the material in minor (whatever it is), to a positive in major. The endless combinations of specifics in the music fills it with individual content and character, on top of more fundamental themes. This is where it’s possible to deduce more complex emotions than the basic ones we saw at the perceptual level, like hope or reconciliation by the switch from minor to major, or triumph against all odds by the glorious recapitulation of the main theme after disturbing turbulence. Stephen Davies reaches the same conclusion and states that complex emotions can be expressed by the “judiciously ordering” of emotion-characteristics in appearances (Davies 1980: 78). I think the examples work in his favor, but I would like to stress the importance of other features of the structure as well, in addition to the emotional charge on the perceptual level. Because we are not only talking about emotions, but rather more complex packages of a plurality of forces with their respective charge and direction in the musical realm. Individuality within plurality as well as consensus within the collective. The logical laying out of an argument as well as spurs of erratic behavior. We sense that music has an agency which shows in action, gesture, direction, reflection etc. It makes it come alive and it’s why we feel like music has “something to say.” It could be only one thing, a singular message, or many things at once. The difficulty then lies in capturing all of the musical structure and its internal relations as it unfolds. To do this, one needs knowledge and experience of music of the style in question. This is what we will look at when we finally arrive at the top of the stairs of emergence and see the view of context in the next two chapters.

Some of the biggest moments in music often happens at the most spectacular structural transformations where some important material is both kept and at the same time recast as something new. Whatever new it becomes, if it would exist independently, it would only express whatever charge is has, but because of this relation, we perceive both that charge as well as the new entity’s relation to its previous iteration (which would fit in with the “de-terminate meaning” above). This is how music works on several levels at once, and what makes it so hard to describe and define. And the more internal references like this music uses, the more cognitive effort is required to fully grasp it. For example Baroque fugal counterpoint relies heavily on such multi-layered presence – motifs (“subjects” in the style terminology) are constantly recurring in different voices in a “contrapuntal weave.” J. S. Bach was arguably the greatest master of this style, and the wide-spread love for his music comes from the sensation of total integration and reciprocal completeness of a vast plurality of voices, within one piece.

The Classical Canon

Almost all music in the classical canon that is remembered and actively performed to date has a form that is effective in the terms described in this chapter. The whole classical canon is too big and too disparate to find any one property that is essential to all, but I think this is the closest one to approach that: comprising a form that provides an interesting narrative solely in terms of the music, regardless of context. There are few if any pieces that does not provide an interesting musical narrative included in the canon. Such pieces are produced as the majority of all written music in history, but they are just not remembered. More ambitious pieces by contrast are those that are original, individual and unique; they cast things in a new light and are therefore more meaningful and worthy of attention. The big symphonies and sonatas have earned their place in the canon not by the conventionality of their forms, but by the novelty and ingenuity of it.