Marching to a
different tune: researchers unlock the motivational power of music
This is the text of my article for The Conversation published there on 12 July 2013.
“Music has charms to
soothe a savage breast, to soften rocks, or bend a knotted oak”, wrote William
Congreve in 1697.We take this for
granted, and therefore often tend to overlook how genuinely mysterious it is
that simple patterns of sound vibrations can have profound effects on our minds
and bodies. This power of music to on the one hand soothe, but equally to
energise, has long fascinated musicians and philosophers. Most recently, psychologists
and neurophysiologists have turned their attention to music, and have sought to
measure, and explain in empirical terms, how music can have so much influence
our moods and levels of energy.
A Belgian study published today has shed some further light
on how this might work. Marc Leman and colleagues at the Institute for
Psychoacoustics and Electronic Music and Ghent University analysed the effects
of listening to different pieces of music on the walking speed of 18 adults.Researchers have long known that people will
synchronise their steps with the tempo of music – after all, this is why we
have marching bands.So for this study,
the researchers chose 52 pieces of instrumental music with contrasting moods
and styles, but exactly the same musical tempo – 130 beats per minute.
Sure enough, almost all the participants stepped in time
with the music.What was more
interesting was that certain pieces of music caused the participants to walk
more energetically – to take larger strides, and cover a larger total distance
– while other pieces caused the opposite effect.
For the record, the piece of music that created the most
vigorous walking in the study was:
After the walking test, the participants were then asked to
rate the pieces they listened to in terms of opposed pairs of adjectives: was
the piece good or bad? Stuttering or flowing?Tender or aggressive?Soft or
loud?Unsurprisingly, the participants
walked with more of a spring in their step to music rated as stuttering, loud,
or aggressive, while gentler, softer, flowing or more complex music had a
relaxing effect.
This effect appeared to be independent of musical genre: the
list of the most arousing music included classical, techno, world music and
house, while the top ten most relaxing pieces ranged from Baroque solo viol
music to contemporary Korean dance tracks.The effect also seemed to be independent of the participants own musical
preferences – the music had the observed affect whether or not the participants
liked that particular style or genre.Leman and colleagues speculate that this musical effect on the vigour of
physical response might happen at an autonomous or subliminal level.This suggests several possible practical
applications of the research, for instance in sports performance or physical
rehabilitation.
What makes this study relatively unusual is that the
researchers then analysed these objective cognitive results in terms of a
sophisticated music theoretical model.They were attempted to discover exactly what the musical features were
that were associated with the arousing or relaxing effects.Nearly 200 sonic features of each piece were
analysed – the loudness of various parts music, the sharpness of the attack,
the structure of the beats, the distribution of pitches and so on – and this
musical analysis was then correlated with the results of the walking
experiment.Surprisingly, only a handful
of features were shown to cause arousal and relaxation, and these all had to do
with the regular structure of the rhythm, which musicians call “metre”.Put simplistically, music with a march-like
rhythm (“binary metre”) causes more arousal, while music with a waltz-like
rhythm (“ternary metre”) causes greater relaxation.
So when you next see a batsman stride to the crease or a
boxer enter the ring to the blare of aggressive, pounding motivational music,
it’s more than just theatre.There’s a
genuine physiological effect at work. And it might be that the Blues’ best chance in
next week’s State of Origin decider will be to make sure the Queensland team
runs out to the sound of the Blue Danube Waltz.
This post is the abstract for my paper at the Annual Conference of the Musicological Society of Australia in December 2012
Recent tectonic shifts in the economics of music (and by
extension, its political economy) have generated unprecedented challenges: for
the music industries; for those concerned with defining and applying musical
intellectual property; for the technologies of the production and distribution
of music, both live and recorded; and
for the artists themselves.It is hard
to believe that it has only been a decade since Napster first made headlines as
a threat to the hegemony of the CD-based recording industry.Ten years on, not only is the music CD in the
last yards of its journey towards obsolescence, it is more-or-less accepted
that the battle to control (and sell) the intellectual property of recorded
music as a commodity has been lost.Social
media are rapidly challenging mainstream media as the conduit for distributing,
accessing, discussing, marketing and discovering music and musicians.Recorded music is now, to all intents and
purposes, free.
Marian Call is an Alaskan singer-songwriter who is one of a
cohort of emerging musicians building a career and a creative oeuvre within these new realities.Classically trained and university educated (she is a composition graduate from Stanford),
she writes and performs songs that span genres from medieval, classical, jazz,
folk/acoustic and many others. She
eschews contracts and labels - her audience base is entirely self-generated
through social media and a frenetic touring schedule.On tour she prefers house concerts to traditional
venues – she will typically crowdsource venues via Twitter in advance of a tour,
and rely on her supporters and followers on social media to publicize the event
locally. She is currently (Oct. ’12) touring
Europe on this basis – a major logistic collaboration between Call and her
supporters that she describes as “like a barn-raising”. Audiences at concerts are
encouraged, but not required, to make a donation; similarly, her music is
freely streamed online, and payment for the recordings are essentially a matter
of honour.
Essentially, Call’s artistic and business practice
diminishes or removes the notion of music as a commodity, an object of
transaction. Instead, the emphasis is placed on relationships, or community –
she has critiques the description of her as an indie or independent artist,
suggesting that a better term is an “interdependent” artist.In this paper I argue that this shift from
music as commercial commodity to music as community catalyst has profound
implications not just for the businessmodels of music, but for its aesthetics and semantics.Call’s authorial voice within her music
speaks and sings to and with her audience on a number of levels – literally, in
the case of “Good Morning Moon” in which she sourced the chorus in the song as
sound files individually submitted by her supporters. Her music has an authenticity of expression
and an imaginative range that, I argue, stems from its basis in a communicative
premise that is, at root, ethical in nature – a code of musical chivalry that
underpins the virtual and actual encounters on her journey as a modern-day trobairitz.
My ANU colleague John Rayner’s excellent recent article
on the physics of music seemed to touch a nerve with the readership of The Conversation.
Although beautifully framed by the personal and anecdotal – John’s piece was subtitled “a love song” – the issues he explores about the relationship between music and physics go back to the ancient Greeks, and are as old as the disciplines themselves.
It certainly inspired me – a musicologist – to write something from the other side, to meet my scientific colleague in the middle in a speculative conversation about the parallels between our two worlds.
Musical meaning is tantalising and elusive. For most of us, music has the power to reach us profoundly and directly. The temptation is to speak of music as a language: the notion of music as a kind of “language of the emotions” is pervasive, centuries old, and nowadays has some limited empirical experimental support.
Most theoretical work now done on musical semiotics treats music as just another flavour of discourse, another language of signs; albeit one with its own special characteristics.
But this runs against an age-old notion: that
music is a natural law. The medieval concept of “music of the spheres” held that the movement of the celestial bodies – what we now describe as astrophysics – was, at root, musical: the planets move in the heavens according to principles of harmony and resonance, with a set of common Pythagorean ratios governing both music and cosmology.
Indeed, we music academics are rather nostalgic for the time (in medieval universities) in which music was considered one of the four core disciplines alongside astronomy, geometry and arithmetic, and we held pride of place above the three lesser (hence “trivial”) language-based disciplines of logic, grammar and rhetoric.
Highs and lows
Physics permeates the language we use to describe music, and the concepts we use to understand it. For instance we
talk about “high” and “low” musical pitch, perhaps without realising how deeply metaphorical this is.
There is no altitude to musical pitch: “high” pitches are caused by faster vibrations than “low” pitches. But we don’t talk about “fast” and “slow” music with reference to pitch (we use those metaphors for something else entirely).
And yet, the notion of musical altitude makes sense if we think about the energy states of the music. If, as
in the excerpt below from Puccini’s opera Tosca, we listen to a soprano sustain a top B flat (as at 2:40 into the recording below), we are aware that she is sustaining a high-energy state, which must eventually relax.
The pitch seems invested with the kinetic energy required to produce it (of course, in Tosca’s case she has a literal encounter with the force of gravity, but that’s quite another story).
Singers, wind and brass players expend energy to reach “altitude”, while string players, keyboardists, guitarists and all the rest work no harder for the high notes than the low.
Yet, perhaps because of the centrality of the
human voice to all music, this idea of fighting against musical “gravity” is ubiquitous, whether in a Paganini violin concerto or a Jimi Hendrix guitar solo, as per the video below. In music, as in physics, what goes up must come down.
And it doesn’t come down just anywhere. Most systems of musical organisation have a fixed point of reference – a pitch that functions as an attractor, pulling the music
towards it.
In Western music, we call this the “tonic”, and most people, regardless of their level of formal musical training, can hear and sing the note to which the music is “pulling”. This idea of gravitational or magnetic attraction to a pitch was arguably the single most important characteristic of Western music between 1600 and 1900, and much music thereafter.
This may be a characteristic of Western music, but in other cultures' musics, the idea of a point of attraction is often even more powerful, as in the example below from Classical Indian music.
Not all music has a tonic, a fixed point of reference – in 1908 in Vienna Arnold Schoenberg famously departed from the principle with the “atonal” concluding movement of his second string quartet (as per the video below), thereby heralding a new and controversial musical age.
By coincidence, three years earlier, across the border in Switzerland, Albert Einstein had thrown the world of physics into disarray by similarly demolishing the idea of a fixed point of reference, in a paper on electromagnetism that described what later would become known as the Special Theory of Relativity.
Questions and answers
It’s worth observing that language has nothing resembling this notion of gravity or attraction: to understand this principle in music the metaphors must come from physics.
There are other concepts that bridge the disciplines in the same way. Balance and symmetry are also ideas that are fundamental to musical structure, and that seem to have more of a physical than a linguistic origin.
In classical music, perhaps the most common phrase structure is often described informally (and somewhat puzzlingly, to me) as “question and answer” – or more formally, as “antecedent-consequent” – two phrases that complement each other structurally, as in two phrases that make up just the opening eights seconds of Mozart’s Sonata in C KV545 (below).
There’s no question that rhetoric plays a role in shaping the way in which these two phrases echo each other. But on a structural level, there is an identity that seems almost mathematical in nature.
The two phrases are in balance: their (gentle) energies are complementary; their shapes are an image of each other; they are like two sides of an equation.
Time and memory
For me, the most important parallels between music and physics happen on a more philosophical level.
The late musicologist Jonathan Kramer started his book The Time of Music with the observation that small children play with blocks and toys to learn the fundamental
concepts of space; by contrast, by singing and clapping, they play with music to learn about time.
There is something profound about the way in which music can accelerate, retard, bend and colour our sense of time’s passing. We can sit in a concert hall or opera theatre for an hour and hear 90 different people make thousands of noises on bits of wood, metal and flesh, and yet walk away with the impression we have heard one thing – a symphony, or an opera.
Music joins up time, and allows us to hear time as patterned and organised. These patterns allow us to predict the future – we listen in anticipation: that a melody will come to rest, or a harmony will move in ways that make sense to us, wordlessly.
Music is also a powerful stimulus of memory – overhearing a piece of remembered music can instantly rekindle long-forgotten memories.
It is much easier for most of us to memorise a song (words and all) than it is to memorise a poem. Music is a tool for grasping the order and sense between what has happened in the past, what is happening now, and what will happen in the future.
And to me, that sounds suspiciously like a definition of physics.
Threat and survival
Sadly, there is one last way in which music
and physics are currently bedfellows. Worldwide, both disciplines are under threat at universities. In America and the UK, several physics departments have closed or are in danger.
Music education no longer receives government funding at UK universities, and in Australia recent controversies at ANU and Edith Cowan are symptomatic of the fact government funding for music is problematic.
pfly
And the provision and quality of music and physics education in our secondary schools, crucial to support and enable undergraduate study, are always competing with the demands for more and more literacy and numeracy in the curriculum.
There is not yet a crisis – at least, not at the high end: it remains, at least for the moment, sexy enough in policy terms to fund the elite practitioners.
The select few physics virtuosi who will discover whatever comes after the Higgs boson, or their musical equivalents who will perform the Queen of the Night aria at the Sydney Opera house or Covent Garden, still capture both the public imagination and the public purse.
But the opportunities for students to study fundamental and abstract ideas – such as music and physics – as part of a liberal arts education that supports a civilised and educated society are becoming fewer and fewer.
John Rayner was right to call the relationship between music and physics a love song. Let us just hope it’s not also a swansong.
Jonathan Powles does not work for, consult to, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has no relevant affiliations.
The
current crisis at the ANU School of Music has widely been reported as
being, fundamentally, about money. The
ANU VC has cut ten academic and two general staff positions to address an
operating deficit at the School of nearly $3 million per annum. This is the fourth review of the School in
twelve years, and by far the most drastic.
The resultant outrage in the community has been swift and vociferous: a
largely middle-class Canberra population has reacted angrily to what it
perceives as an assault on high culture.
Almost all the reporting of the story has focused on a very simple
black-and-white opposition: the profound and inestimable value and deeply
humanizing practice of arts in general and music in particular, versus a corporate culture of
management, bureaucracy and bean-counting.
But are things really that simple?
Nearly all music schools in Australia are in financial
crisis. The ANU has made headlines
simply because its response has been swift and uncompromising. But all seven of the nation’s traditional
conservatoires are struggling to make ends meet. Many have blamed the level of Federal
Government funding for music as inadequate, and indeed the 2011 Lomax-Smith
review of university funding found this to be the case. But the situation is the same or worse
overseas: music schools are operating in increasingly straitened circumstances,
and their graduates are finding it increasingly difficult to get employment in
the area of elite classical music performance in which they are being trained.
But this is all very curious, because the arts themselves,
and the creative industries, are booming.
A 2010
report by the Australia Council, More
than bums on seats: Australian participation in the arts found that
Australians’ engagement with the arts, both as creators and consumers, was
increasing. Young people especially were
becoming more engaged with the art and music, and across the population there
was a growing sense of the importance of the arts to society’s wellbeing. Importantly, the internet was identified as
an increasingly important means of engaging with the arts, with one in three
Australians already using the internet to engage with art in some form. These statistics are borne out by the
economic figures. A 2009 economic
analysis of the creative industries in Australia found that the creative
industries (including music) contributed around 3% to our GDP (more than the
agriculture or energy industries), and moreover over ten years was growing at
5.8% p.a. - nearly twice the rate of the
economy as a whole. It’s a good news
story of flourishing artistic practice and community engagement that is
increasingly bringing both social benefits and hard cash to the Australian
people.
So why are all our music schools going broke?
The issue is one of relevance.
Looking at the history of music, we see that quite
regularly, there are moments of tectonic shift in the styles, economics and
technologies that underpin music-making.
In the 1920s in Australia there were thousands of freelance professional
musicians in Australia – more than four thousand in Sydney alone - earning their
keep performing in cafes, music halls, theatres, and movie theatres, playing to
accompany silent films. That all changed
in the space of five years. The
invention of the ‘talkie’ – the film with sound – spelled an end to the
movie-house orchestra. The rapid spread
of radio, and the foundation of the ABC in 1932, saw professional music-making
start shift out of the cafe and music hall and into the studio. The Depression accelerated the changes – why
would a cash-strapped restauranteur hire a dance band every night when he could
buy a radio?
This led to the institutionalisation of classical music in
Australia. Under the aegis of the ABC,
by 1960 there was a much smaller number of elite performers, mainly comprising
the orchestras in each state capital.
Each capital had a music school with a curriculum designed to produce
players to support that orchestra . The
curriculum included rigorous performance training in the classical tradition;
aural skills and theory for sight-reading; a survey-style overview of classical
music history.
Astonishingly, more than fifty years later, this same curriculum
either still exists, or has existed quite recently, in Australian music
schools. Yet almost every other aspect
of music-making has changed.
The modern music professional needs to be fluent in a wide
variety of styles – classical, jazz, contemporary and cross-cultural. He or she needs to be familiar with a quickly
changing range of technologies for the creation, notation, recording,
manipulation and dissemination of music.
He or she needs to understand the shifting nature of the music business,
requiring a single individual to at different times (or simultaneously) play
the role of performer, educator, entrepreneur, and producer, and take advantage
of music-making opportunities far beyond the concert hall, but in schools, community
groups, studios, art galleries, hospitals, and increasingly online, in computer
games and other applications. Above all,
as modern and younger Australians engage with the arts as participants not just
passive “consumers”, the modern professional musician needs to be able to
facilitate the music-making of others , at a whole range of standards, not just
be an expert practitioner themselves.
There are some shining examples in Australia of curricula
that have arisen to meet the needs of the modern world – those at QUT, the
University of Newcastle, and the University of South Australia spring to
mind. But the old, traditional conservatoires
have struggled to keep up. Unless they
do, I fear the agonies of cuts and forced restructure currently being visited
on ANU School of Music are bound to be repeated elsewhere.
I am not a huge enthusiast for perpetuating the classical music canon - or any other kind of canon, for that matter. I had no interest at all in the ABC's original Classic 100, or the JJJ version that runs each year. But I guess because my own research used to be about twentieth-century music, and how it communicates (or doesn't), and becuase I so much enjoy debating almost anything on Twitter, I got sucked in to following the most recent: ABC's Classic 100 Countdown of the Twentieth Century. And as this exercise in musical democracy has unfolded, I have been disappointed and then annoyed by two things.
What disappointed me, of course, was the reams of mindless pap that got voted into the list. Of course it did not surprise me in the least. Nevertheless, it was a bit demoralizing to have to actually watch Lloyd-Webber's Requiem following the music from Lord of the Rings as the sort of stuff that the Australian Classic-FM-listening community voted as the 100 best, favourite or most important pieces of that fascinating century. I, like several, expressed my disappointment on Twitter.
And that leads to what annoyed me. There was a backlash of commentators on Twitter decrying the "elitism". Like this tweet from @bonfesse:
I was dismayed about the presence of purists in the #classic100 on @abcclassic but their "art music" only exists in their imaginations.
Or @cosmicdancer's observation (to be fair I think he or she was observing, not advocating):
Seriously people. It's a popularity contest, ahem, poll of favourites. What were you expecting? No real surprises so far #classic100
Actually, people, you are completely wrong. The whole point of this exercise is to establish a canon. You might not agree with that aim - I think it's amusingly ludicrous - but logically, if you are running a "top 100" list, then by definition you are accepting the premise that some music is better than others. I personally have a totally relativistic notion of musical taste, in which people are free to like what they like. That's why I don't really agree with exercises like this. But if you are going to have the canon-forming exercise, you have to accept value judgements. If you are going to get irritated about purists, you are simply not understanding.
I'm perfectly happy for people to enjoy McDonalds more than a healthy home-cooked Jamie Oliver recipe. I'm perfectly happy for people to enjoy Celebrity Apprentice more than Casablanca. And I'm perfectly happy never to make a list of the top 100 meals, or top 100 bits of film and television.
But if you do want to go ahead with such projects, and you genuinely want to rank McDonalds higher than Oliver on the list of 100 best foods, then expect people to call you an uninformed trogdolyte.
Professor Eisenbart, asked to attend a girls’ school speech night as an honoured guest and give the prizes out, rudely declined; but from indifference agreed, when pressed with dry scholastic jokes, to change his mind, to grace their humble platform, and to lend
distinction (of a kind not specified) to the occasion. Academic dress became him, as he knew. When he appeared the girls whirred with an insect nervousness, the Head in humbler black flapped round and steered her guest, superb in silk and fur, with pride
to the best seat beneath half-hearted blooms tortured to form the school’s elaborate crest. Eisenbart scowled with violent distaste, then recomposed his features to their best advantage: deep in thought, with one hand placed like Rodin’s Thinker. So he watched the room's
mosaic of young heads. Blonde, black, mouse-brown they bent for their Headmistress’ opening prayer. But underneath a light (no accident of seating, he felt sure), with titian hair one girl sat grinning at him, her hand bent under her chin in mockery of his own.
Speeches were made and prizes given. He shook indifferently a host of virgin hands. “Music!” The girl with titian hair stood up, hitched at a stocking, winked at near-by friends, and stood before him to receive a cup of silver chased with curious harps. He took
her hand, and felt its voltage fling his hold from his calm age and power; suffered her strange eyes, against reason dark, to take his stare with her to the piano, there to swap her casual schoolgirl’s for a master’s air. He forged his rose-hot dream as Mozart told
the fullness of all passion or despair summoned by arrogant hands. The music ended, Eisenbart teased his gown while others clapped, and peered into a trophy which suspended his image upside down: a sage fool trapped by music in a copper net of hair.
Those of you following my tweets over recent months may have picked up that I have been running a course for first-year students in the ANU School of Music that has involved them responding in a variety of creative ways to the Canberra International Music Festival. I asked the students' permission to share some of the outcomes publicly, and here they are.
The responses ranged from the creative through to the journalistic. In the latter category were some newsletters produced by students, one focusing on the student experience of the festival, the other dealing with the audience experience of the venues, as did this report based on audience surveys.
Many groups embraced online media. This tumblr about the Australian composer graham Koehne contains videos, compositions, reflections and photos of the students' experiences working with Koehne during the festival.
The Bachelor of Education students produced a fascinating project reflecting on the role of "conductor as educator", which they published as this blog. Another group interviewed performers and composers, blogging the results here.
One powerful group project was this video made by a group of students about a concert of works focused around the Australian composer Frederick Septimus Kelly. Kelly was a soldier in World War One, surviving Gallipoli only to die on the Somne. He wrote two sonatas in the trenches, one unfinished.
There were several extremely creative responses. Students wrote compositions in response to the music they heard and played at the Festival, such as this work for string quartet. Another group made a series of arrangements of the same music, reflecting their individual responses to the festival.
One of the most interesting responses, sadly too large to upload, was a video of an interview with a flute and guitar duet that performed on original early nineteenth-century instruments during the Festival. The students - another duet - attempted to recreate the stylistic elements of the performance on modern instruments.
Drawing on the symbolic use of colour in the programming of the Festival, one group created artwork and improvised in response to the various colours and images, and discussed this on a video:
The following is the text of a talk I gave about the first of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder at the ICTM "Laments" Symposium at the ANU on April 20, 2011
For some months, in preparation for this symposium, I have been trying to define the characteristics of the idea of “lament” in somewhat structural terms. In fact, this goal of articulating “lament” as a concept, as opposed to merely letting the multiple meanings of the word resonate as they will, has been, for me, a persistent irritation – like a mosquito constantly buzzing about one's head, impossible to swat. Or perhaps it is more like one of those occasions when one forgets a name, or a word, that then remains frustratingly, infuriatingly on the tip of one's tongue, because the tantalising idea that underpins the concept of “lament” is surely one of absence.
Every lament is an encounter with an absence. The classic, canonic and central laments are the elegies and threnodies that mark the felt absences of death. But, life being what it is, there are many other subjects for lamentation: lament for lost love, lament for lost youth, all the way to Beethoven's rage over a lost penny, which certainly qualifies as a lament, even if an infantile one. And what has been frustrating me in my definitional musings is that I cannot think of one single example of a lament that does not encounter the lost, the absent; either actual or potential.
The nature of this encounter with absence vary by context. A musical ritual of mourning usually serves to place an individual's grief in a communal context: to share, and to locate mourning within a cultural tradition. In the lament as ritual, private grief is made public through communal enactment.
By contrast, an artistic response to absence usually creates a presence: through art, music, poetry, an image of what or whom is lost is created within the work. In the lament as art-form, from a real or literal absence, a figurative presence is generated: an image of the departed. Here, private grief is made public through communicative representation.
The majority of my paper concerns the nature of this communicative representation in the first of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder - “Songs on the Death of Children”. The notion of “presence” is loaded, theoretically speaking, and is a contested one, and in some senses this short song of Mahler's is about to become the battleground on which the theoretical struggle for presence will be waged. But first I'd like to fling a few visual and textural laments into the mix, to provide some depth and perspective on the relationship between presence and absence.
Sir George Clausen painted Youth Mourning in 1916. Interpretation here is not problematic: the image is of youth, as a vulnerable, naked young woman, lamenting the dead young men of the First World War. The kneeling figure in a ritual posture of grief, together with the partial cross, frame in the background the waterlogged shell-holes of a Flanders field. The interesting thing here is the portrayal of absence: in particular the cross being truncated at the edge of the canvas tells us that the focus of the composition of the painting has been shifted to what is central, to what is even more important. The cross and the woman frame, enfold – cradle, if you will – what is at the centre of the painting. And what is central is … absent. A palpable absence. We could imagine the mourning woman as Isolde, singing to a dead Tristan that only she can see. It is not that there is nothing at the centre of the painting: on the contrary, there is something, gone. A presence through absence.
Rather than my waxing lyrical about this conceptual inseparability of absence and presence in the lament, it is probably better to let Shakespeare do so for me. Certainly, Harold Bloom would approve of letting art speak in place of criticism. Shakespeare's Sonnet 64 is both a lament and a love song, and makes the point of presence in absence more compellingly than I could:
When I have seen by Time's fell hand defaced The rich proud cost of outworn buried age; When sometime lofty towers I see down-razed And brass eternal slave to mortal rage; When I have seen the hungry ocean gain Advantage on the kingdom of the shore, And the firm soil win of the watery main, Increasing store with loss and loss with store; When I have seen such interchange of state, Or state itself confounded to decay; Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, That Time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death, which cannot choose But weep to have that which it fears to lose.
“A thought … which cannot choose but weep to have that which it fears to lose” actually maps the absent onto the present by force – weeping in the presence of the beloved in the face of the inevitability of absence. There are two powerful presences in this sonnet: one is the speaker, invoking the personified force of time, ruin and destruction. The other is his beloved – but she is absent. She does not speak. Her presence is only affirmed, held, cradled, by the words describing her inevitable departure. There is, it seems, inhabiting the concept of the lament as artwork a structural pairing between presence and absence, in which the figure, the image of one gone is enfolded or framed by what is present: the metaphor I have been using is that of “cradling”.
This notion of cradling the lamented is useful in thinking about the first of Mahler's Kindertotenlieder. The original Kindertotenlieder were a group of 428 poems written by Friedrich Rückert in 1833–34 in reaction to the illness and death of his two children Luise and Ernst. They were an essentially private set of laments, not intended for publication and only published after Rückert's death in 1872. Mahler chose five of the poems for his setting, which he wrote between 1901 and 1904. I want to look in detail at the first.
Nun will die Sonn' so hell aufgehn,
Als sei kein Unglück die Nacht geschehn!
Das Unglück geschah nur mir allein!
Die Sonne, sie scheinet allgemein!
Du mußt nicht die Nacht in dir verschränken,
Mußt sie ins ew'ge Licht versenken!
Ein Lämplein verlosch in meinem Zelt!
Heil sei dem Freudenlicht der Welt!
Now the sun will rise as brightly
as if no misfortune had occurred in the night.
The misfortune has fallen on me alone.
The sun - it shines for everyone.
You must not keep the night inside you;
you must immerse it in eternal light.
A little light has been extinguished in my household;
Light of joy in the world, be welcome
Already we have several presences. Mahler's music enfolds and cradles the presence of the poet, himself gone, but allowed to speak through and with the music. And the poet inscribes a protagonist, the one who speaks and sings; a father who has lost as child in the night. Overwhelmingly, though, the most palpable presence in the song is the absent one – the dead child to whom the second stanza of the poem is (perhaps) addressed. Mahler's music cradles an image of the dead poet, whose poetic imagination enfolds an imagined grieving father, who speaks of, holds, cradles in words his absent child.
Now, at this point, as presences multiply alarmingly, it might be wise to invoke some theoretical and semiotic perspectives. The aim is to seek clarification, but the probable result will be no doubt to further complicate the issue. In a different domain – or possible different - the battle between “presence” and “absence” is the central issue of theory and criticism of the late twentieth century. The deconstruction of what Derrida termed the “illusory metaphysics of presence” is the first item on the post-structuralist agenda. For the criticism of literature and the arts, Derrida's assault on presence, simultaneous to and cognate with Barthes declaration of the death of the author, had the effect of rendering impossible the idea of authorial presence in a work. Meaning is generated through the interplay of texts, the constellation of signs and codes brought together and to bear by the reader or listener in the act of interpretation. The very idea of authorial presence – the notion that Mahler, or Rückert, are speaking to us through the words and music, bring a privileged and essential meaning to the work – is called into question by the inherent nature of language itself (and here, we treat music as a language) to subvert its own meanings: meaning is always partial, incomplete, deferred, provisional, in an endless cycle of intertextual interpenetration that Derrida terms difference.
This post-structuralist and deconstructive position is theoretically compelling. However, it does have its opponents: John Searle was Derrida's most famous sparring partner in the world of philosophy, but in literary criticism the key figure is perhaps Harold Bloom. Bloom's concept of artistic meaning is so centred in the notion of the artist wrestling with tradition, with the oedipal ghosts of his or her predecessors, that some notion of real authorial presence by necessity underpins his conception of meaning. Christopher Norris described it well when he wrote “Bloom [seems] torn between a defence of poetry which holds to the ethos or Romantic individualism, and a deconstructive poetics which tends to dissolve such themes into an abstract system of tropes and relationships. In the last resort, however, Bloom is always willing to invoke the terminology of 'voice', 'presence' and subjective origin which Derrida so resolutely tracks down to its metaphors”.
Less well-known than Bloom is George Steiner. Steiner's 1989 essay Real Presences - subtitled “is there anything in what we say?” acknowledges the theoretical unarguability of a deconstructive position, but takes issue with it on ethical rather than theoretical grounds. I shall return to Steiner's intriguing position at the end of my talk.
In the Mahler, we can see representational and intertextual signification at work in the song at the most obvious and accessible level of interpretation of musical meaning. This is at the level I would term mimeticsemiosis: the music makes imitative reference to ideas in the text, or to ideas that are easily inferred from the context, through the invocation of a referential musical language, to the vocabulary and grammar of which each listener has different and provisional access.
For instance, the repeated, paired couplets are a familiar musical figure, standing for, signifying “sighing” and invoking musical texts from Dowland through Mozart to Wagner, for those able to understand the code. Second, the abrupt shifts of modality from major to minor evoke the shifts from light to dark in the poem, for listeners with even the most cursory familiarity with the affective references of Western music since 1500.
There are more specific intertextualities. The ascending chromaticism, descending diatonic minor vocal lines, and tonic pedals all recall Schubert's Der Tod und das Mädchen, clearly a resonant and appropriate text for the Mahler to evoke. There are other parallels with songs from the Schwannengesang cycle, Schubert's last. Once the door of intertextuality is open, of course, many visitors come flooding in; for instance, Kofi Agawu has observed the presence in the music of the Kindertotenlieder of Brahms-like developing variation, and harmonic practice that echoes agner's Tristan.
One aspect of mimetic semiosis that draws attention to itself is the Mahler's use of the repeated glockenspiel strokes. This recalls the sound of bells tolled to announce a death – the eponymous “death knell”. Sometimes the age of the deceased dictated the number of bell strokes – and here, there are two strokes.
Semiotically, these bells are doing more than making a mimetic imitation of funeral bells. They are of course small, and high – child-sized tolling, if you will – and quite specifically echo the text “Ein Lämplein verlosch in meinem Zelt!” - a little lamp has gone out in my household. The little lamp is the soul of the child, and with these glockenspiel strokes Mahler offers an aural depiction of that childlike soul.
The graphic explicitness of this aural image of the soul is slightly trite. Indeed, it is possible to find it quite comic – although revealing that we do not do so. There is a visual analogy for this depiction which could be illuminating. I think what Mahler has done sonically is similar to what the director has done visually in this piece of film:
The visual representation, from the third Harry Potter film, is of the soul leaving the body - a bright white point of light, the visual analogue of Mahler's glockenspiel strokes. This is extreme mimesis, representation or metaphor driven to excess. It permits the most anachronistic intertextualities, between Mahler and Harry Potter – although I wouldn't go so far as to deny the aesthetic similarities between to two. It is also, in both cases, trite in the extreme.
So where does this leave us in terms of presence and absence in the lament? A surface level investigation of semiosis, which highlights the intertextual interplay of mimetic reference, quickly confirms a post-structuralist reading of presence in the musical text. There is a shifting, provisional and partial presence of Rückert, Mahler, the imaginary father and child, conveyed through bells, sighs, and overtly referential musical symbolism. It's not that difficult to follow the chain of intertextuality to find the presence of Schubert, Brahms, Wagner … or indeed Harry Potter.
Indeed, perhaps because of this lack of interpretative difficulty that the entire deconstructionist project left music relatively untouched, compared with literature and philosophy. The notion that referentiality in music is provisional, deferred, partial and incomplete is not exactly earth shattering, as it proved for language, as the specific nature of referential signification of music has always been problematic. On the contrary, traditionally, the quest for musical presence, for authorial voice, has been located in the domain of structure; in the musical syntagm, rather than the musical vocabulary. The presence of the composer has been observed in ideas like the unity and organicism of the musical work as a demonstration of compositional vision; or through the conceptual superstructures afforded by syntactical tools such as the leitmotif, or dodecaphonic organisation.
Seeing the work's structure, rather than referents, as the site of meaning is what I shall term allegorical semiosis. This terminology follows that of postructuralist Paul de Man who sought to reprioritize structure – the 'rhetoric of pure figuration' – over symbolic or referential modes of meaning. What happens when we look for meaning in the syntactical structure of music, without reference to possible mimetic, intertextual or extra-musical signification; but equally without reference to pre-ordained codes of musical structural interpretation – sonata forms, presuppositions of unity whether motivic or harmonic, as well as more recent a priori music-analytic symbologies such as gendered structures?
The results of this allegoric structural reading of the first of the Kindertotenlieder are significant. Structurally, the music is extremely predictable. There are two generative voice-leading principles at work. One is a classic Schenkerian descent from the fifth scale degree towards harmonic closure:
But of course simple harminuc closure is never achieved. Rather, the upper voice resolves upwards by semitone (another “sigh” in the mimetic plane). From this point of quasi-resolution then initiates the second generative voice-leading principle: a non-functional ascending linear chromatic motion that rises as high as the B-flat (the highest point, as an accented upper neighbour-note, of the original structural descent) at which point harmonic function kicks back in, the B flat is reheard as a dominant minor ninth and the passage moves back towards the first principle of tonal resolution by stepwise descent.
This gesture essentially happens the same way four times in the song: each time there is a moment of discontinuity, a point at which the upward chromatic linearity overpowers the gravitational pull of the functional harmony. This discontinuity is paralleled at the cadence points, in which linear chromatic motion arbitrarily intrudes and disrupts the goal-directed voice-leading.
The point is this: there is absolutely no rational - musical – reason for the change of modality that precipitates the upward chromatic motion and its consequent emotional intensification. It is precipitated by a musical deus ex machina – a sudden and entirely logically inexplicable assertion of lightness or positivity. This abrupt move from darkness to light entirely parallels the structural unfolding Rückert text : “The misfortune has fallen on me alone. The sun - it shines for everyone.”
Theoretically, there is an important distinction here. The music is not symbolizing grief, or giving some metaphorical representation of grief. Rather, we are given in the actual structure of the music a play of figuaration that is that of grief, in abstract: the chaotic and unpredictable shift from hope to despair that characterises the structure of mourning. This is where the fine distinction is to invoke the notion of allegorical semiosis - the rhetoric of pure figuration – instead of representative mimesis.
We are nearly at the end, and have explored some of the theoretical issues to do with the location of meaning in the first of the Kindertotenlieder. We have looked at mimetic semiosis, representation, intertextuality, allegorical meaning, and musical structure as the site of the communicative power of the Mahler's music. However, I would wager that we have been left unsatisfied: that none of these semiotic processes have adequately described what it is we understand from this music, and certainly none has captured the trope of presence in absence which seemed so intuitively compelling at the start of this paper.
In Real Presences, Gearge Steiner writes:
Face to face with the presence of offered meaning which we call a text (or a painting or a symphony), we seek to hear its language. As we would that of the elect stranger coming towards us. There is in this endeavour, as deconstruction would immediately point out , an ultimately unprovable hope and presupposition of sense, a presumption that intelligibility is conceivable and, indeed, realizable. Such a presupposition is always susceptible of refutation. The presence before us may be that of a mute (Beckett edges us towards that grim jest), of a madman uttering gibberish or, more disturbingly, of an intensely communicative persona whose idiom – linguistic, stylistic, hermetically-grounded – we simply cannot grasp. (p. 156)
And here perhaps is the elephant in the room. This Mahler musical text comes towards us as a stranger, offering unprovable hope: that in this music, in these words, are cradled real presences, with whom we have genuinely transformative encounters: a grieving father, a lost child. It is not, ultimately, the processes of signification that generate the most important meaning; it is ultimately ontological semiosis – the nature of being, the being-in-the-work; the presence and absence of real mourners.
What moves us, what makes the music profound, is that Mahler cradles in music Rückert's real and authentic grief. The grief is not yet Mahler's own: Mahler had lost no children when he composed the Kindertotenlieder. Sadly, he lost his four-year-old daughter soon after completing the piece, and wrote “When I really lost my daughter, I could not have written these songs any more”. And maybe this comment should alert us to what is at stake.
Steiner argues that while the deconstructive position is theoretically irrefutable, ethically we need to make a wager on the real force of ontological semiosis; on the power of being-in-the-work to be a communicative force; and thus on the value of the arts to be a genuine tool with which to understand the human condition. Steiner particularly emphasis the role of music in this wager.
Music makes utterly substantive what I have sought to suggest of the real presence in meaning where that presence cannot be analytically shown or paraphrased. Music brings to our daily lives an immediate encounter with a logic of sense other than that of reason. It is, precisely, the truest name we have for the logic at work in the springs of being that generate vital forms. (p. 218)
And there I have to put to rest my own investigations into the semiosis at work in this little song of Mahler's. It feels like I have conjured up a theoretical maelstrom whirling around the still, calm, centre of meaning in the song: which is the real, palpable presence of an absent child. And despite the luminous theoretical reputations of some of the spirits I have conjured; Jacques Derrida,, Paul de Man, Harold Bloom, George Steiner – I might, in the end, leave the last words on the subject of the ontological question of the reality of presence to Harry Potter and Albus Dumbledore:
'Tell me one last thing,' said Harry. 'Is this real? Or has this been happening inside my head?'
Dumbledore beamed at him, and his voice sounded loud and strong in Harry's ears even though the bright mist was descending again, obscuring his figure.
'Of course it is happening inside your head, Harry, but why on earth should that mean that it is not real?' (p. 579)
I have a doctorate in music, and have worked as a music academic, an education academic, in university management, and as an educational and change management consultant. I am a conductor (I conducted the ANU Choir, SCUNA, for twelve years) and composer, but my current creative preoccupation is astrophotography. I have strong opinions on politics, music, food, rugby ... well, everything, really. Especially rugby.
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