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discussion

a conversation about music and history

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dan
Jul 10 2005
10:56 pm

grant and i have been having an e-discussion about music and history, and various related topics that we thought might be interesting to some cino readers, so we decided to post the conversation here. Of course everyone is welcome to join in.

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dan
Jul 10 2005
10:57 pm

Dan,
We will only have two weekends to spend in PA and one will probably be in New York. The other might be Philadelphia or Washington D.C. It’s too bad we might not be able to get together. I’ve been wanting to have a conversation with you about music and history. Maybe we should do it on *cino.
Grant.

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dan
Jul 10 2005
10:58 pm

Hi Grant,
Well I’m no music historian but I’m sure I could learn something from a conversation like that. What are the main questions you’re dealing with?
Dan

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dan
Jul 10 2005
11:00 pm

Dan,

It’s not really about music history as much as about possible alternatives to written accounts (experiences) of the past. It’s kind of along the same lines as I’ve been arguing on *cino, about how themodern scientific definition of history is limiting. I’m reading musicologists right now who are focusing on the historical power of music. Because music is an art form that deals with and is made up of time, like film also, it has an intimate relationship with the historical. So I’m thinking about the differences between written histories and historical music and what music is able to communicate about the past that written history cannot.

Does that make sense?

Grant.

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dan
Jul 10 2005
11:01 pm

Grant,

One way to define history is as the stories people tell about the past (or the future I would say). thus films and literature are historical inasmuch as they tell stories. some music would be historical in the sense that some songs tell stories, but of course all music can be studied historically as to how a particular piece or movement is related to the people and society that produced it.

what do you mean by historical music? it seems clear to me that music can communicate things about the past that written histories can’t, just as films and verbal storytelling can communicate things that books can’t. are you talking about something in music that changes,
augments and strengthens the storytelling?

Dan

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dan
Jul 10 2005
11:05 pm

Dan,

No, I’m talking about music that has no words, not music that tells a narrative. Music that puts you in a time or place or a past emotional state while in the present. Music as time-machine. Like when we listen to Beethoven’s 9th, we are thrown back into the spirit of that age, which history perhaps tries to capture (somewhat Hegelian idea of history as story of spirit) but kills with dead words (old idea of words being dead but breathed spoken language being alive). It seems like music of this sort is the incarnated past. It’s not just representing an idea or narrative. It’s not even limited to the representation of an emotional state. It is a kind of re-incarnation of the spirit, a re-enacting of the motivations and desires of people from past times and places. But since we are hearing it or playing it now, it is also now and also the future, just like doing history. But where it differs from history is precisely in its acting outside of narrative and even moreso “inside” of the narrative. In fact, it is perhaps the breath of the narrative, the singing of the story that engages people’s emotions and moves them to continue to follow the story. So I’m not trying to put one up over the other, music over history. I’m kind of wondering if history-writing has lost its music, just as Homer’s Odyssey or Paul’s letters have become deadened to people who have lost their sense of the music of the language. I don’t just mean that history ought to be sung or read aloud again, but I think something’s missing in our modernist way of abstracting stories from their emotive musical) contexts. There’s a communion that occurs in songs with a story that does not occur in scientific-type (examining an object) methodology. This is where mysticism comes in, but I’ll just leave it at that for now. I’m just rambling here, perhaps hoping to focus my thinking while in dialogue with you (someone who is involved in contemporary history-making).

Grant.

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dan
Jul 10 2005
11:08 pm

Hi Grant,

Ok I now better understand what you’re talking about. I think you’re onto something. Music is a visceral way of learning about the past. Through music you can FEEL the past. This is a powerful argument and I would be surprised if something similar had not already been argued by art historians: such an approach fits squarely within the context of post-modern historical analsis. analyses such as these are some of the best things to emerge from post-modern approaches in my opinion.

If however, you knew nothing about European history, if you grew up poorly educated in Laos for example, and you heard Beethoven’s 9th for the first time, I’m not sure how much you would be able to glean from it. The limits of music as time machine is culture. American’s can’t truly understand ancient Chinese music because it’s ancient, but also because it’s chinese. To understand it you’d have to study the music as well as the narrative forms of chinese history. Similarly I’m not sure how much the average American can know about the early 19th century by listening to beethoven’s 9th unless they have something narrative to hang their feelings onto.

another problem with this is differing individual responses to any particular piece. for example, for one person a metalica song is terribly grating, and for another, the same song could evoke pleasant childhood memories and such. thus, if i, as a historian were to make a claim about the 19th century based on my response to a performance of beethoven’s 9th, i would have to be honest with my readership about my background and personality, just as I would be honest about such things when analysing the diary of a 19th century surveyor.

i don’t know if those are the kinds of questions you were trying to get at? these are the kind of things historians deal with all the time. things were much easier during the couple of decades when people really seemed to believe that the discipline of history was capable of producing scientific truths. but it’s more fun to do history when you can be honest about your own presence as the builder of the narrative.

i totally agree with everything you said in your last email and i think these ideas would make a great article or book. i’ve been pushing to history department here to update their old ways to possibly allow MA theses to be in the form of plays or to incorporate art works of various types. the best history teachers incorporate art into their classes but the problem really is our education system because it requires examination on “facts” and a scientific grading scheme ranging from A to F. Students actually resist learning about history in the ways you suggest because they don’t know how to take notes on it! On the other hand, their frustration in this is probably an excellent learning experience in itself.

have you ever taught a course on music history? i think you’d be good at it and it would help you sharpen your ideas, although they seem plenty sharp already.

dan

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dan
Jul 10 2005
11:11 pm

Dan,

Thanks for the feedback. Yeah, there are others talking this way about music and history, I think. I’m on the look-out for them. I’m reading a book by musicologist Leo Treitler called “Music and the Historical Imagination” which is helping to fill out my ideas. His historical approach comes from Gadamer’s Truth and Method. There’s also a book called “Divine Proclamation” that might be talking in terms Christians can understand. This issue seems terribly important to me as a Christian in the Protestant tradition where the written word (especially in CCM) is idolized and taken out of its proper cultural contexts (I agree about the cultural nature of understanding music, though I don’t think narratives always come first for understanding music; often music is the motivation for a narrative). As far as writing a book on this topic, I’ve been going back and forth the last little while on the best way to communicate this stuff, in a book or through music. Right now, I’m leaning towards music. So many of these ideas are coming together in lyrics for new music Joel and I are working on. It’s in our other music too, of course. This may be a running motif, however long we keep this rock’n’roll dream alive.

Oh, I liked what you said about how uncomfortable this way of teaching is to students. I’ve experienced that too with my students. I got a kick out of hearing that one prominent African-American professor in New York ( His name slips my mind now) asked his students to make rap albums for their sociology class and the school where he worked didn’t like that too much. But there is something there! Something very valuable for an education system: experience!

Grant.

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dan
Jul 10 2005
11:13 pm

Grant,

righto. i keep falling into the trap that i don’t want to fall into, namely that when i have a good idea i feel the best way to get the word out there is to write an article about it. that’s what academics-in-training are discipled to think. making music (or film or whatever kinds of art that people actually enjoy) to express an idea is probably better. graduate school can crush the soul (ie creativity and imagination) and i don’t want that to happen to me more than it already has.

concerning, the idolatry of the written word, this to me seems to me a part of an idolatry of the permanent. in my mind, it’s a part of our desire for unchanging truth, for memories that don’t disappear (photos and such), for eternal youth, for rivers that don’t change their course, and for a climate that doesn’t warm up or cool down. Down with the spoken word that exists for a moment and then is forgotten, or remembered in some altered way. Down with ephemeral art such as live music and theatre, and up with films and recorded music. Down with nomads and up with skyscrapers. Down with the idea that truth evolves.

i’ve been thinking about this question of permanence and non-permanence a lot because i’ve been studying the origin of north american roads and farm boundaries, which are more or less permenent now, but which were often created ex nihilo, if you will. i’m curious why Europeans did that sort of thing and why Native American’s didn’t, or about the different ways they did that. maybe it seems like a stretch, but this question seems central to civilisation as i know it.

what are your views on the difference between recorded and live music? which do you think is more important? what are your goals for each?

we should have had this conversation on cino. what where we thinking? so selfish of us :)

dan

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dan
Jul 10 2005
11:15 pm

Dan,

If you’re up to it, I’d love to have this conversation on *cino. Is there some way we can paste it in?

It’s interesting to me that you seem to have had a similar experience with grad school as I had. I’m still reeling in a way from the pressures that are put on you there. I still have trouble justifying the work that I’m doing in music somehow.

When you put film and recorded music in the same category as other “permanent” things, I think there is a difference. What I love about film is that it captures in a “permanent” way the motions and movements of time that the film-makers have crafted. It’s a super powerful thing to be able to put together two or three hours of your favorite moments that you can experience over and over again (a la Wim Wender’s “Until the End of the World”). I think recorded music is similar. I love the “time” arts much more than the graphic ones, the ones that stay still. But I don’t like theatre as much, or even live music, for that matter. But maybe I haven’t seen enough good live entertainment.

What you’re saying about roads and what people build to establish permanence, this goes way back to the piling up of stones to remember the dead, right? In a restrictive kind of way. And the way Roman leaders’ names were marked into the stone or erased when their regime fell to the new Caesar. I think the New Testament writers are drawing from this framework when they talk about the name of Christ enduring even after the walls of Jerusalem fall. Of course, Christ’s name is written down in their Gospel accounts and the future is written on a scroll in Daniel and Revelation…

Grant.

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Jason Panella
Jul 11 2005
03:40 pm

Thanks for posting this, guys. Interesting reading.