PLAY ON Chapter Two by mike.refinersfireus

What is Music? Part Two

II've left something out. You've already noticed that and probably feel within reason that I've tried your patience because you know what that "something" is. That something is art The dictionaries we cited in the precious chapter said that music was a kind of art: ". . .one of the fine arts which is concerned with the combination of sounds. . ." (Webster) or ". . .an art in sound. . ." (Oxford). And I've even been a bit sly in the previous chapter when I dropped in references to aesthetics (which is the philosophical study of art and beauty) without directly addressing the matter. It needs to be addressed now.

But what is art? For at least over a century, this has been a contentious matter. In 1914, Marcel Duchamp (1887-1968) bought a bottle-rack in a Paris department store. He later told his sister to write something on it (he forgot what) He thought that the bottle rack would end the supremacy of "retinal art" (pictures intended to be looked at) and replace it with an art "at the service of the mind," a "mind art." Not long after he bought it, his stepsister apparently conflated "mind art" with "trash art" and threw it out (that's why he couldn't remember what he told his sister to write and neither could she, the original rack wasn't around to reference). No matter, Duchamp bought others. One he one bought in 1959 was eventually purchased by the Art Institute of Chicago for a rumored twelve-million dollars.1

Example 2.1

Marcel Duchamp

Bottle Rack (Porte-Bouteilles); Date: 1914/1959

The Art Institute of Chicago

1 Shoshone, 'Bottle Dryer (Bottlerack),' Sartle, Rogue Art History, https://www.sartle.com/artwork/bottle-dryerbottlerack-marcel-duchamp#:~:text=Arty%20Fact,no%20less%20than%20%2412%20million.

In the same spirit, in 2019 Maurizio Cattelan (b. 1960) duct-taped a banana to the wall of an art exhibition in Miami and called it "Comedian." Two "editions" of the piece were each sold for $120,000 and in 2024 another was sold for $6.24 million.2 "Comedian" even caused a copyright battle; a previous artist had already exhibited a banana and orange duct-taped to a wall and had gone to the bother of copyrighting it. He claimed that Cattelan was illegally profiting from his idea.3

Twelve million dollars for a bottle rack, six million-plus for a banana, a lawsuit for copyright infringement and damages; it reminds us of art critic Robert Hughes' (1938-2012) quip that the purpose of art is "to hang on the wall and get more expensive."4 The money isn't insignificant. Art, whatever it is, is something precious, and therefore marketable.

The business of the market is going to be important and we're going to come back to it, but immediately we must remember the warning at the beginning of the previous chapter. Just as our purpose in that chapter was to define music, our purpose here is to be clear about what art is, not good art, or bad art, or sublime art, or silly art, just art

E.H. Gombrich (1909-2001) was one of the previous century's greatest thinkers about art. Looking back through the whole history of art, from cave paintings to World War II, he began his 1950 The Story of Art with the conclusion: "There really is no such thing as Art. There are only artists."5 He very well could have been thinking of Duchamp's "Bottle Rack," or

2 When another edition of "Comedian" was exhibited in Soul, South Korea, in 2023, an art student pulled the banana off the wall, ate part of it, and then taped the remains back up. Sarah Cascone, "Maurizo Cattelan Is Taping Bananas to a Wall atArt Basel Miami Beach and Selling Them for $130,000 Each," artnet news, December 4, 2019; https://news.artnet.com/market/maurizio-cattelan-banana-art-basel-miami-beach-1722516; Yoonjing Seo and Kathleen Magram, "Student eats artwork of a banana," CNN, Monday, May 1, 2023, https://www.cnn.com/style/article/student-eats-maurizio-cattelan-banana-art-south-korea-intl-hnk/index.html

3 Jacqui Palumbo, "An Artist Claims Maurizio Cattelan Copied His BananaArtwork," CNN, Tuesday, July 12, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/style/article/maurizio-cattelan-banana-lawsuit/index.html

4 Robert Hughes, The Mona Lisa Curse, Oxford Film & Television, 2008.

5 E.H. Gombrich, The Story of Art, Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1972, p. 4

Example II.2

Maurizio Cattelan: Comedian photo by Carah Cascone

Michelangelo’s "David" or Picasso's "Guernica" as well. What Gombrich so eloquently, and I think persuasively, argued is that "art" is a thing that artists make, it's set aside from other things, and we come to accept it as "art." Artists do something, to something, and in that doing convinces us that it's art and looking at that art we can expect to be rewarded with the kind of pleasure particular to art: aesthetic pleasure, the pleasure we get from looking at something beautiful.6

Let's think about that "doing." Does “art” exist in nature? Consider coming across a rock on the edge of a riverbed. Is that rock a work of art and isn’t that the way we usually talk about it, as a work of art? I don’t think that most of us would talk about the rock in that place in that way. We might say that the rock was beautiful, that it had a particularly pretty color and an attractive or interesting shape and in that sense say that the rock is an aesthetic object and it even gave us aesthetic pleasure, or better perhaps, that we found it to possess these aesthetic qualities, or perhaps better yet: that we ourselves had the capacity to be sensitive to the aesthetic qualities which were part of the rock yet we wouldn’t quickly look at the rock and shout over to our hiking mates: “Look! What a wonderful work of art!” We’d say, “Hey, look at that rock!”

But, take that rock out of the riverbed and place it in the middle of a Japanese garden surrounded by raked sand, and that rock becomes a work of art (Ex. II.3,1). Or take that rock and give it to a sculptor to carve and then place it as an ornament in a French garden then it too becomes a work of art (Ex. II.4). In both cases the natural object has been “worked” into something that we recognize as “art.” In neither case is it in its “natural” setting, but rather it is in an “artificial” setting. Some human being has taken the natural object and imposed a new order upon it. Somebody, some “artist” has imposed a form upon the natural material. The rock has been “worked.”

Example II.3

Two Japanese Gardens

1.Ryōan-ji Temple garden, Kyoto, Japan, 16th Century

2. Huntington Library, San Marino, California, 20th Century

6It's worth noting that if we're to believe Duchamp, his purpose in "creating" the bottle rack wasn't to make something beautiful to look at ("retinal art") but instead something beautiful to think about. We'll come across this notion again when we consider the Pythagoreans and music.

You might be a surprised by my comparison of the “rocks” in a French garden and a Japanese garden, they are so different, it seems far-fetched. But considerAndré Le Nôtre's (1613-1700) gardens for Louis XIV at Versailles and the rock garden at the temple of Ryoan-ji attributed to the Zen master Soami (1455-1525) in Kyoto. Aren’t the rocks in both gardens highly “artificed” in the sense that they are very different from nature, raw and brutal? Where in “nature” do we see perfectly even sand beds, raked in even rows, like the “sea” of sand in Kyoto? And where in nature do we see stones chiseled into Greek gods and trees shaped like the cylinders that parade along the avenues of Versailles? And weren’t both gardens designed to be contemplated, although Le Notre designed his gardens to be contemplated while walking through them and Soami made Ryoan-ji to be meditated on while sitting?

But still you might object that the Zen garden was made for religious purposes while the Versailles garden was made for political purposes. But consider again. Louis’greatest title was his position as Champion of the True Faith (i.e., Roman Catholicism), and it was this religious foundation upon which the theory of “divine right” was based. Even the strict geometric design of the plantings and the prunings pointed to the religious position of the time believing that the Christian God was a God of order who had commanded man to tame the wildness of nature and make it fruitful.

Versailles is a 17th Century French-Catholic view of the earthly paradise: nature tamed by the reason of man and ruled over by God’s anointed monarch (just as Philip II’s El Escorial was a Spanish-Catholic view of paradise). The garden in Kyoto is a similar early paradise, but a Zen one. Le Notre and Soami had similar purposes in their designs, but they had very different aesthetic vocabularies. The real difference (at least on this aesthetic level) lay in the Japanese’s more highly developed aesthetic and economic sensitivities. By training their capacities to gain the greatest aesthetic satisfaction from the simplest elements (abutted contrasting textures, muted color contrasts, small-scale designs), the Japanese were able to do with some sand, rocks, and a few maples what it took the French to do with several hundred acres of grass, fountains, sculptured classical gods, reflecting pools and towering elms. The difference between the French sculpture and the Japanese “natural” stone is one of degree, not of genus, and that difference testifies to cultural differences in taste that become different aesthetic forms.

And that banana? In the supermarket it's a banana, part of the market's inventory to be tracked and sold; to us it's something to buy and later slice on our cornflakes. But Cattelan buys one, convinces an art dealer to let him duct tape it on the wall of the dealer's exhibit space in one of the world's most prestigious art fairs, gives it a title, puts a price on it, and somebody buys it now it's "art." It's silly art (Cattelan tells us that in his title, "Comedian") and if looking at it we don't have any significant aesthetic pleasure then it's failed art, and if we think much about the prices paid for it and the culture that promotes it and the Duchamp and consider all the homeless that money would shelter in Miami and Chicago then it's part of a whole enterprise of deeply sick and maybe even evil art (because abandoning people to live on the street when they could be sheltered is just evil), but it's still art, it's not breakfast.

So "There really is no such thing asArt. There are only artists."

But what about music?

Let's go back to that second thought experiment in Chapter One. That's where you simply listened for about four minutes to the sounds around you. On Friday night,August 29, 1952, theAmerican pianist David Tudor (1926-1996) gave a recital of 20th-century music in the Maverick Concert Hall in Woodstock, New York (no, this is not the Woodstock of the famous 1969 music festival, that happened in the hamlet of Bethel, New York). Since 1902, Woodstock had been the home of several on-again, off-again free-thinking artist colonies. One, the Maverick, built a shed in 1916 to host recitals (these concerts still continue and the Maverick Concerts are the country's oldest continuing summer music festival7). Tudor's program included works by Christian Wolff, Morton Feldman, Earle Brown, Henry Cowell, and a piece, in three movements, by John Cage

7 https://maverickconcerts.org/

Example II.5

Maverick Concert Hall, Woodstock, New York, 2022

Tudor came to the piano with a score and stopwatch. He put the score on the stand and signaled that the first movement began by lowering the piano's keyboard lid.After thirty seconds he lifted the lid, signaling the beginning of the second movement. He turned a page of the score. He signaled the beginning of the third movement by lifting the lid and showed its end by lowering the lid. Alltogether the piece lasted 4' 33".

Apparently, some people whispered and muttered and, according to one report, at the piece's end they burst into an uproar, "infuriated and dismayed."8 This was a paying audience and after having heard Tudor just perform the ferociously virtuosic Boulez sonata they probably thought Cage and Tudor were putting them on; they thought they'd been had. Even one of Cage's best friends later called it a "schoolboy's prank"9

Example II.6 Maverick Concert Program, Friday, August 19, 195210

Cage didn't think it was a prank. Throughout his life he thought it was his most important work. But whatever Cage meant by the piece in 1952, and there's been a great deal written about it and it's not at all uncontested what he meant,11 in the last seventy years it has taken-on a meaning of its own. We can imagine the sounds the audience heard on that summer night in that shed on the edge of the Catskills: the buzzing insects, a bit of rain on the roof, the shuffling of

8 David Revill, The Roaring Silence, New York: Arcade, 1992, p. 166

9 Helen Wolff in a letter to John Cage, April 9, 1954, David Platzker, "Silence Is Not What It Used to Be", Museum of Modern Art, October 28, 2013; https://www.moma.org/explore/inside_out/2013/10/28/silence-is-not-what-itused-to-be-2/

11 One of the most intriguing readings of the piece argues that it was the way Cage came to terms with his homosexuality using the vocabulary of negation he had learned from his studies of Zen Buddhism. Negation or not, Cage was meticulous in defending his work's financial value. He copyrighted several versions of it, sold scores, and in 2002, Peters Edition, Cage's publishers, took Mike Batt to court in the United Kingdom for violation of copyright for including on his album Classical Graffiti a track called "AOne Minute of Silence". They settled out of court for a rumored $130,000. Jonathan D. Katz, "John Cage's Queer Silence; or, How to Avoid Making Matters Worse," Writings through John Cage's Music, Poetry, and Art; edited by David W Bernstein and Christopher Hatch, Chicago and London, University of Chicago Press, 2001; Mark Monahan, "You can't copyright silence," The Telegraph, 28 September, 2002, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/rockandjazzmusic/3583315/You-cant-copyrightsilence-theres-too-much-of-it-about.html

the audience and by placing those sounds in the context of a recital, in a recital space, during an event for which tickets were sold and patrons solicitated we think of them now as being sounds worthy of aesthetic contemplation. Just as Duchamp, with the bottle rack, moved our culture to potentially think of everyday objects as possible "art", things worthy of aesthetic contemplation, (and remember, that "think of" is important because Duchamp believed he was creating a different kind of art, a "mind art"), so today we think of Cage's 4' 33" showing that all sounds can be aesthetically rewarding if we attend to them rightly.

Example II.7

Rose Main Reading Room, New York Public Library

Back to that thought experiment. I'm going to imagine that you did the listening exercise in a library on a fall afternoon, it could have been anywhere and anytime but I'm going to imagine a library. What did you hear? Even though the room is supposed to be very quiet, I expect that you heard quite a lot. You were at a table with other readers. You heard chairs scraping the floor, the little noises people make when they move around. You heard coughs and some sneezes. You heard doors opening and closing in other parts of the building and maybe even great long echoes. You heard whispers and alerts of cell phones (somebody always has one on) and if there are open windows you heard street sounds, traffic, sirens, maybe even the last songs of a robin delinquent on his flight south. If there were fluorescent lights you even might have heard a pitch (fluorescent lights in the US operate at 60Hz, which is close to a B).

You certainly noticed that the library wasn’t as quiet as you first thought it was. Sounds were all around you. And I hoped that you noticed that many of the sounds were in and of themselves interesting and that some of them might have been truly beautiful. The echo of a door slamming in a big building is a lovely rich sound. And the song of a robin is really worth

listening to carefully because it’s beautiful. Although not immediately recognized as lovely, traffic can be interesting to listen to also.

But was that a piece of music, or more directly addressing the matter here: was that a piece of musical art? Sounds attended to by us and valued by us because of aesthetic pleasure they give us?

Yes. It was. Let's go back to that rock we talked about earlier. In the riverbed, it's a rock. But in the gardens it's a work of art. Sounds can be all sorts of things. But by asking you to do nothing but listen, and putting a time limit on that listening, I did something similar to taking that rock out of the riverbed and placing it in an aesthetic context. It may not be the aesthetically most rewarding four-minute piece of music you ever heard and, like that first audience for 4'33", had I sold you a ticket for that piece you might have felt cheated, but just as Duchamp's "Bottle Rack" displayed in Chicago is "art", those four minutes were a piece of music, our "Library Piece."

Echoing Gombrich, we can say that there is no such thing as "music" as in soundconstructions assembled to be enjoyed because of their beauty there are really only musicians. Richard Wagner (1813-1883) took the principles of equal temperament (a tuning system we'll discuss in a following chapter), the traditions of Western European Enlightenment music harmony, instrument construction, singing technique (it's a long list) and molded them into his opera Tristan und Isolde (1865). Leroy Anderson (1908-1975) in 1950 wrote a short concerto for orchestra and typewriter ("The Typewriter"). Olivier Messiaen (1908-1992) transformed bird songs into his piano suite Catalogue d'oiseaux (1958). In 1966, Lou Reed (1942-2013) and the band The Velvet Underground used feedback from an electric voila in the cut "Heroin" in their album The Velvet Underground & Nico (Andy Warhol helped finance the recording and was credited as the producer; one of his silk screens was featured on the album's cover yes, another banana and the Andy Warhol Foundation later licensed the image as an iPhone case cover, over which Velvet Underground sued, and lost).12

12 The Velvet Underground & Nico, Verve Records, Copyright 1967; Martin Aston, "50 years on: The Velvet Underground & Nico," The Vinal Factory, March 12, 2017; https://thevinylfactory.com/features/the-velvetunderground-nico-50th-anniversary/ ; Matthew Perpetua, "Velvet Underground Sue Andy Warhol Foundation For Copyright Infringement, RollingStone, January 11, 2012, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/velvetunderground-sue-andy-warhol-foundation-for-copyright-infringement-233957/

Example II.8

Album cover: The Velvet Underground

At the opposite extreme of Cage's 4' 33", which basically costs nothing to perform, requires no practice, and at least in its first performance celebrated the irenic sounds of a mountain summer evening, is Stockhausen's 1994 "Helikopter-Streichquartett" (part of his gargantuan opera Mittwoch aus Light) Requiring the four members of a string quartet to each perform in their own helicopter, the helicopters circling around the performance venue where the audience listens to the musicians, their performances being broadcast to ground engineers who mix it and relay it through speakers it's loud, expensive and requires, literally, extensive military drill. Stockhausen used all sorts of sounds in the quartet and while the reactions of listeners have been mixed, it may be the ne plus ultra of the principle that in the hands of a composer any sound can be part of a piece of music.13

Even the noise of helicopters. Let me be more precise. In the previous chapter we discussed the difference between music and noises and said that music was a kind of sound that had meaning and noise was a kind of sound that didn't. But what does the sound of music mean? If music is a kind of art, we can ask: "what does art mean"?

We have already seen that we use "art" to describe something that is “made,” not something that we observe in nature. And certainly one way we use the term “art” is to describe something that requires skill to produce or to perform. We even talk about the “art” of blacksmithing, meaning that a gifted blacksmith is more than a man with a powerful right arm, a good grip and the ability to stoke a fire. He is trained in a craft that requires not only sophisticated knowledge of metallurgy and physical strength but also physical dexterity and imagination. So, in these ways we recognize him as an “artist,” or a skilled maker of things. But you might reject my labeling of the blacksmith as an artist, complaining that we really don’t call him that at all. He’s an “artisan,” you would say. And he would call himself a craftsman, if he would give himself any grand title at all (which he probably wouldn’t).

Your objections are all well founded. Yes indeed, we don’t usually describe the blacksmith and the sculptor as the same kind of person, although they both might be making things out of iron or brass over a forge or better, we don’t describe sculpting and smithing as the same kind of activities. The blacksmith hammers horseshoes, he makes hinges; simply said: useful things. Or things used to do things with. We put hinges on shutters so that we can easily close them to protect our windows from hurricanes (in New England) or from the mid-day heat (in the South), and we shoe horses to protect their hooves from damage and disease. A good hinge is a straight hinge and one that allows the shutter to be easily moved. A good horseshoe is a horseshoe that fits the hoof of the horse.

The sculptor’s purpose is different that the smith's. Although he might make a hinge, the sculptor would make it primarily for us to look at. And should he make a horseshoe, it would be a horseshoe to be hung on a wall and not nailed to a hoof. And should he make several horseshoes, the best one would be not the one that most closely fitted a particular horse’s hoof but the one that we found somehow most rewarding to look at, and to look at again.

13 And in thinking about Stockhausen's quartet, we might want to amend the definition by adding "a musician can make any sound a piece of music if enough money is available." For an overview of reactions to a Netherlands performance, see: Marlise Simmons, "A Helicopter Quartet. What Else?" New York Times, July 31, 1995 https://www.nytimes.com/1995/07/31/arts/a-helicopter-quartet-what-else.html

This is the sense in which the sculptor makes things that are not “useful.” The pleasure we get from his sculptures is not the pleasure we get from riding a horse that we know is well shod or owning one that we know is well cared-for, but rather an “aesthetic” pleasure, a particular kind of happiness we have in looking at and thinking about something beautiful. Or better, it is the particular kind of happiness we have when the sculptor shows us something beautiful that we have the capacity to enjoy. This is “art” and that "enjoyment" is an “aesthetic” experience (no, I haven't forgotten Hughes' comment about the purpose of art is to get more expensive, I'll come back to that).

And the meaning of a piece of music? “Sound” becomes “art” when a musician uses it to show us how beautiful it is. The musician first recognizes something beautiful about sound, and then arranges it into a shape that allows us to hear that particular beauty too. That sound, in that shape, is a piece of music. And that music is a particular kind of “art.” And the meaning of this kind of art? This sound is beautiful. And a musician has shown us how beautiful this sound is.

We can now correct our definition from the previous chapter by acknowledging that music is a (1) kind of art and (2) that it exists to give us aesthetic pleasure and (3) the kinds of sounds that give us aesthetic pleasure are created by musicians.

II

But is all music like this? Does all music exist to give us aesthetic pleasure? Is all music art?

What’s the ninth letter of our alphabet? It’s the letter “I.” How did you find that answer? Did you get it because you have memorized the numerical placement of all the letters? ‘A’ is number 1, ‘E’ is number 5, ‘N’ is number 14, etc.? No, you didn’t do this at all. I suspect you did this:

Example II.9 the “alphabet song”

You sang a little song to help you remember the order of the letters, didn’t you? And as you sang, you probably counted off your fingers. Sometime between Kindergarten and first grade you memorized this song as part of your progress in learning how to read. You put the alphabet to the tune “Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star” and memorized it that way (and I bet that until now you didn’t realize it was the tune you were using!).

Was that “music?” Would you say that it was something put together to show how beautiful the sound was? Did you listen to, or sing it, primarily to give you aesthetic pleasure?

I think that despite the fact that the tune is a French folk song (Mozart wrote a charming set of variations on it while he was in Paris), you would agree that we don’t really think of this as a piece of “art.” Instead, it’s an aid to memorization. This is one of the oldest “uses” of music. Here music is not an object to be contemplated in itself, to be listened to aesthetically, but instead music supports another task: memorization of a list. This kind of music is not an art, but a mnemonic device.

Using music and dance to memorize texts is perhaps one of the oldest forms of music. Under the direction of a teacher, high cast Hindu boys memorize the Rig Veda, the sacred texts of Hinduism, by chanting them to melodic formulas, accompanied by specific gestures (the gestures make this a kind of dance as well). Since the scriptures are probably over 3,000 years old, it's reasonably believed that this practice is just as ancient. In a similar way (although not as old) Jewish boys learn the Torah in Yeshiva schools and Muslim boys memorize the Koran in Hifz schools, intoning the sacred texts and rocking back and forth as they sing. You'll remember the selection from lesson one from the highly successful Hooked-on Phonics® that's part of the listening list in Chapter One. That's a modern version of this same practice. The “music” here is a device is assist learning. If you listen to it as “music” it’s pretty silly, but if you use it to help a child learn her letters (as my wife and I did with one of our daughters), it’s a godsend.

Example II.10

Learning the Rig Veda in Varanasi, India14

14 Michael Wood, The Story of India, BBC, 2007

Perhaps you've been in the military and gone through boot camp. And if you have, you've probably been drilled, marched across the camp with the drill sergeant shouting out the first line and you responding, with the rest of your unit, things like this:

Ain't no sense in goin' home

Ain't' no sense in goin' home

Jo-dy's got your girl alone,

Ain't no sense in feelin' blue

Jo-dy's got your sister too

Sound off!

One Two

Sound off!

Three Four

Take it on down

One, Two, Three, Four

One, Two THREE FOUR!

Or you've played in a marching band and the drummers play continuously, not only when you're performing music, but all the time. Are these pieces of music, and are they "art"?

Both the drill sergeant and the drummers were performing cadences Cadences are ancient solutions to the logistical problem of effectively moving groups of foot soldiers. If everybody not only tends to walk at a different pace but, because of differences in height, also has a different length stride, how do you get soldiers to advance uniformly? You inflict upon them a rhythm and the rhythm imposes upon everyone the same number of steps to the mile. If everyone keeps within his rank and steps to the cadence's beat the cohesion of the group is maintained. The ancient Greek historian and general Thucydides (c. 460-400 BC) described the practice in the battle of Mantinea (418 BC).

After this they joined battle, the Argives and their allies advancing with haste and fury, the Lacedaemonians slowly and to the music of many flute-players a standing institution in their army, that has nothing to do with religion, but is meant to make them advance evenly, stepping in time, without breaking their order, as large armies are apt to do in the moment of engaging 15

We not only have Thucydides mention of the flute-players, but two centuries earlier than his history we have a depiction of a performer on a double flute (called an aulos) accompanying a phalanx of hoplites on an early Greek pitcher found in an Etruscan tomb [Ex. II.11]

Sung cadences like Ain't no sense in goin' home are an American innovation and have been attributed to William Lee Duckworth (1924-2004) of Sandersville, Georgia. Stationed at Ft. Slocum, New York, in 1944 Pvt Duckworth improvised a chant to pick up the spirits of his fatigued colleagues on a long march back to barracks. The call and response form, typical of

15 Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War, translated by J.M. Dent, New York: E.P. Dutton, 1910, 5.70.1

Negro Spirituals & African American work songs, proved so popular that it quickly became a form for unlimited improvisation in military units across the country.16

Example II.11

Detail of the Chigi Vase, ca 650 BC17 An aulos player accompanies a hoplites

Example II.12

Monument to Willie Lee Duckworth, Sr, Washington County Courthouse Veterans Memorial, Sandersville, Georgia18

17 "Chigi vase," National Etruscan Museum, Villa Giulia, Rome (inv. No. 22697)

18 Photograph by Mark Hilton, Montgomery, Alabama, 2017, https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=103232

But is this art? These cadences are most certainly music but are they music that we listen to, and perform, primarily for its aesthetic content? Let's consider another example of music and the military.

Since the end of the Vietnam War the military has found another use for music. In late 1989, the United States invaded Panama and sought to arrest the Panamanian dictator Manuel Noriega on charges of drug trafficking. Noriega eluded capture and found refuge in the Vatican’s Panama City embassy. Because diplomatic custom forbad American intrusion into the embassy, and since the Vatican was unprepared to force-out its uninvited guest, the Americans sought to drive out Noriega through psychological means. They surrounded the embassy with huge speakers and bombarded it, night and day, with highly amplified rock music. After several days of this routine, Noriega surrendered himself to the Americans, much to the resident Vatican diplomats’ relief. Nobody had slept for days. In the spring of 1993, the practice was used with even greater sophistication by the American Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms against the Branch Davidians near Waco, Texas. Using a battery of similar speakers, for weeks the government blasted the Davidians with a repertoire ranging from rock to Tibetan chant in their effort to force group’s surrender. It didn’t work (for a variety of reasons the bombardment only strengthened the Davidians' resolve) and the siege ended in an armed assault in which 86 people died, 28 of whom were children. On a more intimate level, the American military has strapped headphones to detainees imprisoned at the Guantanamo Naval Station (and elsewhere) and subjected them to prolonged blasts of rock music in an effort to coerce information from them.19

And we have this. From late October through December we hear the Christian carol “Joy to the World” in stores of every kind and description. Why? Do the merchants perhaps hope their shoppers will stop shopping and concentrate upon the beauty of the tune and the particular orchestration, the carol being presented to them as an object of aesthetic contemplation? Or are the shopkeepers interested in proselytizing their patrons to the Christian religion? With the text, “the Lord is come, let earth receive her king” are they hoping that their customers will abandon materialism to concentrate on the Christian concept of the lordship of Christ?

No, of course not. The cadences, the music used in Panama, Waco, and Guantanamo, the Christmas carol in the department store, while all examples of music they are not examples of music as works of art, music valued as things of beauty. The music is valued because it's a tool, it's useful for doing something not musical. The cadence is useful in winning battles. Mobility, and fast mobility, is an essential part of successful warfare. The cadence helps ensure that the troops will arrive at the battlefield at the same time and perform uniformly At Guantanamo, music is a tool used to cause distress and inflict pain. It isn't valued for its own purpose but

19 United States Lt. Gen. Richardo Sanchez authorized the use of loud music “to create fear, disorient….and prolong capture shock” of prisoners in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantanamo on September 14, 2003. Donald Vance, a military contractor from Chicago who was imprisoned in Iraq by the Americans forces, said that an auditory assault of rock music that went on twenty hours a day soon made him suicidal. Brinyam Mohammed, a prisoner at Guantanamo but earlier held in the CIA’s “Dark Prison” in Afghanistan said that the music would make men smash their heads into walls, screaming. See: “Musicians Protest Blistering Music Used in Prisons to ‘Break” Inmates,”Associated Press, Wednesday, December 10, 2008, published on the web by Fox News (www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,464686,00.html) and Suzanne G. Cusick, “Music as Torture / Music as Weapon” Transcultural Music Review, No. 10 at www.sibetrans.com/trans/trans10/susick_eng.htm).

instead is cultivated for the agony it can cause. It's an instrument of torture (and a particularly clever addition to the torturer's arsenal because it leaves no incriminating physical marks).

And the Christmas carol is a marketing tool. In our culture, Christmas is associated with gift giving, and gift giving is associated with gift buying, and gift buying is associated with gift selling. The music of the carol really isn’t intended to be listened-to at all. It functions as but one more of a number of seasonal decorations swags of greenery, strings of twinkling lights, dummies of fat men in red suits the purpose of which is to enhance sales. The Christmas carol is used to trigger the shoppers' memories, helping them remember that they must buy something before the deadline of December 25. The music here functions as an aid to marketing. It’s part of business. Although originally written as an act of piety and intended as a devotional aid, in its business setting the hymn serves a materialistic purpose. Music here is used to push sales (we’ll see in a later chapter if it works).

Music isn't always art, valued for its aesthetic qualities. Frequently it's utilitarian, it's valued for something else. A hammer is valued because it can drive nails. An air conditioner is valued because it cools. A hammer might be nice to look at and the air conditioner might be beautifully engineered but we don't buy them because they're pretty. They're useful.

Much of our music is simply useful. It's still music but it's not art. Many of us have ring tones on our cell phones that are clips of our favorite songs. But when the phone rings we don't immediately comment on how lovely that clip is, instead we immediately think, "Oh, that's a call from so-and-so." And should we have our alarm clock programed to go off tuned to our favorite radio station, we don't immediately respond to the alarm with a "how lovely that music is" but instead with a "%&#*! Time to get up!." It's still music, but it's not art.

Example II.13

Title page and page 320 Silas Casey: Infantry Tactics, Vol. I

Returning to the military. In 1862, in the middle of Civil War, Union general Silas Casey published a three volume System of Infantry Tactics. It was immensely influential (even the Confederacy used it)[Ex. 11.13].20 The end of the first volume contains forty-five pages of detailed instructions regarding signals for drummers, fife players, and buglers. On the battlefield, knowing the difference between these pieces of music might be a matter of life and death; knowing when to fix your bayonet, and shoot, and stop shooting wasn't trivial and the man listening to this music wasn't concerned about its aesthetic content. No one was commenting to his comrade on Little Round Top during the Battle of Gettysburg, "My, Johnny, doesn't that bugler have a lovely tone!"

Example II.14 Pages 249 and 265

Silas Casey: Infantry Tactics, Vol. I

But there are always exceptions to the rule. At least one of these melodies has, since its beginning, been treasured for its artistic beauty (and treasured is the right word). In July of 1862, Daniel Butterfield, another Union general, modified a traditional bugle call, a rather disjointed and rambling piece of music, into what became known as "Taps." Not included in Casey's lexicon, it was used to signal "lights out" in the camp but, because of its extraordinary lyricism

20 Brig.-Gen. Silas Casey, U.S. Army, Infantry Tactics, for the Instruction, Exercises, and Maneuvers of the Soldier, A Company, Line of Skirmishers, Battalion, Brigade, or Corps d'Armee, Vol I, School of the Soldier and Company. Instructions for Skirmishers and Music, D. Van Nostrand, New York City, 1862

and aching melancholy, became universally used at military funerals. The simple melody is certainly one of the most beautiful tunes ever written.

Example II.15 "Taps", attributed to Daniel Butterfield

Example II.16

Meissen porcelain, Clemens-August Hunt Goblet by Kaendler and Ehder, 1741 and the 18th century horn call announcing the death of a stag.21

Today the horn is one of the most important instruments in western orchestras and chamber music ensembles. But for centuries it was basically a signaling device. Little more than a spiraled length of tubing, it was easily played, loud, and at least compared with a violin indestructible. Slung across the back, it could be quickly pulled to the front and blown over the shoulder. It became inseparable from the hunt. And as with the bugle and drums and fifes in the military, there was a repertory of melodies for the horn that carried specific meanings. How could you signal to your fellows that the hounds had found the stag? There was a horn call

Meissen "Hunt Goblet," Westphalian State Museum ofArt and Cultural History

specifically for that. The death of a doe, or a fox, or the call of the forester; each had its specific call [Example II 16] The memories of those melodies and the concomitant ideals of fraternity, community, and the sublime power of nature that they embody became deeply imbedded in the European consciousness and form the psychological foundations of many of our greatest symphonic works (the opening of Anton Bruckner's 4th Symphony, the last movement of Johannes Brahms’s 1st Symphony, Beethoven's 6th Symphony, the list is almost inexhaustible), but it's important to remember that originally all that music had little, or no, aesthetic value. It was music but not music as "art," it was music as "information transferal."

Until fairly recently, a lot of work involved hard, repetitive physical labor for groups of both men and women. To keep together, to bring greater strength to the task at hand, and to provide a bit of merriment, the activity was often accompanied by songs. It's an ancient practice. Writing probably in the early 4th Century AD, the Greek writer Aristides Quintilianus knew it.

[Music] makes sailing and rowing and the most difficult of the handicrafts not burdensome by providing an encouragement for the work.22

Making the labor "not burdensome" is very much part of the process of making the famous Scottish fabric "Harris Tweed." After having soaked the wool in stale urine (which helps set the dye and soften the fabric), the cloth is placed on a table and women, seated around the table, pull the cloth while pounding it on the table, and pass it to their neighbors on the left. And they sing. It's called "waulking the tweed" The process lasts from two to three hours and the women improvise songs to coordinate their movement and provide a bit of fun [Ex. II 15]. Although the process has been largely mechanized, the old way can still be observed in some locations in Scotland and in traditional Celtic craft fairs all over the world.

Crews that maintained railroad tracks in the United States were nicknamed "Gandy dancers."[Ex. II 16] The origin of the name is contested (supposedly they were named after the "Gandy" company that manufactured their tools) but their labor was essential. Heat and wear and tear would dislodge tracks and teams of men would force the tracks back into line through coordinated teasing with long chisel-pointed rods used as levers. It was difficult work. A "caller" would coordinate the effort by singing two-line, four-beat couplets to which the men would rhythmically tap their bars up under the rails and "dance" down the track. It's reported that a good caller could call all day and never repeat the same phrase twice.23 Waulking songs and Gandy dancer songs are what we call "work songs" and many of the songs we now cultivate as campfire songs originate in that practice (“I’ve been working’ on the railroad,” “What do you do with a drunken sailor;” and “Fifteen miles on the Erie Canal” all good examples). While usually such work songs were sung by the workers alone, sometimes musicians would be added to the

22 Aristides Quintilianus: On Music, In Three Books, translated by Thomas Mathiesen; New Haven:Yale University Press, 1983. Book II

23 Jim Brown, "Gandy Dancer Work Song Tradition", Encyclopedia of Alabama, July 13, 2007, updated Marth 27, 2023, https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/article/gandy-dancer-work-song-tradition/

Example. II 16

Gandy Dancers being filmed for Alabama Public Television Journey Proud25 photograph by

24 Highland History and Culture, "Waulking the Cloth, Harris", https://www.ambaile.org.uk/asset/19611/1/EN19611waulking-the-cloth-harris/ 25 https://encyclopediaofalabama.org/media/gandy-dancers/

Example II.15 "Waulking the cloth"24

Joey Brackner

work gangs to both accompany their singing and maintain it, and possibly push it a long a bit too, as we see in this example from Mexico [Ex II 17]

But even with musicians added, this music was not valued for its aesthetic content. A sailor on a whaler, hauling up sail with his mates, standing on footropes sixty feet above a swelling sea, probably wasn't concerned with aesthetics as he sang Way-hey and up she rises; he wasn't asking "Am I in tune? Do I have the words right? How is my vocal production?" He wanted to get the job done and not die.

We're now in a position to recognize that those definitions of music we remembered at the beginning of this chapter, definitions that called "music" a kind of "art," are misleading. A lot of music is no more "art" than a screwdriver is a sculpture. It's a tool. Cadences, bugle calls, work songs, they're all music but they're also tools. But we're also in a position to better know what "art" is. Should Duchamp take a screwdriver, and put it in the right context, then it could be art. Should John Cage take crickets chipping in a summer evening and put it in the context of a recital, then that sound can become "art."

And let's further think of those contexts as "cultures." Cage created a culture in Woodstock where nature noises became music. Duchamp created a culture where a houseware became art. The administration of President George Walker Bush created a culture where pop

26 Photograph by the National Geographic Society, first published by the Society, August 1996

Example II.17

Wine making in the Marqués de Aguayo winery in Parras, Mexico, 192226

songs became legally-justified instruments of torture.27 We can even go back to that banana. Justin Sun, the Chinese cryptocurrency platform founder who paid $6.24 million for it and later ate it (“as part of this unique artistic experience, honoring its place in both art history and popular culture”) justified his purchase because the work was a “cultural phenomenon that bridges the worlds of art, memes, and the cryptocurrency community.”28 In other words, “Comedian” had meaning within a culture, a culture of high-tech (Sun even paid for it with cryptocurrency). Returning again to Gombrich: yes, artists make art and musicians make music but they don't do so alone. Artists and musicians create communities and communities create the artists and musicians; the relationship is symbiotic. This is a complex issue and we'll return to it but it's important that we acknowledge the relationship now.

We need to go back to the end of the previous chapter and review the definition of music we developed there:

Music is a kind of heightened poetry and dance in which sound and silence are admixed into forms that carry culturally determined meanings.

At the very beginning of this chapter you realized that definition was inadequate. We hadn't discussed art, and on the basis of that omission alone you knew it wasn't sufficient. In the last pages we've had a chance to address that omission and we can now give a fuller definition of what music is. We now know that music is a particular kind of sound. But it's not only sound, it's also the spaces between sounds, spaces we can call silence. Music just doesn't exist, it's something people make. And it's intimately related to two other kinds of things people make: poetry and dance. And when people make music they find it meaningful, but what those meanings are depend on the culture of which those people, and the music, are a part. And it's made and valued for aesthetic and utilitarian purposes. Sometimes it's art. Sometimes it isn't.

Music is a kind of heightened poetry and dance created through the manipulation of sound and silence into forms that carry culturally derived meanings. It is cultivated for aesthetic and utilitarian purposes.

That works pretty well. Or does it?

27 For a useful summary see: "A Guide to the Memos on Torture", The New York Times, n.d., https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/ref/international/24MEMO-GUIDE.html

28 Rob Wile, “Art world shrugs at $6 million banana-based ‘Comedian’purchase as high-end market seeks to regain footing”,NBC News, Nov. 23, 2024, https://www.nbcnews.com/business/personal-finance/banana-art-comedianmarket-struggles-reacts-6-million-rcna181240; also Zachary Small, “Who’s Laughing Now? Banana-as-Art Sells for $6.2 Million at Sotheby’s”, New York Times, Nov. 20, 2024, https://www.nytimes.com/2024/11/20/arts/design/cattelan-banana-sothebys-auction.html, and Josie Thaddeus-Johns, “Maurizio Cattelan’s duct-taped banana sells for $6.2 million at Sotheby’s” Art Market, Nov. 21, 2024, https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-maurizio-cattelans-duct-taped-banana-sells-62-million-sothebys