Initial experience of synchronic description of historical musicology texts

Bazhanov Nikolai Sergeevich ORCID: 0000-0002-0116-2891 Doctor of Art History Professor, Department of General Piano Glinka Novosibirsk State Conservatory 630099, Russia, Novosibirsk region, Novosibirsk, Sovetskaya str., 21, office 6 Bazhanov_Nikolaj@mail.ru

Two basic principles of the historical method that form the famous cross of history are widely known: diachronic and synchronic methods of describing events.

Diachrony considers historical events in the flow of time, while synchrony studies events at a separate and unique moment in time. Diachrony is based on a sequence of events, synchrony is based on simultaneity.  This is declared in a variety of sources, used in the methodology of cross-cultural studies ^[1], there is a synchronic analysis in acoustic terms ^[2] but musicological works that would practically use a historical synchronic approach are almost completely absent. A rare case of the use of synchrony and diachrony in art criticism is contained in the work of L. A. Barash ^[3].

The concepts and terms of synchrony and diachrony were first formulated by the Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure and were later transferred to historical science as synchronic and diachronic approaches. Later, in the historical sciences, the diachronic method was divided into the chronological method and the method of periodization. Diachronic and synchronic principles have become the main logical parameters for a series of scientific analytical methods in various disciplines.

Replacing the word "language" with the word "history" in Ferdinand de Saussure's statement, we get a plausible and profound judgment "at any given moment [emphasis added. – history] presupposes both an established system and evolution; at any moment [my italics. – history] is both a living activity and a product of the past" ^{[4, p.47]}. Saussure's judgment was a methodological generalization of such a high level that instead of words highlighted in bold italics, in the course of further dissemination and semantic adaptations of this judgment, the concepts of "man", "culture", "logic" were visited. Paradoxically, the dichotomous "cross" formed by the system (synchrony) and evolution (diachrony) continued to work and sprout new meanings.

Synchronic description of texts

Here are two striking examples of synchronic descriptions from the book of Kremnev by Franz Schubert. Date May 11, 1809.

 "Seeing that the Viennese did not intend to surrender, the French began shelling the besieged city. For eighteen hours, heavy howitzers hooted, shells whistled, explosions rumbled.

In one of the cellars, Beethoven was lying with a blanket spread out on the damp and cold stone floor. Covering his sore ears with pillows, he tried to get away from the war...

Haydn was dying at the other end of the city. The seventy-seven-year-old elder was struck by a blow at the first gunshot.

And on the University Square, like prisoners in prison, his pupils were constantly sitting among the stone walls of the convict... and Franz Schubert, as usual, composed and recorded music" ^{[5, p. 20]}.

It is the synchronic way of describing the amazing pathos of "simultaneity" that connects Haydn, Beethoven, Schubert, separated by several blocks of Vienna in one moment of history. In this way we learn about Vienna as the real musical capital of the world. And where else could such names be here and now?

Here is another example of a synchronic description. "Schubert died in the most exuberant prime of both human and creative forces.  At thirty-two, a man can only live and live. And create and work.         At the age of thirty–two, Beethoven had not yet created any of his great symphonies - neither the Heroic, nor the Fourth, nor the Fifth, nor the Pastoral, nor the Seventh, nor, finally, the Ninth.

"Hamlet" was written by Shakespeare at the age of thirty-seven, "Othello" – three, and "King Lear" – four years later. And if Cervantes had lived only to the age of thirty-two, the world would have been deprived of "Don Quixote" ^{[5, p. 296]}.

Thanks to the synchronic description, relationships are found between the death of Schubert and Beethoven, Shakespeare and Cervantes, which seems impossible under any circumstances. Consequently, the synchronic approach can show relationships that are "not visible" in the diachronic methodology.

The two main historical approaches are in different relations with the passage of time. In the diachronic method, events (the composer's life, composition, conflict, genre, style, etc.) are not critical of the date. The event selects dates. In the synchronic method, the date selects events or a time corridor (start date, time zone, and end date) within which the history of simultaneity is located.

At the same time, the informational isolation of the synchronic method is revealed. Indeed, the personalities of composers contain information in many articles, books, letters united by the keyword of the composer's name, and the date of synchronization (combination) of historical time is very abstract. In diachronic historical genres, information is concentrated due to the personalities themselves, due to the attributes of the genre itself, and in historical synchrony it is scattered according to various sources. Based on the quality of the thematic concentration of information, in diachrony, the information is concentrated by subject, but blurred by time. In synchrony, they (information) are concentrated in time, but blurred by subject.

The collection of synchronic information is an almost unsolvable task outside of modern computer technologies. How can the reader see, understand and find simultaneous information in different books of a large thematic library. Full-text subject databases with a multivariate information search service are needed ^[6].

 In the synchronic dimension, the hierarchy of great and minor composers is completely different, they are correlated by contemporaries based on the logic of the historical moment. They are all here and now together with their authorities and conquests on the synchronization date.

In the volume of the Mitzler Society, where the obituary of J.S. Bach is placed, the names of the composers who make up the glory of German music are listed; they are named in the following order: Hasse, Handel, Telemann, both Graun, Stelzel, (and only in 7th place J.S. Bach" ^{[7, p. 164]}. A similar series of casuistic assessments of contemporaries continue: Beethoven, Schubert, Pushkin, Lermontov, Impressionist artists... "and further down the list."    

It is logical to criticize the short-sightedness of contemporaries' views on the work of famous artists, musicians, writers and poets. Outside of synchronic logic, it is assumed a priori that a certain person in the history of art has always surpassed his contemporaries, throughout his life, from birth to death, at any moment (by way of refutation – Stefan Zweig's story "The Genius of one Night"). However, there is very little or no synchronic analysis of such estimates. This important reserve of historical research remains unused.

Collective musical intelligence is a certain social, social phenomenon that develops in society only at a certain stage of the development of informatization. This is a flexible social system, a collective community of musicians, in whose activities generalized intonational knowledge is manifested. For example, the collective musical intelligence of an orchestra, a group of composers, a school of composition, style, genre.

"Culture as a whole has a special collective memory apparatus and mechanisms for developing fundamentally new messages in fundamentally new languages, that is, creating new ideas. The combination of these qualities allows us to consider culture as a collective intelligence" ^{[8, p. 558]}.

Then it turns out that the description of the Viennese classical style in individual personalities, and not in the form of an integrative style of collective intelligence, will always be incomplete and partial. It is in the logic of collective intelligence that the understanding of the Viennese classical style grows, from the series of mosaic influences of J. H. Bach, Karl Abel, Johann Schobert, J. Haydn, on Mozart, to unity and integrity at every point of the system of collective musical unity called classical style. This is a completely different model of birth, formation, development and completion of existence. A model similar to a living organism, where growth occurs synchronously, everywhere, at every point of the system of collective musical intelligence formed by a multitude of known and unknown composers.

The key question is to what extent the composers, isolated from each other, are part of a certain collective, where they know a lot about each other's compositions. In the study of this problem, we have to wait for help not from diachrony, but just from a synchronic understanding of the work of composers of the same style.

Beyond the logic of collective musical intelligence, there is no answer to the question why, for example, Johann Christian Bach, Karl Friedrich Abel and Johann Schobert left deeper traces in Mozart's memory than the incomparably superior Glitch?

The purpose of the article is the initial testing of the synchronic approach to the texts of historical musicology, based on the material of the formation of the Viennese classical style. A full-text (full-text system) database of the Novosibirsk Conservatory and a search program dtSearch 7.94 (Build 8600) were used as information support. Full—text databases are a globally recognized source of important and relevant information ^[9],[10]. PBDs include: full texts of electronic versions of books, journal articles, abstract reviews on specific scientific issues, etc. Such texts, as a rule, meet the criterion of completeness, and correspond to the attributes of the genres in which they exist – an article, an abstract, a book, a report, citations, extracts.

The unstructured, full-text database used for synchronous analysis of events was formed by the merger of personal information resources of a number of teachers of the Novosibirsk Conservatory for 21 years. Such a database, which does not have a catalog, is a set of text files of music history and theory, of various nickname formats not divided into categories, sections, personalities, etc. Such databases are often called a "bag of files" Such a database device is explained by the complete lack of state resources to support expensive structured databases in the field of music science. To date, the database is approximately equal to the library of an average university in terms of the volume of information. Insufficient ordering of the database itself is compensated by the advanced service of the dtSearch Desktop search engine.

It should be emphasized that the tasks of testing the synchronic approach in musicology were predominant, and the accompanying goals of a meaningful solution to the problem of the formation of the classical style in music were determined exclusively by the real possibilities of the synchronic approach. 

To test the synchronic approach, the year of synchronization of events in this article is chosen based on the time of publication of Johann Schobert's sonata c moll – 1766, as one of the examples of the formation of the classical style.

 Synchronic description, year 1766

What happened this year?

It's been 16 years since J.S. Bach died;

K.F.E.Bach – 52 years old;

J.H. Bach – 31 years old; In 1766, the composer married a singer (soprano) Cecilia Grassi, who was 11 years younger than him, they had no children.

Haydn Joseph is 34 years old; He is writing the famous autobiography of 1766.   Kapellmeister Haydn is urgently ordered to apply himself to composition more zealously than before, and especially to compose more pieces that can be played on the (baritone) instrument played by his master Nikolai Esterhazy. On January 4, 1766, Haydn wrote 3 trios for baritone, with which Nikolai Esterhazy was very pleased. For the first time, a historical document appears in which Haydn is called a Kapellmeister.

Since March 1766, he has been leading the orchestra after the death of his predecessor in this position. When Werner died in 1766, Haydn received the title of oberkapellmeister, and on his instructions the orchestra was expanded to twenty-two people and the choir was enlarged, hiring the best singers - sometimes from the most remote places, including Italy.

V. A. Mozart is 10 years old; he and his family travel to Holland, he is sick a lot – first angina, then typhus, then smallpox. There is a gigantic undermining of health in childhood. This journey of W. Mozart began in 1763. Paris, London, The Hague, Holland. He was ill from September 1765 to February 1766. April 1766 The Mozart family goes home. On July 9, 1766, the family left Paris, heading for Salzburg, but stopping along the way with concerts in Lyon, Geneva and Munich, and spending several weeks in each city. On November 30, 1766, the Mozarts returned home to Salzburg. Consequently, an integral event – the journey of Mozart (1763-1766) is waiting for its author of the monograph, and we have reached its completion by a synchronic slice.

It is not difficult to notice that synchronization by date (1766) gives too fragmented, mosaic historical picture, which clearly lacks the concentration of the desired meaning. The conclusion about the optimal "corridor" of event synchronization time is justified. Such a time range should contain, on the one hand, enough events for their objective interpretation, and, on the other hand, be sufficiently "narrow" to preserve the properties of the time slice without turning it into a diachronism.

It seems to be a productive idea that synchronization can occur not only by time categories, but also by events. In this case, the unity of the nature of the event works as simultaneity. As an event, "meetings", "travels", "musical compositions", "personalities", etc. can be used. The search statistics in the full-text database confirm this. So in the same database, a search for the date 1766 gave 20 occurrences in the text. If we take the event – Mozart's journey (1763-1766) as a synchronization, then the added years in the search query lead to 53 occurrences in the text. The dtSearch 7.94 search engine allows you to create a search query from a combination of dates and the words "journey", "trip", which allows you to search even more fully for information about Mozart's journey in childhood 8-10 years.

The synchronic description of the history of music and musical works has its own peculiarities and perspectives, limitations and disadvantages.

What is special, specific about the synchronic description of events? We will immediately point out the main pathos and the main function of this method – "comparison". Since the beginnings of events are aligned, it becomes possible to consider them simultaneous and compare them with each other, and the results are attributed to the synchronization time. So, an algorithm is formed in the form of the following chain: synchronization of the start time of events, comparison of the content of different events.

Conclusions

The synchronic approach demonstrates the continuity and monomericity of historical time. By introducing the concept of "event", we, by a logical and theoretical assumption, cut this flow into the parts we need. In synchrony, we see how juxtaposition and comparison overcome the natural continuity of historical time. Events begin, last, end, run parallel to others, mutually influence and are autonomous from each other. It is thanks to the synchronic slice that we see history to a greater extent as a world of events.

The insufficiency of the orderliness of the synchronic approach has already been noted by Saussure "if we study the phenomena of [parentheses]. – (speech activity)] simultaneously, from several points of view, the object [my parentheses. – (linguistics)] appears to us as a pile of heterogeneous, unrelated phenomena" ^{[4, p. 47]}. It should be noted that the result is in the form of "piles of disparate... phenomena" exists as a possibility, but not as an inevitability. It depends on the material, as well as the skill of the researcher to see patterns in the results of the method. However, it is necessary to recognize the desirability of pre-ordering events before synchronization.

The prospects of the synchronic approach lie in the further development of the specifications of this method on the one hand and in its synthesis with diachrony. Merleau Ponty pointed out this quite clearly: "It is necessary to understand that since synchrony is only a cross–section of diachrony, the system that is implemented in synchrony is never completely complete; it always contains potential incipient changes" [Cit. po – 11, p. 85].

The most important methodological understanding of the specifics of the approaches turned out to be the interpretation of synchrony as a method revealing the structure and systemic organization of the subject of study, and diachrony as a way of showing its evolution.

Apparently, synchrony based on one parameter is not enough for a holistic assessment and analysis. For a more productive mapping, synchronization of several parameters and types of events is necessary. Time, genres, form, tonalities...such meaningful categories can act as synchronization events.  This type of historical research can be described as a multifactorial synchronic analysis of historical events.