From: IN%"Siglind.Bruhn@um.cc.umich.edu" 29-APR-1994 21:41:20.21 To: IN%"B071767@vax.csc.cuhk.hk" CC: Subj: Siglind's proposal Received: from um.cc.umich.edu (him1.cc.umich.edu) by vax.csc.cuhk.hk (PMDF #12160) id <01HBRG83DQYG8Y4ZJP@vax.csc.cuhk.hk>; Fri, 29 Apr 1994 21:41 +0800 Date: Fri, 29 Apr 94 09:30:32 EDT From: Siglind.Bruhn@um.cc.umich.edu Subject: Siglind's proposal To: B071767@vax.csc.cuhk.hk Message-id: <34854238@um.cc.umich.edu> X-MTS-Userid: GGPH PATTERNED TIME Siglind BRUHN School of Music, Department of Musicology, University of Michigan 322 N. State Street #103, Ann Arbor, MI 48104, U.S.A. Different "musics" are often contrasted on the basis of what is considered to be their principal constituting factor. Asian music is regarded as predominant- ly melodic, European art music as essentially dependent on harmony, and African music as characterized by rhythm. While all melodic lines, harmonic progressions and rhythmic developments depend on time to take their course, the very perception of time is generally not rendered thematic. Time in music - time as it passes while music captures a listener's attention - does not differ in essence from time as it passes during other activities. Different listeners exposed to different kinds of music, asked to describe what role time plays with regard to the musical event, would probably agree that time is - unremitting and irretraceable; - an enabling means rather than an active agent; - subjectively perceived as passing more or less slowly, while objectively measurable in units of pre-defined constancy. There are, however, musical ways in which time can be brought into awareness. In music determined by melodic and/or harmonic features, silences - unmeasured rests in particular - can be employed to suggest the impression that "time stands still." Or, to give an example from Chinese classical music, especially instrumental music of the nineteenth century: fading or incomplete phrases followed by suspenseful silences can invite the listener to "step out of time". In the realm of rhythm, the nature and degree of conscious perception of time are more complex. For the purpose at hand, let us refer to rhythm not as it is conceived by composers and reproduced by performers (i.e. distributed across several independent voices and including rests, articulation etc.), but as it is perceived by listeners: as a pattern generated by consecutive points of attack. While rhythm is, of course, created - with or without particular plan or pattern - wherever there are consecutive sounds, it emerges into the foreground of perception only under certain conditions. Listeners are most likely to become aware of rhythm when it is either highly predictable or extremely unpredictable. In the first case, consecutive attacks are regularly patterned and perceived primarily on the visceral level; examples include short but frequently repeated rhythmic figures, called ostinato for their "obstinate" or stubborn effect, or completely monotonous sequences produced by way of protracted repetition of a single time value. In the second case, frustrated expectations draw the listeners' attention to the rhythmic aspect of music almost against their will. This happens especially if attack patterns are broken almost the very moment they seemed established, only to be replaced by other patterns which are then deliberately distorted. Reactions can be visceral (more often than not with uneasiness) or cerebral (more often than not with fascination). In both cases, the conscious perception of time as what shapes the musical "message" is inversely proportionate to the degree of stimulation from other parameters such as melody, harmony, articulation, dynamics etc. A third case for bringing time to the foreground of a music listener's attention is by regulating not so much the local succession of sounds but rather the frame within which they occur. Meter (or, technically speaking, time signature) defines two qualities. As a pre-determined frame of reference it determines what time value (a quarter note or an eighth note, for example) is to be regarded as basic for a composition or passage, and how many of these time values are needed to constitute a larger entity - a "measure". These determinants are implicit; they exist, and apply, regardless of the actual sequence of rhythmic events. Four-four time is four-four time whether or not the passage contains a single quarter note, and in fact whether or not any attack falls on any of the counts or beats. The second quality defined by meter is one of hierarchy. In all music that is or could be metrically notated, the designated time signature creates qualitative differences between counts or beats - we talk about strong and weak beats, sometimes even about "good" and "bad" ones. It is in this realm of hierarchy that aspects of time can be brought to a listener's attention. I want to mention here only the two most significant phenomena: syncopation and hemiola. A syncopation results from an "improper" relationship between the duration of a musical event and the hierarchical position of its point of attack. Take for example a note which begins on a weak beat and extends passively into the time allotted to a stronger beat. The passive nature of the extension (in contrast to the active nature of the attack) thwarts due materialization of the stronger beat, transferring the unrealized emphasis backwards onto the beginning of the extended time value and thus upgrading a weak beat to a strong one. (Examples). Similarly, a hemiola consists of a deliberate re-stressing of six consecutive counts or beat against the established hierarchical order. (Examples). In all cases discussed so far, conscious awareness of time, or of aspects of time, is the exception within a larger context not generally geared towards this goal. John Cage's famous composition of requested silence, 4'33" ("tacet for any instrument(s)") constitutes an unrepeatable exception. Now, some composers in the twentieth century have gone further in the attempt not only to shape music so as to focus on time, but also to manipulate time units so as to shape music. Performers of contemporary music often sigh and despair under the task of realizing a constantly changing number of counts to a measure, often alongside of changing values to be counted and irregular rhythms to be executed within any current framework. While these performers, in the best of cases, will enjoy the challenge and thus gain a heightened sense of how the traditional measuring of time is put into question, listeners are more likely to be either lost, or to enjoy the music only when disregarding time as a possible element of order - an attitude which may or may not do justice to what the composer intended. The reason for the discomfort frequently experienced on occasion of metrically irregular music, as well as for the "solution" so often sought, is probably two-fold. On the one hand, there is a conflict of focus: in music which contains highly captivating elements of melody and rhythm, harmonic and structural layout, metric irregularity will at best be perceived as over- stimulating, at worst as an annoying distraction likely to obscure rather than illuminate the "message". On the other hand, the apparent randomness of metric irregularity, intended to sound "free from rules", "improvised" etc., fails to offer any pattern to which a listener might consciously or subconsciously relate, and is thus unlikely to create a lasting impression. The German composer Boris Blacher (who lived from 1903 to 1975 and, appropriately for the East-meets-West perspective of this symposium, was born in China and died in Berlin), has written a number of pieces that explicitly address the issue of raised here. These compositions play with measured time, in such a way that time and the patterning of time are not only conspicuously placed in the foreground of the listener's perception; they actually constitute the generating factor of the entire composition, accountable for both form and content. To demonstrate my point in some detail, I have chosen Blacher's 1950 composition for piano solo, Ornamente. Sieben Studien ueber variable Metren (Ornaments. Seven Studies on Variable Meters). My plan for you, my (and Blacher's) listeners, comprises three steps. First, I will play the entire cycle, without any introduction to form or other features pertinent to each of the seven short pieces. You are explicitly encouraged to concentrate on your visceral experience of the music. Secondly, I will present graphic depictions which I have created in order to supplement, if not substitute for, verbal analyses. These are intended to allow you to correlate invisible patterns with visible ones, and thus perceive large-scale symmetries. Finally, the composition will be played again. Equipped now with analytical information and assisted by visual representations, you may choose either to consciously grasp ongoing processes, or to consciously abandon both the cerebral approach of the critical music listener and the emotional approach of the excited one. In the latter case, you would use the understanding gained to direct your instinctive responses to the experience of the phenomenon of patterned time.