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17 considerations</font></center></h1>
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20 <p>
21 (suggested sample method chapter)</p>
22 <p>
23 Eric Clapton once said about Dylan: "His way of playing anything
24 is totally hybrid. It doesn't make sense musically to the scholar.
25 [...] At first listening, everything he does is just real hopeless.
26 Then you look back and realise it's exactly right." As a
27 scholar I take this as a challenge: If something is "exactly
28 right", but still doesn't make sense to the scholar, it is
29 either the scholar's sense or the scholar's analytical tools that
30 are inadequate. I take the liberty of disregarding the first possibility
31 - although that is probably the commonest cause for scholarly
32 not-being-made-sense-to-ness - and concentrate on the second:
33 the problems inherent in musical analysis of music of Dylan's
34 kind.</p>
36 <p>
37 An analysis presupposes an object of analysis, and this is the
38 first problem. The practice, or phenomenon, of musical analysis
39 is closely connected with developments in the genres and styles
40 of music making of the end of the eighteenth and all of the nineteenth
41 century. This is the so called classical-romantical period with
42 composers like Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Wagner. This is
43 also the period when the modern concept of art developed [see
44 my article Apples and Pears - the ancient and the modern concepts
45 of art], and - towards the end of the period - even modern musicology.</p>
46 <p>
47 A central idea in traditional analysis is the double notion of
49 The work may be the product of a composer's free and creative
50 mind, but it is laid down once and for all in the score, and there
51 ends the liberty. Any realization of the work must be compliant
52 with the score - add a note, and you have, strictly speaking,
53 a different work. There is really no room for improvisation, except
54 within very limited boundaries, and even these are usually not
55 exploited: in the place where the pianist is supposed to improvise
56 an exuberant cadenza, most performers are content with playing
57 the cadenzas that Mozart himself, or Beethoven, wrote. This is
58 of course lamentable from the point of view of musical creativity,
59 but the analyst applauds: it gives him a clearly defined object
60 of analysis, from the first note to the last.</p>
61 <p>
62 Contrast this with the situation of a Dylan song: what is the
63 object of analysis of, say, The times they are a-changin'? The
65 arrangements of Dylan's guitar strumming? The album version, tabbed
66 and downloaded to OLGA? Clearly both alternatives are inadequate,
68 was of this kind. I saw it in a song book before I had heard it.
69 I looked through the melody, the chords, tried to imagine how
70 it might sound - and rejected it as a fairly uninteresting post-motor-cycle-accident,
72 reluctantly, bought the album, this song was a shock of emotional
73 intensity, in this case even reinforced by the tension between
74 the two versions. And you can probably take any Dylan song the
75 same way: It doesn't look much on the paper - whatever power there
76 is, lies somewhere else.</p>
77 <p>
78 This is one reason why a transcription in any form cannot do the
79 song, as a musical work, justice. The other is, of course, that
80 no matter how meticulously you note every single detail of one
81 particular performance, the next time you hear it, it will be
82 different, either because Dylan has rearranged the song, or simply
83 because of the improvisational character of popular music in general,
84 and Dylan's music making in particular. With an object of analysis
85 which cannot be objectified, since it changes all the time, there
86 is really no other alternative than to endorse Paul Williams'
87 approach: to treat every single performance of a song as an independent
88 work of art. The performance is the object.</p>
89 <p>
90 We might have settled with this, but upon closer look, it is still
91 too simple an explanation. I used to be attracted to Jeff Todd
92 Titon's approach to the improvisational character of blues [in
94 of the early blues songs were improvised on the spot, that words
95 and music were assembled while singing, from the singer's storehouse
96 of phrases, situations, turns, descriptions, according to some
97 specific pattern, but without a fixed text that is repeated exactly
99 song several times in a row, it is improvised from scratch each
100 time, and minor (and even major) differences occur between the
101 versions (he actually tested this). I used to think of Dylan's
102 performances in the same way, given the huge mass of text and
103 the re-workings of some of the texts, until I realized that the
104 variations are too small to really fit the model. The texts are
105 actually memorized in a next to exact form, and the different
106 versions of a song like Tangled up in Blue are conscious re-writings,
107 not improvisations.</p>
108 <p>
109 Now, the same goes for the music. This may seem odd since one
110 of the most distinctive traits of Dylan as an artist is his way
111 of constantly changing the musical setting of his songs. The melody
112 is probably the most unstable element, but even the tempo, the
113 rhythm, the instrumentation change all the time. But still: the
114 songs are always recognizeable as such. Usually the chords and
115 harmonies are intact, and variations are within the normal limits
116 of the genre. However different two performances of Just Like
117 a Woman may be, they are versions of the same song all the same,
118 and not only two different works of art which happen to have the
119 same words attached to them. There is always something that is
120 preserved, through all the variations.</p>
121 <p>
122 This simple observation opens up a large field of interesting
123 questions concerning Dylan's relation to the different styles
124 that have influenced him (blues, english folk ballads, The Beatles
125 and rock 'n' roll) on the one hand, and to the different genres
126 of music production (the orally transmitted folk/blues, the performed,
127 score-based classical music and the commercial popular music,
128 transmitted through electronic media). To make this long story
129 short: Dylan relates strongly to improvisational musical traditions,
131 defined either by what the composer has decreed as in classical
132 music, or by what is considered commercially most efficient.</p>
133 <p>
134 In this sense, Dylan's songs are not improvisational once they
135 have reached an album [it seems however that the creational process
136 involves a substantial element of improvisation], he seldom deviates
138 versions. This means that although each performance may be considered
140 to treat the group of works that can be subsumed under the label
142 realizations, much in the same way as 50 prints from the same
143 plates are individual works but at the same time representations
144 of the same work.</p>
145 <p>
146 Paul Williams has himself hinted at a view similar to this. In
148 he relates an anecdote about a backstage meeting with Dylan. He
149 was going to make a comparison between the different Dylan versions
150 and a series of lithographs by Picasso, worked on over the course
151 of six weeks. He writes:<br />
152 </p>
153 <p>
155 in that kind of art at all, but he looked at the page and seemed
156 to be pulled in. Staying with his initial (it seemed to me) anti-intellectual
157 stance, he pointed to the second earliest of the drawings and
158 proclaimed it as the best: "He should have stopped at that
161 </font>
162 </p>
163 <p>
164 But the problems still remains: what is it about a performance
166 are the criteria, and are they the same for Dylan as for, say,
168 or styles comparable at all? This discussion presupposes another
169 discussion: that about what a work of art is in the first place.
170 One possible definition may be: "Somehow a work of art could
171 be described as a structure made up of elements that are considered
172 apt for reflection or contemplation, and in a way that stimulates
173 this. That seems to be what we do with art: we enter a different
174 state (of mind or place) to expose ourselves to something that
175 we allow to influence us, emotionally or intellectually."
176 [The definition is taken from my aforementioned article on aesthetics,
177 and I refer to that article for a further discussion of this]
179 are not objectively given, but open to interpretation on different
180 cultural or historical contexts - in other words: they are dependent
181 upon style. A work of art can only be efficient in some kind of
182 relation - including the revolutionary - to a style [the entirely
183 revolutionary art, without any precedents, although thoretically
184 interesting, is rare enough to be disregarded]. In periodes of
185 stylistic change this relation tends to be explicit, whereas in
186 most cases it is implicit. In Dylan's case there are a number
187 of such implicit styles involved: the blues-background, the folk,
188 the standard rules of european/american harmony, the development
189 of rock, traditions of voice treatment and the relationship with
190 the text, etc. To be able to appreciate a performance fully, as
191 a work of art, it is in fact necessary for the listener to relate
192 it to the stylistic systems he/she finds relevant, on all different
193 levels, from the individual style (Dylan's own style), through
194 genre style (rock/blues/folk in general), and maybe even to some
196 every performance can be seen as a contribution to an ever-ongoing
197 debate - what can be done within this genre? where are the limits?
198 which crossovers are possible or artistically interesting?</p>
199 <p>
200 This brings us back to the definition given above, and the second
201 implication that can be derived from it: that art-status presupposes
202 a volontary act by the listener, both by allowing it to influence
203 us, and regarding the stylistical references we make, whether
204 these are explicitly volontary (I choose to regard Dylan as a
205 blues singer even when he sings Emotionally Yours, because I find
206 it rewarding), or unconscious (I don't consciously realize it,
207 but my appreciation of a Dylan song must derive from a whole lot
208 of different things I've heard and appreciated before), or for
209 lack of knowledge (I don't know enough about the folk movement
210 to really be able to understand that relation).</p>
211 <p>
212 Most of this happens unconsciuosly - we don't ponder a performance
213 and then decide to let it hit us in the stomach with a feeling
214 that changes our life. Rather the choices have been made in beforehand,
216 when it seems that it can be rewarding. I seriously doubt that
217 18th century wiennese, however sophisticated and developed their
218 taste may have been, would have understood anything of any Dylan
219 song. Even (half) the audience at Newport in 1965 and during the
220 following tour with the Band chose not to be moved or touched
221 by performances that are now classical precisely because of their
222 emotionality.</p>
224 <p>
225 Knowing what a pie is, doesn't make anyone a baker. If the foregoing
228 not entirely easy, and one major obstacle is that there is no
229 firmly established analytical tradition for this kind of music.
230 The tools and methods of musical analysis which are used today,
231 rely heavily on the work of the founders of the discipline in
232 the 19th century, for better or for worse. They were certainly
233 clever and skilled academics, but their material and theoretical
234 background was limited, and modern musicology has only reluctantly,
235 and most often half-heartedly, realized that theories based upon
236 works by Mozart may work exellently for analysing works by Mozart,
237 but may be worthless for other genres. Popular music is one of
239 field of musicology: Most, or all, early (pre-Bach) music defies
240 analysis with the traditional methods, in much the same way as
241 a Dylan song does. It quickly becomes evident that the established
242 models or methods for musical analysis - Schenker analysis, functional
243 analysis, thematic analysis etc. - are all derived from and therefore
244 applicable only to music from the classical-romantical era. The
245 moment one crosses this border, in one direction or another, there
246 is a tendency that the treatment of the music itself stops at
247 the descriptive level, or it is abandoned altogether, in favor
248 of a sociological approach. Counting measures and determining
250 contained in those measures, is a completely different matter.</p>
251 <p>
252 Not only the tools and methods are received for free within the
253 traditional fields of analysis; so is the goal of the analysis.
254 When undertaking a Schenker analysis of a Schubert sonata, it
255 is obvious what the goal is: to find the underlying tonal structure
257 of the sounding music. This goal rests on a number of implicit
260 etc.). These are basically presuppositions about the underlying
262 these belong to the foundation of both the music in question and
263 of the analytical method, they can more or less be taken for granted.
265 a Dylan song or a Palestrina motet: there are no such analytical
266 shortcuts available, because of the discrepancy between the underlying
267 ideas of the music and the established analytical methods.</p>
268 <p>
269 Even though there is a growing tradition of popular musicology,
270 each new analysis will still tend to begin more or less from scratch
271 and make up its own goals and methods along the way. We will therefore
272 start out each separate analysis with very elementary questions:
273 Why does the music sound the way it does? Which are the desicions
274 and choices the artist has made, and why has he made them; what
277 but that have been made for him, because they are so integrated
278 in his musical background? Which are the underlying conceptions
279 or systems of meaning that come out of this background? How does
280 he relate to the different traditions (blues, folk, gospel)? Possibly
281 also: What are the choices he has decided not to make, and why?
283 would be the question of the cultural/aesthetic implications inherent
284 in these choices.</p>
285 <p>
286 Two basic presumptions are worth mentioning. One is that the music
287 under consideration is interesting because of the effect it has
288 on the listener, and that this effect has causes that can be explained
289 or at least related to or deduced from specific characteristics
290 of the music itself. Musical effect is not the result of “one
292 cosmos (or God) canalizing its energy through one individual in
294 contact with heaven and earth" - it stems from a certain
295 use of dissonance, agogics and rhythms, phrasing, texture, tempo,
296 breathing, voice tessitura, instruments, interplay between musicians
297 and a whole lot of other factors, which may be difficult to pinpoint,
298 and the totality of which may never be fully grasped, except in
299 the immediate and intuitive manner of the listener, but which
300 nevertheless are at the basis of the experience.</p>
301 <p>
302 The other is that the musician does not have complete control
303 over the making of an artwork. In one end is the influence of
304 the musical traditions, which may not be conscious on the part
305 of the musician himself. On the other end is the listener, who
307 means that what Dylan himself has to say about his music may be
308 interesting but not necessarily essential for the understanding
309 of his music.</p>
310 <p>
311 On the other hand, this may be a too structuralistic understanding
312 of music, which partly misses the point that music may also function
315 an intended sturcture with a specific content from Dylan's side,
316 which may or may not be perceived by the listener, but which still
318 In other words, to the extent that musical elements are also expressive
319 and communicative elements, it will be of importance to the analysis
321 lies on the study of the music, any song analysis which doesn't
322 take into account the lyrics of the song will be incomplete.
323 <br />
324 </p>
325 <p>
326 Suggested topics:<br />
327 </p>
328 <ul>
331 <li>the relation to (and between) different styles (with reciprocally
332 conflicting properties): gospel, blues, folk, hymns etc.</li>
336 <br />
337 </li>
338 </ul>
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