Marcello Sorce Keller

MUSICOLOGISTS AND THE RADIO:
A SHORTLIST OF QUESTIONS,
PROBLEMS, AND ISSUES



This artiche has previously appeared in Theo Maeusli (ed.),
Talk About Radio, Towards a Social History of Radio, Zurich, Chronos Verlag, 1999, pp. 115-126. It is here reproduced with permission by the publisher.


PART I

Are musicologists naturally
"slower" than other people?


Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov, better known to all of us as Nikolaj Lenin, is reported to have defined the radio as "a newspaper without paper and no frontiers". Considering that he died in 1924, when radio broadcasting was still in its cradle, we can surely say that he was one of the first to realize the tremendous impact that this new technology was going to have on social life.
Not only Lenin, however, but politicians in general, did not take very long in recognising the enormous importance of the radio for their particular purposes. In fact the case of Hitler, among many others, is possibly even better known. He once said: Ohne Kraftwagen, ohne Flugzeug und ohne Lautsprecher hätten wir Deutschland nicht erobert! (Without cars, aeroplanes and loudspeakers we could not have conquered Germany)(1) But, of course, it is simply to be expected that politicians, political activists, and dictators be quick in keeping up with such novelties. It is to be hoped that they be alert in grasping the implications of anything that might alter the pattern of social interactions. But, now, what about... what about musicologists, the very people who - by avocation - deal with the cultural dimension of music-making. Were they just as quick in recognising how the coming about of the radio dramatically changed the ways in which music is made and heard? The answer is, I regret to say, a sharp and unequivocal "NO", they were not! Even today, at the very end of the XXth century, "main stream musicology" (what we habitually call "historical musicology") is still not involved in any direct fashion with issues related to the important role the radio and the mass-media play in contemporary musical life (2). Musicology leaves this "dirty job" of dealing with such things mostly to the sociology of music, and to ethno-musicology. Both are still regarded (as any perusal of major musicological journals will certainly yield) as "peripheral" fields of endeavour (3).
Now, why is musicology so late in recognising that the radio and the electronic mass-media should occupy center stage in any conceivable investigation concerned with music in contemporary society? Why is it that the major research efforts of musicology seem to forget that the electronic mass-media exist and are here to stay? Of course, one possible explanation could be that the people who get into musicology are naturally "slower" and "less perceptive" than most other people. But I am a musicologist myself, more or less, I still teach music history, and I want to protect the public image of my profession. That is why I will make an effort, in this paper, to come up with a less unflattering explanation.
Let me give you now, first of all, the historical reason why in my opinion, musicology is less sensitive than desirable to questions related to electronic mass-communications. Then, in the third and last part of my paper, I will present a tentative list of emerging issues, especially worthy of musicological attention, that still wait to be more comprehensively addressed.

PART II

The Problematic Nature of Music listening

Probably, the number one reason why musicology is little inclined to deal with the mass-media is that, doing so would be tantamount with facing primarily the question of "music listening", tout court. And the question of how do we actually succeed in listening to music is, in itself, something that musicology has been reluctant to tackle in all its wide-ranging implications (4). It would be easy, much too easy, to mention the name of numerous important musicologists who never wrote anything on this subject. Just take your pick, at random, and you are likely to hit the target.
But let me backtrack one step and recall how musicology was born during the second half of the XIXth century, and how its task was seen, at the time, as that of explaining the great masterpieces of the past. The assumption was derived from Romantic aesthetics which believed that a "work of art" is the permanent embodiment of spiritual values that make it worthy of durable appreciation in the course of history (5). Or, to put it somewhat differently, the assumption was that "true art" endures the "test of time". If what makes the aesthetic experience possible is then the "work of art", then it is precisely the "work of art" the "real" object of musicology and not the way it may sometimes be used or misused, in the course of time. The traditional attitude, deeply ingrained in the soul of musicology therefore, is that while musical compositions, pieces and masterworks, are the "real thing", the electronic reproduction of such works is at best a surrogate and, at worst, a distortion of those intrinsic qualities they originally had; intrinsic qualities that only in a live performance may come to the fore. Herman Hesse in Der Steppenwolf put it once in more eloquent terms: "the radio" he said "just tosses about at random the most beautiful music in the world, to the most incredible destinations, whether it be bourgeois salons or attics, chatting subscribers, people eating, yawning or taking a nap...the radio takes out of the music some of its beauty, vilifies it, scratches it, regurgitates it, and yet cannot entirely suppress its spirit." (6). Surely, it would be unfair to say that, on the basis of this disdainful attitude, historical musicology has remained entirely silent on the listening experience. There are at least a few examples, some of them even illustrious, worthy of being remembered. The first one to stress that music listening is by no means a straightforward and unproblematic matter was Hugo Riemann, late in the 19th century. Riemann suggested that musical listening does not merely consist in passively registering the effects of sound on the organ of hearing but, rather, in activating the logical functions of the human mind. From this conviction came his doctoral dissertation given at Göttingen in 1873: über das musikalische Hören. Then there was Heinrich Besseler, and that was, only,...some fifty years later, in 1925, when Besseler articulated some of the fundamental questions related to music listening that are still with us for discussion (Besseler 1925). Thirteen years after, Hans Mersmann came along and wrote an entire survey of music history, taking the point of view of the listener (Mersmann 1938).
But Besseler and Mersmann dealt only marginally with questions related to the reproduction of music (7). They were more interested in understanding how formal aspects of musical compositions, might be more or less consciously perceived by the public, in relation to the different possible aesthetic expectations. And it will take just about some thirty more years, after Mersmann's book on Musikhören, for aesthetic theory to arrive at the conclusion (almost generally accepted today) that the experience of music depends crucially on what the listener can bring to it (Nattiez 1987). In other words, it is essential for the intelligence of music that the listener can find in his cultural background all the elements necessary to "create" and give some "sense" to the sonic patterns that reach his ear. After all, there is no need to arrive as far as deconstruction theory in order to comprehend that to engage in a musical activity, whether it be composition, performance or just listening, some more or less compatible mental categories need to be activated (Sessions 1950). Well, such re-evaluation of music listening, understood now as a creative act in its own right, was arrived at, not on the basis of work done by historical musicologists but, on the contrary, as a result of work generated by people affiliated with other disciplines. And it consequently was people working in areas other than historical musicology who found it worthwhile to study phenomena related to the electronic reproduction of music (Winzheimer 1930; Kötter 1968)(8). (That for the obvious reason that listening to the radio, people have to make sense of music that is produced in a different place and time by invisible people. And this involves an even more complex creative intervention, on their part, than that required by listening to music in its original context, while experiencing the same soundscape felt by the music-maker, and observing what type of physical activity is bringing music into being). Listening to the radio moreover, also challenges our capacity to make sense, not necessarily of musical "works" but more likely, of fragments resulting from discontinuous listening, or from artfully compiled "post-modern" concoctions of some sort or another.
While leaving all that to whoever may wish to take it, historical musicology, to this day, still deals with musical works per se, rather than with the question of how they might acquire or lose some of their meaning through the circuits of communication (9). It is not a matter of being "slow" or "stubborn". It is, rather, that the concept of the "work of art" as it was defined in the course of the XIXth c. has been such an influential, such a central value for Western culture, it has been such a strong staple in upholding the claimed superiority of Western art, that musicologist dealing with the Western tradition are having a hard time getting over it (Carpenter 1967; Wiora 1983). That is why (and here I come to the third and last part of my paper), that is why I will give you now a very selective shortlist of intriguing issues brought to the general attention by areas of endeavour capable of looking at music from a more prosaic angle: the sociology of music and ethnomusicology.

PART III

Questions, Problems and Issues


a. Of Physical Space and Compositional Process

In the musical experience the physical perception of acoustical space has always been important. Before the time music could be electronically reproduced, both the music-maker and the listener used to share the same perception of the acoustical ambience they were in. That is why, for instance, in the music of Johann Sebastian Bach, we find fewer modulations (changes of key, of tonal center...), in those works written for the church, where a considerable degree of reverberation could be expected. In his keyboard works, on the contrary, meant as they were to be performed in small rooms, with little or no reverberation, modulations occur more frequently. That is just one instance to stress how the awareness of a given space would exercise some restraints, put some controls if you wish, on compositional process. These were controls that went way beyond mere considerations of instrumentation and timber. In fact, they went much further into the compositional fabric and reached into the very concept of harmony, texture and form.
Once again, it is rather remarkable that musicology, although it has been very much into the study of compositional process over the past thirty years (e.g. in Beethoven, Berlioz, Stravinsky, Bart¢k), it never went as far as gauging how modern composers responded to the possibility that their work might be electronically reproduced. Remarkable indeed if one considers that - for instance - it is known from hearsay that Puccini was often concerned that his "arias" could fit on a 78rpm record (10).

b. The Motor Impulse and the Western Tradition

To me, one of the most striking features of highbrow music in the Western tradition is its lack of "motor impulse". I mean by that that direct, immediate physical response to rhythm that makes your limbs automatically move and wish to dance. Any serious music that happened to produce this kind of effect, in our tradition, would automatically be demoted from the "art- music" category and re-classified as popular, light, or entertainment. If it is "serious" it cannot be "physical" (and why this is so is quite a story that would bring us astray). At any rate, it was no less than Max Weber (1864-1920), the great sociologist, who pointed out how Christianity, having prohibited any religious use of the dance (and seldom allowing serious music to be dance-like) might in this fashion have favoured, as a form of compensation, an ipertrophic development of instrumental (and orchestral) music. This is music that often requires a considerable physical, almost athletic effort (and the conductor is the music made into gesture...). In this light, I find it intriguing to observe how - as far as highbrow music is concerned - this loss of "motor impulse" becomes complete, with the process of electronic reproduction, that makes it impossible for us to get some of that residual impulse out of actually seeing the music-maker in action. As far as lowbrow music goes, well, it is "physical" already, and to such a degree, that visual contact with the music-maker is quite unnecessary for the rhythmic drive to be contagious.
Incidentally, a total separation of the acoustical from the visual impressions of music-making has been at times considered desirable, even before the radio was invented. Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, in Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, made one of his characters say the following words: "...true music is just for hearing; a beautiful voice is the most abstract entity, and the most universal, one can think of, but when the person producing it makes himself visible to us in his physical individuality he destroys the pure object of that universality." (11). And Richard Wagner, after all, in creating the mystischer Abgrung, in which the orchestra could be hidden from the public, was carrying out exactly that very idea.

c. World-wide Diffusion of European Music
and Intercultural Contacts

Alexander John Ellis (1814-1890), one of the founding fathers of ethnomusicology, once wrote in 1885: "Harmony was a European discovery of a few centuries back, and it has not penetrated beyond Europe and its colonies." (12) We can easily imagine how surprised he would be today, in realising that music based on the principles of tonal harmony is being made in Indonesia, Africa and Japan. This is even more striking when we consider that, precisely when the principles of tonal harmony were conquering the world (thanks mostly to the radio), so many Western composers, serious composers, just gave it up altogether, considering it a compositional resource no longer adequate for the expressive needs of the XXth century. At any rate, tonal harmony, thanks to the radio-waves, has proved enormous vitality. In fact, it has been adopted by many non-western musical traditions that have been capable of using the old tonal procedures of Claudio Monteverdi and Jean Philippe Rameau, to express their individual, local and ultimately "ethnic" identity. It may provide some food for thought given that the musical avant-garde of our century has scarcely noticed this planetary revolution.
And this brings me to the following point.

d. Bruno Nettl and the "Meteorite" Effect

It was a striking novelty brought about by the radio and the electronic mass-media, that music being produced here and now, can effect far away realities or will some day effect realities that do not yet exist. Such is the power of the mass-media in disseminating music that makes the popular image of the "global village" come to mind automatically. Moreover, fashionable terms such as "Westernization" and "globalization" suggest and support the commonplace idea that the mass-media are effecting the global soundscape, making it progressively more standardised and uniform. (This perception is by now so deeply rooted in the consciousness of the general public, that it has become commonplace and quite hard to fight). In fact, as it turns out, ethnomusicological research is convincingly showing that - at least as far as music is concerned - it just isn't true. Bruno Nettl (b. 1930), among others, convincingly presented in a recent book some evidence that points quite in the opposite direction (Nettl 1985). He maintains that never before has our planet seen such an extraordinary variety of musical styles and practices. And the interesting sidelight of it is that such variety we owe, almost exclusively, to the mass-media. Bruno Nettl explains in fact, how Western music exerted on non-western cultures the phenomenal impact of a meteorite. The result is that native traditions, confronted with the Western invasion, broke down into sub-genres and styles that tend to drastically diversify from one another. Thanks to this diversification it almost always happens that at least one local genre, totally native in its stylistic connotations, is capable of counteracting the competition of foreign music. You may call it musical Darwinism or "survival of the fittest", like Herbert Spencer would have said. Such is precisely the case, in Indonesia, of Kronkong music or Japongan which, Nettl maintains, would never have existed without the invasion of Western music in south-east Asia (13).

e. Musical Feedback and «zweitens Dasein»

The invention of sound recording techniques was, as it might easily be imagined, of crucial importance for ethnomusicology. This is a field of endeavour which, as we know it today, was actually born with the phonograph. The first acquisition that the phonograph made possible was quite momentous because it simply abolished what had been seen as the essential difference between written and unwritten music. In fact, recordings of unwritten music revealed that it is much less "improvised" and much more "stable and systematic" than had previously been thought. At the same time, recorded interpretations of written music have shown that, even for the most scholarly and careful instrumentalist, the score is only an approximate guide to performance. But let me leave the phonograph aside, or at least let me talk about it, once more, in conjunction with the radio.
A fairly well-known effect of electronic dissemination of music (and in some local areas relatively well understood), is how it interacts with the inner workings of musical traditions that are orally transmitted. Wherever music is handed down by word of mouth, it is more and more frequently possible for people to learn, more often re-learn, or compare a memorised repertoire with samples of it to be heard in radio programs, or available in records, or even in family-made cassette tapes (Manuel 1993). The German musicologist Walter Wiora, wrote many years ago that when folksongs, once solely confined to the oral environment begin to be electronically disseminated as well, they enter a second different condition of existence which he referred to as zweitens Dasein (Wiora 1957). Today, therefore, to put it in the words of a more recent writer, Walter Jackson Ong (Ong 1982), we are often confronted with a kind of oral circulation "of the second degree" (i.e. learning aurally from recorded or broadcast music, as distinct from direct live contact with the original sound source). Oral circulation of the second degree is often retroactive in the sense that people often re-learn from the radio their own music. Two major forms of change taking place during this re-introduction cycle are particularly intriguing and noticeable: no. 1: people become incapable of forgetting things that they would otherwise forget, and then creatively replace them with others just as suited for the purpose, and no. 2: sometimes people re-fashion their own version of a song according to some of the alterations that have been made to the music in order to make it more compatible with the broadcasting or recording format (14)(Sorce Keller 1991). Interestingly enough, however, people are usually very selective in deciding which alterations to accept and which to reject. Choosing is by definition an active process, a process that can only occur within a tradition, within a cultural context. Choosing is and remains, nothing less than a form of criticism.

f. Discontinuous Listening: the End of the Organic Metaphor

While there is therefore, ample ground to maintain that the radio and other electronic mass-media exercised a profound influence in the musical life of both folk cultures and non- Western high-cultures (see in particular Points 3, 4, and 5 of my shortlist), it is hard to overestimate the impact that they had on the musical traditions of Western society itself, both in the highbrow and lowbrow end of the spectrum. And even within the Western context, so much has been written about their nefarious effects that I would be hard put to even summarise the debate. I will then simply be satisfied with raising my voice out of the choir and explain how beneficial the mediatization of music has been to help reverse old aesthetic attitudes (veritable left- overs of romantic thought), that were a considerable obstacle in our effort to comprehend the musical process. And here now, as if in some way closing an ideal circle, I go back to my first theme: the musical "object".
Aesthetic theory has been dominated for a long time by the so-called "organic metaphor", by the assumption - that is - that a work of art is, or should be, some kind of an "organic growth". Translated into the field of music this means that a musical composition is supposed to be a coherent entity to be apprehended, therefore, in its entirety. Any partial appraisal of it would therefore miss, or misunderstand, the import meant by its author (Levy 1987; Schmidt 1990; Toscani 1994)(15). The idea that a piece of music should be seen as an organism, in which the whole is more than the sum of its parts, was born late in the XVIIIth century (Sulzer 1771; Koch 1782), but flourished with Romanticism. Even social scientists in the XIXth century often spoke of the "social body" and conceived society as an integrated whole (let us only think of Emile Durkheim, Ren, Worms, Alfred Louis Kroeber and, of course, Oswald Spengler). No wonder that the "organic metaphor" was equally fashionable in the realm of music. As a matter of fact, it is still alive today, at least in the consciousness of the general public. And it was still on this lingering assumption that Adorno, among many others, advocated "structural listening" as the only form of listening that can do justice to a work of art. And yet we know very well that listening habits in pre-romantic times were often discontinuous. We know equally well today, that radio listening is almost inevitably "discontinuous". In several other contexts too, music listening is today almost always intermittent, marked by breaks or interruptions. It is then perhaps no coincidence that contemporary musicians are beginning to be less and less attached to the "organic metaphor". Organically organised music, by definition, would make no sense if listened to in fits and starts. This notwithstanding, people seem to enjoy very much almost all kinds of music, even when they have access to it in tiny temporal packages. Somehow they succeed in making "some sense" of what they hear; to be sure, some kind of "sense" that is likely to be rather remote from what the composer meant to express. That probably means that most music, even taken out of its original context, can easily be re-contextualized by people trained to live in a complex society, and well versed in the art of "switching gears" and finding in their own mind some kind of meaningful context for Vivaldi, Duke Ellington, Youssou N'Dour or Jan Garbarek.
I see in all this convincing evidence, if that was ever necessary, of how active, how creative the process of music listening is, and how only limited to an historical interest is the "original intention" of the music-maker. And in my view, this old and old-fashioned idea that music is made up of "pieces", that "pieces" are virtual objects (an idea substantiated by the invention of musical notation, and much later by the enforcement of copyright laws), and the corollary that these virtual objects need to be preserved "intact", "pure", and protected from all forms of distortion and corruption, is still an obstacle for the development of musicology. Until there is a general awareness that "it ain't necessarily so" (as the old Gershwin song says), until then do not expect musicology at large to be able to deal with the radio and with the other electronic media much more than it has done so far.

g. One More Hybrid Word for Our Dictionary:
«Mediamorfosis»

This was, as I stated in the title of this paper, a selective listing of issues, problems and questions pertaining to the mediatisation of music. Of course, several other issues could just as appropriately have been mentioned, if more time had been available. Here, however I wish to stop. Just one more thing I would like to say, before reaching the final cadence. You know, when Auguste Comte (1798-1857), in the IV vol. of his Cours de philosophie positive (1839) came up with the new word sociologie, he made many people laugh. Why? Because it is a terrible hybrid, half Latin ad half Greek (societas and logos); and yet the word "sociology" is still with us. Well, an equally hybrid word was coined, tongue in cheek, a few years ago by my good friend Professor Kurt Blaukopf in Vienna. The word is mediamorphosis; not metamorphosis mind you, but media-morphosis (Blaukopf 1989). The term is meant to indicate the cluster of all the transformations that music undergoes when channelled through the radio, and the other mass-media. Mediamorphosis refers, therefore, to all the things I have been talking about today, plus a few others. The term seems to be catching on but, of course, it is hard to say whether it will have an equally long life as the fortunate word invented by August Comte so long ago has had. We can however be confident that all the processes "mediamorphosis" means to indicate are here to stay and, whether we like it or not, it will eventually be necessary for musicology in all its branches to come to grips with them - or face an inevitable drift into insignificance.


NOTES

1. Adolf Hitler, Manuale della Radio Tedesca, 1938-39. [UP]

2. A cursory survey of a few major musicological journals, such as those of the Swiss, American, and Italian musicological societies, would easily substantiate my statement. [UP]

3. Ethnomusicology, dealing for the most part with the music of non-western society, is especially interested in gauging to what extent and degree the mass-media are effecting the life and transmission of traditional repertoires across the non-western world. [UP]

4. All the major musical reference works, e.g., The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians as well as the much older Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart, do not offer any entry devoted to "music listening" and when they have one entry on "hearing" there they dwell only with the physiological and psychological aspects of the process, rather than with the musical and musicological ones. [UP]

5. With the generic expression "Romantic aesthetics" I am referring to the ideas about art expressed by Hegel and Schopenhauer and, more specifically, with what from those ideas the general public of the XIXth century was able to assimilate. [UP]

6. Herman Hesse, Der Steppenwolf, Frankfurt am Main, Suhrkamp Verlag, 1994. [UP]

7. And that they did not in their major works I just cited but, rather, in contributions appeared in the form of article. [UP]

8. It is significant, I believe, that Bernhard Winzheimer (Winzheimer 1930) the author of one of the very first publications to confront the new crucial issue (one of the first contributions dealing with the listening of music through radio- broadcasting), a Ph.D. Dissertation by the significant title of "Das musikalische Kunstwerk in elektrischer Fernübertragung", was no musicologist in the academic sense of the word. Some of the other works relevant in this connection are, in chronological order, the following: Chase 1946; Silbermann 1954; Caplow 1957; Kotter 1968; Bontinck 1972; Ling 1985; Lull 1987; Blaukopf 1989; Chion 1994. Once again, major musical reference works, either do not offer any entry about "sound recording, transmission and reproduction" or, when they do, like the already mentioned New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, the corresponding entry only deals with the technical aspects of the process and not with the musicological issues it involves. [UP]

9. To what extent the problems of music listening have been underrated in the domain of musicology is made visible by the fact that no major reference work on music devotes an entry to music listening let alone to music listening occurring through the go-between function of radio or the other mass-media (e.g. the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, and Musik in Geschichte und Gegenwart). [UP]

10. Equally intriguing is the case of Erwin Schulhoff (1894- 1942), a rather recent rediscovery for music lovers. In the summer of 1930 he wrote his Concerto for string quartet and wind orchestra. Its inception seems closely connected with the composer's experience of recording as a radio pianist. Schulhoff knew about the possibility of mixing sound from different microphones, and one might infer he had this in mind when setting the soft tone of the string quartet against the sound of massed wind instruments, both woodwind and brass (including a tuba). The combination he used is raw, strident and unfamiliar even today. In sum, this Concerto for String Quartet and Wind Orchestra is one of the most obvious manifestations of the composer's long- standing professional involvement with the radio and its technical improvements. [UP]

11. Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Libro 8, Cap. 5. [UP]

12. A.J. Ellis, "Non-Harmonic Scales", appendix to Hermann von Helmholtz, On the Sensations of Tone (1885), Dover Reprint, 1954. [UP]

13. I myself, in a much less ambitious study than Bruno Nettl's, a survey of popular music repertoires in the Mediterranean area, had the opportunity to observe that whereas a layer of international pop and rock can be heard almost everywhere (albeit with various degrees of presence), regional, local, and even vernacular genres flourish, as never before (Sorce Keller 1993). [UP]

14. The piece may be reduced in length, for instance, obscene terms in the song-text may be edited, etc. [UP]

15. It is being learned today that there is a danger in concentrating too much attention upon the structure of the musical work as a single sound term interpreted as a stable whole. Too much emphasis upon the highest architectonic level not only tends to minimise the importance of meanings as they arise and evolve on other structural levels, but it also leads to a static interpretation of the musical process. [UP]


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