Practice-based research in music: A conceptual approach

Contribution by Winfried Lüdemann to a Mini-Symposium on Practice-Based Research, held at theUniversityofStellenboschon 6 December 2011.  The contribution was presented verbally and is not a fully edited version intended for publication.

There are several ways in which to examine the topic of practice-based research (PBR), as we are witnessing during this symposium.  The angle that I propose to follow when I entitle my contribution “a conceptual approach” is the deductive one:  simply to see where it leads me when I consider the topic at hand deductively.  Because:  when one understands what PBR is/can be/should be, what possibilities it opens up, then one can begin to think about how a PhD that includes creative work can be positioned onto it.  The three words in question, of course, are practice, research and music.  The “triangular” constellation of these three words constitutes the concept PBR in music.

I shall proceed to analyse each of these words briefly before I attempt a synthesis of their meaning as a constellation.  I shall do so in reverse order: research, music, practice.

Research

I am stating the obvious when I say that research can mean different things to different people.  For example, research can be what I do when I read up on information for my undergraduate essay on Mozart’s piano concertos.  Or it could be what I do when I collect background information for my performance of a work by Bach for solo cello.  Within the context of a PhD, however, that is not what research entails.  Research in the context of a PhD is defined in the following two quotes as:

DHET definition of research output:

“textual output where research is understood as original, systematic investigation undertaken in order to gain new knowledge and understanding. Peer evaluation of research is a fundamental prerequisite of all recognised research output and is the mechanism of ensuring and thus enhancing quality” (my highlighting)

Michael Biggs, from the field of visual arts,University of Hertfordshire,UK, quotes a definition from a UKGGE (UK Council for Graduate Education) study on doctoral research when he says:

“The UKCGE paper went on to identify broad consensus in theUKabout certain qualities that a doctorate would demonstrate:

an original contribution to knowledge and/or understanding and would include the demonstration of certain competencies:

undertake a systematic enquiry
apply methods appropriate to the subject
a grasp of context
documentation and communication in a permanent form
sustained and contextualised logical argument
justification of actions in relation to process and product
valid and original work of high quality”

All of these criteria can be applied to music.  It is significant that in both definitions the word “understanding” is added to the word “knowledge”, and, in the case of Biggs it is even seen in “and/or” terms.  It seems to me that in PBR the critical mass of the work would lean over to the side of understanding, rather than to the side of knowledge.

Music

The general debate about PBR traverses all the art forms.  While this is to be welcomed, there is a danger that important differences between the various arts are overlooked.  The next stage of my argument, therefore, examines which characteristics of music have to be taken into account when viewing it within the triangular constellation mentioned above.

One of the most intriguing questions in all musicology is the one about the meaning of music.  Whatever else can be said about the matter, it has to be understood that musical signs are non-referential.  This means that music cannot convey meaning in the same way as a painting or poetry can. I should like to phrase it like this:  music cannot convey knowledge, but it is a way of knowing.   This also implies that the meaning contained within music cannot be translated into another language, even if one regards music as a “knowledge system” in its own right.  One cannot articulate the content of music in words.   Neither can it be reduced to another set of criteria, be they social, psychological or physiological.  Even though musicology has developed an extremely sophisticated terminology with which to describe music in its most intricate detail and even though an extensive discourse about how music is embedded in a social context has developed, such description can never replace the actual sound, the actual experience of music. To put it in another way: description cannot replace actual enactment of music.  For music to exist it has to sound, it has to be performed.  (In my opinion the term “integrated PhD” has the real danger of blurring the distinctness between description and enactment, between verbal and musical language, as if translation is possible and should be attempted.  If that is what is meant by integration, then it is a misnomer.  For that reason “coherence” might be a better term.)  Allow me to explain this by means of three examples:

Mary’s room is a thought experiment that is quite instructive in our debate, even if I am using it slightly out of context.  It goes like this:

In philosophy of mind, Mary’s Room is a thought experiment meant to demonstrate the non-physical nature of mental states. It is an example meant to highlight the knowledge argument against physicalism. The example first appears in an article by Frank Jackson, entitled “Epiphenomenal Qualia”[1], which appears in Philosophical Quarterly 32:127 (1982).

The thought experiment is as follows: Mary lives her entire life in a room devoid of colour—she has never directly experienced colour in her entire life, though she is capable of it. Through black-and-white books and other media, she is educated on neuroscience to the point where she becomes an expert on the subject. Mary learns everything there is to know about the perception of colour in the brain, as well as the physical facts about how light works in order to create the different colour wavelengths. It can be said that Mary is aware of all physical facts about colour and colour perception.

After Mary’s studies on colour perception in the brain are complete, she exits the room and experiences, for the very first time, direct colour perception. She sees the colour red for the very first time, and learns something new about it — namely, what red looks like.[2]

It is obvious that the colour red in this experiment could be replaced by the taste of wine or the sound of a particular piece of music or by music in general.

My second example comes with an acknowledgement to Nina Schumann and Luis Magalhaes and goes back to an experience I had during their last concert.  All of us know about Bach’s Goldberg Variations.  In this age of HIPP we probably all have an idea of how we would like to have this music performed.  Now imagine the work being performed not on one piano, but on two modern concert grands in an arrangement by none other than that late Romantic (and I must add: Bavarian!) composer Joseph Rheinberger!  Enough to make the hair in your neck rise? Surely, this time Nina and Luis had got it all wrong:  that was the state of mind in which I went to the concert, armed with all the dogmas and theoretical knowledge at my disposal.  Theoretically speaking, such a piano arrangement could never be convincing, but in practice it turned out to be one of the most moving performances I have experienced in recent months, not only because the arrangement is superb, but even more so because the two pianists played masterfully, interacting in a way that the original version for two manuals on a harpsichord could never have envisaged.

Instead of arguing at length about the matter, analysing all its various aspects, they simply showed that it could be done.  As in the example of Mary’s Room the music (whether it is composed, arranged or performed) makes for a distinct experience that cannot be reduced to description or translated into words.  It is on this quality of music that practice-based research has to rest. And I would argue that the appropriate response to “showing” is “understanding”, the second key criterion of research as set out above.

My third example:  In my work on the composer Hugo Distler I came across a very interesting statement.  In connection with the agonizing search for an apt way to express the religious ideas based on the dialectic theology of Karl Barth during the 1920s and 1930s, a great deal of debate was going on in Germany about which stylistic devices were suitable and which were not, in order to overcome the stale, sentimental and overloaded religious style of late Romanticism, including that of Rheinberger (!).  Many unsuccessful attempts were made by many a small master until the debate came to an abrupt end when one or two composers of genius came along and simply did it, did it intuitively, simply showing how it could be done.  With hindsight their solutions seem so right that one wonders why no one else had come up with something similar before (as is proved by numerous imitators and epigones afterwards).  This example can be extended toSouth Africa at the present time:  many people are arguing about a way to make our music sound “ofAfrica” or to reflect our cultural diversity in some way.  Composition competitions or commissions have even tried /try to “command” or prescribe to composers to write such music.  We should all relax and wait for a composer of genius to come and simply show us how to achieve this aim.  That is how all great styles, all great music comes about.

I could go on about this for a long time referring to Kant’s distinction between science and art, to the devil’s pact in Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, to statements the composer Roelof Temmingh has made to me about what composing really is, about improvisation, or a wonderful example about a project about deconstructing the concept of motherhood undertaken by one of our colleagues in the Visual Arts department across the road, but for the time being I will leave it at that, and provide these examples during discussion time, if it is opportune to do so.

The point in all of this is that the musical component in practice-based research cannot be relegated to the position of exemplification of arguments that are fundamentally musicological in nature.  The quality of a musicological thesis (for example on the music of this or that composer or on this or that culture) depends on the convincing structure of its argumentation, albeit underpinned by representative illustrations “from the field”, but not on the inherent quality of the musical examples.  Conversely, the musical component of practice-based research has to present (show!) a coherent and “sustained” argument in its own right, which is then reflected upon in the written component.  One may even wonder whether the term PBR does not contain some kind of hierarchy, where the musical practice has supremacy.

Practice

What is the difference between the theorem on rectangular triangles of Pythagoras and Mozart’s symphony no. 40 in g minor?  Once I have understood Pythagoras’ theorem and can demonstrate that I am able to produce the proof of its correctness, I can store it in my memory and move on to another (mathematical) problem.  Mozart’s symphony, on the other hand, which, incidentally, I came to know more or less at the same time as the Pythagorean theorem, has been a constant companion throughout my life ever since, a piece of music that I revisit every now and again on a Sunday afternoon.  Even though I hold Pythagoras in as high a regard as Mozart (and that is why I have adopted a deductive approach in this talk), I do not revisit his theorem on Sunday afternoons.

What does this tell us?  In my opinion it demonstrates the difference between knowledge in the academic sense, and practice.  They are different modes of thinking, different modes of knowing, they are different in kind, not interchangeable, not translatable, even if I have understood both of them equally well.  To use Greek terminology:  it is the difference between diegesis and mimesis.[3]  That is why I believe – at least in respect of music – that it is wrong to say that art is a form of research.  Rather, one should emphasize that the researcher and the performer represent two different states of being.  For lack of better words, I would say that the artist has to be in a state of inspiration, of intuition, in extreme cases perhaps even in a state of trance when creating or recreating music.  When that happens we have the magic of a good musical work or a good performance.  And that is why it matters that this is taken into account in a doctoral project, why this has to be examined.  (For that reason, also, I think it is wrong to talk of creative work in music as being a “professional” activity or to talk about the DMus or DMA as “professional degrees”.)

Furthermore, it goes without saying that if such creative work is to be commensurate with the requirements of a PhD and is to be a meaningful and substantial contribution to new and original understanding, it has to be of the highest order.  [Not for the talk but for the discussion:  but I wonder if setting a time frame for such creative work is not more easily justifiable than setting a page length for the written work, because musical expression does take place in time, while the flash of logic in a thesis can be much more instantaneous, and why it is not so absurd to set a time frame in the case of music, because music is time]

Synthesis

Traditionally, research-based knowledge and artistic expression have occupied different spheres, spheres that have been regarded as mutually exclusive.  The one has its home in the research article, book or doctoral thesis, the other in the concert hall, church or place of entertainment.  But, on closer examination, that does not mean that they are hermetically sealed, or closed on each other.  Rather, they can also be regarded as complementary, at the interface of each other (to use modern jargon), and can be brought into mutual orbit.  That is exactly where the new and exciting possibilities open up in the filed of practice-based research.  The difficult question is how to set up this interface.  If it means that the traditional two spheres are dissolved, “lifted up” into a synthesis in the Hegelian sense of the word, then “integration” will have destroyed rather than stimulated the tension that is inherent between the two.  That is why I like the astronomical term orbit:  the sun and the earth are different in kind, but nevertheless they are in a position of mutual tension, governed by the force of gravity.  If that force disappears they would collapse into each other and lose what makes them distinct.  (And that is exactly why I used the astronomical term constellation for my characterisation of practice-based research at the beginning of my talk.)   To remain with the analogy:  PBR cannot be about examining the sun and the earth each in their own right, but rather to examine the force between them that makes them a system, a solar system and the characteristics/features that are a result of the influence of the orbit.  Other models that come to mind would be that of setting up a dialogue between the two spheres or to understand them in an inter-textual relationship.  Coherence?

In conclusion:  That is why the creative work in the doctoral project has to be different from that of taking part in a competition, even if it is a competition against one’s self and one’s destiny (like the Indian cricket player), while at the same time the creative work may not be diluted into mere exemplification of an essentially musicological argument.

---

[1] Qualia ( /ˈkwɑːliə/ or /ˈkweɪliə/), singular “quale” (Latin pronunciation: [ˈkwaːle]), from a Latin word meaning for “what sort” or “what kind,” is a term used in philosophy to refer to subjective conscious experiences as ‘raw feels’. Examples of qualia are the pain of a headache, the taste of wine, the experience of taking a recreational drug, or the perceived redness of an evening sky. Daniel Dennett writes that qualia is “an unfamiliar term for something that could not be more familiar to each of us: the ways things seem to us.”^[1] Erwin Schrödinger, the famous physicist, had this counter-materialist take: “The sensation of colour cannot be accounted for by the physicist’s objective picture of light-waves. Could the physiologist account for it, if he had fuller knowledge than he has of the processes in the retina and the nervous processes set up by them in the optical nerve bundles and in the brain? I do not think so.” ^[2]

[2] http://www.philosophy-index.com/jackson/marys-room/   accessed 3 December 2012

[3] Diegesis (Greek διήγησις “narration”) and mimesis (Greek μίμησις “imitation”) have been contrasted since Plato‘s and Aristotle‘s times. Mimesis shows rather than tells, by means of action that is enacted. Diegesis, however, is the telling of the story by a narrator. The narrator may speak as a particular character or may be the invisible narrator or even the all-knowing narrator who speaks from above in the form of commenting on the action or the characters.  WL: and mimesis then is the character as enacted by the actor.  Wikipedia