Description
- Abstract:
- Reaching back to the apocryphal wanderings of Pythagoras, the artform of music has been indelibly tied to concepts of nature and the natural, principally that of the organism. Composers, theorists, and philosophers across millennia have sought either to confirm or problematize this linkage. The organism has been turned to time and again in order to provide legitimacy to radically different theoretical constructs undergirding musical composition and analysis, with the approach appearing to ossify in the American academy by way of its Romantic expression, systematized by Heinrich Schenker and his acolytes in the mid-20th century. Through discourse, the concept of music as organism, or organicism, has become inculcated as both a foundational aspect of the history of musical analysis and an aspirational bugbear from which to stake out differing views of sonic construction. In the recent period of postmodernity, to say that organicism has gone out of vogue is an understatement, as a critical lens has rightfully brought to light the failings and biases latent in its Romantic theoretical expressions. Mired in controversy, betraying a misplaced universalism, and with an air of anachronism, organicism’s application to the wide variety of musics today has been put into serious doubt. But organicism is pesky; it continues to crop up, while the parameters linking music and nature have continued to shift across time. We as music practitioners, analysts, and listeners find ourselves continually haunted by the specter of the sonic organism, a term whose bounds are fuzzy, its definition evading simple capture. I contend that the Romantic idea of organicism is part of a larger investigation and coordinating of the sonic with the natural. Interrelations between sound and nature have been charted since well before the Romantic era, and resonances between the two have continued to enter musical scholarship and practice amidst the relative domination of Schenker’s understanding of musical organization. In other words, the issue at hand lies not with the relating together of sound and organism, but with the reductionist critique of a single model of organicism that musical analysis has taken in turn as gospel and apostate. The organicism of Schenker must be seen as part of a wider and deeper conversation seeking to draw parallels between sonic art and nature. A variety of thinkers and movements whose work has coupled music (consciously or inadvertently) with appeals to the natural will be surveyed, illuminating how the parameters and expectations of the organic in sound have shifted across time. This historical narrative is constructed with an eye to Anne Harrington’s suggestion that the academic distrust of organicism “depends in no small part on the reduction of organicist thought to one of its variations,” namely its Romantic variant. The inclusion of the theories below is not an endorsement of their validity, or an attempt to rehabilitate them. Rather, these distinct understandings are juxtaposed in order to allow their resonances to appear in starker relief, as reflective fragments of a larger mosaic.
- Notes:
- Thesis (M. F. A.)--Brown University, 2023
Citation
Bentz, Nicholas,
"A History of the Organic in Music"
(2023).
Computer Music and Multimedia Composition Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://repository.library.brown.edu/studio/item/bdr:dhhefugf/
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Computer Music and Multimedia Composition Theses and Dissertations
Theses and Dissertations for the Computer Music and Multimedia Composition department....