UPM Book Series on Music Research, No. 6, 2014 – ISSN 2289-3938.

Time Perception as Musical Sense

Gisa Jähnichen

South Vietnamese ensemble music consists of pieces that vary in their time organisation. One special case is the piece Ca Vọng Cổ that exists in a 2-, 4-, 8-, 16-, 32- and even 64-bar per line version. This paper examines technical, organological and social developments that contributed to that special growth in meter units. Further, this case leads to some more general questions on time perception as a musical sense, especially the question as to why music might be an ideal expression of time-feeling and moving conditions, as well as changes in relationships within society. Traditional notation and transcriptions of performance outcomes are analysed and used for a critical discourse on unique features in a local music practice. Set into a wider context, the analysis may enable us to understand the necessity of music in balancing the human mind. The paper is based on long term field work undertaken since 1988 in Vietnam and among the Vietnamese Diaspora in Europe.

Introduction: “For What One Needs Music?”

When I started to study musicology, many friends asked me: “For what does one need musicology?” The only answer that could stop me from searching for excuses was a counter question: “For what one needs music?”

In the course of my studies at the Philosophical Faculty of Charles University Prague, one of the oldest universities in Europe with a long tradition in philosophy, I asked myself again and again this question and finally I wrote my Master thesis on a topic related to it. Now, many years later, I still frequently return to the question “For what one needs music?” in order to explain what makes my profession useful in a philosophical sense. My approach might appear very abstract. However, I will attach an example to it that may clarify my ideas.

First, I had to discover the functional difference between sensual arts such as depictions in paintings and art objects, performed movements and acting, sounding shapes such as spoken literature. What do these human

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expressions, functioning as communication tools, embrace in such a unique way that makes them indispensible in almost any human community?

The closest look deserves the difference between spoken language and musical sound for they both are acoustically born and determined. They both need tools for sound production and they both appear in reality as a process thus they exist only in real time performance. These conditions apply only partly on dancing and acting, which might be definitely visually born and determined. However, they also exist only as a process in real time and they are often combined with spoken language and musical sound.

Spoken literature and music must have been established before times of re-reification of language and purposely manipulated sound, which are – in themselves – reifications of something real that we have to focus on in order to find the true reason of “For what one needs music?”

From the Beginning

In my early professional life, I was much inspired by Georg Knepler, an emeritus at Humboldt University, who spent some time with his young colleagues in discussing methodological issues on the historiography and philosophy of music. His work on some aspects of the origin of music was a part of my master thesis (Jähnichen, 1984) in which I analyzed music from various philosophical viewpoints structured upon three questions, namely what, where, and why something evolved that we call music by today. However, at a later stage, Knepler denied the validity of his own studies on early music history and encouraged me to find the philosophical essentials out by myself. He guided us to re-read classical literature and to study modern approaches to aesthetics, especially a way of deriving questions from seemingly clear facts. Following his advice, I read Kant, Stumpf (1911), Sachs, Wallaschek (1893), Dahlhaus (1970), the Czech anthropologist Bohumil Geist (1970), Lippold (1971), Nettl (2010) and all the modernist and quasi postmodernist approaches of ethnomusicologists and recently Steven Mithen (2005) in his popular writing ‘The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, And Body’.

However, I had to find the philosophical essentials – not the universals – on my own. Digging deep in the philosophy of language, communication and the theory of reflection, I indeed found something, which is so obvious that

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it has easily been overseen by many sophisticated approaches to the topic: time perception as a musical sense.

To explain it in a simple way: reflecting everything humans perceive is the very nature of humans. There is nothing humans perceive which is not reflected in the brain, thus there are tangible items, changes of these items and feelings towards it, relationships between items and other humans reflecting them, between humans, and between reality and the reflection of reality. In short everything is reflected and re-reflected in affirmation. Furthermore, the reification of these reflections is also human nature and necessary as the reflections themselves. Anything one reflects has to be processed through reification. Among that ‘everything’ is something that cannot be reified in verbal terms or signs and that is the category ‘time’ and its appearances in changes of shapes in the broadest sense, feelings, and perception.

To reify time, one may need a tool of expressing something commonly codified but individually decodable such as real time sound or movements. Thus the core idea of arts might be the balancing of reflective reifications – just seen from its philosophical essence. Resulting from that, we can assume that art expressions, which include musical sound, must be in a way of the same accurateness in reification of perceived time as language in reification of fixed states. Thus music is not blurring individually what language may indicate precisely and directly, rather reality reflected in music is just different from what is reflected through language.

When I thought about this philosophical issue, I tried to find examples that clearly do not fit this idea without much success. However, I found many traces of essential logic in various musical appearances from different periods and different cultures. Musical sound, as it appears, seems to have the possibility to compress and to stretch time, according to one’s needs. Despite all culturally, historically or socially determined variability in what music means and makes, music acoustically reifies human time perception. Of course the particular way this occurs is a ‘culturally patterned’ way (Bartmann, 2011), an individually decodable process that exists only in real time that might be reflected in it as well.

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Making Time

One example may illustrate the extraordinary stretching of time within a classical piece of music from a South Vietnamese Ensemble Music. The development of stretched pieces in this kind of music took approximately 60 years, from 1917 to the late 1970s. It affected actually many pieces of the repertoire. However, one of the earliest pieces was stretched 32 times its original length. The reason for this might have been its popularity in the upcoming urban music theatre, in which it represents the core piece. Another contributor was the early music industry of Saigon (Kieu Tan, 1997, Jähnichen 1998).

The piece mentioned is Dạ Cổ Hoài Lang, later transformed into the piece Ca Vọng Cổ, which means in Vietnamese ‘Longing for the Past’, or ‘Nostalgia’.

The earliest version was a tune in a modal framework of 20 lines of two bars each. Cao Van Lau, who invented this tune in a new combination of modes, played it to his friend Tuan Xuan Tho, who immediately penned the first lyrics.

Figure 1: Rough derivation of the vọng cổ scale from the modes Bac and Nam in the traditional South Vietnamese ensemble music (Jähnichen 1998; Kiều Tấn 1997).

The content of the lyrics summarizes the deep longing expressed in the music. It is, in other words, a musically born song, not a text made into music that describes a husband longing for his wife that is separated from him. They had lived together for more than 8 years without producing children and parted in order to allow for each to try again with another partner. Social background and cultural situation might be caught well in the topic and contributed to the popularity of the song which soon experienced changes in structure and many text variations.

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Figure 2: Translated into modern Vietnamese, the title Ðêm nghe tiếng trống canh mà chanh nhớ đến người bạn đời means ‘In the night, while beating the drum, longing for the friend of my life’.

The first text version from 1920 (Kiều Tấn, 1997: 34-35) maintains the 20 musical lines strictly in the 2-bar framework. The main emphasis is underlined. ‘Empty’ places underlined mark an empty emphasis in which only a small foot served slitdrum is played. Here is an overview of how this little slitdrum, the ‘time’-co-ordinator, is used in piece extensions. It is clearly perceivable that the slitdrum player keeps to time relativity instead of simply dividing or multiplying time.

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Figure 3: Distribution of compulsory beats of the song lang within pieces of different extension from 2-bar up to 64-bar lines.

The musician Tu Choi (Huynh Thu Trung), as indicated by his colleague Bay Cao (Kiều Tấn, 1997: 36) seems to be the first who opened up the narrow scheme to 4-bar lines in order to allow for more musical creativity in establishing the new modal combination and for a more explicit text, which was then widely used in the new urban theatre in larger towns of South Vietnam. One of his texts starts as follows (the first 6 lines):

Figure 4: First 6 text lines of the 4-bar piece according to Tu Choi. 1

The musical extension can be summarized in the abstract notation shown in Figure 5 (without different tone shapes). Becoming more important, the piece was called in an even more sophisticated expression Vọng Cổ Hoài Lang, which means ‘Longing for Past Times’.

1 According to Ba Xây (1986) as reported in an interview with Kiều Tấn.

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Figure 5: Comparison of 2-bar and 4-bar line versions of the piece Da Co Hoai Lang.

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Only a few years later in approximately 1929-1930, Master Giac2 developed further the piece Vọng Cổ nhip tam, which means ‘Nostalgia, in 8-bar lines’. This piece became very famous through the well-known singer Nam Nghia from Bac Lieu who used the text ‘Văng vẳng tiếng chuông chùa’ [The Temple Bell is Calling]. 3

Extensions were mostly pre-conceptually practiced in instrumental versions before they became songs. This way of development underscores the function of time reification in the musical essence, or, to be more precise, it underscores that time perception and might be a musical sense, something that is ‘thought’ using musical means.

Figure 6: Splitting within an instrumental development – three different versions for the 'Vietnamized' guitar successively opening the lines to another division and extending the piece.

Over the following years, the piece was further extended to 16-bar lines, then to 32-bar lines, which is currently the most preferred type. In some cases, especially in instrumental versions, the extension reached 64-bar lines.

However, playing the full piece with its 20 lines of text would take too long for any kind of performance. Therefore, the amount of lines was reduced,

2 According to Sáu Lầu alias Cao Van Lau (1963) as told in an interview by Kiều Tấn. 3 According to Sáu Lầu (1963), Giáo Thinh as told in an interview by Kieu Tan, Mười

Ðờn, Ba Xây, Ba Trung, Năm Vinh (1984) in a discussion at the Vietnamese Institute for Musicology in Ho Chi Minh City. Năm Nghĩa’s real name was Lư Hoài Nghĩa.

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first to 12 lines within 16-bar line versions then to 6 in 32-bar versions. The deciding impulse to reduce the number of lines, however, came from the music industry. In its early period, the record industry in Asia could only produce pieces that were not longer than six minutes. That is exactly the length of three lines of the current Ca Vọng Cổ (Singing Nostalgia). A double-sided record could carry 6 lines of a 32-bar line version or 12 lines of a 16-bar line version.

Figure 7: The result of the extension, taken line 2 as an example. Instrumentally shaped pieces are of great variety. As the only rules of the framework, main beats must be met in pitch and the tempo has to be appropriate to the given modal structure.

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The reduction of lines, on the other hand, did not lead automatically to a reduction of meaning. The missing lines are present in the communal memory and may be added in the mind of the audience to complete the story.

Re-structuring Time

Not surprisingly, the extreme extension of the piece Ca Vọng Cổ caused a culturally patterned and commonly understood re-structuring of time. The actual version in six 32-bar lines is again divided into two parts using mainly 2-3 lines each. These lines are introduced by a musical section alien to the framework of the piece, mostly a local folk melody or a fragment of popular music in the Western idiom. In some cases, the piece is applied directly, starting with a declamatory introduction heading for the final tonic (the first beat of bar 16 in a 32-bar line type, therefore the first line is almost ever only to its half played in solid meter).

Figure 8: Overview about actual practice of Ca Vọng Cổ in the context of performance (Kiều Tấn, 1997, Jähnichen 1998, 1999).

The re-structuring in actual practice expresses the necessity of adapting to perceptive fragmentation of time in social life. Socialization patterns and their institutionalization in schools, working and leisure activities, typolo-gies imposed through social behavior, as well as economically generated manipulations of perceptive capabilities may further deconstruct this extraordinary feature of South Vietnamese classical music.

On the other hand, the observation of the process as a whole gives us an excellent insight into what happens to cultural consistencies in the era of

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productive acceleration and constantly generating multiple choices of expression.

Final Questions

The questions of whether the human brain is capable of coping with the increasing variety of necessary reifications and how the human brain organizes a forced ‘de-selection’ of reflective matters in order to do so have to be further discussed. However, there are no answers that exclude music from being of high importance to the mind of man.

Music thought as a tool to reify the perception of time in all its dimensions is far too little explored. Music research in this area might be of high significance in decoding complex thinking processes regarding time perception thus adding knowledge to the subjective conditions of human consciousness.

References

Dahlhaus, Carl (1970). Analyse und Werturteil. Mainz: Schott.

Geist, Bohumil (1970). Původ hudby. Praha: Edition Supraphon.

Keller, Marcello Sorce (2001). Why Do We Misunderstand the Musics of All Times and Places, and Why Do We Enjoy Doing So? Essays on Music and Culture in Honor of Herbert Kellman. Ed. by Barbara Haggh. Paris: Minerve.

Jähnichen, Gisa (1984). Bisherige Untersuchungsergebnisse zur Entstehungs-geschichte der Musik. Magister-thesis, hudebni veda, ms. Praha: Filozoficka Fakulta University Praha.

Jähnichen, Gisa (1998). Report 1 on Preservation Project of Am Nhac Tai Tu Nam Bo, Instrumental Section. Ho Chi Minh City: Association of Vietnamese Composers and Musicologists.

Jähnichen, Gisa (1999). Report 2 on Preservation Project of Am Nhac Tai Tu Nam Bo, Vocal Section. Ho Chi Minh City: Association of Vietnamese Composers and Musicologists.

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Jähnichen, Gisa and Kieu Tan (1998). Interviews in preparation of the report on an Preservation Project. Ho Chi Minh City: Association of Vietnamese Composers and Musicologists.

Kiều Tấn (1997). Cây đàn ghita phím lõm. Berlin: Deutsch-Vietnamesische Gesellschaft e.V.

Knepler, Georg (1977). Geschichte als Weg zum Musikverständnis: Zur Theorie, Methode und Geschichte der Musikgeschichtsschreibung. Leipzig: Reclam.

Lippold, Eberhard (1971). Zur Frage der ästhetischen Inhalt-Form-Relationen in der Musik. Leipzig: Deutscher Verlag für Musik.

Steven Mithen (2005). The Singing Neanderthals: The Origins of Music, Language, Mind, And Body. London: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.

Nettl, Bruno (2010). Nettl’s Elephant: On the History of Ethnomusicology. Chicago: University of Illinois Press.

Shreffler, Anne C. (2003). Berlin Walls: Dahlhaus, Knepler, and Ideologies of Music History. The Journal of Musicology, 20 (4), 498–525.

Stumpf, Carl (2012[1911]). The Origins of Music [Die Anfänge der Musik]. Ed. And trans. By David Trippett. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Wallaschek, Richard (1893). Primitive Music: An Inquiry into the Origin and Development of Music, Songs, Instruments, Dances, and Pantomimes of Savage Races. Cambridge (Mass.): Da Capo Press.

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Appendix (following pages): Increasing density of musical information through time extension Nhip 2, 6 cầu Dạ Cổ Hoài Lang without dạo (TTNB, M14-03)4; duration: 0’45

Nhip 4, 6 cầu Dạ Cổ Hoài Lang without dạo (TTNB, M14-04); 1’34

4 Code number of the original recording, i.e., Tài Tử Nam Bộ, Master tape 14, track 3.

All originals encoded accordingly are accessible in the Berlin Phonogramm-Archiv.

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Nhip 8, 6 cầu Ca Vọng Cổ without dạo (TTNB, M14-05); duration: 4’21

Nhip 16, 6 cầu Ca Vọng Cổ without dạo (TTNB, M14-07); duration: 7’17