Grantmakers in the Arts, 1998
"Classical musics are comparatively rare; they seem to need for their existence not only a leisured class able to command a quantity of surplus resources but also a situation where that class is to some degree isolated from the majority of the people and possesses the social power to represent its own tastes as superior. Thus classical musics developed not only in Europe but also in India and China, though not, despite the equal richness and sophistication of the culture and the music, in the African kingdoms or in Bali, in both of which the royal courts and their music were accessible to all. (Small, Music of the Common Tongue, p. 9.)
Considering the amount of training, labor, bureaucracy, money, and marketing involved, it is surprising that classical music exists at all; noone ever accused a symphony orchestra of being the most economical means of making music. In fact, if a recent e-mail satire is anything to go by, the orchestra might do well to consider downsizing: cut out the duplicated effort represented by all those violins playing the same tune, and omit all those redundant repeated sections. But maybe that is half the pointÑthe sheer luxury of it all, affordable only to a well-heeled society. And yet, if it is true that a culture's art-making reflects the concepts and values of the society which it inhabits, how does the phenomenon of the western orchestra relate to the societies that employ it? How else can you organize a large group of people (often 40-100 or more) in the act of music-making (or any activity for that matter) and yet avoid the unwholesome spectre of anarchy, noise and chaos?
For in one sense, an orchestra is a feat of crowd control: occupying a group of people for a period of time with a set of predetermined musical instructions and behavioral assumptions. Relationships exist between the notes in the composer's work, between the players of those notes, and the audience which appreciates the result. Each set of relationships can be examined by itself (standard musical analysis focuses exclusively on the score) and also between the different levels. Let us first look at the typical western symphony orchestra and see how our cultural values are embedded in every aspect of the activity, from the notes to the players to the audience.
But wait. Before going any further we need to remind ourselves that music itself does not exist. Despite evidence to the contrary (scores, analytical charts, music stores, CD shelves, etc.) music is an activity not a thing; it only exists in performance, and hence only when at least one person is present. It is therefore a social and political act. Also the old platitudinous saw that music is a universal language needs to be debunked; it is of course learned through conditioning. Yes, the text (the acoustic signals) can be heard by people all over the globe (and maybe beyond), but the context and the meaning are wildly different: the "same" symphony meant something different when Beethoven composed it to when Hitler used it to when it was played in a ruined cathedral in Bosnia to when the cops use it on Hennepin Avenue to clear out the bars after closing time. Just because there are no sung or spoken words in a piece of music does not mean that we all understand the same message (or indeed that we are free to free-associate and still claim to have an intrinsic response to the music). Making music can communicate by embodying an ideal society, in all its depth and complexity, for the duration of the performance, but it is of little help in communicating accurate directions to the train station.
The orchestra (used as the strawman for the purposes of this article) and the institution of the public concert developed in tandem with the rise of the middle classes as a result of the eighteenth century industrial and political revolutions. It should come as no surprise, therefore, that the musical culture came to reflect the values, practices, and ideas of the emerging society: salvation through machinery. A factory is generally controlled by an individual, the boss, who gives directions to a small number of individuals who, in turn, direct the actions of the workers, thus producing a commodity which is marketed to the greater unknown public, the consumers. This pyramid structure can also be detected in the western musical hierarchy where an individual composer-boss (albeit with the aid of an inspiring deity) notates instructions in the form of a score which is interpreted by a conductor who controls the actions of the players (orchestral musicians are the most highly unionized segment of musicians) for the benefit of the audience of consumers (who have the choice of taking or leaving it). The power structure is top-to-bottom in both cases, although the pay scale rarely matches this hierarchy (star performers are the top of that particular heap).
Individual members of the production system, should it ever occur to them, depart from their assigned roles with difficulty because the nature of the system is designed to keep everyone in their place: audience members cannot alter the course of a performance, players cannot improvise a better lick, and the conductor cannot disregard the score. Each is trained for the role. Even the architecture of the concert hall reinforces the assumed roles of the various elements: the players concentrically arranged around the conductor, the audience seated in parallel seats in the dark so as to discourage movement or interaction with neighbors, and the whole auditorium sealed off from the everyday world so as to make the distinction between noise and sound perfectly clear. We are in a sacred ritual space, removed from the humdrum world outside. It is a teacher-centered classroom, all eyes on the board.
We, as audience members, are here to witness the interior journey of an individual composer, made audible for a period of time. (We are sitting passively in the audience, by the way, probably because some teacher long ago told us we had no musical ability and should not waste our time or embarrass ourselves by wanting to be on stage.) We hope the performance will be interesting, emotional and dramatic. If the composer has done his (all too rarely "her") job, we will follow the development of the performance and think it worthwhile; a feeling we can then share with the assembled strangers, our audience peersÑan occasional community of taste. We have hired the performers to do the work for us (how middle class!) and have a right to expect a decent act or demand our money back. This is the end of our participation. The music will have a beginning (where order is established), middle (where order is disrupted), and end (where resolution and closure are achieved and there is nothing more to be said). The whole work will be appreciable by the attentive listener in its entirety; we cannot leave to buy popcorn or take a nap and come back expecting to pick up where we left off. Like a symmetrical architectural structure or a novel we are restricted to one mode of participation; passive appreciation, following the predetermined course of the argument. Few are aware that things could be done in any other way, or why they would be since, after all, we are there to have our emotions manipulated and restored, and this system is set up for that purpose.
"The constitution of the orchestra and its organization are also figures of power in the industrial economy. The musiciansÑwho are anonymous and hierarchically ranked, and in general salaried, productive workersÑexecute an external algorithm, a 'score' [partition], which does what its name implies: it allocates their parts. Some among them have a certain degree of freedom, a certain number of escape routes from anonymity. They are the image of programmed labor in our society. Each of them produces only a part of the whole having no value in itself." (Attali, p. 66.)
Where this industrial metaphor breaks down, however, is in the economic viability of the market; there are not enough consumers with enough capital to maintain the whole system without a philanthropic influx of money (not that this necessarily indicates artistic success or failure). Originally this would have been taken care of by the relevant archduke or prelate who kept the musicians as servants and invited the audience as his guests. Labor is no longer so cheap and yet there are so many vested interests in the institutions, from governments, venerable conservatories, to publishers and benevolent bourgoisie, that the system still persists. It operates in a state of equilibrium that has withstood wars and massive changes in world society, but that does not mean its days are not numbered.
Thanks to the commodification of the act known as music and its attendant history of public relations, we have inherited a set of masterpieces which have been advertised by generations of individuals as great examples transcending time, place, occasion and culture, as immortal as the emotional struggles they embody. Given the weight of this responsibility who would be bold enough to think they could do as well? Still, some benefactors have become resigned to the need for supporting living artists, no matter how unproven by time their talents may be. And patronage is more than a benevolent gamble: supporters are investing in a ritual of social reassurance, bringing together a class of like-minded people who aspire toward noble ideals. Has the fatherly role of patronage changed with the times? One wonders what artistic matronage might look like? Nurturing? Collaborative? Irrational?
There is more than one way, as the saying goes, to skin a cat. In other parts of the world these assumptions do not necessarily hold true. Imagine a society:
Such musics and such cultures are everywhere on this planet but have been subjugated by the values of the colonial western educational system. No less sophisticated, but often less marketable, these "alternative" methods of keeping communities alive rarely have a body of literature with which to compete. African drumming, Japanese gagaku, Jewish klezmer bands, shape-note singing, Indian and Persian classical music, Vietnamese court orchestras, Indochinese minority gong orchestras, Latin American mariachi bands, Peruvian pan-pipe and African Pygmy horn ensembles all go about their art in a way natural for their culture but alien to ours. If analyzed according to western conventions they frequently fail to conform, but that is hardly the fault of the music. And it is only recently that scholarship has begun to dignify other musics by endeavoring to find out how they work on their own terms and develop an intrinsic descriptive language. Early music, experimental music and ethnomusicology share in this attempt.
In a traditional Indonesian gamelan (an orchestra of primarily tuned-percussion instruments), if there is a score at all it is a skeleton for improvisation; the players may elaborate and extend it in any number of ways to suit the occasion. The composer's name is immaterial because the piece is only a recipe to enable the performance to take place and give the performers something agreeable to play. There is a leader who gives aural and visual cues, but he or she is one of the players, not an outside agency or the focus of attention. Membership in the band is not restricted: experienced professionals may play alongside children and beginners who learn through playing (there is little distinction between rehearsal and performance). Dance, costume, and food will all be a part of the event, which will likely be a religious occasion. The audience may show their reactions as the event proceeds, and come and go as they please. The musical parts are stratified decorations of the basic nuclear melody which everyone shares, forming a heterophonic social web quite different from the hierarchical division of labor known as melody and accompaniment. Because this is a community acitivity all expenses are met by the participants without need for an external funding body. If it needed so much money to support it, it would not have survived this long.
Or consider west African (Ewe) or Japanese Taiko drum ensembles: each part may be simple but the interaction with the whole group results in tremendous complexity. There are parts suitable for different levels of skill, and the cues and signals are given by fellow participants who do not micromanage or control the nuance of every phrase you play. The performance is as long as it needs to be, with no printed program, intermission or rehearsal. No small part of the performance is the cardio-vascular workout too.
For those who have problems with authority, try shape-note singing; a southern tradition of spiritual hymns written in easy-to-learn notation. There is no audience apart from the performers, who sit in a square. When the spirit moves you, you may nominate a song to be performed and go and conduct it yourself, everyone taking a turn.
Or Indian classical music, which rarely involves more than a handful of performers. Performers will train for years to master their instruments, choose a raga (melodic modal scale) appropriate to the time of day and season, and spin a melodic line they may never have played before, all the while playing rhythmic games with the tabla drummer. The performer and composer are the same person, and the audience is able to appreciate the improvisational skills in real time, often responding to particularly adventurous phrases with applause.
We may begin to see that the European model of music-making is more like the exception than the rule throughout the world. It is perhaps successfully adapting beyond its origins thanks to the industrialization of the developing world and the concomitant desire to set international cultural standards of cultural improvement. The techniques of composing, reading and playing are attainable goals for those who have the luxury to study them; there is an extensive literature and mystique which make the challenge accomplishable and enticing. Throughout Asia and other developing nations, orchestras proliferate as soon as the economy is settled enough to support such a symbol of opulence. As ice was to missionaries (proof of their advanced culture) so are scores, recordings, and books to fledgling western-style musicians. Countless cultures have sought to improve their native traditions with a little harmony, a standardized 12-tone equal temperament, and staff notation. And who are we to deny them their pleasure? In this global ecology there is no more them and us.
James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis suggests that life on earth will continue in some form in the future even if humans are not around to see it; environment and life forms coevolve. Society has changed since the orchestra was brought together in eighteenth century Mannheim. How has the orchestra adapted and where will it go?
Apart from variations in size and manufacture to project louder sounds into bigger halls, the make up of the orchestra remains what it was in about 1760, when hunting, military, dance and household instruments were massed together for concert purposes. Stamitz, Haydn, Mozart and others began writing for the fledgling ensemble that offered possibilities of volume and contrast never heard before. The invited audience wandered about as it played, chatting informally. If they liked a movement they might ask for it to be played again. They were there to be surprised by the unpredictable turns in the music and, once a work had become familiar it was already too old and was shelved. Hearing would have been informal but attentive since this might be the only chance the audience had to hear a work; radios, supermarkets, and Walkmans being things of the future.
How different from audiences of today, who generally do not go to symphony concerts or tune in public radio unless they are already familiar with the music and know what they are in for. Or like the K-Tel ad campaign assured the would-be purchaser of their recorded collection: "No unknown or unwanted melody." This music has lost its original power to shock, and the audience that wants to be stimulated has gone elsewhere for its kicks. Having become a museum culture and noting the concert goers' attraction to the known, the orchestra managers then seek to convince them that any new musical experience they may have would be accessible and non-threatening. Sometime around the First World War the adventure was taken out of the symphony and it became an artefact of reassurance and national identity rather than a medium of exploration and discovery. That function was taken over by popular culture where the market is always hungry for the latest rock album or movie. The few that have tried to reeducate the audience into coming to their concerts for the unexpected (Kronos Quartet comes to mind) have created an appetite missing from the usual apologetic marketing techniques.
While the instruments, pedagogy, and power structure within the orchestra have remained stable for a couple of hundred years, there have been sporadic attempts to deconstruct them. But given the political Goliath these composers have taken on it is hardly surprising that their attempts have in the main not been taken seriously and had little enduring effect.
The Persimfans Orchestra of Moscow (1922-26), fresh with revolutionary fervor, decided to perform always without a conductor; while their concerts were impeccable they needed so much rehearsal time that they lost money and eventually disbanded.
Chinese Socialism was the background for The Yellow River Concerto, the first orchestral work composed entirely by a committee of composers. The ironies of this abound since popular appeal is hardly ensured by such a process and nothing about the hierarchy of the orchestra has been altered. The choice of concerto form, moreover, is interesting because it is the archetypal story of the struggle of the individual to rise above the masses.
Composer Pauline Oliveros was commissioned to write a piece for the Buffalo Philharmonic. As the premiere date approached the score was not forthcoming, worrying the librarian and conductor. The delays continued until just before the event she worked directly with the players using a verbal instruction score, in the manner of her sound meditation exercises. Her work has not entered the standard symphonic repertoire.
Kenneth Gaburo was asked to write a work for the Kansas City Community Orchestra, Antiphony IX. He seated the players in random positions and placed a child with a toy instrument at the foot of each adult player "to keep them [the adults] honest." Every player had a copy of the full score (no individual had privileged information) and read from the unique microtonal graphic notation (playing the intended pitch is so hard anyway, why write in equal temperament?!). The conductor was relegated to the function of timekeeper with a stopwatch. The form of the work, created through random processes and sensory deprivation exercises, reflected the ordering of the desert environment where the composer lived at the time. Gaburo's work has likewise not entered the standard symphonic repertoire.
English composer and political activist Cornelius Cardew, realizing that literacy, habit and technique dulled the musical life as much as enhancing it, formed The Scratch Orchestra. This orchestra was devoted to the classics of the repertoire and was open to anyone who wanted to participate. The only proviso, however, was that the players must be entirely unfamiliar with their instrument; once you become too skilled you lose the ability to respond freshly.
John Cage, known as a radical experimentalist in his use of chance composition procedures, nonetheless changed little about the social structure of the concert tradition. In such works as Atlas Eclipticalis or Concert for Piano and Orchestra, the players still read their parts from precise notation and realize the composer's [non-] intention as accurately as possible.
Composers Stephen Montague and Douglas Ewart have choreographed large numbers of people in musical activities in ways that could scarcely be confused with the term "orchestra." In his annual open-air ritual Crepuscule, Ewart invites anyone to Powderhorn Park, Minneapolis, guiding their improvisations and directing the participants in processions around the lake and small group sectionals or pods. Montague has composed for taxi cabs and their horns during Friday rush hour on the streets of Manchester, blurring the distinction between the everyday and intentional.
Butch Morris has developed a technique of "conduction" in which the conductor, without the hindrance of a score (or concomitant composer looking over his shoulder) employs a set of hand gestures to control the players' activities: who should play, whether they initiate or react to another's phrase, repeat, or change dynamics. While this may appear to liberate the players from their music stands and force them to use their ears, they are actually even more dependent on the conductor, whose every whim they must follow, and in whom lies total control.
Harry Partch abandoned the tyrannies of the conventional tuning system, the instruments, and the concert culture with its "curse of specialization" for an integrated, corporeal, ritual theater using his spectacular orchestra of hand-made instruments. Partch thereby ensured that his work not enter the standard symphonic repertoire.
The meaning of something is in its use, not in itself, as Wittgenstein said. Music, as we have seen, is an art of socialization, connecting with a public and creating relations between the participants. What are some the possible characteristics of a musical transaction?
The same sound could, of course, serve any number of different functions. Other dualities to be found in each of these circumstances include:
And where does this wider perspective leave the composer, whose task turns out to be more than putting down the notes? The piece does not end with the double barline. Now the dilemna is either to compose a society for the given music, or a music for the given society. Form and function are inseparable so the opportunity to compose the nature of a performance is as much composition as the score. Where you put your work is as important as the sequence of sounds. In this sense "outreach" is the only significant act a classical musician can do: not because it might draw others into the system in the future but because of the sheer incongruity of the occasion.
Or the funders, whose money is needed at every stage of the production process: conception, production, manufacture, and consumption? They are as much part of the professional orchestra as the bassoons, only in this case they are able to call the tunes too. In a society in which school education placed emphasis on musical activities, further education and professional leagues would follow, as they have done for sports. Skilled amateurs and professionals alike would coevolve with the music of the time. But instead we see institutionalized anachronism: schools preparing students for a profession that has not existed for a long time, and orchestras turning into museums. Is money going to change or preserve this picture? Worst case: if the money for orchestras dried up tomorrow would our culture necessarily be impoverished or would something else evolve to take its place?
When pressed, orchestras occasionally pronounce themselves to be multicultural; supporting their claim by enumerating the numbers of women in their ranks, composers of color, or works appropriating an ethnic theme. This of course, while laudable, does not change the nature of the beast. All the same cultural assumptions are still firmly in place. As the world changes, these assumptions increasingly seem quaint. Already teenagers these days are more adept at computers than their elders and use whatever materials they have at hand for their creative activities: sampling technology, ambient mixes, cross-disciplinary media deconstructions, cut-up 'zines, poetry slams, rave culture... seldom 12 notes in a tussle.
While orchestras are all but inaccessible to the aspiring composer, many artists have turned to those forces over which they do have control: themselves, their friends, cheap technology, and other improvising artists. These forms are flourishing. With the democratization of the means of production, vibrating-air enthusiasts have moved on from their former lives as music lovers and left the orchestral world and the concert hall behind. By the same token, the means of branding some products more worthwhile than othersÑthe critics', analysts', and other opinion makers' domainÑhas lost its authority. Whatever the future will bring, it won't, and cannot, bring masterpieces. There is noone to proclaim them and noone to listen.
At any rate, music is about more than the dots on paper and who put them there. Distasteful though it may seem to the purist, it is also about the superstar's appearance fee and who pays it. It is about who we choose to associate with, how, where, why, and what we should wear. By bringing a score from the past into the present we also invoke the politics and economics that caused the music to take that particular form in the first place. As long as it continues to resonate with our current values we will be looking for someone to pay the piper and someone to pipe for the payer.
Bibliography
Attali, Jacques. Noise: the Political Economy of Music (University of Manchester, 1977)
Small, Christopher. Musicking: the Meanings of Performing and Listening (Wesleyan University Press, 1998)
Small, Christopher. Music of the Common Tongue: Survival and Celebration in Afro-American Music (London, 1987)
Small, Christopher. Music, Society, Education (London, 1977)
Discography
Songs and Dances of the Central African Rainforest (including pygmy horn orchestra) (Harmonia Mundi, HM733)
Gaburo, Kenneth. Antiphony IX (Music and Arts CD-832)
Gagaku: Japanese Traditional Music (King, 1990. KICH 2001)
Golden Rain: Balinese gamelan (Elektra Nonesuch Explorer)
Kodo: Heartbeat Drummers of Japan (Sheffield lab, CD-KODO)
Lawrence "Butch" Morris. Testament; a Conduction Collection. Where Music Goes II (New World Records, 80480-2)
Harry Partch: Enclosure Five (innova 405)
Stamitz, Carl, early symphonic composer of the Mannheim School: Symphonies, Op.24 (1786) (CHAN 9358)
Stilling Time: Traditional Musics of Vietnam (innova 112)
Xing-Hi/Yan-Ju/Zuao-Ji: Yellow River Concerto for piano and orchestra
Philip Blackburn is a composer, singer, and builder of Sonic Playgrounds living in Minnesota. He graduated from the universities of Cambridge and Iowa, and is Program Director of the American Composers Forum. (pblackburn@composersforum.org)
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