Theory of music or theory of musical creation?

NICHOLAS COOK
University of Southampton
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There is one point in his writings where Heinrich Schenker starts telling the reader
exactly how Beethoven himself played a particular passage in the first movement of
Beethoven's Op. 14, No. 2 (Rothstein, 1984, p. 19). The effect is strange: how, you want to
ask, does Schenker know? And yet there is a literary device in the analysis and criticism of
music that is even stranger, but so familiar that we hardly notice it: it takes the form of the
statement that 'Mozart (Beethoven, Brahms, Schoenberg) writes (decides, adds, changes)',
usually coupled to an explanation of what he intended in doing so. Conjuring up through its
present tense the image of the composer working before you, this device represents just the tip
of a submerged discourse of creative activity that underlies everyday analytical descriptions
of music. And it is found not only in the context of explicit, though perforce rarely
unsubstantiated, accounts of the compositional process, but also in the very vocabulary of
analytical description: the term 'motive', for instance, constructs the image either of a
composer who wills the music, or more extravagantly of the music willing itself (as in
Schenker's frequent references to the 'will of tones'). To be sure, such terminology is cognate
with the more neutral 'motif' of the visual arts, but its psychological implications will escape
nobody who has read the work of Rudoph Rti, Hans Keller, or Anton Ehrenzweigand it is
perhaps no coincidence that all of these writers, like Schenker, were long-term residents of the
same city as Sigmund Freud.
Today, Schenker's analytical system is the most familiar in which an implicit creative
orientation plays a foundational role. This orientation explains the basic direction of
Schenkerian theory, which is not analytical at all: that is, it does not work through a process
of reduction from music to underlying principles. Rather, Schenker begins with the
underlying principles, or at least with their concretion in the shape of the Ursatz, and follows
the shape of their elaboration (or 'prolongation') into specific pieces of music; the theory is not
one of analysis but of synthesis. In other words, it is predicated on a 'composer's-eye' view,
however idealized, and this explains not only Schenker's then unusual interest in sketch
studies but also his insistence on the creative vision, the moment of authority in which great
works of music come into being: as early as 1894 he wrote that
In the literature of music there are works that came about in such a way that within the
endless chaos of fantasy the lightning flash of a thought suddenly crashed down, at
once illuminating and creating the entire work in the most dazzling light. Such works
were conceived and received in one stroke, and the whole fate of their creation, life,
growth, and end already designated in the first seed. (1)
Such accounts of the creative process in music, for many years mistakenly attributed
to Mozart and Beethoven (Solomon 1988), resonate throughout the analytical literature, and
link it with the eighteenth-century concept of the creative 'genius', itself modelled largely on
traditional theological accounts of divine Creation (Kivy 1993).
For theologians, God transcended time and so grasped synoptically what humans can
experience only as a temporal succession. This is the model of Schenker's genius-composer,
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the authentically creative individual who directly grasps the 'tonal space' of the musical
background and so transmutes it through the compositional devices of prolongation into
perceptible soundand who is thereby distinguished from the non-genius, the perhaps
talented but fundamentally uncreative individual who remains bound to the musical surface,
plodding on from one note to another. When Schenker said that 'there are works' conceived
instantaneously, his purpose was to draw a line between thesethe works of geniusand all
others, and he was quite clear that his theory was not a theory of music as such: it was a
theory of musical masterworks, or perhaps more accurately expressed, a theory of creative
mastery in music. As in other respects, then, Schenker's approach drew on the complex
convergence of ideas that gave rise, around 1800, to the modern concept of the musical work,
(2) and with it a basic aesthetic attitude borrowed from the literary and fine arts: to understand
music is (in Stephen Davies's (2001) phrase) to understand it as the work of its creator.
Analysis contributes to such understanding by helping the music-lover towards a re-
experiencing of the creative act, albeit at second hand; it is no surprise that the first serious
steps in sketch study, taken by Gustav Nottebohm in the second half of the nineteenth
century, coincide with the high point of this Romantic aesthetic. (3) And again the religious
metaphor is telling: Schenker sometimes compared the analyst's role to that of a priest,
making accessible to the wider community a truth otherwise reserved in the one case to
composers, and in the other to mystics.
This intimate link between musical creation and analysis is complicated by a reaction
against the biographical and even anecdotal shape which Romantic interest in composers
frequently tooka reaction in fact spearheaded by Schenker (whose later thinking was an
unstable blend of Romanticism and neue Sachlichkeit). Animating Schenker's work as a
whole is an insistence on the autonomy of music, the need for understanding it in its own
terms; where a modern reader of Schenker may be struck by the vestiges of Romantic
metaphysics in his thought, many contemporary readers were struck by the almost
mathematical jargon of his writing, and to this extent the 'objectivist' approaches of such post-
1945 theorists as Milton Babbitt and Allen Forte follow in the same tradition. There is an
obvious parallel with the anti-contextualism of the 'New Criticism' in literary studies, and the
associated attack on the 'genetic fallacy'; the controversial claim advanced by the Beethoven
scholar Douglas Johnson (1978), that reconstructing the creative process tells you nothing
about the music, was an explicit attempt to cut away the alliance that had been forged between
analysis and the study of musical creation. There is an obvious sense in which all this
represents a turn away from an aesthetic interest in musical works as the works of their
creators, in favour of understanding them as simply what they are, that is, texts.
My argument, however, is that such appearances are deceptive. As shown by the very
success of Schenker's own method in North America, as well as by attempts (for instance by
Forte and by William Drabkin) to link it specifically with the compositional process as
revealed by Beethoven's sketches, analysis remained wedded not only to the values
epitomized by the postulate of creative geniusvision, innovation, personal authenticitybut
also to an essentially compositional conception of music. In other words, it was still assumed
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that an adequate understanding of music meant embracing the underlying conceptual
framework of its creation, and it was analysis that revealed that framework. One might say
that the idea of compositional intentionality remained in place even after attention had shifted
from composer to text.
Some thirty years ago, in his inaugural lecture at the University of Cambridge, the
composer Alexander Goehr likened the idea of muzak to composing 'backwards'. By this he
meant that you start with an intended effect (in the case of muzak, a temporal profile of
excitation associated with high levels of productivity), and work backwards to the musical
organization through which this may be achieved. The relationship between music and muzak
is worth pursuing in a little more detail. For one thing, just as there is a theory of music so
there is a theory of muzak, an explicitly psychological literature (much of it commissioned by
Planned Music Inc, the inventors of Muzak) to set against the multiplicity of epistemologies
that underpin the theory of music. On the other hand, a culture of muzak (and this applies
equally to popular, classical, and early muzak) would be less like the cultures of literature or
the fine arts than those of scents, wines, or other examples of material culture: not an art as
traditionally defined but, in essence, a technology for the creation of certain predetermined
effects. Hanslick, after all, advanced the claim of music to be an art precisely on the
difference between the aesthetic understanding it elicits and such basic attitudinal states as
inebriation, and a wide range of twentieth-century writers ranging from T. W. Adorno to
Roger Sessions to Stuart Hampshire defined responsible musical listening in terms of an
active engagement with the compositional values of musicvalues, that is, which work
'forward' from compositional organization to resultant effect.
But can so clear a line really be drawn between music and muzak, between composing
forwards and backwards, or is there perhaps an element of muzak in all music? In my book
Music, Imagination, and Culture (1990), I brought forward a range of evidence that many
listeners listen to much music most of the time in what Walter Benjamin called a 'distracted'
state, that is to say one of passive and predominantly moment-to-moment reception rather
than active and purposive engagement, and that one of the reasons people value music is the
all-encompassing, oceanic, even coercive quality that this gives to the listening experience.
And Rose Subotnik's (1988) brilliant study of 'structural listening' has complemented this with
an analysis of the ideological underpinnings of the attitude of active aesthetic engagement
with which musical analysis has been identified ever since its emergence in a recognizably
modern form at the beginning of the nineteenth century. In effect the result has been a
mismatch between academic representations of music and its everyday consumption, which
the project of 'structural listening' attempted to rectify by making listening habits conform to
academic prescriptions. Nowadays the position advocated by Adorno, Sessions and
Hampshire may well look old-fashioned and elitist, perpetuating outmoded and undesirable
distinctions between the creativity of the few and the non-creativity of the many, (4) but there
is a prominent contemporary theorist whose work forms an instructive parallel. Fred Lerdahl
(1988) has advocated a similar convergence between compositional and perceptual categories,
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but via a different route: instead of trying to align habits of listening with academic
prescriptions, he has argued that 'compositional grammar' should conform to 'listening
grammar'and analysis is now identified with the latter. (It is telling that in either case it is
analysis towards which convergence should take place.)
There is also a second complication about drawing a clear line between music and
muzak, which I can explain through a comparison with the culture of wine. While there is
only a very marginal interest in wine as the work of its creator, its everyday enjoyment is
certainly not limited to what Hanslick termed the 'pathological' level. If the enjoyment of wine
(and scents, and car design, and fashion) is not to be called 'aesthetic', that is because of a
prevailingly narrow definition of that term rather than because of any limitation in the
contribution of such enjoyment to quality of life. And whereas the idea of a 'theory of wine'
parallel to that of music may seem strange or pretentious, there is certainly a discursive
language through which the enjoyment of wine may be shared, interrogated, or critiqued. I am
referring for instance to the language of the newspaper wine critics, who evoke the qualities
of a particular grape, blend, or product through an extravagantly metaphorical vocabulary.
When critics refer to lashings of gooseberry or chocolatey undernotes, nobody thinks they are
saying that the wine-maker has adulterated the product: they are describing attributes of taste
and aroma, and in a highly stylized manner. In formal terms their discourse sets out causes
from which effects are derived, but we understand it in metaphorical or fictive termsand it
is worth pointing out that this critical language has at best an extremely indirect relationship
to the technical discourses of wine-making (particularly among those who treat it as more a
science than an art, notably the Australians).
In saying this I mean, of course, to suggest that much the same applies to music. The
kind of hermeneutic commentary that seeks to understand music as the work of its
composeras speaking, so to speak, with its composer's voiceis most closely associated
with the nineteenth century, and in particular the reception of Beethoven's 'heroic' style (the
values of which, as Scott Burnham (1995, p. 288) has claimed, became seen as the values of
music in general). But, as I have already indicated, it continued underground in twentieth-
century analytical commentaries that bracketed the composer but retained the idea of
compositional intentionality. Such commentaries are vulnerable to the standard critique of
intentionality: that we cannot know intentions except by deducing them from actions, so that
the appeal intentions is an empty rhetorical device. Or to put it another way, the language of
compositional intentions is a fictive one, part and parcel of what Shibuya Masako (2000) calls
the 'compositional persona'a metaphorical construction that may be closely or less closely
aligned with the historical composer. but that in either case regulates and coordinates the
understanding of music by constituting it as an entity with which listeners engage almost in
the manner of an interpersonal transaction.
I draw two conclusions from this. First, it has for at least two centuries been normative
within the culture of Western 'art' music that we seek to understand it in terms of its creation
and motivation, but this interest is not in essence a factual or historical one: it is rather a
fictive means of regulating and representing our responses to the music's phenomenal
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qualities and the meaning that we discover in (or project into) it. (5) Second, to say that we
seek to understand music in this way is no justification for erecting an impermeable barrier
between the aesthetic enjoyment of art (including music) on the one side, and the hedonism of
material culture on the other. As social beings we seek to represent our experiences to one
another (and even to ourselves), and I have invoked the culture of wine as an example of the
discursive web within which such forms of enjoyment are situated. The radically
metaphorical discourse of the wine critic, constructing a kind of fictive, parallel universe to
the essentially ineffable experiences of taste and smell, is perhaps a representation in
miniature of the epistemological convolutions through which the fundamentally physical and
affective experience of music has been accommodated within a logocentric culture.
And at this point I return, by way of a third and final conclusion, to the positions
advocated by Adorno, Sessions and Hampshire on the one hand, and Lerdahl on the other. In
essence the former want listening, and the latter composition, to conform with analysis
because they all see analysis as embodying the real 'causes' of musical 'effects'. (Lerdahl's use
of the term 'grammar' makes this particularly clear.) If instead we see analysis as a form of
metaphorical discourse, then the telling distinction is between those times and places where
compositional and theoretical conceptions have coincided, as was generally the case during
the so called common-practice period, and those where they have not. After all, the very
question as to how far we have a theory of music or a theory of musical creation is one that
can only arise when there is a generally perceived divergence between the two, and that
divergence is a basic component in the culture of 'art' music today.
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Addres for correspondence:
NICHOLAS COOK
Research Professor of Music
Music Department
University of Southampton
Highfield
Southampton
SO17 1BJ
UK
E-mail: ncook@soton.ac.uk
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Notes
(1) Translated from Schenker's 'Eugen d'Albert' (Die Zukunft, 9, 6 October 1894, p. 33) in
Keiler (1989), p. 287.
(2) See Goehr (1992), but note that subsequent commentators have traced essential features
of the work concept back as far as the sixteenth century.
(3) While for purposes of this paper I concentrate on Schenker, because of the currency that
his approach still enjoys, a fuller account would emphasize the way in which his creative
orientation drew on nineteenth-century theorists and composition teachers (for the
pedagogy of composition is also part of the story) from A. B. Marx on.
(4) Although I do not have space to explore this in the present context, I would link this
socially divisive approach to creativity with the textualist orientation of traditional
musicology, according to which music's meaning is inherent in the score, simply waiting
to be reproduced by performers and received by listeners. One of the great advantages of
reception- and interpretation-based historiographies is that they articulate the creativity of
all participants in musical culture.
(5) Of course it is a premise of social constructionism that socially agreed fictions become
themselves a species of social fact, but there is still a difference between such social facts
and historical ones; this is essentially the argument that Alasdair MacIntyre, following
Wittgenstein, advanced in relation to Freudian psychotherapy (MacIntyre, 1958). A
musical parallel might be the distinction between the lack of perceptual underpinning for
the phenomenon of large-scale tonal closure and its undoubted importance as a 'social
fact' of common-pracice musical culture.
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