Recently I’ve been giving some attention to the notion of a gradated scale amongst musicians from utilitarianism (i.e., restricting yourself only to what you need for the objective at hand) to mysticism (i.e., allowing no restrictions, even those imposed by the necessity of performing.) Even during the full-court press we call ‘finals week’, the idea continues to bubble and ferment.
The comprehension of a piece of music involves exploration at many different levels and from many different angles. The tonal analysis afforded by Schenkerian technique is one such angle, but no piece of music is comprised exclusively of its tonal relationships. Critics of Schekerianism are quick to pounce on the technique’s relative indifference to rhythm. They might as well focus as well on the many other musical aspects that Schenkerian thinking sidesteps: instrumentation, tempo, performance practice, dynamics and diacritical marks, historical context, text (for vocal music), textual-literary associations (i.e., program music), psychological components. All make up the filling of the acoustic enchilada, not just the tonal relationships alone.
But Schenkerian listening serves as an excellent model for a musical experience that attempts to move past the merely utilitarian.
I consider Schenkerian listening to exist primarily in the realm of the tonal imagination. The idea is to listen ‘above’, as it were, or ‘beyond’, the mere surface of the music and focus on larger-scale tonal relationships. To take a very simple example, hearing the first four measures of the Bach C Major Prelude as an overall prolongation of the tonic: I, ii42, V65, and I. These four chords together explore stasis (beginning with the fundamental rest of the tonic triad), creation of harmonic tension (ii42 creates a dissonance out of scale degree ^1, as that tone becomes the 7th of a seventh chord), and the intensification of harmonic tension (as the bass-line 7th of the ii42 resolves downwards, creating a V65 — a chord which contains two sharply active tones, ^7 and ^4, as well as a dominant root which is expected to resolve to the tonic.) The journey from stasis through tension is then resolved back into the tonic, in a chord voiced identically to the original in measure 1. The net effect is of a single tonic, but strengthened, intensified, and given an unmistakable identity, by its journey through dissonance.
That’s hearing a bit above, or beyond, the surface of the music. But the ear can move into deeper territory yet. That same tonic triad that opens the C Major Prelude, and which resolves back to itself three measures later, is then repeated an octave lower a good two dozen measures later, and is heard as a target of motion and as a point of repose. The fact that we hear that chord as a resolution bears potent witness to our ability to hear more deeply than the surface; otherwise, we would not hear it as a resolution. (Consider that along the way from upper-octave tonic to its lower-octave equivalent, we have also heard a transient modulation into G Major, a large-scale dominant that will resolve, eventually, to the tonic.)
But where, precisely, does such hearing occur? Certainly a person who heard notes only as notes, that is to say, without any sense of their connectivity or syntax, would not be aware of these tonal relationships. In fact, most harmony students are not consciously aware of them until a harmony wonk such as myself points them out. But we respond to the relationships nonetheless; otherwise, we might find music to be consistently unsatisfying and unresolved. The Bach C Major Prelude makes tonal sense to most listeners, at least those in the Western-influenced sphere. The final tonal resolution is satisfying; it closes off the proceedings nicely.
It’s all the mind’s interpretative skills at work. A certain amount of tonal conditioning must have taken place, given that there is really no profound acoustic reason why a dominant seventh chord, say, should require resolution to the tonic. Our concepts of consonance and dissonance are largely cultural, not acoustic. True enough, the perfect intervals such as the octave and fifth are close multiples of the fundamental pitch. But the major third is a close multiple while the minor third is a distant sonority, and yet we hear both as consonances. Ditto sixths, which we hear as consonances largely, I think, due to their status as inversions of thirds. Schenker’s notion of the triad as a mystically fundamental unit of nature founders on the rocks of minor thirds, or for that matter, on the consonances found in the church modes. I embrace a lot of Schenker’s techniques, but not necessarily the assumptions that inform those techniques and observations. (Even worse, some of those underlying assumptions were distressingly racist.)
So if I allow that tonal order is largely a mental construct, a grammar and syntax if you will, then it follows that music must exist in some kind of idealized form in my consciousness; otherwise, I have no frame of reference from which to build, no way of placing what I am hearing at this moment into a context of experience and expectation. I must be literate in the language, in other words; otherwise it becomes a series of unrelated sounds to my ear.
Which speaks rather loudly against 100% pure, unadulterated utilitarianism, since even the most nuts-and-bolts performer who eschews all notions of theory, history, or philosophical woo-woo is nonetheless subject to all those culturally-acquired assumptions. Such a musician has, indeed, learned the language–even if he/she isn’t particularly interested in exploring its grammar or syntax. It stands that even a simple decision to play something faster, or slower, or louder, or softer, etc., must draw from a repository of experience, expectation, and prior knowledge. There can be no pure utilitarianism.
But can there be a purely mystical experience as well? I would also argue against that. Consider the prohibition in classical harmony against motion by augmented seconds. The reasoning behind this prohibition is utterly practical; choirs will tend to sing this interval incorrectly. (That happened just the other day in my first-semester eartraining class during a sight-reading session, in fact.) So there we have basic utilitarian thinking that winds up informing our musical expectations, becoming a matter of compositional style even though the fundamental rationale is humdrum practicality. Bach, for example, is quite scrupulous about avoiding augmented seconds unless he has something special in mind; for Bach the augmented second is an emotional trope that points to a heightened experience, occuring in minor-key pieces characterized by a mood of intimacy. Thus in Bach’s personal language, practicality rubs shoulders with emotional impact.
Is it actually possible to hear music in the mind completely apart from the physical reality of vibration? I’m one of those folks with exceptionally good pitch recognition, both from inside-out (i.e., notation or inner-ear to sound) and outside-in (i.e., sound to notational or description). But sound is not wholly abstract in my mind; it has a physical reality, a kind of faux-vibratory quality. I can feel it to some extent, as an actual sensual reality somewhere in those mysterious regions somewhere behind my eyeballs. When I was a little kid, I felt sound mostly in my hands, being a pianist. But as I grew older and acquired more training, increasingly the sensual experience of sound moved more inwards, as that felt vibration deep in my head. Other elements mix in; associations between sound and color (in which the moods elicited by certain colors match the moods elicited by certain sounds, such as my relationship of D Minor to dark red), or the physical feeling of singing a particular note (E above middle C is right on my ‘break’ and thus that slight discomfort is part of my ‘E’ experience), combined with a pianist’s association of harmonies with hand positions. I’m sure that more is involved as well — heat, comfort/discomfort.
And then there is also the association of certain sounds with certain compositions or instrumental combinations. Consider the case of a violin tuned G-D-A-E (whether A=440 or not is immaterial). If you write in the key of E-flat Major for an instrument tuned like that, the resultant harmonics and combinations will come out with a relatively rounded, or cushioned tone — while the same four strings in the key of D Major will be much brighter, more forward, less ‘covered’ in sound. By a happy coincidence, E-flat major turns out to be a very good key for many wind instruments, allowing them to speak quite freely. As a result, instrument music in E-flat Major will tend towards a golden “windy” sound. Thus Haydn symphonies 43, 99, and 103 — which match a lyrical, cushioned mood to their equally cushioned instrumental sonority. Or Haydn symphonies in D Major — such as 93, 101, and 104 — that exploit the instrumental brightness of D Major (so great for brass instruments) with an extroverted, happy mood.
So it stands to reason that when I hear E-flat Major I’m going to be thinking of all those pieces in E-flat, as well as the physical sensation of playing the piano in E-flat Major, or the way notes like B-flat and E-flat feel when singing, or my association of anything E-flat with yellow colors, particularly golden. It is not possible for me to have a ‘pure’ concept of E-flat Major.
Beethoven used to say that he could hear the difference between C-sharp and D-flat Majors, even on the piano. What did he mean by that? My sense is that his response was based on a lot of instrumental hearing. To be sure, the two keys sound identical on the piano, but not when played by non-tempered instruments. Those associations might very well result in the two keys sounding different to him even on the piano, even though actual physical measurements per se would reveal no difference.
Because I am instrumentalist to the tip of my toes and in the hair of my chinny-chin-chin, words carry very little musical significance for me. However, I’ll bet a lot of singers think otherwise, and associate certain words with certain musical gestures. (I suppose we all hear “Hallelujiah” in Handelian terms, for example.) But those singers are also subject to every other association and response, just like everybody else. A singer who insists that he/she acquires all musical understanding from the words alone is not very observant.
In short: no absolute utilitarianism, no absolute mysticism. We cannot divorce our musical perception from the reality of performance, of instruments (including voices) making sounds. Simple and practical considerations are an integral part of the mix, no matter how divorced the so-called “pure” musician may consider him/herself to be from the vulgar act of pushing down keys or scraping a cat’s intestines with with a horse’s tail.