Thursday, June 23, 2005
The Elements of Style
With all due respect to our pal Jerry, I think there's actually an interesting distinction between style and voice.
Style is a generalized (and generalizable) label for musics that share, as I've mentioned a few different places, certain salient superficialities. Take, Reich and Glass as two convenient and often cited examples. Yes, they use different compositional techniques -- Glass does a lot of additive processes and jarring-yet-smooth meter changes; Reich does a lot of cannons, from his early phasing work to the augmentation cannons in pieces like Three Tales and Proverb. To the knowledgeable listener Reich and Glass are nearly impossible to mix up (in fact, I recently heard some music that was obviously not merely a minimalist ripoff but a Glass ripoff.) But style is not about the details, it's about having broad but functional categories for identifying music that can reasonably be lumped together for superficial reasons. And style is based on the ways in which our brains take in music anyway -- if someone tells me that he enjoys the music of Philip Glass I have a pretty good chance of being right that this same person would like the music of Steve Reich. I have a far smaller chance of being right that this same person likes Boulez, or Shania Twain. We make the distinction anyway, so why not use names for the groups? I don't think style is a "necessary evil" as David does -- I think it's a useful tool that we need to be careful not to use for tasks to which it's unsuited. Is Beethoven a classicist or a romanticist? Both! Neither! Who cares?! Asking the question yields a lot of interesting information, and he is clearly somewhere in the classical/romantic category regardless of how precise we can be -- I've never heard anybody ask "Is Beethoven classical, romantic, or 80s hair band?" (I can just imagine Ludwig Van opening for Def Leppard. . . and ther was that band Camper Van Beethoven, but I don't think they were a hair band. . .)
I'm less clear on exactly how "voice" works, but here's a tentative suggestion: Voice is an individual composer's technical predilections. "I like cannons." "I like to follow leaps of a minor sixth with a fall of a half-step." "I totally dig the third retrograde inversion." Most composers won't know what most of their own predilections are -- these are the kinds of choices we make instinctively -- but as an agragate they form a voice. Furthermore, we clearly think of "voice" as seperate from "style" since we often note how even though he went through several stylistic periods, Stravinsky's music always sounds like Stravinsky.
I haven't yet mentioned "genre" which I think is seperate from "style." Maybe "style" is a subset of "genre"? I think we use the terms somewhat interchangeably. It might also be that "style" is the manifestation of "genre." Or perhaps "style" is the intent to ally oneself with a particular "genre?" I do think, however, that we could reasonably propose to use "style" to describe the intersection of "genre" and "voice." Thus, when Stravinsky moved from the neo-classical genre to the serialist genre his style changed but his voice remained the same.
These are unscientific terms, so really "voice," "style," and "genre" mean what ever people mean when they use them, and we probably all have our own personal definitions that match up enough that we can communicate when we don't need to be precise. And this isn't something we need to be precise on all that often, so we get by. On the other hand, I know some people who are putting together an on-line music dictionary, so maybe this is my chance to step in and lay down the law. . .
UPDATE: For some reason Blogger has switched to attributing this post to my username rather than my actual name, which it never used to do. Jerry, is this something in the blog settings?
-Galen H. Brown
posted by Galen H. Brown
2:44 PM
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