PERFORMANCE,PERSONA AND PRESCENCE & PRE-HISTORY: REFLECTIONS ON THE INTERPERSONAL DYNAMICS OF OF MUSICAL PRESENTATION

Michael Bridger

My focus in this paper is not so much on music itself as on the circumstances and processes involved when performer and listener play their respective roles in a musical event. In order to shed some light on this I look back into prehistory for some clues about why music is so important in human culture, and draw attention to some characteristics of the performer/listener relationship in general and in the differentiated contexts of a range of styles.

In previous conference papers and articles I have argued for an approach to musical analysis and scholarship that disregards the seductive actuality of the printed text and concentrates instead on the processes of musical presentation and its reception by listeners. In some of my work, on electroacoustic music, this was due to the fact that scores frequently do not exist, but more is involved than mere practicalities; issues of legitimacy and relevance are more important. In recent years, many writers have drawn attention to the narrow focus of traditional academic musicology. Wilfred Mellers, John Blacking, John Shepherd, Christopher Small, Christopher Ballantine and Peter Martin, to name but a few, have argued for the value and validity of a more societal, contextual perspective.

My aim in this paper is twofold - to contribute further to this broadening of horizons and to lay some foundations for what we hope will be the long term comparative investigation into music praxes of which this conference marks the formal start.

Any musical performance involves a wide range of interpersonal relationships - between the musicians, between conductor and musicians, between musicians and audience, between audience members, and probably several more categories including necessarily illusory ones such as some sort of imagined communion with an absent, usually dead composer. This interpersonal dynamic is both a self-evident and a relatively unexplored phenomenon, and in my view there is a good deal here that invites systematic study and investigation. However, underlying what may seem to be a sociological or ethnological enquiry is a much more fundamental question about the nature of music itself, and in order to establish some basic parameters we need first, in my view, to look back to the roots of music in human prehistory.

It is an interesting and sobering thought that current theories about human evolution lead us to believe that if one were able to transport a young child from 50000 or 100000 years ago into a contemporary family environment, perhaps a family with specifically musical orientation, that child would have fundamentally the same capability to develop a response to, and ability in, the music of today as a contemporary child. In the glacial timescales of Darwinian evolution, insufficient time has elapsed for processes of natural selection to have had any significant impact. This leads to two lines of thought - that musicality must have its roots in the earliest stages of human and prehuman evolution, and that there must have been some benefit in terms of reproductive or survival advantage in that development. Of course, since the archaeological record doesn't reveal a great deal of supporting evidence for many aspects of stone age life, for the simple reason that only the most robust and inert materials have survived, speculation is unlikely to solidify into provable certainty.

However, our understanding of our past is progressively changing. An example of this arises from the work of a colleague who was the first person to systematically examine and actually play nearly all of the surviving lurs (the lur is an early wind instrument mainly found in Scandinavia and now featured in the logo used on Lurpak butter). He observed that these instruments were often highly decorated and ornate, indicating that they had been objects of considerable significance and value in both resource and cultural terms. Also, they have usually been found in pairs. His line of thought about this, and I think it is an insightful reaction to the evidence, is that it is unlikely that such highly prized objects would have been played in unison or in alternation, but that playing in two parts is much more likely to have been the norm. This would put back the development of polyphony by many centuries and necessitate a good deal of rethinking about the development of music and its place in human culture. In another mould-breaking event, the discovery of a fragment of a bone flute of over 50000 years ago, but with finger holes matching the diatonic scale, similarly suggests that our ancestors had highly developed music that shared fundamental characteristics with music of our own time long before orthodox opinion has so far allowed.

A common theme in many fields of investigation is that milestone events such as the beginnings of speech may have happened much earlier than has previously been thought to be the case. We hear that evidence has recently been found in China of written language dating several thousand years earlier than previously estimated, and in the last few weeks it has been suggested that the science and technology of optics was highly developed in Egyptian and Greek times. My hunch is that in the next few years a radically different view of the earliest phases of human development and culture, including music, will emerge.

Moving back to the earlier periods I referred to a few minutes ago - in his book "The Mating Mind", Geoffrey Miller argues that the impulse to be creative is so universal that it must have evolved in our ancestors for purposes of sexual selection, while Keith Devlin speculates in his book "The Maths Gene" about how and why the human brain developed its facility for abstract mathematics, which was hardly an essential key-skill in stone-age life. Amid a wide arena of speculation, the mystery of music's origins takes its place.

While all societies and cultures around the world display, accommodate or rely on music in varying degrees, from the Darwinian point of view of genetic evolution the phenomenon of music and its universal and powerful role in human culture presents considerable problems since, as with mathematics, it is difficult to see what evolutionary advantage was served by its development. Having acknowledged that "music is an enigma", Stephen Pinker suggests that it is "auditory cheesecake, an exquisite confection crafted to tickle the sensitive spots of at least six of our mental faculties... language... auditory scene analysis... emotional calls... habitat selection... motor control... something else. Something that explains how the whole is more that the sum of its parts. Perhaps a resonance in the brain between neurons firing in synchrony with a soundwave and a natural oscillation in the emotion circuits? An unused counterpart in the right hemisphere of the speech areas in the left?"

Along somewhat similar lines, Papousek proposed that "During evolution, individual species, including humans, have utilised the physical potentials of auditory communication for specific needs, such as division of living space, foraging, reproduction, social organisation, or care for progeny. For the perception and production of auditory signals, adequate organs and neural structures have been selected according to both universal, biological principles and specific adjustments to ecological conditions. New structures in the brain and vocal tract offered predispositions for the production of finely differentiated vocal sounds, for their processing, and for their use as differential symbols - verbal or musical - for various events, needs, risks, or social interchanges. Thus, the evolutionary background should not be disregarded in interpretations of the cultural significance of sounds perceived as musical by humans, nor in speculations on a predestined significance of certain musical elements in expressions of emotional states."

While the mechanisms and timescales involved may be speculative, our musical capabilities and the fundamental roles played by music in our lives must, then, inevitably derive from the earliest roots of human evolution. Of course, this can't be the whole story; alongside genetic evolution another process has kicked in, termed "memetics" by Richard Dawkins in 1976 and given a significant boost recently by Susan Blackmore in her book "The Meme Machine". The meme can be described as "a unit of information passed on by imitation", and while it may seem to derive uncomfortably closely from genetic theory, the meme is most usefully seen as a replicator in its own right, so that both genes and memes are examples of a higher principle, that of replication itself. Recent writing about memetics has covered an extremely wide range of fields. In Blackmore's book alone there are persuasive explanations for the size of the human brain and the development of human language, which are actually considerable problems for the evolutionary biologist. Just a few days ago I came across the first detailed attempt to establish a memetics of music, by Steven Jan, and I am convinced that this will prove to be a very fruitful area. The relevance of this to my topic today is that the contact between performer and listener in a musical event is a particularly clear example of a forum for memetic processes, and meme exchange can be seen as a fundamental part of the interpersonal dynamics of my title. Perhaps it could be put more strongly than that; perhaps memetic processes are the primary raison d'etre of all music... An advantage of memetics in explaining or illuminating cultural processes is that timescales can be almost instantaneous, passed from one brain to another, rejected or adopted and retransmitted in seconds. Just think how quickly the news of the lovebug virus spanned the globe. Not the virus itself, of course, since that process did not require conscious human intervention, but the idea of the virus.

To gather some loose ends together before moving on.. I've talked about three fundamental mechanisms -

firstly an innate sensitivity and response to the sonic elements of music that has its roots in the earliest human prehistory and is somehow linked with benefits in evolutionary terms

secondly a synergy between musical behaviours and broader human characteristics

thirdly transmission of musical ideas and elements by memetic processes.

Self-evident factors in human behaviour include the following, in some cases expressed here as dualities:

competitive <> cooperative

altruistic <> aggressive

loyal to immediate group <> hostile to other groups

egalitarian <> hierarchical

gregarious, team working independent <> subservient needs (tribal) gatherings, rituals needs leaders, structures, rules uses language (for both communicative and deception)

inquisitive, seeks significance, tests relevance "the symbolic species" feels kinship with nature <> is interventionist, tool-making

seeks security, stability <> is adventurous, risk taking

rational <> superstitious feels reverence for place

My suggestion is that on a universal basis, regardless of historical (or prehistorical) period, culture or style, human musical behaviour can be expected to show, at the very least, affinities with these innate traits. Then, moving from the universal to the particular, specific types of music could be mapped against a series of parameters derived from this universal that together define their individual, differentiated characteristics.

As I have found in many previous attempts to deconstruct musical processes, Roman Jakobson's celebrated diagram of communication provides a useful framework for starting this conceptualisation. The elaborated version attempts to expand the diagram and the underlying concept to accommodate the chain of different communication processes involved in a typical musical performance. [see diagrams]

Returning to the title of this paper, I need to expand a little on the term "presence". What I was trying to evoke by this was the factor of real human contact; the experience of live music in its appropriate environment, whether jazz club, pop arena or concert hall rather than the introverted personal world of the personal stereo. Many times in the past it has been predicted that technological advance will eliminate the need for communal experience. The video was going to eclipse theatre and cinema, working electronically from home was going to replace the chore of actually going to a work place, video conferencing would eliminate the need for travel. All such predictions have been wrong so far and in my view will continue to be wrong, because while we may have space age technology we still have essentially stone-age bodies, minds and needs. Deep inside each of us is the need to congregate, to communicate directly, to share experience with our fellow creatures. So the musical event is either a version of, or a surrogate for, such gatherings and operates with the same or equivalent dynamics.

Another term of my title - "persona" - is, of course, that of the performer, who can be seen as a version of, or a surrogate for, figures such as the priest, the shaman, the magician, the story teller - all roles that extend back many millennia into prehistory. As sophisticated, educated 21st century people we probably resist the implication that behaviour and events we regard as beacons of our advanced culture may share their origins on an equivalent basis with stone age village rituals; we may also resist the possibility that our minds are just vehicles for the survival of the memes they contain and our bodies the vehicles for the genes that momentarily define us, but these uncomfortable ideas spring directly from the orthodoxies of Darwinian evolutionary theory and arguably come as close as we can get within current knowledge to explaining human life, culture and music. Setting aside this particular polemic, I return to my initial plea that we should not become so absorbed with great works, with notation, with critical evaluation and with measurement of the easily measurable that we neglect the totality of the experience of music, including the elements of persona, presence and interpersonal dynamics, that characterise live performance.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Blackmore, S (1999): The Meme Machine. Oxford

Devlin, K (2000): The Maths Gene. Weidenfeld

Jakobson, R (1960): Closing Statement: Linguistics and Poetics. In Sebeok, A. (ed.) Style in Language. Cambridge, Mass.: The MIT Press

Jan, Steven (2000): Replicating Sonorities: Towards a Memetics of Music JOM:EMIT

Miller, G (2000): The Mating Mind. Heinemann

Papousek, H (1996): Musicality in Infancy Research: Biological and Cultural Origins of Early Musicality. In Deliège, I and Sloboda J (Eds): Musical Beginnings. Oxford: O.U.P.

Pinker, S (1997): How the Mind Works. Penguin