the limits of musical perception, american vs. european style

An Archetypal Dyad

This clip of Foucault and Chomsky is a good reference point for an issue I've been thinking about lately. I guess you could call it “nature vs. nurture”—but that’s such a repellently vague and overused turn of phrase. Plus, as usual for this blog, my focus is specifically on the realm of music aesthetics. So to describe this issue I'd rather use my own makeshift dichotomy: American tonalist vs European serialist. 

What’s helpful about the video isn’t any particular nuance of either position so much as the basic character impressions established. In one corner, a sinister figure with the countenance of an unwrapped mummy, sneering that human nature cannot be appealed to because it’s an idiotic delusion—and in the other corner, a less charismatic but more reassuring figure who'd only be more mundanely professorial if his jacket had elbow patches, unwilling to let go of assumptions about human nature that I (and perhaps you) absorbed as orientation points growing up. To call these characterizations straw men would be an understatement. I’d call them archetypes. 

It would be a big mistake to conclude that the part Chomsky plays here is the less strange of the two. It's not quite that simple. Obviously, it can be fun to play the unfettered rebel in a world of marionettes. But what’s taken me longer to realize is that it can also be fun to rebel against the rebels by playing the square voice of reason. The one honest guy in the room, cutting through the erudite posturing of hipsters by stating unfashionable yet timeless truths. The key thing about this second archetype is that it’s not the same as just... being normal. It emerges in response to the unfettered rebel archetype, from trying on that worldview and being dissatisfied. It's about redeploying whatever eccentricities led you out to the contrarians, but this time to try and get back to the center. This defection is usually met with anger and mockery from those who've settled into the rebel worldview. I strongly associate the first archetype with Europeans and the second with Americans. If that seems like an absurd unfounded generalization, too bad—we’re going with it!

Debates with this underlying dynamic are common in music criticism, but the best entry in the genre that I’ve come across is an exchange between musicologist-composers Fred Lerdahl and James Boros in the journal Perspectives of New Music. Lerdahl, the American tonalist, has an elaborate and ostensibly scientifically supported theory which explains that a lot of avant garde music is incompatible with our most basic listening habits (citing Chomsky, who’s said the same thing); Boros, the European serialist, responds that Lerdahl’s “scientific” “truths” amount to nothing more than authoritarian mind-policing (citing Foucault, who listened to Stockhausen while on LSD).* It’s a battle worth considering for anyone intrigued in the rumor that there are unprecedented and transcendental experiences to be found in the outer reaches of music.

Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems

Lerdahl’s paper “Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems” is the center around which the conversation orbits. His focus—or to his detractors, blinkered obsession—is comprehensibility. He aims to identify the instinctive processes by which we listeners translate perceptible movements of air into pleasing and meaningful musical forms we can hold onto in our heads. The “constraints” that Lerdahl identifies fall into three categories: a) "constraints on event sequences" b) "constraints on underlying materials" and c) "pitch space". I mention this only to give a glimpse of the article’s contents; for our informal purposes, we don’t need to follow every step of the argument. What’s important is that Lerdahl believes that the experiential peaks we search for in music don’t happen unless we comprehend it on this visceral syntactic level—and I suspect he’s right. 

The infamy of “Cognitive Constraints'' can only be blamed on its polemical application of these ideas. The paper's main contention is that many of the avant garde’s most revered innovators flouted these eternal principles of listening in their attempts to generate novel music. Lerdahl is particularly critical of Boulez’ seminal work “Le Marteau sans maître” but notes that he “could have illustrated just as well with works by Babbitt, Carter, Nono, Stockhausen, or Xenakis”. The gist of his complaint is a common one: the intimidating theoretical complexity that shaped these composers' output doesn’t amount to much that you can actually hear. But his elaborate theorizing concerning what kinds of musical organization we really can perceive enables him to make this point more convincingly than anyone I’ve read. 

Often, the most persuasive negative criticism doesn’t outright deny the positive attributes of its subject so much as give you the sense that they pale in comparison to the positive attributes of something else. It’s a matter of noticing the shortcomings that only emerge in a work from a well-contextualized vantage point. The critic isn't a hater, they simply know better, and want to impart their depth of judgement to you. They don’t try to crush your interest so much as redirect it toward something that will reward it better. 

Such is the case with Lerdahl’s critique of experimental music. The picture he paints depicts the composers mentioned above not as absolute geniuses or con artists so much as primitives. Their predecessors in the previous centuries of the western classical canon were the advanced ones. It’s not that there’s something inherently wrong about using unorthodox music-making techniques (stochastic processes, etc.)—it's that they don't get you far enough. Once you’ve generated the material, you still have to organize it into something comprehensible. For earlier artists like Beethoven, this latter process was the composition process. It was what all their creativity and mental energy went into. Compositional structure and listening experience (for the discerning listener) were one and the same. But for the high modernists, the two drifted apart. These artists were ultra-sophisticated and deliberate about the former, yet shockingly unsophisticated about the latter. You might say that earlier composers devised complex and rewarding literature in a comprehensible language, whereas the mid century avant garde devised elaborate systems of keyboard maneuvers that output an aural Library of Babel; occasionally, the results are brilliant, often they’re chaos. Earlier tonal composers worked in an idiom that allowed them to be utterly adept in creating audible complexity—playing with listeners' expectations like silly putty to take them on gripping and ultimately satisfying journeys. Whereas total serialists, computer musicians, etc. fumble around randomly—their compositional actions informed by irrelevant superstitions at worst, blind instinct at best. 

Any fan of the modern composers mentioned above is accustomed to invective far harsher than this—which makes the defensiveness “Cognitive Constraints” has been met with over the years intriguing. Decades after the article’s publication, it was still provoking chastisements like the following:

Vague language and tacit assumptions can be brought into the service of conservatism and aesthetic authoritarianism. It points to the misguided nature of attempts to turn the question of the dissemination of post-tonal music from an aesthetic, political, and indeed economic issue into a cognitive-scientific one. In this age when words like "accessibility" and "communication" are used too frequently and with too little understanding, it is of some significance that at least one major attempt to give scientific respectability to the conservative side of the debate fails.

Despite the pseudo-disinterested tone, I can't help but feel an undercurrent of seethe in passages like this. Why write an entire paper dedicated to refuting a decades-old paper, if that earlier paper really was such a complete failure? A line I was fond of around age 15 (borrowed from a Tyler, the Creator interview) went that if something offends you, it’s probably true. Of course it’s not really so simple—but I still think there’s some wisdom to that. Today, I might amend it as: if something offends you, it’s probably important. True or not, it has some kind of power with which you’re uncomfortable. So the assessments found in “Cognitive Constraints” may be wrong, may be reductive, but the intensity they've often provoked in people who claim to find them oh-so-ridiculous is a sign that that basic angle of approach deserves attention.

Lerdahl vs Boros

Of all the negative responses “Cognitive Constraints” garnered, perhaps only one was chided for its combativeness not just by Lerdahl himself, but also by unrelated commenters. That paper being “A New Totality?” by the aforementioned James Boros. Boros accuses Lerdahl of propping up “antiserialist aesthetic biases” with “pseudoscientific jargon” at some length, questions Lerdahl’s motives as a journal editor, and ends with the obligatory charge of fascism, juxtaposing Lerdahl’s writing with excerpts of a music publication from 1930s Italy. There's a theme to the turns of phrase Boros invokes: he accuses Lerdahl and several peers of reciting “slogans”, “brain-frying aphorisms”, and “jingoistic chants”, etc. The prevailing image is that of Boros as the last free-thinking man, a rebel taking a stand against an army (or rather a Totality) of propaganda-reciting, conformity-enforcing zombies. 

Dramatic as these criticisms may be, they stem from a well-founded suspicion that there's a dark side to Lerdahl’s argument. Grand pronouncements like those made about human listening habits in “Cognitive Constraints” may yield interesting critiques of some music. But what if they really were taken to be the universal and objective truths that Lerdahl clearly believes they are? Strict adherence to these constraints would have the immediate effect of wiping many troublesome regions of aesthetic practice off the map. Boros foresees a future in which Lerdahl’s rules, or others like them, constitute a “pharmaceutical prescription for composers” intended to keep them boringly in-check—a world where all the coral reefs and rainforests have been replaced with Levittowns and all mysteries are proclaimed impossible.

Lerdahl did respond to Boros in a paper entitled “Tonality and Paranoia”—albeit briefly and dismissively. There’s a pleasing symmetry to the exchange: just as “Cognitive Constraints” struck a nerve with Boros, “A New Totality?” apparently struck a nerve with Lerdahl. Lerdahl does offer a perfunctory defense of his impartiality as an editor, but what really seems to irk him isn’t any particular accusation from Boros so much as what he takes to be the latter’s underlying worldview. Lerdahl’s frustration is best distilled in the phrase “hunkered modernist stance”. Boros may view himself as some kind of noble renegade, defending the rainforests against being bulldozed, but to Lerdahl he’s a mere cult member, an antisocial extremist holed up in his high modernist bunker, an obstacle impeding the development of fruitful new trade routes that would benefit all the musical cultures involved.

Whether or not this is an accurate characterization of Boros' position, it is an extremely accurate sendup of a lot of the mid century avant garde’s latter-day proprietors. That’s the tragedy (or comedy) with this stuff: curiosity and open mindedness can give way to hunkered myopia. The desire to untake adventures in the unknown motivates the early explorers. Yet their successors become elitist misanthropes, hiding from the uncomprehending savagery of the philistinic masses beyond the culturally isolated little islands which they guard. (I can't help but wonder if there's a bit of a sunk cost fallacy to some of this zealotry, as if you can invest so much time and effort into grasping certain music that at some point it has to be the best thing ever.) The likes of Lerdahl grow tired of this, and search for ways to rejoin society, where they’ve concluded the real excitement is. The American composer Kyle Gann, incidentally, has a hilarious write up about his experience at a European music festival that perfectly illustrates this dynamic. 

The last entry in the correspondence finds Boros no less adamant in his opposition, but apparently in a better mood for having annoyed Lerdahl. He notes that “hunkered modernist stance” would be a great name for a band. He proudly compiles a list of the various chastisements for rudeness directed at him throughout Lerdahl’s response. He even turns Lerdahl’s pronouncement that “Debussy is complex, Carter is complicated, Schonberg is both, and Glass is neither” into a matching game in the endnotes. Otherwise, Boros mostly sticks to his initial arguments. But he does make a strong case that Lerdahl still hasn’t resolved or even accurately characterized these objections.   

Final Thoughts

If there’s something unsatisfying about this conversation, it’s the scale on which Lerdahl’s ideas are evaluated. The screen is always zoomed out to the max, in a grandiose effort to take in humanity as a whole—and never zoomed in on the duelists themselves. It’s not really their fault, so much as it is a limitation of the conventions of academic discourse.

In this respect, Lerdahl is simultaneously the more at fault and the less frustrating of the two. His ostensibly universal rules at least give some indication of how he personally hears music. I doubt he'd be proselytizing about these ideas if he didn’t find them intuitively correct. By his own admission, he’s laying his aesthetic cards on the table. Boros—for all his anger at the reduction of “something as rich, complex, and personal as music to convenient graphical and verbal representations”—gives us very little sense of what goes on in his mind when he listens to music. There’s the occasional vague allusion to “body-oriented ways of coming to grips with music” and so on. But Boros seems to recognize that if you want to laugh at the cards someone’s put on the table, it’s safer to avoid showing your own. It might turn out that yours aren’t any better.

Since I’m not an academic, I can just admit it: I don’t care in the slightest if Lerdahl’s rules are supported by the latest studies or not. All I really care about is whether or not they’re supported by my own experiences. It’s nice being a random person, not having to agonize about whether ideas like the ones in “Cognitive Constraints” are truly universal or not—unlike those academics who carry the weight of the world on their shoulders. 

Maybe the most honest inward-looking assessment of music’s outer limits I’ve read came from the aforementioned Kyle Gann. In another blog post, he talks about his formative experiences with early modernist classics like “Concord Sonata” and Rite of Spring, describing how these intimidating works gradually opened up to him over many listens. He describes coming to appreciate both their macro-effects and their wealth of fleeting, magical details. But on Lerdahl’s whipping boy, “Le Marteau sans maître”, he has this to say:

In youth I attacked that piece with all the fanaticism of a new convert: read Musique aujourd-hui (of which Boulez eventually autographed my copy for me), did what analysis I could, and even did an independent tutorial learning to conduct the piece. But here again, I eventually came back to the piece in the late 1980s and realized that, after so many years of devotion, I couldn't meaningfully tell one movement from another, aside from the instrumentation. If someone had come out with a recording of Le marteau with half the pitches transposed by half-steps one way or the other, I wouldn't have been able to tell the difference. (I also analyzed every note of the Boulez Second Sonata before hearing it, and was so brainwashed that, when I finally heard it, I cried over its beauty. Today I wouldn't recognize that piece in a blindfold test.)

It’s the last part, ironically buried in parentheses, that most strikingly conveys the point. Unlike the comparatively traditional works mentioned, “Le marteau” and "Second Sonata" never opened up as listening experiences—even with Gann pouring maximum intellectual and emotional investment into them. The full post makes it clear that Gann hears more in high modernist works like “Le Marteau” than 99.999% of the population would, and considers a few of these works masterpieces. But while Gann probably wouldn’t agree with every point, I don’t think he’d sneer at Lerdahl’s basic angle of criticism. In fact, I think his devotion to the music in question would be the exact reason he’d take it seriously. 

Let me put my cards on the table. I think some of Lerdahl’s constraints very accurately describe how I listen to music. Or rather, how I best listen to music. How I hear things when I’m really in. I don’t know Lerdahl’s ideas by heart, but the first few "constraints on event sequences" have really stuck with me. Particularly enlightening is his starting idea of "discretization"—according to which “the musical surface must be capable of being parsed into a sequence of discrete events”. It reminds me of something Kit Mackintosh told me, that as a jazz instrumentalist he’d been taught to contain every phrase within a breath when improvising melodies. This basic principle can be applied on a very small scale (like that of individual "breaths") but also on a large scale. In fact, Lerdahl's next constraint clarifies that this process is "hierarchical"—meaning that each event is comprised of several constituent sub-events, with this process applying across multiple levels. To approach it visually, discretization just entails this sort of labelling:

 

But when it's applied hierarchically, i.e. on multiple levels, the best visual representation would be a sort of tree: 

While it's easy to apply this listening technique to music organized according to the structures of traditional sheet music notation, it's less compatible with music derived from a score like this:

sure, it looks cool... but what AURAL forms are created by these visual ones?

Just as we need to separate speech into words, clauses, sentences, etc. to make sense of them, I do feel as though I have to be able to separate music into roughly equivalent structures to fully appreciate it.

If you've never explored the outer limits, this stuff probably won’t strike you as profound, because you've always been able to take it for granted. But if, like me, you’ve spent a lot of time listening to overedited IDM, babbling computer music, mercurial drone, and the like—wondering why you’re spacing out instead of absorbed—you may understand. Navigation principles are boring until you’ve been lost at sea. It’s all the countless moments of frustration I’ve felt listening to “difficult” music over the years that really vindicate Lerdahl. Looking back, the frustration has almost always come from being unable to parse a specific moment of music. I’m not bothered by unorthodox aural forms, I’m bothered when I can’t make out the forms in the first place. 

If you think of “Cognitive Constraints” as an index of navigation techniques, it becomes interesting that the angle of Lerdahl’s opponents always seems to be: “it’s actually just fine that avant garde music doesn’t follow your rules”. It’s always his premises that are questioned, never his application of them. But how many works in the vast array of music implicated in Lerdahl's critique are more compatible with these constraints than everyone seems to assume? In particular, what if his “constraints on event sequences” that I find so helpful are actually applicable to a lot of avant garde electronic music? 

(For example: around when “Cognitive Constraints” was first published, Francois Bayle was making points similar to Lerdahl. In “Image-of-sound, or i-sound: Metaphor/metaform” he writes that “the way in which the audible is segmented should be taken into consideration . . . correctly segmenting means correctly depicting”—directly aligning with Lerdahl’s principle of discretization. Certainly, Bayle seems to have applied this constraint to his own compositions from the same time: in an analysis of Bayle's 1988 work “Théâtre d'Ombres” Stéphane Roy borrows a method of analyzing the shapes of tonal melodies to parse its aural structures. If the director of Europe’s most uncompromisingly modernist electronic music studio was in such close agreement with Lerdahl, maybe Lerdahl’s critics shouldn’t have been so quick to dismiss his ideas as myopic impositions.)

In an article titled “Does Nature Call the Tune?” the critic Richard Taruskin weighs in on the European Serialist vs. American Tonalist debate. To the former, Taruskin credits “an attractive optimism about human adaptability” while to the latter he attributes a “gentle pessimism” about our listening capabilities.** He’s right. Despite the outward projections of cynicism, it's the European serialist who’s a wide-eyed optimist at heart, who believes that we can genuinely love even the most unorthodox aesthetic outcomes, who guards the assumption that anything is possible. And it's the American tonalist who’s pessimistic, who believes the future can only arrive through major compromise. This pessimism isn't born of out apathy, however. It’s born out of caring too much. An unwillingness to overlook musical shortcomings when one notices them. Refusing either perspective entirely would be to lose a critical part of ourselves. So maybe we ought study navigation techniques like those provided Lerdahl. And then use them to try and sail as far as we possibly can. Past where they're supposed to stop working.

* Boros, it turns out, actually mentions that he's American. But he also delivered the first edition of the paper in question at Darmstadt—a place which needs no introduction if you're versed at all in 20th century classical music history. In other words he's spiritually European. 

** Taruskin concludes he prefers the American tonalist attitude. As a critic who came of age during the Cold War, in a climate where works like "Le Marteau" were hailed as the gold standard of innovation, it makes sense that he'd feel that way. That's the thing about critics: they (we) are just as much products of their time as artists.