Paul Barker: Paradigms Lost & Paradigms Regained: an evaluation of a performative approach to music and words Abstract: The naming of things has concerned philosophers from Wittgenstein to Chomsky. The epithet “performative” relates to an expanding stream of concepts derived from the writings of Austin and Butler. This paper seeks to demonstrate that although named in the last century, the practice of performativity reflects a history which might relate back as far as the development of language and music itself (Blackling, Mithen). Music and language may be seen to inhabit many parallel developments: both are affected deeply by incessant technological inventions which seek to concretise the ephemeral beyond memory, through writing, printing and sound recording itself. This led to cyclical processes of iconisation, where the medium - the object itself - became the subject of veneration, a pretension of immortality. Meanwhile, the process of creativity became shrouded in myth and mystery, reflecting a quasi-religious status to art, with the accompanying concepts of cognoscenti and heretical potential. There have been frequent realignments in the most unexpected places: it was not a coincidence that the concept of performativity spread at about the same time as the popular invention of Karaoke, reflecting a shared rebalancing of processural aspects over product. When the twentieth century threatened to commoditise everything on a global, industrial scale, performative theory reminded us of alternatives. Yet this is not a uniquely contemporary experience: Patsy Rosenburg has written about the long-waged battle between oracy and literacy; Huysman articulated literature as a commodity in the nineteenth century; and Bach epitomised the concept of composer as craftsman, as unconcerned with the burden of immortality as he was obsessed by his daily task. In the twenty-first century, performative theory provides an alternative, personal and subjective definition of value and meaning in words and music, and an opportunity to rebalance priorities between artistic process and product.
    
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    Paradigms Lost & Paradigms Regained: an evaluation of a performative approach to music and words This paper is in three parts. In the introduction I contextualise music and words from the perspective of several authors across a variety of disciplines: multi-cultural, philosophical, historical, anthropological, analytical and applied voice. In the first part I outline the interdependent relationship of music and words through some specific literature and language, authors and commentators, along with the result of political and performative perspectives of writers and their interpretation and point to consequences for cultural theory and reception. In the third and final section I will describe and illustrate my own reaction and consequences to this research as a composer. INTRODUCTION In my country, and in Swaziland, my country of adoption, the fusion of art forms, to be a poet, painter, sculptor, musician, actor, all in one, can be just a matter of course. Ceremonies, rituals, fuse all art forms, to allow for...cross-fertilization... Arriving in Britain I found myself living, or half-living, in different compartments simultaneously. Each compartment seemed hermetically sealed. Each so stiflingly private. Professor Pitika Ntuli articulated this disturbing view of western cultural ring-fencing or partitioning, after his arrival in Britain in the 1970's. There is no evidence to suppose his view would be more favourable today, many decades later. His words sound like a cris de coeur: it combines academic and cultural observation while articulating a critical, emotional context. Ntuli’s perception of compartmentalism is a commonly documented perception of contemporary life. It is alluded to frequently by Midgley who analyses one root cause as the acceptance of Cartesian binary divisions, especially between thought and reason: All thought involves feeling (for instance, feelings of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with an argument). And nearly all feeling involves thought (for instance, anxiety nearly always includes the thought of some specific disturbing circumstances and possibilities).(2002,150) Both Ntuli and Midgley lament and warn about the separate worlds we inhabit. Since the Renaissance, when the arts and sciences arguably began to advance our understanding of the world through inventions such as telescopes and opera, and created polymaths such as Da Vinci and Michelangelo, education has relentlessly pursued a path of specialisation. Distrust between cultures and zealous concepts of ownership are some of the consequences of this specialisation that lead to racism, intolerance and litigious concepts such as intellectual copyright. These separate worlds are exclusive and unaware; discourse and argument cannot exist between them. This inability to admit even to disagreement frequently leads to fear and violent reactions. The dichotomy that lies at the heart of our globalised communications revolution in the twenty-first century is powerfully articulated by Ntuli’s cry. A proverb from Zimbabwe articulates a simple view of the relationship between words and music as more of a continuum: If you can walk you can
    
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    dance. If you can talk you can sing. Western cultural and intellectual development has led to an opposed perspective where words and music have come to reflect a modern binary. This is illustrated by the fact that I am writing this paper for the Words and Music Association, the need for which might arguably not exist in proverbial Zimbabwe, neither in Ntuli’s Swaziland. We must understand how this schism came to pass. Words and music, at different times, began a revolution in their development through notation and the ensuing mass-accessibility arose initially out of dissemination by printing. The consequent separation and inevitable supremacy of written language was noted by Rodenburg (32): I think it is fair to say that in our schools the written word has triumphed over the spoken word. Literacy has had a far greater impact than oracy. A parallel development is evident in musicologists in the twentieth century: Adorno, Schenker and Forte, for example, idealised the score as potentially a perfect art-object, irrespective of consideration of its performance. Their emphasis on the object, consciously or unconsciously supported the aims of consumerism and capitalist theory. In The Death of the Author, Barthes argued of the impossibility of knowable text, perhaps more consciously reflecting on aspects of Marxist theory. Art-music and postmodern literature may then be seen to have opposed each other over this political binary, defining value and meaning from opposite perspectives. To some extent, the more recent mass-availability of recorded music and words may be seen to reassert the primacy of sound and redress the balance between it and print or notation; but these mediatised forms might also be seen as more sophisticated examples of commoditisation, apparently succeeding in concretising an ephemeral form. The relationship of that commodity with the function of the art itself is less clear, and potentially as enriching as it is contentious. Mithen suggests that the common ground of language and music is no coincidence, that language itself developed through a refinement of communication of vocal sound, of primal musical expression. There is evidence that language and music retain aspects of interdependent in their relationship through tonal languages such as Classical Greek and modern Cantonese; this is also evidences in the inherited musicality of lyric forms, both traditional poetry such as the sonnet of and contemporary, urban or street forms such as rap. The path to segregation of music from language, and their respective fracture into visual, oral or concretised forms is a result of the inevitable spread of specialisation, experienced by Ntuli above, termed tellingly as atomism by Midgley (2002, 9). Midgley’s reputation in moral philosophy reminds us of Wittgenstein’s conclusion concerning meaning in language, when he declared the inexpressibility of ethics. Steiner (41) summarises one discussion of the Tractatus with “Language can only deal meaningfully with a special, restricted segment of reality.” The circularity of language is also noted by Steiner: “Wittgenstein compels us to wonder whether reality can be spoken of, when speech is merely a kind of infinite regression, words being spoken of other words.”
    
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    PART 1 This paper concerns musico-linguistic meaning and value. The introduction over, I now discover my words encircled and perhaps protected from the outset by these great and influential names whose words I have quoted. As the echo of their voices gradually dissolves, I discover myself within an ancient and hallowed space I will call Wordhenge. It is part of the cultural inheritance of our academic language that we must ring-fence, re-use or recycle the words of others a priori in order to demonstrate that we might have something of value to say. But if language is as restricted in its application as these arguments of Wittgenstein and Steiner suggest, then how may we address an issue such as the arguably fundamental and primal relationship between music and words? Wordhenge is an image that suggests ancient, monolithic structures such as Stonehenge, which seem to represent knowledge, culture and endurance, worthy of study but also perhaps unknowable. Language also retains aspects of this model: it has been greater than may be now visible, and its very foundations may be crumbling. But language cannot exist in isolation from its culture, any more than those stones. By reaffirming the undeniable connection between language and music, the potential for their interaction leads to something greater than the sum of its parts. The result of their re-combination has been termed a species of trans-disciplinarity, a concept clarified by Nicolescu. The vast majority of music in the world, past and present, is vocal in origin, and involves language. Almost all instrumental music that is not solely rhythmical might be seen to have developed from aspects of the human voice. Music is clearly by that account a trans-disciplinary art-form. We shall see that many celebrated authors and their texts share this characteristic. They also demonstrate Wittgenstein’s linguistic circularity. One of the greatest examples was Milton: according to Le Compte, Paradise Lost contains 913 references to the Old Testament and 490 to the New, as well as modelling itself structurally and thematically to Homer’s Iliad and Virgil’s Aeniad. Contemporary literature abounds with other referential players such as T. S. Elliott and James Joyce. There is one word common to these authors and their work that marks them as striving beyond the self-referencing and circuitous in their meaning. It provides evidence that they were not texts essentially designed to be read, but language to be performed and heard. Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc'd by fate, And haughty Juno's unrelenting hate, Expell'd and exil'd, left the Trojan shore. (Virgil, tr. Dryden, opening) … Sing Heav'nly Muse, that on the secret top Of OREB, or of SINAI, didst inspire That Shepherd, who first taught the chosen Seed, In the Beginning how the Heav'ns and Earth Rose out of CHAOS: (Milton, line 6) There are more than 40 references to sing or singing on Butler’s
    
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    translation of Homer’s Odyssey. Joyce and Elliott, even as they represent distant positions in the lyric heritage, are both commonly represented as writers who emphasised the musical, auditory nature of language. Language which lives in the medium of sound and the dimension of time works on a richer, deeper plain of interaction with human understanding, combining the embodied or visceral with the emotional and the intellectual. Knowledge, as Midgley notes, is derived from understanding that which connects rather than that which separates. These ancient examples are not of abstract, ephemeral literature, but of a living, breathing language. Although Stonehenge continues to crumble, language will continue to change and reinvigorate. Given sound, specifically a human voice, the meaning of the text, and its inherent value (aesthetical or ethical value, vis a vis Wittgenstein) becomes contextualised and lent specific inherent authority, however subjective or temporal. Barthe’s binary concern about writer’s inaccessibility to the reader avoids a performer-audience relationship and with it the dramatic narrative which arguably underpins all literature. Reader, I challenge him. According to Austin, this is a performative utterance: a speech act which performs the action the sentence describes. The famous quote “Reader, I married him” from Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre, which I have usurped, is not. However, by naming the reader it does dramatically perform an action by demonstrating the traditionally unspoken relationship between author and reader, as performer and audience, and crossing the fourth wall of theatre, as do Shakespeare’s monologues. Austin’s linguistic propositions were developed further by Butler, specifically in relation to gender theory. Perhaps because this challenged many traditional views of identity and increased contention in the binary argument of nature vs. nurture, the later part of the twentieth century witnessed the wholesale application of performative theory to cultural theory. Performance studies in Universities arguably gave way to performative studies. Musicologists such as Nicholas Cook have explored and redefined the ground of musicology and analysis from a performative perspective. But wary of replacing one icon with another, Cook avoids any concept of replacing the venerated score by its performance: “Drawing on interdisciplinary performance theory (particularly theatre studies, poetry reading, and ethnomusicology), I set out issues and outline approaches for the study of music as performance; by thinking of scores as "scripts" rather than "texts," I argue, we can understand performance as a generator of social meaning.” And he ends his article by the assertion that the meaning of music lies in its performance: “To call music a performing art, then, is not just to say that we perform it; it is to say that music performs meaning.” This view echoes Butler’s contention that the meaning of such words as “male” and “female” are performed by those who speak them: gender is defined by performance, not genes. Performative theory developed during the last three decades of the last century, at the same time as karaoke. They are both symptomatic of a growing weariness of commoditisation, an apparently unceasing urge of capitalism to see everything in terms of its value as a commodity. The recording industry and many performers certainly profited from the commoditisation of classical music in that time. It also essentially affected the way classical music was taught, performed and received, with audiences judging the standards of one by the other: live performances had to be just as
    
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    perfect and loud, for example. This exemplifies the friction I alluded to earlier concerning the relationship of a commodity with the function of the art, the impossibility of a personal object replacing a communal experience. Modelling the concert hall experience on a recording heard through headphones is as inappropriate as changing a football stadium to reflect a silent television broadcast. Nevertheless there was much talk of definitive recordings which satisfied the urge of music-lovers to iconise and acquire the object of their love, in parallel with the academic’s attitude towards the perfect autograph score. Possession of the object replaced the experience of the art. Karaoke may be seen as either an affectionate footnote to this culture or as an insistence on the place and value of the amateur in an increasingly professionalised world. Classical music as we know it grew out of a need that people shared in order to play music together, not merely to listen to it. In the nineteenth century it spread particularly among the growing middle class through an increasing number of amateur musicians who tried to play the music of composers at home. Editions of Beethoven’s symphonies for four hands at the piano could hardly be printed in sufficient quantity, for example. Playing music at this time meant playing an instrument, and the armies of amateurs supported the much smaller number of professionals. The twentieth century mediatisation of music promoted it to the majority population - who could no longer play an instrument - as an item to be bought. Suddenly playing a piano inaccurately at home was not so well received by other family members who had access to a perfect recording. Capitalism values the object, which is clearly at odds with an art which values the experience. But this binary between object and experience is clouded by the false idea of perfection, a shibboleth constructed to justify the concept of masterpiece. Stonehenge, too, may be a masterpiece, but the epithet adds nothing to our understanding of it. Competition for its “ownership” still, however, attracts publicity. On the other hand, doing – as in performing, speaking or singing – seems to be valued above simply listening in much art from antiquity until today. There exist art-forms as diverse as the genres of madrigal and the flamenco which developed irrespective of any consideration of an audience whatsoever, but for the performers themselves: a financially profitless and unjustifiable indulgence from a capitalist perspective. The inexorable quest for perfection in the recording of classical music contributed to a falling number of people willing to compete, or learn how to play at all. Today playing music suggests someone able to activate the play button on an MP3 player, rather than denoting any intrinsic musical skill. Within a few generations music had transformed from being a popular activity to being perceived as an inactive pass-time for consumers. The value of the musical experience had been exchanged for the value of an acquisition. Perfection had been achieved, but at a price. The advent of Karaoke into popular music may be seen to have broken some of these trends; it was a way in which amateurs could re-enter a professional arena, it re-valued music as an active as opposed to a passive experience and it created potentially a new form of performance, in so doing creating a new set of meanings, to follow the logic of Cook. In a small way it mirrored performative theory by taking authority away from the author, the
    
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    star, the producer or the academic, and reasserting it in the voice of the amateur performer. Even in a form that nobody would want to buy: a modern version of those arrangements of Beethoven’s symphonies.
    
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    PART 2 The setting of words to music is a traditional paradigm which disguises an important divergence. From repeated chanting which disguises semantic meaning, through the extended vowels of Gregorian chant and medieval monody; from Mozart’s Aleluya to Berio’s Sequenza III, words have been semantically disguised and distorted in their collusion with music. There is also an important more extreme form of songs without words, where nonsense syllables are set, such as the fa-la-la of many Elizabethan composers, and the nonsense sounds of many Italian madrigals. In the twentieth century this tradition was reinvented within the genres of Jazz and Barbershop, which gave rise to the improvised syllables of be-bop and doowop. In these forms, the singer does not necessarily sing without semantic meaning – as Cook might note, the meaning arises from the performance. In these forms of jazz, the sound of the utterance in terms of syllable and musical phrase is entirely created by the performer who acts as composer. Author and authority, meaning and value are embodied and reinvented in the ephemera of each performance. This indicates a potentially new role for a composer. In my series, Songs Between Words, I explore these roles and traditions and develop them further. Forty-eight songs for one or more a cappella voices are entirely free from semantic text, but have invented sounds and syllables composed for the music, often notated with the phonetic alphabet. The songs are not abstract in the sense that an instrumental work might be: each has a name which may suggest a genre of song such as Lullaby or Blues, or a dramatic situation such as Argument or Echo, or an invented word such as DoTraKwa which forms the basis for the “text”. Those are the words in between which I compose the music. But the important challenge for me as composer is the relationship I have, through my music, with the performer. The absence of semantics, lightly framed, lends a greater degree of creativity to the performer than might be seen as traditional in notated music. As Cone has discussed, any song is a micro-drama, an opera in miniature, and has a narrative. In this case the narrative structure may be suggested by me but the essence or meaning lies in the singer’s ability to imagine and create. Each singer, or individual performance, becomes the author and director, and so the process allows a far more diverse range of meaning than different readings of the same text. I found that these songs had the additional benefit of being performed internationally without translation, directly to the audience, whatever the nationality of the performer. The lack of cultural or linguistic barriers further emphasised the role and creative responsibility of the performer, affirming their creative as opposed to interpretative status. Audiences clearly responded to the performer without need for cultural or linguistic interface. The success and popularity of these songs and their recording led me to consider the possibility of expanding the ideas into an opera. The first of these was Nye Tand, Eh?, excerpts from which have been performed in workshops and conferences. Whilst that work awaits completion, I was lucky enough to receive a commission from an international theatre company whose director recognised the possibility through these ideas to create an opera for actors which might tour internationally without the constant need for translation in surtiltles, performance and programme notes, to which they are
    
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    accustomed. I began devising the work with them in 2007 and El Gallo was premiered in Mexico in March this year, and will tour in Europe in 2010. One particular aspect of devising the work with the singers was that they collaborated with me in devising or inventing some of the “text” or sounds, all of which were notated, alongside several scenes which are improvised in performance. Both operas were conceived with characters and plot, and designed around specific voices, specific singer-actors. But, given the nature of the framing, it is perfectly possible that they might also be staged in an infinite number of ways, exploiting different characters and plots. In this they might resemble structurally some of the thought behind the open text plays by Martin Crimp.
    
    05/06/2009 Paul Barker Professor of Music Theatre Central School of Speech and Drama University of London
    
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    BIBLIOGRAPHY Austin, John Langshaw: How to Do Things with Words Harvard University Press, 1962 Barthes, Roland Image Music Text Fontana 1977 Butler, Judith: Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity Routledge, 1990/1999 Cone, Edward The Composer’s Voice Unv of California Press 1982 Midgley, Mary Heart and Mind Routledge 2003 Midgley, Mary Science and Poetry Routledge 2002 Milton, Paradise Lost Mentor Classic 1961 Mithen, Steven The Singing Neanderthals Phoenix 2005 Ntuli, Prof Pitika Storms of the Heart: An Anthology of Black Arts and Culture (K. Owusu Ed) Camden Press, 1988; 214 Rodenburg, Patsy The Need for Words Methuen Drama 1993 Steiner, George Language And Silence Atheneum 1970 INTERNET SITES Cook, Nicholas Between Process and Product: Music and/as Performance Music Theory Online http://mto.societymusictheory.org/issues/mto.01.7.2/mto.01.7.2.cook_frames.h tml Accessed 31/05/2009 Nicolescu, Basarab The Transdisciplinary Evolution of the University Condition for Sustainable Development International Congress "Universities' Responsibilities to Society", International Association of Universities, Chulalongkorn University, Bangkok, Thailand, November 12-14, 1997 http://nicol.club.fr/ciret/bulletin/b12/b12c8.htm#note Accessed 31/05/2009 The Facility: Performance as Research at London Metropolitan University; Excerpts from Nye Tand, Eh? Singer-actor Performers: Francis M. Lynch & James Meek. http://www.londonmet.ac.uk/thefacility/projects/2005-06/nye-tand-ehvideo.cfm DISCOGRAPHY Music by Paul Barker: Entre Palabras Quindecim (2005, Mexico) QP134 Cuerpo del Verano Quindecim (2009, Mexico) QP192
    
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