Introduction: 

The inquiry into emotion and spirituality

The most important facet of an art work consists in the so-called emotional and spiritual animation of the perceiver by the work. On the other hand, in most cases an art work is not solely a conduit of emotion to the perceiver, like an emotional vaccination. Representational visual art has a material subject, or at least a chimerical subject. Belles-lettres and theater in all their forms are discursive and/or narrative. They may wield religious or philosophical notions even if those are not their primary agenda. Much music is not absolute. We have song, occasional music, music theater, program music, etc.

Only in the case of absolute music do we have an art which communicates or expresses with no representation, no imagery. The arts which can in effect vaccinate the perceiver with emotion are Islamic tracery, abstract painting, abstract cinema, and absolute music. Even so, these arts also have sensuous pattern. That pattern may intrigue in its own way. In our coarse vocabulary, the word for such pleasure in form is beauty. The beauty issuing from artifice complements and merges with the induction of reflective emotion (as we call it) by the art work.

The only real precedent for this essay is Chapters VI and VII of the Natyashastra of Bharata-Muni, written two thousand years ago in India. Those chapters have what amounts to a psychology of emotion, along with a handbook of the role of emotion in drama and acting. Let us repeat the epigram: “There is no natya without rasa.” Relative to the European tradition, the Natyashastra is extraordinary in dwelling frankly on the humanness of art.

Let me explain in passing that when I use the word ‘esthetics’, I mean the philosophy of beauty. To ask what people gain from the presence of flowers is an esthetic question. Esthetics is not especially about the human practice called art. That leaves me with the phrase ‘art theory’ for an inquiry into art. 

The colloquial vocabulary evidently finds the word ‘spirituality’ indispensable. But the usual treatments of spirituality merely expound antique religions under a different pretext. Or, a modern treatment may abstract a “training” of soul-realization from several religions which teach the ascent of the soul through heavens. That is not even to mention such “training” as purportedly makes the acolyte telepathic. What all this does is to leave spirituality at the level of sectarianism and pseudo-science.

We do not like the word ‘spirituality’: it is cloying. But we resort to the word to signify that there is a corner of life or experience toward which secular rationalism is phobic, yet which surfaces in any case, and does not depend on authoritarianism, sectarianism, or pseudo-science. Only when this corner of life becomes a topic will the word live up to its potential, gaining a definition without pseudo-scientific or abusive presuppositions. The public has not yet accepted any such initiative as this, which is why I feel that I am starting from zero when I address spirituality.

The question of spirituality in art is as circuitous and counter-intuitive as the question of emotion in art. Let us begin with something which is at the very forefront but which has gone unnoticed. Some of the art we admire most may be explicitly religious. (Gospel music.) And yet the religion may be foreign to us. The reason why we do not “go along with the doctrinal gag” is not because we are recalcitrant, but because we were not born to that world in the first place. (Well, it is more clear-cut in the case of Hinduism or Buddhism or Sufi. As a child, I heard black church services on the radio; it was another world side-by-side the one I lived in.)

In the very act of appreciation, we have abstracted the spirituality from doctrine or observance. We might expect the performer to find that troubling; we have converted his or her affirmation of belief to an esthetic object. But on the contrary, artists are liberal about wanting to reach publics outside their doctrinal community. It cannot be underlined enough: the singer who became the Kirana school’s best-known exponent was a Pakistani Hindu who apprenticed himself to Indian Muslims. But even if music can jump doctrinal boundaries, that does not mean that the spirituality abstracted from one or another religion is the same. We are certain that all spiritualities are not the same, because Europe’s spirituality of mathematics and objectification, to be spotlighted below, is assuredly not African pagan spirituality, for example.

Thus, we not only have to discover spirituality as such, in abstraction from inculcated doctrines and rituals, and capable of elaboration in its own right. We also have to differentiate spiritualities. It is so intricate that we need a short treatise on spirituality in itself to prepare for this study. It is in fact the companion piece to this study. How much needs saying in duplicate in both essays remains to be seen.

I may as well acknowledge at the outset that music receives more attention here than the other arts. That is partly because of music’s directness as a non-representing conduit, as will be explained. However, entire topics are simply left unaddressed here. I have extensive draft manuscripts on rhetoric which do venture into belletristic prose, for example.

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Part I. Feeling

“An instance of art”

We react to history by defining the question of art as the question of the emotional and spiritual animation of the perceiver. Technique, artifice, is explained by how it contributes to this purpose.

A certain Western esthetician, writing c. 1900, asked how the artist injects feeling into the inanimate object. That indeed is the great mystery, but the question is formulated wrongly. The art work does not harbor emotion and spirituality. The art object doesn’t feel anything. It is only cloth and paint, or paper and ink, or wood or metal. It induces feeling in the perceiver. 

Based on my experience as a performing singer (1975), I do not concede that even a singer feels primary or “situational” emotion. A singer may be emotionally animated while singing, but the animation is on behalf of communicating the theme. The singer is mimetic. When the audience is moved to tears, the singer is not; the singer is molding a proportioned performance, and may still have dazzling technical passages to negotiate. (Or think of an orchestra performing the Rite of Spring. Even if the music is reducing the audience to bestiality in their seats—as Adorno accuses it of doing—the performers cannot dissolve in savagery. They must remain in the realm of artifice.)

The problem is not to discover how tones or shapes or words harbor emotion; the problem is to understand evocation and reception.

There is, then, something wrong with the very notion of the “art object,” the figurine or painting or poem standing by itself. An instance of art is a thing-perceiver relationship, difficult as that may be for one who prefers an inert object of analysis. What we call the art work is only the objective occasion for the phenomenon which must find its completion in the perceiver. Thus, we must imagine that an instance of art is a “field” which an authored object anchors. This field includes the subjective responses to that object by those who pay attention to it: who “read” it, who afford it a viewing or an audition. We must approach art in this way no matter the difficulties it creates. The European convention of marginalizing the viewer’s or hearer’s psyche is totally unacceptable.

Certainly there is a defining importance to the response of the alert and intended audience, the audience which is au courant. But it is out of the question to restrict “the field” to the cognoscenti or to the artist’s fans. Negative experiences of works are as revealing as positive ones. We have already mentioned Adorno’s denunciations, which are great object-lessons. In fact, one could even imagine writing a textbook on how to deprave the public with music, gaining tips from Adorno, and from the appraisal of the Beatles in the books of the British brainwashing expert William Sargant. To philosophy, a methodology of depraving art—in music, of lewd and unsavory modes—would be as important as any literature of praise for art.

Again, our premise is that an instance of art is a field embracing both an object and psyches. The science of the present civilization will of course be horrified to find something this “vague” or “evanescent” presented for our understanding. But to appraise what people feel, to appraise one’s own feelings—in an arranged situation such as a viewing or an audition—is not that unusual. Music critics are paid to do it routinely. Mann, as we said, offered fictive archetypes of this species of discourse. The scientism of European civilization is unbelievably hypocritical, because revered authorities like Mann do not adhere to scientism. Apart from art, we must judge other people’s feelings in daily life—a good salesman must judge the customer. If such judgments are mistaken, it means that there is something to be wrong about.

So the lump of metal which comprises a figurine, for example, is only a potentiality. We might analogize the art object to a high-quality mirror. A mirror is good for nothing until somebody looks into it in an alert state. (The analogy is not perfect; the mirror does not have a message.) The point is that the art object is nothing without a meaning that has to emerge in the perceiver’s psyche. Convention credits this meaning to the work, but clearly that is simplistic.

The art work’s meaning, that which is evoked in the perceiver’s psyche, is not reliable. Alchemy serves as a metaphor; we are dealing with results which are only approximately public and replicable. 

Another analogy could be to my use of Necker cubes as a notation in logic and arithmetic. The difference is that there are clear and circumscribed norms for what a person who looks at a Necker cube should see. Some viewers are impaired, and are not psychically animated by a optical illusion as they are supposed to be, but in the majority of cases the effect is highly predictable.

Again, art in its intended use—an instance of art—requires completion of the work in the psyche of the perceiver. That is not a side-issue. Here, it is the only issue. The technical specifications of the work, such as the text of a poem, the score in music, are only the instrumentality. We have now left Western culture, because Western culture is phobic toward any phenomenon or state of affairs that has to be completed in the psyche. Inasmuch as the psyche is not external and mechanical—inasmuch as it is “subjective”—Western civilization prefers to deny it outright.

If we cannot talk about emotion and spiritualty in music, then I cannot even speak about the achievement of the teacher I value most—Pandit Pran Nath. I cannot explain why I feel devoted to him. Of course he had a phenomenal knowledge of raga and was a phenomenal virtuoso in various respects—but that was only a preparation. He began where other Hindustani virtuosos left off—that is what matters. 

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Approaching the topic: Bharata-Muni

We have already mentioned that our only precedent is Chapters VI and VII of Bharata’s Natyashastra.

Bharata provides a psychology of emotion: which includes an extensive emotional palette, that is, a schedule of emotion-words. However, the psychology is shaped by the fact that the interest is in what the actor (or mime) does, and its effect on the spectator. We are implicitly talking about mimesis, vicarious experience, and so forth, not about primary or situational emotion. If psychology were the goal, it would be responsible for accounting for situational emotion. 

Since the emotional palette presented is in the context of mime, we first have to be clear on how the emotion enters the theatrical situation. Watching a performance, at some point we recognize the portrayed situation, such as loss of a loved one; we then feel vicarious grief (if we identify or empathize). (We do not want the audience to cackle with glee at a portrayal of anger or sadness because it is badly acted.)

In Bharata, the label for a given rasa is an emotional reaction-word. The rasa is further explicated with correlative situation-words, e.g. grief is stimulated by loss or injury. (Note that what we have on the list that follows is ‘pathetic’, not ‘grief’. The conceptualization is blurry.) The labeled situations are productive of the labeled emotional-reactions.

The actor supplies a bhava, named with a situational emotion-word like love. Bharata does not maintain a strict antecedent-consequent relation between bhava and rasa. The distinction is blurry. The dictum is: rasa is based on bhava.

We must say that in latter-day Hindustani musical doctrine, rasa and bhava get reversed: rasa is pictured as amounting to a flavor in the work; the perceiver’s reponse is bhava. Well, the concepts were almost interchangeable from the outset. 

What of the analogy of the mimed emotion to a flavor? Well, a flavor is nothing more nor less than a chemical class. We register the chemical classes by translating a chemical to qualities on a flavor-plane with four basic flavors at its corners. The flavor, one can argue, is an objective something, a chemical. It needs us to translate it into a quality. But absolute music, for example, does not have bhava-s (if you will) as objective somethings. It has sound-patterns as objective somethings. Registration of a sound-pattern by translation into a quality is what happens when we hear at all, as in the case of pitch-recognition. Something is at stake here beyond mere identification of sounds. Indeed, music is language-like.

Bharata makes a valuable point. The artist mixes the flavors, and the overall response to the result is pleasure, ideally. That underlines that we are not in the realm of primary emotions. The name of the tone of a mixed situation in life is the name of the dominating emotion—and that emotion need not be pleasure.

The only part of Bharata’s emotional palette we will reproduce is the table of rasa-s.

rasa-s

srngara erotic dark blue

hasya comic white

karuna pathetic pigeon

raudra furious red

vira heroic yellowish

bhayanaka terrible dark

bibhatsa odious blue

adbhuta marvelous yellow

The only advance made after Bharata wrote was to add a ninth rasa, peace, to the foregoing. Note that the doctrine assigns a color to each rasa. It also assigns gods to them.

Bharata’s purpose is to expound how the actor should portray the rasa by what amounts to mime, beginning with facial expressions.

Again, it must be clear that Bharata was talking about narrative representing art, specifically the art of performance. It is notable that in Bharata, theater unfolds the meaning of poetry. Theater begins with text.

Theater, the epic or novel, etc. give the audience vicarious experience and the opportunity to identify with a character. They allow the audience to traverse life-episodes while remaining in their seats, by empathizing with what they are shown, approximately. Thus, the audience has a vicarious experience of situational emotions by way of following the story. In the case of narrative entertainment, there may be no more to it than this. Mere vicarious experience and escapism, if that is involved. 

Art usually represents, pictures, tells stories. Then art conjures with portrayed situations and discursive thought. Even if there were no emotional evocation, a content would be conveyed. We can say what the object is about even if we do not care for it. But there is an affirmative side to this. When successful, the representing arts use pictorial or discursive contents to drive emotional or spiritual evocation—and analysis has both to separate them and re-integrate them. 

If the work is supposed to be more than entertainment or escapism—if it is supposed to impart something more, even something spiritual—then the message enters as a “conclusion” relative to the life-episode which the audience lives vicariously and may be cued by discursive dispensations. Here we have the merit claimed for literary or dramatic masterpieces. (Excuse me if I am underwhelmed by Tolstoy or whoever is supposed to be awesome.) 

By the time we get to Japanese Noh, the enactment of narrative has become so stylized that it might better be described as mime. For its intended audience, Noh is not really in the realm of vicarious experience, if we understand correctly. It is too stylized, too refined. Cf. Zeami’s levels of refinement. Asian art’s deliberate and extensive use of subliminal effects. Heartbreaking beauty; the participation of the audience in a miracle. To “do nothing at all” (a stationary tableau) and have it be emotionally overwheming.

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Uses of music

Music serves as well as any art to illustrate the ranges of uses art may have. The arts may accompany; they may be devoted to an occasion. In music, we have: song for all sorts of purposes, lullabies, hymns, anthems, dirges and what have you. There are various uses of musical sound on the battlefield. Music may be intended to accompany dance and/or to stimulate dance. Music may be inseparable from theater, as in Noh or opera. There are marches and processional music. Thus, some music is intended to complement or even spur a human action; other music is intended to tranquillize the hearer, to soothe the savage breast.

Concert music allows suites extracted from theatrical works. It also allows pictorial music: called program music or the tone poem.

Some people use musical masterpieces to do housework to. The masterpiece energizes them and fills the mental void, but the “sacredness” of the work is lost on them.

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Absolute music and its unique emotional mode

Arriving at absolute music—a case of the first importance for the principle of the thing—vicarious experience by way of following a pictured life-episode is not the consideration. Given that the music offers a pattern of sounds over time, there is an evocation of emotion which does not pass through a story (a “program”). The emotion is (already) sublimated. (The listener does not live sadness while identifying with a fantasy-person. What the listener gets is a sublimated sadness.)

However, we cannot simply rule out identification in absolute music, because some absolute music is not actually absolute. No more formidible musicians than Robert Johnson and Pandit Pran Nath ever lived—but both of them sung poems. In the case of Robert Johnson, the texts were autobiographical and woven inseparably with the music. It is extremely important, then, the the listener is afforded an opportunity for an identification with the emotion of the situation, for interpreting him or herself into the emotional silhouette. (Even if it is not a matter of re-traversing a lengthy narrative or recalling a literally similar life-situation.) 

To resume with our definitions, we call “primary” emotion situational emotion. Primary unhappiness means that unhappiness has been imposed on one by an external occurrence. 

The emotion elicited by absolute music does not have the same gamut as “primary” emotion. “Tragic” music does not elicit misery in the listener by imposing misery on the listener. It makes one mindful of tragedy in a way that may well make the listener feel validated and redeemed. In other words, the listener who has the intended experience does not listen as an act of masochism, quite the opposite, actually. We will call the evoked emotion secondary or reflected emotion. 

The great lesson here, then, is that the English (natural-language) word ‘sadness’ does not mean reflected sadness. Thus, English has no legitimate vocabulary whatever for “emotion” as it enters in art.

Some terms that will be important here are these:

vicarious experience

identification with a protagonist

mimesis

sublimation

catharsis

escapism

Some of this vocabulary is due to Aristotle. 

“Emotional psychology” has never been ready to address the non-primary levels of the emotional life, which may be correlative to imagination and fantasy but cannot be said to have fantasy as their destination, so to speak.

One who attends a performance sits in one place. All the while, he or she goes on a journey because his or her imagination is guided. It is like an externally evoked and meticulously guided daydream.

Having said that, we must caution that the reception of art and a daydream are not the same thing. With art, not only is there an external communication whose reception minutely guides your interior journey. We say that art sublimates and that it affords a catharsis. In contrast, daydreams are merely self-involved. They are slices of life effortlessly scripted by the fantasyist. Daydreams may involve a rather unedifying sublimation; they hardly reach the realm of catharsis.

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Animation’s elusiveness

Next we outline some features of the instance of art which make it elusive. (And undesirable as a topic in European thought.)

• The responses of listeners lack uniformity not only on one dimension but on many dimensions.

—one perceiver thinks a work is terrible, another loves it.

—in a more nuanced comparison, two supposedly competent listeners judge a piece differently. One knowledgeable listener says poignant, the other says mawkish. 

—two enthusiasts of a piece have different experiences of it; they like it in different ways.

—the reaction of one and the same listener is markedly different at different times: the listener “matures” and comes to treasure a piece which at first seemed dull or bad.

—the reaction of one and the same listener is markedly different at different times: the listener “matures” and realizes that a piece which once sounded vital is formulaic and perfunctory.

Obviously, a living person, for example, can elicit a diversity of reactions, can be like a Rorschach blot. But in the case of the art work, the artist has tried to bring it to a condensed message. A human individual does not reduce him or herself to any condensed message.

Even sympathetic listeners, who listen avidly, cannot be assumed to experience an identical emotional animation. Westerners listening to Indian music may differ according to whether they have spent time in India and have seen the reception accorded to the musicians in their native land. They may differ according to whether they can play an Indian instrument. According to whether they can count the tala; according to whether they know the formal sections of the performance.

The Sigmund Spaeth quote is worth repeating.

“Even those who are familiar with the so-called “standard repertoire” include a large percentage of mere sentimentalists, quite ignorant of the structural and musical significance of what they are hearing.”

Here we have one of many hints that value and appreciation in art are hierarchical. There is no such thing as non-judgmental art appreciation.

Well beyond the question of the listener’s appreciation of artifice, listeners may differ in their attitudes to the religion which is the express theme of the work. (Pran Nath’s “Invocation of Lord Krishna.”) We will come to this later.

The power of the art work to animate psychically is less predictable than the effect of an optical illusion or a flavor. There is no guarantee that an art work will be appreciated even by connoisseurs—if they are of the wrong background. I have seen musically educated people dismiss work which I found of the highest, such as Pran Nath’s recording of Asavari. Even when people are engaged by a work, there is no reason to think that they all feel the same thing.

[Many, even the majority, may not get it. There is no guarantee that what is evoked in perceivers is the same for all, or is even confined to two alternatives, say.]

• If we wish to report emotion in a language of words, the latter affords us only the coarsest means—and that is not even to recall the point we made above, that English has no words for reflected emotions. Thus, music may be the only ‘language’ which can somehow report emotional nuances without representation, without imagery. (If abstract expresionist painters thought they could do this, they had a wildly inflated opinion of themselves.) Even if we illicitly use primary emotion-words for secondary emotions, words are just too crude to delineate the emotional nuances that can be demonstrated by a repertoire of outstanding musical examples.

• As we have noted, using Adorno as an example, the feeling elicited by the work in the perceiver is not guaranteed to be followed by the judgment called approval. Nor need the feeling be the one the artist intended. The feeling elicited may be disgust for an obnoxious work. In that case, the work has elicited a primary emotion; the elicited emotion is situational. It may be that not many art works fail in the sense of disappointing their own creator. However, works estrange audiences all the time.

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A digression: “art” which has a primary state of being as its aim (trance music)

Generally speaking, we assume that members of the audience for an art work remain observers. In music in which the refinement of a maestro is all-important, there may even be prohibition of applause at the end of the performance. However, there are various cases in which the perceiver is so affected as to become a participant. For that matter, there are all sorts of participant events which are not usually analyzed as art but have a family relationship to art. Social dancing, religious services or rituals, Masonic initiations, etc.

When the perceiver becomes a participant, then the analysis in terms of secondary or reflected emotion becomes less germane. On the one hand, social critics decried music which reduces the audience to savagery. William Sargant has a sketchy appraisal of Beatlemania as a form of brainwashing. In this case, the teenagers, the girls, act out visibly. Adorno charges that Stravinsky reduces the audience to bestiality in their seats. As far as we can tell, Adorno was shocked to the core by Stravinsky. Adorno’s revulsion may or may not be taken as dated today. But we can still entertain the hypothesis that that the listener who does remain in the theater seat may still begin to participate. Then an analysis in terms of reflected emotion may not be sufficient.

There was the species of absolute music called “trance music.” it aimed to place the perceiver in an altered state. Trance music may cover a multitude of sins, but it also has worthy examples. The music does not narrate/delineate. If time-limits impose an arc on the piece, a beginning and ending within the compass of a concert, then the intro and the coda will be mere touches, although they may be done with great sensitivity. Most of the piece will have a uniform texture; variation is used to sustain interest and fascinate in a uniform way.

As with other music, not all listeners are guaranteed to have the intended response. But the perceiver who does have the intended response does not remain an observer. The perceiver falls into the “psychic space of the work,” reaching an altered state which is an end in itself. We say ‘psychic space of the work’ as a figure of speech; here more than ever, the actual work is a relation between the programmed sounds and the perceiver.

In the case of trance music, the relation between form and technique and the animation of the listener is closer than ever—and emotional animation may not be the best word for the indended listener response.

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Social allusion

Artistic communication has a dimension other than emotional vaccination and other than pictorialization. The art work is socially allusive. That is part of what we mean when we say that music “has genre.” In the case of the representing arts, beginning with songs, the social allusion is explicit, and art criticism has to address portrayed situations and discursive thought, not just emotional tone. Portrayed situations and even discursive thought contribute to the emotional tone.

Social allusion is typically involved in music as in the other arts. It’s not only feeling a propos of nothing. The very sound is: a language which can allude to a way of life. That does not solve a problem; it creates a greater problem. What if the way of life alluded to is not entirely wonderful? Why do we find more depth in art from traditional societies which have social arrangements we could never abide with? Why is it that we detect the allusion to a regressive social order but are not estranged by it?

To keep it short, I have the beginning of an answer to this question. “Our” social order is not so perfect that we can afford to treat it as the touchstone. Because we have not acceded to a utopia, we have lost as much as we have gained. 

(A sense of that is found in Whitman’s poem on Northern commercialism after the U.S. Civil War, “Respondez!” which Whitman suppressed. One would expect Whitman, as a New Yorker, to have given unqualified praise to the victor in the Civil War. But he didn’t.

“Let there be money, business, imports, exports, custom, authority, precedents, pallor, dyspepsia, smut, ignorance, unbelief!”

The poem does not afford a catharsis, and like so much of Whitman’s work, is more oratorical than poetic. It is an example of the art work which has the real world as its reference, and which incites its readers. In that sense, it is not pure art.)

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Structure and language

We have seen that some art conjures with portrayed situations and discursive thought. It is not surprising, then, that an art work may have the form of a communication with a definite grammar. As to the grammar, it is even more evident in music, which does not necessarily conjure with portrayed situations. In most music, sounds come from a lexicon and are combined according to discernable rules. That is what learning a raga involves; that is what we allude to when we say that ethnic music has genre. Composition in the style of Bach has been formulated as a computer program. 

Whether natural-language syntax is more stable over time than the “syntax” of a genre of music is an open question. As far as we know, ragas are held stable and alteration of a raga is denoted by a new name. (The composer who does something new may experience the old rules as confining and the new practice as a kind of freedom, but with the passage of time, it becomes clear that the new rules are also confining.) All the while, we should not overdo the analogy to natural language. In music, it is common for many “voices” to speak at once and to complement each other by doing so.

Aside: the scoring of music vs. emotional mimesis

When we ask what the musician does objectively that evokes this or that feeling, the abstraction which we call a score goes a considerable way toward answering that question. As we will see, the score is the objective cue of the feeling. With a reasonable understanding of what a score can accomplish, we can begin to talk about the macrostructure of an extended musical work, and of how the work cues an entire journey of feeling. 

There are grave cautions here. The questions of what notation should accomplish, and when it should be considered faithful to the music, are large questions in their own right. To answer them in an epigram, a score should capture structural elements which the performer has to master and execute to present a competent performance. In other words, a score should be a means for the working musician. All this became very concrete when I attended several of Pran Nath’s courses (master classes) in the 1980s at the Mela Foundation in New York. Pran Nath taught songs such as “Invocation of Lord Krishna” (Darbari) which were fixed (set pieces); all students were meant to learn and execute them recognizably. I took it on myself to notate what one had to do to accomplish that. I had long since developed a proprietary elaboration of European notation for such purposes. 

Again, notation should be a means for the working musician. I notated pitch with the accuracy of Hindustani pitch-names (twelve steps to the octave as in European music). I did not attempt to notate tunings of the scale steps, assuming that that is a subtlety that the master has to impart. 

Then there is another key point. Indian music is not monodic; it is all “dyadic.” Even though Mashkoor Ali Khan practices a capella, that is highly atypical. In performance, the vocal note is always in “concord” with the drone. I give the tambura tuning for the raga. Beyond that, tambura playing is a subliminal art; the strings are attacked serially and regularly, but the point is to make the attacks disappear to the ear. I do not notate the tambura part, leaving the working musician to assume it as an invariant.

The other caution is that the performer has to supply more than structural elements to give a worthy performance. Precision of intonation; vocal quality; what is called feeling. We do not even touch on the proprietary exercises and techniques the student receives in order to become a professional singer. 

The structural elements cue feeling, and in fact they cue the macrostructural journey of feeling. But the structural elements do not vivify the performer. The performer understands the emotional theme, and mimes it in order to convey it. It is not situational emotion, and the performer does not drown in emotion. This vivification of the performer, then, is a very large part of our topic.

The point is that even though we associate Hindustani music with the virtuoso improviser, it has set pieces and a norm of acceptable performance by different people, by many people. In the first instance, that sets the expectations for notation. What I was doing in the 1980s is not to be compared with the scores produced for non-Western musics by musicologists. These travesties merely reflect the warped perception produced by European musical indoctrination: all non-Western music ends as a piano score. The musicologists have learned nothing since Mozart’s “Turkish” movements in his sonata-forms.

To dwell for a moment on standard notation, it evolved in conjunction with European common-practice music—and ended up controlling it, driving improvisation out of European music. What is more, the advent of scoring in European music, combined with the enhrining of novelty as art’s purpose, resulted in the score becoming the end rather than the means. Thus, the role of the score in European art music today is not a good model for the broad problem of capturing structural elements of music for the working musician. 

In 1937, Deems Taylor published a slighting essay on “Oriental” (Chinese) music. It said, in part: “the Oriental has never been able to evolve a satisfactory system of musical notation … ” (Of Men and Music, pages 261-2.) On this matter of notation Taylor turns out to have been profoundly right. In the clash of civilizations, non-Western music is placed at a great disadvantage by its lack of a faithful notation. It makes it easy for the Western authors to call non-Western music rudimentary and slapdash. Since there is no score, the structural elements are not expressly identified. The expedient of talking about the score as a proxy for talking about the expression is not available.

We may touch on painting—a confined flat display, frozen in time. In 1912, Kandinsky considered one of the basic features of a painting to be that it can be surveyed in all its elaboration in an instant. Subsequent to that instant it does not change. It is frozen in time. But when we see abstract cinema done well, then we realize that it is technically possible to make a “picture” change in time (never mind the cinematic recording of theater). We can no longer assume that painting’s inertness is dictated by nature; it puts painting on the defensive for its inertness.

Actually, a canvas, being inert, gained acceptance as an object of furniture. (Before our epoch, the most important application of painting may have been the mural. Figurines were already objects of furniture.) Perhaps that is why we do not experience the inertness of the visual work as dull. It gives its location a constant tone.

Classic painting is highly conventional. The entire culture in which the artist is situated has made decisions about perspective and modelling. Insofar as a painting is a “photograph of the world,” it is a staged photograph with symbolizing images which are standardized. 

The artist or patron has to make “framing” decisions which go unnoticed because they are so basic. How big the painting is. The ratio of its dimensions. Choice of pigment. Whether the painting has panels. A Buddhist painting may combine scenes indicating the passage of time without placing borders between them. Then the painting has to be read, and reading has to be taught.

All this simply underlines how utterly unlike an image from a surveillance camera a classic painting, as representing art, is.

Aristotle spoke about “the unities,” articulating his culture’s canons of proportion in art. If each act of a play took place in a different century, Aristotle might have conceded that it was creditable history, but hid doctrine would deny that it was proper drama. Aristotle was cognizant that art is not a slice of life and is not offered as a slice of life. It is a representation offered to assembled spectators as recreation, re-creation. Because art is, as we say, a product brought to market, the spectators judge the experiences elicited, and witlessly convert judgements of their experiences into judgments of the object. 

In passing, we see, as we will repeatedly, that art is inseparable from judgments of value or excellence—even if there is more than one sort of excellence and more than one hierarchy of excellence. Aristotle, with his “unities,” sought to define the contribution of proportion to quality. 

A work which unfolds in time can tell a story. In a representing art, the story can be a chronicle. In absolute music, there is a story only in a metaphorical sense and it is not a chronicle. The subject of the “story” is the music’s own themes. We call that thematic articulation and development. Themes which are announced have a career in the course of the piece, sometimes being gathered at the end for a recapitulation.

Beyond that, music can present combinations to dazzle (virtuosity), or to engage the listener intellectually in some manner (presenting suspense and resolution in real time). [FN Hindustani music, the arrival at sum, the first beat of the rhythm cycle.] 

Again, the art work is not just an outpouring of emotion or a slice of life. It is entirely stylized and entirely occupied with proportion. The emotion that we wish to address is conveyed within the heavy cage of style and convention. Something La Monte Young wrote about Pran Nath is so instructive in this respect that it perhaps is the first thing Pran Nath’s fans should be told.

“Berva is known to be extremely difficult because there are several other raginis that are very similar and it is considered a rare feat if a performer can sing it for five or ten minutes without one of these raginis creeping into the performance.” 

liner notes, Pandit Pran Nath, India’s Master Vocalist (1971)

Form and technique are inseparable from the goal of eliciting a feeling and may themselves comprise content. The word for all this is artifice.

Once we are clear that the emotion “in” art is conveyed within the heavy cage of style and convention, we can better assess what has happened in European esthetics, musicology, etc. Expression is subjective, and as both Sullivan and Spaeth began to note, the more technified European civilization becomes, the more phobic it becomes toward expression and the subjective and psychic. But the art work is public and palpable and salable. If it is an inert object, it can be measured and described. European music is given a stipulated structure by its score. By all means, then, let us talk about physical dimensions and form. If we can imagine that this or that syntax correlates to the feeling evoked, then by all means let us talk about syntax as a proxy for feeling. 

This is the course taken by Marshall Stearns in The Story of Jazz. Chapter 22 is entited “Expression in Jazz.” It turns out to be about alleged tones in the jazz scale. (Stearns does not get that right, not remotely.)

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