Timbre and Twilight, Part 2
Echolalia
In the early 20th century a bizarre debate broke out amongst a small clique of linguists and psychologists. The row was about babbling in children. Children, before they can speak, go through a phase of babbling where they mimic the speech and sounds around them. This phase is known as "echolalia" and it is universal in humans. The debate, and it was a bizarre one, was whether this phase was inherently egocentric or social.
What the hell?
Babbling, to the ego-centric camp, was an early step on the journey from highchair tyrant to socialized child. The babbling phase was seen as a kind of unsocialized narcissistic solipsism that needed to be overcome as a part of a healthy child’s development. But others saw it as an inherently social act, delighting in the call and response of sound. In this case, babbling was primitive mimicry and was one of the first ways the infant could explore the world. This exploration formed the basis of their lifelong relationship to that world, one that would evolve from crude mimicry to creative social speech and then to internal dialogue. At the very center of this process, we find the same timbral and echoic listening that we found in the last post. Solo, or duet?
Children in the echolalia phase are pure chaos and potential. Their speech is "infinite" in the sense that their mouths haven't yet learned to restrict themselves to the basic sounds, or phonemes, that are the necessary building blocks of any particular language. In fact, echolalia happens even before a "sense of self and individuation develops." From this state of chaotic volatility and cosmic oneness, the infant will slowly descend into its body, the world and society, learning which sounds we make and what words we use. But, it will no longer be infinite.
The pre-Oedipal stage corresponds with intense echolalia, first in rhythm, then in intonation, before a phonologic-syntactic structure is imposed on the sentence. Julia Kristeva 1
Kristeva's stages of language acquisition have obvious musical parallels. Rhythm=phrasing, intonation=ornament, phonologic-syntactic=the grammar of 2-D melodic listening. It even conforms to the order that we have followed in our archaeological dig. This also helps explain what Timothy Rice said in our discussion of ornament, that instead of these extra-melodic elements being added “on top” of melody, children learn to ornament before melody (it would be interesting to teach klezmer in this way, although 2nd language acquisition is very different than first language acquisition, another tempting field of research with implications for klezmer that I know nothing about).
Kristeva’s focus on Echolalia turns it into an aural version of Lacan’s mirror stage.2 It becomes the device that pries the developing child out of the chaotic, primordial state of being and into normal, everyday, subject/object consciousness, with all its wonderful potentials for socialized life and anxiety (see Worrying the Strings, Instrumental Music and Anxiety, forthcoming). We can’t get back to that state without going bonkers, and it certainly isn’t clear that anyone would want to, but we can get a little bit closer, and that makes a big difference.
We Can’t Go Back, We Must Go Back
In our last post, we saw how the timbral end of this axis could be found in various musical traditions. Even our own American culture has such traditions, albeit long neglected and strange. But we stopped before considering why that end of the axis mattered.
We take natural delight in timbral listening, but seem to have a hard time doing so consciously. Yo-Yo Ma and his friends may have had a blast clinking glasses at a restaurant in China, but they didn't decide to put that on a stage. For many of us, the fleeting wonder we feel as beginners creating a chord or a single note is quickly dismissed if noticed at all and only consciously appreciated if and when attention is brought to it in retrospect. By the time it happens, we’ve already been trained to listen melodically.
If you listen from the perspective of melody, you’ll begin to get bored and wonder why the singer doesn’t change the pitch… You have to listen in a different way… as if you were holding a diamond up to the light and rotating it ever so slightly while observing the shifting prismatic effects of light… Süzükei in Levin pg. 53
Timbral listening in the pure sense is almost completely lost to us. But in small doses, it is still highly effective. Valentina Süzükei, who we met in the last post, noticed that when Turkish cafedwellers heard traces of central Asian sheepherder timbres in the local music, "Something was aroused in them."3 She never went any further than this. In Southern America, we have the same thing- "The high, lonesome sound" so prized in bluegrass singing is exactly this same tinge or trace of the timbral in the melodic. We should be specific here- this is not a matter of melody, phrasing or ornament, this is timbre. But what, exactly, is aroused?
Then there is nostalgia. This word was coined by a Swiss doctor in 1688 to describe a malady common among Swiss mercenaries fighting in France and Italy. It had been called the “mal du Suisse” or Swiss sickness but Dr. Johannes Hofer more precisely described it with two Greek words, “nostos” and “algos,” that when combined meant, “homesickness”. This was triggered by the singing of songs which revived the memory of the Alpine valleys from which the mercenaries had been recruited. Rousseau, in his Dictionary of Music, wrote that this became such a serious problem, leading to desertion, illness or death, that the mercenaries were forbidden to sing these songs altogether. [Mat Callahan, Music and Historical Memory, 2015, See also Aaron Fox4]
Phrasing took us down, into our bodies, but timbral listening takes us back. Psychologically, timbral listening contains a trace of that time before the subject/object split. It can’t take us back there, that’s too far, but it can point us in that direction. Between chaos and order, between you and it, between the pastoral and the sedentary. It’s a bird singing at twilight, between night and day.
There are many ways this works itself into music, but I'm thinking of those great long notes, in American and Jewish culture that go on just a little bit too long and threaten to stretch the fabric of melody to the point of rupture, exposing its timbral foundations.
Wallachian and Jewish musicians are common; and the extraordinary length of time during which they dwell upon a single note, with their heads thrown back, their mouths open, and their eyes fixed, and then follow it up with a whole sentence, rapidly and energetically uttered, is most singular.
The power of these moments can be so overwhelming and strange to us, that they have to be smuggled in through the Trojan horse of melodic listening. At times, they so threaten our everyday perception of the world that our skin produces goosebumps just to reinforce and remind us of the border between inside and out.
Other practical examples of this can be seen in the timbre-rich genres of the Jewish doina and the African American Lost John. I dedicated an earlier post to these genres, but will recap briefly: These forms share some key features: they are not melodic in the usual sense. They refer to a real-life pastoral (or anti-sedentary) sense of freedom. They encourage and require the performer to "take liberties." They are expressive in ways other tunes aren't expected to be.
Timbre takes us home.
Home
If those absolutely important things are ignored, of how we speciated, how we adapted to the planet, then we're going to lose something precious, there won't be anywhere to go and no place to come home to. Alan Lomax
Our hyper-melodic age has made timbre’s echoes fainter and fainter.5 The structure of musical education all but ignores the timbral's worldview. Instead, musicians are self-selected for their ability to work as perfect little melody cogs in the service of various conductors, composers and various other cultural bosses and gatekeepers, for whom Freedom and Liberty are solely reserved.
Likewise, doinas seem to be a vanishing genre in contemporary klezmer. Without the black dots on the page, we seem be unable to trust that what we have to say is worthwhile. Is it just babble? And ever alert to our precarious status in this competitive and anaesthetic culture, we lack the ability to be slow enough to indulge the timbral. Timbre isn’t serious.
And yet, as modern, sedentary people, our relationship to these pastoral signifiers is hopelessly complicated and goes back to the dawn of history (see Enkidu). What to do?
Every musical performance is, in some sense, an answer to this question. When we listen to a performance, we hear notes, but we are also hearing the performer use the grammar of timbre to communicate complicated and unconscious psychological, political and social values that go back to primal moments in our collective and individual history. This is a language we can understand, if we listen.
Next: Timbre and Twilight, Part 3: Conclusion, Ecstasy and Equanimity
Why did I use Kristeva here? She sums up this process nicely, but she’s more poetry than science IMHO. This innocent quote comes in the middle of a wild passage. Throughout this entire series, I’ve tried to avoid using French Theorists, although they, esp. Bataille, are hovering closely in the wings. I’ve also tried to avoid using language acquisition theories, but here they are unavoidable, so I have used them as little as possible and tried to point to better sources. Maybe someone who knows more can make use of these intuitions or tell me I’m completely wrong.
“Timbral listening is an ideal sonic mirror of the natural world.” Levin pg 58. For a good sensible explanation of the mirror stage, I think James Elkins is best.
Dang it, can’t find this reference. This part of the essay is over 10 years old and I misplaced it. Will find.
Listen to Aaron A Fox from 15:00 discussing nostalgia and country music, including the use of musical “grammars” of ornament and lament. He also writes about timbre in other places and if this essay was longer I would use it.
You could make the case that the ambivalence in our culture about back equalling home is also at fault here. Hugely influential African American musical culture has a very complicated and rich relationship to timbre. For example, the rough-hewn voices that signify home to post-war country singers meant something else to the jazz singers, who largely eschewed them. Is home always in the past? Or can home also be in the future?