jwilzewske: The Rest is Not ‘Noise’: Can Concerts with Performers’ Explications between Works Be ‘Mashups’?

Georges Braque, Violin & Candle Mashup, 1910

W o Menschen singen lass dich ruhig nieder.
Denn böse Menschen signen keine Lieder.
[Where people are singing, rest easy.
Because bad people sing no songs.]”
— German proverb/rhyme.

The ‘unity’ of a concert experience—its musical components and its narrative components—occasioned a remark by Allan Kozinn in the New York Times last week, in his review of a Lark Chamber Artists concert. The concert was comprised of a diverse array of [excerpts of] works, ranging from Brahms’s Quintet Op. 111, Jennifer Higdon’s ‘Soliloquy’, John Adams’s ‘Book of Alleged Dances’, and Giovanni Sollima’s ‘Waves’. Allan wrote, “That’s right, just the Allegro [movement of the Brahms Quintet]. Several works were represented by excerpted movements. Generally, this is a bad idea, unless you can argue that individual movements from diverse works add up to a kind of classical mashup. But that’s an assertion you can’t make if, as in this case, each work is given a spoken introduction.”

[In popular multimedia/web-software vernacular, a ‘mashup’ is a ‘composite’ mix of elements created and edited from more than one source, so as to appear as one thing.]

Why would Allan say those things? What authority ever defined once and forever what mashups are or could be? (If anything, the term ‘mashup’ deeply resists any crisp or immutable definition because the inherently ‘populist’ nature of the mashup idiom defies elites and top-down authority, top-down ‘definitions’.)

And, anyhow, presenters’ ‘spoken introduction’ elements are regularly written or extemporized with great poetical and editorial care. Presenters’ remarks are ‘composed’ as programming elements in their own right, to complement and inform the music. Presenters should not be backhandedly demeaned as mere shills/impresarios/educators making ‘noise’, as Kozinn’s comment appears to do!

What’s more, a presenter’s remarks need not be didactic, in the way that Kozinn’s comment implicitly presumes. The presenter may say things that are instead ironical or provocative or enigmatic—for the express purpose of adding drama or stimulation or poignancy to the concert experience.

Or the presenter (or the author of Program Notes, or others) may construct the narrative so as to manifest certain ‘illocutionary’ expressive acts, ones that complement the meanings and modulate the meanings of the musical elements in the conglomerated ‘mashup’. ‘Illocutionary’ is a fancy word that means indirect effects that go beyond the literal text. But it also means that the indirect effects or implications may be multi-layered or different from the superficial or literal sense of the expressions. In English, for example, the interrogative mood is supposed to indicate that the utterance is intended as a question; the directive mood indicates that the utterance is intended as a ‘directive’ illocutionary act (an order, a request, etc.); the words ‘I promise’ are supposed to indicate that the utterance is intended as a commitment.

R ecall that, after Schubert’s death, his brother cut some of Schubert’s scores into small pieces and gave each piece, consisting of a few bars, to Schubert’s favorite pupils. And this act, as a sign of deep piety, is just as understandable as the different act of keeping the scores untouched, accessible to no-one. And if Schubert’s brother had burned the scores, that, too, would have been understandable as a different act of piety.”
— Ludwig Wittgenstein.

Possible illocutionary gestures in English include word-order, stress, intonation contour, punctuation, the mood of the verb, and ‘performative’ verbs. And if I say ‘I promise’ in with an upward pitch inflection at the end (as though asking a question about promising) or with a sarcastic tone, then my expression may not be a commitment at all; it may be a repudiation of any commitment. ‘Illocutionary act’ is a technical term introduced in 1962 by John L. Austin in philosophy-of-mind and linguistics investigations concerning what he called ‘performative’ and ‘constative utterances’. [Of course, ‘utterances’ can be music or text or imagery, not just speech.]

According to Austin’s ‘How to Do Things With Words’, an illocutionary act is an act (1) for the performance of which I make it clear to some other person that the act is or has been or soon will be or should be performed, and (2) the performance of which involves ‘consequences’ like rights, commitments, interpretations, or obligations. For example, in order to successfully ‘perform’ a promise I must make clear to my audience that the promise occurs, and then undertake the obligation to do the promised thing (or induce somebody else to do it). It’s a compound expression. It’s a type of mashup.

Austin introduced the concept of ‘illocutionary [speech] act’ by means of a contrast with other kinds of acts: the illocutionary act, he said, is an act performed in the course of saying something else, as contrasted with a ‘locutionary act’ (the act of saying some literal thing), and also contrasted with a ‘perlocutionary act’ (an act performed by saying something).

Kozinn’s glib ‘mashup’ comment, though, inadvertently relegates presenters’ narratives and the Program Notes authors’ texts to the dust bin—as something to be ignored, not part of the concert experience-proper—if we follow the logic of his remark to its conclusion.

Backhandedly, Allan’s attitude and comment also exalt a kind of traditional and deliberate ‘monumentality’ in classical music programming—a sort of ‘unitary executive’ politics, somewhat like Bruckner’s politics. “There is a pecking-order, and I shall tell you what that pecking-order is, and you shall passively receive it and like it and abide by it.” It is a composer pecking-order and a tradition-bound, conventionality-obsessed pecking-order.

I’m sure that Allan means well, but his comment also seems broadly defamatory and hostile to the whole idea of “individual movements from diverse works, adding up to a kind of classical mashup”—as if the only legitimate way, the only aesthetically and morally acceptable way, to perform a composer’s work is in its entirety. You must perform all of its movements, with all of the movements in the original sequence, and with no apocryphal or extraneous material appended or inserted or layered on top of it, palimpsest-style. Well, damn. I guess all of us electroacoustic folks should go shrivel up and die then. I guess all of us who like to hear chamber music excerpts played in bars should roll over and die.

No. I won’t curl up and die. I like my eclectic tastes, and I bet you do, too. I like to create peculiar playlists on my iPod—sequences that no sane presenter or chamber music ensemble would ever put on a program together. I like the quirkiness of my Last.fm dynamic impromptu mashups. I like to explore different combinations and emotional paths that were never envisioned by the composers whose pieces I put back-to-back. I like to attend concerts by expansive-minded artists and presenters who push the envelope, chart new waters.

Don’t get me wrong: the composer’s intentions do have moral standing and should receive due respect; misusing/abusing a work is never a good idea. But I do favor a ‘multiple drafts’ model of musical interpretation and meaning production, like Steven Jan advocates in his book, ‘Memetics of Music’. The individual (performer; audience member; composer; presenter) is regarded as the sum of her/his genotype and its phenotypic effects, together with her/his ‘memotypes’ and their ‘phemotypic’ effects. Each individual is endowed with inalienable musicality, albeit of different types and in different amounts. Each of us brings to our musical experiences her/his genetic and memetic heritage, conditioning, and intentions. Instead of the composer’s musicality and genetic and musical memetic ‘fitness’ always trumping all the rest of us, the ‘multiple drafts’ model contends that musical performances inevitably shape themselves—through interactions with the intentionality and musicality that each of the rest of us possesses. Mashups empower the rest of us, not just the composers, presenters, and code-heads.

P opfly is a mashup tool for end-users, not for code-heads.”
— Steve Ballmer, Microsoft.

The idea of the composers and artists and audience members as vessels or interconnected conduits for the flow and production of individualized meaning is a centuries-old theme in music history. Indeed, Mozart’s rants against the Archbishop of Salzburg’s provincialism include implications that composers are memetic ‘vessels’, whose expressive authority and merit depend not only on talent but on what memes fill the vessels.

A fellow of mediocre talent will remain a mediocrity, whether he travels or not; but one of superior talent, which without impiety I cannot deny that I possess, will go to seed if he always remains in the same province.”
— E. Anderson, tr. Letters of Mozart and his Family. 3e. Macmillan, 1985. P. 612, letter 331.

We have web mashups and music mashups. The former combine data from more than one source into a single integrated app. An example is cartographic data from Google Maps plus concert data from IONARTS blog, thereby creating a new web service that was not originally provided by either source.

Mashups generally combine content-elements from multiple sources and hide the disparate sourcing behind a unified user interface that obscures the bricolage. ‘Mashups’ and ‘portals’ are both content-aggregation technologies. Portals are older technology designed as an extension to traditional dynamic web applications, in which the process of converting data content into marked-up web pages is split into two phases: generation of markup ‘fragments’. and software-based automatic composition of the fragments into ‘pages’ to be served up to the client app. Each of these markup fragments is generated by a ‘portlet’, and the portal app synthesizes them into a single web page. Portlets may be hosted locally on the portal server or remotely on another server.

Portal technology is server-side, presentation-tier aggregation. It can’t be used to drive higher-level app integration or handle illocutionary interactive user gestures, two-phase transaction commits and roll-backs, or messaging-based redirection of the app-based conversation or search. Portal technology is heavy-handed composer/presenter-dominated politics.

Mashups are Web 2.0 composer/presenter/performer/audience politics. Maybe understanding and accepting and programming mashups is a ‘generational’ thing, an ‘age’ thing, a ‘class’ thing. I hope not. Mashups differ from portals in the following respects:

	Portal	Mashup
Classification	Older technology, extension to web services model; data models coerce semantics	Newer Web 2.0 distributed agent/broker/swarm technology; RDF/OWL data models do not impose top-down ontology and semantics
Compositional Method and Form	Approaches aggregation by splitting role of web services into two phases (markup generation and aggregation of markup fragments), privileging the role of programmer/composer	Adopts an egalitarian approach to content aggregation without regard to markup or authorship
Content Dependencies	Aggregates presentation-oriented markup fragments (HTML, WML, XML, etc.)	Can operate on pure XML content and also on presentation-oriented content (e.g., MusicXML)
Location Dependencies	Content aggregation takes place on the server	Content aggregation can take place either on the server or on the client
Aggregation Style	‘Salad Bar’ style (aggregated content is presented ‘side-by-side’ without overlaps)	‘Melting Pot’ style (individual content may be combined in arbitrary ways, resulting in flexible hybrid content)
Event Model	‘Read’ and ‘update’ event models are defined through a specific portlet API	CRUD operations are based on REST architectural principles, but no formal API exists
Relevant Standards	Portlet behavior is governed by standards JSR 168, JSR 286 and WSRP, although portal page layout and portal functionality are undefined and vendor-specific	Base standard is XML Data Interchange. RSS and Atom are commonly used. More specific mashup standards are expected to emerge.

Incidentally, MusicXML does not yet have an explicit ‘mashup’ ontology and syntax and semantics spec. (Maybe it needs one, preferably as an RDF/OWL ontology, not just low-level XML!) MusicXML 2.0 does have an implicit way to compose a mashup. Currently, MusicXML™ has standard specs to represent—Partwise DTD, where the partwise.dtd file represents a score by part/instrument/voice, and Timewise DTD where timewise.dtd represents a score by time/measure. The partwise.dtd contains measures within each part, while timewise.dtd contains parts within each measure. XSLT stylesheets are provided to couple the two DTDs.

The partwise and timewise score DTDs represent a single movement of music or track. Multiple movements or other musical collections are presented using an Opus DTD opus.dtd file. An opus.dtd MusicXML file contains XLinks to the individual scores, and, by default, they are serial. But there is nothing currently in the MusicXML spec that forbids Timewise DTD from coupling two or more scores, instead of two or more parts. Or, alternatively, you could just instantiate two or more scores in a merged partwise.dtd to create a synthetic mashup with the excerpts and sequences and synchronization you want.

This post has been a very long-winded way of saying, Sing! Play! Devise exotic musical mashups, in whatever ways suit you! Rest easy! People are doing music! (Even us people who use MusicXML for more than just writing and publishing music with Finale™ and Sibelius™ and LilyPond™ software.)

Remember, as they say in Germany, bad people sing no songs. Bad people just don’t make chamber music mashups.

Ken Ueno v. Aaron Jay Kernis composer Flickr Fight Web 2.0 Mashup

L ast night we were finishing off a jam cake and a cheesecake that were in the fridge so my wife and I both had slim slices. I ate my jam cake first, then my cheesecake. My wife ate them alternating bites of one with bites of the other. I guess her approach stopped short of stacking them and mashing them irrevocably together with her fork. She commented on our different methods. And I said, ‘But I like cheesecake, and I like jam cake. And eating them the way you do, I don’t think I get either.’ But there is a flaw in this analogy. In jam cake or cheesecake, a single bite gives us the entire essence of the cake (you’ve got to get some icing on the fork too, though, with the former, and crust for the latter), whereas I’d have to spend time with Bach or Led Zeppelin—to the extent of a movement, in the case of a suite or concerto (arguably) or the whole of the Goldbergs; and, on the other hand, through the entirety of ‘The Rain Song,’ unless one is of the feeling that an entire album constitutes the artwork (which, in Led Zeppelin’s case is not so much the case). So it would depend, in the case of the cakes, on being able mentally to separate the two, and on how quickly one can make that happen. Perhaps my wife can make the shift completely much more quickly than I, and enjoy, savor, each essence completely with a each single bite; perhaps my capacity is such that I need the saturation of a greater amount of cake, given the imminent distraction of the next cake on my plate, or the previous one. Maybe I could be satisfied with the first four bars, or just the theme, of Goldberg, with memory providing the whole of the essence, before moving on to just the guitar solo of the live version of ‘Stairway to Heaven.’ Or maybe you could, but I couldn’t... I’d be sorry to hear just one movement of Brahms in concert, but what if one doesn't know any better? What if one hasn’t trained oneself ... to expect the other movements and not feel the presentation is complete without them? Nineteenth-century listeners would’ve been much less concerned about it, and twenty-first-century listeners who aren’t primarily immersed in this so-called concert music tradition aren’t concerned about it, given the fact that their iPod shuffles through their Minor Threat, Death Cab for Cutie, and Haydn playlists without value/stylistic judgment. [Even though I don’t feel like changing my way of listening], I can acknowledge that mine isn’t the only way to listen.”
— Robert Kirzinger, email, 19-JAN-2008.

jwilzewske

Saturday, January 19, 2008

The Rest is Not ‘Noise’: Can Concerts with Performers’ Explications between Works Be ‘Mashups’?

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