Psychology of the Arts by Hans Kreitler; Shulamith Kreitler; Experimental Research in thePsychology of Music: 7 by Edwin Gordon; The Social Psychology of Music by Paul R.FarnsworthReview by: Joscelyn GodwinNotes, Second Series, Vol. 30, No. 2 (Dec., 1973), pp. 277-280Published by: Music Library AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/895980 .

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In Germany, a country Dowland traveled in extensively during 1594-96, Or- nithoparcus's treatise went through five editions during the sixteenth century and was highly regarded. It seems more likely that Dowland acquired the work during his German stay or perhaps later in Denmark where he served at the Danish court from 1598 to 1606. In any event, his translation was not published until 1609, nine years after Eastland's announcement (not six as Poulton states, p. 251) and then not by Eastland. Although Ornithoparcus's trea- tise is conservative, as both Poulton and Burney point out, it is also comprehensive and particularly useful in matters of musica ficta, didactic devices, and definitions. The most important reason for making the book available to English readers, however, is given by Dowland himself in his son Rob- ert's publication Varietie of Lute Lessons (1610). In the section titled "Other Neces- sary Observations Belonging to the Lute"- apparently overlooked by Poulton-John Dowland cites the authority of the Microlo- gus and recommends it to any lute student who wants to understand the elements and principles of polyphonic composition and also to any teacher who wishes to "instruct aright" (fol. E r [p. 17])-a matter with which he was much concerned. In spite of the self-serving nature of his recommen- dation, it seems inconceivable that a man of Dowland's genius would have wasted his time translating a useless treatise.

Chapter VIII, devoted to Dowland's "Posthumous Reputation, Fall and Rise [sic]," chronicles the changing attitude toward his music in the years since his death in 1626. According to Poulton, the nadir of his reputation was reached in the eight- eenth century when the peripatetic English

historian Charles Burney in his A General History. . . commented unfavorably on Dowland's abilities as a composer. Burney's biases concerning late-renaissance music are well-known and Poulton should have presented his views in their historical con- text for the sake of balance and perspective. Furthermore, since Poulton reprints Bur- ney's entire discussion of Dowland's music, she should respond to these misguided and sometimes mistaken comments of the most eminent music historian of the eighteenth century.

Although much valuable research has been done by dedicated amateur scholars like Mrs. Poulton, her book suffers from technical defects that sometimes plague such scholarship-defects which reduce its usefulness. She employs a quaint but anti- quated set of symbols (*, t, t, etc.) to identify her footnotes-a system which is visually distracting and impractical for cross- reference. Other problems are created by her inconsistency in the use of op. cit., ibid., and shortened title forms of citation. And such curious spellings as "del'Aquilar" for the Italian poet Serafino dall'Aquila or "Huizinger" for Dutch historian Huizinga, cannot be charitably dismissed as misprints since they recur in the text, bibliography, and index. The examples of editorial care- lessness could go on. Since the book was first published by Faber, the English pub- lisher must bear the responsibility for not providing Mrs. Poulton with competent editorial assistance. Poulton's book is not the definitive study Dowland's music de- serves, but it is the first comprehensive one and we must be grateful to her for it.

RICHARD WANG

Psychology of the Arts. By Hans Kreitler and Shulamith Kreitler. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1971. [xiv, 514 p.; $13.75] Experimental Research in the Psychology of Music: 7. Edited by Edwin Gordon. (Studies in the Psychology of Music, 7) Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, [c 1971]. [vii, 179 p.; $6.95] The Social Psychology of Music. Second edition. By Paul R. Farnsworth. Ames, Iowa: The Iowa State University Press, [c1969]. [xvi, 298 p.; $8.50]

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Psychology of the Arts is a large book which the authors hope will be a milestone in the history of this thorny subject. They offer their theories as an alternative to the four principal explanations of artistic experience provided up to now: Psychoanalysis, Ges- talt, Behaviorism, and Information Theory. After demonstrating the shortcomings of strict adherence to each of these schools (but retaining useful concepts from them such as that of the "good gestalt"), they ask first: Why is art pleasant? Because it "mediates the relief of . . . preexisting tensions by generating new tensions which are specific" [and by releasing them]. Pre- sumably this means that our habitual neuroses and worries are symbolized by the tensions of the art work, and that a vicarious dissolution of them gives us some tempo- rary comfort. The authors then go to great lengths to demonstrate the operation of tension and release in each art form: paint- ing, music, dance, sculpture, and literature.

Other factors are brought in to the argu- ment, as a summary of their musical find- ings will demonstrate. In music the contrast of dissonance (tension) and consonance (release) is central. Man's idea of it has evolved through a "progressive conquest of tones," from consciousness only of the simplest notes (a tone, its fifth, and its octave) through five- and seven-toned scales, to the modern twelve-note system. The reason for this type of progression, in all the arts, is that people repeatedly become bored (i.e., no longer feel tensions) with current resources and demand some- thing more stimulating. In conformity with this, the idea of dissonance and consonance, in melody as well as in harmony, has changed from medieval times to the pre- sent, culminating in Schoenberg (virtually the only modern composer mentioned) and his school. They, finding even dissonances lacking in tension:

did away with the conventional keys, but the idea of tonal frames of reference has been preserved. These frames of refer- ence are not the ones dictated by tradi- tional and habitual use, but are created anew by every composer for each indi- vidual piece of music. . . . [In atonal music] the listener has far more difficulty in becoming acquainted quickly enough with each scale, with which he is con- fronted for the first time through this particular composition (p. 134).

The authors seem to be stronger in their knowledge of painting, and more enthusi- astic in their approach to dance, than in their treatment of music. Nevertheless, they touch in this section on several other inter- esting subjects: on melody and rhythm as gestalts, the emotional connotations of in- tervals, Freud's views on rhythm, the history of explanations for consonant and disso- nant experience, and the role of expectation in various styles. In the remainder of the book, music is used along with the other arts merely to illustrate the authors' theories. All this is done with a wealth of documentation: two bibliographic refer- ences are given, for instance, for the state- ment: "It has been shown that passing the hand over smooth surfaces is a pleasant experience" (p. 206). One cannot avoid the impression that the authors have done more thinking and reading than listening, look- ing, and laughing.

Their theory of the art work is, briefly, that the art work provides an expansion of Cognitive Orientation (the authors' term for "meanings and complex structures of beliefs"), in that it falls on a receptive "set" or disposition in the spectator, gives tension and release, allows him to experience empathy yet retain a certain aesthetic dis- tance, and activates and fulfills repressed and ungratified wishes. All this, and much more, is arrived at through minute discus- sions which define the concepts set out baldly, and perhaps misleadingly, here.

Cognitive Orientation, the corner-stone of the Kreitlers' theory, is a concept of such all-encompassing vagueness that I cannot accept it as being in any way an explanation of the psychology of art. All it says, basically, is that art affords us a cognitive experience. This is admittedly easier to accept than any of the narrower theories, but then anything so obvious and general is bound to be true, if not useful.

The book is valuable, however, for its huge bibliography and for the comprehen- sive presentations of the problems which each art offers to psychology. The Kreitlers have made a brave attempt to construct a Gesamtkunsttheorie, but their work on the specific art forms would be more convincing if it had been aided by specialists.

Experimental Research in the Psychology of Music teems with graphs and tables which bespeak a quantitative approach to the subject-if indeed this is the same subject

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as that of which the Kreitlers speak. The first article, by Warren C. Campbell on "A Computer Simulation of Musical Perform- ance Adjudication," is a lengthy proof that a computer can compare an "ideal" per- formance with a number of actual per- formances, and come up with graded as- sessments of the latter that compare well with those arrived at by a panel of human judges. Unfortunately the expansion of this useful resource beyond the judgement of high-school girls singing a thirty second extract from Messiah (as in Campbell's ex- periment) would incur much card-punch- ing and many imponderables about the nature of an "ideal" performance.

Pierre Divenyi's "The Rhythmic Percep- tion of Micro-Melodies . . ." springs from a similar conviction that it is profitable to correlate mental with mechanical activities. This ninety-page article, based on a doctoral dissertation, describes an experiment de- vised to ascertain whether the perception of small rhythmic irregularities, such as performers deliberately or intuitively use, is dependent on the pitch intervals between which such irregularities occur. The au- thor's laboratory experiments show that this is so, and justify the tendency of performers to "take more time" in circumstances such as large melodic leaps and certain perfect intervals (as we are assured that they do). Divenyi then forms a mathematical model for an apparatus which would react as the ear does in not noticing these irregularities. He tries to find physiological correlates to the components (counter, comparator, etc.) required by his model. This article has some moments of real prose (a rarity in such studies), and is a serious attempt to induce universal truths from a particular experi- ment.

Edwin Gordon, the editor of the series, contributes a short progress report on his five-year experiment with instrumental stu- dents in "culturally-disadvantaged" schools. It is hardly surprising to learn that they are not yet doing so well as their "cultural- ly-heterogeneous" neighbors. Gordon is obviously the prisoner of his jargon, and, one might add, of his experiment, as can be seen if one bothers to penetrate this sentence:

. . .it seems already apparent that stu- dents with high musical aptitude who attend culturally-disadvantaged schools

are capable, in time, of developing a standard of excellence in instrumental music performance which is not only similar to that demonstrated by cultural- ly-heterogeneous students who have cor- responding levels of musical aptitude but, more importantly, they demonstrate greater achievement than culturally-het- erogeneous students who have lower levels of musical aptitude (p. 142).

In the last essay James L. Mohatt assesses Professor Gordon's Iowa Tests of Music Lit- eracy, "designed to evaluate the extent to which students develop tonal and rhythmic aural perception and music literacy." The results of these tests, as performed by a group of eighth-graders, are compared to "validity criterion measures," i.e., assess- ments of their performances by judges. It comes as no surprise to learn that the Tests are found to be highly reliable guides to students' achievement.

Finally there is a small selected bibliog- raphy covering the years 1937-1970: the period since Studies in the Psychology of Music lapsed. The series was initiated by Carl E. Seashore in 1932, and its revival after more than thirty years (Volume IV, 1936; Vol- ume V, 1967) was welcome, as is the resolve to publish it annually from this issue on- wards. It is regrettable, however, that the editor pads out one solid article (Divenyi's) with three insignificant ones, one of which seems to have been included solely as an advertisement for his own work. But then, as he says in his Preface, "the continued success of the series is in large part depen- dent on the extent to which worthy studies are contributed for publication." One hopes that this will be the case for Volume VIII.

The best book of the three, and the only essential one for the average music library, is Paul R. Farnsworth's The Social Psychology of Music. It is worth having this second edition for the post-1958 bibliography in the notes, the improved chapter on scales, and the general updating of material and ideas. Farnsworth is an eminent man in the fields of psychology and aesthetics, and has also served on the Executive Council of the A. M. S. His only shortcomings are in the minor fields of astrology and Greek theory. He starts from the assumption that "music must look for its explanations far more often to social science than to physical science" (p.226), but by this he does not mean that he approaches it as a sociologist.

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He hopes, encouragingly, that researches of the sort he describes will lead through better understanding to greater musical enjoyment.

Farnsworth's favorite method is to take a popular belief and to show how it is grounded not in "fact" but in the social and psychological conditions of its believers. Among other fallacies, he debunks the supremacy of old Cremona violins, the "coldness" of Heifetz's playing, racial and physical characteristics thought to be pecu- liar to musicians, and the objective justifica- tion of scales and tunings. He has chapters on music as a language, musical taste, musi- cal ability, and the use of music in industry and therapy. The chapter on taste contains statistics which I, for once, found fascinat- ing: they show the changing fortunes of

composers in performance, in reference books, and in the estimation of various groups of people. (The members of the American Musicological Society, for in- stance, chose the same "Top Ten" as Stan- ford University students, except that they admitted Haydn over Tchaikovsky.)

To read Farnsworth is to realize anew how little of music is in the ear of the listener, and how much in his head. One has to conclude, in the end, that either humans are very stupid in their behavior when it comes to music, or else that music is a bigger thing than any of us, and that as such it will always evade attempts to bottle it up in theories.

JOSCELYN GODWIN Colgate University

Musikinstrumente im mittelalterlichen Kroatien: Beitrag zur allge- meinen Organographie der Musikinstrumente und zur mittelalterli- chen Musikgeschichte. By Koraljka Kos. Zagreb: Musikwissenschaft- liches Institut der Musikakademie, 1972. [121 p., 80 glossy plates, 7 p., diagrams; no price given]

Musical Iconography: A Manual for Cataloguing Musical Subjects in Western Art before 1800. By Howard Mayer Brown and Joan Lascelle. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1972. [xiii, 220 p.; $7.00]

Extant Medieval Musical Instruments: A Provisional Catalogue by Types. By Frederick Crane. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, [c 1972]. [xiv, 105 p.; $6.95]

A large share of modern research in medieval and renaissance music has been concentrated on the transcription of manu- script and printed sources in the anthologies and opera omniaeditions that line the shelves of any respectable music library today. Making such music easily accessible for stylistic analysis will continue to be a neces- sary activity, but commensurate with the steadily increasing size of such a repertoire are the growing demands for solutions to some fundamental questions of perform- ance practice. What was (or is) the correct manner of performing a Josquin motet, a Machaut mass, a Perotin organum, a Bin- chois chanson? How can modern instru- ment makers learn more about producing correct copies of extinct instruments? Will a more precise knowledge of the perform-

ance practices of those times actually affect any editorial procedures in modern edi- tions? Perhaps one source of answers to these and other questions lies in the cliche quoted by Brown and Lascelle that a picture is worth a thousand words.

In his report on the inaugural meetings of RIdIM (Repertoire International d'Icon- ographie Musicale) in this journal, Barry Brook laments that "few areas are as lacking in research tools, as ill-equipped in meth- odology, or as haphazard in source control, as musical iconography" (Notes [June 1972] 2814:652), and estimates that activity in this field has lagged over 100 years behind the cataloging of music that gained impetus with the pioneering work of Robert Eitner. The three books under review here attest to the vastness of resources and complexity

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