Kevin Laskey Aesthetics & Criticism Iva Hewett

The work of a 21st century arts presenter is a battle. There are fights for institutional

grants, fights with a population that does not mind spending £3 on a latte but wants its music for

free.1 And even if the presenter is able to get bodies in the concert hall or art gallery, the battle

continues. “My kid could do that,” resounds at an exhibition of abstract expressionist masters at

the Museum of Modern Art in New York. “I didn’t get it,” fills the lobby at Alice Tully Hall just

across town after a concert of music by Edgard Varese. The critics may have liked the shows for

the ambitious programming and new insights, but to the other audience members who quizzically

read the review the next day, these critics seem to have a special knowledge and expertise that

allows them to understand the difficult artwork. The reviews become easy to ignore and the

cycle continues, with the presenters trying even harder to convince former subscribers that this

modern art is worth seeing and hearing.

When American listeners were turned off by the new pieces they were hearing at

symphony orchestra concerts in the 1950s, the response of serialist composer Milton Babbit was

“Who cares if you listen?”2 Rather than taken aback by their lack of appeal, Babbit and his peers

seemed to relish in their music’s complexity and obtrusiveness. Total-serialist music was more

about the pure and impersonal compositional process than loosey-goosey expressionism anyway.

However, what this movement did was create a cult of inaccessibility in the world of avant-garde

classical music that had a profound impact on how audiences listened to and interacted with new

works. In order to understand the music, in the minds of the composers, you had to understand

the processes going on, whether they were retrograde inversions of tone rows or the simpler

1 This predicament is quite humorously portrayed in a homemade cartoon web video about a professional choral group. See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T0W59PDwFNM2 The title of Babbit’s paper wasn’t his idea, but it conveniently sums up his big points that compares the complexity in modern music to the complexity of scientific papers.

rhythmic permutations in the music of Steve Reich.3 Most of the time, this kind of listening made

the music unapproachable to anyone other than fellow musicians and helped propagate a deadly

conception of what makes a good piece of music and what it really means to understand it. A

good piece of music is not the one with the most ingenious process, but as according to Roger

Scruton, is great despite the process, suggesting its meaning is not arcane and difficult to parse

for a layperson.4 In actuality, the critic at the New York Varese concert knows only as much

about the formal processes in the music as the novice sitting next to him or her. The significant

difference in understanding the music has as much to do with the particular kind of listening

carried out by the critic and the novice as the particular facets of the music itself.

In order to determine what it means to understand a piece of music, one must start in

figuring out what music actually communicates. Firstly, music can communicate itself, or more

precisely, a group of people (or increasingly a machine) can transmit a piece of music to an

audience. On its most basic level, music is a series of sounds unfolding over time, and so the

music communicates its own particular series of events. Therefore to understand the piece, one

would simply need to know the sequence of events and be able to duplicate it – this view of

music is inherently self-reflexive. That is much easier said than done, and is ultimately at odds

with the history of musical performance. If an audience must understand a piece to enjoy it, and

of course a musician will only continue to work if the audience enjoys his or her music and

returns to hear it again, then the musical audience would solely consist of other musicians who

would understand and enjoy the piece for its own sake. This certainly does not sound like a

3 In his manifesto “Music as Gradual Process,” Reich lays out the importance of hearing gradually-changing processes in his music, in contrast to the free expression of improvised music popular among his New York peers. Reich’s music gained wider popularity when he ceased to be as dogmatic about the processes in his music, especially in Music for 18 Musicians.4 Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

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sustainable business model for music and also poses an origins problem. If musical

understanding consisted solely of technical understanding of the sequence of events, then the

first piece of music performed in history would not be understood by anyone who heard it, and

dismissed as noise. Herein lies the major problem of the self-reflexive theory of musical

meaning. If music is only capable of expressing itself, as suggested by the composer Igor

Stravinsky,5 then it gets reduced to mere noise, which is also just as good at expressing itself.

From here, one must decide whether there is no such thing as music apart from noise, or if there

is something peculiar about music that allows it to express something, such as a thought or an

emotion, beyond its combination of sounds.

Considering how much time and energy humans have devoted to making music, it would

be a shame to think that it only held the value of noise. In light of that, we will proceed with the

base assumption that music does express something beyond itself and that it is possible for a

hearing-equipped human to understand that expression. With this assumption in hand, we travel

to Los Angeles, California in October 2009 to hear the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s first concert

of the season, featuring a new piece by the esteemed American composer John Adams called

“City Noir.”6 We take our seats in the concert hall behind two elderly men. They have

apparently been friends for a long time and have been going to philharmonic concerts together

for years. After the performance of the Adams piece, we follow the two men out of the hall and

queue up for an interval drink. While waiting, the two converse about the piece.

5 Stravinsky famously questioned music’s ability to express any meaning in his 1935 autobiography.6 Thanks to Ivan Hewett for suggesting this particular example for a thought experiment. I have expanded on his original take. Leonard Bernstein’s Young Person’s Concert on musical meaning also provided inspiration.

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“I really felt the piece was a spot-on portrait of 1950s Los Angeles,” the first man said.

“In the last movement, during the trumpet solo, I could see a private eye, alone on a dark street.

When the percussion came in, he jumped in his car to chase after some criminal.”

“Really?” the other man replied. “I felt that it could have a sequel to ‘My Father Knew

Charles Ives,’ if under a different name. The celeste parts there were like falling snowflakes, and

that trumpet solo sounded like a lone fox in the woods. And that section with the percussion felt

more like an avalanche. All very wintry New England.”

“Huh, I’d never think of it like that. Either way, it sure did feel like Adams was trying to

channel the sound of old film scores.”

“Yes, the orchestration was quite syrupy.”

Despite hearing the same piece, these two men came away with two different

interpretations, two sets of images, two understandings. While the first man’s interpretation may

be closer to depicting the images that inspired Adams when writing it,7 the second man certainly

did not mis-understand the piece. In fact, the differing interpretations are more similar on

examination. Both reference the same points in the music – the trumpet solo and the groovy,

percussion-heavy finale. Both sets of images have a similar basic emotional underpinning. The

trumpet solo reflects a sense of isolation and loneliness, while the insistent pulse of the finale

suggests moving bodies and a sense of inevitability. In this case, Adams’ music seems to

communicate some very basic concepts and emotions, while the listeners take those bits of

7 City Noir Performance note, http://www.earbox.com/W-citynoir.html.

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information and use their imagination to arbitrarily add a story or images to them. Both listeners

understood the piece, but their understandings were colored by preexisting biases and particular

sonic associations.

This example is narrow in that it deals with two characters that are familiar with the kind

of music they are listening to, and in one case, the previous work of the composer. Would a

listener who had never heard an orchestra in his or her life, let alone the music of John Adams,

have the same basic emotional understanding of “City Noir?” After the shock of seeing so many

people with weird apparati on one stage wore off, this listener would at least be able to grasp the

strongest basic emotions in the piece. In psychological experiments, humans have proved adept

at recognizing moods in a particular piece of music from outside traditions they are familiar with.

For example, untrained western listeners were able to correctly articulate the mood associated

with an Indian rag just by the sound.8 Non-western peoples faired similarly well in recognizing

emotions in western pieces.9 Beyond recognition, diverse peoples also use similar expressive

devices in their music. In Alex Ross’s new history of the descending basso lamento pattern, he

shows how the musical figure featuring a melody descending step-wise to perfect fourth below

the original note crops up in western classical music, Hungarian folk music, and Delta Blues,

among others, and in almost all cases signifies a feeling of lament.10

8 Laura-Lee Balkwill and William Forde Thompson, “A Cross-Cultural Investigation of Emotion in Music: Psychophysical and Cultural Cues,” Music Perception, vol. 17, no. 1, Fall 1999, pp. 43-64.C9 Thomas Fritz, et. al, “Universal Recognition of Three Basic Emotions in Music,” Current Biology, no. 19, April 14, 2009, pp. 1-4.10 Alex Ross, “Chaconna, Lamento, Walking Blues: Bass lines of music history,” from Listen to This, London: HarperCollins, 2010.

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All of these findings suggest an apparatus for shared musical understanding, but do not

articulate how this apparatus works. The philosopher Peter Kivy has a workable suggestion in

which humans are able to recognize contours and conventions in music.11 Contours are musical

features or events that bare a similarity to human emotional features – a piece of music is sad

because it resembles a sad person. Conventions, on the other hand, are musical features that over

time in a particular tradition have come to be associated with certain emotions and require

metaphorical cognitive transfer; something such as a minor key in western music. However,

Roger Scruton objects to this distinction. Scruton argues that a piece of sad music does not

literally wallow and droop like a sad person.12 To recognize a piece as sad requires metaphorical

thinking, making the difference between contour and convention irrelevant and also suggesting

that there is no base cognitive apparatus for human musical cognition.

However, Kivy’s concept of contour holds up to the objection when examining the

underlying cognitive functions. Humans are equipped with the ability to recognize another’s

emotions not just by the other’s physical behavior, but by changes in vocalizations. Excited

people will speak quickly, loudly, and with large changes in intonation. Sad people speak more

slowly and with a smaller tonal range. When music is quick, loud, and features melodies with

large jumps, the listener processes the sound with the same functions that allow them to

understand the emotion of another speaker, helping the listener to understand the music as

exciting. When listening to slow music with constrained melodies, the listeners process the

emotion as sad in the same manner. Scruton’s argument also brings up the possibility that a

contour can acquire aspects of a convention, which is certainly necessary to express anything

11 Peter Kivy, The Corded Shell, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.12 Scruton, Aesthetics, p. 153.

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more than the simplest of emotions. The basso lamento pattern as described by Ross has both

aspects of convention and contour – the falling melody may suggest a human sigh, but the

particular combination of descending steps is a specifically western practice that surfaces in

music from (Henry) Purcell to (Jimmy) Page and evokes a more complex emotion than a simple

sigh.13 Because the perception of contours are traceable to basic human lingual-cognitive

abilities, the emotions packaged in musical contours are likely to be understood by any potential

listener. Perception of emotions via conventions requires musical training – exposure to a

particular tradition of music. The listener must be able to recognize the convention (requiring

storage in long-term memory) and associate it with a particular emotion.

Beyond basic emotion, a piece of music also has a capacity to convey basic ideas through

allusion. This allusion may be to a particular sound not generally found in a performance space,

like a birdsong or thunderstorm, or to another piece of music. An allusion to a particular sound

is a more universal form of convention, as it only requires knowledge of the common sound

source. The recognition can inspire an emotional response through association as well. An

allusion to a particular piece of music within another can communicate a composer’s opinion of

another musician, or give the piece a geographical setting. For instance, jazz trumpeter Dave

Douglas quotes Miles Davis’ “Boplicity” on a tune called “Penelope,” expressing admiration for

the older master. Aaron Copland uses the Shaker folk tune “Simple Gifts” in his ballet

“Appalachian Spring” to strengthen the ballet’s American backwoods setting. In order to

understand the musical allusion, a listener must have prior knowledge of the piece that is alluded

to. If the listener does not recognize the alluded piece, he or she will not get the joke, and will

13 Two of Ross’s examples in “Chaconna” are Dido’s lament from Purcell’s opera Dido and Aeneas and Jimmy Page’s guitar lead from Led Zeppelin’s “Stairway to Heaven.”

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not understand the potentially odd musical gesture. However, allusion is for the most part a very

small aspect of a piece of music. To return to the City Noir example, the listeners noted

orchestrational references to golden-age Hollywood film scores, but the recognition of this

allusion did not affect their understanding of the basic emotional content of the trumpet solo and

percussive finale. A listener who was not familiar with scores by Bernard Herrmann and Elmer

Bernstein would still achieve an adequate understanding of the piece.

Even if a piece of music is littered with arcane references, understanding the basic

emotions transmitted by it is attainable by an average listener in a particular culture. There is no

technical knowledge required, just basic cognitive faculties. But if it really is this easy to

understand and enjoy music, the common gripe of “I don’t understand it” in regards to more

contemporary music can mean a couple of things. First, it could mean the particular piece of

itself does not evoke contours of human communication and/or does not use conventions that are

recognizable by the audience. Second, it could also mean that the term understanding is misused

by an audience member to mean something else – that the listener did not actively engage the

piece and therefore did not receive any emotional information.

These two points are related because they deal with ambiguity in music. As noted by

Leonard Bernstein in one his six Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 1973, western

classical music became increasingly ambiguous throughout the 19th century through extreme use

of chromaticism.14 He makes an example of Chopin’s Mazurka no. 4 and how it obscures its

tonal center through harmonic relationships that suggest multiple keys, and holding off any

14 Leonard Bernstein, “The Dangers and Delights of Ambiguity,” from The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.

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standard V-I cadence for nineteen bars.15 The pinnacle of musical ambiguity comes in serial

music. By its very nature, serialism is meant to be tonally ambiguous, but by eliminating all

relationship to tonality, it becomes emotionally ambiguous as well. Some psychologists have

tried to explain that the difficulty of listening to serial music is that there are fewer rules

regulating probable musical events.16 Humans do not have computational brain power to parse

these probabilities, and so from a technical concept, cannot understand it. However, this concept

of unsatisfactory processing also applies to understanding Bach’s crab cannon in “A Musical

Offering,” (no one can hear the complex form as the piece unfolds) and listeners usually do not

have the same reaction to that piece as Webern’s Six Pieces for Orchestra. Instead, the difficulty

in understanding serial music is that the desire to use all twelve notes of the chromatic scale

equally leads to decidedly jagged, inhuman contours. In addition, by throwing out all vestiges of

tonality, serialism lacks the vocabulary of tonal conventions that a listener could understand.

Certainly this kind of music may be transmitting some emotion, it is just that the emotion is hard

to articulate and unfamiliar to an average human.

However, artistic ambiguity in every discipline has received forceful advocacy for its

beauty and power. For instance, the literary critic William Empson in his 1930 book Seven

Types of Ambiguity praised the oft-ignored poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins for its irregular

wordplay.17 Empson showed how emphasizing different syllables in a particular line of Hopkins

could change the line’s meaning, adding richness to the poetry.18 In current music criticism, it is

common to praise an album as a “grower,” one that reveals new layers of beauty on repeated

15 Ibid. 209-210.16 This computational aspect of music is discussed in Fred Lehrdal and Ray Jackendoff’s A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983.17 William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, London: 1930.18 Ibid, 186-189.

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listens.19 This praise of musical ambiguity acknowledges the arcane manner of emotional

transmission, but also suggests that mysteriousness inherent in the work makes it a more potent

and rewarding listen. If emotional ambiguity is such a good thing, why does it turn so many

listeners off?

Let us return to the City Noir experiment. Previous, we were able to account for

differences in understanding between the two listeners in that their understandings shared an

underlying recognition of basic emotions transmitted by the piece. But now after hearing their

conversation, we walk back towards the hall and hear another longtime patron’s comment.

“I liked that kind of Latin jazzy part at the end, but I didn’t get most of what came before

it. I’d rather hear ‘Short Ride in a Fast Machine’ than sit through that slog.”

How was this listener’s experience so much different than the other two’s? This man is

also familiar with Adams’ previous work, so his difference in understanding is not attributable to

knowledge. Rather, this response has to do with the particular listener’s level of engagement at

different parts of the piece. There are different ways for a listener to engage with a piece of

music. The easiest to carry out, and perhaps most visceral, is to dance, to move one’s body in

synchronicity with the regular pulse. It is very uncommon to hear “I don’t understand the

music” at a discotheque or a folk dance ceremony because the appropriate audience response is

simple to grasp and carry out. A step down the audience-behavioral response chain is a jazz

club, where the audience can move to the music more subtly (foot tapping, head bobbing) and

19 A good example comes from reviews of the American rock band Wilco, and their album A Ghost is Born. See http://allmusic.com/album/a-ghost-is-born-r683455/review and user comments on the Amazon.com page for the album.

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cheer after a particularly impressive solo. However, there is a greater degree of attention and

patience required to follow the narrative of an improvised solo or the interplay of the rhythm

section. The next major step beyond the jazz club is hearing classical music at a concert hall.

There is no room for bodily movement along to the music and sometimes not even a regular

pulse to move to. Applauding in the middle of the piece is disdained. The listening experience

in a concert hall is abstract and takes place exclusively inside the minds of the audience

members. In order to engage a piece of abstract, serious music, the listener must have an active

mind because the music does not actively engage the body like dance music does. The first two

men we met had very active minds during the City Noir performance. As the piece played out,

they performed subconscious mental acrobatics by connecting the piece to other music they had

heard before (the work of Adams and old film scores) and associating the basic emotions

transmitted by the piece with particular images or experiences, which heightened the power of

those emotions. These two understood the piece much more thoroughly than the third man

because they mentally participated in the music making, rather than sitting back and waiting for

the music to do something that would actively grab their attention. The more passive form of

listening is adequate for engagement with a top 40 pop song, as those tunes do whatever they can

to lodge themselves in the listener’s brain through repetitive hooks and straightforward

emotional gestures. But as music gets increasingly abstract, the listener must become much

more intellectually active and search for the piece’s power, rather than having it served to them

on a silver platter. The intense satisfaction that some listeners get from abstract music is perhaps

attributable to the sense of discovery when mining through the murky piece.

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To understand and enjoy a piece of music, one does not need special knowledge of the

technical aspects of the music, or the composer’s history, but rather just a proper mindset. The

importance of the active mind while listening to a musical performance can help bridge the gap

between the basic contour-gesture theory of musical understanding to the concept of why music

is so potent to people in very particular ways. Say a modern jazz connoisseur and a person who

has never heard a note of jazz in her life listened to two different charts by the Duke Ellington

band – “Take the A Train” and “Happy Go Lucky Local.” The inexperienced listener would

probably get a basic emotional understanding of the pieces, perhaps recognizing the imitative

sound effects of the brass section and a feeling of movement from the driving swing. But

beyond that, the pieces would sound much the same because they share a vocabulary of contours

and gestures – the pieces transmit the same basic information. However, the jazz connoisseur

uses her experience to think about the pieces as they play. The horn sound effects in “Happy Go

Lucky” both remind her of free jazz she hears in New York basements and help her create the

image of an old train crisscrossing the American south in her head. She enjoys the infectious

melody of “Take the A Train,” but it fails to strike the same deep feeling in her mind. The two

are vastly different pieces to her because of how she uses her experiences and memories to relate

to them.

If listeners were only able to respond to music with basic emotions, music would not

have the kind of potency to make it the unavoidable cultural activity it is. However, music is not

a true universal language, as it does not transmit semantic information to express complex ideas

or emotions. Rather, musical similarities to basic human communicative gestures suggest the

same basic emotions that the original gestures express. The real emotional potency of music

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comes from the listener’s own mind and the hardwired connections between particular sounds,

tones, emotional states, images, and memories. Music is inherently abstract for the most part,

but that abstraction allows for the expression of deep and complex emotions, albeit created

differently in the mind of each listener. To understand music is to merely engage with it,

allowing one’s mind to wander during the performance and subconsciously connect auditory

stimuli with emotion and image-recognizing sections of the brain. In the end, the music not only

cares that you listen, but that you think too. The performer and listener are co-creators of

musical meaning.

Sources (in case footnotes are not visible)

Alex Ross, “Chaconna, Lamento, Walking Blues: Bass lines of music history,” from Listen to This, London: HarperCollins, 2010.

City Noir Performance note, http://www.earbox.com/W-citynoir.html.

Fred Lehrdal and Ray Jackendoff, A Generative Theory of Tonal Music, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983.

Laura-Lee Balkwill and William Forde Thompson, “A Cross-Cultural Investigation of Emotion in Music: Psychophysical and Cultural Cues,” Music Perception, vol. 17, no. 1, Fall 1999, pp. 43-64.

Leonard Bernstein, “The Dangers and Delights of Ambiguity,” from The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976.

Peter Kivy, The Corded Shell, Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1980.

Roger Scruton, The Aesthetics of Music, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1997.

Thomas Fritz, et. al, “Universal Recognition of Three Basic Emotions in Music,” Current Biology, no. 19, April 14, 2009, pp. 1-4.

William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity, London: 1930.

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