Whose Music?: A Sociology of Musical Languages

by John Shepherd

Whose Music? combines historical, musicological, and sociological materials and styles of analysis in ways that connect to the field of sociology. The analyses of social class systems presented here speak in translatable ways to analyses of musical forms. Not only that, both are connected to an understanding of the organizations through which works are distributed to their audiences. Perhaps most importantly for the contemporary reader, this book depicts the part of the process by which dominant class groups justify their domination--cultural and otherwise.

300 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

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[Jerusha · Rating 4 out of 5]

SOME OBSERVATIONS ON THE SOCIAL STRATIFICATION OF TWENTIETH CENTURY MUSIC
---Phil Verden and Trevor Wishart

"The tonal system of music out of organum= the hegemonic standard
Argument: there is a separate tradition of 'genuine folk musics'= don’t operate according to rules of tonality
Musics are largely stratified according to class (social-political, economic and cultural class, [refer Bourdieu] in industrial societies
Music of the elite---church music/ commercially popular songs---folk music "
Folk music, though having simple chord progressions, weaves an elaborate extemporization of melody and an expressive nuance of rhythm, timing and tone, within the given structure
This happens because the music of the elites and the music of the folk serve different functions

A thorough hierarchical organization of society around the specialization of functions= different experiences and differences in symbolic articulation. The working class, in the routines of their daily drudgery, not only alienated from the products of their labour [refer to Weber], but also from their intellectual potentials
Working class: adapted to incomprehensible and massively unmovable physical and human world= concerned with material interests, abide by authority, seek security in communal strength
Affluent classes: voluntaristic optimism and individualism; tendency to internal compulsion and competence built on a distanced and abstract mediation
Language: Bernstein. Working class role relations favor a communication code emphasizing verbally the communal rather than the individual, the concrete rather than the abstract, surfaces rather than processes, immediate behavior rather than intentions, statuses rather than individual personalities. 'Solid' working class, identifications are closely shared, restricted code is sufficient. Intent of listener is taken for granted. Focus on immediate, descriptive and categoric, rather than the mediate, abstract and hypothetical
"Artworks are in general best understood as prescriptions for perception, conception and hence, ultimately, the organization of our moral and political activity"

"The separation of 'song', or 'music' from 'speech' is an aspect of an alienated sense of the world, a symptom of our denial of the unity of being. So too is our attribution of truth only to the written word and to what we suppose to be the discourses of natural science and our ordering of our sensorial powers or symbolic modes in a hierarchy of importance."

A restricted coding contains its own aesthetic, a simplicity and directness of expression, emotionally virile, pithy and powerful and a metaphoric range of considerable force and appropriateness. Some examples of the writings of working class children taken from the schools... have a beauty which many writers may well envy. Bernstein, 1973a, p76)
...a restricted code is the basic code. It is the code of intimacy which shapes and changes the very nature of subjective experience, initially in the family and in our close personal relationships. The intensifications and condensations of such communication carry us beyond speech and new forms of awareness often become possible, p78.

Western classical music is the apodigm of the extensional form of musical construction. Theme and variations, counter-point (as used in classical composition) are all devices tHat build diachronically and synchronically outwards from basic musical atoms. The complex is created by the combination of the simple, which remain discrete and unchanged in the complex unity. Thus a basic premise of classical music is rigorous adherence to standard timbres, not only for the various orchestral instruments, but even for the most flexible of all instruments, the human voice. Room for interpretation of the written notation is in fact marginal.... The rock idiom does know forms of extensional development but it cannot compete in this sphere with a music based In this principle of construction

Rock, however, follows, like many non-European musics, the path of intensional development. In this mode of construction the basic musical units (played/sung notes) are not combined through space and time as simple elements into a complex structure. The simple entity is that constituted by the parameters of melody, harmony, and beat, while the complex s built up by modulation of the basic notes, and by inflexion of the basic beat. (The language of this modulation and inflexion derives partly from conventions internal to the music, partly from physiological factors.) Al existing genres and sub-types of the Afro-American tradition show various forms of the combined intensional and extensional development... the 12-bar structure of the blues, which for the critic reared on extensional forms seems so confining, is viewed quite differently by the bluesman, for he builds 'inwards' from the 12-bar structure and not 'outwards'. Complexity is multidimensional and by no means quantifiable, and the aesthetic capacity of a musical form cannot be measured by complexity alone, but the example of the country blues shoes the complete adequacy of a purely intensional mode of construction to am immensely subtle and varied project of aesthetic expression (Chester, 1970, pp 78-79)

The rural blues is in fact a simple pentatonic structure but with extremely complex inflexion of pitch, timbre, attack and rhythm which defies notational analysis. The idiosyncratic sounds of the different blues artists, rather than specifiable notes they play ad sing, are at the heart of the artform. The meaning of the music lies not only with what is uttered but more importantly with how it is uttered.. the nuance of intonation holds much of the meaning.
continuum from explicit or extensional music to implicit or intensional; explicit music can be implicit eg. light operetta to musical and ballad tradition or implicit music can be extensional eg. the formal procedures and harmony development in cool jazz and progressive rock (Emerson, Lake and Palmer and Yes)

The blues as an extreme pole, in 'opposition' to the system of tonality: develops implicitly by inflexion; immediate, non-literate and passed on in an oral-aural tradition; organizes the terms of its musical system upon the principle of 'mutual communality'
different musics encode deeply different relationships between people and between people and their realities

Electrification of communication- recording and broadcasting- brought whole of industrial world face-to-face in sound; blacks found resonance with the experience of others who felt alienated from the established order
Generations: young born before WWII 'crooning' and sweetened jazz way was the ideal expression of the rhythms of life
the young of the 1950s dug deeper into the American black folk tradition to express a wider difference between the generations' experiences of their times; immediate, demystified and tougher individual stance; dissent of the dispossesed; frontiers of jazz and rock not just expressing an alienation from mainstream culture but an alternative attitude to the world; predominant 'chant-like' nature of the music, often displaying modal features
Pitch inflexion is also characteristic of Indian classical music and Schuller considers it 'worth mentioning that Indo-Pakistani music is divided into six principle modes, three of which -afternoon modes- are nothing but the blues scales. To establish possible historical links between these modes and he American Negro's blues scale might be an interesting project for a future student of jazz'.

pitch inflexion/ whole chord bending found in the blues cannot be found in functional harmony

John Shepherd: "pre-literate consciousness" of restricted or intensional coding
Jazz commentators: blues= accommodation between pentatonic melody and tonal harmony
Elucidation of white society's ethnocentric musical analysis; Blacking's (1973, p.73):
"since musical patterns are always acquired through and in the context of social relationships and their associated emotions, the decisive style-forming factor in any attempt to express feelings in music must be its social content. If we want to find the basic organizing principles that affect the shapes or patterns of music, we must look beyond the cultural conventions of any century or society to the social situation in which they applied and to which they refer"