Process and Creativity - connecting the dots between music, language, and performance

R.G. Collingwood, a big figure in the Expression tradition of aesthetics, sees "creativity" as the important feature of art. "The artist's expression, essentially the artwork itself, is the artwork...the creative process and the art itself are most closely aligned" (Fenner, p 76). In music, of course, the creative process of performance is the product -- even if a song has already been written down, a performance will always be slightly different. It will sometimes be vastly different, as in jazz or some "jam" bands, but even a rock band plays a slightly different show every night. (If they play shows, that is. And even if they don't, we should understand pop as coming from a long tradition of performance.)

The contemporary pop era is characterized by a desire to see a "behind-the-scenes" process as product, or process as central to the artistic experience: bands blogging live from the studio, the famous interview with Brian Wilson as he was working on Smile, filming the recording of an album (Let it Be, I Am Trying to Break Your Heart), etc. Or think of DVD extras of deleted scenes and alternate endings. (this is not music, of course. But still.)

The pop world values the process of making pop music ESPECIALLY now that recordings -- products -- are the basic unit of pop. See, the process is what connects us to that immediacy that we desire from pop. We like seeing inside that creative process because it is closer to what is still (vestigial?) the main basis of pop music: performance.

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John Dewey, another aesthetician,
- emphasized the interaction between the perceiver of art and the art object,
- talked about art as a unified and complete experience,
- believed in the importance of "the experience of the common person."

Dewey is a good resource if we want to think of Pop as Populist, which I think it is. We've got the relationship, the Pop world of fancriticartist interaction, we've got the "totality" (still not sure what this means unless the "unified" part of the experience is the merging of art and criticism, or interpretation and experience). And it is open to anybody with ears to hear.
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Keith Sawyer uses Collingwood and Dewey to lay out his "values of improvisation," which I think apply to almost any musical performance, not just jazz improv. They are:

1. Emphasizing creative process over product
2. Problem finding, not problem solving
3. Art is like everyday language use (this is important, more on it later)
4. The importance of collaboration, between musicians and between artist and audience. Sawyer paraphrases Collingwood: "the audience is not only an influence, but should be considered to be a collaborator with the artist" (p. 110). Art is never isolated by always made in a communal context. (see where I'm going?)
5.The role of the ready-made in improvisation (I've talked about ready-mades a bit, but ultimately this is not going to be that important to the aesthetics of pop, I don't think)

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OK, so, what about art similar everyday language use? First, note everyday and my assertion in a recent post that pop is wholly incorporated into "the everyday. "Also note that everyday language use is process, a continuous, improvised, collaborative performance by anyone and everyone having conversations.

Next, we turn to Kofi Agawu's "The Challenge of Semiotics," who lays out 11 propositions concerning the relationship of music and language (paraphrased):

1. Music, like language and possibly religion, is a species-specific trait of man.
2. Unlike language, which can be both communicative and artistic, music is primarily artistic.
3. Unlike language, music exists only in performance (actual, idealized imagined, remembered).
4. Like language, music is organized into temporally bounded or "closed" texts.
5. A music text is organized into discrete units or segments.
6. The musical text is more continuous in its sonic reality or "real-time unfolding" than a verbal text.
7. (is really confusing to me but basically says) More than one melody can exist at the same time (e.g. harmony), but there's no corollary for that sort of thing in language -- two people don't speak over each other at the same time (unless you're in a Woody Allen movie. Ha.)
8. Units of language have more or less fixed lexical meaning, while units of music do not.
9. Musical and linguistic meaning may be extrinsic or intrinsic. But in music intrinsic meaning is more common, and in language the opposite.
10. The essence of music is play. Not so much in language. "Music means nothing but itself" (p. 145).
11. Language interprets itself, but music cannot interpret itself. We use language to interpret music.

What does this mean for the aesthetics of pop, or for what seems to be the central problem, which is How do critics evaluate pop music if its definition is based on performance but it exists primarily in recorded form? We know from Agawu that music is always performance and that its essence is play (I couldn't tell you what "play" is, exactly). So what happens when the "language" of music -- this living, changing, playing thing -- gets recorded, trapped, entombed on tape?

Walter Ong calls written language "dead" oral language, BUT...

"The paradox lies in the fact that the deadness of the text, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid visual fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts by a potentially infinite number of living readers" (Literacy and Orality, p. 81).

Therefore, by analogy:

The paradox lies in the fact that the deadness of the recording, its removal from the living human lifeworld, its rigid aural fixity, assures its endurance and its potential for being resurrected into limitless living contexts by a potentially infinite number of living listeners.

Right?

Are we spiraling out of control here?

This is getting a little ridiculous.
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To reiterate, the problems of pop aesthetics are -- I think --
Definition: 1) vocabulary, 2) social, 3) economic, 4) vs. Serious music
Evaluation: 1) of performance, 2) of recording

NEXT: Walter Benjamin's "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" might provide some insight into the nature of recorded pop music and what we ought to do with it.

"Even the most perfect reproduction of a work of art is lacking in one element: its presence in time and space, its unique existence at the place where it happens to be." (Benjamin)