On beauty, taste, and 'Hearing the performance'

 

On beauty, taste, and ‘hearing the performance’ (Part 1)

 The philosopher of music Peter Kivy establishes a useful distinction which, although originally applied to classical music, can serve equally well to contextualise the discussion that follows. It is possible, Kivy argues (2007), when listening to classical music, to hear the music but not the performance.

What he means is that any given musical score is both played and interpreted:

played, because the notes are there, along with most dynamics (e.g. loud vs soft, crescendo, accents, tempo), and any instrumentalist will play what is written.

Interpreted, because there is space enough for a musician to give their own twist to those notes and indications – taking a passage more slowly than indicated, playing legato instead of staccato, accentuating this note rather than that one, and of course changing the tempo.

 So in the words of Kivy, a performance is a token (a sort of example) of the music-type, and each performance is both (more or less) faithful to the score while at the same time being unique. Take two piano players, give them the same score to play, and while they will be playing the same notes they might well end up playing those notes differently, giving the same music a different feel – giving it the player’s personality, making their interpretation unique. (Let us add here that this is a general case: personality might well be what distinguishes the great players from the average ones. In other words, not all players will be able to imprint their personality on what they play).

 In insisting that it is possible for someone to ‘hear the music but not the performance’, Kivy is therefore highlighting the difference between listeners – which for us here, of course, means Readers. A casual listener, a listener who wouldn’t know the music, would only hear that music but would not be able to tell the difference between interpretation A and interpretation B. Each encounter with that music would be the first.

What that means for us is that it is therefore possible to hear two renditions of, say, a sonata, and each time hear only the music, that is, not be able to tell the difference between each interpretation of the music – each performance. Any rendition of a piece we do not know is effectively the first time we hear it, which makes hearing nuances nigh-on impossible.

 This distinction between music and performance – between token and type – is useful in that it points at a basic problem with literature: when someone has little reading experience, the subtleties that tell a text apart from another are likely to be ignored. This reader will attend to the most obvious traits – the score, the type, the surface – but might miss out completely on what makes a text unique: the performance, the token.

 It's important here to realise that ‘uniqueness of performance’, in the world of texts, refers to what distinguishes one text from others within the same genre: two science fiction novels, two romantic novels, two naturalist novels, for example. Farah Mendelsohn, in her The Inter-galactic Playground: A Critical Study of Children's and Teens' Science Fiction (2009) showed how rare it is for adults to start reading science fiction if only because when they do, they have no understanding of the genre, and therefore each novel they try to read is the first instance of that genre. As a result, they will not hear the performance (what makes that particular novel what it is) but will remain stuck in the music as a whole – and to be clear, Mendelsohn doesn’t use that distinction herself. The newer the music is for them, the less they can see beyond it. The superficial aspects of the genre stand in the way of attending to the subterranean meanings the text offers.

 Ok, so what? Why should we care?

Well, one problem with Genres is to do with tropes, i.e. recurring features in that genre. Ask anyone to name what they associate with, say, Science Fiction, and if they are not familiar with that genre, they’re likely to say things like: ‘Aliens, robots, Technology, Space travel, Laser, Spaceships, Future’. Disregarding the fact that those elements are really not applicable to a lot of science fiction (and most certainly not applicable to what the best science fiction has to offer), it remains that those are tropes of the genre, and long-time readers of it will not be distracted by them. Yet a lack of familiarity with that genre will often mean that first-time readers of it will be distracted by any or all of those elements should they be present. They are likely to think ‘But starships don’t exist’, or ‘We don’t know whether there are aliens’: fair enough, but who cares?

 Well, those readers do, simply because any such question is based on the music-as-a-whole, and consequently obscures the performance. If you’re constantly asking yourself ‘Ok, but you can’t fly to Venus like that, it’s impossible’, you are very unlikely to think symbolically.

An alien is, symbolically, ‘the Other, the Unknown, the Different’. A spaceship is ‘A way to go somewhere’; another planet is ‘A different place where they do things differently’. Technology, since Arthur C. Clarke’s famous quote, is 'a form of magic when you don’t possess it' . Seen that way, all those tropes can function symbolically; seen as elements of a music you’re not familiar with, they are distractions and obscure the discourse.

As you immediately understand, this problem is far from limited to science fiction (should that interest you, see some references at the end). Take any sub-genre (Romance, Thrillers, Detective novels, Adventure, Chicklit): they will have their own tropes, their own recurring features that unite them all.

• Someone meets someone, they fall in love (or probably not right away), they can’t be together then they can; they marry and are happy forever after.
•   Someone was murdered, it’s a mystery, someone’s going to investigate by asking questions, going round the place, meet people, deduct, identify the culprit, case closed.

You can see how this goes.

And remember: with tropes like that come connotations: if you think the idea of aliens is ridiculous, you’re unlikely to take a novel with aliens seriously; if you think the shepherdess-meets-prince idea is cringey, you’re unlikely to give its chance to a novel that features it.

‘Who cares’ also because there’s another problem here: it’s that basic, three-way distinction when it comes to text-reading –  there is the level of the Story, that of the Plot, and that of Discourse. Teachers know how students usually get stuck at the first, sometimes at the second, level, and that the third one – Discourse, in other words, Meaning – is the hard one to reach; in fact, that’s the one everybody struggles with. Most people read for the story, unconsciously relying on the plot, and are quite happy with that. Yet most people would agree that there’s ‘more to the book than the story’ –  the problem is how to get there, and what stands in the way of doing so.

 

Part 2 next time! Where we apply all this to aesthetics, text selection and interpretation