(suggested sample method chapter)
Eric Clapton once said about Dylan: "His way of playing anything is totally hybrid. It doesn't make sense musically to the scholar. [...] At first listening, everything he does is just real hopeless. Then you look back and realise it's exactly right." As a scholar I take this as a challenge: If something is "exactly right", but still doesn't make sense to the scholar, it is either the scholar's sense or the scholar's analytical tools that are inadequate. I take the liberty of disregarding the first possibility - although that is probably the commonest cause for scholarly not-being-made-sense-to-ness - and concentrate on the second: the problems inherent in musical analysis of music of Dylan's kind.
An analysis presupposes an object of analysis, and this is the first problem. The practice, or phenomenon, of musical analysis is closely connected with developments in the genres and styles of music making of the end of the eighteenth and all of the nineteenth century. This is the so called classical-romantical period with composers like Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert and Wagner. This is also the period when the modern concept of art developed [see my article Apples and Pears - the ancient and the modern concepts of art], and - towards the end of the period - even modern musicology.
A central idea in traditional analysis is the double notion of a unified musical work with an internal development. The work may be the product of a composer's free and creative mind, but it is laid down once and for all in the score, and there ends the liberty. Any realization of the work must be compliant with the score - add a note, and you have, strictly speaking, a different work. There is really no room for improvisation, except within very limited boundaries, and even these are usually not exploited: in the place where the pianist is supposed to improvise an exuberant cadenza, most performers are content with playing the cadenzas that Mozart himself, or Beethoven, wrote. This is of course lamentable from the point of view of musical creativity, but the analyst applauds: it gives him a clearly defined object of analysis, from the first note to the last.
Contrast this with the situation of a Dylan song: what is the object of analysis of, say, The times they are a-changin'? The published "score", usually with remarkably silly piano arrangements of Dylan's guitar strumming? The album version, tabbed and downloaded to OLGA? Clearly both alternatives are inadequate, to say the least. My first encounter with "Forever Young" was of this kind. I saw it in a song book before I had heard it. I looked through the melody, the chords, tried to imagine how it might sound - and rejected it as a fairly uninteresting post-motor-cycle-accident, pre-"Blood-on-the-tracks"-song. When I later, almost reluctantly, bought the album, this song was a shock of emotional intensity, in this case even reinforced by the tension between the two versions. And you can probably take any Dylan song the same way: It doesn't look much on the paper - whatever power there is, lies somewhere else.
This is one reason why a transcription in any form cannot do the song, as a musical work, justice. The other is, of course, that no matter how meticulously you note every single detail of one particular performance, the next time you hear it, it will be different, either because Dylan has rearranged the song, or simply because of the improvisational character of popular music in general, and Dylan's music making in particular. With an object of analysis which cannot be objectified, since it changes all the time, there is really no other alternative than to endorse Paul Williams' approach: to treat every single performance of a song as an independent work of art. The performance is the object.
We might have settled with this, but upon closer look, it is still too simple an explanation. I used to be attracted to Jeff Todd Titon's approach to the improvisational character of blues [in his book "Early Downhome Blues"]. He assumes that most of the early blues songs were improvised on the spot, that words and music were assembled while singing, from the singer's storehouse of phrases, situations, turns, descriptions, according to some specific pattern, but without a fixed text that is repeated exactly from performance to performance. Even when singing the "same" song several times in a row, it is improvised from scratch each time, and minor (and even major) differences occur between the versions (he actually tested this). I used to think of Dylan's performances in the same way, given the huge mass of text and the re-workings of some of the texts, until I realized that the variations are too small to really fit the model. The texts are actually memorized in a next to exact form, and the different versions of a song like Tangled up in Blue are conscious re-writings, not improvisations.
Now, the same goes for the music. This may seem odd since one of the most distinctive traits of Dylan as an artist is his way of constantly changing the musical setting of his songs. The melody is probably the most unstable element, but even the tempo, the rhythm, the instrumentation change all the time. But still: the songs are always recognizeable as such. Usually the chords and harmonies are intact, and variations are within the normal limits of the genre. However different two performances of Just Like a Woman may be, they are versions of the same song all the same, and not only two different works of art which happen to have the same words attached to them. There is always something that is preserved, through all the variations.
This simple observation opens up a large field of interesting questions concerning Dylan's relation to the different styles that have influenced him (blues, english folk ballads, The Beatles and rock 'n' roll) on the one hand, and to the different genres of music production (the orally transmitted folk/blues, the performed, score-based classical music and the commercial popular music, transmitted through electronic media). To make this long story short: Dylan relates strongly to improvisational musical traditions, but also to traditions with an ultimately defined "work": defined either by what the composer has decreed as in classical music, or by what is considered commercially most efficient.
In this sense, Dylan's songs are not improvisational once they have reached an album [it seems however that the creational process involves a substantial element of improvisation], he seldom deviates strongly from, and always relate closely to the "official" versions. This means that although each performance may be considered an independent "work of art", it is still meaningful to treat the group of works that can be subsumed under the label "Just like a woman" as one single work of art with many realizations, much in the same way as 50 prints from the same plates are individual works but at the same time representations of the same work.
Paul Williams has himself hinted at a view similar to this. In
the introduction to his books "Bob Dylan: Performing Artist"
he relates an anecdote about a backstage meeting with Dylan. He
was going to make a comparison between the different Dylan versions
and a series of lithographs by Picasso, worked on over the course
of six weeks. He writes:
"At first Dylan protested that he wasn't interested
in that kind of art at all, but he looked at the page and seemed
to be pulled in. Staying with his initial (it seemed to me) anti-intellectual
stance, he pointed to the second earliest of the drawings and
proclaimed it as the best: "He should have stopped at that
one." Then, looking closer: "Oh, but I see why he had
to keep going..."
But the problems still remains: what is it about a performance that makes it worthy of the label "work of art"? What are the criteria, and are they the same for Dylan as for, say, Pavarotti or U2? Are "works of art" from different media or styles comparable at all? This discussion presupposes another discussion: that about what a work of art is in the first place. One possible definition may be: "Somehow a work of art could be described as a structure made up of elements that are considered apt for reflection or contemplation, and in a way that stimulates this. That seems to be what we do with art: we enter a different state (of mind or place) to expose ourselves to something that we allow to influence us, emotionally or intellectually." [The definition is taken from my aforementioned article on aesthetics, and I refer to that article for a further discussion of this] That implies several things: the "structures apt for reflection" are not objectively given, but open to interpretation on different cultural or historical contexts - in other words: they are dependent upon style. A work of art can only be efficient in some kind of relation - including the revolutionary - to a style [the entirely revolutionary art, without any precedents, although thoretically interesting, is rare enough to be disregarded]. In periodes of stylistic change this relation tends to be explicit, whereas in most cases it is implicit. In Dylan's case there are a number of such implicit styles involved: the blues-background, the folk, the standard rules of european/american harmony, the development of rock, traditions of voice treatment and the relationship with the text, etc. To be able to appreciate a performance fully, as a work of art, it is in fact necessary for the listener to relate it to the stylistic systems he/she finds relevant, on all different levels, from the individual style (Dylan's own style), through genre style (rock/blues/folk in general), and maybe even to some kind of "meta-style" of song in general. Seen this way, every performance can be seen as a contribution to an ever-ongoing debate - what can be done within this genre? where are the limits? which crossovers are possible or artistically interesting?
This brings us back to the definition given above, and the second implication that can be derived from it: that art-status presupposes a volontary act by the listener, both by allowing it to influence us, and regarding the stylistical references we make, whether these are explicitly volontary (I choose to regard Dylan as a blues singer even when he sings Emotionally Yours, because I find it rewarding), or unconscious (I don't consciously realize it, but my appreciation of a Dylan song must derive from a whole lot of different things I've heard and appreciated before), or for lack of knowledge (I don't know enough about the folk movement to really be able to understand that relation).
Most of this happens unconsciuosly - we don't ponder a performance and then decide to let it hit us in the stomach with a feeling that changes our life. Rather the choices have been made in beforehand, we choose to like a certain kind of "screaming" or whining when it seems that it can be rewarding. I seriously doubt that 18th century wiennese, however sophisticated and developed their taste may have been, would have understood anything of any Dylan song. Even (half) the audience at Newport in 1965 and during the following tour with the Band chose not to be moved or touched by performances that are now classical precisely because of their emotionality.
Knowing what a pie is, doesn't make anyone a baker. If the foregoing may be taken as a proof that Dylan's music can be analysed, it still remains to show how that can be done. This is not entirely easy, and one major obstacle is that there is no firmly established analytical tradition for this kind of music. The tools and methods of musical analysis which are used today, rely heavily on the work of the founders of the discipline in the 19th century, for better or for worse. They were certainly clever and skilled academics, but their material and theoretical background was limited, and modern musicology has only reluctantly, and most often half-heartedly, realized that theories based upon works by Mozart may work exellently for analysing works by Mozart, but may be worthless for other genres. Popular music is one of these, but there are even examples from within the "established" field of musicology: Most, or all, early (pre-Bach) music defies analysis with the traditional methods, in much the same way as a Dylan song does. It quickly becomes evident that the established models or methods for musical analysis - Schenker analysis, functional analysis, thematic analysis etc. - are all derived from and therefore applicable only to music from the classical-romantical era. The moment one crosses this border, in one direction or another, there is a tendency that the treatment of the music itself stops at the descriptive level, or it is abandoned altogether, in favor of a sociological approach. Counting measures and determining keys can be done with any kind of music. Determining what is really contained in those measures, is a completely different matter.
Not only the tools and methods are received for free within the traditional fields of analysis; so is the goal of the analysis. When undertaking a Schenker analysis of a Schubert sonata, it is obvious what the goal is: to find the underlying tonal structure of the piece and its relation to the surface level" of the sounding music. This goal rests on a number of implicit presuppositions (that there is such a tonal structure, that it stands in a certain relation to the surface", etc.). These are basically presuppositions about the underlying systems of musical meaning" at work in the piece. Since these belong to the foundation of both the music in question and of the analytical method, they can more or less be taken for granted. (organicism, harmony). This is not the case when analysing a Dylan song or a Palestrina motet: there are no such analytical shortcuts available, because of the discrepancy between the underlying ideas of the music and the established analytical methods.
Even though there is a growing tradition of popular musicology, each new analysis will still tend to begin more or less from scratch and make up its own goals and methods along the way. We will therefore start out each separate analysis with very elementary questions: Why does the music sound the way it does? Which are the desicions and choices the artist has made, and why has he made them; what is his goal"? Which are the means involved in reaching that goal? Which are the choices he has not made himself but that have been made for him, because they are so integrated in his musical background? Which are the underlying conceptions or systems of meaning that come out of this background? How does he relate to the different traditions (blues, folk, gospel)? Possibly also: What are the choices he has decided not to make, and why? A further development of this, as a kind of meta-level" would be the question of the cultural/aesthetic implications inherent in these choices.
Two basic presumptions are worth mentioning. One is that the music under consideration is interesting because of the effect it has on the listener, and that this effect has causes that can be explained or at least related to or deduced from specific characteristics of the music itself. Musical effect is not the result of one heart speaking directly to another" or the forces of cosmos (or God) canalizing its energy through one individual in a mystical and ineffable manner" - it stems from a certain use of dissonance, agogics and rhythms, phrasing, texture, tempo, breathing, voice tessitura, instruments, interplay between musicians and a whole lot of other factors, which may be difficult to pinpoint, and the totality of which may never be fully grasped, except in the immediate and intuitive manner of the listener, but which nevertheless are at the basis of the experience.
The other is that the musician does not have complete control over the making of an artwork. In one end is the influence of the musical traditions, which may not be conscious on the part of the musician himself. On the other end is the listener, who in the sense outlined above is the real creator" - < > This means that what Dylan himself has to say about his music may be interesting but not essential for the understanding of his music.
. The methodology will have to be pluralistic/eclectic. For the analytical chapters I would suggest close reading of specific songs (or for that matter specific concerts, specific performances or series of performances of the same song) as an attractive model, much the way you have done in your paper. (Cf. my comments about object of analysis on my site). I'm not sure about the usual catalogue of albums, song by song - on the one hand they are reader-friendly, I suppose, but they are rather tedious and predictable. I would rather see a broader approach - eg. how one tuning (BOOT) or style (TOOM) or chord structure (Oh Mercy) predominate on an album, the development of the different styles (eg. early vs. late blues, the "country" element etc.)
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The other problem with the concept of the work is its inherent idea of organicism. A work of art is, very simply stated, to be judged as an organism, where all the parts are related to eachother in much the same way as the limbs of the body. This is one of the basic aesthetical principles behind classical music. Even harmony is arranged in a similar manner: all the available chords are related to the tonic, the fundamental harmony of the piece, in a coherent and logical way, which even restricts the transition from one chord to another.
This system found its way from classical music into the realm
of popular music through the hymns and the popular tunes of the
Stephen Foster-type, and the military marching bands. They even
managed to influence the field-hollers and laments of black Missisippi
workers to eventually produce the 12-bar blues, and from here
it spread to today's popular music genres. But in these new settings
most of the underlying aesthetic presuppositions of the Western
classical harmonic system were not present. The aesthetics behind
the rural blues is almost the exact opposite: instead of striving
for a coherent organical whole with beginning, middle and end,
it rather emphasises timelessness, through ostinato patterns (the
12-bar blues pattern itself can be considered one) and through
the predominance of the tonic and the fifth. Mellers (1984:116)
describes two songs of the early blues singer Pete Williams, as
"still basically hollers in which speech is translated into
pentatonic tumbling strains, with the guitar providing an ostinato
accompainment with no sense of harmonic progression." Harmonic
progression, which is so essential to western music, has virtually
no place at all in blues music, and the dominant chord, the means
par exellence by which harmonic progression is achieved, is also
a foreign flower in the landscape of the blues. It is noteworthy
how the dominant chord often sounds awkward - if it is clearly
sounded at all - in much rural blues, mainly due to the sharp
contrast between the blues' flat pentatonic seventh, and the sharp
leading note of the dominant chord.
The harmonic stasis is very much due to the open