“Pat Metheny: Stories Beyond Words,” reflection 5 – music and the metaphor of storytelling

One focal point of my recent writing has been exploring ways that metaphors can be used to talk about. Music, This has appeared in my blog postings and in my forthcoming book Pat Metheny: Stories Beyond Words (University of Chicago Press, coming in Fall 2024). Metheny’s work provides a useful lens to consider the meaning of a storytelling metaphor in part because Metheny himself speaks in these terms. But maybe more important, I find that the metaphor helps me understanding his music and, in the book, provide keys to listening to it.

By storytelling I truly mean “story” as a metaphor, not literal storytelling. Unlike my daughter who, as a child, constantly invented stories with characters and plotlines, here I am talking about “stories” in a very different way, but one I find no less meaningful. There is, in fact, a long tradition of music treated in a directly referential manner (in the book I note several examples in Euro-American Art music of the 19th and 20th centuries, and one finds this in other cultures as well). I also have, in a previous article, about pioneering electronic composer Morton Subotnick’s Sidewinder (https://newmusicusa.org/nmbx/morton-subotnicks-sidewinder/) suggested a narrative approach to a musical work. There, I explained why I provided playful names to the various sonic gestures or phrases that comprise the piece:

“Sidewinder introduces us to a cast of ‘sonic characters.’ Deviating from inherited traditions of electroacoustic music in which sounds are described in strictly sonic rather than referential terms, I have given them suggestive names. My rationale is tied to the magical way in which Subotnick’s sonorities exist somewhere between the referential and the abstract. The opening sound sequence, after which this work is named, is highly suggestive. Whether or not the work is in fact simply about the sounds themselves rather than forming a dramatic narrative, is beside the point. One can choose—or choose not—to read in a story line, or multiple story lines. I personally prefer not to do so, instead allowing my imagination to take me at each listening.”

I assigned playful names to nine of Subotnick’s sounds or gestures: “Rattler,” “Stoomp,” “Rev,” “Sound Mass,” “Worble,” “Helicopter,” “Pluck,” “Kalimba,” and “Pulsing Mass.” Were I listening and writing on another day, I might have come up with different names, alternate conceptions, or even simply listened without any suggestive narrative helpmates.

What I wasn’t suggesting was that this was the only way to hear Sidewinder, just one route to guide listening. My point was that one could listen in any number of ways and, even if one were to imagine a narrative or characters represented by musical features, there were numerous avenues for that, too. My goal was to model how one might do so and, for listeners unfamiliar with music akin to Sidewinder, offer a way to find an entry point to approach the music. This seemed natural to me, since it has long been clear to me that humans are by nature story tellers and we tend to internally narrate much or all of our experiences. We can resist this and listen just to individual sounds themselves without reference, as in the traditions of electroacoustic music, following Pierre Schaeffer’s musique concrete, or to listen to melody qua melody, or listen more analytically. But once we start listening to chord progressions as they follow a course that inextricably becomes cyclical, we are on the edge of telling a story.

The metaphor of “telling a story” has a long history among jazz musicians and the idea of musical dialog appears across musical traditions, notably in Black America. In Pat Metheny: Stories Beyond Words, I make note of the ways Randy Weston, Kenny Barron, Esperanza Spalding, and some of Pat Metheny’s mentors have used the metaphor. I also trace how At the same time, Metheny himself is clear that music, unlike language, resists referential meanings: “One of the many things I love about music is that it is always just out of sight, just out of reach. You get glimpses of it here and there, now and then—but it is ultimately always out of reach.” In the book, I provide a narrative, story metaphor treatment to Metheny’s “Imaginary Day,” “America Undefined,” and a few other works.

My suggestion that Metheny’s work can often be listened to through a “storytelling” metaphor is primarily grounded in the concept that a story, such as a film plotline, takes the viewer/listener/reader from one “place,” and then, metaphorically, on a “journey” that includes points of tension and repose, maybe intrigue, and eventually, a resting point. This is akin to a metaphor I once heard drummer Billy Hart use for the way Herbie Hancock improvised, picking up a baby, carrying it for a while, and then laying it down. I introduce the concept of metaphor through the work of Lakoff and Johnson, among the first of a number of writers to construct a substantive conceptual framework for how we conceptualize the world through metaphor.

Metheny has sought, from an early point in his career, to approach composition in a manner that supported this concept. He found that he could facilitate it, at times, by constructing forms with extended, stepwise bass lines, juxtaposed with subtly shifting harmonies. In that way, an improvisation can inventively unfold over an extended period of time, sufficiently expansive to create a distinct sense that a kind of (metaphorical) “journey” has taken place. Metheny preferred this concept over the existing alternative of 1930s song forms favored by bop musicians or riff and vamp structures drawn from R&B, preferred in the 1970s by Chick Corea, Herbie Hancock, John McLaughlin, and others. An ensemble that blended the idea of “story” with riffs and vamps was Weather Report.

One device that Metheny has drawn upon to achieve a sense of continuity across extended musical segments is by employing a series of motifs, brief musical figures or phrases, generated in the moment, but to which Metheny returns again and again within the solo. I trace examples of Metheny’s favorite guitarist, Wes Montgomery, and another important influence, saxophonist Ornette Coleman modeling this idea in the 1950s and 60s.

“Storytelling” is one of many metaphors by which one can listen to and explore music. When you read Pat Metheny: Stories Beyond Words, you’ll understand what I mean by listening to the musical examples while you read the text. Something to look forward!

~ by bobgluck on February 5, 2024.

Posted in Crafting the text, great musical thinkers, metahpor, musical content, musical perception, Pat Metheny
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Leave a comment