Perceptualism (First Study).

Format:

Sound recording

Author/Creator:

Steingo, Gavin, Author.

Contributor:

Laska, Eric, Editor.

Library Stack, distributor.

Series:

Lateral Addition ; 81

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Composition (Music).

Hearing.

Music.

Sound.

Composition.

Genre:

Music

Music.

Physical Description:

1 online resource.

Place of Publication:

[Place of publication not identified], Lateral Addition, 2023.

Summary:

"What happens when the ear is presented with ten independent melodic lines? Or twenty? Or a hundred? In a series of sonic-perceptual experiments over the past few years, I've found that beyond about eight independent melodic lines, we lose the capacity for perceptual discrimination and begin to hear nothing but mush. But if we go further still (between about 20 to 50 lines) one of two things happens: either we hear more mush (I.e., noise), or something clicks and the ear begins to gestalt things into groups. Et voilà: melodic-like shapes begin to emerge from the morass. Our auditory systems are constantly doing this kind of analytical work. They do it every time we hear a phoneme or a note, for example, by fusing the many spectra into a cognizable thing. We also do it when we listen to music, separating out the various layers (drums, bass, guitar, and voice in rock music, for example). Even so, I am surprised every time it happens: when going beyond about 20 lines yields something new, something with a kind of cognizable shape. Usually in a way that's quasi-improvised (and using some kind of pitch set or simple harmonic motion), the shift from ten incoherent lines to the uncanny popping Gestalts of 40 lines takes my breath away. When it happens. It often does not, and I end up with something ragged and ugly that I erase immediately. Part of what I'm working on now is understanding what works and what doesn't. The little audio piece in this Lateral Addition issue was my first ever attempt with this compositional process. (I recorded it in my lockdown living room on the 2nd of April, 2020.) Since then, I've done many other pieces, and I have advanced the process quite a bit, but there's something about the freshness of this first attempt that I still find perceptually thrilling. In the version here, I've attempted to make something out of the little fragment of 20+ independent melodic lines. My friend and collaborator Jim Sykes plays wonderfully chaotic drums over the thing. I see this attempt as part of an approach to music composition (and to music generally) that I call perceptualism. The claim of perceptualism (and I will elaborate on this soon in various places) is that Western music has historically been divorced from questions of perception. This is so both in terms of making music (composition, performance, etc.) and theorizing music. But what do I mean when I say that music is divorced from questions of perception? Surely musicians care about nothing other than how the sound they produced is perceived? And surely academic types do nothing but try to explain how music is perceived and how it affects listeners? To some extent, yes, these assumptions are true. But we also know that historically Western music has had a deeply idealist or even mathematical thrust. Pythagoras' hammers were merely abstractions rather than sounding bodies. The birth of "modern" instrumental music ca. 1800 also traded primarily in abstractions: of pure and organic form. The listener is often less than an afterthought. I propose a perceptualist music: an approach to music making that engages questions of auditory perception directly. I said that Western music has historically been divorced from questions of perception. What I have in mind can be expressed if we split that history into several trajectories. Since the 18th century and the sedimentation of homophony, perception is mostly simple and unambiguous. Of course, there may be types of ambiguity at larger structural levels (the "hypermetrical" level, for example), or in other ways. But in the vast majority of music since ca. 1800 it is clear what the listener is supposed to hear: a melodic line (marked off by timbre and other aspects) and supporting harmonies. The listener knows what the melody is. In this sense, perception is not a real issue in this kind of music because we know what is meant to be perceived and, to a large extent, how. Music is pure perception: perceiving a melody with its harmonic support. This includes various emotions and affects. By contrast, most "complex" music of the 20th and 21st centuries does not bother with the question of perception in another way. It explores other things. There will continue to be debates about whether it is possible to hear the tone rows in Schoenberg. And complex theoretical operations will continue to be developed to explain how the processes in Babbitt or Ferneyhough are "perceived." But any honest person will admit that the question, "What exactly do you hear in this music?" is beside the point. The issue here is not that these composers do or do not "care" if anyone listens, but rather that the relationship between the musical structure and the human perceptual/cognitive apparatus are divorced from one another. We hear all kinds of things in Babbitt's music, but the music is not designed to be registered in terms of the question of what an individual listener perceives at any given sitting. The same is true of pre-1800 polyphony from J.S. Bach backwards to early organum. Going far too quickly over an enormous corpus, this music is not aimed at an external listener who might parse out a coherent perception from the whole. Think about 14th or 15th century polyphony (Machaut, Dufay, etc.) and its intricate interweaving of vocal lines. When I asked a prominent historian of this music how one is meant to perceive it, he answered that it's a "black box" and that the question is not meaningful. I tend to agree. Certainly, the question of textual intelligibility was a huge one, as exemplified by the simplification of polyphony by the Council of Trent in the mid-16th century. It may be the case that listeners were meant to focus on individual vocal lines in order to apprehend the words. (Pedantic side note: Even in cases where to the modern listener it may sound impossible to disentangle melodic lines, musicologists have recently shown that in Medieval acoustic settings vocal lines might have been more easily tracked. See Anna Zayaruznaya's "Intelligibility Redux" [2017].) Even so (and to riff on David Yearsley), the "meaning of counterpoint," the meaning of the relationship between different vocal-melodic lines, was entirely something other than a perceptual issue-it was a mirroring of cosmic order in an earlier period, and in the time of Bach the intermingling of melodies was likened to the way an alchemist mixed metals in an attempt to produce gold. (A possible counter-example: Bregman offers a potentially genuine, if not especially rich, example of Baroque perceptualism: "Composers in the Baroque period (approximately 1600-1750) frequently wrote music in which individual instruments rapidly alternated between a high and a low register, giving the effect of two intertwined melodic lines ('virtual polyphony' or 'compound melodic line'). While the performances were typically not fast enough to fully segregate the high and low melodic lines, it still produced a certain degree of segregation." He then offers an example by Telemann as evidence.) If we take these three trajectories as broadly paradigmatic of the main poles of Western music history, we see that perception is not an issue. There was a moment in the 1960s and 70s when Western music took a near perceptualist turn. Buoyed by ethnographic analyses of non-Western music (especially East African and Indonesian music), the composer Steve Reich, the music ethnographer Gerhard Kubik, and the psychologist Albert Bregman simultaneously and independently developed Gestalt (or Gestalt-like) theories of perceptual grouping in music. Similar ideas, perhaps less ethnographically-oriented, are evident in work by Maryanne Amacher and James Tenney. My compositional work takes stock of this moment in music history, trying to recuperate it and radicalize it. All I really want to do, at least at this stage, is to make music that sounds genuinely interesting. No theorization can produce interesting-sounding music, but at the same time I feel that we have tried too long to make interesting-sounding music without sufficient theorization. Beginning on a perceptualist footing is, I believe, a step in one possibly fruitful direction. We have many possible places to look in the past to help us, should we wish to. If not, we can continue making music that either offers itself nakedly, or is totally indifferent, to the listener.

(The third option, which I believe is possibly the one taken by many interesting composers today, is to intuitively find some middle-ground. But intuition may have run its course.) I don't think I have succeeded in any very substantial way with this study, and I recognize the mismatch between the grandiose claims of this text and the slightness of the music. That said, perceptualism is not one thing, and I see this LA posting as an invitation to further creative exploration in this area. - GS"-- provided by distributor.

Notes:

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