Reading, Looking, Listening

In a recent post, “Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and the Experience of Art (Musical and Visual),” and in the comments section attached to that post, I argued that the experience of literature is different in some ways from that of visual art or music. I’d like here to explore and clarify this distinction a bit further.

The experience of visual art or music involves looking or listening, each of which entails direct sensory perception of external phenomena that can impinge themselves upon us without our choosing – we experience something simply by being in the presence of the visual or auditory object. To experience something that is not superficial of a sculpture, painting, photograph or piece of music, of course requires more than this – active looking or listening involving concentration, contemplation, and conceptualization.

Reading literature (or anything else) is always operating already at the sort of second order level we see with active looking and listening. Reading involves and is built upon looking, but looking alone isn’t reading. The sensory experience of a book or computer screen and the visual qualities of letters and words aren’t text (i.e. the page isn’t the text). Text is always something created internally by contemplation and conception (e.g. seeing that “A,” “a,” “a,” or “A,” look different is direct sensory experience of visual phenomena – recognizing any or all of them as “the letter A” involves internal conception and interpretation), albeit prompted by and in relation to the concrete visual qualities of the page (“the letter A” can only be recognized in relation to a limited range of visual phenomena) much in the same way that active listening or looking involve inner contemplation in relation to distinctly external phenomena.

A Clarification on "Qualitative" and "Quantitative" Difference

In several recent posts (“Measurement and Interpretation: Let us Speak no more of Quantitative and Qualitative Research;” “Thinking Problem: Rethinking Ethnographic Methods in Relation to a Study of Students’ Cultural Models of Drinking;” and “Ethnographic Research Methods and Ethnographic Writing;”) I have argued that the terminological distinction between “qualitative” and “quantitative” research is a false distinction that would be better replaced with an emphasis on certain aspects of the research endeavor, “measurement” and “interpretation,” that we encounter with all good research.

In two other recent posts, I used the distinction between qualitative and quantitative difference as a critical component of my arguments. In “Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring and the Experience of Art (Musical and Visual),” among other things, I argued that the experience of viewing an original work of visual art was (typically) different from that of viewing a reproduction and that the experience of listening to live musical performance was different from that of listening to recorded music. I further argued that the differences between viewing original and reproduced art and between listening to live and recorded music were only partially analogous. With both domains of artistic experience, there is a quantitative difference at play. One typically experiences “more” with the original work of visual art – one sees aspects of size more accurately, the textures are more clearly discerned, etc. With live performance of music, a fuller sense of the total dynamic qualities of music might be experienced, but with live music there is also a qualitative experience as well. The experience of original or reproduced works of visual art is the same sort of experience, the experience of seeing or looking. Live and recorded music are qualitatively similar in involving hearing, but live performance, especially of music of high volume, low pitch with long wavelengths, or played with acoustic instruments which not only produce soundwaves but also displace air physically, also can involve a bodily feeling as the live music is experienced literally viscerally, resonating through one’s body in a way that recorded music almost never does (the only time I’ve ever experienced this bodily sensation from recorded music was with dance music with very low, constant bass sounds, played extremely loudly in a dance club from speakers about 15 feet tall).

In “Shamanism, Fascism, Gulags, and Genocide,” I argued that while some terms, like “shamanism,” might be extended from their original contexts to apply to qualitatively similar phenomena in other cultural settings to make useful cross-cultural comparisons, so long as the extension of the term is done carefully. At the same time, I argued that other terms, such as “fascism” or “gulag,” should ideally be restricted to their original cultural and historical contexts. It’s one thing to compare fascism with other sociopolitical phenomena – that can be useful – it’s quite another to refer to other phenomena by that term when there are important quantitative and qualitative distinctions between fascism and other phenomena.

So, when I object to the terminology of “quantitative research” and “qualitative research,” it’s not at all the difference between “qualitative” and “quantitative” to which I object. Making valid distinctions is an important component of any scholarly activity, and that includes the ability to distinguish between different types of differences. Distinguishing between differences of amount and differences of type or category is obviously important and useful. My objection to “qualitative research” and “quantitative research” is twofold. (1) There is no pure qualitative or quantitative scholarly work. (2) Not only is there no pure research of one type or the other, but all research is thoroughly qualitative and quantitative.

Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring and the Experience of Art (Musical and Visual)

I had the wonderful experience this past weekend of watching and hearing Robert Spano and the Atlanta Symphony perform Igor Stravinsky’s The Rite of Spring. I have listened to recordings of this piece many, many times, but hearing and seeing it performed live for the first time, I began to understand some of the extreme reactions (including negative reactions) some have to the work, both at its premier in 1913 and subsequently. (I’m also aware that part of the initial reaction at the premier in 1913 was to the “scandalous” visual aspects of the ballet which the music accompanied – but I also suspect then and later, that the seemingly unusual qualities of the music had a lot to do with the violently negative reaction.) I’d like here to address two topics having to do with the experience of art musical and visual: (1) the differences in experience of live musical performance or original works of art versus the experience of reproductions (whether recordings of music or prints or photographs of visual art); and (2) a greater conservatism apparent with regard to audiences for music compared to audiences for visual art.

“Live” vs. Facsimile

There is a difference between the experience of music performed live and the experience of recorded music. (There is also music that blurs the difference, such as live performance which incorporates taped material – and there are both “high” and “low” art versions of this.) While it doesn’t seem quite right to refer to the experience of an original painting or sculpture as a “live” experience (though that description would certainly apply to visual performance art), there is a difference between seeing an original work and a reproduction (though here too, there is art that blurs the distinction, e.g. Warhol’s camouflage screen prints, or mass produced casts of Rodin’s sculptures).

In the case of both music and visual art, there are differences between individual pieces in the degree to which the experience of the live performance or original work is different from the experience of a facsimile. Large scale paintings or sculpture feel far different in person than in photographic reproduction in even the best art books, as do highly textured paintings, where the texture is not reproducible in the flat two dimensional page. On the program with The Rite of Spring were also Stravinsky’s “Dumbarton Oaks” concerto for chamber orchestra and Mozart’s piano concerto no. 17, with piano soloist Garrick Ohlsson. While I enjoyed the performance of these two pieces, the main difference in experiencing them live was in seeing what the musicians were physically doing at any moment, while my physical experience of The Rite of Spring was completely different from that I have ever experienced while listening to it on CD.

This brings me to a major difference in the experience of visual art and music. The difference between seeing an original painting and a reproduction is not the same as the difference between a live performance of music and a recording.

The difference between the visual experience of an original visual work and a facsimile is primarily a quantitative one. One sees more of the texture, the size, the other details indicating the skill of a painter or sculptor. The experience of live music also involves such quantitative differences, but a qualitative difference in experience as well. Looking at a painting and looking at a reproduction of it, while producing different specific sensations, are the same sorts of experiences. Listening to live and recorded music provide similar sorts of auditory experiences, but live music can also provide a distinct bodily experience rarely provided by recorded music played over speakers. This is especially so with high volume live music, or live performance involving especially deep, resonant pitches that are experienced in a literally visceral way, experienced bodily in the gut as much as in the ear.

Conservatism in Musical Experience

A few years ago, my local symphony orchestra, the Pensacola Symphony Orchestra, also performed The Rite of Spring. I’m ashamed to admit I missed the performance – I don’t even remember why any longer, but afterwards, according to one member of the orchestra I spoke with, the Pensacola symphony received several letters of complaint about the choice to program this piece of "cacophonous non-music." I was aghast at the time that anyone would have reacted this way – The Rite of Spring has been standard repertory for almost a century now. While tempting to pass this off as the backward taste of provincial rubes, I’ve also encountered similar musical conservatism in other places (for example, I’ve encountered numerous writings attempting to dismiss Schoenberg or Berg as “cacophonous” or “snarling dissonance” – a reaction I find both wrongheaded and simply inaccurate [dissonance sure, as in any interesting music, but no snarling or cacophony]), and as I said above, after hearing the piece live, while I find it even more than before one of the most profound pieces of 20th century music, I can begin to understand others’ visceral reactions against the piece (in part because it is a literally visceral reaction).

The experience of visual art or of music is different from the experience of literature. Literature also presents a unique object to be experienced (with this being especially a goal of poetry). But the experience of literature requires active participation of the reader in a way that visual art and music do not. One cannot simply pass by a book and experience anything of it the way one could with a painting or a musical performance. Instead it has to be intentionally picked up and read, and the experience of it is a distinctly interior one. Paintings, sculpture, and music are experienced as things more clearly exterior than literature, with the experience occurring somewhat more passively (one can actively look or listen, but one can’t easily not see something that passes through one’s field of vision and one can’t easily not hear something within auditory range), with the object impinging upon one’s senses from outside.

At the same time, there is a difference in this exterior, passive experience of visual art and music. Visual art is more exterior, and not at all visceral in any literal way. It is only seen, where live music is heard and felt, experienced as something distinctly exterior while also something distinctly resonating in one’s physical being. One can also more easily stop experiencing painting or sculpture – by closing one’s eyes or looking in another direction, while music cannot be tuned out so simply. It impinges on one’s ears and body, and it cannot be ignored. It can force itself upon a person in a way that visual art (much less literature) cannot. As a result, music can be physically delightful – or a physical shock and violation if the music is not to one’s liking.

Many were once shocked by modernist experiments in sculpture and painting. Some perhaps still are, but really only very few can still honestly profess to be shocked or disturbed by Duchamp, or Picasso, or Pollock (much less the impressionists). But The Rite of Spring remains physically exhilarating or frightening or both at once.