ROGER MOSELEY Luminos is the open access monograph publishing program from UC Press. Luminos provides a framework for preserving and reinvigorating monograph publishing for the future and increases the reach and visibility of important scholarly work. Titles published in the UC Press Luminos model are published with the same high standards for selection, peer review, production, and marketing as those in our traditional program. www.luminosoa.org Keys to Play The publisher gratefully acknowledges the generous support of the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University, the Cornell Open Access Publication Fund, and the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. Keys to Play Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo Roger Moseley UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS University of California Press, one of the most distinguished university presses in the United States, enriches lives around the world by advanc- ing scholarship in the humanities, social sciences, and natural sciences. Its activities are supported by the UC Press Foundation and by philanthropic contributions from individuals and institutions. For more information, visit www.ucpress.edu. University of California Press Oakland, California © 2016 by Roger Moseley This work is licensed under a Creative Commons CC BY-NC-ND license. To view a copy of the license, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses. Suggested citation: Moseley, Roger. Keys to Play: Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo . Oakland: University of California Press, 2016. doi: http://doi.org/10.1525/luminos.16 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Moseley, Roger, 1974- author. Title: Keys to Play : Music as a Ludic Medium from Apollo to Nintendo / Roger Moseley. Description: Oakland, California : University of California Press, [2016] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016013674 (print) | LCCN 2016015714 (ebook) | ISB 9780520291249 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780520965096 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Music—Performance—History. | Keyboards (Music)—History. | Play—Cross-cultural studies. | Electronic games. Classification: LCC ML457 .M67 2016 (print) | LCC ML457 (ebook) | DD 786—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016013674 Manufactured in the United States of America 25 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 To my family, with love and gratitude, and for Verity, my song of songs. keys to play: music as a ludic medium from apollo to nintendo contents Acknowledgments xi Prelude: Press Any Key to Start 1 Part I. Fields and Interfaces of Musical Play Key 1. Ludomusicality 15 1–1 Orders of Play 23 1–2 Beyond Work and Play 33 1–3 Th e Sound of Gunplay 43 1–4 Bits and Beats 49 1–5 Playing Undead 58 Key 2. Digital Analogies 67 2–1 Apollo 1, Marsyas 0 72 2–2 Notes on Keys 78 2–3 Interface Values 90 2–4 (Key)board Games and Temperamental Tactics 99 2–5 Tristan’s Chord, Schoenberg’s Voice 109 Part II. Play by Play: Improvisation, Performance, Recreation Key 3. Th e Emergence of Musical Play 121 3–1 Unforeheard Circumstances 127 3–2 Pantomimes and Partimenti 140 3–3 From Black Box to Glassy Shell 151 3–4 Th e Case of Winkel’s Componium 159 3–5 Th e Invisib le Th umb on the Scale 167 Key 4. High Scores: WAM vs. LVB 178 4–1 Unsettled Scores 181 4–2 Mozart’s Two-Player Games 188 4–3 Concerted Action 200 4–4 Mozart and Mario Play the Field 212 4–5 Beethoven’s Recursive Feedback Loops 219 Key 5. Play Again? 236 5–1 Nintendo’s Brand of Ludomusicality 243 5–2 Analogous Digitalities 250 5–3 Th e Ludomusical Emergence of Toshio Iwai 258 5–4 High Scores: Nodame Cantabile 263 5–5 Replay: A Cento 271 Notes 275 Bibliography 365 Ludography 419 Index 423 xi Acknowledgments As my digits near the end of this protracted tap dance over my computer keyboard, it is a pleasure to reflect on the choreographers, partners, and fellow players—new and old, close and distant, willing and oblivious—whom I am lucky enough to have encountered along the way. To start with the most recent, I am grateful to my editor Raina Polivka, her predecessor Mary Francis, project editor Francisco Reinking, eagle-eyed copyeditor Robert Demke, and editorial assistant Zuha Khan at the University of California Press for the faith they have shown in this project and their hard work in bringing it to fruition. I am particularly appreciative of the feedback from William Cheng, Emily Dolan, Alexander Rehding, Benjamin Walton, and the anonymous readers for the press: their thoughtful observations proved invaluable. From the outset, UC Press encouraged me to explore the exciting possibilities offered by Luminos, its new open access publication program. Since this book deals with the materiality of mediation, it is fitting that its appearance on this platform has involved getting to grips with the affordances and constraints of multiple analog and digital formats, from the venerable PDF scroll and the random access of the print-on-demand tome to the ePub document’s wherewithal for rich multimedia content. While it has presented challenges, devising a book about musical play con - taining elements that can be set in audible and visible motion has been a transfor- mative experience, allowing me to realize ideas that would previously have been unimaginable. As an admirer of the vision on which Luminos has been founded as well as the expertise of Paige MacKay, her colleagues at Ubiquity Press, and the production team at diacriTech who have helped to realize it, I am delighted that this book appears under its imprimatur. xii Acknowledgments At Cornell, where I have been happily ensconced for the last six years, it has been a pleasure to admire at close hand the mental, manual, and podial virtuosity of historian-keyboardists extraordinaires Annette Richards and David Yearsley. The playful musicality of pianist Xak Bjerken has been a source of delight in and out of the concert hall: playing selections from Bizet’s Jeux d’enfants with him and joining forces to concoct a graduate seminar on “keyboarding” were pivotal events in this book’s gestation. Neal Zaslaw generously shared his encyclopedic knowledge of Mozartian matters, which was complemented by James Webster’s comprehensive command of Haydn’s humorous strategies. The quick-witted Ben Piekut has kindly allowed me to bounce endless ideas (and the occasional squash ball) off him, while Annie Lewandowski’s subtle artistry has led me to appreciate the play of sound in new ways. Judith Peraino, Alejandro Madrid, and Andrew Hicks lent their expertise in fields ranging from rock music and micro - tonal maneuvers to medieval theory; Steve Pond and Roberto Sierra have been supportive departmental chairs and lively interlocutors. I am especially grateful to Cornell’s professor of violin Ariana Kim, to gradu- ate students Shin Hwang and Matthew Hall, and above all to professor emeritus Malcolm Bilson for lending their unique talents to the recording of the book’s audio components. Malcolm’s musicianship has been more than an inspiration to me: his showing, telling, and playing have opened up new historical vistas, modes of physical engagement, and ways of reimagining familiar music. I feel inexplica- bly fortunate to have crossed his path. As reflected by the book’s (inter)disciplinary orientation, many of its ideas started to take shape while I was a fellow at Cornell’s Society for the Humanities in 2011–12. Among innumerable stimulating conversations on and around the focal theme of “sound,” interactions with Tim Murray, Nina Sun Eidsheim, Brían Hanrahan, Damien Keane, Nicholas Knouf, Tom McEnaney, Trevor Pinch, and Jennifer Stoever were particularly memorable. While there, I offered a class on digital games and techniques of sonic recreation that fed into subsequent teaching as well as research. At the seminar table, I have benefited a great deal from the sharp minds and adventurous spirits of Niccolo Athens, David Friend, Dietmar Friesenegger, George Karalis, Enongo Lumumba-Kasongo, Ryan MacEvoy McCullough, Jillian Marshall, Jordan Musser, Sergio Ospina-Romero, Mackenzie Pierce, Jonathan Schakel, Mia Tootill, Morton Wan, Maxwell Williams, Andrew Zhou, and many others. Carlos Ramírez provided valuable research assistance, and special mention must go to Aya Saiki, who has not only devoted an inordinate amount of thought and care to this project, but also taught me much about ludomusicality in Japa - nese contexts. For their knowledge, expertise, and technical skills, I am grateful to Cornell’s music librarians Bonna Boettcher, Bill Cowdery, Lenora Schneller, and Eric Feinstein; music department manager Chris Riley; music typesetter and image- wrangler Evan Cortens; keyboard technician Ken Walkup; recording engineer Cass Acknowledgments xiii Barbour; graphic designer Katherine Jarriel, who produced the keyboard imagery throughout the book; and general miracle worker Laure Conklin Kamp. Before moving to Ithaca, I spent three years at the University of Chicago, where I made my first forays into the ludomusicological field. I am grateful for both the personal warmth and the critical rigor of Thomas Christensen, Martha Feldman, Berthold Hoeckner, Kaley Mason,Steven Rings, and Lawrence Zbikowski. In particular, I cherish the joyous sense of adventure that suffused the Historically Inspired Musical Improvisation workshop I facilitated there: alongside Martha and Larry, Majel Connery, Daniel Gough, Shawn Keener, Emily Mackevicius, Alyssa Matthias, Emily Norton, Peter Shultz, Jonathan De Souza, and (from a dis - tance) Bettina Varwig made signal contributions toward our improvised staging of Mozart’s “Musik zu einer Faschingspantomime,” K. 446/416d,the impact of which is registered in Key 3–2. Such activities owed much to the groundbreaking work of Robert Gjerdingen, whose revelatory framing of the cognitive, social, and aes - thetic circumstances under which eighteenth-century music was conceived and played has transformed my outlook on the presentability of the improvised past. My interest in historical improvisation had been kindled by David Dolan when I was studying collaborative piano at the Guildhall School of Music and Drama. I am thankful for the bold example he set, for Robin Bowman’s incom - parable coaching, and for the profound subtleties of Graham Johnson’s teaching: in thought, word, and deed, Graham provides a model of artistry to which I shall always aspire. While in pursuit of my PhD at the University of California, Berkeley, I was part of a wonderful musicological community. Beyond my immediate cohort, which included Laura Basini, Melina Esse, Anna Nisnevich, Francesca Rivera, and Holly Watkins, I was struck on arrival by the daunting sophistication of advanced stu- dents such as Matthew Gelbart and Jacob Hosler, not to mention the all-star facul - ty: Katherine Bergeron, Mary Ann Smart, Kate van Orden, and the much-missed Wendy Allanbrook set the bar high when it came to thinking and writing about music. But nobody was more intimidating or inspiring than Richard Taruskin, whom I was honored to call my supervisor. Although this book stands at a far remove from my dissertation, and perhaps also from his towering vantage point over the musicological landscape, his exacting standards as well as the scope of his ambition left impressions that will never fade. “Don’t write the only book you can write; write a book that only you can write,” he once advised me. Thus far, I have attempted only to fulfill the prescription; if I manage to comply with the proscrip - tion, I hope that my subsequent efforts will please him At Oxford, where I was both callow undergraduate and jaundiced post - doc, Roger Parker sparked a musicological flame that has sometimes flickered, but is yet to go out. I am enormously grateful for his extraordinary generosity, limitless patience, and razor-sharp upper-case interventions. At different stages, xiv Acknowledgments Timothy Jones, Suzannah Clark, and Nicholas Mathew provided crucial enlight- enment, encouragement, and entertainment; from my earliest months there, James Martelli and George FitzHerbert offered enduring friendship During my teenage years in Newcastle, I (mis)spent many ludic hours with Ghoshy, Guff, Baz, and Cass on the five-a-side pitch, in the Cullercoats arcades, and at the odd rave. But my affinit for musical play can be traced back to the vitality, passion, and wisdom of Kate Miller, my first piano teacher, and beyond that to my mother Caroline’s ear for the graceful beauty of sound in motion and my father David’s unorthodox musicality. It found an early digi - tal outlet in the form of the BBC Micro Model B that he brought home from work one blessed afternoon: the challenge of rapidly oscillating between the “Z” and “X” keys to improve my triple-jump technique in Hyper Sports (Konami, 1984) provided the perfect opportunity to “practice my trills” (and vice versa). Beyond that, my ludomusical instincts were nurtured by the love—sometimes tender, sometimes tougher—that has always flourished between my sisters and me. In multiple ways, contexts, and forms, Polly and Bess showed me how to play. Now a father myself, I observe the twin-play of Asher and Milo with wonder. For this joy, as for so many others, I have Verity Platt to thank. She has played an utterly indispensable role in the making of Keys to Play, from conception to deliv- ery, and my love for her is boundless. Over the course of hours dark and bright, this book was written for her. υυυ Keys 1 and 2 incorporate material first published as “Digital Analogies: The Keyboard as Field of Musical Play,” Journal of the American Musicological Society 68, no. 1 (2015).Keys 1 and 5 include some content that initially appeared in “Mu - sic, Visual Culture, and Digital Games,” in Th Routledge Handbook to Music and Visual Culture, ed. Tim Shephard and Anne Leonard (New York: Routledge, 2014); and “Nintendo’s Art of Musical Play,” in Music in Video Games, ed. K.J. Donnelly, William Gibbons, and Neil Lerner (New York: Routledge, 2014). In the latter case, I am grateful to my coauthor Aya Saiki for permitting me to repurpose portions of the text for which I was responsible as well as for providing expert guidance and assistance with all matters Japanese. Finally, Key 3 contains traces of material first published in “Entextualization and the Improvised Past,” Music Theory Online 19, no. 2 (2013); and “Mozart’s Harlequinade: Improvising Music alla Commedia dell’Arte, ” Common Knowledge 17, no. 2 (2011). Thepublicationofthisbookwasmadepossiblebygeneroussubventions,awards, and grants from the Hull Memorial Publication Fund of Cornell University; the Cornell Open Access Publication Fund;the AMS 75 PAYS Endowment of the American Musicological Society, funded in part by the National Endowment for Acknowledgments xv the Humanities and the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation; the Westfield Center for Historical Keyboard Studies; Cornell’s Department of Music; and the Society for the Humanities via a Humanities Research Grant and my participation in a Brett de Bary Interdisciplinary Mellon Writing Group. The book also benefited from the sponsorship of Improvisation in Theory and Practice, an interinstitutional working group that Annette Richards and I facilitated, by the Central New York Humanities Corridor from an award by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. 2 2 2 2 2 3 3 4 1 Prelude Press Any Key to Start Drawing on conceptual models informed by theories of play, media, systems, and cultural techniques, this book pursues the significance of play across a panorama of musical phenomena extending from Greek myth to contemporary digital games. In particular, it examines forms of play that have emerged at the digital interface of the keyboard. By situating the keyboard in a range of historical, cultural, and epistemological contexts, Keys to Play explores how it has been played in a multi- plicity of ways (and to as many ends) by composers, improvisers, performers, and gamers. Reciprocally, the book makes the case that the keyboard itself has played the role of a medium, which is to say a means of generating, processing, relaying, storing, and accessing information. At the keyboard, play becomes apprehensible as a primary means by which musical behavior can be materialized, embodied, performed, and communicated. Through its affordance of modes of engagement that are at once playful and musical, the keyboard is implicated in diverse forms of what might be called ludomusical praxis. As a threshold at which music becomes playable and play becomes musical, the keyboard defines a strand of ludomusicality that has woven its way across broad swathes of time and space. In mapping its course, the book shuttles back and forth to frame the keyboard from oblique historical, cultural, and disciplinary angles, some running parallel and others intersecting with established musicological per - spectives. The warp and weft of this ludomusicological approach trace the criss- crossing processes by which music has been devised, realized, and recreated at the keyboard via techniques both in keeping and at odds with the prevailing rules of play. 2 prelude Despite what Johan Huizinga identified as the “remarkable” etymological and historical connections that demonstrate the profound “affinit between music and play,” the substantial body of literature on play has made little impact on the study of Western art music. 1 In large part, the suppression of ludomusical discourses and practices in musicological scholarship reflects their virtual absence from the archival record. Accordingly, Keys to Play departs from the premise that the lin - ear models of historical narrative typically assembled from the interpretation of textual evidence are unfit for the purpose of representing musical playfulness and its modes of mediation. Since ludomusical rules often defy the unidirectional logic of cause and effect, they demand alternative means of accounting for their prin- ciples of operation and cultural functions as well as for the conformity and resis - tance they have engendered. In order to register the keyboard’s distinctive role as a medium that has conveyed, reflected, and shaped the formation of these rules, the book delineates the varied implications and realizations of keyboard play not by way of a sweeping narrative arc, but via shifting configurations of digital and analog cultural techniques. The word “digit” refers to both a finger and a number, and the keyboard has long constituted a field of play where these two meanings come together. As early modern descriptions of the keyboard as an “abacus” suggest, the digital is rooted in the embodied performance of calculation. Beyond that, the keyboard’s inter - face forms a digital medium in its configuration of discrete, commutable elements and its dependably arbitrary mapping of input onto output. In both musical and computational contexts, this enables it to represent letters as well as numbers and pitches, and thereby to mediate between literate script, algorithmic program, and sonic signal. Furthermore, as Wolfgang Scherer has observed, keyboard play has long involved the encoding and decoding of musical transmissions, tasks accomplished by way of sophisticated techniques acquired through intensive training. 2 As a means of measuring, ordering, equalizing, and articulating musi- cal differences, most notably across the contiguously frequential realms of pitch and rhythm, the keyboard’s field of play enables digital actions to be quantified, evaluated, and compared according to formal and ideological codes of conduct, whether they have to do with compositional protocols, standards of performance, or improvisatory capacities. Digital techniques and technologies can only go so far in accounting for the teeming variety of musically playful phenomena, however, for they are always supplemented by analogical counterparts. Analogical play relies on correspon - dences and oscillations, on one object or action echoing, tracing, or indexing another. Analogical relationships model the transduction of a musical phenom - enon from symbol to signal and for the capricious leaps and freewheeling asso- ciations characteristic of play in its gestural and theatrical senses. The sweep of a harpsichordist’s arms over the plane of the keyboard and the phenomenon of Press Any Key to Start 3 Bebung at the clavichord can be understood to operate analogically, exemplifying continuity of motion and triggering commensurate modes of signification and understanding. More broadly, the subjunctive mood (the “as if”) of fantasy and make-believe is analogical, whether figured as mimesis, mockery, simulation, or simulacrum. In order to track formations of play that have traveled freely across digital and analog domains, Keys to Play construes ludomusical activity at the keyboard as— and by way of—a constellation of digital analogies. A digital analogy situates digi- tal and analog phenomena relationally rather than drawing a binary distinction between the discrete and the continuous. On the one hand, this acknowledges the keyboard’s myriad forms and transformations; on the other, it recognizes that its defining digital attributes form a relatively stable point of reference over the course of centuries, enabling these different forms to be profitably analogized as sites of ludomusical encounter between bodies and machines. At the keyboard, digits operate as natural phenomena, as agents of cultural forces, and as the means of distinguishing between the two. Correspondingly, digital analogies register both the forces that have shaped forms of play at the keyboard and the strategies that have been held to account for them. Rather than fetishizing difference or insisting on identity, digital analogies uncover and demonstrate both the recursive nesting of technomusical configurations and the continuous modulation of ludic dynam- ics that have enabled one term, symbol, object, or being to stand for another. Digital analogies are predicated on Huizinga’s conviction that play is elemen - tal rather than epiphenomenal: playful activities “do not proceed from culture, [but] rather precede it.” 3 As a cultural technique, moreover, musical play forms (and is formed by) sequential processes that link humans to objects in ways that simultaneously configure the rules of play while making them conceivable and writeable as such. In other words, ludomusical rules exist a priori insofar as they establish the conditions for play, but they also attest to the recursive processing of play as a set of symbolic functions. On the one hand, this helps explain the always-alreadiness of rules and the sense in which they are inherited as inviolable legacies; on the other, it clarifies their drastic contingency and their legibility or decipherability as evidence of social regimes. As illustrated by Gregory Bateson’s classic example of a playful nip that at once is and is not a bite, play simultaneously enacts and frames its own ontology: it constitutes territory, map, and the means of relating the two. 4 When players play, they also play with play. In the terms of Niklas Luhmann’s systems theory, the (meta)communicative strategies of play illustrate how “recursive operative chains bring about a switch from first-order to second-order techniques (and back),” as Bernhard Siegert formulates it. 5 For participants and observers alike, the paradoxical logic of play shuttles between the material and the symbolic as well as between the real and the imaginary, revealing the worlds it creates to coexist with those on which it reflects