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Courtney Cazden recalls of Camp Woodland,

Its curriculum was definitely Dewey-like, but with what might be called a more “political agenda,” from the United Nations to more inclusive freedom struggles closer to home. In 1945, my first Woodland summer, with the ending of World War Two I remember marching through Phoenicia in the victory parade, singing the UN hymn with its chorus:

United Nations on the march, with flags unfurled,

together fight for victory, a brave new world…

Then in the mid-fifties, the Camp recruited staff from African American activists at lunch counters in the south. Pete Seeger would make an annual visit, teaching us new songs and learning new ones himself which he then made famous – such as “Guantanamera” that he learned from a Cuban staff member.

The Catskills had long been a cultural and musical crossroads. For Norman Cazden and his camp co-workers, this became the base for collecting songs drawing on English, Irish, and African-American traditions, immigrants and emancipated slaves reinventing themselves in the New World. Then, other cross-currents: the Southern Catskills were a favorite holiday destination for Jewish New York, and summer camps for communist youth. The Communist Party of the United States comprised mainly Eastern European immigrants, a significant proportion of whom were Jews.²⁶⁷

Cazden and colleagues were eventually to document their work in a massive two-volume compendium.²⁶⁸

Cazden had enrolled at Harvard University, receiving his masters degree in 1944, and Ph.D. in 1948, with a dissertation titled Musical Consonance and Dissonance. He embarked then on an academic career, teaching at the University of Illinois from 1950 to 1953. He was denied tenure because the FBI was investigating him for his communist connections.^§AS1.4.1c Citing his Fifth Amendment rights he refused to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1954, but these rights were not enough to get him back his academic career. It was sixteen years before he could get another academic job, in 1969 at the University of Maine.²⁶⁹

Cazden’s theory of music more or less tracks our theory of the materialization of meaning, articulated in two long and densely packed philosophical and technical articles, one published in 1951 while he was still at the University of Illinois, “Towards a Theory of Realism in Music,”²⁷⁰ and the other in 1980, the year he died, in an obscure Yugoslav music journal, “The Definition of Consonance and Dissonance.”²⁷¹

Likeness: Cazden called this “naturalism” or sound imitation. For instance, in Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony, the nightingale, quail, and cuckoo are represented in passages for flute, oboe, and clarinet. This is for music, what onomatopoeia is for speech.²⁷² The representation is necessarily inexact, limited as it is by the affordances of musical instruments as media – but herein lies the art.

Directedness: This, Cazden called “pictorialism.” In his Durch Adams Fall Ist Ganz Verderbt, says Cazden, “Bach interprets the opening line of the text by means of a series of wide, descending leaps of a chromatic, distorted type in the bass. If this be called to our attention, verbally, we readily accept it as a valid though obvious type of musical commentary, a sort of pictorial illustration of the fall of Adam.”²⁷³

Abstraction: Some would say that music is “a wondersome play of sounding forms, and it signifies nothing.” No, says Cazden, lest we fall “victim to the inane mysticisms of the purists who deny that music has any meaning at all.”²⁷⁴

The word he wants to use for music’s less directed meanings is “realism.” This works for us in our grammar in the sense that these are abstractions developed in social and culture context. They are conventional meanings that are not obvious in a naturalistic or pictorial way, whose broader meanings are only intelligible to insiders in the culture. Musical meanings are conjured by association in riffs, phrases, songs, movie scores – the sound shapes of feeling that connect with wider patterns of meaning by multimodal transposition.

“Reference to the real world is present in all music,” says Cazden. “It is what we derive from music as an aesthetic experience … [T]he listener is a member of a human social group, and he does not come to music with a blank, innocent, and ignorant mind, but with a deposit of musical experiences, associations, and orientation.” So, “music is realistic, in the sense that it is the real practice of real people. Musical experience … relates primarily to common values and meaning in the human world.” Musical composition, he says, is “a translation and adaptation by the composer of the previous musical experience of his audience for the creating of a new revelation.”²⁷⁵ The revelation, in the terms of our grammar, is in the redesign.

And from the Catskills – the mountainous, poor, immigrant, folkish, Jewish, communist Catskills – the revelations flowed. No longer Robert Zimmerman, the Jewish boy from Duluth, Minnesota, Bob Dylan took up residence for a while in the sixties. He recorded his Basement Tapes there, backed by The Band. Janis Joplin recorded there too, in the same studio. Then the Woodstock Festival in 1969, in nearby Bethel.²⁷⁶ This is the meaning of a whole lot of the music living in our bones, its social abstractions and, for this, its “realism.”

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²⁶⁶ Paul C. Mischler, 1999, Raising Reds: The Young Pioneers, Radical Summer Camps, and Communist Political Culture in the United States, New York: Columbia University Press, pp. 99–107.

²⁶⁷ Nathan Glazer, 1961, The Social Basis of American Communism, New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, pp. 130ff.

²⁶⁸ Norman Cazden, Herbert Haufrechet, and Norman Studer, 1982, Folk Songs of the Catskills, Albany: State University of New York Press; Courtney Cazden, personal communication.

²⁶⁹ Stephen Erdely, 1981, “Norman Cazden (1914–1980),” Ethnomusicology 25(3):493–96; www.normancazden.com/biography/

²⁷⁰ Norman Cazden, 1951, “Towards a Theory of Realism in Music,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 10(2):135–51.

²⁷¹ Norman Cazden, 1980, “The Definition of Consonance and Dissonance,” International Review of the Aesthetics and Sociology of Music 11(2):123–68.

²⁷² Norman Cazden, 1951, “Towards a Theory of Realism in Music,” The Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism 10(2):135–51, pp. 135–36.

²⁷³ Ibid., p. 138.

²⁷⁴ Ibid., pp. 141–42.

²⁷⁵ Ibid., pp. 150, 141, 137, 144.

²⁷⁶ Weston Blelock and Julia Blelock, eds. 2009, Roots of the 1969 Woodstock Festival: The Backstory of Woodstock, Woodstock, NY: Woodstock Arts.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 110–112. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Norman Cazden’s “Theory of Realism in Music” §AS1.4.2a