Trans Transcultural Music Review Revista Transcultural De Musica, 2009
Through much of its history, tonality has been described in terms of law. And yet it represents t... more Through much of its history, tonality has been described in terms of law. And yet it represents the composer's negotiation of an individual identity within the socialized world of pitch relations, and as such took on more and more of a performative aspect across the twentieth century. With this shift, composers of art music readdressed the basic question: what kind of relation between the individual and the larger social order does art music demonstrate? Tonality is almost infinitely particularized, but we can go even further to say that tonal music is constituted in the act of its description: to describe a sub-type of tonal composition, to name its particular system of contraventions against tonal "law," is to comprise that sub-type. Tonality, in short, is a performative in both J.L. Austin's and Judith Butler's sense. The differences between normativity and performativity boil down to the relation of the individual to the general: if the law presumes compliant subjects, performative theory assumes a certain manner of individual failure, an essential and defining form of noncompliance. Legal theorists justify a normative conception of the law that will in turn justify specific legal decisions; performativity, on the other hand, precludes the kind of power structure that allows and perpetuates such dualisms. In looking into these aspects of tonal discourse, we arrive at the subject of tonal theory itself and the question of what that music-analytic term might actually mean. We find in the end that tonality resembles law only in a dialectical or Foucauldian sense, with principles given their significance by deviation from said principles: it is the contraventions that define the rule.
Table of Contents Introduction / Arved Ashby Music and Cinematic Time 1. "Without Music I Wo... more Table of Contents Introduction / Arved Ashby Music and Cinematic Time 1. "Without Music I Would Be Lost": Scorsese, Goodfellas, and a New Soundtrack Practice / Julie Hubbert 2. Lost in Translation: Popular Music and The Melodramatic Mode of Sofia Coppola / Tim Anderson Music and the Image 3. A Musical Tour of the Bizarre: Popular Music as Fantasy in David Lynch / Gene Willet 4. Songs of Delusion: Popular Music and the Aesthetics of the Self in Wong Kar-wai's Cinema / Giorgio Biancorosso Music as Instrument of Irony and Authenticity 5. O Brother Where Chart Thou?: Pop Music and the Coen Brothers / Jeff Smith 6. You've Heard This One Before: Quentin Tarantino's Scoring Practices from Kill Bill to Inglourious Basterds / Ken Garner 7. Wes Anderson, Ironist and Auteur / Arved Ashby Bibliography Index
Page 1. Institutions, Industries, Technologies Frank Zappa and the Anti-Fetishist Orchestra Arved... more Page 1. Institutions, Industries, Technologies Frank Zappa and the Anti-Fetishist Orchestra Arved Ashby The ... tweedlydeedlydee. -Frank Zappa, 1983 ...
appeared after his thesis submission, and misses most written after 2004, including Edward Venn, ... more appeared after his thesis submission, and misses most written after 2004, including Edward Venn, ‘Cornelius Cardew’s Autumn ’60 for Orchestra’, Tempo 60/238 (2006), 2^7, and my ‘‘‘Well, It’s a Vertebrate’’: Performer Choice in Cardew’s Treatise’, Journal of Musicological Research, 25 (2006), 291^317. He could have read his sources more closely. Referring to a review by John Walters of three recordings (‘Time for a little experiment’,The Guardian, 2 Oct. 2002), Harris applies Walters’s opening sentence about a CD by Christopher Hobbs, ‘English experimental music has been simmering away quietly for more than three decades’, to the instrumentation of a Brazilian pop artist in the third CD. Harris could have chosen his sources more carefully. He notes that Lebrecht’s account of Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra in his Companion to Twentieth-Century Music ‘is simply incorrect’ (p. 6), yet he uses the same book for Nono’s politics. Harris’s book needed editing for capitalization (‘Scratch Music’ and ‘scratch music’ on pp. 60^1) and word use (p. 155: ‘The example . . . bares a visual resemblance’). He seems overly familiar when he refers to ‘Cornelius’ in his preface. Finally, although he thanks informants (Parsons, Skempton, Tilbury, Dave Smith, Chris Shurety of CoMA, Barry Russell, and Anton Lukoszevieze) for talking to him in what he later describes as ‘interviews’, these are not detailed in the footnotes or bibliography, a basic practice in oral history. Building a case for a ‘Cardewist’ manifesto, Harris comes closest to explaining the gaps in his narrative. Quoting Philip Bohlman, in Disciplining Music: Musicology and its Canons (Chicago, 1992), that ethnomusicology challenges ‘the very processes of canonization, which . . . hammered a wedge between our music and the Other’s’ (Bohlman, in Harris, p. 132), Harris concludes that Nyman’s definition of experimental music ‘aids the shoehorning of the legacy [of Cardew] into the Western classical canon as defined by Bohlman’ (p. 133). Nyman, however, accurately described the division between the experimental and avant-garde movements as the avantgarde and experimentalists understood it at the time, an argument that was played out in Perspectives of New Music, Die Reihe, and other forums. The avantgarde identified most closely within the Western tradition and canon (its venues, grants, awards, commissions, and professorships); experimental music identified most closely outside the tradition (see David Nicholls, ‘Avant-garde and Experimental Music’, in Cambridge History of American Music (Cambridge 1998), 518). Many of Nyman’s defining features are ill suited to Russell and Lukoszevieze, Harris’s chosen legatees, so Harris chooses only elements from the history that supports his present. The Legacy of Cornelius Cardew is thus incomplete as a progressive chronological history of Cardew’s aesthetic and its legacy. It explains Morton Feldman, but not Christian Wolff. It omits minimalism. As executor of Cardew’s legacy, Harris is only concerned with his legatees Russell and Lukoszevieze, but not (for example) Gavin Bryars’s music programme at Leicester Polytechnic, the Chicago composer Frank Abbinanti’s support of music by Tilbury and AMM, or Warren Summers’s multilingual production of Paragraph 7 with immigrants in Sydney, Australia. Harris does not explain adequately how Cardew’s political ideology has affected his legatees. However,The Legacy of Cornelius Cardew makes sense when it is read in reverse: Harris’s group of legatees at the end of the book are the subject, while previous chapters provide its support. Harris’s selective history is actually a retrospective history: the inheritance of the Cardew Ensemble, Apartment House, and CoMA. We must look elsewhere for a concise history of Cardew’s work and aesthetic in the context of his time. VIRGINIA ANDERSON Experimental Music Catalogue
The Lyric Suite is Berg's first extended twelve-tone composition, yet by his own description ... more The Lyric Suite is Berg's first extended twelve-tone composition, yet by his own description only half of the work uses twelve-tone techniques. This compositional hybridity raises significant aesthetic and political questions. How could the composer demonstrate what he called ““the possibility of expressing myself musically in that way”” and at the same time artfully prevaricate on the issue of twelve-tone necessity? When in its genesis did the composer understand the Lyric Suite to be a hybrid composition? Here the sketches and autographs——held by the ÖÖsterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna——prove invaluable. Berg's sketches reveal that he began the Lyric Suite by working around the twelve-tone movements, which started with minimal experimental work that he did not keep. Berg attempted some kind of ““twelve-tone music”” with the Lyric Suite, but in failing to differentiate the compositional process from the supposedly pre-compositional, his approach was inconsistent wit...
Page 1. THE PLEASURE OF MODERNIST MUSIC Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology Edited by Arved A... more Page 1. THE PLEASURE OF MODERNIST MUSIC Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology Edited by Arved Ashby Page 2. The Pleasure of Modernist Music Page 3. Eastman Studies in Music Ralph P. Locke, Senior Editor ...
Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction
Arved Ashby
University of California Press, June 2010
336... more Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction Arved Ashby University of California Press, June 2010 336 pages ISBN: 9780520264809
INTRODUCTION 1
1 THE RECORDED MUSICAL TEXT 27
2 RECORDING, REPETITION, AND MEMORY IN ABSOLUTE MUSIC 60
3 SCHNABEL'S RATIONALISM, GOULD'S PRAGMATISM 91
4 DIGITAL MYTHOLOGIES 123
5 BEETHOVEN AND THE IPOD NATION 162
6 PHOTO/PHONO/PORNO 194
7 MAHLER AS IMAGIST 221
ABSTRACT: Recordings are now the primary way we hear classical music, especially the more abstract styles of “absolute” instrumental music. In this original, provocative book, Arved Ashby argues that recording technology has transformed our understanding of art music. Contesting the laments of nostalgic critics, Ashby sees recordings as socially progressive and instruments of a musical vernacular, but also finds that recording and absolute music actually involve similar notions of removing sound from context. He takes stock of technology's impact on classical music, addressing the questions at the heart of the issue. This erudite yet concise study reveals how mechanical reproduction has transformed classical musical culture and the very act of listening, breaking down aesthetic and generational barriers and mixing classical music into the soundtrack of everyday life.
... The questions were devised by Awed Ashby and Margarita Mazo, translations effected by Margari... more ... The questions were devised by Awed Ashby and Margarita Mazo, translations effected by Margarita Mazo and Diana Lentsner. ... Recently I finished a piano quartet for the Bridge Ensemble in Seattle, and it premiered October 13th. ...
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2001
... As philosopher of science Larry Laudan reminds us, a scientific theory functions in two ways:... more ... As philosopher of science Larry Laudan reminds us, a scientific theory functions in two ways: (1) empirically, to explain and predict ... and twelve-tone music have concentrated almost exclu-sively on their empirical aspects-sinking at worst to what Schoenberg called "counting ...
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 1995
... Concept of Row Derivation* ... As evidence of Hauer's influence, scholars have noted... more ... Concept of Row Derivation* ... As evidence of Hauer's influence, scholars have noted the row permutations in Berg's second setting of Theodor Storm's Schliefle mir die Augen beide and the first movement of the Lyric Suite, two works based upon the same series (Fig. ...
Trans Transcultural Music Review Revista Transcultural De Musica, 2009
Through much of its history, tonality has been described in terms of law. And yet it represents t... more Through much of its history, tonality has been described in terms of law. And yet it represents the composer's negotiation of an individual identity within the socialized world of pitch relations, and as such took on more and more of a performative aspect across the twentieth century. With this shift, composers of art music readdressed the basic question: what kind of relation between the individual and the larger social order does art music demonstrate? Tonality is almost infinitely particularized, but we can go even further to say that tonal music is constituted in the act of its description: to describe a sub-type of tonal composition, to name its particular system of contraventions against tonal "law," is to comprise that sub-type. Tonality, in short, is a performative in both J.L. Austin's and Judith Butler's sense. The differences between normativity and performativity boil down to the relation of the individual to the general: if the law presumes compliant subjects, performative theory assumes a certain manner of individual failure, an essential and defining form of noncompliance. Legal theorists justify a normative conception of the law that will in turn justify specific legal decisions; performativity, on the other hand, precludes the kind of power structure that allows and perpetuates such dualisms. In looking into these aspects of tonal discourse, we arrive at the subject of tonal theory itself and the question of what that music-analytic term might actually mean. We find in the end that tonality resembles law only in a dialectical or Foucauldian sense, with principles given their significance by deviation from said principles: it is the contraventions that define the rule.
Table of Contents Introduction / Arved Ashby Music and Cinematic Time 1. "Without Music I Wo... more Table of Contents Introduction / Arved Ashby Music and Cinematic Time 1. "Without Music I Would Be Lost": Scorsese, Goodfellas, and a New Soundtrack Practice / Julie Hubbert 2. Lost in Translation: Popular Music and The Melodramatic Mode of Sofia Coppola / Tim Anderson Music and the Image 3. A Musical Tour of the Bizarre: Popular Music as Fantasy in David Lynch / Gene Willet 4. Songs of Delusion: Popular Music and the Aesthetics of the Self in Wong Kar-wai's Cinema / Giorgio Biancorosso Music as Instrument of Irony and Authenticity 5. O Brother Where Chart Thou?: Pop Music and the Coen Brothers / Jeff Smith 6. You've Heard This One Before: Quentin Tarantino's Scoring Practices from Kill Bill to Inglourious Basterds / Ken Garner 7. Wes Anderson, Ironist and Auteur / Arved Ashby Bibliography Index
Page 1. Institutions, Industries, Technologies Frank Zappa and the Anti-Fetishist Orchestra Arved... more Page 1. Institutions, Industries, Technologies Frank Zappa and the Anti-Fetishist Orchestra Arved Ashby The ... tweedlydeedlydee. -Frank Zappa, 1983 ...
appeared after his thesis submission, and misses most written after 2004, including Edward Venn, ... more appeared after his thesis submission, and misses most written after 2004, including Edward Venn, ‘Cornelius Cardew’s Autumn ’60 for Orchestra’, Tempo 60/238 (2006), 2^7, and my ‘‘‘Well, It’s a Vertebrate’’: Performer Choice in Cardew’s Treatise’, Journal of Musicological Research, 25 (2006), 291^317. He could have read his sources more closely. Referring to a review by John Walters of three recordings (‘Time for a little experiment’,The Guardian, 2 Oct. 2002), Harris applies Walters’s opening sentence about a CD by Christopher Hobbs, ‘English experimental music has been simmering away quietly for more than three decades’, to the instrumentation of a Brazilian pop artist in the third CD. Harris could have chosen his sources more carefully. He notes that Lebrecht’s account of Cardew and the Scratch Orchestra in his Companion to Twentieth-Century Music ‘is simply incorrect’ (p. 6), yet he uses the same book for Nono’s politics. Harris’s book needed editing for capitalization (‘Scratch Music’ and ‘scratch music’ on pp. 60^1) and word use (p. 155: ‘The example . . . bares a visual resemblance’). He seems overly familiar when he refers to ‘Cornelius’ in his preface. Finally, although he thanks informants (Parsons, Skempton, Tilbury, Dave Smith, Chris Shurety of CoMA, Barry Russell, and Anton Lukoszevieze) for talking to him in what he later describes as ‘interviews’, these are not detailed in the footnotes or bibliography, a basic practice in oral history. Building a case for a ‘Cardewist’ manifesto, Harris comes closest to explaining the gaps in his narrative. Quoting Philip Bohlman, in Disciplining Music: Musicology and its Canons (Chicago, 1992), that ethnomusicology challenges ‘the very processes of canonization, which . . . hammered a wedge between our music and the Other’s’ (Bohlman, in Harris, p. 132), Harris concludes that Nyman’s definition of experimental music ‘aids the shoehorning of the legacy [of Cardew] into the Western classical canon as defined by Bohlman’ (p. 133). Nyman, however, accurately described the division between the experimental and avant-garde movements as the avantgarde and experimentalists understood it at the time, an argument that was played out in Perspectives of New Music, Die Reihe, and other forums. The avantgarde identified most closely within the Western tradition and canon (its venues, grants, awards, commissions, and professorships); experimental music identified most closely outside the tradition (see David Nicholls, ‘Avant-garde and Experimental Music’, in Cambridge History of American Music (Cambridge 1998), 518). Many of Nyman’s defining features are ill suited to Russell and Lukoszevieze, Harris’s chosen legatees, so Harris chooses only elements from the history that supports his present. The Legacy of Cornelius Cardew is thus incomplete as a progressive chronological history of Cardew’s aesthetic and its legacy. It explains Morton Feldman, but not Christian Wolff. It omits minimalism. As executor of Cardew’s legacy, Harris is only concerned with his legatees Russell and Lukoszevieze, but not (for example) Gavin Bryars’s music programme at Leicester Polytechnic, the Chicago composer Frank Abbinanti’s support of music by Tilbury and AMM, or Warren Summers’s multilingual production of Paragraph 7 with immigrants in Sydney, Australia. Harris does not explain adequately how Cardew’s political ideology has affected his legatees. However,The Legacy of Cornelius Cardew makes sense when it is read in reverse: Harris’s group of legatees at the end of the book are the subject, while previous chapters provide its support. Harris’s selective history is actually a retrospective history: the inheritance of the Cardew Ensemble, Apartment House, and CoMA. We must look elsewhere for a concise history of Cardew’s work and aesthetic in the context of his time. VIRGINIA ANDERSON Experimental Music Catalogue
The Lyric Suite is Berg's first extended twelve-tone composition, yet by his own description ... more The Lyric Suite is Berg's first extended twelve-tone composition, yet by his own description only half of the work uses twelve-tone techniques. This compositional hybridity raises significant aesthetic and political questions. How could the composer demonstrate what he called ““the possibility of expressing myself musically in that way”” and at the same time artfully prevaricate on the issue of twelve-tone necessity? When in its genesis did the composer understand the Lyric Suite to be a hybrid composition? Here the sketches and autographs——held by the ÖÖsterreichische Nationalbibliothek, Vienna——prove invaluable. Berg's sketches reveal that he began the Lyric Suite by working around the twelve-tone movements, which started with minimal experimental work that he did not keep. Berg attempted some kind of ““twelve-tone music”” with the Lyric Suite, but in failing to differentiate the compositional process from the supposedly pre-compositional, his approach was inconsistent wit...
Page 1. THE PLEASURE OF MODERNIST MUSIC Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology Edited by Arved A... more Page 1. THE PLEASURE OF MODERNIST MUSIC Listening, Meaning, Intention, Ideology Edited by Arved Ashby Page 2. The Pleasure of Modernist Music Page 3. Eastman Studies in Music Ralph P. Locke, Senior Editor ...
Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction
Arved Ashby
University of California Press, June 2010
336... more Absolute Music, Mechanical Reproduction Arved Ashby University of California Press, June 2010 336 pages ISBN: 9780520264809
INTRODUCTION 1
1 THE RECORDED MUSICAL TEXT 27
2 RECORDING, REPETITION, AND MEMORY IN ABSOLUTE MUSIC 60
3 SCHNABEL'S RATIONALISM, GOULD'S PRAGMATISM 91
4 DIGITAL MYTHOLOGIES 123
5 BEETHOVEN AND THE IPOD NATION 162
6 PHOTO/PHONO/PORNO 194
7 MAHLER AS IMAGIST 221
ABSTRACT: Recordings are now the primary way we hear classical music, especially the more abstract styles of “absolute” instrumental music. In this original, provocative book, Arved Ashby argues that recording technology has transformed our understanding of art music. Contesting the laments of nostalgic critics, Ashby sees recordings as socially progressive and instruments of a musical vernacular, but also finds that recording and absolute music actually involve similar notions of removing sound from context. He takes stock of technology's impact on classical music, addressing the questions at the heart of the issue. This erudite yet concise study reveals how mechanical reproduction has transformed classical musical culture and the very act of listening, breaking down aesthetic and generational barriers and mixing classical music into the soundtrack of everyday life.
... The questions were devised by Awed Ashby and Margarita Mazo, translations effected by Margari... more ... The questions were devised by Awed Ashby and Margarita Mazo, translations effected by Margarita Mazo and Diana Lentsner. ... Recently I finished a piano quartet for the Bridge Ensemble in Seattle, and it premiered October 13th. ...
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 2001
... As philosopher of science Larry Laudan reminds us, a scientific theory functions in two ways:... more ... As philosopher of science Larry Laudan reminds us, a scientific theory functions in two ways: (1) empirically, to explain and predict ... and twelve-tone music have concentrated almost exclu-sively on their empirical aspects-sinking at worst to what Schoenberg called "counting ...
Journal of the American Musicological Society, 1995
... Concept of Row Derivation* ... As evidence of Hauer's influence, scholars have noted... more ... Concept of Row Derivation* ... As evidence of Hauer's influence, scholars have noted the row permutations in Berg's second setting of Theodor Storm's Schliefle mir die Augen beide and the first movement of the Lyric Suite, two works based upon the same series (Fig. ...
Uploads
Papers by Arved Ashby
Arved Ashby
University of California Press, June 2010
336 pages
ISBN: 9780520264809
INTRODUCTION 1
1 THE RECORDED MUSICAL TEXT 27
2 RECORDING, REPETITION, AND MEMORY IN ABSOLUTE MUSIC 60
3 SCHNABEL'S RATIONALISM, GOULD'S PRAGMATISM 91
4 DIGITAL MYTHOLOGIES 123
5 BEETHOVEN AND THE IPOD NATION 162
6 PHOTO/PHONO/PORNO 194
7 MAHLER AS IMAGIST 221
ABSTRACT: Recordings are now the primary way we hear classical music, especially the more abstract styles of “absolute” instrumental music. In this original, provocative book, Arved Ashby argues that recording technology has transformed our understanding of art music. Contesting the laments of nostalgic critics, Ashby sees recordings as socially progressive and instruments of a musical vernacular, but also finds that recording and absolute music actually involve similar notions of removing sound from context. He takes stock of technology's impact on classical music, addressing the questions at the heart of the issue. This erudite yet concise study reveals how mechanical reproduction has transformed classical musical culture and the very act of listening, breaking down aesthetic and generational barriers and mixing classical music into the soundtrack of everyday life.
Arved Ashby
University of California Press, June 2010
336 pages
ISBN: 9780520264809
INTRODUCTION 1
1 THE RECORDED MUSICAL TEXT 27
2 RECORDING, REPETITION, AND MEMORY IN ABSOLUTE MUSIC 60
3 SCHNABEL'S RATIONALISM, GOULD'S PRAGMATISM 91
4 DIGITAL MYTHOLOGIES 123
5 BEETHOVEN AND THE IPOD NATION 162
6 PHOTO/PHONO/PORNO 194
7 MAHLER AS IMAGIST 221
ABSTRACT: Recordings are now the primary way we hear classical music, especially the more abstract styles of “absolute” instrumental music. In this original, provocative book, Arved Ashby argues that recording technology has transformed our understanding of art music. Contesting the laments of nostalgic critics, Ashby sees recordings as socially progressive and instruments of a musical vernacular, but also finds that recording and absolute music actually involve similar notions of removing sound from context. He takes stock of technology's impact on classical music, addressing the questions at the heart of the issue. This erudite yet concise study reveals how mechanical reproduction has transformed classical musical culture and the very act of listening, breaking down aesthetic and generational barriers and mixing classical music into the soundtrack of everyday life.