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Music and the Soundscape
- Wesleyan University Press
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Music and the Soundscape In The Tuning of the World I predicted that by the end of the century music and the soundscape would draw together. We have passed the end of the century; there is no need to retract what I said. I meant that the reciprocal influences between what we call music and what we refer to as environmental sound would become so complex that these hitherto distinct genera would begin to syncretize into a new art form. I was speaking of the Western world. In other parts of the world the two types have never been completely distinct, and though they now begin to show signs of separating, I wouldn’t care to predict what will happen in places beyond my listening experience. To understand the momentum for blending today it is first necessary to show how Western music diVers from soundmaking elsewhere. In the Western tradition music is an abstract entertainment for the pleasure of the ears alone. The word abstract is emphatic. Listeners are not encouraged to associate music with functions or purposes beyond the aesthetic enjoyment it provides. Functional music is relegated to a lower order and music that is made to serve political , mercantile or even religious purposes is always under critical suspicion. Religious music sometimes escapes censure because so many Western composers wrote so much of it; but the conservatories and concert halls where it is taught and performed have been careful to minimize whatever religious messages it may sustain, concentrating on its aesthetic merits. In order to achieve this purity it was necessary to separate music from the soundscape. The soundscape is a plenum. The music room is a vacuum. Music fills it. Without music in it, it is scarcely a room at all: chairs, a stage, music stands and a podium, these are its scant furnishings. But there is a method in this arrangement. All the chairs face the stage and all the sounds will come from here. This will be the exclusive focus of attention during the concert. No longer are we at the center of the soundscape with sounds reaching us from all directions; now they reach us from one direction only, and to appreciate them we must point our ears, just as we point our eyes when we read. In this quiet space the composer will be able to fashion much more intricate structures than were possible outdoors. The music has a definite beginning and ending. r. murray schafer ⢇ [ 58 ] The audience will arrive before the beginning and remain until after the ending, sitting in rows facing the performers. They have voluntarily surrendered the use of their bodies and their feet and will use only their hands and voices to express their appreciation at the end of the music. In order not to distract from the listening process, the performers also move as inconspicuously as possible and their faces are neutral and expressionless. Definitely the concert promises psychic rather than somatic satisfaction, and the composer uses the concentration of the audience to arrange his material in a vast architecture of principal and secondary themes, transitions, harmonic centers, modulations, instrumental interplay and dynamic shading—an ideal soundscape of the imagination, elegant, controlled, dissonance-disciplined and invigorating. The economist Jacques Attali claims to find the clue to the political economy of nineteenth-century Europe in the concert of the eighteenth century, dutifully listened to by the bourgeoisie and faithfully transmuted into a harmonious industrial order in which commodities flowed out to fill the world just as tones had filled the music hall.1 Sometimes I have thought the traditional sonata form is a model for a colonial empire: first theme (loud), the mother nation; second theme (softer), the supine colony; then follows the rhetorical and occasionally pugilistic exchanges of the development section, the rapprochement of the mother and colony in the recapitulation (both now in the home key), and the coda—consolidation of the empire. The classical music of Europe during the era of colonial expansion was a music of departures and conquests, exciting openings and exultant conclusions . That this form of music-making is unusual among world cultures is by now quite well-known. Elsewhere music is eVortlessly associated with dance, with physical tasks, with religious rituals and healing ceremonies of all kinds. In those cultures there are many musics, each associated with special activities and celebrations. In many cultures the word music does not exist at all. In Africa, for example, there is no...