Titillated by Titles, Knowing by Names
“The first thing I want to write to you about is the titles you sent, at first I liked them both but then I cooled to one and then the other … but I’m no judge because I don’t know at all the taste of the American public so you’ll decide and it will be wonderful and the important thing is the book after all - isn’t it?” (from a letter by Alice B. Toklas to W. G. Rogers)
I.
To name is to call into existence, to make of the amorphous matter (is this why we say that something matters or doesn’t?); what we wish to deprive of attention, we withhold in nomenclature. The politically invisible is what we either cannot or choose not to name (the Don’t-Say-Gay Bill of Tennessee State Senator Stacey Campfield makes it illegal to talk about any sexual behavior other than heterosexuality prior to the ninth grade). But names may also be said to merely scratch the surface of phenomena, that a rose by any other appellation would smell as sweet (or to borrow from Gertrude Stein’s riff off the Bard: a rose is a rose is a rose). Alice B. Toklas, in the letter quoted above, wonders out loud if what’s important in a book is not, after all, the title but its content, and she surrenders the job of naming to the buffetings of commercial expediency and whim of public taste.
II.
Behind the names “sonata” and “symphony” (obviously the major difference between a score and a book is that the title of a book is merely a fraction of the wordier whole, whereas the title of a score is often the only opportunity a composer gets to explain himself with words) lie the presumption that the information regarding form is primary, or, at the very least, that it is, of all musical parameters, the easiest to describe. But form, if paraded around, as it so often is, as mere description (binary, ternary, AAB etc), provides no new insight into a work’s meaning, apart from objectifying music in the most callous of ways. Form is also just one of the many possible anchors where we locate meaning: concern with form, with architecture, seems to be primarily an 18th century phenomena, which makes sense, given that era’s predilection towards a notion of absolute music. The 19th century, which found the sonata an impossible project to follow, abandoned form in favor of character. Titles were however still felt to contain the key to a work’s meaning: Schumann, while admiring Chopin’s Preludes, nonetheless wondered what they were preludes to. Where the 19th century title privileged character, the 20th century opened the field: Cage in 4’33” privileged duration, and in his Number Pieces, he found great poetry in describing the number of players in a work’s particular instrumentation.
But titles such as “sonata” and “symphony” also serve to provide a listener with a set of expectations arising solely from the title, and thus a corresponding set of surpriseswhen he is deprived of those expectations in the experience of the music (why else would Schubert’s Unfinished Symphony be labeled “unfinished”? It is neither fragmentary nor unpolished; it exists, as all musics as text do, as work-in-progress, awaiting performance. The more likely candidate for Schubert’s Unfinished is Rendering by Berio).
Is this then the function of a title? As carrier of tension between expectation and surprise? But most of Cage’s titles, for example, do not surprise even if the music does, except perhaps through flawed performances, for example if 4’33” lasts a pithy 4’22” or if only three players turn up for a performance for Four2 (that said, 4’33” does surprise because we expect but are deprived of four minutes and 33 seconds of something). But to expect something of a form (of a title) implies that that form is currently employed in common usage, and in the absence of a common practice, there can be no expectation prior to the experience of a work (this is, obviously, not unique to our century. The 19th century is full of titles withholding expectation of any kind: what, after all, does one expect from a ballade or a novelette? But composers then wanted it both ways: to privilege form without any consensus on form).
III.
One of my favorite titles is Morton Feldman’s Madame Press Died Last Week At Ninety. Not only does the title explain the work’s eccentricities, its cuckoo-clock repetition, but it also makes them endearing.
IV.
Names have a private side to them with a profoundly mythic resonance. The immediate task following the act of creation was the act of naming: He named the light “day” and the dark “night”. When we name our children, we color the rest of their lives with our hopes and wishes for their character and their temperament; we aim either to distinguish them from their peers (my dad named me “Marc” and not “Mark” because the latter he considered too common, too ubiquitous) or to remind them of their heritage. He was named after his grandfather. He was a noble man. Such statements imagine human qualities as bequests that pass by virtue of naming.
V.
To know something is to know it by name, and names give us the ability to talk about objects, to share them with others. And objects aren’t worth very much apart from the relationships they inspire.
