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Beethoven's Anvil: Music in Mind and Culture, Chapters 2 & 3
2001
From the book flap: We tend to think of the arts as luxuries rather than necessities, and as inventions of society rather than evolution. Yet the origin of musical ability was a turning point in the evolution of modern humans. Every culture, without exception, has some form of music. Is this really a luxury or does it answer some basic biological need? If so, what? In Beethoven's Anvil, William Benzon takes up the fascinating and unexplored link between music and the brain. Among early humans, he says, there was no distinction between music, dance, ritual and religion—they were all part of the same activity, and this activity used every part of the conscious brain. Language, movement, vision, emotion, hearing, touch and social interaction were all involved. In fact, Benzon argues, music is necessary precisely because it engages so many different parts of the brain. It literally keeps the brain in tune with itself and with the brains of others. The ultimate form of musical experience is that feeling of oneness with a larger entity that we identify as transcendent religious experience. We feel this way because that’s precisely what the brain is doing: becoming one with a larger unit, the human tribe. [Contains final drafts of chapters 2, Musical Coupling, and 3, Fireflies: Dynamics and Brain States, the central theoretical chapters]
Nietzsche and Music: Philosophical Thoughts and Musical Experiments
Nietzsche and Music: Philosophical Thoughts and Musical Experiments, 2022
Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was not only a philosopher who loved and wrote about music; he was also a musician, pianist, and composer. In this ground-breaking volume, philosophers, historians, musicians, and musicologists come together to explore Nietzsche’s thought and music in all its complexity. Starting from the role that music played in the formation and articulation of Nietzsche’s thought, as well as the influence that contemporary composers had on him, the essays provide an in-depth analysis of the structural and stylistic aspects of his compositions. The volume highlights the significance of music in Nietzsche’s life and looks deeply at his musical experiments which led to a new and radically different style of composition in relation with his philosophical thought. It also traces the influence that Nietzsche had on many other musicians and musical genres, from Russian composers to current rock music and heavy metal.
The Composer's Mind Through the Looking Glass Can Bilir
Dissertation, 2019
This dissertation argues that the structural methods of pitch analysis remain inadequate for the task of explaining what composers are actually doing in their minds. In this work, I address the following questions: where the structural unit appears, does ‘pitch,’ as an isolated term, still affect the contemporary composer’s mind; what is the nature of the composer’s mind; and where does pitch fit into the context of the assemblage of Mozart’s unfinished opera Zaide and Chaya Czernowin’s second opera Zaide /Adama? What is pitch and what does it have to do with contemporary music compositions? What is the true nature of the musical idea and what is the source of this idea? Furthermore, how can a person understand the subjective experience of this musical idea in a composer’s mind? Composition is not the mere imitation of previously experienced contexts. Performativity as practicality and abstract thinking in the forms of the objects and rules of the mind as distinct from the subjective experience and syntax recognition provide complex incompatible mediums for composers. Syntactic structuralism is identical neither to the sensations nor to the ideas of the contemporary composer. As a composer, I believe that the reduction of the complexity of composition erodes the nature of the composer’s creative ideas. In this text, I argue for the impossibility of generative processes to reduce sounds that we create into immediate simpler entities and the inability of larger entities to be made explicitly recognizable or reproducible. Chaya Czernowin’s music in general, in my opinion, represents an excellent example of this non-reducibility.
The Correspondence Between Composition in Fine Arts and Music throughout History
Frontiers in Psychology, 2016
This study explores a novel approach to estimating a timeline of the evolution of music by establishing the commonalities between the principles of spatial organization of pictorial composition in works of visual art and the principles of tonal organization of music composition in music works. The cross-modal features of perception of music allow musicians and listeners to envisage melodic motion and harmonic progressions in a peculiar virtual space, where the height axis is associated with frequency, the width - with time, and the depth - with music texture, i.e., the number of simultaneously active parts and/or voices. The available evidence from psychophysiological research suggests that capacity of music to trigger spatial representation constitutes a cross-cultural phenomenon biologically rooted in the shared mechanisms of perception of pitch contours of music parts and visual contours of pictorial and real-life objects. Hence, drawing parallels between the typologies of visual composition in works of realistic art, on the one hand, and the typologies of music texture and schemes of harmonic organization in music compositions, on the other hand, might reveal patterns of tonal organization of music that otherwise are hard to identify. This line of inquiry is especially beneficial for the reconstruction of prehistoric music that lacks direct documentation, other than the disposition of holes on the earliest wind musical instruments excavated by archaeologists. Prehistoric artworks, in contrast, present a well documented source for charting a timeline of evolution of spatial organization through establishing patterns and schemes of pictorial representation of perceptual reality. Matching of such schemes to the typological schemes of tonal organization of music of those indigenous ethnicities that maintain the lifestyle and inhabit environments similar to prehistoric people can potentially help detect the general course of the evolution of music and sketch its global history in a manner similar to existing histories of human art. This study seeks to review the compositional commonalities between major canons of pictorial representation, from the Ancient Egypt to the 18th century Europe, and those music systems that were in use by the same people who used those pictorial canons. I start with the well established similarity between the rules of linear perspective and the rules of Western tonality and try to track their correspondences at first to the Hellenic theory of perspective and theory of music, then, identify their common traits and trace their development chronologically all the way from the earliest forms of Paleolithic art to the Baroque period, focusing on the geographic area of Europe and the Near East. The presentation contains 40 carefully selected images and 45 audio examples - identifying 15 principal types of musical texture along with their pictorial analogs. The entire overview reveals the dramatic change in compositional organization that accompanied the rise of urban civilizations of the Bronze change, followed by the steady increase in structural complexity, the discovery of the depth parameter and the prevalence of naturalistic approach to semantic content - until the fall of the Roman Empire. The Dark Ages marked a temporary decline in the techniques of rendition of the depth parameter while instituting new means of compositional integration, until the compositional methods of Antiquity were restored on a new platform of hierarchically differentiated parameter of depth during the 12-14th centuries. At this point the compositional practices of the West and the East diverged. The Renaissance opened a new era of rational science-like approach to various aspects of composition, eventually merging them into a coherent comprehensive theory of perspectival organization in arts and theory of tonality in music. In the process of this advance, music composition acquired a considerably greater capacity to transmit large volumes of information amongst general population than that of pictorial composition. In conclusion, this study offers possible explanations of this discrepancy.
University of California Press eBooks, 2017
xxix "Th e main fault of this book is in fact that it is still the only one. More than six hundred pages devoted to objects weigh down one pan of the scale. To counterbalance it, the author should also have produced a Treatise on Musical Organization of equal weight. " 1 Th is statement appears on the fi rst page of the "Penultimate Chapter" of the Treatise. It could be construed as a mitigating disclaimer, although this would be a grave mistake. But we should not forget that the Treatise is a work by Pierre Schaeff er; his prose style, along with the scrupulous care with which he used the French language, is part and parcel of his message. Consequently, the passage must be read within the context of the book and its overall formal plan. I could have begun with another apparently alarming sentence written some eleven years earlier: "It is possible to devote six hundred pages to not saying what one had to say" (659). But neither of these passages is an admission of failure or regret. On the contrary, they represent a deliberate rhetorical strategy. In addition to closely argued sections on linguistics, acoustics, classifi cation, and description, Schaeff er's writing contains many self-eff acing remarks and wry comments on contemporary music (these are oft en directed to "a priori" methods of composition). His language is, therefore, integral to the book's subject matter and its methodology. With commendable honesty Schaeff er acknowledged there are areas where more still needs to be done, but rather than suppressing such sentiments, he identifi es them and invites readers to acknowledge that as far as music is concerned, "making" and "doing" are ongoing processes. 1. Pierre Schaeff er, Traité des objets musicaux: Essai interdisciplines (Paris: Seuil, 1977), 663. Subsequent citations of this edition are given parenthetically in the text.