A Brief Introduction to the Struggle between Music and Text:
On August 4, 1800 in Vienna, Austria, Ludwig van Beethoven wrote as part of his dedication for his song Adelaide, “The greater the progress which one makes in art, the less is one satisfied with one's old works.” 1 Consider music as the art form it is: it has steadily developed through different generations of color and texture ultimately culminating into that which we call popular music. In the process, composers continuously questioned previous developments and revolutionized music on their own.
For as long as humans have created various combinations of the two aesthetic elements of printed text and music (whether it was notated or not,) they also have sparked debate about which would be the victor. If one were to congregate every person on this planet into a large group, and then individually ask all of them which component would reign supreme over the other, one would theoretically receive two opposing answers. On the one hand, one half would agree that, standing alone, “music as an art [enables] us to understand the world,” likely in a broad and unexplainable sense. 2 Meanwhile, on the other hand, some would reply that only the text, which is commonly associated with music in works such as operas, “really does the representing, not the music.” 3 This argument stood to be true even back in the ninth and tenth centuries, when Christians added text to their alleluia prayer, which demonstrated for them “a conflict between the primacy of words or music that has” indeed “continued to the present time.”4
This conflict has spanned across religions and cultural boundaries naturally because music and text are components shared by almost every culture of the world for various rituals and celebrations. However, the textual element, in the form of literature, was not always the top priority, for as a result of the Holy Catholic Church’s considerable religious control over music, with its strict adherence to a monophonic structure, “books didn't sell in large quantities in the Middle Ages, when they were mostly religious items in monasteries.” 5 Clearly, at this time, music was winning the battle. Enhancing this triumph, the Greek culture had already formulated the ambiguous concept of mousikē, which, despite “[covering] indeed a remarkably wide range of aspects regarding religion, education, politics, and even the art of war,” 6 specified “music could put men in touch with the gods, and ensure a sort of afterlife through the power of memory.” 7 However, by the Age of Enlightenment, a great period during which “the idea of authors as sources of wisdom and entertainment became commonplace,” 8 attention turned toward the text instead. Although “books were not sold for most of their history,” this was when, “with the advent of industrial capitalism,” books became “mass-market [commodities.]” 9 People read “ultimately [to] see for a moment, through eyes that [were] not their own, the way life [was] for someone else,” 10 an outlook on humanity that could not be appreciated equally in pure music. (This outlook, one that connected humans to others in a universal relationship, will become more fundamentally important later in this paper.) Reading was a pleasurable activity, and even dramatic. In fact, “Charles Dickens offered some of his meganovels in the second half of the nineteenth century… with chapters being released on a weekly basis in newspapers. Readers drawn to Dickens's plot and style regularly bought newspaper copies.” 11 Simultaneously, “dime novels sold by the millions.” 12 This planted a seed for readers of the future in the form of a brief textual takeover.
The Purpose of Opera:
Around this time, when stories were gaining popularity in such a manner, esteemed academics were already conceiving something so groundbreaking that it would be revered for centuries to come, even to the present day: opera. There seems to be some controversy about how opera was established, but the most generally accepted view is that which favors the Florentine Camerata creating a foundation for opera. “Italian academics began as humanists who would “[provide] an alternative to the sometimes pedantic university world” by “[experimenting] with new music, or [sponsoring] poetry contests…” 13 These scholars must have thought that they finally and successfully terminated the music-text battle with the creation of the recitative, born as a way to solve a disputed “Renaissance understanding of ancient music [that] increasingly demanded a synthesis of” “conventional spoken theater with musical interludes,” and also create a “distinctively operatic form of musical speech that [made] continuously sung theater possible,” after Bardi staged intermedi for the de’ Medici wedding celebrations. 14
On their part, the recitative was a fair and innovative compromise of the textual and musical elements, each having an equal portion of the performance on the stage to the point where “…disconnection between the words and music [would] undermine the value of the opera,” 15 because “in a successful opera the words express the narrative and the music enriches it by providing the emotional aspect.” 16 Monteverdi, supposedly “the father of opera,” 17 displayed a “commitment to opera as primarily a dramatic medium [necessitating] that listeners come prepared to follow the story and stay alert to the text.” 18 “[The Florentine Camerata argued that by singing,] the Greeks were able to make the emotional content of the words accessible to the audience.” 19 At this point, the text was again prevailing over the music. One verismo, La Bohème, blatantly expressed an opinion on why the textual element was apparently so significant. Ironically, the character, Rodolfo, did it in song:
I am, I am a poet!
What's my employment? Writing.
Is that a living? Hardly.
I've wit though wealth be wanting,
Ladies of rank and fashion
All inspire me with passion;
In dreams and fond illusions,
Or castles in the air,
Richer is none on earth than I. 20
Rodolfo loved to write, and he just might have implied that writing was a good thing to do in life, indirectly foreshadowing a reading revolution that would change the way we perceive literature.
How Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring Contributed:
As aforementioned, music was always, and always will be, a constantly changing, growing being, like a human. With this revolutionizing comes great creativity and innovation from the minds of the composers, who would become tired of the same old musical customs after a while. The ones who would revolutionize music rode on a train of thought with the mantra, “Don't give the public what the public wants; instead, teach the public to want something different.” 21 In the act of creation, each composer “may mean to conjure up a storm, but may not be adept enough at orchestration to create the drama that had been hoped for.” 22 For Igor Stravinsky, that storm would be an “earth-shattering masterpiece of twentieth-century music,” 23 controversial too. It was not opera, however; he defied the standards of ballet with dissonance and overt references to pagan Russia too shocking for the audience to handle. It caused a riot, and according to one reviewer, “at the end of the Prelude the crowd simply stopped listening to the music so that they might better amuse themselves with the choreography.” 24 The choreography was a part of the story that the music simply was not, and a sharper focus on this aspect might have partially led to the division of text and music as a unit. Indeed, Stravinsky achieved his goal; “[with these pieces,] the prestige of a composition or a composer proceeds from the challenges the music presents, and where popularity might be considered as an index of failure…” 25 Having said this, as a composer, Stravinsky must have felt an internal pain of some sort from the negative reception, but when it comes to composing, “the work is hard and the physical desire to do it sometimes not very great; but the writer {in this case, of music,} has nothing to say about it—the idea must out.” 26 Music of this kind shared an association with “a continual striving for originality,” 27 something listeners now feared.
They ironically had a collective knowledge that art is like a human, and can become too powerful for itself. One may theorize that they feared the music would become too complex, so they started to back off from listening to it as strongly to simply enjoy its aura, in the hopes that, also like a human, it could soon recover. They reverted to enjoying what they liked from the operas from a time of literary supremacy: the story, aka the textual element. After all, “…the recitative [was] central. It [enabled] the plot to move forward.” 28 Essentially, it is the core of the opera, the music only providing an emotional background that might not have been necessary in their view, considering the simple librettos they would come to utilize.
A Textual Takeover:
According to Karl Marx, “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of… in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another.” 29 Many of those disputes ended “in a revolutionary reconstitution of society…” 30 This is what the middle class audience members attempted to do with a textual takeover that took place after the premiere of The Rite of Spring. The middle class already created a substantial background for itself in history as the class that overtook the proletariat class in an escape from their considerable oppression. Who is to say, then, that they could not do the same with the arts, and take command over the musicians? They already did that with opera in the past. They demanded art, and wanted to see it performed at subscription concert halls, even willing to pay a lot of money for them, and play music at home. They wanted to get out of the hole created by the Church’s musical control, along with that of their lords and fellow aristocratic proletariat members. The audiences grew to be fuller, and composers had to meet the demand with more impressive, complex compositions. They wrote verismos like La Bohème and Carmen with a new magnified look at the average person on the street: the middle class man or woman. In a way, they created their own fear, but in the end, they voted to stick to simplicity. Simplicity was not their idea, though. Inventors were always creating new technologies designed to make the world an easier place in which to live. This is a trend so clear even into today’s society that it does not need to be explained in its entirety here.
A part of the reason for this rebellion was that the “orientalism, exoticism and nationalism” key to the development of impressive operas “[were] beginning to look out-of-date in the brave new world which emerged after the First World War… and the Russian Revolution.”31 The people were now searching for more realistic, simpler plots, satisfied with the verismos, which “emerged in both literature and opera during roughly the same period (in novels and spoken theatre around the 1870s, in opera around the 1890s),” 32 during the same period in which La Bohème just happened to premiere, in 1896. In these operas, “the crisis [was] usually defined in terms of… stylistic departure from a norm…” 33 appropriate for a mass of society looking to deviate. Verismos were simple, and “narrative structure [assumed] greater prominence than it had previously.” 34 This shows a strong gravitation toward a simpler story line, which they would utilize with reading and writing; except, they did not seem to realize that when Monteverdi wrote the recitatives, he “[resisted] casual listening,” 35 foreshadowing more issues ahead. The people did not seem to realize that “…the circular track of the avant-garde binds it to a continual shifting of position: it may be part of a mass culture… [or] a necessary part of its development. It may be integral to it…” 36 When applying the term avant-garde to the middle class situation, one can imply that complexity is simply a part of a natural cycle. One enters a phase of simplicity, only to reenter one of complexity. The middle class was destined to return to complexity, and it did. “…The restricted market of the avant-garde, driven by fashion and constant turnover in symbolic value, mirrored the mass market better than any other restricted market…” 37
“…Modern society had now become increasingly 'specularised'—sight over sound. The capacity of the Western intellect to decode sound has largely atrophied.” 38 In part, this is because with the advent of the simple, catchy tunes of blues, jazz, and rock and roll in the 1950s and 1960s, music certainly dropped that weight of complexity, Stravinsky having tainted its name. A surprisingly relevant example is the popularity of mystery novels, “the most widely read genre for more than a century.” 39 It is so astounding because the readers of these books not only satisfied their urges for simplicity with “nearly universal bare-bones plot outlines” 40 and “formulaic, repetitious, or conventional plots” 41 quite similar in concept to the structure of librettos, but also “[sought] their particular pleasure in the text and in the images they [would create] in their minds.” 42 They seem to have received the same attention as operas in a way, because “reading detective novels has been a passion of academics and other consumers of canonical literature.” 43 The readers became so ingrained in the appeal of novels that they soon began to control the entire literature industry. In the 1940s, George Gallup was insightful, and it was likely he saw that “the book business, in common with other culture industries, both [shaped] and [plumbed] cultural response.” 44 Suitably, “a ‘marketing orientation’ dominated American corporations during this period” 45 In 1943, this industry had a “unique marketing problem [with] competitive organization [and] overproduction… [seeking] to satisfy a public taste, thought to be wholly unpredictable.” 46 “Authors [became] jealous about the control of their ideas, and there [was] usually friction between authors and artists or authors and film directors,” 47 supporting how “marketing… [suggested] a measure of sensitivity on the part of authors and publishers to readers’ tastes.” 48 “Competition from other forms of leisure entertainment, such as radio and television, also spurred studios to examine the desires of film patrons” 49 when “a 1937 AIPO poll found that 46% of filmgoers paid more attention to the story than to any other factor in selecting a film.” 50 Fittingly, keeping this information in mind, Gallup surveyed audience preferences, which actually “influenced the casting, narrative structure, and promotional campaigns of films ranging from Gone with the Wind to Walt Disney's cartoons.” 51 It is obvious that the middle class was engaged in a revolution similar to Marx’s prediction (although he discussed Communism) in “[reconstituting]” society. 52 “…Studio executives during the 1940s viewed audience research as a way to minimize risk and maximize profits…” 53 just as the book industry continued a “trend… toward corporate monopoly and standardization of output.” 54 The textual element was killing the musical element to the point where the people were essentially writing their own films and books. Recall Rodolfo, who found the enjoyment of writing so pleasurable that “richer was none on Earth than [he.] 55 Since he happened to say this in a verismo fine-tuned for the raw public who had wanted a change because of Stravinsky’s outrageous developments, it makes sense to infer that the public was almost conditioned to think this way. The humanist scholars would have been glad to see such an interest in the recitative they specifically formulated for class and grace. “…It is possible that… recent successes of graphic novels as films will cause the tail to wag the dog, producing even more incentive to create graphic novels.” 56 This was a climax of the complexity cycle aforementioned; as is the nature of a cycle, there would be a decline, with hints of resurgence again.
The Fate of Music and Text:
When it comes to popular music nowadays, “…if the public likes it, if it makes it feel satisfied, it will not notice [any] difference.” 57 Fundamentally, the people had ripped the soul out of the opera in the form of books when they started the revolution, and with simple music came passive listening. “…A demotivated Western youth had relegated music to a background role in their lives.” 58 Again, it was natural; “the western genre [at least for graphic novels] prospered until at least the 1970s, when cultural changes undermined its premises.” 59 The interesting part is that both the musical and literary cycles, i.e. the cycles of the musical and textual elements, both faltered at the same time. “The last twenty years has witnessed a miscegenation of sound and vision which has befuddled the 'pure' qualities of both.” 60 Similarly, we used to live in a world where we cared more about the plots in our books than the sounds on our radios, but now we only live in a world with the same passivity toward music and an additional detriment to literacy with less people having the urge to read. It is a shameful epidemic, caused by technology and social media, a field again into which this paper will not describe in detail. It seems as if we as a society will no longer appreciate the arts as much as we used to.
Recall the complexity cycle. We are currently in a down state in the cycle, so does this mean we are set up for another revolution or sudden interest in literature and/or music? It is possible thanks to Roger Waters of Pink Floyd, who attempted to spin the wheel back twice. In the 1960s, there were “rare examples within the canon that [did] exceed critical expectations, to the extent that listening [seemed] to need to go beyond the competences developed through the genres of popular music, such as the Beatles’ ‘Revolution 9’ and the Beach Boys’ unreleased Smile album…” 61 Pink Floyd definitely counts as an example of a group whose sounds elevated the complexity lost with other rock and pop groups of the time. Waters is “one of several composers who have tried to disprove that” 62 “…opera is a diminished art form that can offer little to an American audience in the twenty-first century.” 63 His “[belief] in accessible, exciting opera” made his opera album Ça Ira “[become] the best-selling “classical” recording on both sides of the Atlantic and is probably the fastest-selling English language opera in the history of recorded music.” 64 Waters is the type of musician who truly appreciates music, even digressing from psychedelic rock to venture into opera in 2005. He knows that society has essentially killed music and tried to bring it back with a bang. Granted, “there is next to no character development; and the conflict between individuals, a feature of virtually every successful opera in the western tradition, is barely attempted,” 65 it was at least a start.
It is unfortunate that people have lost musical appreciation; “…ordinary [listeners] to popular music hardly ever engage in musicological analyses. When they do, it is as if they are ‘struck … by the difficulties of talking about how and why music works.’ 66 However, in retrospect, it seems to make sense that people migrated toward simple passiveness because “the concentrated listening required to appreciate ‘the most intellectual music ever created…’ is superficial [because it directs] attention only to isolated elements within the performance [and] listens to the totality in [a]… way that equally refuses to recognize the structural complexity of the work…” 67 Nevertheless, probably thanks to Waters in some respects, “annual {opera} admissions are now estimated at 20 million, roughly the same attendance as NFL football games (22 million, including playoffs, in 2006–07).” 68
Conclusion:
There will always be a battle raging between music and text for supreme aesthetic reign. Despite their obvious differences, they seem to both be equally qualified contenders for the trophy. Unfortunately, it became a stalemate because of the people hungry for art and revolution making the situation worse instead of better against the intention. Perhaps there will be a comeback, and perhaps there will not be. The cycle for both text and music is currently on the low side, but hopefully there will be future authors and musicians willing to change that for the better. The humans who tried to manipulate the arts manipulated themselves in the process.
Notes:
1: Beethoven, Ludwig van. “Beethoven: the Man and the Artist, as Revealed in His Own Words.”
2: Morris, Michael. “The Meaning of Music.” The Monist 95, no. 4 (2012): 556-587.
3: Ibid.
4: Reynolds, Robert D. “Textless Choral Music.” The Choral Journal 41, no. 2 (2000): p. 20.
5: Stavans, Ilan. “Should Books be Sold?” World Literature Today 88, no. 1 (2014): 15-18.
6: Raffa, Massimo. “Music and the Muses: The Culture of ‘Mousike’ in the Classical Athenian City.” edited by Penelope Murray and Peter Wilson Oxford: Oxford University Press, (2004): p. 108
7: Ibid., 109
8: Stavans, op cit.
9: Ibid.
10: Karl, Jean. “Market Trends Don't Write Books, People Do.” Children’s Literature 10 (1982): 206.
11: Stavans, op cit.
12: Davis, J. Madison. "How Graphic Can a Mystery Be?" World Literature Today 81.4 (2007): 7.
13: McNeely, Ian F. “The Renaissance Academies between Science and the Humanities.” Configurations 17, no. 3 (2009): 228.
14: Ibid, pp. 246-247.
15: Pratt, Scott L. “Opera as Experience.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 43, no. 4 (2009): 74.
16: Ibid.
17: Ringer, Mark. “Music; For the Father of Opera, a Rare Family Reunion.” The New York Times, April 2002.
18: Ibid.
19: Pratt, op cit., p. 75.
20: Giacosa, Giuseppe, Luigi Illica, translated by W. Grist, and P. Pinkerton. "The Project Gutenberg eBook, La Bohème."
21: Stavans, op cit.
22: Morris, op cit.
23: Chua, Daniel K.L. “Rioting with Stravinsky: A Particular Analysis of the Rite of Spring.” Music Analysis 26, no. 1-2 (2007): 60.
24: Ibid, p. 59.
25: Atton, Chris. “Listening to ‘Difficult Albums:’ Specialist Music Fans and the Popular Avant Garde.” Popular Music 31, no. 3 (2012): 348.
26: Karl, op cit., p. 206.
27: Atton, op cit., p. 349.
28: Ringer, op cit.
29: Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Bantam Dell, 1888. p. 13.
30: Ibid, p. 14.
31: Chua, op cit., p. 59-60.
32: Ciorazzol, Adriana Guarnier. “Opera and Verismo: Regressive Points of View and the Artifice of Alienation.” Cambridge Opera Journal 5, no. 1 (1993): 39.
33: Ibid, p. 40.
34: Ibid, p. 42.
35: Ringer, op cit.
36: Atton, op cit., p. 349.
37: Ibid.
38: Buckley, David. “Popular Music.” The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 10, no. 1 (2002): 131.
39: Goldman, Alan H. “The Appeal of the Mystery.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69, no. 3 (2011): 261.
40: Ibid, p. 263.
41: Ibid, p. 261.
42: Davis, op cit.
43: Goldman, op cit., p. 261.
44: Taylor, Ella. “Novels as Popular Culture.” Qualitative Sociology 9, no. 4 (1986): 397.
45: Ohmer, Susan. “Measuring Desire: George Gallup and Audience Research in Hollywood.” Journal of Film and Video 43, no. 1-2 (1991): 6.
46: Berreman, Joel V. “Advertising and the Sale of Novels.” The Journal of Marketing 7, no. 3 (1943): 234.
47: Davis, op cit.
48: Taylor, op cit., p. 397.
49: Ohmer, op cit., p. 11.
50: Ibid, p. 15.
51: Ibid, p. 3.
52: Marx, op cit., p. 14.
53: Ohmer, op cit., p. 4.
54: Taylor, op cit., p. 397.
55: Giacosa, op cit.
56: Davis, op cit.
57: Stavans op cit.
58: Buckley, op cit.
59: Davis, op cit.
60: Buckley, op cit.
61: Atton, op cit.
62: Chandler, David. “Roger Waters and British Opera.” Journal of Popular Culture 43, no. 1 (2010): 26-44.
63: Pratt, op cit.
64: Chandler, op cit.
65: Ibid.
66: Atton, op cit.
67: Ibid.
68: Leaf, Jonathan. “America’s Opera Boom.” The American (2007)
Bibliography:
Atton, Chris. “Listening to ‘Difficult Albums:’ Specialist Music Fans and the Popular Avant Garde.” Popular Music 31, no. 3 (2012): 347-361.
Beethoven, Ludwig van. “Beethoven: the Man and the Artist, as Revealed in His Own Words.”
Berreman, Joel V. “Advertising and the Sale of Novels.” The Journal of Marketing 7, no. 3 (1943): 234.
Buckley, David. “Popular Music.” The Year's Work in Critical and Cultural Theory 10, no. 1 (2002): 131.
Chandler, David. “Roger Waters and British Opera.” Journal of Popular Culture 43, no. 1 (2010): 26-44.
Chua, Daniel K.L. “Rioting with Stravinsky: A Particular Analysis of the Rite of Spring.” Music Analysis 26, no. 1-2 (2007): 60.
Ciorazzol, Adriana Guarnier. “Opera and Verismo: Regressive Points of View and the Artifice of Alienation.” Cambridge Opera Journal 5, no. 1 (1993): 39-40; 42.
Davis, J. Madison. "How Graphic Can a Mystery Be?" World Literature Today 81.4 (2007): 7.
Giacosa, Giuseppe, Luigi Illica, translated by W. Grist, and P. Pinkerton. "The Project Gutenberg eBook, La Bohème."
Goldman, Alan H. “The Appeal of the Mystery.” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 69, no. 3 (2011): 261.
Karl, Jean. “Market Trends Don't Write Books, People Do.” Children’s Literature 10 (1982): 206.
Leaf, Jonathan. “America’s Opera Boom.” The American (2007)
Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. New York: Bantam Dell, 1888. p. 13.
McNeely, Ian F. “The Renaissance Academies between Science and the Humanities.” Configurations 17, no. 3 (2009): 228.
Morris, Michael. “The Meaning of Music.” The Monist 95, no. 4 (2012): 556-587.
Ohmer, Susan. “Measuring Desire: George Gallup and Audience Research in Hollywood.” Journal of Film and Video 43, no. 1-2 (1991): 6.
Pratt, Scott L. “Opera as Experience.” The Journal of Aesthetic Education 43, no. 4 (2009): 74.
Raffa, Massimo. “Music and the Muses: The Culture of ‘Mousike’ in the Classical Athenian City.” edited by Penelope Murray and Peter Wilson Oxford: Oxford University Press, (2004): p. 108-109
Reynolds, Robert D. “Textless Choral Music.” The Choral Journal 41, no. 2 (2000): p. 20.
Ringer, Mark. “Music; For the Father of Opera, a Rare Family Reunion.” The New York Times, April 2002.
Stavans, Ilan. “Should Books be Sold?” World Literature Today 88, no. 1 (2014): 15-18.
Taylor, Ella. “Novels as Popular Culture.” Qualitative Sociology 9, no. 4 (1986): 397.
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