Formalism vs. Contextualism, part two

In my last post, I was trying to clarify the point of contention between Arthur and me by distinguishing what I called formalism and contextualism and explaining how I thought Arthur had blurred the distinction. I'd also like to say a little bit about why I think I tend to fall on the formalist side of the divide.

The first point to make is that I don't always fall on the formalist side. There are some early songs of Bob Dylan's, for instance, that I would be hard pressed to defend on formal grounds but that frequently have a magical effect on me. That effect has to do with Dylan's possibly unprecedented way of singing, which owes something to Woody Guthrie--a loaded association for me already, since my dad was born into the same Oklahoma dust bowl that Guthrie wrote about--and which evokes something of Greil Marcus's "old, weird America," but which, because of Dylan's intimacy with the microphone, infuses the uncanniness of The Anthology of American Folk Music with a new human warmth. Where Dylan borrows lyrics from the folk tradition, that intimacy (which, by the way, disappeared very quickly, only to reemerge in the mid-1980s) recharges them with the romantic longing that must have animated them in the first place, and I associate that longing with the photo on the cover of Freewheelin', Dylan young and charmingly innocent with a girl on his arm, a photo that evokes the excitement of Greenwich Village in the early 1960s--which I also associate with my parents' youth, which coincided with Dylan's, and which I imagine now with the same fond nostalgia I feel when I remember my own, which like Dylan's was marked by musical ambition and coffee house performances and cheap apartments and long, late talks with people who seemed eccentric and brilliant and passionate. But at the same time, I can't look at that picture or listen to those recordings without imagining the haggard Dylan of today, who sings with such rue on Time Out of Mind, "I been to Sugar Town, I shook the sugar down," or without remembering the weird incense smell of the candlelit basement room in my freshman dorm where I listened to Dylan in earnest for the first time, sitting on the floor, and where the discovery of his music seemed like a ritual, a right of passage--all of which add to the swirl of sensations and emotions that the music elicits.

I could probably go on, but the basic point is that this is one case among many where what matters most to me about a group of recordings seems to be "what they mean culturally", in Arthur's formula. I treasure the experience of listening to those recordings for all their associations. But at the same time, I feel that tracing out all those associations will do me very little good. As Arthur put it in his comment, it's "not an intellectual pursuit he [me] is interested in".

That's because any particular, magical confluence of associations is very unlikely to occur in exactly the same way again, so it's not much of a guide to future decisions about what music to buy. I take it as axiomatic that the point of arts criticism is to (1) deepen people's appreciation of familiar works of art or (2) guide them to unfamiliar works of art that they will deeply appreciate. My appreciation of those early Dylan songs could hardly be deeper, so (1) doesn't really pertain. At the same time, I've found that a singer's proximity to the microphone, or the fact that he or she is roughly my parents' age, is not as reliable a predictor of a satisfying aesthetic experience as, say, melodies of wide range that feature lots of leaps and wander out of the diatonic scale.

I realize that this could sound like a circular argument: formal properties are better than cultural meaning at predicting what music I'll like, but that's only because, for some idiosyncratic reason, I'm more intrigued by music's formal properties than by its cultural meaning. If that's true, however, then Arthur and I may not really be disputing anything; we just appreciate different aspects of music. But then, I don't really see anywhere for the conversation to go. It doesn't do a whole lot of good for either of us to say to the other, "Care about this thing that you don't care about!" Caring is something that can't be done on demand.

But the reason I write lengthy blog posts instead of just shrugging and walking away from the conversation is that I think that, for most people, formal properties really do make a difference. I think that even the trippiest hippie at Woodstock, who just wanted to make the scene and feel the peace and love vibe, probably recognized formal differences between the music of Jimi Hendrix and that of Sha Na Na, and that those formal differences probably led to aesthetic discriminations, one way or the other. One of the reasons for this blog is to try to develop a more nuanced and precise critical vocabulary for discussing formal differences. The vast majority of pop-music criticism has, in fact, concentrated on cultural meaning; I'd like to at least try to nudge my seven or eight readers toward thinking more about the notes.

Formalism vs. Contextualism, part one

I know, I know, I've started to look like one of those people who start blogs full of enthusiasm but forget about them within months. But since my last post, I have gone to southeast Asia for two weeks, come back to find that in addition to having, basically, started a new job, I'm also editing a new section of the magazine, agreed, nonetheless, to write a story for the next issue on a topic that I didn't really know anything about, found a place to live with my girlfriend, packed up and moved all of my earthly belongings, and gone to Texas for my sister's wedding, for which, in what might laughably be called my free time, I wrote a song. The new apartment is still full of unopened boxes, I'm still behind at work, and Elise and I spent the last two days in New Haven, but dammit, I'm determined to get something up on the blog today. [When I wrote the preceding sentence, BTW, "today" meant November 18.]

My last post prompted a bunch of great comments, which I hope to at least begin to address.

It's true that for years Arthur and I have been carrying on a debate about music, and like him, I've been inclined to think of it as a clash of aesthetic principles, between what we might call formalism (my side, a concentration on the formal properties of music) and contextualism (his side, a concentration on, as he puts it, what music "means culturally").

The distinction between formalism and contextualism is, like most distinctions, somewhat specious. It's probably impossible, except maybe for people with severe autism, to attend solely to the formal characteristics of music; my preference for particular types of melodic or harmonic movement must derive, at least in part, from the cultural contexts in which I first encountered them. Similarly, it seems unlikely that someone could attend solely to the cultural context of music and make no discriminations based on formal properties. Summer-of-love hippies and straightedge punks both considered music vital to the advancement of their cultural and political agendas, but I don't think that you could have swapped the formal properties of the music--psychedelia and hardcore--without also altering the associated cultures.

But, also like most distinctions, the one between formalism and contextualism is probably useful for some conversational purposes. Arthur's comments, however, blur that distinction in ways that I don't quite follow.

That may be because I have the opposite tendency: making overnice distinctions in cases where they're not useful. It's true that, when discussing music, I tend to talk a lot about melody. But most of the melodies I find "interesting"--the one I mentioned in my last post is a notable exception--wander out of their home keys, so they also have interesting harmonic implications. And of course, varying the durations, both absolute and relative, of the notes in a melody can change its character utterly, so it's even more difficult to wall melody off from rhythm. (Again, the Rick Astley tune provides something of a counterexample: the melody of the chorus is fairly straight, with just a little syncopation each phrase. In the first phrase, the syncopation falls on the "eh" of "forever." Interestingly (maybe), if you give equal duration to all of the notes in the melody, you fall into waltz time: to GEH-ther-for EH-ver-and NEH-ver-to PART ... ONE-two-three, ONE-two-three, etc.) I think I tend to emphasize melody because, while there's a lot of pop music with good grooves or interesting harmonic features but boring melodies, there's less with interesting melodies and boring rhythmic or harmonic features. Actually, there's less pop music with interesting melodies, full stop.

Anyway, granted that I overemphasize melody in my discussion of music's formal properties, I still consider rhythm a formal property. So I'm a little confused when Arthur says that "Sometimes he [me] admits that he likes a 'groove' or something like that; we once discussed the appeal of Outkast's 'Hey Ya.' But mostly those things seem to fall into some sort of 'visceral appeal' category." Particular types of groove may very well become associated with particular cultural movements, but the same is true of harmony and melody. A bunch of added chord tones can turn almost any pop song into a jazz piece, with all of jazz's contextual associations; and the "blue notes" of blues melodies--the equivocations between the flatted and natural third, fifth, and seventh--virtually define the genre.

Nor do I think that "groove" intrinsically falls into "some sort of 'visceral appeal'" category. All music falls into the visceral-appeal category, at least initially; that's why we get into it. It's only later that we (or at least some of us) begin to analyze its formal properties. If I've spent less time analyzing the rhythmic properties of pop music, it's probably because they seemed less mysterious to me when I started writing my own songs. Jay's right that my "first exposure to popular music was relatively late and that [I] appreciated what [I] heard as a classically trained musician." But on the other hand, the classical music I was listening to was mostly Shostakovich, Bernstein, Stravinsky, and Copland. The rhythms of pop music seemed rather tame in comparison. But the melodies--I didn't really conceive of melody as a separate formal property until I started to realize how hard it was to write good pop tunes.

Okay, I have lots more to say, but I'm going to save it for later. Because otherwise, it could be another two weeks before I get this post up on the blog. But in closing, I feel obliged to point out that it was Vanessa who introduced me to Tay Zonday mere days before I mentioned him on my blog with such casual knowingness. I am justly rebuked for failing to give her credit.