12.
Adorno's modes of
cognition, George Rochberg on time-space and space-time
Adorno categories of the dynamic-expressive and rhythmical-spatial
listener are, obviously, not the only ways we can think about how people think
about music. The American composer
George Rochberg approximated Adorno’s categories in an essay published in 1963.
Since it’s easier to let Rochberg explain Rochberg:
THE AESTHETICS OF SURVIVAL:
A COMPOSER'S VIEW OF TWENTIETH-CENTURY MUSIC
GEORGE ROCHBERG
Copyright (c) by The
University of Michigan 1984
ISBN 0-472-10037-8
The Concepts of Musical
Time and Space (1963)
pages 97-98
... For it must follow from
the two terms which comprise the conjunction that only two orders are possible:
time-space and space-time. This type of verbal logic is no idle exercise, for
it is completely corroborated, as we shall see, by the evolution of music,
particularly twentieth-century music. The two conjunctions, time-space and
space-time, may be viewed as prototypes of fundamental significance. As
prototypes, they will serve as the basis for penetrating structural
relationships which resist traditional approaches. These prototypes will permit
us to comprehend structural relationships which define totally different types
of music and, at the same time, provide us with insights into the reasons for
the crisis which has driven the audience of our own time from the music
composed contemporaneously with it--a problem which cannot be taken lightly.
Until the
twentieth-century, Western music was rooted in one prototype--time-space. ...
page 100
To appreciate fully the
essential difference between time-space and space-time it becomes necessary to
discuss first "direction in music." Essentially, direction in music
is the creation of an integral order which is perceived or sensed as structural
goal or purpose. This is to say that when a composer creates an order in his
music which defines its own form as it emerges in concrete sound, one can sense
its direction, or, as we say, "we know where it is going." Direction
in music derives from a clear perception of, and therefore corresponds to, the
clear presentation of temporal and spatial points of departure and movement or
passage en route to points of arrival or destination. The sense of direction
coincides with, or runs parallel to, the actual growth process of the music and
the order in which the growth process occurs. The classical music of Haydn,
Mozart, and Beethoven offers us a prime example of the growth process of such
an integral order in which structural direction is dependent on two essential
conditions: periodicity of rhythmic motion and tonality. By their very nature, both are essentially
directional ...
I’ll pause in quoting Rochberg to note that for those familiar with
his story, 1963 as still before the composer’s repudiation of twelve-tone and
serial techniques, not after. Rochberg
was, so to speak, still on Adorno’s side of the atonality/tonality divide in
twentieth century aesthetics of music, but not for long.
So, let’s get back to Rochberg on time-space and space-time. He
made an interesting point about early atonal composers that sheds some light on
Adorno’s previously mentioned antipathy toward post-Webern serialism:
page 105
...By the time Debussy had
completed his work, atonality was already a living force in music (1908-1915).
The struggle of Schoenberg to solve the problem posed by the abandonment of
tonality finally led to his discovery of the twelve-tone method, a rationale
for establishing once again a systematic order of pitch relationships on both
the horizontal and vertical planes, thus ensuring a new type of structural
integrity and the organized incorporation of the intuitive nonfunctional
harmonic vocabulary of atonality (1923). During
this time, however, periodicity continued to exert its influence. Composers
who, like Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern, had abandoned functional tonality did
not turn away from periodicity. The musical phrase, based on the
metric-rhythmic wave, became more supple, plastic and asymmetrical; but it
remains, nevertheless, the structural means for establishing the audible
continuity. [emphasis added] ...
pages 115-116
... Whether the forms were
based on melodic phrase succession or on procedural forms like fugue or canon,
spatial components projected a musical discourse in which timbre and dynamic
level were expressive elements associated with pitch but lacking any objective
value in themselves; no could pitch per se be viewed in abstracto so long as it existed as the sonorous means for projecting,
say, a melody and accompaniment. With
the demise of periodicity and continuous passage based on the growth process of
traditional musical discourse, pitch, timbre, dynamic--in short all spatial
components--emerged as potentially objectivized elements which had no meaning
beyond their own projection; they could be presented in a musical context for
their own sakes. This abstraction of
spatial components from a cohesive discourse created the possibility of the sound
structure comprised of all the parameters associated with pitch and time. No longer a function of periodicity and the
melodic phrase, the sound structure now existed as a concrete manifestation in
its own right. [emphasis added] Thus
a tone, C-sharp, may be part of a composite sound structure which includes instrumental
timbre, dynamic level method of attack, registral position, density, and
durational proportion. The new space created by means of sound structure is
essentially homogenous, i.e., musical events are free to occur in any register,
no longer subject to the traditional stratification of registral levels which
articulated a relationship of melody and accompaniment: it is a space without
hierarchical order. Requiring no
preparation or resolution as a part of a continuously evolving discourse, each
individual sound or aggregate of sounds is a concrete projection of
itself. Thus sound structure has emerged
as an independent abstraction, no longer a functioning serving another end. The sound structure is coextensive with
itself; it is the music. ...
If the time-space presented a linear narrative, a path along a
river, a journey down a road with a destination that can be anticipated, then
space-time transformed the gestalt of sonic parameters into a kind of
three-dimensional space that can exist in the perceiving mind, moment by
moment, in which we are beholding a sonic world that surrounds us. The time-space of traditional Western music
since 1500 takes us on a proverbial journey and if that journey is on a
monoaural recording, so be it. The
nature of space-time, by contrast, almost begs for a sonic experience that is
performed, recorded and engineered in what’s colloquially known as “surround
sound”.
So what does this mean? This won’t mean that there are no vestiges
of conventional harmony or melody, but it can mean that you can’t fully enjoy
Pinkfloyd’s Dark Side of the Moon if
you listen to it as a monoaural recorded work.
Quadrophonic surround sound is too integral to the way in which the
album was created. If you hear Haydn’s
string quartets performed by an ensemble like The Schneider Quartet in
monoaural sound you may not get the “depth” of a more modern stereo recording
but the “journey” of Haydn’s music won’t be lost on you.
It also means that Adorno, in his earlier rant against the
spatialization of music, had perhaps not
caught up with the possibilities of composing in a space-time paradigm. In later writings Adorno conceded that
composers like Varese and Ligeti made striking, successful musical works and,
like Rochberg would later claim, Varese’s experimentation worked because he let
his ear guide him rather than a compositional procedure. Rochberg’s concept of space-time can help us
get our heads around music that isn’t composed along a Western “linear” model
but since in the West the space-time paradigm is relatively new, there could be
some growing pains in the cumulative efforts to master this new approach to
sound as art. Rochberg wrote that:
The Structure of Time in
Music (1973)
page 139
It seems logical to infer,
then, that when a musical language is being consciously formulated or a new one
consciously invented, rational involvement with all aspects of the craft and
syntax of that potential language becomes mandatory. From the fact that an
intuitive grasp of that craft and syntax is slow to develop and mature it also
follows that composition itself is slowed down. Donald Tovey has remarked,
"It is very seldom that a composer or writer can simultaneously
concentrate his energies on the working out of a new language and on the
construction of big designs."
Ragtime, however, audibly exists within the time-space convention
outlined by Rochberg. If Adorno was
right to claim that the expressive-dynamic and rhythmical-spatial approaches to
listening needed to be properly combined or balanced, as he asserted was the
case in great Western art music, then to bend all these concepts toward some
practical compositional act, we have to bear in mind that Adorno’s
expressive-dynamic and rhythmical-spatial approaches can be subsumed within
Rochberg’s time-space concept.
What Adorno contemptuously referred to as the cans into which
interchangeable materials could be dumped that made for popular song don’t have
to be viewed as cans. We are not,
centuries after the dawn of the Romantic era, forever tethered to the norms of
organicism and large-scale development. We can draw upon conventions from the
galant style or the era of figured bass.
If the work of composing a ragtime sonata constitutes work in what
Rochberg called time-space music then Adorno’s old “cans” can correspond to
places in a spatial-temporal river or path upon which we can begin to frame
points of spatial-temporal correspondence between the syntactic parameters and
norms of sonata forms and of ragtime strains.
There are at least two aspects to such a project we have to
consider. The first is more complex in
the abstract and yet simpler when taken head on. What do we make of the plurality of styles
within which people have so often bracketed eighteenth century sonatas and
ragtime into ostensibly opposed camps?
Wielded as a shibboleth, the concept of “pluralism” has often been used
to either defend or attack a range of musical loyalties within musicology,
music theory, music history, and music historiography that seem to have little
to do with musical pluralism manifest in flesh and blood people and more to do
with academic turf wars about curricula.
The second is simpler in premise and harder in practice, if we
take the concept of pluralism to suggest possibilities for musical fusions a la
Gunther Schuller’s Third Stream and various forms of jazz fusion or even
progressive rock, the practical question we run into is how rarely fusions are
regarded as successful not just by purists who are for jazz or classical or
rock or whatever, but by more “people on the street” music lovers.
If attempts to find a truly effective fusion of African diaspora
musics that are often in popular styles with western European concert music
traditions seem so often to have failed to catch on is the problem that the
idea is a bad one? As the son of an
inter-racial marriage I will admit my answer to that question is “no”. It’s not a bad idea to develop a fusion of
jazz, rock, blues, country and other pop styles with the formal possibilities
of sonata forms. But it may be possible
that those who have attempted to develop a classical/pop fusion have done so so
firmly in one camp that the “crossover” intended can’t happen, yet. With respect to ragtime and what are called
“classical” conventions I intend to take up a couple of case studies that,
though I find the interesting, are also works I think fall short of a
successful fusion of ragtime and classical compositional methods.
Compared to the thought and work of composing, say, a ragtime
fugue, discussing a concept like pluralism is, frankly, pretty easy. I’m going to move along to discussions of
pluralism in the contemporary West by George Rochberg and Leonard B. Meyer to
show that within academic musicology affirming that pluralism exists is much
easier than having that affirmation lead to musically interesting results.
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