On style
As you might have inferred from a previous post, I’m currently reading My Name Is Red by Orhan Pamuk, the 2006 Nobel Laureate in Literature. Among the many themes Pamuk deals with in the novel is the question of what constitutes “style.” The dictionary defines style as “the combination of distinctive features of literary or artistic expression, execution, or performance characterizing a particular person, group, school, or era.” Style is what distinguishes a particular artist, author, or musician as himself—their individuality, their “way,” their -isms.
How then is a style born and then perpetuated to the point where it is distinguished as a style? Here’s a quote from the novel in which Enishte Effendi, a master illuminator, explains to another how a new style of painting comes to be:
The birth of a new style is the result of years of disagreements, jealousies, rivalries and studies in color and painting. Generally, it’ll be the most gifted member of the workshop who fathers this form. Let’s also call him the most fortunate. To the rest of the miniaturists falls the singular duty of perfecting and refining this style through perpetual imitation.
A master imparts his teachings (and his style) to his pupils. And as a result, the master’s students pick up the master’s nuances—if not consciously trying to imitate them, then simply by being around a certain way of doing something for an extended period of time. As a saxophonist, I can usually tell who someone has studied with, or at the very least in which pedagogical line they’ve been trained, simply by their tone color, phrasing, articulation, and choice of repertoire. But what actually defines that master teacher’s style?
I’ve heard it said that what we hear (speaking in terms of music here) to be individuality and someone’s style are actually the little mistakes they make and their own peculiar manner of executing certain things, such as an articulation or a phrasing choice. And the way a student begins to sounds like the teacher is by imitating these subtle “mistakes.” (In the context of Pamuk’s novel—illuminators and miniaturists in sixteenth-century Istanbul—the only acceptable way to render an illustration is by reproducing as closely as possible the figures of the great masters from centuries ago. This is seen as the only acceptable style. Adding your own “signature” or synthesizing new or foreign ways of painting is viewed not only as a disgrace to your particular guild, but also an afront to Islam.) I don’t necessarily agree with the statement that an artist’s isms constitute subtle “mistakes.” It’s merely their particular way of executing a portion of their art. (Granted it might sound like mistakes to some.) And as far as synthesizing elements of different players into your own playing, I’ve written before that doing so is the beginning of the path to developing your own unique voice, which unlike in sixteenth-century Istanbul is something I’m told is desirable for artists these days.