the music of language, the music of place
TRANSCRIPT
-
8/15/2019 The Music of Language, The Music of Place
1/9
The Music of Language, The Music of P lace
By: Lee Barry
Aphasia, the inability to use or comprehend words is one of the side effects of
a stroke. But the ability to sing words is rarely affected, even if the words cannot be
spoken. Using the music in language, the patient can be reminded of the words,
and eventually restore the damage done by the stroke. Somehow the brain remains
receptive to the rhythmic segmenting of language, as if the brain is partitioned like
the hard drive of a computer, whereby the files (words and phrases) are erased,
but the underlying structure of the drive remains intact, so that the files can be
replaced. Its as if the hard drive of the brain is formatted with bar lines, allowing the
rhythms to fall into their proper places.
Listening to Language
Even this sentence has a rhythm. Read through it in your mind, and you
should notice that the highest point is the first syllable of the word sentence. If we
were to notate the sentence it would look like this:
If you read the sentence with stresses on other words and syllables, it
becomes almost unintelligible, and perhaps even sounds like a foreign language.
Read the sentence and put the stresses on the second syllable of the word even
and on the second syllable of the word rhythm.
The Music of Language, The Music of Place
Page 1 of 1
-
8/15/2019 The Music of Language, The Music of Place
2/9
How meaning gets mapped onto language is largely musical. Syllabic stresses
are like upbeats and downbeats, and when placed in a specific temporal context
communicates ideas.
The following musical example represents the shave and a hair-cut, two bits
ditty barbers would shout out to get men to come in for a preen, and eventually
became the basis for a riff used in many blues songs:
Music is so intricately intertwined in culture that it is often difficult to discern
whether it is the language of the music or the music of the language that shapes the
culture. It is a boundless phenomenon, a blend of melodic contour and custom,
making a music which seems to resonate from the core of the culture, yet could by
the same token, grow out of the music itself.
In Oriental cultures, with a history of a more rigid social structure, you find a
music comprised of microtones, with tiny steps from note to note, mirroring the
narrow, confined social spaces. In African and Native American cultures you tend to
hear bigger leaps in the melody--intervals of fifths and octaves, which is perhaps a
gesture to express the expansive landscape.
When you listen to a foreign language you can instantly hear the music in it.
If you listen beyond the surface elements, you also hear what it might represent in
terms of its political position, and the boundaries it might be making or breaking. Hip
The Music of Language, The Music of Place
Page 2 of 2
-
8/15/2019 The Music of Language, The Music of Place
3/9
Hop music has this effect where you instantly get certain impressions that it is taking
a position, and is willing to defend its boundaries. The overall sound is brazen, biting
and ironic, and often has a militant tone. It succeeds in breaking new ground as an
artistic movement, and perhaps breaks boundaries for the marginalized; but makes
unintentional boundaries of social class marked by the cadence of the voice. Alan
Lomax, the preeminent musical ethnologist found that a raspy vocal quality was a
primary characteristic of war chant, and in fact we hear it in lots of music, even to
this day, albeit in a different context. The rasp may not necessarily be in the voice,
but it is in the cadence of the music, and it says in essence, I am willing to defend
our boundaries and establish our identity.
It is ironic that sometimes in efforts to make these types of cultural
boundaries we make them so that they can also work against us. And in this sense,
slang or dialect can become a barrier, even though in our minds, we feel we have
removed the boundaries. The boundary remains a faint palimpsest visible to
everyone but us--a kind of bell curve that everyone follows. Dialects can also be
clues of class distinction and social status--and like the railroad tracks in the
American South--a profound margin; mostly invisible, but oftentimes the chalk-mark
of racial discrimination. Prior to the civil rights movement the South was not a safe
place, and consequently created communities of resistance, further establishing a
boundary, but at the same time removing the barriers to freedom. Forty years
hence, there may still be a margin, but never a boundary. In theory, the more you
defend a margin or boundary, the more you establish its power to oppress and limit
freedom. It is an endless, paradoxical phenomenon. In many cases it was music that
broke the barriers, even music that was filled with the dialects that made the
barriers in the first place.
Language, music and a place called home
The Music of Language, The Music of Place
Page 3 of 3
-
8/15/2019 The Music of Language, The Music of Place
4/9
Region creates the voice of a culture. This voice is an emergent property of
place, as language is an emergent property of intellect. With language of any kind, it
creates memories of places, and dialect boundaries demarcated by the terrain.
This sense of place can create physical boundaries as well, such as the fertile
crescent in Western Mississippi, the place where Delta Blues was born, at the
proverbial intersection of Highway 61 and the railroad tracks. When we use the
terms country and urban blues, it suggests how clearly this sense of place gets
translated into music. B.B. King's Why I Sing The Blues describes Chicago's ghetto;
James Thomas's Highway 61 celebrates the road through the Delta running north
to Chicago. The music also evokes the isolation of an empty room or a highway in
the Mississippi countryside. The Blues comes from the country, out of the work songs
drifting out of the night air, as the fields are plowed:
I'm setting here a thousand miles from nowhereIn this one-room country shack
Yes, and I wonder will my baby be coming backI wake up every night around midnight
I just can't sleep
All the crickets keep me company, you know the wind howling 'round my feet(As sung by James Thomas, 1968, Leland Mississippi)
The Music of Language, The Music of Place
Page 4 of 4
-
8/15/2019 The Music of Language, The Music of Place
5/9
Poetry and music keep the secret that language tries to tell
If you were to distill the essence of language, you'd come up with something
resembling poetry or music. It reduces language to concepts, ideas and symbols;
and leaves just enough ambiguity, such that it takes something like heart or soul
to fill in the spaces with stories about the culture.
It was this terse approach to language that made Mark Twain so popular, and
such a seminal force in American literature. It had a vocal quality that spoke of
common experience and of simple values; and addressed difficult social issues with
wit, stripping away the pompousness in favor of an easy-going vernacular. This is
not to say that simplification of language or music is an attempt to dumb it down--as
humans can never lose innate intelligence through atrophybut people can be more
easily influenced when the intellect is not challenged; and musics poeticism leaves
just enough room to make them feel comfortable to begin a deeper contemplation of
social issues. Once the door has been opened, people begin to delve more deeply
into complex topics, and not feel so intimidated by them.
Jazz is an example of this expansion of possibilitieswhich crosses the
threshold from a simple art form with folk roots to multidimensional concept art.
As jazz grew out from the mlange of cultural influences, it eventually
became a very sophisticated and complex language, both in a musical sense as well
as culturally; carrying much more information beyond the music, such as artistic
rebellion and social commentary. The music or language can sound simple on the
surface, but the subtext is much more salient.
Even with all its folk and ethnic influences, jazz eventually evolved into a very
esoteric art form, and to this day maintains its reputation as high culture. Like
conceptual art, jazz is ambiguous enough to leave the listener feeling slightly curious
and perhaps confused--not unlike reading a poem and contemplating its hidden
meaning--and very often remaining perplexed about it. These hidden meanings are a
The Music of Language, The Music of Place
Page 5 of 5
-
8/15/2019 The Music of Language, The Music of Place
6/9
cunning device by the poet or musician to deconstruct language; to shuffle the deck,
deal a new hand, and play a joke on the listener with the intent of getting them to
think about it, and to further investigate their own feelings and opinions. In a sense
the poet says, I have a secret, and its up to you to discover it. And if you discover
it, you will be smarter as a result. Poetry and music are the perfect devices to
influence people, as they take apart normal everyday language and reassemble it so
that the mind can think about it and fill in the spaces, and in the process enrich the
listener.
Jazz is also interesting in that it sets up an interesting feedback loop between
music and language. Horn players often say vocalists influence them, and vocalists
often say horn players influence them. Scat singing is an attempt to mimic horn
phrasing; and horn phrasing is an attempt to make the horn have a vocal quality. In
a sense, scat singing and the jazz solo are placeholders of speech; as you could go
back later and plug in a lyric; and it would make perfect sense.
All boundaries need a center
All cultures have their centers as well as boundaries. In the American south
the center has often been the church, where the boundary between gospel music
and folk music is blurred, and perhaps consequently led (at least partially) to the
development of the Blues as a genre.
Mississippi Blues singers often referred to pitching sounds backward and
forward, which seems to suggest a call and response, as if a ball were being tossed
between the performer and the audience. In the church, the preacher and the choir
are the performers and the congregation the audience. The tossing of this energy
has the effect of removing the barrier between the two, so that everyone in the
church becomes one. In this experience, the division of a spiritual life and life itself is
virtually dissolved. If the Blues genre is indeed the extension of spiritual music, then
The Music of Language, The Music of Place
Page 6 of 6
-
8/15/2019 The Music of Language, The Music of Place
7/9
it perhaps follows that the sorrow that can sometimes be expressed through blues is
essentially the voice of spiritual longing, shared through community spirit. Whether it
comes in the form of vocal music or with acoustic guitars, the form of the words and
the emotional contour of the melody ultimately inform the guitar playing, the facial
expressions and language of the body. In a sense, these gestures are even more
telling of the inner state of the people, and is the way the culture describes itself
with unique sounds and emotion. This then extends deeper into the culture and
shapes a unique sense of place.
While language and music may evoke the vision of a place, it also in
mysterious ways, constructs boundaries around what voices belong in certain places,
and in what station in life they belong. Humans, as creatures of habit, have a
penchant for putting things into neat categories with distinct boundaries around
them. What we say in essence is: The pigeon is a bird, the pigeon has its song, and
the pigeon has its hole. It is a pigeon and nothing more. As the music informs the
language it can be suspected to also create boundaries or perhaps even barriers that
function, in a Darwinian sense, to the survival or detriment of the community over
the individual. The individuals either survive through the community, or survive by
escaping from it and establishing other ones, based on a cultural subset with new
ways of thinking and using language.
Culture, Music and the Tw o-Pronged Trident
Culture is a way of seeing, a way of hearing and a way of feeling. It can be
difficult to see the world from another perspective, and even if you do, it can never
include all the nuances. In music, white people often find it difficult to sing with a
soulful, black voice. Obviously, many people have learned to do it, but there are
barriers that prevent us from becoming black enough to be convincing. Miles Davis
used to talk about music sounding too white, and could often tell how good a
musician was by the way they held their instrument. There is a whole set of
The Music of Language, The Music of Place
Page 7 of 7
-
8/15/2019 The Music of Language, The Music of Place
8/9
embedded cultural rules that transcend normal understanding. And we don't fully
understand other cultures for some of these same reasons. Anthropologist Edward
Hall referred to this phenomenon as high context whereby culture is driven by
ideas and concepts transcending language, obviating the need to be reminded of the
concepts.
Bulgarian music is similarly intractable for Western sensibilities, and its
intricate rhythms can be utterly perplexing. The music is usually insanely fast; in odd
time signatures like 7/16 or 9/16, and the melodies are uniquely ornamented. An
American upbringing prevents us from relating to this music; yet in Bulgaria they
dance to this music with great aplomb at weddings! The straight back beat of most
Western pop music is easy for us to relate to, yet there would be someone from
another culture that wouldn't be able to understand it, as their brains were never
wired for it. Language and music are interdependent and have no real cultural
saliency without each other.
In the 1960s, anthropologists conducted studies in the African bush where
they would show the natives photographs and asked them what they saw. Many of
these people had never seen a photograph before in their lives. One woman, when
shown a photo of her own son, failed to recognize him. However, when they were
shown the same images on cloth or stone, they were able to relate to them. This
may indicate that certain cultures may have invisible constructs in the brain that
prevent subjective interpretation of the outside world. Its encouraging to think that
music and art can be effective in breaking these barriers; as they transcend a
language comprised solely of words. Music and art have their own language largely
based on context (as in the photo recognition problem of the bush people); and you
encounter similar problems with people understanding artistic intent. In music,
especially instrumental music, you can more easily understand the culture, as what
they value in the community is reflected in the musical product, generally speaking.
The Music of Language, The Music of Place
Page 8 of 8
-
8/15/2019 The Music of Language, The Music of Place
9/9
Western music and art tends to defy this explanation, as it is very often conceptual
and ironic, and conceals its intent from the surface of the work. In this sense, it
creates a boundary around itself, such that only people attuned to the intent of
conceptual art can understand it. (Which consequently can exclude many Americans)
While music can be the snapshot of a culture in a theoretical sense, Western
varieties tend to obscure it, or at least partition it off from the culture for purpose of
taking sides with a subculture. But the true essence is in the cadence of the voice,
and the music we instantaneously hear in it.
The Music of Language, The Music of Place
Page 9 of 9