THE CHALLENGES TO THE PERFORMING MUSICIAN, AND THE CONSEQUENCES FOR THE MUSICOLOGIST, IN THE POST-MODERN AGE.
Stephen Cottrell
In this paper I hope to draw together a number of ideas relating to the different kinds of work frequently undertaken by professional musicians in the urban situation, and to consider whether the different contexts from which musicians approach a musical performance needs to be factored into musicological considerations of the performance itself. Let me start by saying that although I have just about the longest title for a paper at this conference, this does not mean it is the most explicit, so perhaps I could begin by explaining what I mean by my rather loose use of the term 'post-modern' in this context.
Without wishing to rehash arguments about what constitutes modernism or postmodernism in music, one significant feature of postmodernism across many different fields is its essentially diffuse, or at least eclectic, nature, utilising methodologies which may be drawn from various sources, rather than applying one overriding theoretical dogma or compositional approach. In our own music of today we see somebody like Steve Martland heavily involved with musicians from the jazz and rock worlds; Mark Anthony Turnage writing for jazz players in his piece 'Blood on the Floor'; and somebody like Kevin Volans using African sources for his music. Equally, we can observe those often categorised as jazz composers being commissioned to write for non-improvising, even classical, forces, and I am thinking here of perhaps Mike Westbrook, Django Bates or Eddie Parker. And I am sure there are many other examples which would further underline the point that today's western musical culture appears to be rather more fragmented than seems to have been the case for western cultures of the past, although I am conscious that this may be a trick of historical perspective, which perhaps tends to homogenise past cultural differences, whereas our own contemporary reality tends to exaggerate present ones. But it is this plurality of musical styles, and the continuing cross-fertilisation between them, to which I am alluding by my use of the term 'post-modern' in the present context.
This plurality inevitably has consequences for those professional performing musicians whose job it is to work in these various kinds of environments. First, even within the context of one piece, they may find themselves called upon to perform convincingly in a number of noticeably different styles, to a level which I would describe as being rather better than just a passable pastiche. We have become so used to hearing, to give an obvious example, clarinettists competently bring off the opening of Gershwin's 'Rhapsody in Blue', that it comes as something of a surprise when it is done badly. This is not to suggest that all musicians are equally adept at these kinds of stylistic crossovers, and neither do they get it right all the time. I might very subjectively offer the example of, say, Kiri Te Kanewa's renditions of jazz and popular music as being the kinds of performances which, to my ears at least, leave something to be desired in terms of what I would describe as 'stylistic integrity'.
Second, and going on from this, not only must musicians be familiar enough with these different styles to deal with them within the context of one particular piece, but, in the urban situation, and particularly in a city such as London where there is a great deal of competition for diminishing amounts of paid musical work, they need to be competent enough to undertake entire performances in as many different styles as possible, in order to maximise their work opportunities and hence their income. In London, for example, a busy freelance musician might be called upon to undertake within the space of a few weeks, some orchestral work with one of the major orchestras, a contemporary music date with a smaller ensemble, a few performances in a West end musical, and perhaps a backing track for a film or a pop group, etc., all of which require not only different social skills and knowledge of the different performance conventions, but also, and more importantly in the present context, a clear understanding of the different musical performance skills necessary for competence in that given style. Such skills are fundamental to a musician's employability: the more styles you are convincing in, the more work you are available for, and the busier and therefore wealthier you are likely to be.
Elsewhere I have argued that the way in which freelance musicians attempt to balance the economic and cultural parameters of the various employment opportunities available to them reveals to us something of their self-conception as musicians. As part of this argument I constructed the following 'map' showing how such opportunities might be conceptualised by an individual musician, when deciding which engagements to accept and which to reject. Although I don't want to go into detail on this particular argument here, I use the same map again simply to show how varied these different performance opportunities can be.
I hope this diagram is in fact fairly self evident; different types of performance event yield different quantities of what I have described as capital. Economic capital is of course real money, the fee for the engagement; cultural capital is a rather more abstract measure of the value placed on the engagement by the performer according to its prestige, or significance in the context of their own aspirations, etc. But in the present context I offer this simply to indicate something of the variety of potential employment opportunities available to London's professional musicians.
Indeed, for many freelancers, such variety of work is one of the few attractions mitigating the often difficult and insecure lifestyles to which they have submitted themselves. And although I come at this from the perspective of a freelance woodwind player, who would perhaps have the opportunity to undertake certain types of engagement which would not necessarily be available to, say, a harpist or a viola player, my discussions of this with other musicians suggest that analogous situations occur in these other specialisms, with the perfumeries juxtaposing different types of engagements, perhaps, but in a similar way.
I should also mention that these kind of adaptive strategies, where musicians need to expand their range of skills to cater for a fragmented landscape of performance opportunities, are not unique to the western urban situation but seem also to exist elsewhere; Daniel Neuman has shown how rural musicians in the Hindustani tradition evolved various adaptive strategies during the late 19th and early 20th centuries, as increasing numbers of them migrated to the urban areas of Delhi, an environment which encouraged them to become proficient in musical styles or instruments outside of their previous narrow specialisms (Neuman 1978); similar patterns of socio-musical change are evident among musicians in the Carnatic tradition in Madras (L'Armand and L'Armand 1978). Such adaptability, therefore, would seem to be a natural consequence of the particular demands made of musicians in the urban context.
The flexibility musicians need to show in these different situations, and their need to acquire, process and reproduce the essential performance criteria necessary to demonstrate competence within them, has often brought to my mind Mantle Hood's notion of bi-musicality. Hood's short but influential paper on this subject, published in 1960 underpins ethnomusicological notions of learning to perform as a means of truly understanding another music culture. Hood argues that in order to properly comprehend such a culture one must develop a cognitive understanding of the musical bases upon which that culture is predicated; by, for example, being able accurately to sing the correct intervals, being able to reproduce those intervals on an instrument, learning to improvise in the correct way, memorising musical structures, etc. Hood asserts that the best way to achieve this level of musical understanding of another system is to learn to perform in it in some way. And it was this acquiring of another musical 'language' which he described as 'bi-musicality'.
I deliberately use the dangerous analogy of 'language' at this point because, as John Baily has pointed out (Baily 1985), Hood presumably adapted both the notion and terminology of being 'bilingual' for his own musical purposes. Yet there are problems implied by this terminology. Being bilingual is usually taken to mean being equally fluent in two languages, perhaps having learned them together from childhood. Mastering a second language later in life, however competently and fluently, is never quite the same thing. Yet Hood certainly intended that his term 'bi-musicality' should include those acquiring skills in later life, since he used some of his graduate students in California as examples. And although I cannot speak with authority on this, since my own attempts at speaking foreign languages usually result in the other person reverting immediately and hurriedly to English, I have noticed that often even those who do have considerable competence in a second language will revert to their mother tongue for particular operations; for example, in the act of counting. So the problems implied by Hood's terminology are to do with cognitive space. How different do these traditions have to be before mastering them can genuinely be described as 'bi-musicality'? And are we speaking of a genuinely separate cognitive space into which we put this new performance information?
I think I would argue that what Hood describes as bi-musicality is a development of a musician's cognitive abilities into a different sphere from that in which they first evolved, and is not the establishing of a completely separate system of mental capacities. So that although one may become highly skilled in a different musical language or culture one is never able entirely to forget one's initial training, but must modify or adapt it, even reject parts of it, in order to accommodate new ideas. But I suspect there may still be what I describe as some 'cognitive slippage' in this area, in an analogous fashion to the way I described second languages and counting, and I hope the relevance of this will become clear in a moment.
I would argue that the cognitive flexibility demonstrated by professional musicians in the urban situation in some ways parallels Hood's notion of bi-musicality; or even, as he goes on to assert at the end of his paper, tri- or quadri- musicality. The competent participation in and re-creation of different musical styles is necessarily grounded upon a cognitive understanding of the musical differences between them. Admittedly, these may not involve different interval structures in quite the way that Hood suggests, although the bending of intervals in certain performance styles would come close to this; as somebody who once incurred the wrath of an MD for not being able to bend notes in the way he wanted them, I can assert that lacking such skills can have very real consequences. There are also certain contemporary pieces which require playing in just intonation or microtones, which certain performers seem unwilling to learn. So it is clear that there are a number of significant differences between these various performance styles which may in some cases be part of the oral/aural tradition attached to each one, and which, furthermore, may not necessarily be conveyed with any exactitude by the notation underpinning the performance event. In order to be able to navigate their way through these different styles, musicians need to develop their cognitive abilities to the point at which it feels 'natural' to be participating in this or that particular genre. And although, as I have already suggested, economic expediency necessitates that musicians must be as flexible as possible to compete within the marketplace, this is not to suggest that they are all equally successful in all areas.
The specific differences between these various styles are rather too complicated, and I suspect to many here, rather self-evident, to go into in detail. But to take one very simple example of this, consider the following short musical motif:
I accept, of course, that one would never see this motif without being contextualised within a larger piece of music, and that this would itself reveal a number of issues relating to how to play it. But from the performer's point of view this simple motif, particularly if presented as barely as I have done so here, can be performed in a variety of different ways, each of which require different conceptualisations from the performer in order to execute it properly. Thus, in the world of contemporary music we might find it played quite forcefully, with the last accent particularly exaggerated:
In the classical orchestral field such a strong accent would be unlikely to be tolerated, and we would hear:
In a show context we would get swung quavers:
Whereas in other jazz contexts we might get less obviously swung quavers, and arrive at:
Now I am conscious that this is a relatively superficial example, and that what I am dealing with at this point is competence in different musical styles being demonstrated at a rather local or small-scale level. But my point here is that musical structures which are theoretically 'the same', by which I mean they are essentially grounded on the same theoretical principles which underpin all western music, and expressed through notations which are broadly similar or identical, in practice result not only in rather different sonic surfaces or events, that is, they sound different, but the events themselves may be surface representations of quite different cognitive structures.
And if this is true at the small scale level, if small scale gestures can be taken as representing different underlying cognitive patterns, then it stands to reason that different musicians will conceive larger structures in quite different ways. Furthermore, and most importantly in the present context, I also wonder whether this may apply not only to those structures which sound quite different, but even to those which actually sound very similar or identical. What I am suggesting ultimately is that musicians approaching similar or identical pieces of music from different directions may conceive underlying structures in rather different ways, notwithstanding that the surface representation may sound quite similar, which it obviously will in the case of musicians performing the same piece.
This may seem self evident to some. It is a basic tenet of musical analysis (in these post modern days at least) that there is no absolute interpretation of any given work, but that any piece is subject to multiple interpretations. But what I am trying to suggest is that the underlying cognitive structures betrayed by a musician's performance of a given work may be influenced in part by their experience of musical performance in a wider field, in musical genres which may be unconnected with the original, but which are unlikely, I think, at the cognitive level, to be entirely separate in the musician's mind.
I am led to thinking about musical performance in this way by considering John Baily's (1988) work on the cognitive approaches underlying traditional Afghan and Hindustani music. Baily has shown that these two geographically adjacent traditions, as one might expect, share many common features in their music making, including the use of a large repertoire of verbal terms as part of their music theory. Baily's work particularly concentrates on the use of tabla bols, an oral notation comprising a variety of syllables or mnemonics, which are used to encode playing patterns on the tabla, the Indian drums. He shows that this shared music theory, as represented by these mnemonics, is used rather differently in these two areas. He writes that:
In Afghanistan music theory is mainly a representational model. It is a post hoc theory, which organises, systematises and explains what is already part of performance practice. In India the theory serves a more operational role. It is certainly involved in the learning process (Baily 1988: 122).
Baily's point is that in these two different situations, in which the surface material shares a considerable number of similar characteristics, the music theory underlying them is used in two quite different ways, and hence the cognitive structures upon which this theory is predicated are also different; in the Afghan context it is representational, or to put it another way, largely descriptive; in the Indian context it is operational, an a priori requirement to musical performance.
Of course, I am not suggesting that exactly the same happens in the western context. I am not sure that underlying cognitive structures are as clearly differentiated in our various traditions in the same was as Baily suggests for his South Asian examples, although he does write that they are 'closely related but distinct', a description which might equally apply to some of our own traditions.
But what we do have, which they do not share (I think), are musicians who cross over between our various traditions, and who take with them their experience of performing in one musical style as they undertake the next. And it is in this sense that I refer to the notion of what I described as 'cognitive slippage'; to what extent do musicians' experience of performing music in one of the various western musical genres provide a frame of reference for, or influence their conception of, the music of another genre? The challenge for the musicologist therefore, is not only to consider whether this is in fact the case, but to develop models of musical performance in which such differences may be taken into account.
Ó Stephen Cottrell 2000
Bibliography:
Baily, John (1985). Learning to Perform as a Research Technique in Ethnomusicology. In 'Lux Oriente'. Begegnungen der Kulturen in der Musikforschung. Feschrift Robert Günther zum 65. Geburtstag, Klaus Wolfgang Nielöller, Uwe Pätzold, and Chung Kyo-chui, eds. Kasse: Bosse, 331-47.
--- (1988). Anthropological and Psychological Approaches to the Study of Music Theory and Musical Cognition. Yearbook for Traditional Music 20 (1), 114-24.
L'Armand, Kathleen and L'Armand, Adrian (1978). Music in Madras: The Urbanization of a Cultural Tradition. In Eight Urban Musical Cultures, Bruno Nettl, ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 115-45.
Neuman, Daniel M. (1978). Gharanas: The Rise of Musical 'Houses' in Delhi and Neighboring Cities. In Eight Urban Musical Cultures, Bruno Nettl, ed. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 186-222.
