Of late I’ve gotten some odd stares from certain of my colleagues, as they ponder me wondering if I’m altogether OK or if over the course of the past some-odd years a few screws have started working their way loose.
This has come about due to my (politely) demurring with statements such as “ah, opera! the REAL, true music!”. It isn’t as though I hate opera—quite the contrary, in fact—but I am not about to allow opera, or any other textual stuff, to be given precedence over non-verbal music. In fact, my own stance is that music is far better served without words, without storytelling or playacting, without being required to narrate which little piggy went to market or why Jesus wept or who killed whom in the sacristry.
True enough, for most of music history, the little piggies predominated. Music served the words. Catholic plainchant (amusingly called Gregorian despite its namesake having little or nothing to do with it) employed musical chant formulae in order to remove subjective interpretation from readings of the psalms and such, as well as to serve as an aide memoire. Along the way, Gregorian chant managed to become the wellspring of the Western musical tradition, but that stems more from the church’s rapacious stranglehold on culture and less with any musical superiority per se.
Plainchant and early polyphony existed comfortably side-by-side for a good long time, probably longer than the written history indicates. (After all, the formal history of music is limited to musical notation and writings about music; as a result, most of the good stuff happened offstage and was never reported.) For the most part music still remained chained to words, although certainly Notre Dame organum made an early and determined feint away from dependence on the verbal. The typical Notre Dame example stretches each syllable of the underlying plainchant out to near-ludicrous lengths, hanging on the vowel far past the point at which it contains any semantic meaning to a listener, while the accompanying duplum, triplum, and even occasionally quadruplum voices perform scintillating riffs in rhythmic modes on free vowels. In other words, Notre Dame organum isn’t really about the text: it’s about the music, the singing. More to the point, it’s about the contemplation, the long periods of private meditation that were such an integral part of early Christianity and have (sadly) disappeared with the advent of Protestantism, Vatican II, and Tammy Faye Bakker.
Even the dazzling swordplay of the 14th century motet, all artifice and rhythmic sophistication, blurs the text to the point of incomprehensibility. Certainly the words are still important—consider how hockets highlight certain words by bouncing them around the group—but at the same time, isorhythm and isomelos aren’t about the words: they’re about the relationship of rhythm to melody. And an isorhythmic motet is just dandy heard without the words, and a good thing too given that only the most experienced linguist could ever make sense of all that speed-French spattered out by straining falsettists. (Note to self: write a sizzling article blasting the conceit of early music groups that insist on medieval languages that nobody understands and always subject us to those damn screechy male voices when they could just sing the damn thing an octave lower and sound like real, sexy men instead of vapid eunuchs who make us want to cross our legs while listening and give us three-Excedrin headaches after fifteen minutes.)
But really it took the coming of instruments en masse to divorce music—the interplay of pure sound without accompanying verbal training-wheels—from the tyranny of story, words, and syllables. Tentative in the Renaissance, and then gloriously in the Baroque, instrumental music proved itself more than capable of standing on its own, expressing itself in purely musical terms without recourse to words, words, and more words.
I find it significant that the Enlightenment was the age that really elevated instrumental music to full status. New thinking for new times, the Enlightenment. The symphony became the kingpin of the musical world in so many ways, especially once Haydn, Mozart, and Beethoven had gotten their hands on the thing. Who needs words to deal with the Eroica? The music works for itself, speaks for itself, in purely musical terms. There is no need to describe it: oh this is like a cathedral, oh this is heroic, oh this is Beethoven being depressed due to his encroaching deafness. In fact, such exegesis is useful really only for beginners, for those who are just getting their feet wet in the heady world of musical development and logic.
It’s fairly easy to understand a Baroque aria as: I’m mad at you and I want revenge, you son of a bitch. But it’s another matter entirely to unfold the structure of the first movement of the Eroica, to trace how that simple opening idea of an arpeggiated triad (so rudely destabilized by a C# hinting at far-remote key centers) is carried through a series of purely musical developments to create the titanic structure that never seems more than a few minutes long, even though the stopwatch tells us otherwise. And to do it without words, cheap descriptions, or blatant appeals to our other, presumably more experienced, senses.
This explains my fascination with Schenkerian analysis, I think, given that Schenker’s tools are also devoid largely of the verbal. A graphic analysis repurposes the symbols of music notation in order to use music to describe music. That’s a huge improvement over using words, in my humble opinion. Unfoldings, shifts, couplings, ascents, linear progressions, urlinie, bassbrechung, ursatz. All of it expressed in purely musical notation; thus one might elucidate the Eroica using its own language (pure sound in a latticed structure) rather than imposing the strictures of an alien tongue (English) on the material.
Music is music, and words are words. They both have their places. And sometimes words and music come together, as they do in vocal and theatrical music. But are any of them the REAL music? I’m not inclined to make such a statement, but if I were forced to choose, I’d go with the non-verbal every time. After all, there’s a certain Platonic essence to non-verbal music, organized pitch without phonemes. We have a lot of words in our world (I’m certainly contributing plenty of my own). Perhaps we need fewer words, and more glorious pure sound.