Re: kafka and rilke

John O. writes:
<< I assume you are not including South America, then? Or Africa? I think
this claim might be a bit overstated and I also suspect the definition
offered might be a bit limited. I can think of other forms of "songs" than
the one you mention, even today, such as the long, improvisational pieces
from *Nighthawks at the Diner* I mentioned earlier, like "Nighthawk
Postcards" or "Putnam County" or "Spare Parts I: A Nocturnal Emission," all
of which are "songs" on a Waits album, but none of which fit your above
definition in any way. >>

>From consideration I am excluding neither South America nor Africa. And it
is true that I am no expert in ancient cultural musics, but I am not aware
that either continent had, properly speaking, "songs" until the influence of
the West. They had music, surely; even damned fine music perhaps. But
songs?

I should be insulting no one with this limitation. Is Beethoven's Ninth a
song? Surely you're entitled to insist obstinately that it is -- but then
you must acknowledge that you're using in this instance a damned funny
understanding of "song," or at least not the ordinary one most of us use
every day. Hell, if after the first few minutes of a performance of the St.
Matthew Passion, you lean into the person next to you and say, "Damned fine
song," he might thing you're being insulting or sarcastic. He'll at least
think you're confused.

Of course the "definition" I gave sought no finality, and there are of
course cases where we use the word "song" in other senses, but I do believe
that this is the most usual one today. People who listen strictly to choral
music, say, or strictly to classical music, tend to use the word very
sparingly if at all. Likewise, it might be that Tom Waits considers the
pieces you mention to be songs, but I do know many musicians of both popular
and classical styles from whom it would be by no means unusual to hear in
response to the word, "That wasn't really a song, we were just jammin'."

The earliest musical notation is, I believe, from the very tail-end of the
first millennium, and this notation contains no rhythmic indication -- which
is fine for chant, but modern music can't be written this way. Perhaps the
invention of adequate notation is among the biggest factors in the emergence
of fully modern music. Rhythmic indication didn't come about for several
hundred more years. The earliest evidence of polyphony -- the setting of
multiple, independent but usually intertwined pieces at harmonic intervals,
which between voices or a voice and a guitar is characteristic of virtually
all modern Western music -- is around the 11th century, and soon blooms into
rich medieval counter-point (listen to Palestrina for the best example and
some of the most stunningly beautiful music you've ever heard).

Most of the earliest surviving Western music, so far as I know, is chant.
It is based on traditional Jewish cantillation and musical theory handed
down from the Greeks. With the advancements mentioned in the previous
paragraph, this soon blossomed into a vast and rich music. It was still a
while though, until there was much that most of us would unhesitatingly call
"songs." There were a few very early ones, certainly, but the "song" in
what I take to be the most usual sense of the word today became the popular
form of music relatively late.

If you can find something like a modern song from South America or Africa or
elsewhere -- not just beautiful music, which was probably abundant, but
something that most people approached on the street would immediately call a
song -- that already existed in its current form, established prior to the
arrival of Christian missionaries, I'd be interested to hear about it. (In
fact, when one hears performances in high schools and elsewhere of
"traditional African songs," reading a translation often reveals a
surprising degree of Christian symbology.)

I expect it might even be the case that many Westerners would not be
immediately inclined to call something a song that is in neither a major nor
a minor scale (though after prodding, they might say that it is, in the same
sense that one might say Beethoven's Ninth is one too). Such technical
aspects of music that most of us never consider, such as how our instruments
are tempered, have a profound impact on the "feel" of the music that comes
out. Modal music seems a little unusual if you're not used to it.
Traditional musics that use "micro-intervals" (like those of India and
China, for instance) tend to strike the untrained Western ear oddly, too.
By design, our Western instruments register fundamentally similar intervals,
participate in the same scales.

I suppose that there ARE songs played on such instruments these days, though
they might be strange on first hearing to most in the West. But were there
songs for these instruments in the first millennium? I expect that there
were, in the sense that Mozart composed songs. But in the sense -- which I
think is the more usual one today -- that it sounds downright funny to call
Mozart a song-writer, I expect that there were not.

John O. also writes:
<< Now, while we're defining, anyone want to talk about hip-hop, and the
spoken word stuff on Def Poetry Jam? >>

Most hip-hop conforms to the same general form (for radio play, etc.) as
most popular music, and I would be inclined to call a lot, if not all of it,
songs. This varies, though, as there are more and less song-like (and even
musical) rappers, and more and less song-like (and even musical) sub-genres.
I think you will find, however, something that might even approach a mild
reluctance amongst the rappers themselves to call what they make "songs."
This certainly varies from individual to individual and rap to rap -- but
nouns like "raps" and "rhymes" are more common, I think (very often,
especially amongst successful rappers, even "tracks").

-robbie
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Received on Sat Jun 28 20:31:43 2003