Victor Zuckerkandl: Motion (Part 2 of 4)

The second section of Zuckerkandl’s Sound and Symbol is devoted to the paradoxical concept of musical motion. Motional description of music is quite natural. But what is it exactly that moves in music? In the external world, motion refers to the act or process of a physical body or thing moving from one place to another. How can something move in music which has no physical bodies or things? This is the problem taken up—a problem that is eventually turned around ingeniously by VZ by showing that it is exactly because music is not attached to things or bodies that musical motion is the purest instance of motion.

One might answer the above question of what moves in musical motion by saying that, at least in terms of melody, it is the tones that move. VZ points out an inconsistency between this idea and reality. In reality the successive tones that comprise a melody are of course, completely stationary. “It is the exact opposite of motion.” (83) And when an attempt is made to generate a smooth connection between tones (say, an ascent from scale degree 1 to scale degree 5), “the result is the familiar screeching glissade of the siren, in which melody and music are destroyed.” (83) The idea of melodic motion is indeed problematic.

In passing, VZ discusses our use of spatial terminology when describing music, particularly in terms of height. We say that one tone is higher than another, but nothing is really higher at all. After making a few brief suggestions as to why we do this, he says that the use of these terms are entirely metaphorical. Furthermore, the issue is said to be entirely irrelevant to our understanding of musical motion. VZ brings this point out in his discussion of triadic harmony, for harmonic motion demonstrates more clearly than melodic motion the irrelevance of height metaphors since what we hear in a chord transcends its constituent tones to a greater degree. The question of whether a V-I cadence is an ascent or descent becomes pointless. “Thus, to a certain extent, harmonic motion represents the most extreme and purest case of musical motion.” (114)

In what initially appears to be an irrelevant excursion, VZ describes the famous paradoxes of Zeno. His aim is to rescue musical motion by showing that our conception of physical motion, motion as we experience it in the real world, is itself highly problematic. If the proverbial tortoise is given a head start, then the hare will never reach his opponent since he will forever be cutting the distance in half. The paradoxes can be rendered in various ways, but the underlying point stressed by VZ is the incongruity between the motional and the spatial or material. “[Zeno’s error came by] equating the ‘between’ of motion with interspace. They assumed that the process of motion could be entirely comprehended in spatial data… The contradictions and paradoxes… merely show that motion cannot be entirely comprehended in spatial-local data.” (128) VZ’s first tactic is therefore not to bolster the shaky foundation of musical motion but to attack that of physical motion, indicating that the dismissal of musical motion on the simple grounds that it fails to link up with our concept of physical motion is no longer valid.

Turning then to the psychological perception of motion more specifically, VZ draws on the work and studies of Max Wertheimer. Wetheimer noted that an accurate idea of motion is largely divorced from things and places. The distinction is made through the precise use of prepositions: “If seeing motion is not a seeing of things in places, if the process that we see as motion is able to free itself from connection with things and places, appears as a progression neither in places nor through places, but over them, as a pure passing over, this means that motion is such.” (135) Motion is something purely dynamic, detached from everything static—“change detached from a thing that changes.” (136)

Now to the crux of the matter. When we listen to music, we do hear motion in the tones. When we use motional terms to describe music, we are not using metaphors (contrary to the spatial metaphors we use). It is true that on a “lower level” we hear stationary tones that comprise a melody. But on an “upper level,” we hear the musical motion that resides between the tones—the musical motion that transcends the tones. And since we are constantly listening between the tones, which are themselves not stationary but dynamic—since our hearing “does not remain with the tone, but reaches through it and beyond it” (137)—and since music does not involve things or places, motion itself is manifest “in absolute purity and immediacy” through music. Musical motion is the core of all motion, and “every experience of motion is, finally, a musical experience.” (138) We can see motion and touch motion but only through the mediation of physical things in physical space. But in relation to these senses, our hearing faculty “gets at the essence; [it] pierces to the core of the phenomenon.” (146) Music therefore provides an invaluable source of access into our world. “We see the rind, or, under special conditions, through the rind, but we hear the core of this world.” (147)

Victor Zuckerkandl: Tone (Part 1 of 4)

I am currently working through Victor Zuckerkandl’s book Sound and Symbol: Music and the External World from 1956. The book is divided into four sections each containing a subheading: Tone – Motion – Time – Space. My blog entries on Zuckerkandl will come in four parts corresponding to these four sections.

In his opening section subtitled “Tone,” Zuckerkandl (henceforth referred to as VZ) concerns himself with general (but by no means simple) questions involving the nature of music, how and why it is that we hear sounds as music. His first order of business is to deal with melody. Since melody is more than a simple succession of tones, what exactly is melody? VZ initially provides a very unhelpful definition of melody as “a series of tones that makes sense.” (15) Obviously this begs a further question, “What is it that is meaningful in tones, that allows us to distinguish sense from nonsense in successions of tones?” (16) The answer to this question becomes a principal tenet of the entire section: “It is the dynamic quality that permits tones to become conveyors of meaning; that makes melodies out of successions of tones and music out of acoustical phenomena. The dynamic quality is the properly musical quality of tones.” (21) What VZ has in mind by dynamic quality is this: each tone we hear within a tonal system (C major, for example) “becomes active” and carries with it a tendency or tension (“almost a will”) that strives towards resolution. Ultimate resolution rests in scale-degree 1, which is the tonal center. And each scale-degree points to scale-degree 1 in its own distinct way, giving each tone its own unique dynamic quality. It is this dynamic quality that we hear inherent in the tones that gives them meaning—that makes them music.

VZ is very much a formalist, believing that the meaning of music comes from within, not from without. “Tones do not relate to things, do not express anything about things, represent nothing, betoken nothing, indicate nothing.” (16) Rather, meaning rests for VZ in music’s syntactical structure. Melodies are created when musical tones succeed one another in a sensical manner. Scale degree 2 leads to scale degree 1 in the same way that a transitive verb leads to a direct object.

From here VZ analyzes various theories of how the dynamic qualities came to reside in the tones. He offers and finally dismisses the Pulse Theory which has as its basis the frequential “pulses” of the acoustical pitches of the overtone series He also rejects “Associationism” which claims that the dynamic qualities came to inhere tones through conventionally established use. In other words, we learned to hear these qualities in.

VZ then sets up a dichotomy between the outer tangible world which we encounter through sense perceptions, and the inner world of our thoughts, emotions, and feelings. Every sensation is usually thought to be “made up of two components, one coming from without, physical, one coming from within, psychic.” (58) In other words, we see red in the external world through our eyes, and our inner thoughts add to that perception a feeling tone: warning, excitement, or whatever. The same applies to music. We hear a tone, an acoustical fact, through our ear, and then we apply to it an emotional tone. But music’s third component, namely its dynamic quality, links and ultimately drastically diminishes the other two components: “What makes tone musical tone is so much the work not of the physical and not of the psychic component but of the third, a purely dynamic component, that, compared with the latter, the two others appear to sink to the function of trigger and aftereffect: a physical process sets off the dynamic phenomenon; the latter reverberates in a psychic process.” (61) VZ calls musical tones dynamic symbols. They are unlike the symbolism of words in a language. “Words are signs that refer to things or ideas… they bring to our knowledge the things they signify… The meaning of a tone, however, lies not in what it points to but in the pointing itself; more precisely, in the different way, in the individual gesture, with which each tone points toward the same place.” (68) Tones are dynamic symbols because we hear forces in them.

VZ ends the section with one of his more provocative ideas. The sense of hearing, the hearing of tone more specifically, is unique from the other four senses. Our senses of feeling, seeing, touching and tasting encounter things, objects. We don’t see red, we see red things. We don’t feel smoothness, we feel smooth things. VZ claims though that “[musical] tone (as distinct from ‘noise’) is the only sensation not that of a thing.” (70) The sense of hearing then enables us to encounter an invisible, intangible part of this world. The final page of the section contains the following ideas to which these thoughts lead. Make of them what you will: “There are tones because there is music, not the other way around. Only in tone is the true nature of sound revealed; in the hearing of tones the sense of hearing fulfills its destiny and discovers the side of the world that is its counterpart. Which side is it, since it is not the material-factual side? Whatever the answer may be, we know that the question itself is reasonable… Because music exists, the tangible and visible cannot be the whole of the given world.” (71)

VZ’s writing is engaging and his ideas are always provocative. If one of the main goals of philosophers and music theorists is to question given assumptions which in turn stimulate deep though, VZ by all means succeeds. He is not afraid of the bold and dramatic statement. However, in my opinion, his analysis of melody and tone as being defined entirely by the dynamic quality of tones is far too simplistic. Meaning is not determines solely by this quality. True, the dynamism of tones contribute to our understanding of the syntax of tonal music. (Implied in VZ’s analysis is the idea that “atonal melody” and even “atonal music” are both oxymoronic.) And if the syntax of music is incoherent, we will have trouble making sense of the music. But so much is left unsaid by VZ. Even in the context of tonality, so much more than the dynamic quality of tones contributes to the meaning of music and to our emotional psychic responses to music. After all, these dynamic qualities can be heard in the worst of the worst tonal music.

Stockhausen & the Sound of Music

If anyone knows anything about composer Karlheinz Stockhausen it is that as a cornerstone of the musical avant-garde of the 1950s, his music possesses an austerity that prevents it from being readily accessible—it is a music whose elaborately constructed structure would hardly lead one to consider it natural. In his writings about music, it is therefore surprising how often Stockhausen appeals to the limits of perception and the human body, and to nature in general. Still more surprising is the number of these appeals in an article devoted to electronic or synthesized music.

Stockhausen's 1971 article entitled "Four Criteria of Electronic Music" (in Stockhausen on Music: Lectures and Interviews. New York: M. Boyers, 1989) focuses on the dramatic changes in musical experience and methods that developed after the advent of electronic music in the 1950s. These changes stemmed from a fundamental shift in musical thought to an "idea of music as sound." In other words, the means of the electronic music studio allowed composers to isolate individual sound units for meticulous aural inspection, a process that divorces the sounds from the physical means that produced them. Yet, all the while making these observations, Stockhausen grounds his ideas about purely abstract sounds by connecting them with the physicality of our human bodies.

In dealing with both rhythm and meter he notes that they...

“…are organized in measures, traditionally to a fixed periodicity or tempo for a given movement, say fast, or medium fast, or slow, because everything was based on dancing or body actions, and that’s where the music came from.”

Of our perception of tempo, Stockhausen says that our bodies and bodily activities create in our temporal perspective a “certain middle position” by which all other phenomena are related. We measure any tempo faster than the speed of a relaxed heartbeat (about 70 beats per minute) as being fast and any tempo slower than the heartbeat as being slow. The same can be said of relaxed breathing pulse (about 20 to 30 beats per minute). In sum, this “middle position” is determined “by the body, by the breathing, the heartbeat, the speed with which the limbs—including the fingers—can be moved, the tongue, lips, head and so on.” Stockhausen then applies this idea of a so-called “middle position” to realm of pitch. High and low are determined by the position of the normal speaking voice.

Most fascinating in Stockhausen’s article is the connection he makes between various parameters of music—most notably pitch, rhythm, form—a connection made by what he refers to as a “unified time domain.” These musical parameters or “domains” are separated from each other due to the limits of our perceptual capacities as determined by our bodies. For example, if we take a rhythmic pulse and speed it up to sixteen attacks per second, which is the upper limit of our rhythmic perceptual field, we begin to approach the lowest level of perceptual pitch spectrum. Rhythm thus can transition very smoothly into the domain of pitch. Conversely, if we were to take the same rhythmic pulse and slow it down to a comparable degree, we approach the domain of form. Stockhausen sets, however arbitrarily, the transition between rhythm and form at eight to ten seconds. Thus, time, the musical time inherent even in the isolated sound unit, links the various musical parameters together. In Stockhausen’s summary words, “the ranges of perception are ranges of time, and the time is subdivided by us, by the construction of our bodies and by our organs of perception.” And the electronic music studio provides the composer with useful means of linking these divided musical parameters.

In the end, the isolation and inspection of music as isolated sound has led to fundamental changes in how we hear, create, experience music.

“New means change the method; new methods change the experience, and new experiences change man. Whenever we hear sounds we are changed: we are no longer the same after hearing certain sounds, and this is the more the case when we hear organized sounds, sounds organized by another human being: music.”