Distraction in Polyphonic Gesture

1 [Anthony Gritten & Elaine King (eds.), New Perspectives on Music and Gesture (Farnham: Ashgate, 2011), 99-122] Chapter 5 Distraction in Polyphonic Gesture Anthony Gritten Once set out a word takes wing beyond recall. (Horace) If music drifts relatively mindless of the pressure put on it by interpretative intervention, then how might the listener engage with it? What type of aural intentionality might be appropriate if it is true that in the contemporary era Music escapes from musicians Attali : cavalier attitude of music to its own future? ? How might the listener respond to the Concerned with such issues around perception, intentionality, and responsibility, this chapter complicates an attractive and commonsensical thesis that has been circulating for as long as people have talked about music. In the last quarter century or so, the thesis has afforded a welcome and emphatic paradigm shift in the humanities (back) towards humanity and its citizens, and in the case of music towards the ecologically grounded concerns that motivate the judgements that real listeners make and debate as part of their engagement with music. This thesis has been phrased in 2 various ways, of which the following statement is representative: people can and do enjoy music without being able to make what are, in terms of musicological representation, the most elementary and basic perceptual judgements Cook : 218; cf. Cook 1987, 1994). Acknowledging this statement s kernel of truth, I note, as Nicholas Cook did and still does, that the situation is somewhat more complex. This chapter unpacks one issue that makes it so, working in the wake of the dialogical turn in the humanities that readings of Mikhail Bakhtin have inspired, and in the shadow of Walter Benjamin s lifelong concern to understand the decay of experience that has characterized Modernity. My intention is to suggest one way of accounting for the invigorating experience of listening to musical gestures and to begin to loosen the stranglehold of an uncritical and partial appropriation of Bakhtin that has worked its way into many disciplines, musicology included. What might it mean to suggest that dialogic and distraction are words we live by, and what might the consequences be for understanding musical gestures? I In the third movement of Stravinsky s Violin Concerto (1931), Aria II, one of the solo violin s gestures in the first section exhibits a multi-dimensionality, opening its constituent voices outwards towards gestures that can be heard in Bach s Double Concerto, Brahms Violin Concerto, and Tchaikovsky s Violin Concerto (Examples 5.1– 4). The presence of such multi-dimensionality within the aesthetic fabric of this and other works has generated an industry of scholarship devoted to searching for the right terminology for such gestures, from the vulgar Freudianism of quote-spotting through to aesthetically sophisticated interpretations of the music s relationships to its others: allusion, re-modelling, pastiche, parody, intertextuality, reference, sideshadowing, recomposition, quotation, wrong-note harmony, multi-voicedness, and so on. 3 [insert Examples 5.1–4 here – all portrait] Example 5.1 Stravinsky, Concerto for Violin, III, bars 77–9 with relevant gesture circled in the extract Example 5.2 Bach, Concerto for Two Violins in D Minor, BWV 1043, II, bars 16-19 with relevant gesture circled in the extract Example 5.3 Brahms, Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 77, I, bars 445–50 with relevant gesture circled in the extract Example 5.4 Tchaikovsky, Violin Concerto in D Major, Op. 35, II, bars 39–51 with relevant gesture circled in the extract A brief context for the multi-dimensionality of this gesture is useful here. It hardly needs pointing out that Stravinsky s music is dominated by agon. From the shock tactics of The Rite of Spring to the ritual juxtapositions of Symphonies of Wind Instruments to the conflict of styles in Apollo to the tonal parody of the Symphony in C to the hieratic panels of Threni, it is an infamous Stravinskyian signature, both the technique and the result. Many have written about the extraordinary influence of agon, using or coining terms like concerto principle Asaf yev , stratification and interlock (Cone 1962), concertante idea (Walsh 1993), discontinuity (Hasty 1986; Kielian-Gilbert 1991), drobnost (Taruskin 1996), explosive disintegration (White 1930), anti-organicism (Rehding 1998), moment form (Kramer 1978, 1988) and block juxtaposition (Van den Toorn 1983; Cross 1998), to cite only a few. The particular agon within this gesture in Aria II is, like the writing in Apollo a few years earlier, softer in tone than in some Stravinsky, and contributes to a strain of expressive tendresse in Stravinsky that is yet to receive proper critical attention. Some preliminary observations can be made about the agon of voices in this single Stravinskyian gesture. The three other gestures embody varying degrees of 4 similarity to the gesture in Aria II, and thus their voices can be heard differently within it. The Bachian voice is initially embodied as a result of Stravinsky reading the notes off the stave and ignoring Bach s key signature, and bears the closest material resemblance to the Bach. The Brahmsian voice is used most frequently at the same transposition levels as its two occurrences in the Brahms (bars 206 and 445): E sharp–F sharp and G sharp–A appoggiaturas. The Tchaikovskyian voice is furthest removed in syntax, but seems through its generic affiliations and stylistic attributes to contribute to the overall tone of the Stravinskyian gesture; many other musical moments could have been invoked in order to illustrate such generic links outwards from Aria II. More generally, as Aria II unfolds, the appoggiatura gesture takes with it some of these other overtones, and it comes to play a quasi-structural role in the movement. In George Balanchine s 1972 choreography of the concerto, Aria II was created as a Pas de Deux and the appoggiatura gesture was taken up directly and centrally in the dance (Jordan 2007: 184–8). This violinistic gesture in Aria II has an individuality, autonomy, and selfmanaging quality that is not co-extensive with the musical work as a whole, and a multiplicity of meaning and function that exceeds the boundaries of its syntax. It is found and constructed at the middle levels of perception, and is thus implicated as anthropomorphic because it fits via metaphorical transfer into its virtual world like the listener does into hers: it has parts (appoggiatura, leap down to longer note, overall descent in lower part), is found in groups (there are three here, and various groups later in Aria II), and is subject to wider imperatives (the movement s A major / F sharp minor tonality, the physical constraints of violin bowing, the stylized expressive topos of grief). For all these reasons and more, this gesture in Aria II can be described in Bakhtinian terms as a matter of polyphony. 5 II What does Bakhtin mean by polyphony? In Problems of Dostoevsky s Poetics Bakhtin develops a philosophy of consciousness, rethinking the essentially Hegelian question of how part and whole relate to each other. Unlike his earlier writings, in which the discourse was a mixture of philosophical aesthetics and phenomenology, his nominal subject here is literary theory and the novel, and thus part and whole , object and subject , other and self become character and novel . In a nutshell, there are three issues at stake for Bakhtin: the nature of the novel as an open whole, the manner in which the characters are combined, and (most important) the self-governing autonomy of the individual character. This is a matter of finding a way to accommodate the singularity of the individual character, the simultaneity of the individual characters, and the plurality of the overarching novel. For Bakhtin, polyphony is the solution to this ethical and aesthetic problem, for it is based on the premise that within every utterance there can be heard an irrevocable multi-voicedness and vari-voicedness (Bakhtin 1984: 279). Inside every utterance dialogic relationships exist within and between constituent voices, each of these voices belonging to a separate character and contributing its own tone or intonation to the material. This means that, from a moral perspective, The truth about a man in the mouths of others, not directed to him dialogically and therefore a secondhand truth, becomes a lie degrading him and deadening him, if it touches upon his holy of holies, that is, the man in man Bakhtin : 59). For this reason, Bakhtin attempts to theorise an aesthetic object in which the most important element is the character s self- consciousness, in which any words taken as (provisionally) final are those that come out of the character s mouth, not those that come out of the author s mouth. If this configuration is possible, as Bakhtin claims (differently to his earlier writings), then 6 there are radical implications for the relationship between author and character. For if the author truly affirms the independence, internal freedom, unfinalisability, and indeterminacy of the hero Bakhtin : , rather than treating the character as merely one of his creations, that is, if the author treats the character as a real subject complete with tone of voice and decision-making capabilities, then many of the traditional activities of the textual function going by the name of author need to be rethought. While, relying on the groundwork of his earlier chapters in which authorship is more than a narrowly literary affair, Bakhtin is clear about the ethical moments of polyphony and the character s perspective (her right to reply), he is less clear about how the apparent aesthetic paradox concerning the author might be resolved (how to write without putting words into the character s mouth). For the purposes of this chapter, however, this potential problem can be bracketed. Returning from talk of characters to talk of gestures, Bakhtin s claims about the autonomy of the individual characters can be worked through in order to make use of perceptual analogies between the terms author and listener and between character and gesture. III I have drawn attention to a few relationships between voices in a gesture in Aria II that embodies the spirit of Stravinsky s mature Neoclassicism, and outlined the conditions of possibility for polyphony, as Bakhtin defines it. My concern is with how and with what the listener is afforded perceptions of the gentle polyphonic agon of this multidimensional gesture. I will now follow a theme of distraction taken from Benjamin in order to explore the phenomenology of the agonistic Bakhtinian polyphony in Aria II: less the diverse dialogic relationships that can be teased apart amongst its voices (there are obviously 7 more than just the three voices selected here to get the ear rolling) and transcribed with respect to their syntax and style, more the nature of the perceptual process affording the analytical and hermeneutic moments of such musical listening. What is it like to listen to the dialogic relationships between and within its appoggiaturas? I first unpack a little genealogy of distraction, before exploring how provides a useful grounding for polyphony. Distraction has long histories in a variety of domains and various meanings. Theologians have despaired of it for millennia, anxious that human failings not delay the advent of the Divine; think of the narratives of texts like Saint Augustine s Confessions, in which books one to eight tell of Augustine s life prior to and leading up to confession in the Milan garden, dominated as it was more by secular curiosity than by a proper sense of awe and pleasure (Saint Augustine 1991); or the idea in Corinthians 13 that partial knowledge shall become, through love, full understanding and being understood; or the wandering spirit of the Psalms Psalm : ; and so on. Pascal wrote about distraction centuries ago in terms of its sociological and existential functions, acting respectively as entertainment and as a way of tempering or putting off profound thoughts (cf. Bauman 2007: 107). The Cartesian cogito was constructed upon an essential assumption of its absence. Closer to the needs of this chapter, Siegfried Kracauer discussed the term in the 1920s with reference to film (Kracauer 1987), and Benjamin revisited the term a few years later in the now classic The Work of Art in the Age of its Mechanical Reproduction (Benjamin 1968), wherein he developed an account of how technologies which allow artworks to be recorded and copied have transformed their reception and interpretation. Rather than focussing on Adorno s critique of atomistic listening, the important thing here is Benjamin s attention to overcoming 8 distance, to highlighting and valuing positively the intimacy and closeness of objects in a post-auratic era (Benjamin 1986; Benjamin 2005; Gasché 1994). In the wider world of late Modernity, understanding and controlling distraction has become important in numerous domains. The distraction of sound has been developed, tested, and implemented, from the role of distraction in urban life (Latham 1999) to its impact on potentially dangerous activities like driving (Wiesenthal et al. 2000; Brodsky 2002; Dibben & Williamson 2007), from its medical use to help reduce pain and anxiety (Wang 2002; Gaberson 1995; McCaffrey & Good 2000), to its reduction in the ubiquitous human-computer interaction that demands a large proportion of attention (Horvitz et al. 2003). In such contexts, distraction across all of the senses is usually referred to in terms of interference, the point being that in most cases the intention is to reduce distraction and improve performative efficiency and productivity within the social totality (Furnham & Bradley 1997; Furnham & Allass 1999; Furnham & Strbac 2002; Furnham & Stephenson 2007; Nelson et al. 1985; Lesiuk 2005; James 1997). In the musical world, the reduction of distraction is important in the training of performers, whether relating to, for example, performance anxiety (a pathological type of distraction; Sloboda et al. 2003), the inner audiation of musical percepts (Brodsky et al. 2008), the development of sight-reading abilities (Wöllner et al. 2003), or teaching them to shift attention between structural levels (Williamon et al. 2002). In the domain of listening that is the focus of this chapter, much work has been done by music theorists, cultural and media theorists, historians, and philosophers, of which the following are representative highlights. Listening to popular music differs from classical music both because of the music and because of the dynamics of its media and discursive set up (Goodwin 1992; Waters 2003; Rutsky 2002), though pop music can 9 obviously be listened to attentively as well (Smith 1995: 40 cited in Clarke 2005: 150). In contemporary concatenationist culture musical attention has become more fragmentary and moment-to-moment (Levinson 1998; Cook 2006). In the historical shift from late nineteenth to early and mid-twentieth century worldviews, sustained attentiveness, rather than fixing or securing the world, led to perceptual disintegration and loss of presence , to a certain unbinding of perception (Crary 1989, 1994, 1999). Navigating a path between concert music and ambient music, a theory of ubiquitous listening is needed that, being based upon a more flexible notion of attention, is adequate to the contemporary networked world (Kassabian 2001). Within everyday life there is plenty of distraction (often under other names) already within the popular discourse on music appreciation, understanding music being predicated upon the ability to follow it , which means the ability to respond appropriately to each musical event as it comes into hearing. These genealogies of distraction could be expanded with examples from inside and outside musical discourse, but I simply note that there are two complementary approaches to distraction: to reduce it or use it. This chapter attempts the latter. My focus on distraction is not historical, and avoids the rich implications of Benjamin s social and cultural theses, an important one being the idea that distraction is part of a constellation of terms, including attention, curiosity, distraction, fascination, indifference and reverie or day-dreaming, that point towards a phenomenology of modernity as utopian longing Osborne : . I do not ask whether, beyond the spectacular distractions organized by the Culture Industry and the attention-hungry media, distractions can be planned, constructed, and delivered to the public at a set time so that they might pass the time between events and purchases. Benjamin did not develop the concept of distraction far into the acoustic domain (Eiland 2003; Koepnick 2003), and I 10 am not concerned with whether the phenomenology of distraction is appropriate to musics other than Stravinsky s modernism. My focus is on a phenomenologically grounded aesthetic notion of distraction, with a view to its role in the judgements that the listener might make about the Bakhtinian polyphony of gestures in Aria II. IV There are many signposts pointing from polyphony back towards distraction. Rich possibilities can be extrapolated, for example, from Eric Clarke s Ways of Listening (2005) and Peter Szendy s Listen (2008), both of which make various appearances below, and both of which take distraction (not always their term) or its cognates to be a necessary and pragmatic constituent of any cognitively and culturally appropriate theory of listening. However, my opening gambit comes from Rose Subotnik s chapter, Toward a Deconstruction of Structural Listening (1996), and a recent volume of chapters on it, Beyond Structural Listening? (Dell Antonio ). This is for the reason that, tackling the matter head-on, these chapters highlight the ways in which the concept of polyphony (not their term) needs to be grounded in distraction in order to afford a more phenomenologically adequate sense of the listener s engagement with Aria II. Structural listening arose alongside the consolidation of the work concept Szendy : . As Dell Antonio summarises, it seeks to transcend the potential sloppiness and impreciseness inherent in the physical manifestations of sound; the written score is seen (!) as having more integrity than any sonic realisation of the musical work, and as more indicative of the creative process of the composer, which manifests itself through the structural necessity and organic completeness of the musical ideas that unfold from the beginning to the end of a musical work (Dell Antonio 2004: 3). Just as the focus of work around structural listening has tended to drift 11 towards a complementary focus on the structuring of listening, from structure towards affect, epistemology towards phenomenology, so the polyphony of the appoggiatura gesture in Aria II needs to be grounded – reverse engineered – in a similar way. Since structural listening as Subotnik expands Schoenberg s, Adorno s, and Stravinsky s conceptions of it is a subset of Bakhtinian polyphony, examining the discourse of structural listening will provide us with a sense of how to listen to polyphony. Recall what is at stake with polyphony: Polyphony provides a theory of distributed networks (not Bakhtin s term) inside and outside the musical work, comprised of multiple dialogic relationships between voices. It presupposes a listening set up focused on what goes on when someone, whether or not a musical trained someone, listens to music seriously, attentively, the way a serious composer intends and hopes. That person is attending to musical sound events not with a mind completely blank and bereft of thought, nor a mind occupied with thoughts and problems for which the music may serve as a soothing background, but a mind occupied with the music (Kivy 2002: 81, 70, 75, 76, 105–7, 250; Godlovitch 1998: 44, 46). )t is a matter, as Szendy says, of a great listening corresponding to great music, with whose form and details it is supposed to agree perfectly Szendy : . Listening polyphonically means apprehending, segmenting, categorizing, and cognizing a gesture as a gesture, and this may be describable in terms of, inter alia, metaphorical transfer, mirror neurons, schemata building, Schenkerian reduction, mapping semiotic squares, and so on – ultimately, some form of (value) judgement as to the aesthetic singularity and significance of the gesture. If the listener hears a gesture (tone rather than just sound) then she is hearing polyphonically; conversely, if she is not listening polyphonically then she does not hear the dynamic life of the gestures in the music. 12 Polyphony, then, is biased towards the musical work, towards its structure and towards modes of listening focussing on structure (however widely conceived) at the expense of other things. Even if the concept of structure is broadened to include everything within the orbit of the musical object, it is still biased towards interrupted musical attention per se, and assumes that this is how the listener listens (cf. Crowther 1993: 84–93). It is unclear, despite Bakhtin s invocations of sideways glances and other nominally process-oriented relations between voices (Bakhtin 1984: 31–2, 201, 232; Benson 2006: 76–7), to what degree polyphony is static and spatial in conception. If polyphony does not spontaneously come into being ex nihilo, then its emergence and temporality need refiguring, especially since Bakhtin s goal is the dialogism of free indirect discourse rather than the mere call-and-response of dialogue . In part, polyphony needs to be imbricated with a theory of perception and understanding as over-hearing , where the over is used in four discrete but related senses: it is at once the complex over of overdetermination; the temporal, historical over of something repeated, done over again; the incomplete, falling short over of overlooking; and the combination of fortuitousness and intention that informs the over of the more usual sense of over-hearing Aczel 1998: 597; Aczel 2001). Thus, consider how Subotnik s interlocutors describe the type of engagement often advocated by structural listening s closest ally in the music business, music analysis. Listening begins with awe, with wonder at the different kinds of conceptualization that the same phenomena can sustain (Dell Antonio 2004: 174). The heard musical work is a clue to the range of its possible appearances within the hearer, which can be further teased forth by processes such as memory, association, and reflection (Dell Antonio : 247). Music can stimulate various desires, one of which is a desire to engage analytically with structure (Dell Antonio : 184–6). What music 13 has tended to afford in Western Modernist music like Stravinsky is a particular set of activities and grammar of conceptualization, in which the grammar of attending to music has followed certain patterns, particularly inside scholarly discourse. It is, for example, often maintained that it is the listener s business to attend to music and fulfil an obligation to a life of rigour and discipline justified with reference to the legitimacy and pertinence of the contract between composer and listener, the characteristics of which are silence, attention, greatness Szendy : . This aids the upkeep of a type of utterance that Bakhtin calls direct and unmediated object-oriented discourse (Bakhtin 1984: 186). At bottom, as one philosopher puts it, according to this standard analytical set up grounding structural listening, what it means to understand music is to enjoy and to appreciate it for the right, relevant reasons: that is to say, to enjoy and appreciate in it those aspects of it that the composer intended you to enjoy and appreciate, and to enjoy and appreciate them in the way or ways intended Kivy b: 217). This is a robust and rigorous methodology, as is appropriate for musicological inquiry. Nevertheless, it is worth asking if it is always appropriate or possible, given the following: the capacity of the listener to bring visual or other associative experience to bear upon the act of listening, while listening Dell Antonio vagaries and interplays of memory and attention (Dell Antonio : 251 n. 2); the : 248); the listeners or readers, who may or may not have been, at the time, thinking of something else entirely (Godlovitch 1998: 127); and musicians testimony that for them expressive, communicative, and other performative aspects are equally vital to the listening experience Marshman 2007; Marshman 2008). After all, a dose of pragmatism affords the acknowledgement that Even the ideal listener, trained to maintain constant attention, is sometimes flooded by a host of associations. If he 14 manages to keep them aside, in the margins of his mind, they will lose consistency, shed their contents, melt into listening. But their silent presence still enriches the music with an invisible trail of feelings David : : Now that you have seen and perhaps imagined the sounds of the music examples above, I could ask you to try to forget these voices while I play you a recording of Aria II. Even without recourse to such shortcuts, it is easy to hear such acknowledgements of pragmatism related to what Bakhtin calls loopholes itching to get out from Aria II and drive themselves into your mind. To wit: did you think back to that concert in the Royal Festival Hall when you heard Hilary Hahn play the concerto, when you were sat in that unfortunate acoustic position right at the very back? Did you hear an interesting orchestral balance in the opening motto chord of Aria II that you didn t remember hearing on any of the recordings you had studied? Did you get something communicative out of the soloist s facial expressions and the way her body language worked through the four-square metre of the movement with a steady swaying that only interrupted itself at the 1/8 bar in the second section? Did the interpretation of Aria II play out the helpful programme notes? (Did you go on to reflect, given that this was Stravinsky, whether it was an interpretation at all? Wasn t it rather like Erbarme dich from the St. Matthew Passion? Did you notice that the third and fourth utterances of the motto chord are respectively metrically and motivically disembowelled, yet still make the Da Capo form clear – was their re-voicing here even noticeable? Didn t that listener s watch alarm down in front on the left seem to annoy those sitting near it – even though others, too, surely noticed that it chimed in time with the pulsing quavers in the orchestra? And the coughing? The list of such distractions during and after listening call them thoughts to dignify them) goes on. Stepping back, what is interesting to follow through slowly is the 15 basic principle at work here: what several of the writers in Beyond Structural Listening? describe as a distracted sort of listening (Dell Antonio : 218, 157, 162, 239, 298 n. 23, 299 n. 26). In the broadest sense this might be a distraction from form (Dell Antonio : 112; Smith 1998; Lyotard 2006: 277), a certain wavering at the heart of listening (Szendy 2008: 122). As one writer puts it, The thing being turned over in memory is not exactly the single measure, of course: the pitch pattern extends the figures into pairs of measures, and, even more significantly, complicates them, by making composites (Dell Antonio 2004: 186). Following the general idea that a free listening is essentially a listening which circulates, which permutates, which disaggregates, by its mobility, the fixed network of the roles of speech Barthes : 259), it is (to use Lawrence Kramer s rhetoric an opportunity rather than an obstacle, for the experience is like nothing so much as my novice attempts at meditation, in which my attention wanders, again and again and again, from its object (Dell Antonio 2004: 239–40), while synopsis perpetually unravels into process (Dell Antonio : 240; Foucault/Blanchot 1990: 22), and what ends up getting interpreted may not be what one set out to prove (Dell Antonio : 241). In this respect, the musical object is an enigmatic rebus (cf. Eagleton 1990: 329). If, as Catherine David analogizes, It is meaning itself that is leaking through these unravelling gestures, like a drop of water from a leaky tap David : , or, in Szendy s poetic words, the inscribable flow of a musicality that, like wine or blood, pours out in waves Szendy : , then it is up to the listener to catch, or at least watch, these drops moving in time with gravity (to continue the metaphor). Such an opening of thought is in line with the tendency for description to end up far from its starting point and from its object of attention, and the oft-repeated notion that a text s unity lies not in its origin but in its destination Barthes a: . It is 16 the general idea that aesthetic activity cannot […] be reduced to an absorbed attention to the surface qualities of the object […]. Rather the object is also the centre of, and is the occasion of, many possible lines of reflection or movements of the mind, transformations of perception, attitudes and feelings that may affect a person s life and modify the quality of his experience long after he has ceased to contemplate the particular object itself (epburn : . )ndeed, In order to do justice to the qualitative moments of the thing, thought must thicken its own texture, grow gnarled and close-grained; but in doing so it becomes a kind of object in its own right, sheering off from the phenomenon it hoped to encircle Eagleton : . This is not a cause for regret: after all, as Kramer asks in all seriousness, Am I failing to experience the music when I vary my attention level or simply let it fluctuate, when I interrupt a sound recording to replay a movement or a passage, when I find myself enthralled by a fragment of a piece that I hear on my car radio without losing concentration on the road, when I intermittently accompany my listening by singing under by breath or silently verbalising commentary on what I hear, when I perform some part of a piece in my mind s ear, perhaps vocalising along, and perhaps not? (Kramer 1995: 65) Most potently, one might be led to reflect on the radical human potential afforded by a certain distraction: How seldom it was that you fully inhabited your surroundings, engaging not only your senses but your awareness. On the occasions that you did so, time had a way of slowing, or appearing even to stop. So did we hurry on with other thoughts because we were preoccupied, so well adjusted to the world that it was scarcely worth our attention? Or would committing ourselves to it more fully involve experiences of time or doubt or fear that we did not really wish to have? Had the ability to escape into abstraction, to live outside our surroundings, been favoured by natural selection? (Faulkes 2005: 316) 17 V With these suggestions that distraction might yet be recognized as a key cognitive skill concerning cross-modal redescription and adaptation (cf. Clarke 2005: 5, 43, 122, 123, 132, 154; Crowther 1993: 7), I am beginning to drift from analysis and memory (and their handmaiden, recording) as the regulatory mechanism of structural listening (Clarke 2005: 9), and from structural listening as the regulatory mechanism of the polyphony in Aria II, towards analysis as creative distraction. Indeed, distraction seems to be coeval with the analytical enterprise, for it is not only directed at a general transformation of consciousness: it aids the recognition of specific thoughts and feelings that (note the tense) we may have been having but were not aware of (Dell Antonio 2004: 60, 176, 187; Rosen 1994: 72–126) and encourages the listener to become much more aware of their perspective on the objects of perception Clarke : , . However, there is a corollary to acknowledge: unpacking this single gesture in Aria II necessarily opens up listening and analysis to further listening and analysis; it is like translation (Szendy 2008: 47–56). According to one analyst, analysis always changes the way things look, and sound, and feel [...] the story changes, and keeps changing as one analysis enters into the endlessly proliferating stream of other possible interpretations Perrey . There is a displacement of the musical thought and attention is directed elsewhere, inflected or bent from its path to focus on something else Evens 2005: 27), not as a chronological displacement but as a multi-dimensional reconfiguration of the gestural relationships in Aria II (Dell Antonio : 11; Benson 2006: 80). What are the implications of this for polyphony? It is clear from the concept of distraction emerging from within the constellation of writings around structural listening and its cognates that in order for the listener to listen to the polyphony of 18 voices in this appoggiatura gesture in Aria II, there needs to be a certain loosening (rather than tightening) of attention. This is in line with a wide range of developments across the humanities (Bruns 1999: 27, 31, 45, 62, 67, 92, 116–7, 127; Butt 2002: xii, 16, 41, 54, 68, 74, 84; Eagleton 1990: 341, 345; Barthes 1975: 64; Barthes 1977b: 159; Derrida 2002: 36; Kivy 2007a: 130; Negus & Velázquez 2002: 135). This loosening goes hand in hand with a need for a measure of calm quiet attentiveness – of evenly hovering attention Barthes : that can satisfy (and, more importantly, exceed) structural listening. The point is that whereas the speaking subject moves consecutively along syntactical lines, the listening subject is […] nonlinear, open to distraction, indeed in a constant state of interruption, because a world organized according to listening is a world of simultaneous events that, unless one is ready to exclude most of what happens, one is bound to sort out into lists rather than into narratives and propositions Bruns : . This makes sense, given that thinking about music tends to require a move away from the object, followed by an oblique return: it requires turning it over in the mind, or perhaps being turned over by it – to adapt the classic Freudian schema, bending the ear to music s affordances. The extent to which listening can bend before the virtual elastic anchoring the listener to the music breaks, often causes theoretical anxiety, as, for example, when the nominal distinction between conscious and self-conscious listening is considered: what might happen when the listener start[s] thinking about what I am perceiving as I am perceiving it Kivy 2007b: 230), about the fact that sensation points out the direction the technical search much take; in return, each technical progress brings forth new sensations David : 43). This anxiety is not surprising, given that, although listening to music is said to involve an open-ended and pleasurable passage of emergence and the experience of going from our world, with all of its trials, tribulations, and ambiguities, to another 19 world, a world of pure sonic structure Kivy 2002: 260), still this is often countered by an underlying drive to suppress any distractions that this very passage might entail, lest it is unproductive (in what should now be clear is a crude sense of productivity . In the standard Western Classical set up distractions are usually conceived in terms of non-musical noise which is inessential and even a distraction , such noise being a matter of real-world distractions and a potential distraction or barrier to understanding (Hamilton 2007: 41, 43, 57). The ideological basis for these exclusions can be bracketed in the search for a more inclusive understanding of listening somewhere between this conventional boundary and the non-boundary set up by Cage in , in which distractions are simply classed as music. Some distractions come from outside the music and the mind, others within (Currie 2007: 122). Some happen on an imperceptible timescale, while others are triggered suddenly (Kassabian 2001). Sometimes the thoughts associated with a strain of music […] have no relation to the gesture being made […they are] the babble of the banal David : . Some nominally non-musical distractions are contextually obvious and transient (the police car screeching past the concert hall, the screeching of fans as Herbie Hancock strolls onto the Barbican stage). Internal musical distractions are usually more subtle, encompassing events such as another segment of the same work, a different musical parameter (distracted by the grain of the voice, the implications of the libretto, the diminished harmony, the motivic return, her arm gestures or breathing), sound perceived as tone, and so on. They are, perhaps paradoxically, structural distractions (Hatten 2008), taking place at the intersection between part and whole in the material realm, and between instant and process in the temporal realm (oeckner : and complete with multiple formal and hermeneutic affordances. In addition, if one classifies extraneous mental associations (such as the few selected just above, or those 20 personalized further up) as a common form of secondary distraction, then it is necessary to note methodologically that just as associations are many, varied, and highly personal […] they are vague, blurry around the edges, and fade into one another. Furthermore, they are constantly changing, not static, innate, set pieces 171). Kivy 2002: Distractions, however, are not just or always multiple, as they happen to be in the case of the dialogic relationships between the voices in the polyphony around Stravinsky s appoggiatura. They are equally singular: every gesture in itself is distracting, both seductive and dangerous (Currie 2007: 125–7) by virtue of its resolute physicality. Indeed, because distraction is a matter of cognitive and hermeneutic attention, there is an infinite regress: listening is itself a matter of distraction (the boundary between primary and secondary distractions noted above is not rigid . This means, fundamentally, that it is not that distraction is opposed to the concentrated structural listening advocated by Adorno, Schoenberg, Stravinsky and others, and that the latter is pure and uncontaminated by the sound and noise of music and its performers. Rather, distraction is built into structural listening as an integral moment of its Modernism (Hirschkop 2008); it is part of a constellation of terms fracturing any simple binary dialectical relations (Osborne 2006: 42–3). Thus, rather than continuing to oppose distraction to structural listening, as in the standard ideology (cf. Evens 2005: 8), rather than opposing analytical to holistic listening or test conditions to normal listening Cook : , ; Sloboda 2009), and rather than opposing virtuosity to a transparent performing in which instrument and body are un-distracting O Dea : 49, 53, 58, 60), what is needed is a graded typology of forms and modes of distraction (cf. Derrida 1988: 18). Roland Barthes had it right when he wrote that structurally, there is no difference between cultured reading and casual reading on trains Barthes 21 1977b: 162); in Bakhtinian terms, pleading claims to pure structural reading or listening are, because monologic, false and not to be trusted. As Joseph Dubiel notes, the relevant sort of contrast is between different kinds of perceptibility, different terms of conceptualization for what is sensed Dell Antonio : –4). Consider the continuity criteria governing work, performance time, and personnel (Godlovitch 1998: 34–41). These keep ritual disruption and other large-scale forms of distraction outside the boundaries of what constitutes a true and proper performance of a work, although it is difficult to prove or disprove interpretive continuity from the acoustic evidence alone of a performing event. Stan Godlovitch goes a step further, noting that success conditions apply to listening too and seeking to marry up the concerns of the performer and the listener, whereby the former produces a state of active concentrated attention in the latter, and the latter responds in like terms to the former s efforts (Godlovitch 1998: 44–9). Beyond the analytic rigour of these definitions, however, there will always be a [synthetic] gap in our knowledge, hence a gap where the performer s own decisions will prevail – decisions dictated by her own taste, judgement, and artistry Kivy 2002: 244), and it is here that distraction has the potential to reconfigure intentional decision making, for it happens despite the listener s decisions before or during performance. Indeed, who is to say that even when the listener thinks that the change in her focus of attention was the result of her choice or intention, that it was not equally the effect of a distraction that she has unconsciously appropriated and to which she has given a name? Extrapolations of Benjamin that talk of the post-auratic era of distraction as the time of hypersurveillance, in which the past, digitized and stored, is available all of the time and the future […] is omnisciently and algorithmically and more or less probabilistically predictable Lash : are overly technocratic and utopian, old-fashioned – if not paranoid – in their belief that the 22 human listener can summon up, synthesize, and use such resources without break, lapse, relief, or pause, let alone without fault, history, or distraction – without any difficulties Szendy : . Although empirical research naturally refers to the subject s selective auditory attention Jones , it is worth pausing to ponder the necessary assumption that all attention is selective , in the sense of it being a matter of choice (at whatever level of reflective awareness). It could be that musical attention results from distraction. After all, as Benjamin noted, experience is less the product of facts firmly anchored in memory than of a convergence in memory of accumulated and frequently unconscious data Benjamin : –11). The faultlines in listening – its inability to hold itself together attentively for long – are the evidence of its happening. When defined narrowly, then, distraction is a removal of attention away from (rather than towards) the polyphony of voices in the Stravinskyian gesture: initially the listener is able to attend fully to the music, but is subsequently distracted. And this is true if distractions are taken to be a barrier to proper structural listening, which is silent, stationary, uninterrupted, ears glued to the musical structure and eyes closed. [However, as Clarke notes,] It hardly needs pointing out how uncharacteristic this actually is of most people s listening habits. […] Overwhelmingly, people listen to music in a far more pragmatic and instrumental manner (Clarke 2005: 136 and 144), as with the personalized interjections above; could it have been that listening to Hahn play Aria II had been a temporary distraction from the latest budget crisis in the Higher Education sector? )ndeed, Benjamin s insight that Truth is the death of intention (Benjamin 1977: 36) can be turned round into the suggestion that distraction is the birth of intention, that moment from and within which listening proceeds. In the manner of Proust s infamous madeleine, distraction draws involuntary memory towards the riotous, over-populated present of listening. 23 To extend distraction in this direction (so that it encompasses not just listening to muzak but to Modernist music, full-circle) requires short-circuiting a tradition that includes, inter alia, Brahms, Schoenberg, Hindemith, and Ives, which has sometimes argued that sound gets in the way of music and that thinking that moves anywhere outside of the music at hand is ceasing to think about the music altogether Kivy 2007b: 231). The idea is to acknowledge the inherent elasticity of attention and to allow the emergence of distraction as itself a form of musical thinking (Levinson 2003), as, like dance, a Nietzschean metaphor for thought itself (Badiou 2005): gestures like the appoggiatura in Aria II, like certain words in context, seem to attract the listener s attention by glistening and shimmering Barthes 1975: 42; Barthes 1985: 259). The idea is that distraction, lacunary listening, might also be a means, an attitude, to make sense of the work; that a certain inattention, a certain wavering of listening, might also be a valid and fertile connection in auditory interpretation at work (Szendy 2008: 103, 119, 122, 128, 134). This idea embraces the position that Music must be allowed to linger, – but not to listen to itself Adorno 2006: 104, 232) alongside its flipside; the listener may linger as long as the music (broadly conceived) retains her attention in one way or another – as long as it distracts her. Thought , as Terry Eagleton notes, must deploy a whole cluster of stubbornly specific concepts which in Cubist style refract the object in myriad directions or penetrate it from a range of diffuse angles Eagleton : . The idea, then, is that distraction works alongside familiar and still useful Enlightenment values of clarity, teleology, singularity, and communication, producing ambiguity, circularity, multiplicity (sideshadows), timbre, and tone. No longer repressed as an annoying way of preventing time-saving efficient data communication, distraction becomes the surreal, simple, and pleasurable (decadent but not excessive) experience of time itself as played out in the dialogic relationships between the voices in the gesture 24 in Aria II. Such a concept of distraction has important ethical and political elements with respect to the constellations within which distraction emerges, the idiosyncratic freewheeling of the imagination which recalls the devious opportunism of the allegorist (Eagleton 1990: 332); indeed, for Benjamin himself (after Baudelaire), ethics and politics came together historically in the figure of the flâneur. Since the listener cannot get (back) to what she was listening to prior to the distraction in the same manner as before (rather like the duck–rabbit phenomenon), and may not always even have been aware of the distractions impinging upon her listening, she is forced back upon her own resources and must react in an appropriate manner to the distractions that she does hear, and cope with the movements that they set in motion: she must decide what is to be done – a matter of reflective judgement. In this sense, distraction is not quite an opening to carnival, and in a post-auratic era it remains the case that Schoenberg s construction and Stravinsky s masks both register the liquidation of the subject (Roberts 1991: 99) only if liquidation is read at a poetic tangent to refer to the becoming liquid characterising the current stage of Modernity (Bauman 2000, 2005, 2007), in which the listener is forced to develop ways of encountering and coping with distraction (Bruns 1999: 80) and to cultivate a virtue ethics of listening alongside the older quandary ethics presupposed by structural listening and polyphony (in its narrowly un-distracted Bakhtinian form). There are implications, too, for the commodification of music and its industries, now that the nature of the historical work that functions as the site for exchange has changed: We certainly do now hear music as a fragmented and unstable object [...] as we have taken power over music on records […] so the musical work has ceased to command respectful, structural, attention Frith : ; Szendy 2008: 135). The appoggiatura gesture in Aria II should be engaged less as expressive media than as 25 material ceremonies, scriptive fields of force to be negotiated, dense dispositions of signs less to be read than meditatively engaged, incanted and ritually re-made (Eagleton 1981: 117). VI I have been led far from Stravinsky and the gesture in Aria II. In rethinking Bakhtin, I have appropriated a partial reading of Benjamin. If it is not already clear, then the following remarks from Clarke s study of ecological approaches to the perception of musical meaning will illustrate the broad sweep of distraction that I have tried to convey: One of the remarkable characteristics of our perceptual systems, and of the adaptability of human consciousness, is the ability to change the focus, and what might be called the scale of focus , of attention – from great breadth and diversity of awareness to the sense of being absorbed in a singularity. Clarke : 188) Of particular importance is the transferrable value of such adaptability. Clarke continues with the observation that the transition between these different perceptual worlds, or the interruption of one by another, can be disturbing and disruptive (when the ticking of a neighbour s watch breaks into the environment of [a performance of Beethoven s String Quartet] Op. 132, for instance) ibid.). Just as important, too, as this chapter has suggested, is the notion that it can be a positive musical experience. There can be benefits and pleasures in being led to look up often, to listen to something else Barthes : , for example, diverting our attention from sound to time (Dunsby 1995: 75), or switching attention from one salient musical gesture or parameter to another, from Stravinsky to Tchaikovsky, from the sound of the E string to the compound melodic line (insofar as such voices can be teased apart) – with sudden, deceptively decisive turns, fervent and futile Barthes : . Indeed, it works both ways: Just as concentrated listening […] can be diverted in unexpected directions, so 26 too a listener can be unexpectedly and suddenly drawn into some music that until then had been paid more distracted and heteronomous attention – as, for instance, when telephone hold music actually engages your undivided attention rather than being just a sound to fill the waiting Clarke 2005: 136). All this playful agitation and oscillation, to use Kantian terms, is a self-strengthening and reproducing activity, a dark joy that is key to the emergence of aesthetic judgements. The point is that the listener should seek to retain a certain looseness and mobility in her engagement with Aria II, both as her own creative practice and as conceived by others within the disciplinary walls of Musicology, a looseness open to distraction and its creative possibilities rather than hardening and thereby tending to reduction Barthes : and lapsing back into the clanking chains of structural listening. This is because, if her listening to Aria II is to have any hope of ethical and social leverage (Adorno 2002; Leppert 2005: 121–4), as well as the easy pragmatism and realism noted at the outset of this chapter with reference to Cook (1990), then it needs to remain languid yet secretly vigilant Eagleton and fleet of ear. : , open, Gnawing away at the certainties of cognition, distraction works over polyphony and structural listening and loosens their useful and necessary assumptions and elective analytical discourse. It reminds the listener, less that she needs to engage with the lapses from order to disorder within Aria II, and more that she needs to engage with the creation of musical order, which is not given but created by and through its polyphony of gestures. Her task is to learn how to respond to the affordances of gestures like the appoggiatura within and around the polyphonic texture, and this includes gestures that are usually bracketed off as unwanted noise. Doing so, that is, listening with awe – structurally and atomistically, attentively and distractedly – is certainly difficult. Luckily, though, the polyphonic open-endedness of the gestures 27 always affords further attempts, since (again, note the tense) the first attempt will never have been finished, since it kept getting pleasurably distracted. If all of this high-pitched rhetoric seems like re-inventing the wheel with regard to listening, then it probably is; with the caveat that a central desire in this chapter has been to withdraw the mastery from listening and listen to whatever might be left assuming that listening remains the process in question once some of its aggressive colonising has been short-circuited). What if, in the wake of Bakhtin and Benjamin, after the suggestive contributions of Subotnik, Dell Antonio and his contributors, Clarke, Szendy and others, and alongside our standard theories of listening we listen to music), music can be felt withdrawing from us and therefore affording us the very experience we call listening? This would, not be to resort to a primitive or un-mediated irrationalism about sense perception, but to return to an open acknowledgement of the wonder of listening – what sets us to work in the first place. 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