(Last week, I explored the idea of amateurism as found in Roland Barthes’s 1970 essay, “Musica Practica.” His short piece has stuck with me, and the following is an attempt to consider one of the questions it’s raised.)
Wassily Kandinsky, Improvisation 19 (1911). CC BY-SA 4.0 license via Lenbachhaus and Wikimedia Commons.
There’s only so far you can stretch a metaphor or image or phrase; a signifier meant to to draw attention to one idea can’t necessarily be pulled into service to illuminate another. So it’s not that I’m going to use Roland Barthes’s musical technician/amateur dichotomy, which I pondered last week, to cover the entire realm of musical interpretation. But let’s just say that Barthes’s assertions about the sort of music that allows for the player (and maybe hearer) to “write,” to leave her mark on the creation, to hand over a renewed product, has me considering the world of covers and improvisations.
For one thing, I’d like to know what Barthes thought of one composer quoting (or maybe lifting) a colleague’s work, and then riffing on it—i.e., writing variations on a theme. Think, for example, of mining Bach or Beethoven for inspiration and assistance in crafting your own musical work; think, too, of sampling a piece of someone else’s music for use in your own.(1)
In related fashion, we’ve got artists covering each other’s work, interpreting it in their own ways. On some level, musicians who don’t write their own compositions, but who “only” perform others’, are doing just that—and so, you could go back to Barthes and demand to be shown the difference between technician and amateur, when both are essentially covering other people’s creations. Maybe one thing to consider here is the ability to improvise, to more or less spontaneously stray from and/or add on to the written, “official” notes as you play, while also holding fast to the spirit of the piece itself.(2) But when you see a covered piece successfully crossing from one genre to another, being brought to life in a setting in which it wasn’t originally intended to take shape, I’m willing to bet said music would have counted for Barthes as having been written upon.
There’s John Coltrane’s “My Favorite Things,” of course, which was entirely transformed from its decidedly not-jazzy origins in Rogers and Hammerstein’s The Sound of Music—while still remaining within the bounds of what is idenfitiably the piece originally composed for the stage. And there’s also Dave Brubeck’s “Blue Rondo à la Turk.” Music Brubeck heard while in Turkey got shaped into his jazz classic (and influenced much of his sound as a whole)—and then lo and behold, decades later, classical string performers Quartet San Francisco arranged the song (and many others) for two violins, viola, and cello.
All fine and good—but there’s always the lurking question of appropriation, as in the long history of white performers being celebrated for what Black musicians have been doing all along, those performers taking up someone else’s sound and style while the people who really came up with it and continued putting it all out there go ignored, often uncredited, often denigrated. Barthes was restricting himself to a very narrow range of music and performers—classical European composers, and amateur musicians (limited, it seems, to their own salons) who felt able to take up those composers’ pieces. Hence, the question of appropriation might not have applied, outside of the ghost of Bach rolling in his grave when some upstart used one of his themes to write a terrible little tune. But as we broaden the area under consideration, the exchange grows more complicated. White musicians’ appropriation of the blues has long been recognized; what about the way Tejano developed along the US–Mexico border when the accordion came over from Bohemia and Germany and Poland? I’m guessing that latter situation doesn’t qualify as appropriation in the way we’re defining it here; for one thing, there were no global recording outfits ready to seize one in-power group’s interpretation of a musical form and ignore the out-of-power originators; there was no purposeful exclusion of the Europeans’ traditions thanks to, as this rattled MTV interviewer attempted to justify to David Bowie in 1983, “narrowcasting.”
I suppose what I’m asking is whether the difference between amateur and technician has anything to say to a discussion on the continuum between sharing and stealing musical ideas and practice. As melodies and rhythms are handed on with the hope that they’ll leave their mark and be carried on once again, at what point can we say that a listener-creator has accepted those gifts, while denying that their givers ever existed, or contributed anything at all? At what point can we say that another creator hasn’t taken a gift and extended its life, but has instead tried to wipe out its true origins, along with the spirit that produced it in the first place? Maybe that’s where it begins: trying to hide the fact that there was ever an original behind the interpretation. And on the listener’s side, one indication that appropriation has taken or is taking place is the lack of desire to go back and seek out the original, to find out who it was and why, that gave voice to this new thing.
I’d like to hope that the amateur, feeling the music he’s playing in his bones—especially as opposed to recording music to win fame and fortune—also feels the urgency to acknowledge the source of that magic. The urgency not only to keep the music alive, but to repay the debt of transmitted sound—to upold the creations, careers, and memories of those who first brought it into the world.
(1) For example, you could drop the theme from Knight Rider into pretty much anything, and I can almost guarantee I’d listen. Apparently, many an artist feels the same way.
(2) After all, you can’t just toss anything into the mix and say it fits; although jumping into some Steve Reich in the middle of “A Mighty Fortress Is Our God” would be entertaining, we could probably declare that attempt at improvisation a fail, at least if the intent were to prove one’s knowledge of how the hymn works, what it’s trying to do, by extending that hymn’s own nature.