Chapter VII - "An Eclectic Method for Sound, Form, and Reference"

In this chapter, Dr. Ferrara lays out a step-by-step outline - a method of approach, if you will - for his "Eclectic Method," or as we more often call it, the eclectic analysis.  

Hooray!  

Why am I cheering?  Because this chapter was not only short (comparatively speaking), but also hella useful!  Though I had an idea of the eclectic analysis before and had even begun a bit of it already, now I know exactly how to approach, view, question, answer, and let-be my piece of music (or any piece of music, for that matter!).

Ferrara recommends this order:

1. Historical Background

Traditional questions regarding important dates and categorizations of the composer and the work from a historical perspective.  Ferrara is careful to point out that the questions he suggests are not to be taken as "must-answer" questions, but that the questions may be edited and adapted, added or omitted based on what the work itself calls for.

2. Open Listening

Here the listener gets to know the work in a non-judgmental, open and innocent way, like a child experiencing something, in its immediacy.

3. Syntax

This step of the process is what we would consider a traditional music analysis, roman numerals and all.  Whoo.

4. The Sound-in-Time

A phenomenological description of the piece, creating a nice bridge between steps three and five.

5. Musical and Textual Representation

This step explores the referential meanings of the work...

6. Virtual Feeling

...leading nicely into exploring how the work is expressive of human emotions and feelings, as well as how it affects the listener.

7. Onto-historical World

This step explores the social and cultural world the composer was writing in, the piece was written in, what the piece itself is expressing and what happens when it interacts with present day.

8. Open Listening

A return to the open listening to infuse different elements together, keeping the analytical process "non-static."

9. Performance Guide

This should be a helpful tool for future performers of the work.  Based on what you have discovered through your research, analysis, and experience of the piece, what would you want performers to keep in mind in their approach?

10. Meta-Critique

This is an overall assessment of the strengths and weaknesses of the analysis in its entirety.

Meta-Critique (2 of 2)

I wanted to take a slightly different approach to this assignment; when I read the prompt the first thing I wondered was how personal opinions come into play when doing a meta-critique.  The meta-critique, as far as I understand it, is not the place for bracketing out personal preferences.  Adversely, it is where personal opinions come into play, and whether you as the reader feels that the critique has done the work justice or not, whether it has given enough information, and whether the information given has been the right kind.  It occurred to me that - "not knowing any better" - an audience reading a review without being familiar with the piece under review could very well have an entirely different impression of how effective the critique was, as opposed to the point of view of an audience who knew the piece.

Wanting to see the difference, I found two album reviews from Slant Magazine - the first being Nickel Creek's 2005 Why Should the Fire Die? and the second Chris Thile's new venture Punch with his new band The Punch Brothers.  I chose these specifically because Chris Thile is one of my favorite artists, a musician I hold in rather high esteem but at the same time I'm not always partial to everything he does.  I am incredibly familiar with Why Should the Fire Die? and having spent lots of time with it, I have my own ideas about the album.  Punch, on the other hand, I've never heard before.  I saw his new group perform when they were still backing Thile on his 2006 solo album and later when they were playing around under the name "The Tensions Mountain Boys," but not being familiar with them as a cohesive unit nor their new sound, I feel I'm sufficiently in the dark to read the review as a member of an objective and merely interested readership.

Jonathan Keefe's review of Why Should the Fire Die? is almost entirely referential.  He uses adjectives throughout to describe what a song sounded like and how it affected him.  We're given a little bit of historical information (not much of it ontological, though) regarding the group's past albums and the producers of such, comparing them to this album under the new producer Eric Valentine.  This historical background also serves to compare the past albums to the present one, noting that the "restrained" quality has been taken away, as if now they have permission to give their "aggressive" songs "some bite to them."  

The entire review glows, and only a near-throwaway comment near the end sheds light onto why the album recieved only 4 out of 5 stars.  Are their standards that high?  "Still, as accomplished and compelling as Why Should the Fire Die? ultimately is, the lasting impression it gives is one of a record that's destined to become a "transitional album" in the catalogue of the most innovative, exciting artists in popular music."  With all these great things to say about the album, are we really to be satisfied when told, "yeah, well, this album is freakin' fantastic and their next one is sure to be better, but it's because this isn't as good as their potential future work that we're not giving it all the credit it's due?"  Even if it didn't turn out that this was Nickel Creek's final album (they broke up in 2006 to pursue independent musical interests), I'd still answer No, I don't think so.

In his review for Punch, however (both albums were reviewed by the same critic), he cites strengths and weaknesses of the pieces and the album as a whole in a way that makes me inclined to believe him without having heard the album myself.  This review is also highly referential, but throws in more specificities regarding Thile's (and fellow members') virtuosity and how it plays into their songwriting.  Much appreciated, considering that his sheer brilliance (my words) in composition is what has earned him so much respect and acclaim.  I understand that this is a review for an internet entertainment magazine, but in a critique that dug a little deeper I'd love to be shown more syntactical information: concrete examples of cool things done with the music.  God knows there are enough of them.

Strictly Referential Critique (1 of 2)

When I set out to complete this assignment I wanted a bit of a challenge - I didn't want to make it too easy on myself by choosing I piece I was very familiar with, or one that I already had lots of interpretive ideas about. So I did what any self-respecting twenty-first century college student would do: I set my iTunes on shuffle.

The first thing in the list was actually a song I had never heard before (and I kindof wonder how it even made its way into my iTunes!): Kylie Minogue's Burning Up from her album Fever.

But I withheld judgement (bracketing them out, in fact!), as I readied myself for some open listenings.

The title "Burning Up" fits perfectly within the images conjured up by the album title "Fever."
At the start of the song we're greeted with mellow guitar strings swinging a beat. Kylie's voice comes through them like she's contributing to the guitar's conversation - continuous ideas but in choppy bits, with gentle "ooohs" in the background - giving the impression of a mellow, pleasant acoutstic sound. But the strange effects give it away - at the very begnning of the song and continuing throughout there is a strange descending electronic effect that sounds like aliens descending on the moon. And then, suddenly, we're in a disco! Totally transported, the music explodes with House beats and slowly ascending vocals mount as the dancers in the club get sweatier and abandon themselves to the music with even more vigour.

Just as suddenly we return to the beginning section, like Kylie "burned up" a little too much and needed to step outside for a bit of air. She tells us she's going to the disco, and we accompany her on her nighttime walk to get there. Then she arrives, steps inside, and we're back amongst the dancing and the revelry until the end of the piece.

This was actually kindof hard as far as critiques go -- I kept finding myself wanting to say things about how the number of beats or different accentuations affected the structure of the piece, but then remembered that this must be strictly referential and deleted them. It was really difficult to describe the song using *only* referential, descriptive methods, and while I feel like I did the critique correctly there is a part of me that still doubts, simply because without added syntactical information the critique feels unfinished!

Chapter V - "Heidegger's Philosophy of Art"

This chapter took us through Heidegger's On the Origin of the Work of Art, but in order to do so we needed to deal a little more directly with the "turn" I mentioned in my last blog. So the chapter opened with a brief review of Heidegger's major concepts as laid out in Being and Time before delving into some of the concepts laid out in his other works, and that would be needed to understand On the Origin of the Work of Art. The majority of the chapter deals with these overviews, before finally settling in to discuss the ideas regarding art themselves.

We are reminded that in order to achieve true, authentic existence Dasein ("there-being" or "Being There" in English) must tend toward Death, which is its final end. Being aware of yourself being thrown into the world and aware of your finite existence leads to this 'authentic living.' It means allowing Being to be open and show itself, which is at once a spontaneous event that is waited for, and a responsive event that is asked for and questioned. The thing to remember in the midst of all this complex philosophy is that "only Being can discharge openness" (123). That implies a necessary respect for being as well as an awareness of it. That is, remembering that it isn't YOU that creates or reveals this openness, but your engagement with the Other. It is this Other (Heidegger's "Being") in an active engagement with you that reveals openness. This is important to remember later when we circle back and discuss "revealedness" and "concealedness" creating strife in an art work.

Ferrara continues on to summarize how Heidegger was interpreting the works of famous Western thinkers (Kant, Hegel, Nietzche, etc.) "in an attempt to deconstruct the Western Metaphysical tradition" (123). In order to do that, he needed to backtrack a little regarding his own works, so he could break down a few false conceptions about him that his contemporaries and readers seemed to hold. In other words, if Heidegger wanted to move forward in the direction in which he wanted to go, he had to "shed the technical and manipulative style of Being and Time" (124).

When it moves into the overview of pertinent information regarding Heidegger’s theories on art contained in On the Origin of the Work of Art, things start getting ridiculously complicated. It was a dense, though fascinating few pages (and I must add this chapter was very enjoyable to read). He talks about Closed and Open, openness and spaciousness, spaciousness versus space itself, and the strife that occurs when Earth (the work materials) wants to close while the Spaciousness by nature Opens the window on to the historical/cultural world of the artist. It is this “strife” that makes art work, at the same time making an art work from an art object.

Heidegger uses two examples, a Van Gogh painting of peasant’s shoes, and an ancient greek temple. Regarding Van Gogh’s work, it is not the fact that it is a painting that makes it art. The “correct and factual representation” is not what matters to Heidegger in art, but the fact that the painting “discloses the being of the shoes” (129). Suddenly while looking at the painting, you can see the shoes for what they are and contemplate it, whereas when you are using the shoes or viewing them in their normal context, their “equipmental nature” hides the shoes’ “being” from view. The greek temple opens the world of the ancient Greeks, a historical/cultural setting that is now lost to us forever. That world is thrust forward because of the stone it is made of, the rock upon which it sits, the ways the stone has been worked. If you came across that same type of stone as a pebble in the street that you kicked, or a bench that you sat on, you would have taken no notice of it.

I love the way Ferrara worded it when he talked about how Heidegger “abandoned much of his earlier philosophical terminology and technical approach in Being and Time and moved toward a meditative and poetic stance” (124). I find it an interesting thing to note – in order to get his message across the way he wanted, he had to change the way he wrote. It reminds me, indeed, of art itself! Language, the written word is really just another form of it…if Heidegger were an artist and sought to present a subject to an audience in order to convey a particular message, it would make a major difference whether it was painted in oil or in watercolor, and whether on canvas or concrete. If it were pencil on lined paper the message would be equally different.

One of the things I loved was that comment, when speaking of how historical/cultural time-worlds are lost, it was said that ‘you can go back to the city, but the world is gone.’ I can’t remember now if that was mentioned in the reading, or if it was perhaps mentioned in class at one point. Either way, it stuck with me; it is so true, and something about that sentence made it very clear to me in very simple terms. I thought immediately of Vienna, and of Venice – two places where I felt particularly haunted by the past. “You can go back to the city,” yes, and it is a modern city entirely a part of the modern context. And yet the overwhelming relics that a past generation left behind lend an eerie, ethereal cast…their world is forced into the open before our eyes and forced to confront and interact with whatever is modern in the age of the present, ages who in turn leave their own relics, layer upon layer, like some kind of patchwork quilt or decoupage.

"Heidegger's Hermeneutic Phenomenology" (4 of 4)

In chapter IV, Ferrara is careful to point out that while Heidegger's debt to Edmund Husserl's conceptions of phenomenological analysis in his own philosophical ideas was great, Heidegger cannot be considered a student, or follower, of Husserl.  Heidegger's hermeneutic phenomenology is distinct to the point of being called a "turn," as in "turning away from" Husserl's idea of transcending the ego and bracketing out all personal judgements.

This is key, because while Heidegger and Husserl agree in their approach to analyses through descriptive means often excluded from traditional analysis, in Heidegger's opinion it is quite impossible to "bracket out" your personal judgements.  He argues that every person is born into a certain ontological world, and that thing - that "dasein" - that being-in-the-world cannot come to understand anything except through the pre-judgements and biases given it by its ontological and historical circumstance.  It is by embracing and recognizing these prejudices that the thing itself (Heidegger embraced Husserl's early phenomenology and greatly focused on going "back to the things themselves") to show itself.

I tend to agree with Heidegger on this point.  I am quite fascinated by the way our respective cultures and life-worlds, along with all those other amazing words we've borrowed from the Germans to describe the same things - dasein, Lebenswelt, Zeitgeist - shape and inform our ways of thinking in ways that are very often completely invisible to our consciousness.  I wonder if it is even possible to make oneself aware of all of the ways the world we have been born into automatically shapes our minds and personalities, and the way we approach, view, and judge other things?  I wonder if it may be impossible.  We can see it for ourselves to an extent, but without completely transcending our own time and minds, there is no way to view ourselves objectively - and that is the same thing I think Heidegger thought about Husserl's method of analysis!  I feel like if I were to truly rid myself of all pre-judgements, I would lose myself entirely, lose my identity, and cease to exist.  And if I reach a state where my own identity does not exist, why should I care to contemplate other things in the world?