art, meaning, and the intersection of Mozart, the Sandman, and porn

We went to hear Neil Gaiman speak at MIT on Friday, and while I was not terribly impressed by the surprisingly insipid Q&A session, I was fascinated by Gaiman's opening talk. He spoke on the distinctions between genre and story, between intent and interpretation, between creation and meaning, and it was striking how similar the issues in comics and fiction are to issues in musicology. We, too, struggle constantly with determining musical meaning as it is derived from stated or perceived compositional intent, performer interpretation, and audience reception. Our field tends to privilege compositional intent even as we acknowledge the impossibility of establishing the exact parameters of that intent, but I have always been interested less in intent than in compositional decisions that influence performer and audience interpretation. Musical scores are road maps, they are not the music itself, and while the map will always take you from point A to point B on a specific route, there are still infinite possibilities in the means of travel. Listening to Beethoven's 9th symphony, as conducted by James Levine, is not the same experience as listening to that piece as conducted by Seiji Ozawa or Raphael Fruhbeck de Burgos or the conductor of the local community orchestra. So how can one speak of a piece of music in meaningful ways, when a single definition of what that piece of music actually *is* is impossible to reach? Simple answer: one cannot. We can talk about the notes on the page, we can talk about the methods of interpretation, we can build strong cases around patterns of composition and interpretation, but we cannot come to a definitive conclusion on what the piece *is*. That is the fascination of music for me - those possibilities, those subtleties, those variations, those personal stamps on "universal" works. My Beethoven's 9th is not the same as yours; we each have our own personal copy in our minds and souls, and no one can take that from us. When I study a piece of music, it is not to define it, but to illuminate it, to notice its unique qualities, to find things that make me think, "well, isn't that clever!" The composer, the time period, the social context, the intended audience - all these things are important to understanding a particular work. But what really matters are the things in the music that kept it alive in the canon for hundreds of years, the things that speak to the performers and audience in ways that compel them to play it again and again for enlightenment and for pleasure. That's the good stuff; that's why I'm in this field; that's why it's impossible for us not to sing along in the car; that's why the Brandenburg concerti are hurtling through space as ambassadors for the human race. By Gaiman's definition, I will always be an analyzer rather than a creator, but I like to think that, by studying things to find their possibilities rather than their limitations, I am broadening the scope of the creators' works and encouraging alternate viewpoints that expand interpretive horizons. Is that egotistical of me? Probably, but anything I can do to combat the concept of a single "correct" meaning for a given piece of music is good work, in my opinion.

So what's with the reference to porn in the title? Well, one of the most entertaining and enlightening moments of Gaiman's talk was when he took a concept from a Linda Williams book and extended it to comics and art in general. In talking of genre, he described Williams' comparison of musicals and adult films as media in which the audience put up with the story to get from song to song, or from sex scene to sex scene. It was a fascinating discussion...especially as he extended it to serial comics/stories/graphic novels, and as I could see the metaphor in opera, as well. Good stuff.