Uncaged
Recently (okay, it was a couple of months ago and I haven't gotten around to writing about it) I was thinking about the perception and reception of music, paticularly new music. In particular, I was thinking about people's reactions to music that is particularly "out there," like, say, 4'33", by John Cage. Many listeners, when confronted by a piece like this, or even one considerably less radical in conception, will say, "Oh, but that's not music!" Whether you agree with such a sentiment or not, it still raises the question, "What is music, anyway?" Most of us like to think that there is some easy definition of "music," and things either are or are not musical. But when we try to account for our own impressions -- the Mozart Requiem is music, 4'33" isn't, the Beatles are musical, hip-hop isn't (purely as a hypothetical set of impressions, though I'm sure there are some people who would agree with them) -- things get pretty complex. To try to craft an explicit definition of music that includes the things we want to include and excludes the things we want to exclude would lead to a hopelessly complicated definition, full of conditions and exceptions. If we instead try for a simple definition, it is either too narrow -- only the 3 B's are music! -- too broad -- any organized sound is music! -- or possibly both. Should we just give up on the question?
The question of defining music can be taken further, to the definitions of genre. The Mozart Requiem is clearly "classical music;" is 4'33"? Is it "experimental music?" Is one a subset of the other? Or, if you'd rather not think about Cage too much, how do we determine genre boundaries in the rock and pop music? For recent music, you might think that we can ask the creators for their own classifications, but this is even more problematic. Creators of music seem to have an innate resistance to being put in categories. I believe that Philip Glass once claimed that "minimalism" was a label that couldn't be applied to anything written (by him or anyone else) after 1972 or so, while you really need to fast-forward to 1980 or so to hear significant stylistic differences from his earlier music. Conversely, Arnold Schoenberg and Paul Creston both described their respective harmonc languages as "pandiatonic," though it is hard to imagine two more dissimilar-sounding styles from that time period. How can we hope to categorize music, when both the music and its creators seem to constantly defy categorization?
The problem, I think, lies not formulating precise definitions for music and its genres, but in examining our model for categorizing music. Basically, I think that exact definitions, while useful in many ways, are inherently faulty for dealing with things like music, because exact definitions don't reflect how we perceive musical categories, or most categories, for that matter. The lignuistic George Lakoff, I believe, developed the notion of "radial categories," suggesting that this the model by which we form most categories. When we think of some category, such as "fruit," we don't automatically think of something like the strict botanical definition. Instead, we have a small number of prototype members of the category, such as apples and oranges. Other items are classified as fruits according to their similarity to a prototype member, or their similarity to other items already classified as fruit. The more steps we have to take to get from a prototype member to an item in question, the less "fruity" that item is, in general. Exactly where we draw the line between "fruit" and "not-fruit" is largely a matter of personal opinion: are tomatoes, which are edible, colorful, similar in shape and texture to many known fruits, but not sweet, fruit?
For many common categories, most people within a culture tend to have identical or similar prototypes for those cultures. For native English speakers, the robin seems to be a prototypical bird. Apples and oranges may be prototypical fruits to us, but I wouldn't be surprised to see coconuts and pineapples as the prototypical fruits in a tropical culture. Furthermore, I would imagine that the more complex or abstract the category is, the more variance there would be in individuals' prototypes.
And this brings me to music. I believe that for nearly all of us, music, and its many subdivisions, are radial categories. We don't have some complicated Boolean expression in our heads that tells us, "This thing here is music;" instead, we have some number of prototypical instances of music -- probably the things we were introduced to as music at a young age -- and think, "These are definitely music; how do I relate this new thing to them?" From this, we can see that there are a number of reasons why two people might have different ideas of what constitutes music: their prototype examples might be different, they might have different threshholds for how dissimilar something can be before it ceases to be music, or, perhaps most subtly, they may have different notions of what constitutes a similarity (to most people today, Mozart and Rossini sound very similar, perhaps indistinguishable, while 19th-century Italians saw a world of difference between the two; conversely, most people would consider 4'33" to be a world apart from Music of Changes, an "unsilent" work also by John Cage, while specialists would recognize that both works were built from material generated by random numbers and the I Ching.). And we can turn to this model again when we consider the question of musical genre. I would bet that Beethoven is a nearly universal prototype for "classical music," while for "rock music," people's prototypes may be as varied as Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and Nirvana.
You may be wondering, "So, what's the point of all this?" What's the point, indeed? Well, I think there are several points that can be drawn from this, but I will stick with the one or two points that are of greatest practical concern to me as a composer. Musicians like me face a number of related problems, from the "death of classical music," to the perception of "modern music" as "noise." These problems depend partly on our notions of such concepts as "classical music" and "modern music," and I feel that in dealing with such problems, we should be mindful of how others perceive these classifications. For one thing, we should realize that, even with a seemingly obvious category like "new music" or "modern music," an explicit definition just doesn't accurately reflect how listeners actually perceive those categories. And if we find that some of these categories seem to be "infected" in some way -- perhaps the prototypes someone has for "modern music" are all unpleasant to that listener, so if you write something they find pleasant, it will not be considered "modern" -- then maybe, instead of trying to broaden the perception of these categories, we should be trying to create new categories. Or maybe the right categories are already in place, and we just haven't been using them as labels enough. Or maybe we'll discover that we are fighting an inherently unwinnable battle, though I doubt this is the case.
Thus, I am interested in your impressions -- what are your prototypes (if any) for these categories? I am particularly curious about your prototypes for the following categories:
* Music
* "classical music"
* "Western art music"
* "contemporary [art/classical] music"
* "modern music"
* "new music"
* "experimental music"
It'd be great if you could come up with specific pieces or composers, but descriptions or impressions of your prototypes can be just as useful. And if any of the above categories are completely meaningless to you, that's perfectly okay. Maybe you can come over to my house, and I'll give you a prototype or two!
-TT
The question of defining music can be taken further, to the definitions of genre. The Mozart Requiem is clearly "classical music;" is 4'33"? Is it "experimental music?" Is one a subset of the other? Or, if you'd rather not think about Cage too much, how do we determine genre boundaries in the rock and pop music? For recent music, you might think that we can ask the creators for their own classifications, but this is even more problematic. Creators of music seem to have an innate resistance to being put in categories. I believe that Philip Glass once claimed that "minimalism" was a label that couldn't be applied to anything written (by him or anyone else) after 1972 or so, while you really need to fast-forward to 1980 or so to hear significant stylistic differences from his earlier music. Conversely, Arnold Schoenberg and Paul Creston both described their respective harmonc languages as "pandiatonic," though it is hard to imagine two more dissimilar-sounding styles from that time period. How can we hope to categorize music, when both the music and its creators seem to constantly defy categorization?
The problem, I think, lies not formulating precise definitions for music and its genres, but in examining our model for categorizing music. Basically, I think that exact definitions, while useful in many ways, are inherently faulty for dealing with things like music, because exact definitions don't reflect how we perceive musical categories, or most categories, for that matter. The lignuistic George Lakoff, I believe, developed the notion of "radial categories," suggesting that this the model by which we form most categories. When we think of some category, such as "fruit," we don't automatically think of something like the strict botanical definition. Instead, we have a small number of prototype members of the category, such as apples and oranges. Other items are classified as fruits according to their similarity to a prototype member, or their similarity to other items already classified as fruit. The more steps we have to take to get from a prototype member to an item in question, the less "fruity" that item is, in general. Exactly where we draw the line between "fruit" and "not-fruit" is largely a matter of personal opinion: are tomatoes, which are edible, colorful, similar in shape and texture to many known fruits, but not sweet, fruit?
For many common categories, most people within a culture tend to have identical or similar prototypes for those cultures. For native English speakers, the robin seems to be a prototypical bird. Apples and oranges may be prototypical fruits to us, but I wouldn't be surprised to see coconuts and pineapples as the prototypical fruits in a tropical culture. Furthermore, I would imagine that the more complex or abstract the category is, the more variance there would be in individuals' prototypes.
And this brings me to music. I believe that for nearly all of us, music, and its many subdivisions, are radial categories. We don't have some complicated Boolean expression in our heads that tells us, "This thing here is music;" instead, we have some number of prototypical instances of music -- probably the things we were introduced to as music at a young age -- and think, "These are definitely music; how do I relate this new thing to them?" From this, we can see that there are a number of reasons why two people might have different ideas of what constitutes music: their prototype examples might be different, they might have different threshholds for how dissimilar something can be before it ceases to be music, or, perhaps most subtly, they may have different notions of what constitutes a similarity (to most people today, Mozart and Rossini sound very similar, perhaps indistinguishable, while 19th-century Italians saw a world of difference between the two; conversely, most people would consider 4'33" to be a world apart from Music of Changes, an "unsilent" work also by John Cage, while specialists would recognize that both works were built from material generated by random numbers and the I Ching.). And we can turn to this model again when we consider the question of musical genre. I would bet that Beethoven is a nearly universal prototype for "classical music," while for "rock music," people's prototypes may be as varied as Elvis Presley, the Beatles, and Nirvana.
You may be wondering, "So, what's the point of all this?" What's the point, indeed? Well, I think there are several points that can be drawn from this, but I will stick with the one or two points that are of greatest practical concern to me as a composer. Musicians like me face a number of related problems, from the "death of classical music," to the perception of "modern music" as "noise." These problems depend partly on our notions of such concepts as "classical music" and "modern music," and I feel that in dealing with such problems, we should be mindful of how others perceive these classifications. For one thing, we should realize that, even with a seemingly obvious category like "new music" or "modern music," an explicit definition just doesn't accurately reflect how listeners actually perceive those categories. And if we find that some of these categories seem to be "infected" in some way -- perhaps the prototypes someone has for "modern music" are all unpleasant to that listener, so if you write something they find pleasant, it will not be considered "modern" -- then maybe, instead of trying to broaden the perception of these categories, we should be trying to create new categories. Or maybe the right categories are already in place, and we just haven't been using them as labels enough. Or maybe we'll discover that we are fighting an inherently unwinnable battle, though I doubt this is the case.
Thus, I am interested in your impressions -- what are your prototypes (if any) for these categories? I am particularly curious about your prototypes for the following categories:
* Music
* "classical music"
* "Western art music"
* "contemporary [art/classical] music"
* "modern music"
* "new music"
* "experimental music"
It'd be great if you could come up with specific pieces or composers, but descriptions or impressions of your prototypes can be just as useful. And if any of the above categories are completely meaningless to you, that's perfectly okay. Maybe you can come over to my house, and I'll give you a prototype or two!
-TT