Teaching Literacies

Debate intervention for the panel "New Music Analysis Pedagody" at the 2010 Conference of the Dutch-Flemish Society for Music Theory, Amsterdam, March 12.

What is a musicologist in training today supposed to know about contemporary music?

A question such as this would not readily be asked, for instance, about training in Beethoven research. For this field of activity has been structured to such an extent that we know exactly what someone is expected to know and to be able to do in order to contribute on competitive level on the international scene.

Is this any different from the situation in contemporary music? Well, yes it is – to the extent that this field is less tightly structured in terms of its methods of research, its repertoires, research themes, common theoretical understandings. The reasons for this are diverse: the great variety in contemporary musics, the lack of historical distance with regard to the object of inquiry, the changes in composing and in the musical material, the fragmentation of the musical and musical-technical languages. Because of this instability it is hard to assess the ultimate teaching goals in curricula for contemporary music on the university level (in musicology, one needs to add nowadays).

It is also something special to ask this question with regard to the training of current generations of students. The contemporary repertoire at hand is in most cases completely unknown to them. Hence, the first and foremost task of the curriculum is to create points of access to these unknown territories. Previously – and in conformity with the majority of standard literature on the subject – the point of access was created by drawing a historical line, a narrative in fact, from the nineteenth century to the twentieth and into twenty-first. From the late works of Beethoven and Wagner followed those by Schoenberg and Webern, and these in their turn lead to Boulez and Stockhausen. Add to these the names of Stravinsky and Varèse and the major developments in modern music start to appear before one's eyes. As Patrick van Deurzen will explain (or will have explained) in his contribution to this panel, this historical narrative also has serious drawbacks.

An alternative approach is to turn the contemporary aspect of contemporary music toward the students. After all, this music is from our time and from this world, and however much it occasionally veils its identity with classical, romantic and modernist gestures, the influence of the grand developments of our age will mostly be noticeable. Especially in music composed from the early 1990s onwards (I will situate this point even further back in time later on) lends itself ideally for a "lateral" approach for which mediality, popular culture, commercialism, network culture, theatricalization and other trends offer valuable means of access. Many of the works by Dutch composer Mayke Nas, for instance, cannot be understood from a reading of their scores alone. This lateral aspect of contemporary music offers a second, and to my mind ineluctable and attractive narrative for opening up, interpreting and teaching the music written most recently.

The question which has always been most important for me as a listener and as a musicologist is, What is at stake in this particular piece of music? Although this question can and should to my mind be answered on all levels in my own work I generally focus on the culture theoretical and philosophical stakes of the music at hand. By "stakes" I do not mean to refer to whatever the music's maker has intended to effect (whether in his/her work or through this work) but to whatever it is that the piece as such effects in a performative sense, within the contexts it operates in and on. A composer, it is understood here, does not just create beautiful sounds and patterns but creates new situations by setting things into motion.

My task as a musicologist is to account for these movements, effects and situations (created as either slight undulations or as folds, as shock waves or as violent ruptures) a piece of music creates. But there is more. Also, I regard it as my task as a musicologist to study the grounds that enable music to be effective in such a way in the first place. For, in contrast to what still appears to be believed by many, music does not coincide with its conditions of possibility. The task of musicology, as I see it, is to describe the musical, cultural and aesthetic preconditions that allow a composer to write a single note in the first place. One of these preconditions – literacy – I shall focus on below.

The principle task of this musicologist-seismographer is to inspire and cultivate vigilance. Vigilance not in the sense of being vigilant with respect to something in particular, but wakefulness as the price we pay for the freedom to "speak" freely in our music and to continue doing so. Vigilance is what contemporary music itself teaches us and it is also what it presupposes. My personal method for teaching contemporary music is aimed at showing, and hopefully also transferring to my students, this vigilance as a musical and spiritual habitus. As I have argued elsewhere our relation to contemporary music is always constellated by dorsality. We constantly need to be vigilant with respect to the effects that music - on the basis of its inherently technical character – has on ourselves and the situations we find ourselves in. As far as cultural products are concerned vigilance requires first of all the ability to read music and to interpret it.

If I were now to circumscribe the repertoire we are dealing with in this panel I would be tempted to use Richard Taruskin's terminology. In this A History of Western Music he suggests to use the notion of literariness to distinguish between composed music and other musics. As many have argued the concept of composition is found among many genres including jazz and pop, reducing its power to demarcate musical genres. The music we are discussing here, it may be argued, has a particular - and extremely complex - relationship with writing and the ability to read. The first task of education in contemporary music (for musicologists) is no different from education in other periods of the "literate tradition," that is, literacy. This theme is the subject of my contribution today.

Although modern music notation has a high degree of penetration in our culture this late variation on the alphabet system does not guarantee general readability. For music is simply too regional, fractured too extensively in itself. Someone who merely reads notation cannot decide on the basis of that skill alone what is said. For interpretation he or she will need still other skills and knowledge such as, among other things, music theoretical skills and music theoretical knowledge. In the case of contemporary music, that is, the "literate tradition" from the Second World War onwards there is something special to be taken into account. This music has developed in such a way that it has in fact steadily reduced the readability of its own notated output.

The problems created by this often surface on the level of the score rather than on the level of gesture, figure, musical dramaturgy or concept. When I teach contemporary music using among other things scores it is usually presupposed by my students that a score is something one can read. This is what they have learned in the music lessons and learn again in the course series on music history offered as core-curriculum at the Amsterdam musicology department. This series comprises the whole of Western music history and its musicology running up to the present and arrives at about the 1950 turning point where my teaching assignment begins. Up until this moment in the series the score is a place where the musical work is to be found. It is a document that can be read and interpreted using a variety of music theoretical concepts and analytical tools and more often than not it appears as though the notes "themselves" will reveal the inner workings and deeper meanings of the construction piece essentially is.

More recent scores, however, hardly ever offer such a delightful gift of self-revelation. Arguably contemporary scores are objects of extraordinary beauty – graphical, lush in detail, digital 3-D or full-color – that appear to conceal the mysteries of the musical object they both encode and decode. As it appeals to the reflexes and presuppositions cultivated in their training students often feel attracted to this document and want to read its secret code. However, the message I have to give them is often that, alas, even though this is a score by all appearances and even though it is readable (if not it would be dysfunctional) it is not decipherable in the traditional sense. Yes, it is decipherable but the information it provides often hardly enhances our understanding of what the piece of music represents, means or how it works culturally. Rather than being an encrypted message or concealed substance the score is a source of pure, and mere, information, analogous to, for instance, information about how a particular building has been erected without telling us about the nature, function or workings of that building.

The level on which the work reveals its meaning, that is, the manner in which it intervenes in the world, in which it manifests itself, is often the level of gesture, musical dramaturgy and aesthetic concept rather than on the level of notes. The latter certainly entertain a relationship with the former but this relationship is never direct to the extent that the notes determine the gesture or strategy (lisse/strié). An analysis of contemporary music will need to focus on the question whatever it is that a composer does through the notes he or she writes. What does the piece do? Which contexts does it pressurize? What kind of place does it create? The means to answer such questions may come from a variety of sources: theater studies, media theory, musicology, philosophy – and music theory.

The question I would like to pose here to my music theory colleagues is the following. Despite the changes in the score's status a theoretically informed analysis of the notes should still be thought capable of introducing and developing valuable new forms of musical logic that may or may not pressurize and transform the levels of gesture and strategy. Arguably it requires a combined analytical and music theoretical effort to articulate, on the basis of a reading of the score, those musical logics (captured in figures of notes, figures of thought, figures of listening) that open up and transcend the private realm of individual works of music. How do you, then, my dear colleagues, assess the current state of theorization of contemporary music as the creation of new (music-theoretical) concepts is concerned?

Let me add one final consideration to this. To my mind, the musicology student's capacity to read should go well beyond the confines of the score. In fact, the latter is only one among many representations of music that are on offer for close reading (which involves close listening too). We should, I think, be wary to broadcast to students of music the notion that scores enhance our understanding of the work at hand in all cases. The primacy of the score and of its genesis that is still enshrined in certain areas of musicology and music theory should be considered as a vestige of a metaphysics of profundity and originality. No music has ever truly been served by a mythologizing of the alleged viewpoint of the musical manufacture. As I said before, this not the same as saying that we should stop reading – on the contrary. We need to expand our notion of what musical literariness is and configure our tools accordingly.

This is increasingly important as contemporary music is in the process of becoming ever more intimately intertwined with other media. Someone desiring to understand temporality in the music of Giel Vleggaar will need to turn on their television, go to the cinema or dance club and get to know current transformations in the cultural concept of presence. This requires forms of literacy that cannot be taught on the basis of the available text books on contemporary music. Someone desiring to understand the art of Yannis Kyriakides or Michel van der Aa will need to consult the latest from the fields of theater studies, film studies and media theory. The notion that such a broadening and diversifying of music literacy will render musicology vulnerable to university managers in financial crisis risks loosing the track of the rapid transformation of contemporary music. Musicology simply cannot afford to limit itself methodologically in the face of important changes in the field it claims to study.

Talking about general theories of music – such as general theories of contemporary music I mentioned earlier (gestural and dramaturgical levels) I need to address one final point. The multiple literacies I endorse as a teaching model for contemporary music enable us to move across the field of contemporary musical genres. Being myself a teacher in both "literate" traditions, pop music and some borders between these genres and improvised music (Miles Davis and offspring) I experience that it is increasingly difficult to provide a rationale for the distinction between these genres, both musically and methodologically. The entanglement between these genres since 1970 requires us to reconsider such divides and put our energies in developing more generally applicable approaches. These would enable us to do justice to the new aesthetic languages that have developed in the interstices and do so close to "the music itself" without falling prey to new essentializations of certain representations of music. What we need is in a sense a theorie lisse: a smooth theory of contemporary musics at large.

This reference to the line of flight extending from Boulez to Deleuze and beyond is also meant to remind ourselves to the great moment when a conceptual distinction (smooth/striated) from music theory made it into general cultural theory and is now helping is – see for instance the essays in Björn Heile's volume The Modernist Legacy from 2009 – to understand the stakes of this seemingly inapproachable music. With my students I hope to keep working on such lines of flight and such networks of multiple and hybrid literacies. Contemporary music is from this world, and co-produces this world. It needs the world as a whole to be accounted for and understood.