Margaret Marco & French Baroque Oboe: The Composer, The Performers, The Audience

T    he change in the disposition of sonic objects in the acoustic space may alter the perspective of the listener. Where various sound-objects move in different directions... the listener may reasonably assume himself to be at a point of rest. If, however, a number of sound-objects are spaced at various points of the compass... might suggest to the listener that he himself is spinning whilst the frame of reference remains still... Depending on the type of material used, closeness may imply intimacy, distance a sense of eavesdropping or of detachment, and, at various stages in between, a sense of interpersonal communication or more formalised social communication... and aural ‘magnifying glass’, quite different from our experience of normal acoustic perspective.”
  —  Trevor Wishart, p. 148.

L ike good butler, a good Baroque composer does not ‘eavesdrop’... she/he ‘discreetly overhears’.

N ot in the sense of surveillance or espionage, of course. More in the sense of parent/guardian or journalist. This CD contains recordings of seldom-heard pieces, infrequently-performed composers.

1. Bouin-Cinquième Suitte: I. Le Prudent-La Prudente
   
2. Cinquième Suitte: II. Tambourin
   
3. Cinquième Suitte: III. Musette
   
4. Cinquième Suitte: IV. Les Oiseaux
   
5. Huguenet-Première Sonate, Op. 1: I. Grave
   
6. Première Sonate, Op. 1: II. Gay-Grave
   
7. Première Sonate, Op. 1: III. Sicilienne
   
8. Première Sonate, Op. 1: IV. Gigue
   
9. Chedeville-Sixième Sonate, Op. 3: I. La Rivièr d'hier
   
10. Sixième Sonate, Op. 3: II. La Dificile
    
11. Sixième Sonate, Op. 3: III. Rondeau
    
12. Sixième Sonate, Op. 3: IV. Les Adieux de Brunoy
    
13. Naudot-Sixième Sonate en Trio, Op. 7: I. Musette
    
14. Sixième Sonate en Trio, Op. 7: II. Gavotte
    
15. Sixième Sonate en Trio, Op. 7: III. Allemande
    
16. Sixième Sonate en Trio, Op. 7: IV. Menuet
    
17. Sixième Sonate en Trio, Op. 7: V. Sarabande
    
18. Sixième Sonate en Trio, Op. 7: VI. Gigue
    
19. Naudot-Caprice en Trio, Op. 7: I. Caprice
    
20. Caprice en Trio, Op. 7: II. Tambourin
    
21. Caprice en Trio, Op. 7: III. Menuet
    
22. Caprice en Trio, Op. 7: IV. Chaconne

    [50-sec clip, Margaret Marco, Jacques-Christophe Huguenet, ‘Première Sonate – IV. Gigue’, 1.6MB MP3]


    [50-sec clip, Margaret Marco, Nicolas Chedeville, ‘Sixième Sonate – IV. Les Adieux de Brunoy’, 1.6MB MP3]


    [50-sec clip, Margaret Marco, Jacques-Christophe Naudot, ‘Sixième Sonate – VI. Gigue’, 1.6MB MP3]

• Margaret Marco, oboe
  
• Barbara Bishop, oboe
  
• Matthew Herren, cello
  
• Rebecca Bell, harpsichord

T hese sonatas are not merely ‘evocative’. They report on particular kinds of relationships—between performers and their audience; between composers and performers and patrons. There are hints in these 18^th Century works, about the nature of such relationships that may have been distinctly French, plus elements that were widely-traveled... The rhythms and textures, the binary or rounded binary form with sectional repeats, the predominance of dance-inspired forms such as the courante, rigaudon, menuet, and gigue.

H idden Gems’ brings together works that share natural affinities characteristic of the time. But hearing them together illuminates some of their not-so-obvious ‘hidden’ qualities as well. Not only do the individual pieces seem to provide a [backhanded; unintended] commentary on each other, the pieces taken together embody who it was these composers were writing for. The pieces suggest how the performers conceived of their audiences. And the pieces contain clues about the aristocratic patrons and how they wished to be diverted and perceived by each other: a society that delighted in ‘overhearing’ juicy conversations. Even the music suggests ‘positioning’ in order to surreptitiously overhear things and repeat them to others, a rhetoric of reciprocal pleasure...

L    anger’s [Philosophy in a New Key: A Study in the Symbolism of Reason, Rite, and Art, 1957, p. 218] philosophy [portrays] ... music-making as a symptom of ... eavesdropping. If music were only a matter of releasing pent-up personal desire, music’s formal excellence would not matter the way it does. In fact, the more ‘self-expressive’ something is, the less musical it is likely to be. Music, Langer is convinced, is not about exposing, discharging, or expressing feeling; and yet, it is clearly related to feeling in some way. How might that be? Simply, music is a presentational symbol; and as such it is neither a stimulus nor a symptom of feeling: it is ‘not the cause or the cure of feelings, but their logical expression’.”
  —  Wayne Bowman, p.210.

V    arious performative strategies that ‘opera buffa’ adopts in the rhetoric of pleasure... [which] cannot exist without the eavesdropping presence of the audience.”
  —  Downing Thomas, p. 228.

W hile Chedeville and Huguenet and Naudot were part of the same tradition, culturally and musically, their backgrounds were very different. Nicolas Chedeville (1705-1782) was a prolific composer and instrument maker, a member of the Douze Grands Hautbois, a group of oboists and bassoonists who performed for state ceremonies during the reigns of Kings Louis XIV and XV. Jacques Christophe Huguenet (1680-1729) was a violinist and composer, appointed an ordinaire of the Royal Chamber in 1710 and a member of the Petits violons. Jacques-Christophe Naudot (1690-1762) was a self-taught Parisian flautist who had many aristocratic pupils and patrons. By contrast, not much is known about Jean-Francois Bouin; even his birth and death dates are not known. But from the title page of his compositions we know that he was a publisher and teacher of the ever-disparaged ‘vielle’ (hurdy-gurdy), about which he wrote a large, erudite, defensive tome. The righteous pique he develops in this book makes it a satisfying, if exotic, read—somewhat like reading transcripts of lawyers’ celebrated pleadings in courts of law, on behalf of hurdy-gurdies in the dock.

T hese works show sophisticated adults who as a salon game pretend to be children, amusing themselves with stylizations of fashionable dances. The differences in the composers’ approaches, and indeed, of their psychological make-up are evident enough. But the similarities of gesture and rhetoric are also evident. Marco’s and her colleagues’ musicianship is excellent, enabling us to hear and imagine these things (stylized ‘eavesdropping’ behaviors, relished and storied) beyond the musical texts themselves.

I  admit I bought this CD with the somewhat ‘detached’ intention of learning something about composers I’d never before heard and woodwind ensemble literature about which I was totally ignorant until now. But I am thrilled to have found not a pallid scholarly account but instead a rich provocation to Baroque dreaming and conjecture, in French. Cool!

M argaret Marco is principal oboe with the Kansas City Chamber Orchestra and has appeared with various orchestras including the Orquesta Sinfònica de Maracaibo, the Rome Festival Orchestra, the Dubuque (IA) Symphony and the St. Joseph (MO) Symphony. She is the Associate Professor of Oboe at the University of Kansas and holds degrees from Northwestern University, University of Iowa, and University of Illinois in Champaign-Urbana. She served as President of the Midwest Double Reed Society and performs frequently on Kansas Public Radio and with the flute, oboe, piano trio Allègresse. She currently serves on the Executive Committee of the International Double Reed Society as the coordinator of the Fernand Gillet-Hugo Fox International Oboe Competition.

R ebecca Bell, harpsichordist, studied at the Royal College of Music in London, where she won the prize for clavichord playing while studying with Ruth Dyson and Robert Woolley. She has concertized in the U.S., Canada, England, the Netherlands, Italy, Austria and Germany. She is a founding member of Summerfest Kansas City where she served as the Artistic Director from 1995-1999. She is the harpsichordist for the Kansas City Symphony and the Kansas City Chamber Orchestra.

M atthew Herren has performed at Alice Tully Hall at Lincoln Center and The National Gallery in Washington and has recorded orchestral and chamber music for the Deutsche Grammophon, Sony, Atlantic, Helicon and London Decca Labels with The Orchestra of St. Luke’s. His performances have been broadcast on NPR’s Performance Today. Herren performs regularly with The American Composers Orchestra, The New York Oratorio Society, and The New York Concert Singers, Trio Fedele, The Kansas City Symphony, Kansas City Chamber Orchestra and Chamber Music Society.

B arbara Bishop is Associate Principal Oboe with the Kansas City Symphony and co-principal of the Kansas City Chamber Orchestra and Assistant Professor of oboe at the University of Missouri-Kansas City Conservatory. She trained at the Eastman School and has a Master of Music degree from the University of Minnesota. She is a regular Guest Principal with the Saint Paul Chamber Orchestra.

• Margaret Marco page at KU
  
• Marco et al. Hidden Gems: Oboe sonatas of the French Baroque. (KPR, 2009.)
  
• MargaretMarco.com
  
• Marco M. French Baroque works for oboe in the Bibiotheque Nationale, Paris. The Double Reed (IDRS) 2004; 27: 61-4. [200KB pdf]
  
• Midwest Double-Reed Society
  
• Bowman W. Philosophical Perspectives on Music. Oxford Univ, 1998.
  
• Thomas D. Aesthetics of Opera in the Ancien Régime, 1647-1785. Cambridge Univ, 2009.
  
• Wishart T. On Sonic Art. Routledge, 1996.
  
• Hurdy-gurdies at luthiers' exhibit, at Rencontres Internationales de Luthiers et Mâitres Sonneurs, 11-15-JUL-2009, Castle of Ars, Saint-Chartier, France.

Ambient-Aleatoric Representation: Lisa Bielawa’s ‘Chance Encounter’

I    s such musical representation ‘depiction’? Is the listener to imagine perceiving a struggle, [or a lover’s kiss]? The mode of perception may be indeterminate. It need not be fictional that it is, for example, by a combination of introspection, kinesthetic sensation, and vision that one perceives the struggle (one’s own), nor that one merely sees and hears it occurring (a struggle among others). It might still be fictional that in some manner or other one does perceive the struggle. One has a sense of it occurring here and now…
  —  Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 341.

I f you happen to be in New York next Friday, on Valentine’s Eve, you might like to go to the Whitney Museum of American Art (945 Madison Ave at 75th Street), to hear Knights Chamber Orchestra and soprano Susan Narucki perform Lisa Bielawa’s composition, ‘Chance Encounter’. The event is Friday, February 13, with two performances, one at 6:50 pm and the other at 8:05 pm. It’s free with admission to the Whitney under their ‘pay-what-you-wish’ policy on Fridays. No tickets or reservations are required.

C hance Encounter’ is a 35-minute piece in, and about, transient public space with texts overheard in transient, public spaces. Susan Narucki and 12 instrumentalists converge and diverge, one or several at a time, in the context of a public space that contains whatever [transient] objects and [transient] occupants (including you, if you attend) as it may—plus whatever occurrences and ambient environmental sounds arise spontaneously in the space during the performance. Susan will sing songs and arias constructed of extemporaneous utterances that were collected in transient public spaces. The interaction of these vocal utterances/sung texts and the instrumental parts amounts to a re-enactment of a private (yet collective) experience of the then-current performance space itself— as well as a meta-enactment of the original eavesdropped utterances (texts) and spaces. The effect is an exciting, haptically-rich chamber music experience—new and different each time it is performed.

I    don’t do anything to it – it just comes out like this.
I’m trying to catch my breath.
I hope they know what they’re doing.
I found a place where we can sit together…
  —  Lisa Bielawa and Susan Narucki, text excerpt from ‘Chance Encounter’, ambient remarks, overheard in a public space.

C ontinuing my thread on intertextuality and representation from the previous CMT post, I want to suggest that even a composition like ‘Chance Encounter’ can be considered ‘representational’. At least it would be if we agree with the analysis of philosopher Kendall Walton.

F    ictional representation’ would point clearly to the exclusion of non-fiction. But I resist the implication that [the category we shall discuss] is a species of a larger class of ‘representations’ … ‘Mimesis’, with its distinguished history, can be understood to correspond roughly to ‘representation’ in my sense … but I disavow any implied commitment either to a ‘picture theory’ of language (or ‘symbols’) or a ‘correspondence theory’ of truth, or to an ‘imitation theory’ of depiction.
  —  Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 3.

T ransient, stochastic, ambient qualities don’t get explicit treatment in Walton’s book, ‘Mimesis’. But some of the examples he uses to illustrate some of his arguments do have those qualities. Just have to extrapolate a little bit; read between the lines.

I f a piece of music is ambient and aleatoric, it’s impossible to ‘know the piece well’ in Walton’s sense. The stochastic performance-time indirection inherent in transient configurations of listeners and passers-by in the performance space preempts listeners’ forming any expectations—other than maybe expecting nothing in particular, or expecting, say, to be surprised by unpredictable rhythmic and harmonic/timbral textures and chance interactions between the text and the music. Lisa and the chamber artists place you in a state of persistent anticipation and collaborative mimesis ...

A    ny ‘non-figurative’ or ‘non-objective’ painting that is to be seen in some figure-ground will qualify [as representational]. So, probably, will any design making use of what Gestalt psychologists call ‘closure’: such a design will mandate our imagining a square, for example, when it contains only hints of one. Jackson Pollock’s dripped and splashed paintings may turn out to generate fictional truths about [the processes of--] dripping and splashing. Most or even all music will likely have to be considered representational, for analogous reasons.
  —  Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 56.

C hance Encounter’ was co-conceived by Lisa with Susan Narucki. Lisa composed the piece for Susan and the New York-based Knights Chamber Orchestra. The overheard texts that were selected and transcribed may be ‘found’ objects, but they’re not ‘random’ ones—and their orchestration isn’t mechanical or haphazard or chaotic; they were selected in such a way so as to be capable of forming a coherent narrative arc and being emotionally parsed—by first-time participants/listeners as well as by those who have prior acquaintance with the work. The conceit is a non-figurative ‘ambience and transience as inescapable elements of the human condition’ that acknowledges and includes the space and the ad hoc, transient listeners and passers-by as quasi-performers.

B ut Bielawa clearly had a specific, coherent vision—one that’s beautifully and ably rendered here, with apt, if variable, emotional impact on virtually everyone present. The personnel for any particular performance can change; the sequence and timing can change; the ambient sounds are different each time; the visual and acoustic elements of the performance space are different each time—and all this ‘run-time indirection’ contributes to the representation ... of the human impossibility of mastering or controlling or insuring or preventing any aspect of life, or death. Linguists might term Lisa’s compositional grammar in this piece ‘agglutinative’, because of the multiple [transient] affixes/morphemes per phrase ...

A    central thesis of Leonard Meyer’s ‘Emotion and Meaning in Music’ is that ‘affect or emotion is aroused when an expectation—a tendency to respond—activated by the musical stimulus, is temporarily inhibited or permanently blocked.’ (p. 31) The appreciation of music derives largely, he claims, from frustrations of expectations about how the music will proceed. In the case of a deceptive cadence, listeners expect the tonic to follow the dominant, and they experience ‘affect’ when it does not. This may be an accurate description of the experience of the first-time listener, but what about the listener who knows the piece well? … It is fictional that the listener expects the tonic, regardless of what she actually expects, and it is fictional that she is surprised to hear the submediant or whatever occurs instead. This makes music a ‘prop’ in a game of make-believe and, hence, representational in our sense, in much the way that non-figurative painting is representational.
  —  Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 262.

T he piece is nominally ‘in and about transient public space’, as Lisa puts it in her program notes. But it’s also and more deeply about our relationships with each other and with the world. The effect you experience when immersed in a performance of ‘Chance Encounter’ is one of intense ‘expectancy’. It does have a ‘beginning’, a ‘middle’, and an ‘end’. It is possible, were ‘Chance Encounter’ extended to several hours or more in length—like an ultra-long Morton Feldman or John Cage or Karlheinz Stockhausen experiment (instead of Chance Encounter’s 35 minutes, as-composed)—that the effect would wear off, or that the narrative arc would be lost—or that the cognitive and attentional demands, becoming after awhile unsustainable, would cause our emotional response to mutate and the meaning of the piece to shift.

B ut, as-composed, ‘Chance Encounter’ is just the right length—poignant, amusing, thought-provoking, uplifting, satisfyingly listenable. It precipitates something of a ‘tikkun olam’ / ‘repair the broken world, one shard at a time’ / ‘if not us, who? if not now, when?’ sizzle in the audience. The displacement of classically-trained musicians, out of venerable-dear-ossified concert halls and into up-close contact with broader society with more socioeconomic and ethnic diversity, like chamber music in bars or like some of what Greg Sandow exhorts us to do, to make serious music more vibrant and accessible.

I    n Haydn’s String Quartet ‘The Bird’, op. 32, it is fictional that one hears the chirping of birds… A ‘depiction’, then, is a representation whose function is to serve as a ‘prop’ in rich and vivid perceptual games of make-believe.
  —  Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 296.

W    hen music is representational, is it [necessarily] ‘depictive’? Music and painting appear to be alike in being ‘perceptual’ arts, in contrast to literature… If music is a perceptual art, won’t musical works [always] be ‘props’ in perceptual games? The answer is, often not… In the case of much ‘expressive’ music, it may be fictional not that one sees or hears or otherwise perceives external things, but that one experiences or is aware of (one’s own) feelings or emotions or sensations or sentiments or moods. The listener imagines experiencing excitement, passion, fervor, … It may be fictional of one’s actual awareness of auditory sensations that it is an awareness of such feelings. In place of fictional perception of external objects, then, we have fictional introspection or fictional self-awareness. If I am right, this is likely to be true even of such stalwarts of musical purity as Bach’s ‘Art of the Fugue’. And to whatever extent introspection is analogous to the ‘external’, it will be reasonable to expand our understanding of ‘depiction’ to include this.
  —  Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 334.

• susan narucki, soprano
  
• kyle armbrust, viola
  
• mike atkinson, horn
  
• christina courtin, violin
  
• gareth flowers, trumpet
  
• josh frank, trumpet
  
• adam hollander, oboe
  
• colin jacobsen, violin
  
• eric jacobsen, cello
  
• stephen menotti, trombone
  
• alex sopp, flute
  
• lance suzuki, flute.

Y ou can get a sense of the beauty of the indeterminacy that Lisa and her collaborators achieve by looking at this segment of ‘Chance Encounters’ from a 2007 performance, on YouTube:

G    ame worlds are paramount in music in a way that they are not in painting. The music still qualifies as representational in our sense: its function is to serve as a ‘prop’ in the listeners’ [introspective fictions and] games. … Listening to music [and performing it--] is thus more like dreaming; one’s imaginative activity is largely solitary [even when it is done in the company of others]. You and I will not, fictionally, notice or learn about something and later compare … when we attend a concert together, we might explain to each other what fictionally we feel; this is like telling our dreams to each other at breakfast. And it can be fictional that we compare notes on what we feel when we hear [perform] the music. But we cannot fictionally compare what we feel about such-and-such a mutually observed event or situation or person. We end up talking about the music, rather than participating verbally together in a game of make-believe using the music as a prop.
  —  Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 337.

C hance Encounter’ songs and arias are made up entirely of speech overheard in transient public spaces including airports, sidewalks, streets, parks, cafes, buses and the subway. Bielawa blogged about her ‘eavesdropping existence’ during the period when she was composing ‘Chance Encounter’. You can read her blog here.

M    usical depictions are ‘weak’ in point-of-view [compared to paintings or literature]. When sounds are depicted, very little is fictional, usually, with respect to the angle and distance… When it is fictional of the listener that she hears in the musical motifs a brook gurgling, is it fictional that she hears it from upstream or downstream, from the side or from above, from near or from afar?
  —  Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 340.

Y es, there is the composer’s/eavesdropper’s viewpoint—the issue of privacy. But it is not at all like capturing ‘found sound’ waveforms in the field, and then reproducing them in some mash-up, like some composers of electroacoustic would do. Nor is it like representational art that generifies and refers to extraneous utterances of anonymous any-woman/every-man. Nor are there any ‘mondegreens’ or misheard phrases, at least not in this ‘Chance Encounter’. Bielawa’s composerly role is not at all like a detached observer of a gurgling brook, rendering a representation of those sounds in music.

I nstead, it is musical anthropology in the era of Web 2.0—and the anthropologist is never ‘neutral’ or purely ‘reportorial’, something Margaret Mead used to point out. In ‘Chance Encounter’, anthropology becomes art… we become installation art, and participate in the uniqueness and immediacy of whatever, musically, is created. It reminds me of some of the classical music events I have attended in Second Life, where performers and other virtual attendees array themselves in unpredictable configurations, and ambient sounds and moving imagery are variable.

F rom what I have heard of it, ‘Chance Encounter’ does not seek to subvert the natural expressive properties of the vocal or instrumental parts into a chaotic process or renounce the traditional control that the composer over the material as deep or ‘radical’ indeterminists (like Cage) do. Lisa is not a ‘radical indeterminist’: sounds and utterances do not have equal value, nor is their placement in time or pitch or timbre fungible. Sounds are chosen according to aesthetic principles by the composer and by the performers, and the choices are guided by the narrative and other intentions that they share, with humanly-varying comprehension and faithfulness. So it seems to me that ‘Chance Encounter’ probably embodies an in-between stance, somewhere between ‘moderate indeterminacy’ and ‘moderate aleatorics’. (In ‘strong aleatorics’ or ‘radical aleatorics’, the indeterminacy is controlled more explicitly by the composer—usually by offering the performers a smaller number of possibilities to choose from, and usually not treating the transient performance space or the transient audience and passers-by as part of the acoustic ‘palette’.)

A ttend the event at the Whitney next Friday if you can. I’m sure you’ll enjoy it. Say ‘Hi’ to Lisa and Susan and the Knights or, alternatively, gift them with some ambient original art-utterance that’s worth their overhearing/eavesdropping.

I    remember the following: four hundred drunken Finns swarming through the Soviet passport control [pushing and cursing in the Tallinn, Estonia, airport] ... their boots making the noise of dried blood... the metaphysical noise [can only, I think, be] called ‘the edge of Night’.
  —  Stephen Kuusisto, ‘Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening’, p. 180 (Kuusisto is blind)

• Knights Chamber Orchestra website
  
• Lisa Bielawa website
  
• Lisa Bielawa blog
  
• Susan Narucki website
  
• Whitney Museum
  
• Creative-Capital.org
  
• New York State Council on the Arts (NYSCA)
  
• Lower Manhattan Cultural Council
  
• Second Life
  
• DSM. Second Life: Chamber music mixed reality and virtual reality. CMT blog, 03-JUL-2007.
  
• Second Life Fontana Music Town (classical)
  
• DSM. Sound Art: Beyond mere music. CMT blog, 26-APR-2008.
  
• Mondegreens page at Wikipedia
  
• Boellstorff T. Coming of Age in Second Life: An Anthropologist Explores the Virtually Human. Princeton Univ, 2008.
  
• Bruns A. Blogs, Wikipedia, Second Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage. Peter Lang, 2008.
  
• Cage J. 'Indeterminacy', in Silence: Lectures and Writings. Wesleyan Univ, 1961, pp. 35-40.
  
• Castronova E. Exodus to the Virtual World: How Online Fun Is Changing Reality. Palgrave-Macmillan, 2008.
  
• Chase N, Clark J. Platform Second Life: Developing Real World Applications. Manning, 2009.
  
• Gaylin A. Eavesdropping in the Novel from Austen to Proust. Cambridge Univ, 2003.
  
• Jenkins H. Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide. NYU, 2008.
  
• Kuusisto S. Eavesdropping: A Memoir of Blindness and Listening. Norton, 2006.
  
• Malaby T. Making Virtual Worlds: Linden Lab and Second Life. Cornell Univ, 2009.
  
• Meadows M. I, Avatar: The Culture and Consequences of Having a Second Life. New Riders, 2008.
  
• Meyer L. Emotion and Meaning in Music. Univ Chicago, 1961.
  
• Ray B. I Keee You!!: A Collection of Overheards. Atomic, 2008.
  
• Rufer-Bach K. The Second Life Grid: The Official Guide to Communication, Collaboration, and Community Engagement. Sybex, 2009.
  
• Rymaszewski M, et al. Second Life: The Official Guide. 2e. Sybex, 2008.
  
• Walton K. Mimesis as Make-Believe. Harvard Univ, 2006.
  
• Weber A, Rufer-Bach K, Platel R. Creating Your World: The Official Guide to Advanced Content Creation for Second Life. Sybex, 2007.

D    o Jackson Pollock’s [drip-and-splatter] paintings represent the actions by which they were made? Should we allow that ‘expressive’ music ‘represents’ emotions or the experiencing of emotions? Is expression a species of representation? Program music is representational, no doubt, but what about background/ambient music in film? How shall we classify Stravinsky’s ‘Pulcinella Suite’, Jasper Johns’s targets and flags, Duchamp’s ready-mades, or happenings? The existence of borderline or undecidable cases, even vast numbers of them, is not the problem. What is of concern is the fact that we cannot easily say why something does or does not count as representational.
  —  Kendall Walton, Mimesis as Make-Believe, p. 2.