- Thread:
- Gelbart Discussion
- Post:
- RE: Gelbart Discussion
- Author:
- Tyler Alessi
- Posted Date:
- January 14, 2014 2:10 PM
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- Published
I would argue that music with
complex harmony can also "be felt by all men". I believe that the
popularity of vocal a cappella music is a good example of this. while
their harmonies are not complex by classical standards, they still
incorporate more complex harmonies than ones that we hear in traditional
pop music.
- Thread:
- Week 2 Reflection
- Post:
- RE: Week 2 Reflection
- Author:
- Tyler Alessi
- Posted Date:
- January 14, 2014 1:50 PM
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- Published
I definitely believe that
function is still a focus in music tday, at least some music anyway. I
am thinking in particular of church music which often plays an important
role in the church service. This music, while still beautiful, is meant
to reinforce the sermon and support the message of the day.
Furthermore, there are pieces that are sung every service that
functionas prayer.
- Thread:
- Week 2 Reflection
- Post:
- RE: Week 2 Reflection
- Author:
- Tyler Alessi
- Posted Date:
- January 14, 2014 1:49 PM
- Status:
- Published
I definitely believe that
function is still a focus in music tday, at least some music anyway. I
am thinking in particular of church music which often plays an important
role in the church service. This music, while still beautiful, is meant
to reinforce the sermon and support the message of the day.
Furthermore, there are pieces that are sung every service that
functionas prayer.
- Thread:
- Gelbart Reading
- Post:
- RE: Gelbart Reading
- Author:
- Andrew Jones
- Posted Date:
- January 14, 2014 1:20 PM
- Status:
- Published
That is an
excellent question! Initially, I thought the scholar/composer should receive
full credit for his or her new innovation. However, there had to have been
someone or something that inspired them to create something new, so maybe
putting everything that is associated with the creation of the new invention in
a giant umbrella category is the way to go? For instance, Jackie Brenston and
his Delta Cats recording of “Rocket 88” is credited as the birth of Rock and
Roll. But, early R.R. was a culmination of blues, gospel, and rural music
styles, so it might be more relevant to include those genres and musicians as
part of the actual birth of Rock and Roll as well instead of just naming one
sole entity as its creator.
- Thread:
- Week 2 Reflection
- Post:
- RE: Week 2 Reflection
- Author:
- Andrew Jones
- Posted Date:
- January 14, 2014 12:44 PM
- Status:
- Published
That is a very
interesting thought regarding the classification of music before and after the
advent of recording. If music historians do re-categorize music based on the
goings on after recording began, I would assume a great deal of new genres and
sub-genres would form and some current ones might even face the chopping block.
In terms of what the meaning of nature pre-1760 is, nature was responsible for
keeping the pace of life steady (I think). It was to show humans how they were
in their simplest form (i.e. pastoral) and was to give them guidance as to how
to live in the world around them.
- Thread:
- Week 2 Reflection
- Post:
- RE: Week 2 Reflection
- Author:
- Douglas Easterling
- Posted Date:
- January 14, 2014 12:36 PM
- Status:
- Published
Nicely put! This seems to make
more sense. I think Gelbart described his ideas poorly regarding
function/origin. He should have had you as an editor.
- Thread:
- Gelbart Discussion
- Post:
- RE: Gelbart Discussion
- Author:
- Douglas Easterling
- Posted Date:
- January 14, 2014 12:33 PM
- Status:
- Published
I think that you are probably
on to something regarding popular music. In fact, I think much of the
talk about "natural" music in regards to the style galant has to do with
this accessibility. I think people can be put off by complicated music
(think of Babbitt). However, I think that in our culture rhythmic and
textural complexity, especially in regards to percussion parts of
popular music, might be valued more. I'm thinking especially about
dubstep and mashups, where DJs sometimes work to create rather complex
rhythmic layerings.
However, popular music probably
could not get away with rhythmic complexities along the lines of the
totalist composers (John Luther Adams, etc.).
- Thread:
- Week 2 Reflection
- Post:
- RE: Week 2 Reflection
- Author:
- John Hausmann
- Posted Date:
- January 13, 2014 11:35 PM
- Status:
- Published
Building on your critique of
how Gelbart treats the shift from origin to function, I wonder how much
of that also stems from Enlightenment subjectivities that privilege the
individual (at times over the group). I think it is telling that we even
wonder about who created the string quartet genre, which emphasizes a
concept of the person that is creative, adaptive, and reasoning. This
type of person would have been one ideal during the Enlightenment, and
since the shift from function to origin occurs then, I imagine these
narratives are connected. Like most music history, I find I end up
learning as much about us as I do historical audiences.
- Thread:
- Gelbart Discussion
- Post:
- RE: Gelbart Discussion
- Author:
- John Hausmann
- Posted Date:
- January 13, 2014 11:29 PM
- Status:
- Published
To build on your question re
popular genres, I wonder if we can apply 18th century ideas about the
"natural" to a very different historical and social context. Taking for
granted the primacy of melody (as opposed to text, or rhythm, or
arrangement/production, each of which might have a stronger individual
claim to explaining popular music's success), it might help to
understand the process of listening melodically as culturally
constructed. I don't think it has as much to do with nature (the idea
that melodies can have universal appeal) as nurture (the fact that we
find certain types or styles of melodic writing pleasing (Tchaikovsky,
Palestrina, Lennon) might stem from the fact that we have been raised in
a culture that values those types of melodies).
- Thread:
- Week 2 reflection
- Post:
- RE: Week 2 reflection
- Author:
- Brianna Matzke
- Posted Date:
- January 13, 2014 8:56 PM
- Status:
- Published
I completely agree, Gelbart's
initial chapters are sorely lacking in musical examples. In my opinion,
he is too hasty bringing us to the "other side of the divide" -- he
ought to have spent more time explaining his justification for the first
halves of his dichotomies before diving into the second halves. Musical
examples could have shored up some of his initial claims that we are
all finding issue with.
I also agree that he is not
careful enough distinguishing between literary and musical sources, as I
mention in my own response. It does seem that he tends to make blanket
statements, sometimes drawing a conclusion about music that was based on
a non-musically focused source, a tendency that is problematic for
obvious reasons.
- Thread:
- Week 2 Reflection
- Post:
- RE: Week 2 Reflection
- Author:
- Brianna Matzke
- Posted Date:
- January 13, 2014 8:35 PM
- Status:
- Published
- earlier today, I was staring at a stack of music books titled "church music," and "wedding music," and most of those books contained a mixture of classical, popular, and folk-ish pieces to use in a very functional way.
An interesting observation... It is my understanding, based on what
we have read thus far in Gelbart's book, that he investigates the
function/origin dichotomy as a means of understanding the divergence of
"folk" from "art" music. In light of the new Enlightenment ideal of the
"self" (a multi-faceted concept), perhaps we can understand the source
of this divergence not as a shift from function to origin, but rather as
as the development of a new function: the function of self-expression.
- Thread:
- Gelbart Reading
- Post:
- RE: Gelbart Reading
- Author:
- Michelle Lawton
- Posted Date:
- January 13, 2014 8:09 PM
- Status:
- Published
Erik Paffett discussed the
idea of attributing a single genre to a single composer in his post,
too. I agree that oftentimes it seems like a composer is simply given
credit for something based on his popularity or the number of
contributions he made to the field (Haydn also is known as the Father of
the Symphony, even though countless composers wrote symphonies
before/at the same time that he did - they just didn't write over a
hundred, many of which then became known all over Europe and Britain).
It is useful, however, to have some sort of attribution, even with qualifiers, when teaching - a nice moniker is usually memorable. It's also difficult to say that something is the culmination of previous traditions/composer's efforts - there is sort of a connotation of the work being described as being the end or the best, and in the case of the song cycle or the symphony, there is a long and rich tradition that follows Beethoven and Haydn as well. Rarely, it seems that a composer should get even get credit for creating a style or genre - Schoeberg and serialism, for instance, or even Chopin and the purely instrumental ballade.
I'm hoping that Gelbart gets around to mentioning the contributions of Herder's contemporaries in later chapters!
It is useful, however, to have some sort of attribution, even with qualifiers, when teaching - a nice moniker is usually memorable. It's also difficult to say that something is the culmination of previous traditions/composer's efforts - there is sort of a connotation of the work being described as being the end or the best, and in the case of the song cycle or the symphony, there is a long and rich tradition that follows Beethoven and Haydn as well. Rarely, it seems that a composer should get even get credit for creating a style or genre - Schoeberg and serialism, for instance, or even Chopin and the purely instrumental ballade.
I'm hoping that Gelbart gets around to mentioning the contributions of Herder's contemporaries in later chapters!
- Thread:
- Week 2 Reflection
- Post:
- RE: Week 2 Reflection
- Author:
- Michelle Lawton
- Posted Date:
- January 13, 2014 7:48 PM
- Status:
- Published
I enjoyed the section on
the supposed origins of Scottish music, too - a sort of commonly
accepted fiction that fact is then built on is a major theme
I'm pondering in my research right now. Gelbart had a very clear
synopsis of historical constructionism and manipulation re Scottish
music that was downright humorous to read at times.
I agree about the functional/origin dichotomy issue - earlier today, I was staring at a stack of music books titled "church music," and "wedding music," and most of those books contained a mixture of classical, popular, and folk-ish pieces to use in a very functional way. I also don't think Gelbart's reasoning that "original creative sources are essential criteria in defining art music" (p. 8) works completely either, to flip the issue: there's a lot of annonymous or tenatively attributed medieval and Renaissance music that is courtly and full of art/artifice. It would seem strange to me not to consider some 500+ years of music as separate from the art/classical music tradition just on the basis of lacking an original creative source...
I agree about the functional/origin dichotomy issue - earlier today, I was staring at a stack of music books titled "church music," and "wedding music," and most of those books contained a mixture of classical, popular, and folk-ish pieces to use in a very functional way. I also don't think Gelbart's reasoning that "original creative sources are essential criteria in defining art music" (p. 8) works completely either, to flip the issue: there's a lot of annonymous or tenatively attributed medieval and Renaissance music that is courtly and full of art/artifice. It would seem strange to me not to consider some 500+ years of music as separate from the art/classical music tradition just on the basis of lacking an original creative source...
- Thread:
- Week 2 Reflection
- Post:
- RE: Week 2 Reflection
- Author:
- Michelle Lawton
- Posted Date:
- January 13, 2014 7:24 PM
- Status:
- Published
I'm having trouble with the
nature/natural terms through the era, too. I think some of it may be
because there aren't distinctions between the time terms shifted and
where they were shifting first, and how it pertained to music.
I dug this up from Dr. Morrow's nationalism class: "Our recent composers have given themselves over to the reigning fashion, except for a few that still have heart enough to care more about a good, natural melody and touching expression than twisted wit and cute little notions...." (Woechentliche Nachrichten (1767), review of Johann Schwanberger's Sonate per due Violini e Violoncello, translation provided by Dr. Morrow). I don't think "natural" means outdoor camping here, or some sort of natural primitive state - just like you said in your post, I think it refers to a melodic line that was phrased well and didn't modulate strangely or was overly virtuosic. (But it seems the critic thought it was going out of style, instead of becoming a stronger trend in music the further from Baroque fortspinnung, kinda curious). So at least in one review in Germany in 1767, "natural" in reference to music still meant a stylistic distinction. I'd be curious to know when the term "nature/natural" shifted in regard to music in other countries (even though the focus of this book is clearly Germany and Scotland).
I dug this up from Dr. Morrow's nationalism class: "Our recent composers have given themselves over to the reigning fashion, except for a few that still have heart enough to care more about a good, natural melody and touching expression than twisted wit and cute little notions...." (Woechentliche Nachrichten (1767), review of Johann Schwanberger's Sonate per due Violini e Violoncello, translation provided by Dr. Morrow). I don't think "natural" means outdoor camping here, or some sort of natural primitive state - just like you said in your post, I think it refers to a melodic line that was phrased well and didn't modulate strangely or was overly virtuosic. (But it seems the critic thought it was going out of style, instead of becoming a stronger trend in music the further from Baroque fortspinnung, kinda curious). So at least in one review in Germany in 1767, "natural" in reference to music still meant a stylistic distinction. I'd be curious to know when the term "nature/natural" shifted in regard to music in other countries (even though the focus of this book is clearly Germany and Scotland).
- Thread:
- Week 2 Reflection Final Try After This I Give Up
- Post:
- RE: Week 2 Reflection Final Try After This I Give Up
- Author:
- Brianna Matzke
- Posted Date:
- January 13, 2014 2:53 PM
- Status:
- Published
SUCCESS. (Internet Explorer fails and Firefox wins yet again. Sorry for the technical difficulties, folks.)
- Thread:
- Week 2 Reflection Final Try After This I Give Up
- Post:
- Week 2 Reflection Final Try After This I Give Up
- Author:
- Brianna Matzke
- Posted Date:
- January 13, 2014 2:53 PM
- Status:
- Published
I will attempt to respond to
this dense text in 500 words or less, but I find myself spinning! First of all,
I must say that I am grateful for my undergraduate classes in Western
Civilization -- having read Rousseau and Locke has proven helpful in dissecting
this text. I am fascinated by the idea of the "mind as a lamp" being
connected to this type of musicological study. My cursory knowledge of
"folk music" study in the 20th century lends me to think that much of
that study was guided by this principle, and I wonder what sorts of
transformations have been undergone in this 21st century age of postmodernism,
or even post-postmodernism... Is the mind still a lamp? Perhaps I am thinking
too hard... However, I do have to wonder how far-reaching this idea of the
"invention" of folk music will prove to be. I look at the composers
of our generation who are just now beginning to come to the fore, who
increasingly show the influence of the gamut of musical genres (popular,
classical, and folk) and often flit between the distinctions with hardly a
second thought.
I want to address a few issues I find with the text. First of all, I would be grateful if the author would have included a section addressing the divisions between the study of TEXT AND MUSIC, the study of TEXT ALONE, and the study of MUSIC ALONE. He cites various sources that encompass all of these categorizations, but he does little to distinguish between them. However, I think that there are important distinctions between the three -- for example, the associated external definitions of textual vocabulary affect how one would interpret the source, while purely musical content may be interpreted as more objective -- that affect the idea of the creation of a evolutionary timeline of the development of art, and these distinctions were certainly noted by the authors Gelbart is citing. Why then, doesn't he acknowledge the differences between the three?
I also wish Gelbart had spent more time making a solid case for the pre-Enlightenment understanding of music as an extension of nature. It is quite easy to understand how Enlightenment thought embraced the creation of musical "rules" as a way to demonstrate human intellectual ability, but I do not think he spent sufficient time defending his conclusions regarding pre-Enlightenment viewpoints.
I want to address a few issues I find with the text. First of all, I would be grateful if the author would have included a section addressing the divisions between the study of TEXT AND MUSIC, the study of TEXT ALONE, and the study of MUSIC ALONE. He cites various sources that encompass all of these categorizations, but he does little to distinguish between them. However, I think that there are important distinctions between the three -- for example, the associated external definitions of textual vocabulary affect how one would interpret the source, while purely musical content may be interpreted as more objective -- that affect the idea of the creation of a evolutionary timeline of the development of art, and these distinctions were certainly noted by the authors Gelbart is citing. Why then, doesn't he acknowledge the differences between the three?
I also wish Gelbart had spent more time making a solid case for the pre-Enlightenment understanding of music as an extension of nature. It is quite easy to understand how Enlightenment thought embraced the creation of musical "rules" as a way to demonstrate human intellectual ability, but I do not think he spent sufficient time defending his conclusions regarding pre-Enlightenment viewpoints.
- Thread:
- Gelbart Discussion
- Post:
- RE: Gelbart Discussion
- Author:
- Erik Paffett
- Posted Date:
- January 13, 2014 2:23 PM
- Status:
- Published
That's a really good question.
Harmony seems more "assembled" or the result of craft while melody
(vocal melody at least) as Rousseau says is closely related to language,
so it's more natural. But I think language is really a construct too. I
agree melody tends to dominate textures and is often the most memorable
part of piece of music, and that my favorite pieces tend to have great
melodies, but, there are times when harmony can take a brutally simply,
boring melody and make it interesting.
- Thread:
- Week 2 Reflection
- Post:
- RE: Week 2 Reflection
- Author:
- Erik Paffett
- Posted Date:
- January 13, 2014 2:17 PM
- Status:
- Published
Yea, I don’t really perceive
a difference between natural and nature. If I can remember from Dr. Morrow’s
classes, the idea of ‘natural’ phrasing, melody, etc. as an aesthetic
preference was based on the theory of mimesis, or imitating ‘nature.’ So I
guess it’s kind of an arbitrary thing to say that 2+2 phrases or triadic
melodies, etc imitate nature, because there is a lot of asymmetry in nature. It
seems to imitate more closely architecture from antiquity than ‘nature’ per se,
at least in my opinion.
- Thread:
- Week 2 Reflection
- Post:
- RE: Week 2 Reflection
- Author:
- Erik Paffett
- Posted Date:
- January 13, 2014 2:11 PM
- Status:
- Published
I really agree with your
second paragraph. I thought that was the most interesting section in the
book so far. I think he also says that Burney's definition of the term
"national music" from his famous comprehensive History of Music is what
we would consider now folk music. Or something along those lines.
-Erik
-Erik
- Thread:
- Week 2 reflection
- Post:
- Week 2 reflection
- Author:
- Michelle Lawton
- Posted Date:
- January 13, 2014 2:07 PM
- Status:
- Published
Sorry
for the length, folks – but some of this relates to my research
interests closely and I’m having issues with Gelbart’s book. So far the
book is drawing primarily from literary/philosophic/political writers
(many not concerned with the strictly musical) and there are not very
many real musical examples presented to cement Gelbart’s observations in
the practical musical world of the time. I think that the lack of
musical examples may be why I’m having a difficult time buying into some
of Gelbart’s ideas, such as the distinctions over time regarding the
pastoral, “nature/natural,” and nature/natural in relation to
nationalism. “Nature/natural” could mean following the rules of good
taste and harmony, being connected with the outdoors, and some earlier
state of being that hadn’t progressed to being civilized and corrupted –
and it often wasn’t entirely clear what meaning of the term Gelbart was
using. Perhaps that was because “natural” was in flux at the time as
well. Gelbart’s reasoning explained a lot of 18th and 19th
century fascination with Scottish music; yet I’m left wondering how it
would apply to other countries like Italy, whose political national
unity came later but was showing signs of cultural nationalism at this
time, and could have a “national music” that may not be connected to the
“natural” at all. Lack of musical examples/references and perhaps an
overreliance on literary traditions also mean confusing sentences like
“Genre itself, no longer a natural given, became something to stretch
through force of character” (p.51) – apparently in respect to poetry,
but in a book dealing with music the assumption could be that it also
should apply to music. Gebart doesn’t specify a particular time frame
for this decline of genre, and certainly in the mid-Romantic era, the
outer chronological boundary of his study, many (not all) pieces of
music can still be classified by genre fairly easily.
In
regards to the pastoral, the descriptions of literary genres and their
excerpts are fairly convincing, but Gelbart doesn’t discuss other
historical nobles-playing-at-peasants events, even relevant to the time
(Marie Antoinette’s famous idealized peasant farm, for instance, which
would be hard to construe as functionally “teaching literate courtiers
and their like about themselves” (p.43)). That “pastorals” presented to
the nobility were idealized versions of reality does eventually emerge –
but it’s a long time in coming and obscured by statements like
“pastoral was a leveler: it stripped off the veneer to show how all
humans really are or should be as part of nature.” (p.43). I’d suggest
that throughout much of the history of the pastoral, it was simply
replacing one veneer (the courtly) with another (the idealized peasant).
Once again, without musical examples it’s difficult to determine how
much the change in the meaning of the “pastoral” in poetry or philosophy
is affecting music; simply stating that Corelli’s pastoral from the
Christmas concerto and Beethoven’s “Pastoral” symphony are different
doesn’t really work for me, since there are myriads of other reasons why
those two pieces of music are different (nearly 100 years, a different
country, rules, styles, idiom, dialect, and strategic play, for
instance) besides a change in the meaning of the word “pastoral.”
I
think it’s convincing that nationalism helped spur interest in the
concept of “folk” but I find it hard to go the other way: “Like the folk
themselves, national music was conceived as a vestige of music’s
ancient and Eastern roots, but preserved in modern times within the
civilized continent of Europe. (p.60). Once again it’s a blanket
statement made with only one citation that dismisses the rest of the
world that may have been influenced partially by Western music
traditions (i.e., America, Norway, or Russia), and disregards a huge
body of “national” music that may NOT actually relate back to ancient or
Eastern roots (my question about the Italian’s national music comes
back here). I know he gets around to discussing art music and its
national/folk interactions (all three problematic terms) in later
chapters, but the statement above doesn’t seem to set up that discussion
well at all. The later chapters also seem to have moved forward a
little chronologically, and so miss the fact that Herder’s ideas of
“Volk” and a desire to create a sense of German nationalism were
applied, deliberately and practically, by opera composers such as Hiller
and Weisse – sometimes before Herder’s term came about, like the opera Die Liebe auf dem Lande in 1767 (see “Songs to Shape a German Nation,” Joubert, Eighteenth Century Music 3/2, 213-230).
I
also had trouble with the sentence “To claim that original creative
sources are essential criteria in defining art music is perhaps not
contentious, since we tend to think immediately about composers when we
think of this category.” (Gelbart, p. 8) Not true, especially if as a
scholar you deal in the courtly music traditions of the medieval and
Renaissance eras, many of which are either anonymous or only tenuously
attributed. Yet it is difficult to think of the often elaborate courtly
rondeau of the 15th or 16th centuries as not also falling under the category of “art music,” – so Gelbart was wise to state “perhaps
not contentious” (emphasis mine). His emphasis on composers makes more
sense when he limits himself to about 1700-1850 but is really
oversimplifying the case especially in earlier eras, as is the
delineation between function vs. origin in regards to art music. I think
that statement is only partially true, especially when I’m sitting on
the floor of my apartment staring at an almost depressingly large stack
of music books labeled “wedding music,” “church music,” etc.
- Thread:
- Gelbart Reading
- Post:
- Gelbart Reading
- Author:
- Tyler Alessi
- Posted Date:
- January 13, 2014 2:05 PM
- Status:
- Published
There was one section of Gelbart’s The Invention of “Folk Music and “Art Music”
that I found particularly interesting. In chapter three Gelbart discusses
Johann Gottfried Herder and his contribution to “the discourse on folk and art
music” (having been the person who coined the term “folk song or “Volkslied”).
Gelbart goes into great detail on how Herder is both underrated and overrated
which at first I felt was pedantic, but then found to be very interesting.
At the end of Chapter three Gelbart states
that, “The underestimation of Herder is thus partly the underestimation of his
generation…” I found this to be particularly fascinating. It makes me think
that any ideas come from a culmination of the ideas that came before it. This
is where my mind sort of wandered off the topic.
I began to think of how this
relates to the development of any idea or object in history or even today.
Often in education we credit one person with coming up with an idea (i.e
Beethoven’s An die ferne geliebte is
presented in most music history classes as the first song cycle ever written),
but in actuality there was a deeper process, for example, Beethoven’s contemporary
Carl M. Weber wrote Leyer und Schwert which predates An die ferne geliebte by three
years and adheres to many of the traditions of a song sycle. While Weber is not
credited as writing the first song cycle it is clear that the idea of grouping
songs together was not original to Beethoven.
The question that comes to my mind
then is, are we right to award an important idea/achievement to one scholar or
one composer? Or is it more appropriate to state that this achievement (the coining
of the term folk song, composition of the first song cycle etc…) is the
culmination of all the work that predates it?
Maybe this is an obvious question or maybe I may have read into this a bit too
much, but I find it intriguing.
- Thread:
- Gelbart Discussion
- Post:
- Gelbart Discussion
- Author:
- Andrew Jones
- Posted Date:
- January 13, 2014 11:47 AM
- Status:
- Published
In the first half of Matthew Gelbart’s The Invention of ‘Folk Music’ and ‘Art Music’:
Emerging Categories from Ossian to Wagner, the following topic caught my
attention: In chapter two, Gelbart elaborates upon the Rousseau versus Rameau
conflict, that is whether or not melodic (Rousseau) or harmonic (Rameau)
content serves as the basis for deeming works of music as good or bad. He states that harmony was not known to the ancient Greeks and other primitive
peoples and that all music was “natural” and “could be felt by all men.”
Harmony was a “learned” concept and did not happen in a “natural” manner. I
find Rousseau’s belief that the melody will make or break a piece of music as
the more accurate side of the argument.
For instance, without
the age-old, “primitive” melodies from the English countryside, neither Percy
Grainger nor Ralph Vaughan Williams would have been influenced to compose works
such as to Lincolnshire Posey, Shepherd’s Hey!, or the English Folk Song Suite. Additionally, without an innate sense of
melody, Tchaikovsky and his works would not be as well known in popular culture
as they are today. The finely tuned melodies from the Romeo and Juliet overture and The
Nutcracker have been used time after time in film and television to portray
the emotions of different characters. Because of this exposure, they have become
instantly recognizable or “natural” in modern culture and can “be felt by all
men.”
In closing, the music
in the popular genres is (for the most part) simplistic harmonically and melody
driven. Because this musical genre relies on the melody in order for it to come
into full fruition, could one say that its popularity is due to the
aforementioned ideal that it can “be felt by all men” because it has a more “natural”
and simplistic quality to it?
- Thread:
- eunyoung Chung
- Post:
- eunyoung Chung
- Author:
- Eunyoung Chung
- Posted Date:
- January 13, 2014 12:38 AM
- Status:
- Published
Attachment: 
week 2 seminar.docx (12.302 KB)
week 2 seminar.docx (12.302 KB)- Thread:
- Week 2 Reflection
- Post:
- Week 2 Reflection
- Author:
- John Hausmann
- Posted Date:
- January 12, 2014 7:30 PM
- Status:
- Published
The changes expanded upon in
chp. 2 were the most difficult for me to follow, in part because I’ve
never really understood the difference in 18th century thought between
“nature” (where one goes camping) and “natural” (as an aesthetic
category or stylistic descriptor). I know that (with regards to music)
some of this relates back to changes ca. the mid-century currents of the
Enlightenment, meaning that “natural” phrasing and melody were valued
over “artificial” Baroque fortspinnung, but this is obviously not the
focus of the book’s discussion.
Some of this confusion might result from the shifting meanings the word had for contemporary writers, which involved (prior to 1750) conceiving of “nature” as a totalizing system that was made manifest in science and art. Gelbart treats the pastoral genre as an example of what nature means in this time, and I imagine that when he says the pastoral is working in a “genre-dominated artistic world” (42), he is referring back to chp. 1’s discussion of shifting meanings from function to origin? (If not, I don’t understand how the time after 1750 was also not dominated by genre– especially w/r/t his comment on 51 regarding genre being “no loner a natural given”).
It was clear that ca. 1760 nature’s meaning shifts to stand as the opposite of civilization, and that humankind is progressing away from nature/its natural state and towards civilization, urbanization, specialization, etc. I was wondering how this represents changing attitudes towards nature per se, and not simply typical Enlightenment narratives of progress, development, and so on. I understood the 3- or 4-stage development of humanity towards its current form and away from nature, but I am not yet clear about what nature meant before this, like when Gelbart claims it fulfilled “its older role as the basis and overarching framework of civilization” (56). Any insight would be greatly appreciated!
Last but not least, I always love discussing how people categorize music (I loved the first chapter), and I have been thinking lately about the most paradigm-altering change in music consumption, distribution, and aesthetics in all of human history, its mechanical reproducibility. I imagine later music history texts will essentially divide the subject into before and after recordings, but until we get to that point, it seems that contemporary music is still divided into categories indebted to pre-recorded thought patterns and concepts. I have been interested to think about what a re-categorization of music that accounts for this major shift would look like.
Some of this confusion might result from the shifting meanings the word had for contemporary writers, which involved (prior to 1750) conceiving of “nature” as a totalizing system that was made manifest in science and art. Gelbart treats the pastoral genre as an example of what nature means in this time, and I imagine that when he says the pastoral is working in a “genre-dominated artistic world” (42), he is referring back to chp. 1’s discussion of shifting meanings from function to origin? (If not, I don’t understand how the time after 1750 was also not dominated by genre– especially w/r/t his comment on 51 regarding genre being “no loner a natural given”).
It was clear that ca. 1760 nature’s meaning shifts to stand as the opposite of civilization, and that humankind is progressing away from nature/its natural state and towards civilization, urbanization, specialization, etc. I was wondering how this represents changing attitudes towards nature per se, and not simply typical Enlightenment narratives of progress, development, and so on. I understood the 3- or 4-stage development of humanity towards its current form and away from nature, but I am not yet clear about what nature meant before this, like when Gelbart claims it fulfilled “its older role as the basis and overarching framework of civilization” (56). Any insight would be greatly appreciated!
Last but not least, I always love discussing how people categorize music (I loved the first chapter), and I have been thinking lately about the most paradigm-altering change in music consumption, distribution, and aesthetics in all of human history, its mechanical reproducibility. I imagine later music history texts will essentially divide the subject into before and after recordings, but until we get to that point, it seems that contemporary music is still divided into categories indebted to pre-recorded thought patterns and concepts. I have been interested to think about what a re-categorization of music that accounts for this major shift would look like.
- Thread:
- Week 2 Reflection
- Post:
- RE: Week 2 Reflection
- Author:
- Douglas Easterling
- Posted Date:
- January 12, 2014 6:38 PM
- Status:
- Published
I agree about the
function/origin complaint. I doubt that we leave out considerations of
function in classifying music today. One genre of music comes to mind
whose name, EDM (Electronic Dance Music), seems to contradict any ideas
that we do not consider function today. The "beat" used in these songs
usually has the same tempo as other songs. When pop songs are
incorporated into this genre, they are sped up/slowed down to this tempo
so that all songs can be played in succession without a break in the
beat at a tempo ideal for what experts call "getting one's groove on."
This beat is really a defining characteristic of this genre. Function
function function.
Similarly, the broader categories of
art music and folk music seem, to me, to have different functions. I
hear folk music at festivals, but in the concert hall it is considered a
novelty. Moreover, folk music may often be used for dancing, whereas
art music is typically not today, unless that dance is performative. But
then again, I think that the categories of art and folk music both
contain so many subgenres that it might become meaningless to speak
about them in general terms, and better to speak about the individual
genres themselves like I did in the above paragraph (even though that
genre is certainly a "pop" genre).
- Thread:
- Week 2 Reflection
- Post:
- Week 2 Reflection
- Author:
- Douglas Easterling
- Posted Date:
- January 12, 2014 6:21 PM
- Status:
- Published
In the introduction to The
Invention of “Folk Music” and “Art Music,” Matthew Gelbart introduces his
idea that the conceptual categories of folk and art music did not exist until
the mid 1800s. Gelbart’s main reasoning behind this claim is what he views as a
change in how we categorize music; according to Gelbart, before these
categories emerged, people classified music according to its function, and now
we tend to classify according to origin.This idea fascinates me, but I wonder
if our classification methods are indeed this cut and dry. Do we not conceive
of “folk music” and “art music” (and “popular music” for that matter) today as
having different functions? I agree that we do focus on origin, but is there no
functionality involved in our classifications?
In chapter 1, Gelbart suggests Nationalism as the original
catalyst for this shift from conceiving of musical categories based on function
to conceiving them based on origin. This idea seemed much more convincing to
me; while I am skeptical that today’s musical divisions do not take function
into account, I was convinced that a shift of importance took place, and I
think Nationalism makes sense as its initial stimulus. As the focus shifted
away from ancestral commonalities, anyone trying to unite larger groups of
people had to find cultural
commonalities that more people could unite under. Besides making sense,
Gelbart’s evidence seemed more convincing in this section as well. Particularly
convincing was the replacement of David Rizzio with James I as the “author” of
Scottish songs and musical style. This became even more convincing when Gelbart
said that neither individual is actually responsible for the Scottish style;
the idea of a Scottish author was so important that one was invented.
Similarly, I liked the idea that a folk music category could
emerge because of the view of “nature as Other” (p. 79). Since the idea of
“natural” had taken on “national” connotations, this makes sense; nations
(including the cosmopolitan modern individuals) were bound by a primal origin
which, for the modern individuals within the nation, had now become an Other.
The ideas of what “naturalness” meant in music were also fascinating since we
tend to only gloss over those things when we teach about the Style Galant.
The summary of different views on the origins of Scottish
music in chapter 3 (from trained musicians to bards and eventually to the
people), reminded me of the bias that we all face when writing. It was
interesting to see biases play out over the discourse of a long period of time.
I find it remarkable that Campbell’s “primary scale of
nature” is the same as Thomson’s “national scale,” but Gelbart never mentions
this in support of the idea that “nature” and “national” had shared meanings!
Questions: Do we indeed only focus on origin for musical
categorization today? Or do we still consider function?
Do you agree that popular music lacks the re-fashioning and
re-creation” of folk music, even in today’s digital “Remix Culture”?
- Thread:
- Week 2 Reflection
- Post:
- Week 2 Reflection
- Author:
- Erik Paffett
- Posted Date:
- January 11, 2014 1:05 PM
- Status:
- Published
Folk ramblings
(Erik Paffett)
The
historiography of the various and gradually-changing conceptions of “Scot
music” as well as the development of the folk modality during the eighteenth
century are equally illuminating and perplexing. On one hand, many of the
assumptions that appeared, such as Benjamin Franklin’s theory that gapped
scales resulted from transposing tunes on early Scottish harps and Rousseau’s
theory that melody represents the most “natural” element of music with its
close relation to language, seem obvious enough. While on the other, notions
linking Scottish and Chinese music as well as ideas about a folk or people’s
music originating from a learned tradition of bards and minstrels, seem
outlandish, at least in my opinion. Viewed in light of the outsider
perspective, or primitive othering, and whatever prevalent anthropological
theories may have influenced eighteenth-century thought, these ideas seem more
reasonable, I suppose.
Overall, I
thought Gelbart made a successful argument, treated a great deal of research
and sources, and provided more information here than I could process in a week
(I took copious notes, though). That said, the book is not completely without
problems, in my opinion. Gelbart’s argument that origin-based definitions of
genres seems to imply that they disregard function entirely (though I could be
misstating Gelbart here). While trying to credit a single composer with the
creation of a genre may be a wild-goose chase of sorts, function has always
played a significant role in defining genres. And although bromides such as
“Haydn is the father of the string quartet” may not have any use to scholars,
they may still have good use in music appreciation classes and the non-concert-going
public in general. Also, Gelbart’s tendency to jump around chronologically
caused some confusion. I think if authors stray from a strictly a chronological
presentation, they should be extra clear, at least for hasty readers such as
myself.
I am always
interested in dismantling the progress narrative in music, and it seems that
many of the assumptions originating in the early-nineteenth century, like George
Thomson’s belief that the cultivation of art music, particularly instrumental
music, led to the gradual replacement of the pentatonic scale and just the
general idea that scales gradually became more complex starting with the
pentatonic and eventually leading to chromatic or microtonal scales, are still
lurching here and there in music. I think there are some good examples to
counter these assumptions, especially in this book. For example, Dauney’s
“Skene Manuscript” argued that chromaticism existed in Egyptian music and
microtones appeared in Turkish, Persian and Indian music for a long time. Are
there any other examples that come to mind?
Is there a way to put a "break" or "jump" link into this so it doesn't take up so much scroll space on the main blog page?
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