From Dance! to "Dance": Distance and Digits

The relationship between "art" musics and vernacular (or "popular") musics in Western society is complex and has a long history. From engagement and synthesis to incomprehension and antagonism, this relationship has reflected larger social trends--themselves the product of economic and technological change. Within this continuity, there are periods of intensified exchange. In the 1920s, for example, it centered on jazz, but in the 1990s the picture was not so clear. There is a cautious consensus that in the 1990s, there was a profound difference: art music itself appeared to be increasingly isolated as a minority interest (an old argument to be sure, but increasingly highlighted). Another major contribution to this polemic has been the ever-increasing access to sophisticated tools for music production that computer technology has enabled.

The Roots of Music

Let us assume that music has its origin in the earliest experiences of our evolution, namely in the body and in the environment.

The Body

The body generates many rhythms and sensations with cyclic periodicities lying within the duration of short-term memory. The most important are breath, pulse, and the limb movements of physical work, dance, and sex. These are a product of our biological evolution, our size, and our physical disposition in relation to the mass of the earth--hence its gravitational field--and would be different if we had evolved to be the size of a bat or an elephant, or if the earth had possessed a different mass.

The Environment

The environment has a different time scale--with both periodic and aperiodic rhythms--and this is often beyond the limits of short-term memory. This often necessitates repeated listening and consignment to long-term memory, thus encouraging contemplation and consideration: water, wind, the seasons, landscape.

The body and the environment are in perpetual interaction, of course, but this interaction is sometimes uneasy. The relative values of contemplation and distance versus body action and involvement have varied from mutual support to outright hostility within the social fabric of different cultures. There has always been an uneasy relationship of altar to maypole--of a "modern" religion to its "pagan" predecessors--alternating dramatically between destructive and punishing anger and wholesale appropriation, adaptation, and absorption.

Early religious music of the European tradition articulated the contemplative (distanced) condition, banning nearly all aspects of body rhythm and expression for many centuries, aiming to create a sense of transcendental timelessness beyond that of the corporeal. Even breath was harnessed in the creation of long lines of chant, quite beyond the normal periodicities of regular breathing. While the description of a musical activity such as plainchant as "art" is relatively recent, it embodies in prototype many of the values of what was to become art after the Renaissance: distance, contemplation, and extended concentration. However, as Christopher Small (1998) has pointed out, strictly silent concentrated listening at concerts only emerged in the 19th century.

As the vernacular and secular European world invented "art" as separate from religion, the emphasis shifted back from the timeless to the clear articulation of time (through meter and rhythm)--increasingly so from the Ars Nova. This separation was finally crowned in the flowering of the Western art music tradition at the time of the Renaissance itself, which increasingly threw the body and voice, dance and song, to the forefront of its discourse.

While we may not usually dance to the rhythms of the environment, we have an apparently insatiable desire for mimesis of its sounds and their relationships. From Jannequin's Chant des Oyseaulx through Beethoven's Pastorale to Debussy's La Mer, the relatively simple periodicities of dance and song became progressively extended and distorted through the influence of these "environmental" forces, finally being displaced altogether by the large gesture and the grand sweep of the elements (but always from a distance, in our imaginations).

The Rite of Spring (1913) is an example of this confrontation at its most unmediated, where the different rhythms of body and season...