MARCELLO SORCE KELLER

SOME REMARKS ON MUSICAL AESTHETICS
FROM THE VIEWPOINT OF ETHNOMUSICOLOGY

THE MUSIC REVIEW (1988), no. 2
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There is one problern that artist, philosopher,
and critic alike must face: the relation
between permanence and change.
John Dewey [1]

PREMISE
I will begin by posing a rhetorical question: do you suppose one can enjoy had poetry?
Well, the Latin poet Horatius once noticed: even those who write 'mala carmina' (i.e. poor poetry) are, none the less,' guadentes scribentes' (i.e. they enjoy doing it). [2] Now I feel that, if that is true, why does the enjoyment such authors feel really have to be only theirs? Why does not aesthetics-rather than celebrating "geniuses" and "masterpieces" - help us feel all the excitement that even mediocre artists experience?
While considering the question in its musical implications I have come up with thoughts that I should like to share with you. They concern our concept of "work of art", of "authorship" and most of all - that of "authenticity".

2. THE NON-WESTERN PERSPECTIVE
Our culture developed the notion that music is produced only by very gifted people, then reproduced and delivered to a public by others whose talents are essentially different. As the process unfolds, a selection takes place: masterpieces are retained and go down in history, while mediocre works are gradually forgotten.
Other cultures see things differently. They do not think in terms of "composers" and "pieces" as much as we do [3] - possibly, because they lack a specific interest in self-expression and the desire of translating expression into an object of durable quality. In the absence of that, both musicians and public develop little awareness of composition as such. Spectators at a funeral lamentation in Sardinia, for instance, feet no concern for originality or authenticity. They expect, of course, a skilful performance, a convincing performance; and, still, there is for them a lot more to it than aesthetic quality (there is the pleasure of repeating a ritual act, the sharing of sorrow, the desire to reach a state of excitement leading to a final catharsis). The Japanese connoisseur of art-music who, on the contrary, is more interested in quality 'per se' still, unlike the European, takes delight in the knowledge that a beautiful work of art is made to be fragile and impermanent. Apparently then, when music-making is not the intentional production of an opus perfectum et absolutum the terms "composer" and "piece" may obscure - rather than clarify - the comprehension of the musical process.[4]
That is why ethnomusicology gives such notions a relative value and even drops them altogether when they make no sense In the culture under consideration. [5] This relativistic approach of ethnomusicology, however, although scientifically correct, does not do much for music lovers. Scholars may succeed in appreciating a foreign repertory 'juxta propria principia' but the public, even an educated one, when confronted with a totally foreign tradition, cannot be expected to do the same.
Perhaps there is a way of avoiding both Scylla and Charybdis (i.e. both the silly application of a Western standard and the arduous application of the native standard). There is - if aesthetics, rather than teaching excessive respect for composers, helps both critics and public to be more active in the musical experience and gain aesthetic gratification even from the music of people that may not feel a need for it. Why I feel that this approach is not necessarily arbitrary, why it is preferable to others and why today it may be the only viable one, I will try to explain.

3. THE ROMANTIC POETICS OF MUSIC:
«AESTHETICA ANCILLA ARTIS»
Let me take it from here. Alan Merriam once discussed whether Western aesthetics could be applied to other world societies and reached a negative conclusion. [6] In a way, he oversimplified the question by choosing as a term of comparison the art theories of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries - as if they were aesthetics tout court. Strictly speaking, there would be no point in applying them to any other period in history or to any other tradition than the European. But Merriam, I think, was aware that - despite Marxism, psychoanalysis and structuralism - a combination of Winkelmann's reverence for ancient monuments with the Romantic awe for the "genius" still thrives in the popular consciousness. [7] This attitude towards the arts is misleading for the Middle Ages, inadequate for contemporary art-music and just plain wrong for the music of most other cultures - but it is still so pervasive (so second-nature) that even culturally sophisticated people tend to fall back on it the moment they wear their mental slippers, so to speak.
One thing seems clear to me: as long as we hold that music

(1) is it form of self-expression
(2) resulting in it piece or score
(3) to be interpreted but not arbitrarily altered
(4) because the original idea deserves protection, [8]

then all aesthetics can do is to investigate the author's intention (hoping there is such a thing) and celebrate the few works that realize it to perfection.[9]
Aesthetics in this sense is then ancilla artis, just as, in the Middle Ages, philosophy was ancilla theologiae. To put it differently: aesthetics in this form has its 'raison d'être' only when art needs explanation and analysis. Its primary tool is philology, something that non-literate societies do not have and do not actually need, since music for magic, for rites of passage or for calendric celebrations requires no exegesis or hermeneutics.

4. «AESTHETICA LIBERATA»
The study of oral societies, therefore, has made ethnomusicology aware of how misleading it may he to focus on authors and their texts. Literary criticism, through a very different path, has come to the same view (Michel Foucault, Juri Lotman, Roland Barthes, Umberto Eco, Jacques Derrida). It has realized that transmitting and receiving an artistic statement is a very creative activity. For this reason, the author needs less attention while performers and public deserve more. In fact, although Western high-culture has remained strongly attached to the Romantic ideas of genius and masterpiece it is not unusual for contemporary art-music to allow the creative process to continue after its originator is no longer active. It is, then, becoming legitimate for performers and public to appreciate a piece in a manner that does not necessarily coincide with the composer's. To put it differently: active listening, by itself, somewhat denies the objective existence of the work of art.
More generally: if music is not made of discrete, finished units to be preserved and experienced just as they are, then pieces can never be completely finished and can never be fully preserved (except, of course, by electronic means). Once performers and critics realize it, they can help to open single pieces up to as many understandings as possible. The more they do so, the more our interest in the music is kept alive.
I will call this other approach aesthetica liberata because, unlike the other, it lets performers and critics do for the public much more than they have traditionally been allowed to do. Their intervention is much needed by contemporary art-music, but it benefits the music of the past as well. Even recognized masterpieces need help to withstand the wear and tear of continuous performances; the many lesser works that we musicologists dig out of archives need help, too, or often they would not command the public's attention. This approach, it seems to me, makes even more sense when it is applied to the music of other cultures, which, no more than our own, can claim for their artifacts the status of sacred, untouchable objects.
Now, please notice that what I am saying is considerably more drastic than the commonplace belief that performers and critics mediate between composers and public and, in that way, contribute to the success of the performance.

5. ART AS «MISUNDERSTANDING»
OF PREVIOUS ART
What I am suggesting, rather, is that any attempt to make a work of art more appealing is always, at least to a degree, a re-presentation or a re-composition. Harold Bloom once said that every work of art is both an imitation and a misunderstanding of a previously realized work. That is precisely the practice of film directors when they adapt a novel for the screen; and they are considered artists in their own right for doing so. Musical adaptations, on the other hand, often encounter a cold reception. When Raul Gunsbourg re-arranged and staged Berlioz's Damnation de Faust, making it for the first time a success, Debussy said the operation was an act of blasphemy. [10] Perhaps a transformation implying a change of medium (e.g., literature vs. film) is more easily accepted than a less drastic one remaining within the same medium, because it seems to produce a new text rather than alter or corrupt a new one. Still, adaptations with music at both the beginning and the end of the process are those that yield the most intriguing reflections.» [11]
A piece can be "arranged", "revised", "edited", "transcribed" or "quoted". A piece can also be subject to "interpolations", it can result from "centonization procedures" or from "parody"; it can even be "revisited" by the author years after the original creative impulse has waned. It still remains music, although not necessarily the same music [12].
We are all aware of that and still like to believe that certain pieces, however composite their origin may be, become so perfect as not to tolerate further arrangements or interventions. In the field of the fine arts we even feel that certain works should not be reproduced or copied.

6. COMPOSITION AS TRANSFORMATION
We were brought up to believe that a copy of Mona Lisa must necessarily be worse than the original. We take it for granted that Mahler's re-orchestration of Schumann's symphonies cannot be superior to the real thing. Still, such irreverent acts often polarize the public's interest: "annotated" versions of Alice in Wonderland are enjoyed today by people who would not care to read the plain book once more; the jazzy Bach by the Swingle Singers revived the interest of many students for whom The Well-Tempered Clavier had become a mere collection of melodious keyboard drills. Liszt and Thalberg did wonderfully in "paraphrasing" operatic tunes that had been sung to death. In another domain, Mendelssohn's revision of the St. Matthew Passion, and the Longo edition of Scarlatti, succeeded in making the music come alive in the only way in which, at that time, it could be alive. From the standpoint of an ancillary aesthetics those were corruptions. From the standpoint of the aesthetica liberata they were art.
Outside of Western high-culture all this is rather commonplace. In oral societies poetry and music are not created once and for all by authors concerned with posterity. Thus, in the absence of a recognized Urtext, Anglo-American ballads, Balkan epics, African dance dramas and the like gradually adapt to new times and circumstances - until they become something altogether new.
If music-making implies continuous, inevitable change of what is handed over by tradition, then perhaps what we usually call composition is, in essence, simply a transformation process taking more or less drastic forms depending on context. [13]

7. CAN OR SHOULD ART LAST FOR EVER?
Maybe, then, there is no real need to talk about composition, originality and authenticity (except perhaps for collecting copyrights). Without drawing a sharp line between composition and performance it becomes easier to perceive that it makes little sense to hold the products of tradition as something sacred to be handed down intact to future generations. Edward J. Dent once, wondering how the idea that art should be eternal ever came about, [14] ventured that it may have come from our experience of architecture. Whenever we do not like a symphony, he said, fortunately, it is soon over. Once a cathedral has been put up, and we do not like it, it stays there. We may think it is hideous. The next generation may not even take notice of it; another will venerate its antiquity; another, again, may even find it beautiful.
Thus, if architecture is nearly eternal, maybe literature and music should be as well-at least, "art-music". [15] I am trying to say, therefore, that it is misleading to regard durability as the seal of great art and to make it the very criterion to tell Art from non-Art. Survival time and quality have little to do with one another. If that is So, then the question is, of course: is art worth preserving?

8. INTERPRETATION AS COMPOSITION
To be sure, for the scholar everything is worth preserving, because everything is a document. The philologist may wish to know exactly how Chopin liked to perform his music. The musician, on the contrary, cannot feel bound by Chopin's opinion because the art of the past may or may not be valuable for the present (nor should it be at all costs). Thus, when a performer takes up a piece, musical considerations may compel him to be unfaithful to the author's intentions (in the few cases when such intentions were unequivocally expressed). If these premises are accepted the performer is no longer a second-class creator but stands on an equal footing with the composer by acting for or against him. In this perspective the old questions-how creative is performance? and how faithful to the text should it be? - lose much of their significance; they become a false issue. The performance is the Music. [16]

9. AESTHETICA EX MACHINA
Near the end of this essay let me mention a more radical possibility. If we move from an ancillary aesthetics (barely aimed at celebrating the "work of art") to the aesthetica liberata (in which everyone has the right to become as involved as the author in the aesthetic experience), then we might possibly conceive a sort of aesthetica ex machina powerful to the point of giving us the experience of art in the virtual absence of art itself. It would be a discourse similar to that of Friedrich Schlegel who, in his Lucinde (1799), reflected on four possible novels he had conceived but never actually written. All the more reason. I feel, for doing likewise with artifacts that exist but, by traditional standards, do not qualify as "art": sounds of everyday life or, even, Kitsch. Or it might be music from any culture, even music from cultures that do not conceptualize music as such (or that do not think of it as "aesthetic"). The way we decide to experience gamelan music might not be shared by native listeners, but neither would Beethoven approve of the many adaptations of the Moonlight Sonata made over more than a century. Unfaithfulness is a structural necessity unless we regress to a merely philological, or archaeological, experience of art.
To conclude: ancillary aesthetics is perhaps an anomaly of the Western mind, since it exists nowhere else. Treating masterpieces like pinned butterflies under a window-glass does not, in the end, render a good service to them or to their authors-let alone to the public. Few people, I imagine, would argue that there is much good in having to hear Beethoven's Fifth some 1800 times in an average life-span. The aesthetica ex machina - on the other hand - may be a last resort when social conditions discourage art production 'tout court' or when we are confronted with traditions that are too distant from us in time, space or both: when art speaks for itself, aesthetics is necessarily weak and subservient; when art is weak, aesthetics may have to take over and be strong.
What I believe is undeniable is that the Western idea of the work of art as a 'unicum' solidly linked with an author is not shared by many cultures and is not even applicable to all domains of Western culture. Therefore, it is fundamental for an aesthetic theory more widely applicable not to take anything for granted - not even what seems to be obvious: not that there is such a thing as a creator, an interpreter and a public, not that the classics need to be interpreted rather than improved upon; ultimately, not that there is such a thing as Art, on the one hand, and Kitsch or non-Art on the other.
To go back to the initial question: can one possibly enjoy bad poetry? - or, rather, bad music, incomprehensible music, non-music? In our time not only can one but. I think... one should!

NOTES
[1] Art as Experience (1934. R/Perigee Books 1980), p. 322.

[2] «Ridentur mala qui componunt carmina, verum gaudent scribentes et se venerantur et ultro, si taceas, laudant quicquid scripsere beati.» (Horatius, Epistulae, Book II, no. 2).

[3] According to Merriam, for instance, the Basongye people of Africa do not admit to individual composition (The Anthropology of Music [Northwestern University Press, 1964] p. 264). Such is the case with several tribal cultures.

[4] See Patricia Carpenter, «The Musical Object», Current Musicology, no. 5 (1967), pp. 56-87.

[5] A re-examination of these notions, in their literary equivalent, has already taken place (cf. Umberto Eco, Jacques Lacan, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault. the "deconstructionists" of the Yale Department of French, etc.). Curiously, the results have not yet been applied cross-culturally (where they would be more meaningful) by comparative literature: a rather conservative field, contrary to what its name leads one to believe, a field that has little in common with comparative musicology.

[6] Anthropology of Music, Chapter XIII: «Aesthetics and the Interrelationship of the Arts».

[7] This Romantic veneration for the "genius", however, was prepared during the Renaissance. It was, in fact, the Renaissance that invented the "artist", distinguished him from the artisan and began to exalt the former at the expense of the latter (see Edward Lowinsky, «Musical Genius: Evolution and Origins of a Concept». The Musical Quarterly, Vol. L (1964), no. 3, pp. 321-340 and Vol. L (1964), no. 4, pp. 476-495).

[8] See U. Eco, «Il problema dell'opera aperta» in La definizione dell'arte (Milano, Garzanti, 1983), p. 163.

[9] It is to be hoped that the author was not working for financial gain and other unworthy goals or, at least, only in a subordinate way, because a commercial attitude all but discredits, in this philosophy of art, the author's intentions. For this reason few "masterpieces" fully qualify, according to the several points of this enumeration. They represent, its Max Weber would say, an "ideal type".

[10] Claude Debussy, Monsieur Croche antidilettante (Paris, 1921). Ch. XXIII.

[11] Ambiguous feelings, towards such interventions are well revealed by the literature dealing with the relationship between art-music and folk-music. Even Bartòk, a man divided between "two cultures", felt ambivalent about them. He was aware that great music can thrive in an oral environment. At the same time, his composer's pride made him argue that using folk materials in art-music detracts nothing from the creative power of the autor: on the one hand, there is the fascination for spontaneous "collective creation" and on the other, an equal desire for art to be the expression of pure subjectivity (Béla Bartòk, Scritti sulla musica popolare, Torino, Boringhieri, 1977, ibidem).

[12] Of course, a piece can also be analysed and become the object of criticism. In that case the end-result is no longer music. That opens another interesting question: when, in what circumstances, does a critical response to an aesthetic statemcnt need to take shape in another medium?

[13] For a discussion of some of the ways in which transformation may take place see: M. Sorce Keller, «Life of a Traditional Ballad in Oral Tradition and Choral Practice», Ethnomusicology, Vol. XXX, no. 3 (Fall, 1986), PP. 449-469 and Segmental Procedures in the Transmission of Folk Song in Trentino, Sonus, Vol. VIII, no. 2 (Spring, 1988), pp. 37-46.

[14] Edward J. Dent, The Future of Music (Oxford, Pergamon Press, 1965 (1926)), p. 9.

[15] Ballet has been relatively unaffected by this attitude - possibly because choreographic notation, including the Laban System, is less suitable to be considered as a "text".

[16] On this subject, cf. Gerard Behague, «Introduction», in Gerard Behague (ed.), Performance Practice. Ethnomusicological Perspectives (Greenwood Press, 1984), pp. 3- 12.