Attention Span in Music

If you listen to a symphony or a polyphonic mass, there are two levels at which you can understand the music:

(1) euphonically, that is, understanding it based on its good-sounding-ness

(2) formally, that is, according to its set-up.

A good symphony and a good mass can be understood on both levels. In fact, it's really not understood until it's understood on both levels. And with especially good symphonies and masses, it will be difficult to understand it as (1) without understanding it as (2). A really good composer is not obscure about the formal beauty of his piece. He draws you into its formal beauty, luring you in with its pleasant sound.

Take Beethoven. His music is engaging at any given moment, but it's difficult not to understand the overall drama of the sonata form present in the work. Beethoven is a Herodotus or a J. K. Rowling. The moment you're listening to is exciting, but he draws you into the bigger picture, the garden, wilderness, and garden-city of a symphonic first movement. Beethoven, good story teller that he is, lengthens your attention span.

Think of it this way—for a three-year-old, as he listens to Lord of the Rings being read to him, chances are he doesn't understand the big picture: the quest to destroy the Ring, Sauron trying to thwart Gondor, Sauraman, Rohan. But that doesn't mean that he can't feel the excitement during Helm's Deep. It doesn't stop him from looking like a stone when Frodo's finger's getting ripped off with teeth.

A twelve-year-old, on the other hand, is likely to understand the big picture. It isn't simply an instantaneous enjoyment of the moment that keeps him going. It's the unresolved tension way back in Book One that holds an inexorable grasp on his attention while he's reading Book Five. If you reflect for a moment, you'll realize it's really quite amazing that something he might have read three months ago is informing how and why he reads right now.

But why does the knowledge that The Ring Must Be Destroyed really matter that much? Couldn't it be that three-fourths of the way through the book, Frodo slips and falls, gashes his head, drowns in a river, and the ring gets forgotten for another thousand years? No. This couldn't happen any more than Sauron dying at the end from food poisoning. It's because the twelve-year-old recognizes form that he knows that none of these things would ever happen. That's why we feel gypped when an author pulls a deus ex machina. That's why everyone hated the last episode of Lost.

People recognize the form of stories. They know certain things are in the realm of possibility, and certain things aren't. Within that realm, what the author does is exciting. The bad guys might just win - that's in the realm - but the piece might also end on a picardy third, so to speak.

Which brings me back to my original point. In most cases (and, I grant, not all), the reason someone gets bored with a symphony is not because the symphony is boring, but because he is a boring person. He does not recognize a form. He's like someone who doesn't appreciate an exciting story when he hears one. But we must have pity on this sort of person and try to educate him to enjoy the tension of a story.

That's why Beethoven lengthens your attention span. If you recognize the form, if you understand what's in the realm of possibility and what isn't, you'll know that the symphony has its natural crescendo, climax, and resolution, just like a story. And if you realize that, you're the twelve-year-old of music, now, no longer the two-year-old. You don't simply have an instantaneous enjoyment of the music. What happened in the first few bars is informing how you see the end of the movement.

Why is that so hard? What I read a month ago at the beginning of War and Peace sticks in my head word for word as I read about characters at the end of the novel. But I have a hard time identifying a simple tune that shows up at the beginning of a piece six minutes later. Why is that?

Simple, Hilarious, Popular, and Modern

Percy Dearmer prefaces The Oxford Book of Carols with the opening sentence,

"Carols are songs with a religious impulse that are simple, hilarious, popular, and modern."

How about that?

A Matter of Taste

"This is in sharp contrast to the relatively minor status of individual 'taste' in Western musical practice and aesthetics from the ancient Greeks until the late eighteenth century. To an earlier age, our contemporary idea of a complete relativism in musical judgment would have seemed nonsensical. One could no more make valid individual judgments about musical values than about science. Music was no more 'a matter of taste' than was the orbit of the planets or the physiology of the human body. From Plato to Helmholtz, music was understood to be based on natural laws, and its value was derived from its capacity to frame and elaborate these laws in musical form. Its success was no more a matter of subjective judgment than the laws themselves." (Who Needs Classical Music?, Julian Johnson, "Musical Values".)

Why Sing Goudimel?

This is something I wrote a while back, attempting to explain why Goudimel uses so many root and so few inverted chords. It's not as clear as I'd like it to be, but it's a start.

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Our goal is congregations with ever-increasing, corporate activity in worship. One of the oldest tools for enhancing this activity, especially in early Protestant traditions, is the singing of hymns in parts. The problem with this is that congregations don't know how to sing in parts. They don't know how to begin to learn. This goes back to a deeper problem, an attitude that musicianship is a mater of talent, of divine gift, of genetics. It's not. It's a combination of two things - discipline and conditioning.

Claude Goudimel gives you both. Goudimel's approach to part writing is, at best, unusual. But it's a conscious attempt to compel a congregant into becoming a musician. His method is simple - give each person a sense of identity with one of the four voices of a hymn. Your identity as a soprano, alto, tenor, or bass is something that has a tangible application in the sound. Your section has a distinctive way it jumps around or honks a note. The best of it all is that this means you don't have to read music to learn, but learning how to sing naturally ends up teaching you how to read.

It starts with the melody, which is usually pretty catchy. This doesn't really pose a problem. The next part that we naturally want to hear is the bass, since it gives us a sense of the harmony of the piece. Theoretically speaking, if you're a bass, there are three possible notes you can sing with each melody note without creating dissonance, since Goudimel's policy is almost always to have the bass note sing the root position of any given chord. But, of course, nobody really thinks in those terms when they're singing. Simply due to the fact that most other possibilities than the one Goudimel writes are awkward and unsingable, it's intuitive for a bass to sing it the way Goudimel wrote it. From the point of view of someone learning, there's simply a distinctive sound that accompanies his identity as a bass. From the composer's perspective, Goudimel simply never (well, hardly ever) writes an inverted chord.

From hereon out, it's pretty simple. You have a soprano and a bass line in place. The rest essentially fills in the blanks. The alto and tenor parts, which would seem to be more difficult since they're close to each other, again, have that intuitive sense of what not to sing because the other parts are already singing it. To dip again into the theory behind it, at any point, either the alto or the tenor is going to be singing a note that neither the bass nor the soprano are yet singing. For the person who's learning, it sounds funny otherwise. To help distinguish between the two parts, either of the two middle parts at any point is going to be doing something melodic, while the other is honking on one or two notes. Simply by virtue of the fact that there are only two possibilities for each voice at any given time, and neither can do both at once, possibilities are limited and parts become intuitive.

What's important to realize is not how it happens but that it happens. Goudimel is forcing people who aren't comfortable with music to listen to themselves, listen to those around them, distinguish notes from notes in thick textures, and identify themselves with a particular sound. This is, perhaps, why the people who usually end up looking down on Goudimel are those who know the most about music. Not all Goudimel hymns are created equal, and most of them are milk. As long as we keep in mind that the meat is, say, Bach, we're on the right track. But Goudimel is good for where we are now - introducing the idea of sanctifying corporate worship. It's a matter of creating better musicians through a delicate mix of discipline and conditioning.

"Whole Meaning Lies in the Words"

"'Uncle' sang as peasants sing, with the full and naive conviction that the whole meaning of a song lies in the words, that the tune comes of itself and exists only to give measure to the verse, apart from which it is nothing. Consequently this unconsidered tune, like the song of a bird, had an extraordinary charm." (Tolstoy, War and Peace.)

Music and the Public Square

While I am the last person to have an unnatural desire to apply Marxist historicism to everything I can get my hands on, it's worth noting that Classical music is, in much of its history, a matter of social distinction. You go to Classical music concerts if you're rich and you can pay for it. These boundaries are largely destroyed in the advent of commercial recording, but even now they still exist. If you want the real taste of Classical music, the live performance, the aspect of the connoisseur, you must go rub shoulders with the city councilmen and the local music theory faculty at a live performance. Maybe your dentist, your family doctor, your French teacher. Chances of seeing the plumber there? Adjuster? Not really that high. It's a bit like golf, but worse.

Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. But it is worth noting that it can be fallacious when people formulate bombastic apologiai for Classical music, trying to win "back" the younger generation and the majority of people to the aesthetically superior form of music. The problem is, Classical music has never had a wide audience and, quite possibly due to commercial availability, never wider than today. It isn't a matter of getting Classical music back to a position of wide-spread appeal, since it may not have had it in the first place.

On the other hand, not all Classical music is like this. It doesn't seem likely that you're going to hear Brahms' 2nd piano concerto if you're a 19th century Dickensesque inn keeper. It does seem considerably more likely that you hear a Bach cantata if you're an 18th century inn keeper. Bach's music was music that was heard in church and, while, at its more corrupt moments, the Church's liturgy has been a matter of class, music of the church is music that is heard by all the congregation. And, in early Lutheran Protestantism more than anywhere else, perhaps, the music is informed (but not dictated) by the congregants' needs and their level of musical education. These early Protestant churches love congregation-lead music.

I've talked before about the tune that most of us sing O Sacred Head Now Wounded to—it was apparently a German love song. Both his predecessors and Bach himself took this tune and set it many different ways. (And, so did a few composers who came after him, most famously Brahms.) This is an example of the composers of High music lifting folk and popular tunes out of the culture and implementing them in a religious context. I think it would be a little unrealistic simply to attribute that to some already-existing quality in the folk song that merited its use in worship. Bach et al were, to some degree, trying to teach and edify by using something that would be, to most of the congregation, familiar.

Bach is an excellent example, but he's not the only example. As I've mentioned before, Josquin and Dufay do this with the famous tune L'homme arme, just barely leaving the tune recognizable but ubiquitous in their Missae L'homme arme. There's even a rumor that the tune Pange Lingua, to which is set St. Thomas' famous poem, was in fact a Roman marching song.

But does that mean that modern Church music composers should take a "melody" (coughcoughcough) from Coldplay or Regina Spektor and use it as the basis of a Kyrie? Yyyeah, no. That's dubious, to say the least. Not that I have anything against Coldplay or Regina Spektor (that would be appropriate in this post), but the issue is one of apples and oranges. Bach and Josquin were working on generations upon generations of people who had built up a Christo-centric culture. The music that came out of that culture was certainly not sinless and certainly not totally consistent with a Christian worldview. But the music didn't clash with Christian doctrine. Today, we have a totally different field to play on. Inevitably, a song (regardless of the ethos of its authors) that hits the top of the commercial music list is going to clash with the catechesis of Christian worship. That doesn't mean it's not going to work 100% of the time, but it does mean that there are many more issues to weigh in the balance and many more insidious cultural connotations to deal with. Bach and Josquin had a level playing field—they weren't in a battle with the majority of the culture. We are.

When the music of a culture is defined by the music of its Church (I don't think it ever isn't), when, in short, at the center of the public square is the music of worship, the effects on folk and pop music will be drastic. When this happens in Christian Churches, and we all come to hear, worship with, love, and understand the High music of the church, the gap between the aesthetically richest 10% and the aesthetically poorest 10% will be narrowed. But, as usual, it doesn't work to regulate that. It has to happen organically, over the course of generations and academic years and, uh, counterpoint classes. But then we won't be far from the sort of culture that writes quodlibets for a pastime. Everyone will be edified, musically, by being immersed in music they have, over time, come to understand. The give-and-take between the music of the Church and the music of the culture will be such as was not really possible for the majority of the history of Classical music.

High Music and Folk Music, Part I

Johannes Tinctoris, in his treatise Concerning the Skill of Counterpoint, begins with a quote from Horace's Ars Poetica:

"Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons." That is, to understand or to have knowledge (sapere) is the first principle and the fountain (principium et fons) of writing well (scribendi recte).

It's worth noting that Tinctoris is drawing a pretty clear corollary between the skill of poetry (ars poetica) and the skill of counterpoint (ars contrapuncti). He's importing a principle from the one for the other so he can explain to his reader the difference between just scribendum (writing) and scribendum recte (writing well). The difference is sapere.

Understanding this in cultural context is important. In the 15th century, counterpoint is the not-uncertain capital of the Church. The French chansons, the obvious exception to the vast majority of contrapuntal pieces serving a liturgical function, was stylistically not all that different from the many of the liturgical pieces (take, for example, the similarity between Josquin's Absolon fili mi and his Je ne me puis tenir d'aimer). Obviously, because of the lack of commercialization and the printing press, the audiences to this sort of secular music was extremely limited, probably to nobility and their clergy.

So, when Tinctoris starts off saying that knowledge is key to writing well, he's not talking about writing a nice tune that a troubadour might sing or the latest local hit song in the tavern. Tinctoris is talking about High music. And the first thing he points out about this music that distinguishes it from just any music (hence the recte, "well" qualifying scribendi, "writing") is the possession of a body of facts concerning counterpoint.

Folk music is music centered around the village square or the domestic hearth. In the 20th century, with the rise of commercial music, it may center around the LP or the iPod, but I think it's still the same principle. There's a fundamental difference between this and High music. High music can be described as requiring ars or τεχνη or skill. That skill comes only through a knowledge of the theoretical techniques and musical precedent.