When designing an introductory course in music analysis for first-year undergraduates five years ago, I thought that one of the jewels in the crown of my syllabus would be Pauline Oliveros’s Bye Bye Butterfly. Oliveros – a lesbian Tejana born in 1932 who preferred creatively crafted graphic and text scores to traditional Western notation – ticked many of the boxes that would appease the then-nascent movements supporting the decolonization and “queering” of the curriculum. More precisely, she was not one of the pale, male, stale composers that the discipline of music analysis has historically occupied itself with. But if I chose Bye Bye Butterfly, it was primarily because the piece, recorded in 1965, is a glorious eight minutes of sound. It is the product of Oliveros playing an LP recording of Giacomo Puccini’s Madama Butterfly while availing herself of the equipment lying around at the San Francisco Tape Music Center (two Hewlett Packard oscillators, two line amplifiers in cascade, two tape recorders in a delay setup) to generate new sounds in real time as a response, however loosely understood, to what she was hearing. The piece is one of those that can spark many a conversation on the purpose and value of musical analysis itself, understood as close reading of musical works: even if we can account for every formal aspect of a piece, can we locate where its genius lies or why it moves or excites us so? And the piece also allows one to dabble in questions of meaning: while some musicologists have argued that Bye Bye Butterfly is a desperate cry against patriarchy – a quasi-stereotypically marginalized composer sonically disrupting an opera that is today seen as “problematic” -, Oliveros always insisted that she did not have such particular intent in mind: she picked the Puccini because it just happened to be there. Such complications should make for an extremely attractive starting point to discuss what music analysis is, what it does or what it should do – Can analysis help us disentangle the intentions of the composer? Do the intentions of the composer exist in the first place, and should we concern ourselves with them?
While some musicologists have argued that Bye Bye Butterfly is a desperate cry against patriarchy, Oliveros always insisted that she did not have such particular intent in mind: she picked the Puccini because it just happened to be there.
My attempt to teach Bye Bye Butterfly was however a mixed success; it was not the jewel in the crown that I had envisaged. Some students enjoyed what they heard – at least that’s what they said – but it soon became apparent that my discussion of the piece would clash against the students’ lack of understanding of its historicity. I do mean historicity here and not simply history: I was prepared to find a class who had never heard of Oliveros, tape music or post-1945 American experimentalism, and provided context accordingly.
It soon became apparent that my discussion of the piece would clash against the students’ lack of understanding of its historicity.
I was more surprised to find that, out of a class of about 120 students – most of whom were majoring in Music -, only one had ever listened to Madama Butterfly, and perhaps two or three more had ever heard of Puccini. Not only were they unable to recognize the tradition that Oliveros was engaging with: even the ramifications of Oliveros engaging with a tradition were largely lost on them. Yet how the piece engages with tradition is indeed the kernel that gives rise to many of the questions that can be asked of Bye, Bye Butterfly. Western classical music has historically depended – likely to a greater extent than other styles – on composers being extremely aware of what came before them, and responding to it in one way or another: by imitating, or rebelling, or doing something in-between.
Western classical music has historically depended on composers being extremely aware of what came before them, and responding to it in one way or another: by imitating, or rebelling, or doing something in-between.
The idea that Oliveros, as a composer loosely situated in the Western tradition, might have been rebelling against that tradition is interesting (many other composers rebelled before her, including Wagner and Schönberg) – but so is the suggestion that her choice of Puccini was dictated by circumstance rather than will and therefore she did not rebel after all (choosing not to rebel when there is a tradition of rebelling can be a statement in itself). In the past, the discipline of music analysis saw protracted battles with its cognate discipline, historical musicology: analysts have sometimes insisted on analysing the work – the music itself – to the detriment of any kind of historical context, which was left to historical musicologists. Still, analysis was always tacitly informed by a sense of historicity: the very selection of the repertoire on which analysis typically focused rested on judgments of what is historically important, while the success of the concepts and methodologies that analysts identified and developed rested on their applicability across a range of composers pertaining to the same Western classical tradition. Even this tenuous sense of historicity, I discovered, was absent from my students’ backgrounds.
Analysts have sometimes insisted on analysing the work – the music itself – to the detriment of any kind of historical context, which was left to historical musicologists.
I have continued teaching Bye Bye Butterfly over the years; in fact, I will do so again soon. It is a piece I think students will benefit from knowing about, even if not in the way that I would have desired. But there are other reasons. I am under no illusion that a ten-minute, bullet-point-like discussion of context will make up for the kind of life-long, first-hand awareness of Puccini and of operatic culture that would immediately have embedded Oliveros’s improvisations on the luscious operatic recorded sound with certain possibilities – but I hope that it at least drives home the point that tradition and history can be important. I could simply have followed the advice a colleague gave me when I started my teaching career twelve years ago: teach each piece of music as a one-off; do not assume the students will have ever heard of, say, Borodin or Count Basie; ignore context; ignore history; and, most importantly, immerse yourself and enjoy the liberating potential of this isolation. This is advice (or versions thereof) that I increasingly see academics in my discipline and others within the Humanities follow, for reasons that will likely be understandable to most who are familiar with present-day English-speaking academia.
First, we used to have a conceptual tool that allowed us to recognize that historically important works and figures (however defined) were so not only because of their intrinsic values but also because of their relationship to each other: the canon. The canon is of course now under scrutiny and critique, but, to my knowledge, no serious alternatives have emerged that allow us to account for the importance of tradition and historicity in any form of art.
Second – and partly as a result of the above -, students increasingly arrive at higher education institutions lacking knowledge or skills that would have been seen as a given only ten years ago. One such bit of knowledge is an awareness that much of Western art and culture – and I dare say equivalent traditions in other parts of the world – is inseparable from the notion of tradition as a living force that connects past, present and future. As this awareness is difficult to instill in a few weeks or months, it is not surprising that many academics opt for working around it rather than against it.
Finally, in creative disciplines such as music, engaging with tradition and following one’s drive for self-expression are often regarded as antithetical – increasingly so, I would say, and perhaps as a corollary to the growing atomization and sacralisation of individual identity.
But I choose not to follow this advice, mostly because, if I did, I would feel that I was robbing the students of several important lessons that it is my role as a university teacher to expose them to. Firstly, that a great many pieces of music and art cannot be understood without recourse to the tradition in which their authors (and performers) consciously operated; sure, they can certainly be enjoyed and perhaps engaged with at surface level (in the manner, say, of a music appreciation class), but such an ahistorical engagement would not be conducive to the critical consciousness that we would normally expect of a university education. Secondly, that – whether we like it or not -, many others have made music and produced scholarship on music before us; we can choose to see this as intimidating or as an invitation to join this community that extends beyond the boundaries of one’s lifetime and to do more, perhaps to do better. Thirdly, that most practices, objects or behaviours we can think of can be historicized – including the pretence that music, or art, should be about one’s self-expression: it is only for so long, I fear, that we can pretend to be ahistorical.
