Banal Order ys. Rich Disorder Janos Marothy; Marta Batari Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae, T. 38, Fase. 1/2 (1997), 143-149, Stable URL hitp:/Mlinks jstor-org/siisici=0039-3266% 281997%2938%3A 1%2F2%3C 143%3ABOVRD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-V Studia Musicologica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae is currently published by Akadémiai Kiadó, ‘Your use of the ISTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use, available at hup:/www,jstororglabout/terms.hml. ISTOR’s Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at hupufwww,jstor.org/journals/ak:hl, Each copy of any part of @ JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the sereen or printed page of such transmission. STOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to creating and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support @ jstor.org, bupslwww jstor.org/ ‘Sat May 21 23:28:41 2005Banal Order vs. Rich Disorder” Janos MaroTHy ~ Marta BATARI Budapest The idea of contrasting désordre riche with ordre banale comes from Henri Pousseur’s stimulating book Musique, Sémantique, Société (1972). In order to save richness from disorder and order from banality he sug- gests a third category, ordre riche. Actually, the discovery of various “rich disorders” as opposed to the “banal orders” of existing European music is a major characteristic of our century. True, what seems to be disorder from one aspect can be order from another one. A most spectacular case is dodecaphony contrived to negate the existing order by creating a new one, the purpose of which was precisely a systematic exclusion of the former. On the other hand, there are contemporary discoveries which oppose not only a given system of pitches, rhythms etc. but pitches, rhythms ete. in general, that is, all structures which are “musical” per definition, namely periodic organisations. Indeed, non-periodic sounds, commonly called noises, are among the most conspicuous components of twentieth century music, from Luigi Russolo through Pierre Schaeffer to John Cage and beyond, Yet, it would be wrong to assume that the main difference between “old” and “new” music consists in the exclusion or exploitation of noises. In fact, the negation of periodicity is just as important for any kind of mu- sic as its utilization. No really convincing musical performance is imagin- able without the practice, which Riemann called Agogik in the field of rhythm but is equally valid for pitch deviations from prescribed frequen- * Paper eadat the interationl conference Maric! Aesthaie 95 organised bythe Hungavian Associaton for Aestheties, Budapest, Ot. 13-15, 1995144 J. Maréthy ~M, Batéri: Banal Order vs. Rich Disorder cies. Garbusov (1948) spoke in this respect of the “zonal nature” of human pitch perception and considered these deviations not as accidents or im- perfections but as vital components of musical expression. As regards tim- bre, inharmonics are produced not only in the sound laboratories of IR- CAM but also in the daily practice of “academic” music, as a necessary consequence of, for example, the structure and playing technique of stringed instruments, as recently demonstrated by A. H. Benade (1990). Beyond inharmonic partials, direct noise effects are produced by the transients necessarily brought about by attackting a note, especially a stressed one. Increased amplitude is only one component of musical ac- cent, which is unimaginable without an increased spectral density, that is, a bundle of transients largely alien to the “offical” frequencies of the note attacked. A désordre riche indeed, just as necessary for a musical event as the ordre banale of periodic structures; one of the many reasons why, in music, one can only speak of a quasi-periodicity. Therefore, no avantgarde is needed for realizing the importance of noi- ses. Even classical music did not put up with the noises produced by attak- king a sound: for particular stress effects, the help of percussion instru- ments was needed. In this respect, the noisy quality was regarded not asa drawback but as a direct adventage of percussive sounds. A most spectacu- lar case of this role is the utilization of the quasi-white noise of cymbals as ‘a requisite of indicating a climax. Thus, paradoxically, non-periodic sounds have been used for enhancing the pivots of periodic structures. In vocal music, a similar role has been played by the consonants Jozsef Ujfalussy (1993) expounding his views at a conference of neuro- chirurgists ~ most characteristically of recent holistic approaches ~ spoke of the distinguished role of consonants already in human linguistic com- munication, where the main role is played by the elements of noise, the consonants. Conceptual under standin, the meaning ofthe acoustic system of symbols is based upon them, Forexample, the writing of the semitic languages ~ as well ag stenography ~ indicate the consonants He attributes a similarly conspicuous function to the consonants in the emotional expressivity of both speech and singing, where “direct sen- suality feeds the actual artistic message as an emotional fuel.” By means of an Arie! digital signal processor, I have analysed the mi croscopic qualities of different consonants pronounced in various situ-J. Maréthy ~M, Batéri: Banal Order vs. Rich Disorder las ations. So the sonic events produced by sh, rich and even in shine, delicate in shy is almost transformed into an explosive in shut up, by stopping the air immediately before the burst into vowel. Dietrich Fischer-Diskau, bold in using expressive sounds far beyond the norms of academic singing, uttered a remarkable sh in Mahler's Lieder 8099 em Fig. Ib146 J. Maréthy ~M, Batéri: Banal Order vs. Rich Disorder Fig. le eines fahrenden Gesellen, In bemoaning his sweetheart’s wedding to someone else, the lyric hero should produce a forte subito on the last word of the phrase wm meinen lieben Schatz. Well, Fischer-Diskau sounds here a sh of the word Schatz expressing rather a curse than a tender feeling, quite near to the signal from in shut up, previously shown.! Here is the signal of Diskau’s sh in question (see Fig. 2) ‘Thus it would seem that periodicity and aperiodicity run in separate channels, the latter lending emphases for the former. There is, however, a third possibility, where the “aperiodic” channel itself assumes various kinds of, as it were, a secondary periodicity. One of such cases is vibrato, where the “not this pitch” opposed to “this pitch” enters into a relation of periodic alternation with the latter. So a frequency of, say, 440 Hz can al- ternate with a pitch of, say again, 456 Hz; and, if their alternation speed is, eg. 8 vibrations per second, then a frequency of 8 Hz is added as a third component. Similar cases of secondary periodicity can be produced by semi-vowels like r, or even by the kind of singing characterized by Alan Lomax as “raspy” — let alone other various specimens of “secondary vi- bration” like trill or tremolo. In such a way, a multi-dimensional process " CD version of Deatsche Gramophon Stereo 415 191-2 GH. P 196470 Polydor Intemational GbH HamburgJ. Maréthy ~M, Batéri: Banal Order vs. Rich Disorder ur Fig. 2 of various vibrations can bring about even five, six or more periodic struc- tures with, of course, their respective partials built into each other. If all this proves that any kind of music including the “classical” one must necessarily utilize noises, contemporary music has undoubtedly drawn into its arsenal a vast quantity of so far unexploited sounds. Beating the wood of violin or piano, reproducing the sounds of an iron foundry, using a water pail as a musical instrument etc., etc. serve not only for shocking the bourgeois. Academic music-making has considerably nar- rowed down the sounding landscape of human existence as well as its pos- sible self-expressions encompassing cries, sighs, groans and death-rattles as much as polished bel canto manifestations. The real problem, here again, is how to organise all this in, and/or bring into relation with, peri- odie structures. Precisely this is in the centre of attention of the major per- sonalities of contemporary music. So Pierre Boulez has, in a series of self- analyses (e.g. 1960, 1961) constantly returned to the problem of the “maze” which, “as against the classical procedure”, seems to him “the most important recent innovation in the creative sphere.” He exemplifies this “idea of the labyrinth, or maze” whith Kafka’s short story, The Bur- row, the artist creating “his own maze” being similar to “a subterranean animal” building its burrow “continually moving his supplies for the sake148 J. Maréthy ~ M, Batéri: Banal Order vs. Rich Disorder of secrecy and changing the network of passages to confuse the outsider.” ‘The main question is, also here, how to establish a relation between the “maze” and the periodic structures. This is why he combined, in his Deuxiéme improvisation sur Mallarmé, “three different categories of in- struments — accurately pitched, partially pitched and unpitched (‘noise’)”. A similar idea motivated Henri Pousseur developing, in Decroupet’s words (1994), “a system spreading from consonance to noise”, “a univer- sal harmonic matrix”, in his endeavour of “bringing into relation what seems incompatible.” The tension is still greater between the poles, now carried to the ex- tremes of both order and disorder, in Luigi Nono’s pieces. The order is represented this time by the simplest scheme of a funnel-shaped, continu- ously expanding All-Intervall-Reihe recurrent in several of them while, on the other hand, the sound material extending from the rudest noises of an iron foundry or a street demonstration to the ethereal singing of micro- modulated soprano voices ~ visions of a “concrete Utopia” as Jiirg Stenzl put it ~ may seem at first hearing a real labyrinth of disorder ~ a “maze”, to quote Boulez again. Thus, your first impression of, say, La fabbrica il- Juminata can be divided by separating sections of noises from sections of singing (a soprano again, of course). Yet, you may soon discover the mu- sical aspects of a “factory notturno” with its dramatic crescendo of iron casting as well, the other way round, the noise elements absorbed even in a most delicate soprano part. Here, a vast range of possible human ulter- ances are involved, with several stages of their transitions into singing and vice versa. Nono, developing Schonberg’ idea of Sprechgesang, discerns here, by different signs, five degrees: singing with definite pitch, speaking with definite pitch, speaking without definite pitch, whispering and quasi- speaking. At that, he maximally exploits the possibilities of phonemes, vowels, semivowels and consonants alike, within or without the context of meaningful words. Thus, existing words like afferrano ¢ non si fermano with their marked and prolonged r can as well be an opportunity of tim- bral variations (here with a “raspy” semivowel), as ah, u, m, or n “eman- cipated” from any lexical context Let us illustrate all this with an extreme case, the Finale section of La fabbrica illuminata, where the tape stops and the solo soprano remains quite alone. In opposition to the previous sections, where the spokenJ. Maréthy ‘M, Batéri: Banal Order vs. Rich Disorder 149 words are of a documentary character, Nono selects here four verses of a poem by Cesare Pavese: passeranno i mattini pe non saré cosi sempre ritroverai qualcosa sseranno le angosce The verses themselves have an expressively developing line from the equal spondees of everyday monotony to the dynamized trochees and dac- tyls with their faint promise of a “concrete Utopia”. Yet, Nono’s music moves on different rails, not consecutively but permanently contrasting the “disorder” of noiselike consonants and shouted interjections with their sudden transitions into the “order” of a most delicate lyric singing. The disorder is pushed as far as transgressing the grammatically correct pro- nunciation, so mattini uttered as ma-tti-ni with redoubled desperate excl ‘mations, just to make their contrast still sharper to the ethereal vocalis tions eliminating even the words with their everyday meaning as well as all noises connected with the consonants. References Bunaot, Arthur H. 1990: Fundamentals of Musical Acoustics. New York: Dover Publi tions, (An extensively corrected and enlarged posthumus republication of the edi- tion originally published by Oxford University Press, 1976.) Boutez, Pierre 1960: “Sonate, que me veux-tu?” First published in German in Darm- stddter Beitrdge zur neuen Musik, Vol. Il, Mainz: Schott, The English translation is taken from Pierre Boulez: Orientations, ed, by JJ, Nattiez and translated by M. Cooper. London-Boston: faber and faber 1986, paperback 1990, pp. 142-154 Bountz, Pierte 1961: Consiruire une improvisation, lecture at Strasburg, originally in German. For the English translation, see Orientations op. cit. 155-173 Deceourer, Pascal 1994: Henri Pousseur. In: Komponisten der Gegenwart. Hrsg. v. HW. Heister und W.-W, Sparrer. Minchen: Text*Kritik. 4, Nachlieferung, Ganausov, Nikolai Aleksandrovich 1948: Zonnata priroda zvukowyssomogo sluha, (The Zonal Nature of Pitch Hearing.) Moskva-Leningrad: Tzdatel'stwo Akademii Nauk SSSR, Pousstuk, Henri 1972: Musique, Sémantigue, Société. Toumnai-Paris: Casterman. Unavussy, Jézsef 1993: The Role of Music and Song in Human Communication, In: Acta Neurochirurgica (Suppl.) 56: 6-8. 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