[Smt-talk] Fwd: the impossibility of listening

[Michael Morse]

  In the same gesture, Professor Malitz makes a point that is both valid and egregious. The suggestion from the Abbate/Parker quote that analyzing the note-structures of an opera can be misleading or misguided, thus eminently dispensable, is of course self-evident on one level. Analysis of any piece of music that includes text, but ignores its role(s), will become semantically one-sided, to a greater or lesser extent. Somewhat ironically, analysis of an oral tradition tune family such as the passamezzo moderno ["Amazing Grace"/Pachelbel Can{n}on/Alexandrov] bass pattern, can probably get away with ignoring the text rather better than a consideration of a Schubert song, or Wozzeck. In the latter instances, the influence of the course of the text on the course of the music is sufficiently integral and profound that a strictly "note"-based approach will border on violence to the piece as a whole.
  To the extent that Abbate/Parker are suggesting or claiming that "mere notes" are dispensable in opera analysis because it is an inextricably integral form of expression, their statement is reasonable; as far as it goes. But to suggest that analysis perforce means semantically sundering the tones from the words and the action is preposterous. We saw the quote offered here as a rationalization for not including notation; let's hope that their book doesn't take that as license to ignore music!
  But Professor Malitz also suggests that his form of analysis successfully pits "experience" against "[the] notes." Without further and very serious qualification, this is absurd. If it is true that myopic--or whatever the acoustical equivalent of "myopic" should be--forms of analysis tacitly define "the notes" as "those black thingies on the score page," the only workable conception of "the notes" is "what we experience"; or, if you will, in the case of vocal and dramatic music, "an integral part of what we experience." Save for the purposes of a limited if not trivial polemic, the contradistinction of notes and experience is flat wrong, I believe.
MW MorseTrent University

Date: Wed, 31 Oct 2012 20:35:04 -0700
From: imalitz at omsmodel.com
To: smt-talk at lists.societymusictheory.org
Subject: [Smt-talk] Fwd:  the impossibility of listening

I don't find the authors' comments to be disturbing.
In my own research, I am concerned with the analysis of music from the 
"experiential" side - I'm interested in how music stimulates listeners 
(from an aesthetic point of view)
I find my kind of analysis to be fascinating, deep, enlightening in many 
ways. (It even sheds light on the analysis of musical scores)
It has its own rigor, although that rigor is different from the rigor of 
conventional note-centric musical analysis.
I have also found that my kind of analysis is not popular in the 
mainstream of musical academicians.
 
So, the author's approach to discussing opera (via experience rather 
than notes) seems a natural approach.
I look forward to reading their book!
 
[The negative comments I have seen in this thread just seem to express 
resistance to something that I think is new and good]
 
 
Isaac Malitz, Ph.D.
www.OMSModel.com
imalitz at rdic.com
 
 
 
Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker: "...we wanted to write a book without 
reference to musical scores."
 
 

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