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From: timhsu@athena.mit.edu (Timothy M. Hsu)
Newsgroups: comp.music
Subject: Re: Categories of Musicological Analysis
Message-ID: <1990Aug17.085910.1098@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 17 Aug 90 08:59:10 GMT
References: <9931@rice-chex.ai.mit.edu> <1918@idunno.Princeton.EDU>
Sender: daemon@athena.mit.edu (Mr Background)
Reply-To: timhsu@athena.mit.edu (Timothy M. Hsu)
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Organization: Massachusetts Institute of Technology
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Mr. Smith writes:

>>Now, my next question is What are the basic categories of musicological
>>analysis?  In other words, in what few basic categories can all
>>musico-analytic problems be understood?
>> (1-6, Sound, Rhythmics, Harmonic, Melodics, Lyrics, Corpographics)

Ms. Seltzer responds:

>The main problem with this categorization is that is has an inheretly Western
>musical bias....  At the same time, there are categories which relate to both
>Western and non-Western music which have been excluded here.

>Musical acoustics, as reported in the Journal of the Acoustical
>Society of America, is such a discipline.  In acoustics we would normally talk
>about pitch (rather than melody), timbre (rather than harmonics), temporal
>properties (rhythm is probably an acceptable term, but one might wish
to analyze
>the temporal properties of a sound on a more microscopic level),
relationship of
>music to text (rather than "lyrics", a word which assumes certain
composition
>processes which might not occur in certain types of music, such as
improvised
>Indian ragas where syllables are insterspersed with words).

Hmm... that Great Cosmic Question, "What *is* music?" rises again.

John Cage's stuff seems to get to a lot of these issues.  _4:28_ (I may
be off by
a few seconds) (*), for instance, is usually seen as a presentation of
silence
(thus, formally, even fitting within Mr. Smith's 6 categories, though
certainly
not in the usual manner).  However, you could also look at it as saying
that
the presentation aspect of music, the fact that somebody comes out in a
tuxedo
and expects you to listen to what he does for 4 1/2 minutes, is a
fundamental
aspect of music, perhaps more so than Rhythm/Harmony/etc.  Of course,
you
could just say that Cage is nonsense, and many people do.

As another point, I think the matter of Organization/Chaos is an
important one,
though this applies to all art, of course, and not just music.  Cage, I
believe,
specifically takes the position that all sound is music, and thus
presents many
chaotic noises as music.  For instance, in "101", his recent thing for
the BSO,
there are a few structural elements present (some repeated piano thing,
I think), but basically, everybody just gets up on stage and just plays
whatever occurs to
them at the time.

On a more mainstream level, you could look at this issue as
Writing/Improv,
or even Composing/Interpretation.  Was Charlie Parker composing a new
piece
every time he got up to play "Cherokee"?  Is Ornette Coleman's "Free
Jazz"
music at all?

Thoughts & flames are welcome.

--Tim






(*) For anyone who doesn't know the piece, in _4:28_, a pianist is
instructed to
go onstage, sit down, open a piece of music, play nothing for 4 min. 28
sec.,
get up, get applause (well, maybe), and leave.  The "intended sound"
could be
seen either as pure silence or the sounds of the concert hall (rustling
programs, 
coughing, whispering, and, as inevitably happens, people leaving).

Btw, in Tower Records, I saw a CD put out by some percussion ensemble
(Ithaca
College, I think) which featured _4:28_ as one of the tracks.  Arranged
for
percussion ensemble, of course.  Hmm....