by Nicholas Cook
Oxford University Press

I finished it a week ago, and thought that before I forget too much about it, I ought to temper my other postings with a response to the book as a whole. I wrote those when I was at my most annoyed with this book, which for the most part was actually quite satisfying to read.

I remember coming across this book in college and being really happy to see someone complaining about how so much stupid stuff is said about music without being subjected to the test of whether it can possibly be relevant to the listener. I was pretty fed up, honestly, with all the “analysis” that went on within no particular parameters. People would say “look, you can see a pattern in this piece!” or, even worse, “look at this fascinating not-quite-pattern!” and that would be it. Nobody bothered to answer the question “how is this pattern relevant?” My feeling at the time was that they didn’t like answering that question because any possible answer is subject to criticism – if you say “because listeners hear it” someone can say “not necessarily” and then you have to argue with them. And it’s easier to just come up with stuff that can’t be argued with because it’s true – like, that all the themes in a given piece “CAN BE SEEN AS” related to one another because they are made of complementary sets of intervals. Yeah, they are, and so I guess they “CAN BE SEEN” that way. But are you saying that you think the composer constructed them that way? Or that, in some way, it affects our experience of the piece? My straw man responds: “Certainly in some way. Certainly! I can’t claim to know what the composer intended, of course, but that’s beside the point. What’s important is what’s actually there in the piece, and what’s there is the esoteric relationship I just pointed out. Q.E.D.” But this just weasels out of the question in the cheapest possible way. Certainly in some way it’s relevant? Where do you get off saying that? You just think nobody can ever prove you wrong!

Cook’s valuable contribution in this book, from my point of view, is to argue that it’s a) possible to talk seriously about what’s relevant to a listener, and b) worthwhile, because the listener’s experience is important. He knocks down a lot of widespread musico-phlosophical muddle-headedness (most of it emanating from Schoenberg) that denies a) and b), stuff like the idea that a piece of music is really just about the relationships that exist among the constituent parts, and that therefore the performance of a piece of music is just a means of getting the music across to the audience, who might equally well read it on the page, if they were fluent. Or stuff like the idea that while certain things (like, say, derivations of a 12-tone row) might not be audible to the conscious mind, the subconscious mind loves ’em.

Cook isn’t much into the idea of listeners taking a subconscious interest in things, and his argument, which is mostly by analogy with argument against Freud himself, is a good one, I think – he says that Schoenberg and friends are making a form of the fallacy of reification – confusing abstract models with real things – when they say that a motif (or whatever) is, since it can be claimed to exist in a work, therefore a reality for the listener, just as Freud was making an error when talked about “the id” as though it existed in some real sense. But I made an argument against allowing for “subconscious relevance,” back in my undergraduate thesis, that I like even better: if we allow for obscure things to have “subconscious influence,” we have absolutely no criteria for distinguishing between real relevance and mistaken relevance. If we’re capable of conceiving of any construct in a piece that is too obscure for even the apparently wizardly subconscious mind (and even Schoenberg granted that it was very hard to make things truly perceivable, that this was a composer’s task), then we must accept that somewhere there is a limbo bar of obscurity below which patterns are not relevant, no matter how cool they might be. And to figure out where that limbo bar lies requires us to really investigate the listening experience.

This is where I differ from Cook, or at least I think I do. It seems to me that, obviously, a great deal of music is understood on some sub-conscious level, and the analogy with sub-conscious linguistic parsing makes a lot of sense to me. Cook, after a lot of talk about how that which listeners are unable to report must not be relevant (see previous posts!) then lets this one drop in a footnote to a dismissal of subconscious perception:

It is possible to distinguish two concepts of subconscious perception in music, one modelled on Freud and the other on psycholinguistics. I have touched on the latter in my book on analysis (1987a: 220-2); this discussion should be read in the light of Serafine’s remarks (1988: 63-4) regarding the perceptual reality of phonemes.

That’s not cool. So ELSEWHERE, he’s reassuring us, he said something about this big problem with his argument…something which you should only read in a properly sympathetic frame of mind. I now feel obliged to go find his book on analysis and see what he can possibly say about this, but I strongly suspect that if he had something good to say, he would have included it in this book too.

So I got defensive when he started being hard on old-fashioned appreciation education, because I see it as comparable to language education. His invocation of Virgil Thomson’s rant against “The Appreciation Racket” is inappropriate, since Thomson was railing against a particular type of dumbed-down commercialized pseudo-education that was rampant in the 30s and which nowadays is a much smaller part of the musical landscape, as Thomson himself acknowledged in the 1960 addendum to the extremely amusing essay in which that ranting occurs: “Why Composers Write How.” Sure, some kinds of “appreciation” are still vacuous and misleading, but identifying the parts of a sonata movement is not, and it’s wrong of Cook to let this stuff all get mushed together in his book. BUT all his other enemies are my enemies too, and it’s good and heartening to hear someone articulating these sorts of commonsensical objections on philosophical, theory-oriented grounds rather than simply as a disgruntled listener.

On the other hand, in defense of not-so-much-for-listening 20th century musics, I feel like it’s obvious that hyper-serialism is some kind of art. Maybe it’s not listener’s music, and maybe that means we shouldn’t even call it music – and we certainly shouldn’t ever have let its practitioners tell us that it was the only truly progressive music, that’s crap – but neither is it just a big mistake on top of a mistake. If 20th-century music is like so much bread that didn’t rise, that doesn’t mean we should doubt the value of matzoh, or doubt that people actually enjoy it. Matzoh and bread shouldn’t really be fighting it out for the title, honestly. It doesn’t make sense. A book like this quite reasonably points out that bread that does not rise cannot a sandwich make (because it’s all crumbly), but the implication that matzoh is a mere mistake is unnecessary. Likewise, Milton Babbitt, matzoh does not represent the evolution of bread! Grow up! Bread will always be more popular, and for good reason.

In more general terms, the book is quite readable and has several memorable (and for a book like this, brave) personal discussions of the workings of experiences like half-remembering a piece of music and faking the details, or imagining a piece of music in a way that works in the imagination even though it wouldn’t work in reality. Very pleasant reading and not nearly as dry as the heavy footnoting would imply.

The title and cover are lame, though. “Culture” shouldn’t have equal billing with “Music” and “Imagination.” And the semi-obscured question mark on the cover, which is stupid enough to begin with, looks like a 2, to me. Don’t you think? Scan to come.

This book, I found to my astonishment, has been scanned, along with a zillion others, by Google Print. You can’t read it all (without hacking into the system), but you can read many pages. Crazy.