Moving to Portland brings all the positives and negatives of urban living. A notable positive is access to the arts and I’m looking forward to catching Stravinsky’s The Firebird this weekend with the Oregon Symphony. Part of the program is a new work by composer Vijay Iyer who has a history of incorporating concepts derived from African rhythms, hip hop, and jazz into his compositional efforts. I took the opportunity this morning to read his 1998 dissertation from Berkeley that capped off his interdisciplinary program in the cognitive science of music. I’ll just say up front that I’m not sure it rises to the level of a dissertation since it does not really provide any significant new results. He notes the development of a microtiming programming environment coded in MAX but doesn’t give significant results or novel experimental testing of the system or of human perceptions of microtiming. What the dissertation does do, however, is give a lucid overview and some new insights about how cognition and music interact, as well as point towards ways to test the theories that Iyer develops during the course of his work. A too-long master’s thesis might be a better category for it, but I’ve never been exposed to musicology dissertations so perhaps this level of work is normal.
Iyer’s core thesis is that musical cognition and expression arise from a physical engagement with our environments combined with cultural situatedness. That is, rhythm is tied to a basic “tactus” or spontaneously perceived regular pulse or beat of music that is physically associated with walking, heartbeats, tapping, chewing, and so forth. Similarly, the culture of musical production as well as the history that informs a given piece all combine to influence how music is produced and experienced. This is constantly contrasted with the linguistic-computational model of cognition as a symbol processing engine; instead music operates pre-symbolically in echoic/perceptual memory, but then has varied components in short term and long term memory as well. He uses tactus to identify and consolidate some of the known ways that tempo varies in differing types of music, especially in microtiming variations in idioms like swing, jazz, and Afro-Cuban music. These, he notes, are associated with the natural consequences of having:
…a bank of timers in our neural apparatus, each related to the time constants of our various limbs, digits, and other effectors as they perform various tasks
In other words, the specifics of different idioms of music and how they achieve their unique timing qualities are tied directly to the limits and capacities of the human form engaging with physical instruments. When we MIDI-fy music perfectly it sounds sterile. Even chamber musicians micro-vary their attacks/releases based on experience and expectations that are small and unrelated to annotated changes like dotted notes, swing time, and so forth. It is the microtiming that is essential to human-produced music.
On the cultural front, Iyer expends some effort debunking repugnant ideas about the relative complexity of Western music versus African or Eastern. It seems quaint in 2023 but was still a needed palate cleansing in 1998 to go after intellectuals who clung to some kind of high/low art abstractions. Considering that painting and sculpture spent the 20th century deconstructing traditional ideas of what is high art—a trend that has continued to where cartoonish bored ape NFTs are ginned up as the future of art—the notion that music should have escaped this expansive embrace and reconsideration of its own cultural baggage is odd, but the minds Iyer pushed back against were not necessarily as tuned to the transformative expansion of ideas of music in the modern world. Part of that is culture: rich and fancy folks dress up to go to the symphony and marvel at the old-timey ideas like Slavic folklore romantically recast in highly structured ballet movements. They don’t as often listen to hip hop or African drumming.
And that brings me back to Iyer’s premiere of a new work that precedes The Firebird. I am looking forward to his pre-talk and whether I can see his direction of the players drawing out their own physical engagement with the work, their instruments, the culture of production, and my own fancy form perched in the balcony. I will feel the cello, I am certain.
fixed typos