Hey another post! Yes, I am determined to be productive this week. So I thought I’d blog about Varese even though we brought him up weeks ago. Oh well, I hope you find this thought stirring anyway. Last week in MUS 676, post tonal theory, was article presentation week, and if you know me at all, you know I get a little nervous about public presentations. And I’m going into education. . .hmmm.
Anyway, I presented on an article by Elizabeth West Marvin entitled “ The Perception of Rhythm in Non-Tonal Music: Rhythmic Contours in the Music of Edgar Varese.” Marvin is an interesting character. On top of being a theory professor she also has a secondary appointment in the University of Rochester’s Brain and Cognitive Sciences department. Much of her work deals with musical cognition.
Nearly every piece in Western tonal music and much of Western non-tonal music has a beat as an essential part of its structure. However, much of twentieth century Western music has an increasingly ambiguous sense of pulse. It is interesting to wonder how the ear perceives rhythm in a pulse-less framework. Because, according to certain psychologists I can’t cite right now, listeners accustomed to Western music perceive rhythm as the division of a steady beat or the addition of multiple beats. In non-pulse music, what we would call rhythm could actually be treated as series of durations. If this is the case, it questions the role of traditional rhythmic notation in music such as Varese’s Density 21.5 and Octandre. Even this non-beat music has to be performed with some sort of micro-pulse in mind so that the durations are accurate. The conductor or performer usually determines this micro-pulse. However, the listener’s aural perception of the music probably does not pick up on these smaller subdivisions: oh, the limitations of the human brain.
Most of the structural analysis of atonal music has been based on pitches and pc sets. Little analysis has been done on rhythm and duration succession as a marker of form in atonal music. The rest of the article goes on to analyze Density 21.5. It’s too much to talk about in this blog entry, and frankly, I don’t think I’d do it justice. If you want to read the article, it’s available on JSTOR, and the title is “ The Perception of Rhythm in Non-Tonal Music: Rhythmic Contours in the Music of Edgar Varese.” The reason I mention this article is that Marvin brings up several questions that reflect our discussion of tradition versus innovation. For example:
If we write outside the confines of a temporal pulse, does that change the audience’s perception of the music?
Rhythmic contours are much more difficult to aurally perceive than melodic contours. Does it make sense then to organize the structure of a piece around temporal values if the audience won’t pick up on it?
If we are going to write music without pulse, should we abandon tradition rhythmic notation since it doesn’t seem to serve the music?
How do we practice and perform non-beat rhythms or durations?
What is the point of using rhythmic complexities that are impossible to process aurally?
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Claire, I think this idea of pulse-less music is very interesting. There is more theoretical work on rhythm, meter, and hypermeter in the work—I believe his name is—Harold Krebs, if it interests you.
ReplyDeleteWhat you said got me to thinking about even music that does have a pulse can, if put in the right context, still provide the listener with a sense of timelessness. That's something I sometimes experience when listening to minimalistic works. The pattern is repeated so many times that I lose track of the time passing. In most music, I experience the rhythm or beat as defining the passage of time, i.e. making me actually hyper-aware of units of time passing. But in repetitious rhythmic contexts, I become hypo-aware of this. Weird, I think, but interesting nonetheless.
I also experience this kind of timelessness when I listen to certain works from 16th-century polyphony. Four- to six-voice polyphony can disintegrate any sense of strong or weak beats because the high an low points of each voice strengthens and weakens different beats than those of the other voices. This is in contrast to 18th-century polyphony, which has a much stronger sense of rhythm and pulse. The real irony is that musicians and scholars made great strides prior to 1600 trying to work out how to notate music metrically so that they could achieve coordination among the various polyphonic voices. The result, however, erodes that sense of meter. I hear this happening in a great deal of 20th/21st-century choral music as well.
It sort of reminds me of what we said in class about the strictly controlled music, like that of Milton Babbitt, sounding chaotic to the listener. It seems paradoxical that such a strictly overseen system should sound as though it has lost all oversight.