THEORIZING SOUND WRITING (4/22/2011)

When I began my graduate studies in music, a seed being planted in the musicologically rich soil of UNC-Chapel Hill, I was admonished by my peers to eschew "roadmap musicology," a type of writing about music where sequences of events in a piece of music are mapped out.  On top of this, the path of becoming a solid academic scholar involved mastering the infrastructure of good research. Engaging writing was given a back seat.

Writing about music. There are those who question writing about music at all.  The argument is that music should speak for itself and that contemplating music can never surpass doing music and experiencing music directly.  To this I counter that there have been so many times when I have read about a piece of music or about a composer or style that made me want to hear the music and take a look at the music.  Accounts of music I already knew gave me insights that I had not considered when listening to or playing the music.  Writing about music matters a great deal.

What the "Theorizing Sound" group meetings at NYU reminded me was that writing about music is a performance in itself and not a substitute for the musical experience.  Writing about sound can be revelatory and engaging, or
not -- just as creating musical sounds can be, or not.   Going to these meetings has most definitely helped me achieve the goal I set for myself during my "year in New York" of transforming many of my experiences into words.  But I also wanted to write words that others would want to read. Reading and hearing the works of others at various stages in their writing life and who, like me, desire to be more vivid and engaging writers about sound has helped the process tremendously.  There are, of course, many days when just getting words on paper is a tough proposition and I have to settle for just that--much like practicing. 

The final gathering of the group was a day-long symposium featuring five highly regarded scholars each "theorizing sound writing" in her or his own way.  As I followed their presentations I focused on both what they had to say but also how they said it.

Anne Rasmussen,  an ethnomusicologist from William and Mary, vividly evoked here thesis statement by reciting from the Qu'ran.  Her strong, impassioned recitation not only illustrated the title of her presentation, "Women Out Loud!: Religious Performance in Indonesia," but also surprised listeners by its suddenness.  This outpouring led to the question, "How can we learn culture by listening?"  What we had just heard most definitely had an impact on us, but what was its significance?  It is the aspiration of every reciter of the Qu'ran to channel the beautiful language of the Qu'ran through the body to the listener to allow them to arrive at a state of "tarab," or ecstasy and enchantment  The voices of women, women who normally might be be quiet and soft-spoken, become loud, strident, and authoritative.

Such strong reciting voices develop as a result of a long, highly disciplined and competitive process in Indonesia.  A very strict competition system that begins in childhood and continues to early adulthood hones and refines the skills of girls.  A paradoxical aspect of this process is the fact that while the adjudication process strives to the utmost in objectivity with technical elements paramount and emotional display minimized, the ultimate goal of reciters is to attain a personal voice that is instantly recognizable. The "festivalization of sound" has been said to have tempered the ecstatic element in recitation.  The parallels with the competition system in Western traditional classical music are obvious as performers, often groomed from childhood, must adhere to strict dimensions of performance while still striving to move listeners.  One might also ask the question of the role of politics and personalities in the adjudication process.

The loud, strident sound of recitation draws its inspiration from the noisiness of life in and around Indonesian mosques, noise that represents power, energy, and potency.  However, we remind ourselves that the recitation must rise above this noise to convey the beauty of the text and capture the attention of the crowd. Professor Rasmussen noted that "those who recite well are many but those who receive well are few."

Finally, Rasmussen noted the volumes that women's Islamic recitation says about their status. In Indonesia, Arabic is the language of intellectuals, and by letting Arabic "live on the lips of women, women's involvement in life beyond domesticity is confirmed."

From her opening recitation, Rasmussen unfolded a story that continuously went back to the recitation.  In such recitations the cognitive, emotional and spiritual are encompassed.

Moving from the centuries-old tradition of Islamic recitation to the very current topic of virtual music, ethnomusicologist Martin Daughtry explored its potential and its limitations.  This new way of accessing music is filled with implications.  There has been a shift from music as content (stored in a CD or LP or performed on a concert or recital) to music as a service.  Rather than purchasing a record or cd or even going to a performance people are more frequently streaming digitized sounds and creating virtual play lists (or having them created for them).

Mr. Daughtry reflected on both the pessimistic and optimistic views of this change.  On the side of the pessimists, the continuous partial attention given to much MP3 listening with earbuds tends to dull the senses.  Tastes can become balkanized as people gravitate toward the kinds of music they prefer because they can.  There can be a certain flattening of the consciousness as the parameters of sound become constricted.  On the side of the optimists, the apparent open and decentralized nature of streaming offers unprecedented personal freedom.  Access is enlarged exponentially as the infrastructure of receiving music has shifted.

What was perhaps the most interesting element in Martin Daughtry's  presentation was the presence of "hidden" controls in the "dematerialized" world of virtual sound.  The idea of certain performers being "discovered" by their performances "going viral" is tempered by the fact that there are services that can be obtained to help in his process. "Going viral" is not always an accident.   Online sites such as YouTube, Pandora, Amazon and Netflix use algorithms to determine a given user's preferences and therefore, while ostensibly helping the user, also push the user in certain directions. They are also often paid to "promote" certain materials so that works appear on a "you might also enjoy" list that have little or nothing to do with one's established preferences. 

Our means of listening to music play crucial roles in our use and access to music.  Contemplating the potential end results of shifting habits of listening is a field of inquiry that most assuredly warrants our attention.

Yet another avenue of "theorizing sound writing" was pursued by David Henderson from St. Lawrence University.  Professor Henderson pondered the question of writing about music without reference to either audio musical examples or musical scores.  Can one's writing become so vivid and meaningful as not to require such aids?  One question I often posed to my students was the value of musical examples.  Often, they are provided but not explained very well so that they almost become decoration. Or else they are not really contemplated by the student unless the instructor goes over them.  Audio examples can be useful but are sometimes awkward to use in in a print-based format. Developing writing in a completely digitized format  helps to an extent but the purpose of Professor Henderson's presentation was to consider the text-only format.  Working within only one medium can open up possibilities.  Text-only presentation requires heterophonic thinking from the writer.  It is not just the words but the sounds and the images that must be conveyed so as to awaken the mind of the reader.  The senses need to be stimulated.  An interesting experiment is to take another medium, say image (not necessarily score), and convey what one wants to convey through that image.  This is of course what visual artists do although they are not always addressing a medium beyond the visual.

Each of the presentations had a particular angle, but perhaps the most unique was that of Tomei Hahn from Rensalaer Polytechnic Institute who had some provocative things to say and some interesting ways of saying them.  Like Professor Rasmussen, Professor Hahn surprised the audience by reading her presentation from a scroll which had been painstakingly written out.  In addition to conveying a sense of "wisdom of the ages," this unique format forced her to pace herself and not be hurried.  The unrolling of the scroll gave the listeners a focus for viewing.  She made the important comment that "writing is a structure that restructures thought,and yet, hearing a speaker or reading a text are, like music, ways of experiencing sound. The question then still remains:  How are we to display experience with sound?  She offered a number of suggestions:

First, be still with yourself.  Get into a quiet place.  ("Recollection in tranquility"). Next, we often find orientation through disorientation. Things that are too well ordered and premeditated often dull rather than stimulate the senses.  We determine a theory behind a sound by recalling its most vivid aspects, not always its most subtle aspects.  The subtlety is the shading that enhances the true message.   There are things we do for the benefit of others that cannot be seen by others. These hidden devices can act as a control or focuser. We must  "yearn" for words that evoke the experience.   Just as the composer searches for the "right note," we must often search for the "right word."   Given the choice between a word that expresses an idea but is rather flat and a word that has a richness to it that makes its "pop" off the page, the latter should always be considered.  Judicious using of such words can take the reader to a different place.  A quote I read just the other day speaks to this point::  "Good words enter you and become moods, become the fabric of your being." (Ben Okri, Art as a Way of Life).

Perhaps the most gripping presentation of the day was the final one, given by Deborah Wong from, a professor at the University of California at Riverside.  Entitled "Deadly Soundscapes: Scripts of Lethal Force,"  Professor Wong's sound writing literally hit close to home as it deals with a controversial event of police action in her community of Riverside, California.  Each point she made not only advanced the narration but also illustrated practices of sound writing. 

Two policemen shoot and kill a man outside a motel in Riverside.  By law, their actions in confronting and attempting to subdue the man must be recorded on a digital recorder.  [Sound writing describes sound by directly engaging the senses, in this case the confrontation, tazings, struggle and shootings--all recorded.]

When the policemen are questioned and their colleagues asked about the justness of their interaction with the man (who was found to be deranged) the "blue wall of silence" is often set in place.[Sound writing cannot always be heard, cannot aways be read.What us NOT heard or read becomes as important as what IS heard or read.]   The legal ramifications of any comments can be enormous.

The digital recording, which is automatically relayed to a station, is transcribed.  This written transcription becomes evidence in the case and, therefore, the nature of the transcription becomes more vital than the original recorded encounter and can vastly change one's perception of the event. [Writing about sound--or representing it differently--changes our perception of style, and our relationship to it.]

Because of the legal requirement of recording and because police know that the recorded encounter (and, more importantly its written transcription), they have practiced what they need to say in encounters (such as repetition of certain phrases-- "get on the ground,"  "get on the ground" ...... "get on the ground!").   Sound writing involves the development of poetics.

Ambient noises (such as people yelling or sirens sounding or cars and trucks) can effect the perception of the event.  (The sounds of people yelling or a siren sounding can be much more invasive than words such as "people standing by yelling" or "an ambulance with siren drives by").

The transcription of the encounter between the police and the man is a form of sound writing.  Professor Wong's writing about the entire process takes the sound writing process to another level.  And here, we are not talking about discussing a symphony or a tribal ritual, we are talking about a lethal incident that the sound writer did not personally witness but for which the stakes are high.  Professor Wong is an activist in her community.  Through her writing she neither wants to misrepresent the police action, nor does she want to misrepresent the actions of the man who was shot.  By writing about this event she was forced to think through the ramifications of every word she wrote, every nuance she conveyed, every point made.  It was not something she was comfortable doing.  She still has to live in the community she is writing about.

Writing is not easy. Writing about music is definitely not easy.  The "Theorizing Sound Writing" meetings and discussions have most definitely opened some doors for me and I am most grateful for the opportunity I had to participate.