The Musical Map - Charting the Unknown Territory of the Significant Form of Music

John Rahn has articulated an impassioned plea against representation as the "mere re-presentation which it in fact cannot attain and to which it does not even dare aspire (the map is not the territory)."(1)

I am going to use the word "map" differently to argue that all art is an attempt at representation, at some level, and that it is precisely this inability of art to completely re-present the artistic impulse that gives art its potential for meaning. If art could completely represent anything of interest, it would have to become as vast as that which was being represented in the "Borges tale where the cartographers of the Empire draw up a map so detailed that it ends up exactly covering the territory."(2) Art cannot completely re-present either the personal experience of the artist or the universal condition, but can afford glimpses into this personal/universal dichotomy. Deleuze and Guattari establish an important distinction between what they call a map and a tracing:

What distinguishes the map from the tracing is that it [the map] is entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real.(3)

It is this distinction that I see as fundamentally describing the difference between mere entertainment and true artistic expression. I consider both the creation of an artwork and its critical perception and analysis as not mere tracings but a cartography of the human experience. In this way it is the orientation of both the artist and the perceiver that differentiates art from entertainment. If I am allowed to pursue further the cartographic metaphor: art as a map serves to chart territory to afford the perceiver a guide. But each perceiver uses the map in his or her own way for their own particular journey. Entertainment commodities are directed and inflexible, describing only well-travelled routes to specific destinations: interstate highways, if you will-where regardless of the distance travelled, the scenery is essentially the same, and all exits deposit the traveller in a shopping mall or some other similarly homogeneous destination. Art, on the other hand, creates a myriad of back roads that afford the traveller the opportunity to stop and admire the scenery and accumulate new experiences along the way. After such a journey, the traveller is transformed, not simply effortlessly transported to a new co-ordinate that is essentially the same as the point of origin. Benjamin Boretz distinguishes between high art and entertainment art in a similar fashion:

Entertainment surrogates our time; relieves us of it for a spell; lives through it for us while its on loan; does what it takes to keep it for just so long as that feels nonconsequential, not threatening our ultimate reappropriation; returns it refreshed but otherwise intact, unsullied by any lingering tarnish or blemish of content; cleansed but not altered, corroborated but not invaded, renewed but not re-formed. High art surrogates our time exactly so also; but aspires to not only surrogate our time but also to transform it permanently and substantively: purports to return it to us comprehensively reconstructed: such that not just immediately during or following, but always thereafter, and even with cumulative effect, our time (= the world) will not be the same.(4)

"The map is not the territory." But what is this territory that we as artists and critics are mapping-human potential or some hitherto un-rediscovered "ecosystemic mind?"(5) David Dunn states that because it necessitates the intention of multiple levels of mind...music-making remains one of our most powerful tools for self-investigation" and that musical activities may help precipitate "a resonant interconnection of the multiple levels of mind where consciousness reflects upon the wholeness of this larger mental system."(6) Perhaps this territory cannot be described by descriptive language or mimesis in any medium, but only briefly glimpsed by artistic and critical maps. The distinction between map and tracing drawn above is crucial to distinguishing between high art and entertainment art, and between the interactive mapping activity of productive critical reception and the tracing of passive reception. That is, the map and the activity of mapping is "entirely oriented toward an experimentation in contact with the real. The map does not reproduce an unconscious closed in upon itself; it constructs the unconscious."(7) This activity of mapping is always new; it "always has to do with performance, whereas the tracing always involves an alleged 'competence'."(8) Boretz makes a similar distinction when he states that rather than artworks being "about the world,...they are in the first place of the world."(9) I understand Boretz to say not that artworks are not representational, but that the activities of artistic production and reception create new artistic artifacts. That is, the inability to completely map or re-present anything of the world results in any attempt to do so becoming itself a new entity of the world, rather than a copy of something that already exists. Boretz also carefully distinguishes between the qualitatively different ways that art can be perceived. In order for the perception of art to be an actively creative cartographic activity, the perceiver must be experienced not just as a passive tracer, but he or she must be experienced in the creative, cartographic act of perceiving artworks "as artworks"(10)

This crucial distinction in the activity of perception is one of the most important factors in allowing one to discriminate between an artifact functioning as high art or entertainment art. Too often, it is merely the artwork itself and the context of its production that contribute to the assignment of high art status. However, the reception of an artwork is also an integral part of the artistic process. Distinctions between high art and entertainment art are always problematic when they are based on the hegemonic power relations of the dominant intellectual culture. [This next bit is awkward] For example, in music the absolute importance of the performance is often ignored in the Western music tradition; but the performer and the performance are absolutely essential in distinguishing between high art and entertainment art in all musical traditions. In music that has a primarily oral tradition, there is often only the realization. However, even in the Western tradition of the masterpiece score, the performance and the reception of the performance must be maps and not tracings. Compare the banal tracing that is a rendering of a popular song arranged as "elevator music" with the exhilarating "lines of flight" in a recording of a performance of the same song by Charlie Parker. Or, compare the reception by a snobbish symphony subscriber of a pedestrian performance of "The Fifth" with the committed and engaged reception by an aspiring composer of a concert of new student works. These examples bring to the fore the complexity of issues of musical production and reception.

I propose that there is a personal/universal dialectic that must be engaged in order to try to explicate these complexities. As John Rahn points out: "The dimensions of the creative act are at once intimately personal-this is me out there-and inevitably involved with ideologies, religions, metaphysics, [and] politics."(11) An artwork cannot merely represent a single perspective, but must allow and even demand that it can be "reworked by an individual, group, or social formation."(12) Of course, an imaginative perceiver could probably contrive any number of "readings" of a given artwork. However, there is some balance required for any given work to be perceived as a high artwork as opposed to an entertainment artwork. As Rahn puts it, "all expression is both existential and personal."(13) It is possible to discriminate between art that has this potential and trivial entertainment. Baudrillard presents an interesting example. He manages to find the existential and the personal in his analysis of commodity culture. However, it is clear (to me at least) that when he visits Disneyland and is prompted to write a creative, provocative essay, it is this essay which is the artistic mapping, rather than the "hyperreal" theme park itself.(14) But there is a diminishing return in the enterprise of fashioning artistic maps out of such crass simulacra or tracings. It might be worthwhile to invoke a theoretical apparatus that allows one to situate the relatively creative mapping and stifling tracing in both the production and reception of a given artifact. Is it possible to rehabilitate Nattiez's admittedly problematic theory of a semiology of music to facilitate such an endeavor?(15) My fundamental objections with Nattiez's model are: 1. that his tripartition seems to be not a true triadic structure in the Peircean sense, but rather two concatenated dyads, and 2. his distinction between the poietic (production) and the esthesic (reception) levels is an artificial one because the composer or performer is simultaneously a perceiver and the perceiver creates his or her own perception. However, even if one allows for the utility of distinguishing between the producer and the perceiver, the distinction I am making between map and tracing is not accounted for by Nattiez's model. Could the inclusion of the personal/universal dialectic, in both the poietic and esthesic levels of Nattiez's tripartition, create a useful theoretical appararatus? In order for an artwork to fulfill its function as a creative map it must be created with the intention of establishing this personal/universal dialectic for the perceiver. If a work of art is created with too much emphasis on the personal without allowing for the possibility of some universal relevance, then it would not be artistically successful. For example, someone outside of any tradition or context just indiscriminately making noises would not likely produce something that could be readily perceived as a coherent musical work.(16) Conversely, someone who creates a musical work that is too strongly derivative of existing traditions might create something that would be widely recognized as music, but at the expense of personal expression. As John Rahn puts it, "in losing originality art loses itself."(17)

This balance of the personal and the universal must be maintained by the perceiver or critic, as well. If a reading is too personal, it may be just insupportable solipsism; and if the reading is too universal or general, then its superficiality would preclude the perceiver from having a profound artistic experience. The quintessential popular song and its attendant cliché-being jilted by a lover-is a good example. Most popular songs with this theme simply communicate that losing a lover is an unpleasant experience. This is certainly something that is almost universally recognized as true, but most banal popular songs communicate little more than this about the experience. Even for this simple idea to be communicated, it is necessary that: firstly, the songwriter and performer balance the universal feelings about the situation with something personally meaningful; and secondly, that the listener his- or herself experience the universal/personal dialectic. Without the activation of both halves of the dialectic, one cannot transcend the simple functionalism that John Rahn calls "induced aesthetic value."(18)

Figure 1 - Modified Semiological Tripartition (19)

Figure 1 is a modification of Nattiez's tripartition showing the relationships in the production and reception of an artwork (including critical work). The poietic level is the level of production. An artwork is created (a personal act). It attains some degree of universal significance when it becomes "of the world." At the esthesic level, the artwork is perceived by the personal act of attention to the artwork, and the perceiver is transformed by the universal and personal significance of the artwork. Simply put: a personal creative act (both poiesis and esthesis are creative acts) creates a new object of the world which has universal and personal significance. In this way, any creative act is a glimpse into the terra incognito of human potential. So, any creative act is a mapping of human potential. Is it possible to consider that, in this model, the enigmatic neutral level is this vast territory of human potential and the creative acts of poiesis and esthesis are mappings of this ever-changing virtual landscape? What of music, then?-the least representational of all the arts. Eric Gans convincingly argues that music-while the least specifically mimetic of the arts-nevertheless must be representational:

I would emphasize that the consciousness of the relations of which music is composed is not a mere abstract capacity of human perception. It is not sufficient that man perceive musical relations; he must have the potential to experience them as significant with sufficient force to make their formal closure, independently of reference to other activities (including the other arts), an adequate motivation for the oscillatory experience we call the esthetic effect.(20)

It is not the complexity or accuracy of the mimetic features of the map that infuse it with the potential to transform its user, but its quality of being "open and connectable in all of its dimensions," with "multiple entryways, as opposed to the tracing, which always comes back 'to the same'."(21) And it is music-the least representational form of expression-that, not paradoxically, most profoundly functions as a map or representation of human potential.

Works Cited:

Baudrillard, Jean. Simulations. Translated by Paul Foss, Paul Patton, and Philip Beitchman. (New York: Semiotext(e), 1983).

Boretz, Benjamin. "Interface I-V: Texts and Commentaries on Music and Life." Originally published in Perspectives of New Music. Reprinted in Perspectives on Musical Aesthetics. Edited by John Rahn. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994): 121-42.

--. "Nelson Goodman's Languages of Art from a Musical Point of View." Originally published in Musical Quarterly. Reprinted in Perspectives on Contemporary Music Theory. Edited by Benjamin Boretz and Edward T. Cone. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1972): 31-44.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Translated by Brian Massumi. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1983).

Dunn, David. "Speculations: On the Evolutionary Continuity of Music and Animal Communication Behavior." Originally published in Perspectives of New Music. Reprinted in Perspectives on Musical Aesthetics. Edited by John Rahn. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994): 177-93.

Gans, Eric. "The Beginning and End of Esthetic Form." Originally published in Perspectives of New Music. Reprinted in Perspectives on Musical Aesthetics. Edited by John Rahn. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994): 66-79.

Nattiez, Jean-Jacques. Music and Discourse: Toward a Semiology of Music. Translated by Carolyn Abbate. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1990).

Rahn, John. "Introduction: The Aesthetics of Perspectives." Perspectives on Musical Aesthetics. Edited by John Rahn. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994): 1-4.

--. "Repetition," Contemporary Music Review 7 (1993), 49-58.

--. "What is Valuable in Art, and Can Music Still Achieve It?" Originally published in Perspectives of New Music. Reprinted in Perspectives on Musical Aesthetics. Edited by John Rahn. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1994): 54-65.