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WHY MUSIC? QUALITY ESSAYS ON MUSIC LISTENING FOR AVID READERS
MUSIC DISTRIBUTION AND SHARING IN CONTEMPORARY AND TRADITIONAL SOCIETIES: DIFFERENCES
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WHY IS MUSICAL ANALYSIS STILL IMPORTANT IN THE MUSIC TECHNOLOGY ERA?
Musical analysis and the rise of computer music
Is musical analysis, which is a discipline mainly practiced by scholars, segregated from musical performance? No, musical analysis is not an accidental attribute of music, because the constant questioning of analysts tends to provide performers with strategies for music listening and interpretation. Thus it leads to new ways of experiencing music, especially nowadays, due to the appearance of electronic instruments and mixed music, which is made of sounds made by both electronic and traditional instruments.
Actually music technology is combined with the rise of new musical sensibilities, be it those of composers, performers or listeners. It now coexists with more ancient developments in the history of music. Let us notice that, as musical instruments did not disappear with sheet music, sheet music did not disappear with computers. And music technology has not suppressed the will to understand personally what a musical work is. Moreover, analysts, while working, are making successive micro-decisions that continue to shape each of their analysis. But music technology has undoubtedly brought new aesthetics with it.
Continuous renewal of musical forms and musical analysis
It all began with music recordings: for the first time, people could experience the benefits of music without doing it, on a regular basis. And music could be brought into each home, which led to the form of cultural capitalism known as the music industry, where producers and consumers are clearly distinct. In traditional societies, capitalism cannot be adopted: everybody produces what they consume. But that cultural capitalism is unceasingly contributing to the creation of new forms of music.
That is why musical analysis becomes, in fact, more and more frequent, be it analysis of music compositions or analysis of musical practices, leading notably to musical collaborative design, a process whose target is to design new music production tools, uniting music composers, analysts, software developers and listeners. And when it comes to attributing a meaning to music, everyone contributes: composers and performers of course, but also programmers, analysts and listeners.
Analysts are not only trained in music theory and musicology, but also in various listening practices. And musical analysis is a form of expanded or augmented listening. Studying the relationships between music technology, compositional processes and listening practices, analysts create new pieces of musical knowledge that can be exploited by all sorts of music industry agents, from composers to marketeers. They contribute to making music understandable by a higher number of listeners. Thereupon, it may happen that listeners, being more aware of the musical content transmitted through sounds, pay them more attention. And as music is more accessible than in the past, it is a very good thing that people take care instead of considering music as a simple commodity. Analysts are thus on a mission to bring musical meaning to listeners.
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MUSICAL ANALYSIS AS A SCIENCE DESCRIBING THE SINGULARITY OF MUSICAL WORKS?
Musical analysis to enhance the personal creativity of composers, performers and listeners
In its early stages, musical analysis was only a set of normative tools inserted in treaties that just described how previous composers wrote music, advising students to learn from masters’ good practices. It was about showing that, one piece of music presenting specific characteristics, it could be related to a known musical form. Now, analysts want to distinguish what, in musical works, makes them what they are. They go further and ask: ‘Why, while having a specific form, does a specific piece of music produce an effect that other pieces having the same form do not produce?’
To answer that style of question, they are helped by sound processing’s tools and concepts. In fact, sound processing gives pieces of information that are strictly musical, in objectifying and quantified ways offered by music technology. What are the main practical targets of the analysts, in that context? One of them is to analyze the creative process in music, amongst composers, performers and listeners. By doing so, they take into account the research done by ethnomusicologists during the 20th century and by composers themselves.
Music recordings as a way to preserve the singularity of musical performances
Amongst the first composers that could get benefits from musical recordings, Bela Bartók was glad that new techniques offered him the possibility to transmit his own performance of his musical scores. At that time, it was totally new: for the first time, the composer had opportunities to transmit his own interpretation of his works via a physical medium. For his part, Bartók was conscious of the fact that no performance of a piece of music is the ultimate one, even when it is the performer who plays his own piece. Actually recordings may be a form of musical appropriation and help analysts to determine the singularity of a music beyond the score. And in this way, they may help performers and listeners to attribute a personal meaning to the music they play or hear.
Music recordings, that became digital, are now part of analyst’s toolbox. When there are many recordings of a same piece of music, the analysis is generally enriched. And for the listener, multiplicity is good news, especially in the field of classical music, as classical recordings are usually made during live settings and include various performers, be it orchestras or soloists. In the field of pop music, there is significantly less variety, due to the fact that the personas of popular artists tend to be very strong, and as their voices are part of these personas, they are recorded and reproduced as consistently as possible: music labels have an interest in ensuring the uniformity of the main popular pieces of music, as they are thus more easily identified and remembered by a large number of listeners.
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WHAT VALUE DOES MUSICAL ANALYSIS BRING TO MUSIC, COMPOSERS, PUBLISHERS AND LISTENERS?
Somewhere between acoustics and musicology
Musical analysis involves two main domains: acoustics and musicology. In fact, pieces of music and their structures are explained using both the concepts relating to sound processing and those coming from a research-based study of music. The target of musical analysis is to answer that question: ‘How does a piece of music work?’. That scientific discipline was born during the second half of the 18th century and incorporates several approaches and models.
Some analysis, like that done by Donald Tovey during the first half of the 20th century, can mainly use language and human sciences to describe what happens in a piece in a chronological order, but other analyses are more based on elements that are intrinsically linked to music, like counterpoint. Schenkerian analysis, a well-known model developed around the same time and wanting to explain tonal music, seeks to understand music by using counterpoint. Anyhow, musical analysis intends to discern the fundamental structure of a musical score.
Concerns and fulfilments raised by musical analysis
During the 19th century, composer and aesthetician Adolf Bernhard Marx became editor of a music journal. Being besides a friend of composer Felix Mendelssohn, Marx had thus all the skills and opportunities to think about the structure of musical works. And he was aware tof the fact that, for most music teachers, it was not easy to give lessons without having a deeper understanding of great musicians’ work. Becoming later a music teacher at the University of Berlin, Marx even founded a private conservatory and, publishing a book dedicated to the analysis of the main composers, including Beethoven, he exerted a deep influence on the development of the sonata as a musical form and as an academic subject.
However, such teachings were accompanied by some issues. In the case of Marx, specialists felt that ‘the’ sonata or ‘the’ rondo, of which the sonata is a variant, did not exist in the mind of great composers. They questioned the extent to which these musical forms can be taught. Moreover, they found that the relationship between sonatas and rondos was not sufficiently stringent. Actually, where does the problem lie and why do analysts criticize analysts? It is all about the viewpoint: some put an emphasis on tonal relationships, some on thematic relationships, and the former are considered to be more rigorous, especially nowadays, because sound processing and technology influence music composers. However criticism does not exclude respect and, for instance, Marx’s terminology was taken up during the 20th century by composer Arnold Schoenberg, even if a modified form. And ultimately, for analysts, the point is to uncover relationships that are hidden in a score. They also question musical scores in connection with music listeners to understand how they perceive various pieces of music.
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WHAT ARE THE ADVANTAGES AND DISADVANTAGES OF NEW ONLINE MUSIC DISTRIBUTION MODELS?
New ways to deliver music on the internet and their consequences
The economic culture of the internet is, today, divided in two tendencies: a centralized industry made up of major companies that create culture for the masses, in different economic fields, and a decentralized folk culture, made of small and independent companies. The music industry, which is small, compared to other industries at the economic level, but very powerful, culturally speaking, does not escape this trend. The legal system trying to articulate the two tendencies is intricate, notably in the entertainment industry.
The development of technology and the internet has increased the speed of music creation and music sharing, giving new ways of accessing, mainly streaming, interactive or noninteractive, and downloading. That situation presents both cultural and financial benefits and issues. The advantages include cost savings, an increased number of musicians and musical diversity. The hazards are linked to the integrity of musical artistic works and are translated inot legal terms. What does this mean? It implies in particular that the cultural reference points are becoming indistinct, as the sources of musical and cultural creation become more and more numerous. And that is why artists may want to be sure that they will get some benefits when their music is used, online or offline.
Cycles of innovation and resistance
All these changes are reshaping the structure of the music industry. But how? There have been cycles of innovation and resistance. During each cycle, one or several companies have developed a new technology to deliver musical items to consumers, that technology offering benefits in terms of flexibility and convenience for the consumers but resulting in losses for copyright owners. In fact, some new online companies do not hesitate to imagine a business model whose basis is to provide users with music content that is not legal because intellectual property rights are not paid to their owners. The ensuing battles result in legal status quo, in intellectual property reinforcement or in the creation of an alternative compensation system.
Each new music technology can be based on the proprietary system or not. How does ‘free’ compete with proprietary? How do entrepreneurs that promote ‘free’ music make money, using these new business models? For end-users, the advantages of ‘free’ are in unlimited access to music. Disadvantages are mainly for artists, not only regarding financial aspects, but also moral rights: it is not always easily that artists will really receive any credit for their work, and that work is sometimes modified without their consent.
The match is not always perfect between people who pay and people who benefit. Even in the proprietary system, it is not so easy, technically speaking, to track what individuals are listening to. And a piece of music produces a benefit for the musicians that created it and possibly the team supporting them only when the listener listened to it for more than 30 seconds. Finally, it is not so easy to check who is listening. However, as the years pass, more and more online music companies are becoming more and more respectful of music copyright laws.
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MUSIC DISTRIBUTION AND SHARING IN CONTEMPORARY AND TRADITIONAL SOCIETIES: DIFFERENCES
A global awareness of world sounds
In societies where there were no formal seasons, clocks or directions, music gave a direction: opening and closing the rainy season, for instance, it shaped the time. Music also structured the space: there were places where music was played, other ones where it was not. In some tribes located in Central Brazil, the day still begins with collective singing. As a result of that, music would configure relationships between people. Thus it was all about ceremony.
Can Western musicians be inspired by such a way to consider music? And how could it be translated in economic terms, in terms of economy? During the rise of nationalism, composers renewed classical harmonic structures by using local sounds. Today, composers are going further, integrating sounds from all around the world in their compositions, foreign sounds being more accessible now due to the development of the internet. Nationalism was transcended by a global awareness of ancient traditional music as a collective patrimony.
Music production, conservation and use
Ethnomusicologists, archivists and curators help to preserve music created within the framework of the music industry. In fact, sounds and music styles cannot be considered in a vacuum or in nature anymore: voices and instrumentations and more broadly musicality are now shaped in recording studios, mixed and distributed by economic agents that tend to showcase the richness of the sonic world. During the 20th century, recording companies helped to disseminate and playback music everywhere. They partly put music outside of the sphere of ceremony by making it available at any moment. When they introduced the record, they also put it into the personal chronology of listeners.
Nowadays, the quantity of music that is produced is much greater than in recent decades. Yet will all sounds be played and heard eternally? Is it possible to recover the music recorded and played on earlier systems? As the type of support used is less visible than it was before, even if the music recording techniques are more sophisticated, it is not certain that all that new music can be conserved easily, especially when it is not part of a larger system having powerful hard disks. Recorded music that is included in wide databases is more likely to be kept and used on a long-term basis.
Anyhow, in a society where a lot of people consider music as a commodity, it is not an easy concept to convey. To recover the essential meaning and the power of music, ethnomusicologists do not hesitate to cross borders and find societies that do not have any contact with money and the financial system. In these societies, music still accompanies daily activities: awakening or doing laundry, so, they are not making money out of music, they are making a society out of music. But of course, most of the time, music is not their main activity. Also, let us notice that such a relationship with music is still partly lived in some small religious communities, where music is performed and created by anonymous musicians who want to, in this way, contribute to recreate their community.
Musical analysis is a complex academic discipline which, today, is inherently related to the fields of music technology and music economics. Why does musical analysis stay important in the music technology era? You may read more below.
WHAT IS MUSICAL ANALYSIS?