Composition

Suprised by the Beauty of 20th-Century Music


EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted here with the gracious permission of The Catholic World Report, where it first appeared.

Robert R. Reilly has written about classical music for more than 35 years, including for Crisis magazine, where he was music critic for 16 years. He has also written about music for High Fidelity, Musical America, Schwann/Opus, and the American Record Guide. He is the director of The Westminster Institute, which was established in 2009 to “promote individual dignity and freedom for people throughout the world by sponsoring high-quality research, with a particular focus on the threats from extremism and radical ideologies.” During a quarter century of government service, Reilly worked in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, in the White House under President Ronald Reagan, and in the U. S. Information Agency; he was also the director of Voice of America. In addition to his writings about music, he has written widely on foreign policy, “war of ideas” issues, Islam, and culture.

Surprised by Beauty, by Robert R. Reilly
He recently corresponded with Catholic World Report about a new and expanded edition, published by Ignatius Press, of his book Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music.

CWR: You have been in the military, served in the White House under President Reagan, and were director of Voice of America. How did you become a music critic? And how, in particular, did you become interested in modern classical music? How did you end up writing music reviews for Crisis magazine?

Robert R. Reilly: Well, I was thunderstruck by music when I heard, quite by accident, Jan Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony. By the time the recording was over, I was a changed person. I was 19 years old at the time; my music quest began. I plunged in in search of the experience and for an explanation as to why I had had it. What was it about? French poet René Char wrote that the “grace of the stars resides in their compelling us to speak.” This music compelled me to speak. So, some 15 years later, after I gained the right vocabulary and enough experience, I began writing about it and the other treasures I had discovered. As you pointed out, this was not my day job. My day job was fighting the Evil Empire.

So, as an avocation, I wrote for a number of musical journals like High Fidelity and Musical America. Then Deal Hudson, whom I did not know at the time, moved to Washington, DC, to take over Crisis magazine. He came to my house and, out of the blue, asked me to contribute a monthly article about classical music. He is one of those rare conservatives who are culturally literate in every sphere, including classical music, about which he is equally enthused. I did that for 16 years.

It was Deal who suggested that we publish a book of my essays. It turned out that most of what I had written was about 20th century music. That had not occurred by any design of mine or his. That book, the first edition of Surprised by Beauty, came out in 2002, with Deal as the publisher.

Lo and behold, some 14 years later, now the second edition of the book is out – this time from Ignatius Press. It is more than twice as long as the original and completely revised. There is so much more good news about the recovery of modern music in this listening guide. I hope readers will be enticed to explore some of the many CD recommendations in it. I emphasize that this is not a book with technical jargon written for music specialists. It is for the general reader who has an open mind, an open heart, and who opens his ears.

CWR: The terms “modern music” and “modern classical music” are usually not met positively by those who hold to more traditional beliefs about the arts, culture, and religion. Is it the case, however, that stereotypes and assumptions have obscured necessary distinctions between various composers, movements, and schools of music?

Reilly: Modern art strove hard to earn its bad reputation. It succeeded. People fled the concert halls because they did not want to hear what sounded like a catastrophe in a boiler factory. Likewise, many people shunned modern painting when canvases looked like someone had spilled a plate of spaghetti. Modern architecture seemed to be a contest as to who could design a building that best disguised the fact that human beings would be in it.

Unfortunately, the avant-garde gained control over the levers of the art world – by which I mean the commissions, the prizes, the positions in academe, the cultural press, etc. Unless you played ball with the avant-garde, your artistic goose was cooked. This was not true for some of the giants who continued to write in the traditional tonal manner, but it was decidedly true for the up-and-coming younger composers from the mid-20th century until about 20 years ago. They suffered a lot.

The whole point of my book is to announce that it is safe to come out of the bomb shelters now. Not only is beautiful music being written again but, it turns out, beautiful music was written all along, throughout the 20th century. It simply went underground. Some of it was suppressed (literally the case in some Communist regimes), some of it was simply neglected, but it is surfacing once again. And it is glorious. These are the composers I write about in this book, along with the recommended recordings of their works. They are the other 20th century about which most people have never heard – though there are a number of composers, like Samuel Barber, Benjamin Britten, and Ralph Vaughan Williams, whom they probably have heard of, who are in the book. Of course, I also include contemporary composers. The tremendously good news is that we are living at the time of a major musical renaissance.

CWR: In the Introduction, “Is Music Sacred?”, you explain how the destructive musical revolution of the 1920s, directed by Schoenberg and others, rejected tonality and melody. What were some of the deeper reasons for this revolution? In what way does that revolution relate to the cultural upheavals in Western societies?

Reilly: Yes, there were deeper reasons that were ultimately metaphysical and spiritual. Music, art, and architecture reflected a wholesale rejection of form, which is another way of saying Nature. I recall one artist saying, “If I don’t do anything else in my artistic life, I want to smash form” – which expresses, shall we say, a certain resentment of reality.

Going back to Pythagoras, the traditional understanding of music held that it was somehow an approximation of “the music of the spheres.” In fact, Pythagoras thought that music was the ordering principle of the world. The whole point of approximating the heavenly harmony was to instill inner harmony in the soul. Following Pythagoras, Plato taught that “rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful”. This idea of “the music of the spheres” runs through the history of Western civilization with an extraordinary consistency, even up to the 20th century. At first, it was meant literally; later, poetically.

Then it was rejected. The radical metaphysics of modernity denied the existence of Nature as a teleological order. Things no longer had inbuilt ends or purposes. In other words, there was no longer a “harmony of the spheres” to approximate. Some such understanding led Arnold Schoenberg to his chilling statement that he had been “cured of the delusion that the artist’s aim is to create beauty.” Here we see the complete loss of vocation. Ugliness became a norm. If external order does not exist, then music collapses in on itself and deteriorates into an obsession with techniques. Music degenerated into a manipulation of sounds without discernible form. The new serial school of music, created by Schoenberg, systematized dissonance in such a way that harmony could no longer be heard. He claimed that tonality did not exist in Nature, but was simply a convention that man made up. Harmony and melody went out the window. Of course, to a large extent, I think this happened because of a spiritual crisis, a loss of faith. The most popular American classical composer today, John Adams, said that he had “learned in college that tonality died somewhere around the time that Nietzsche’s God died, and I believed it.”

The impact of nihilism on the arts of the 20th century was succinctly explained by the late English conductor Colin Davis in an interview:

Have you read The Sleepwalkersby Herman Broch? In it, Broch analyzes the disintegration of Western values from the Middle Ages onward. After man abandoned the idea that is nature was in part divine, the logical mind assumed control and began to try to deduce the first principles of man’s nature through rational analysis. The arts followed a similar course: each art turned in upon itself, and reduced itself further and further by logical analysis until today they have all just about analyze themselves out of existence.

I think we should also not forget the contribution made by the horrors of World Wars I and II. I think one thing that drove artists deeper into abstraction was what they considered the ugliness of reality. The uglier the reality, the more abstract the art – as a means of escaping from it. Of course, at a certain point the art was no longer “abstract” – as it was not a discernible abstraction of anything. It was really an attempt to create an alternate reality – what turned out to be a false reality. For instance, Schoenberg said that, through habituation or conditioning, we would soon hear dissonance as consonance. Of course, this did not happen. German composer Claus Ogerman hilariously referred to many modern avant-garde compositions by saying, “It’s as if you had a factory producing things that weren’t working.”

Just as the loss of tonality, melody and harmony in music reflected a spiritual loss, composers like Adams speak of the return to tonality in today’s music as, first and foremost, a spiritual recovery.

CWR: You offer a striking quote from British composer John Tavener – a convert to Eastern Orthodoxy – about recovering “one simple memory from which all art derives.” What is that memory? And how do you think it relates to Beauty as an objective, eternal quality?

Reilly: Tavener answers your question as to what it is a memory of. He said, “The constant memory of the Paradise from which we have fallen leads to the Paradise which was promised to the repentant thief.” Most movingly, he elsewhere wrote, “The gentleness of our sleepy recollections promises something else; that which was once perceived ‘as in a glass, darkly’ we shall see ‘face to face’.” Obviously, Tavener speaks here from Corinthians explicitly as a Christian, as it is Christ whom we shall see “face-to-face.” This is what his music is about.

Other composers make it clear in different ways that the highest vocation of art is hieratic – to make the transcendent perceptible. Sibelius said that in his struggle to compose his Fifth Symphony it was as if “God the Father had thrown down pieces of mosaic out of the heaven’s floor and asked me to solve how the picture once looked.” That is a lovely Platonic reflection. Elsewhere, he wrote that “The essence of man’s being is his striving after God. It [composition] is brought to life by means of the Logos, the divine in art. That is the only thing that really has significance.”

As to your other question, God, of course, is Beauty. So if music is going to make the transcendent perceptible, it has to be beautiful. But this beauty is not necessarily soothing. It can shake you to the core of your being, as can any encounter with the Divine.

CWR: One idea that is repeated throughout the book is that the many composers you write about reject the idea that “the past has no meaning.” Why is this stance so important? How does a composer’s view of the past affect their writing?

Reilly: The goddess Mnemosyne was mother of the arts – the nine muses – in ancient Greece. Her name means “memory”. Without memory, there is no art – or really anything else. Some modern artists developed the artistic equivalent of Alzheimer’s. Schoenberg said, “I am conscious of having removed all traces of a past aesthetic.” Indeed. Even worse, French composer Pierre Boulez proclaimed, “Once the past has been got out of the way, one need think only of oneself.”

The serial method guaranteed disorientation – so you had no means of telling where you were in a composition. British composer Nicholas Maw spoke specifically to the loss of memory that this involved: “The problem for me was that serialism rejected whole areas of musical experience. I later realized the difficulty was that it’s an invented language that deals only with the moment as it passes. There is neither long-term nor short-term memory. You could even say that the memory is suppressed.”

My late friend, American composer Steve Albert, said to me, “What was going on was the massive denial of memory. No one can remember a twelve-tone row. The very method obliterates memory’s function in art.” “There is no virtue,” declared American composer George Rochberg, “in starting all over again. The past refuses to be erased. Unlike Boulez, I will not praise amnesia.” So Rochberg strove “for authenticity linked to the longing for immortality” and against “the forgetting of being.” As he expressed it to me in a personal letter, what stands out clearly is “my insistence on memorability, remembering, remembering, remembering, without which we know not ourselves or anyone, the past, the evanescent present, [and] face only a blank future.”

The end result of the Alzheimer school of music is that the work of its adherents has itself largely been forgotten – because it contains nothing memorable. Part of the good news is that their game is up.

CWR: In your extensive study of these neo-tonal composers, who seek to bring beauty and tradition back into “classical” music, have you noticed any common threads regarding religious belief and/or practice (or even searching) among them?

Reilly: Well, the thread in common is the underlying spiritual thirst for beauty, rather than any specific religious belief or practice, though a number of the composers I cover are Christian. For instance, here is what Rochberg, the American composer who had more to do with the break from Schoenberg’s serialism than any other, told me when I read to him Schoenberg’s remark about being “cured of the delusion that the artist’s aim is to create beauty.” Rochberg responded, “But I have re-embraced the art of beauty but with a madness. Absolutely. That is the only reason to want to write music. The only reason. But what do I mean by what is beautiful? I mean that which is genuinely expressive, even if it hurts… Music remains what it has always been: a sign that man is capable of transcending the limits and constraints of his material existence.”

I think that very effectively sums it up. Beauty – transcendent beauty – is the only thing that can slake their thirst, and that is what they seek.

CWR: Some of the composers you discuss came of age after the school of Schoenberg began its damage to tonality, and reacted against this from the start. What are some reasons they give for that reaction? Others wrote atonally themselves before changing their tune, if you will. What sort of things seem to have effected their change of heart?

Reilly: Actually, almost all of the composers in the book were schooled in Schoenberg’s system; it was still de rigueur indoctrination in the music schools. And most of them initially wrote in the serial system. They turned against it for various reasons, but most of them experienced what Plato would call a turning of the soul. What sparked that turning of the soul? Some of them will talk about it; some of them will not. When Arvo Pärt turned against modernism, he retreated to a Russian Orthodox monastery for several years of silence. The Soviet authorities were not too pleased when he emerged and began composing again – because he wrote Credo.

Some composers I know of turned against it because of its inadequacy to deal with what they experienced in a death in the family. To express what they needed, they had to return to tonal music. Others, like Finnish composer Einojuhani Rautavaara, simply said, “I realized that I was not able to express myself according to the laws of Darmstadt, of serialism.” He told me he completely agreed with Sibelius’s description of a composer’s vocation.

To get some overall perspective, here is something worth quoting at length from Ken Fuchs. He wrote to me:

It is amazing to see now, from the vantage of over 25 years, what was actually happening. We really were at the beginning of a movement. The whole generation before that was so musically dry and barren and acrid and arid. Thank God people had the courage of their convictions to write music invested with feeling and emotion! . . . I remember all too well, as a student at Juilliard in the late 70s and early 80s, what that felt like. Even during those years, well after the shift had started, it was a very steep climb out of a trench… it took a LOT of courage in that heady environment to write truthful music in a style that would eventually become part of “the new Romanticism.”

CWR: Who are some composers whose change regarding atonality was particularly dramatic or surprising?

Reilly: That’s easy to answer: George Rochberg. He was the golden boy of the American avant-garde, the most accomplished American composer in Schoenberg’s serial system. Then he turned against it, and returned to tonal music. It caused an absolute scandal. Why did he do it? He said, “I could not continue writing so-called serial music. It was finished, hollow, meaningless.” In this case, his conversion was occasioned by his teenage son’s death from cancer. Rochberg said, “It was a shock of a kind that necessitated a new sense of how I had to live the rest of my life.” He told me, “I couldn’t breathe anymore. I needed air. I was tired of the same round of manipulating the pitches, vertically and horizontally… You have to work your way out of this labyrinth, this maze, so that you can be free and you can once again sing.”

This led Rochberg to issue a kind of manifesto when he published his great Third String Quartet. In part, it said:

The pursuit of art is much more than achieving technical mastery of means or even a personal style; it is a spiritual journey toward the transcendence of art and of the artist’s ego. In my time of turning, I have had to abandon the notion of originality in which the personal style of the artist and his ego are the supreme values; the pursuit of the one idea, uni-dimensional work and gesture, which seems to have dominated the aesthetics of art in the 20th century; and the received idea that it is necessary to divorce oneself from the past…. In these ways, I am turning away from what I consider the cultural pathology of my own time toward what can only be called a possibility: that music can be renewed by regaining contact with the tradition and means of the past, to re-emerge as a spiritual force with re-activated powers or structure; and, as I see it, these things are only possible with tonality.

I think that about says it all. Rochberg was a hero to me, and I was very moved by the fact that we became friends. What a privilege!

CWR: Which of these composers or compositions have had a special or personal impact upon you as a listener, critic, and lover of beautiful music?

Reilly: Well, I’ve already told you about Sibelius’s Fifth Symphony, but I continue to be surprised by beauty. There really seems to be no end of it, which is a joy that I want to share. My one frustration was with the large number of composers I had to leave out of the book because it was getting too big for Ignatius Press to handle.

Wait till your readers discover John Kinsella, the octogenarian Irish composer who just finished his Eleventh Symphony. Did you know there was a major symphonist working in Ireland who has created music that is viscerally thrilling and possessed of true magnificence? It’s extremely exciting to make discoveries like this, and then have the privilege of communicating with the composer, as I have over the past several years, about his life and work.

Then there are the contemporary American composers like Ken Fuchs, Morten Lauridsen, and Jonathan Leshnoff who are writing such startlingly beautiful music. There are also amazing discoveries from the past, like the symphonies of English composer Edmund Rubbra, a Catholic convert, who wrote 11 symphonies, four Masses, and a good deal of chamber music. His music is ruminative, rhapsodic, and, finally exultant, ecstatic, entering heaven in a vision. It is not to be missed.

I could go on, but the truth is that all the composers in the book had a special impact upon me, which is why I wrote about them.

CWR: This is the second edition of Surprised By Beauty. What are some additions and changes from the previous edition? How did Jens F. Laurson contribute to this new edition?

Reilly: As I mentioned, this edition is twice as long as the original and contains many more composers. Also, what was in the original edition has been revised, expanded, and brought up to date in terms of CD recommendations.

Jens Laurson is a brilliant young German music critic. We actually met when he was in Washington studying for a master’s degree back in 2002. He read the first edition of Surprised by Beauty and that began a very lively conversation between us. He could read music before he could read German. He sang in the Regensburg Choir, conducted by Benedict XVI’s brother [Monsignor Georg Ratzinger].

Jens then began writing music criticism for the Washington Post, WETA classical music radio station in DC, and Ionarts, an arts blog. Since returning to Germany, he has become one of the foremost music critics writing in Europe. Few can equal him in style or insight. I was delighted that he agreed to be a contributing author to this new edition. He has contributed new chapters on Walter Braunfels, Erich Wolfgang Korngold, Eric Zeisl, and Franz Mittler, Ahmed Saygun, Othmar Schoeck, and together we wrote the chapter on Shostakovich. What’s more, Jens helped to thoroughly revise the discographies for all the composers in the book and added his own CD recommendations to mine. I think that if there is a third edition of Surprised by Beauty in 10 years, he will be the main author and I will be a contributing author. At least, I hope so.

Composition

Fighting Back: Thoughts on Robert R. Reilly


Robert R. Reilly was the music critic for Crisis magazine for 16 years, and is still reviewing concerts and operas for Ionarts. He is an assiduous follower of modern music for the concert hall, and has for many years been a champion of beauty against noise and of tonality against the avant-garde. His reviews of recordings have been collected in a single volume – Surprised by Beauty – now reissued in an expanded edition by the author in association with Jens F. Laurson. The result is an indispensable guide to the forbidden land of real contemporary music, a map of the vast catacomb of serene and consoling masterworks, hidden beneath the field of fashionable noise. The downpour of state and academic subsidies, which keeps the noise industry going, does not seep through to this underworld, which is nurtured solely by the passion of its devotees. But it is the place to which real music has retreated and Reilly’s aim is to show how easily you too can visit it, thanks to the adventurous recording companies who have been there first. Moreover much of this real music has found its way onto YouTube, and it is an unusual pleasure to summon up the pieces that Reilly describes as you read his penetrating descriptions of them.

It should be said that Reilly is no ordinary music critic. A former US Army armoured cavalry officer, who has served in government under President Reagan and in the United States Information Agency, and who has also been director of Voice of America, he could fairly claim to have been conducting the battle for our civilisation simultaneously on all available fronts. He has written with knowledge and insight about the historical origins of Islamism in the Ash‘arite theology that came to dominate Muslim thinking in the 11th century. His book – The Closing of the Muslim Mind – is beginning to have the influence that it deserves, as we ask why it is that Islamists have no other recourse, in the encounter with those who disagree with them, than to kill as many as they can. What goes wrong, when people seriously believe that they believe something, while forbidding all debate as to its truth? This – the question on which civilisations turn – has troubled Reilly as it ought to trouble us all.

If I were to single out the features of Western civilisation that justify our defence of it, and which seem to be so palpably absent from the barbarism with which the Islamists wish to replace it, the tradition of classical music would be high on the list. Reilly clearly sees things in the same way, and is as distressed as I am by the fact that a deliberate attempt has been made to bring that tradition to an end. The noise industry has conquered the faculties of musicology and composition, has displaced harmony and counterpoint from the curriculum, and set up shop with acoustic laboratories in the heart of every music school. It has equipped itself with theories, critics, and schools of composition that maintain a vigilant and censorious presence in the culture. It tells us that we must like Birtwistle, Boulez, Carter, and Nørgård if we are to show any real understanding of the modern world and the modern ear. And it rests its case in the destructive theology of the Zeitgeist, which has dominated the understanding of art since Hegel. Music, it tells us, must always be progressing, always saying something new, always conquering unexplored territory. It can never go back, never stay in one place, never be comfortable with the way things are. Any attempt to repeat the devices and effects of the past will inevitably be “inauthentic,” “pastiche,” or just “kitsch.”

In itself that collection of clichés is harmless, and could be ritualistically uttered by someone writing in the idiom of Richard Strauss or Vaughan Williams. The problem for modern music arose, however, from the way in which, thanks in part to Schoenberg, in part to Adorno and his followers, and in part to the Darmstadt school, ideas came to displace feelings as the source of musical creation. The twelve-tone serial technique gave a new theory of music, and a new way of learning to arrange pitched sounds in sequence without reference to melody or harmony. Adorno’s critical attack on the “regression in listening,” and on the exhausted nature of the old tonal sequences, made composers afraid to write tunes, for fear that the result would be merely “banal.” And then came Boulez and Stockhausen, clever charlatans who were able to intimidate the world of music lovers into believing that there could be no future for music if Boulez and Stockhausen were not put in charge of it. The fact that the resulting music was entirely without appeal was put out of mind as irrelevant. The point was the charm of the theory, not the sound of the result. A concert-hall from which the audience has fled is not a cultural disaster if a group of state-subsidized zombies is making noises at one end of it.

We have lived through all that, and, as I pointed out in my obituary of Boulez on this site, the whole thing was founded on a mistake. Music is not an arrangement of “pitched sounds” in mathematical permutations. It is a dynamic process in virtual space, a form of movement in which static sounds become goal-directed tones, and simultaneous pitches are magically blended into chords. The whole enterprise of acoustical research, which for Boulez and Stockhausen spelled the way forward into the music of the future, was based on a false conception of the musical ear. It was precisely by building on theory rather than intuitive understanding that the music of the future ceased to be music, and became instead a dance of spectres in a mausoleum of sounds.

We have put that episode behind us. But it leaves us with the great question that is at the forefront of Reilly’s writing about modern music: the question of a “live tradition.” How can the tradition of the classical concert hall survive the assaults of the avant-garde? Conscious repetition of learned effects does not amount to real musical content, and mere competence will always leave a “so what?” impression in the listener’s mind. So might there be some truth in Adorno’s argument that we can no longer write tonal music, since the result will always be repetitious and banal, a rearrangement of stock effects that have lost their meaning for the authentic musical ear?

Surely the way to answer that question is not to go on producing theories and counter-theories, but to listen. We need to go down for a long spell into the forbidden land of melody, and hear what its denizens are up to. And the result, Reilly shows, is truly surprising. There really are tunes down there, and they really do soar and move and enchant as tunes have always done. There is harmony, rhythm, and development too. It all goes on as before, vital but unacknowledged, like the rituals of a forbidden religion. Reilly is voluble in his praise of melody: he finds it especially in Samuel Barber, whom he credits as a founding father of modern American music, the one who never betrayed the heart for the head, and who showed how to be entirely original while speaking to every musical person.

Reilly’s search for melody leads him to concentrate on the modern symphony, whose practitioners have remained true to the classical heritage, taking intelligible thematic material and developing it in comprehensive arches of melodic and harmonic invention. It was precisely this heritage that Adorno most fervently attacked, since the symphony represents the bourgeoisie, subdued after a day in the office, slowly and peaceably recuperating in the concert hall as another group of workers toil in tuxedos for their comfort. The great symphonies of Sibelius, with their romantic evocation of the landscape beyond the villa window, were, for Adorno, an offense against modern life, as were the comparable outrages of Nielsen, Vaughan Williams, and Roy Harris – all escapist fantasies for the after-dinner hours of the bourgeoisie.

Yet composers continue to be drawn to the symphony, the concerto and the string quartet, and Reilly has uncovered and described for the reader much of this hidden treasure – hidden because those who create it believe that beauty and humanity are essential to the artistic enterprise, and that clever mathematics can never be a substitute for real musical form. Among symphonists who have called forth Reilly’s praise several were all but unknown to me – including the Dane Vagn Holmboe (19091996), composer of thirteen symphonies in a hectic idiom of their own, the Irishman John Kinsella, and the American Stephen Albert. Indeed reading Reilly’s gripping chapters, with YouTube on the screen, was both an education in itself, and a source of shame to me, who have defended tonality all these years without realising that it is a live tradition, constantly renewing itself in defiance of an academic orthodoxy that denies its right to exist.

One modern symphonist has commanded the affection of concert-going audiences throughout the contemporary world, and that is Dmitri Shostakovich, whose great, cloying, and self-dramatizing works, with their no-holds barred assault on the listener’s emotions, both real and fake, have somehow defeated the critical outcry from the avant-garde. The special circumstances under which Shostakovich lived and worked, forced to address the people in officially sanctioned accents, while covertly reaching out to his fellow sufferers from the regime of violence and lies, have silenced the scoffers and the kitsch-hunters. This is serious music for a serious audience in a serious world. And it is gripping, eloquent and, in its demonic way, enjoyable, replete with melodies, some banal, and none exactly lovely, but melodies nevertheless.

Is it only the special and deplorable situation in which Shostakovich composed that explains his mysterious grandeur? Can we learn from him, and can we, in our pampered conditions, risk such a direct appeal to the audience? Reilly does not answer those questions; instead, in a learned and wide-ranging essay, he reflects on the desolation that haunts Shostakovich’s works. “If Shostakovich’s symphonies are tombstones,” he writes, “the 15 quartets are the flowers he lays on the graves.” Of the last quartet, composed of six uninterrupted adagios, Reilly makes the parallel with Haydn’s Seven Last Words of Christ on the Cross, suggesting that, appearances to the contrary, Shostakovich, a professed unbeliever, was not a nihilist but a seeker after consolation, who believed that the spirit of song and dance will eventually banish despair. But Reilly admits that in the grotesqueries of the 4th Symphony we confront torment, death, brutality, violence, and drunken destruction with little respite and no redemption promised.

Well, that period of history is over. And Americans never had to suffer it in any case. So how does the symphonic tradition fare in America? Reilly quotes Stephen Albert, who decisively rejected twelve-tone serialism, with its implied premise that “the past has no meaning. What was going on,” Albert wrote, “was the massive denial of memory. No one can remember a 12-tone row. The very method obliterates memory’s function in art.” (Compare Fred Lehrdahl’s attack on Le marteau sans maître, to which I refer in my obituary of Boulez.) Albert turned to Shostakovich for inspiration, and also to the earlier masters such as Sibelius and Stravinsky. Shostakovich was the initial inspiration also for another American symphonist, Steven Gerber, who gradually worked towards his own very American idiom with his Spirituals for String Orchestra and Serenade Concertante. And the good news to which Reilly constantly returns is that the younger generation is taking composers like Albert and Gerber seriously. This we discover in the Violin Concerti of Jonathan Leshnoff and Jennifer Higdon, both works of beauty and both increasingly popular.

For Reilly the case of Albert’s teacher, George Rochberg, is of the first importance. Rochberg was educated as a modernist and for twenty or more years composed serial music, teaching in the music department of the University of Pennsylvania, and obeying all the usual strictures of the avant-garde, avoiding melody and tonal progressions and writing music for the high-brow (which is to say, brow-beaten) listener. And then, in 1964, his teenage son died of a brain tumour. Urgently needing to express his grief, Rochberg found the serial idiom entirely incapable of meeting that need. It seemed suddenly sterile, abstract, intellectual in the negative sense, as though it had been deliberately cleansed of all reference to human emotion.

That was when Rochberg set out to compose in a tonal idiom, modeling himself on the Beethoven quartets, because they were the deepest example that he knew of music that expresses emotion, orders it as only music can order it, and in doing so brings consolation to the sufferer. Rochberg’s return to tonality has caused predictable outrage. As a modernist, teaching the pure gospel of Nothingness to innocent neophytes, he was naturally under observation from the censors. Critics have crowded into the space he tried to create, in order to trash it. The charge is repeatedly made, and not only by serial dogmatists, that Rochberg’s assumption of tonality is “pastiche,” the imitation of musical expression rather than a real instance of it.

Last year I had the honour to deliver the annual lecture established in memory of Dr Lloyd Old at the City University of New York. (Dr Lloyd, in addition to his enormous achievements as an oncologist, was a keen and accomplished violinist and a paragon of the old New York concert-going culture.) The theme of the lectures, established by Dr Lloyd’s sister, Constance Lloyd, is modern music and where it is going, and I had the benefit of a string quartet, provided by the Brook Centre for Musical Research, in order to illustrate my argument. I tried as best I could to rehearse what is at stake in the dispute between the classicists and the avant-garde, and then I handed it over to the audience to judge. The quartet played three pieces: The first movement from Tippett’s fresh and energetic Second String Quartet, Webern’s Bagatelles for string quartet, and the third movement of George Rochberg’s Sixth String Quartet, which consists of variations on Pachelbel’s canon in D.

The Webern produced pursed lips and furrowed brows, as the audience strove to match the terse stabs with which the instruments puncture the silence – a wonderful effect, of course, but one on the very edge of musical meaning. The Tippett, moving in a space of its own, but never far from tonal harmony, seemed to produce no response from the audience at all. But when it came to the Rochberg the majority were visibly moved, the members of the quartet playing with great emotion, completely at one with the work, as they were not really at one with either the Webern or the Tippett. I was back in the world of the classical concert, in which audience and musicians are united by an unseen web of sympathy, producing music together out of their shared and rapt attention.

As soon as the lecture ended, however, I found myself surrounded by keen graduate students from the Brook Centre, telling me how absolutely awful the Rochberg movement is, how it is impossible to write like that and mean it, and how the piece should never be played. The contrast between the young musicians to whom the future of their art was being entrusted, and the audience on which they will depend for their livelihood, could not have been more striking. The break with tradition was clear. As for Tippett – yes, honest stuff as far it goes. But going round in circles in an enclosed English garden.

The argument goes on, riveting, vital, and inconclusive. No one is more accomplished in defending the tonal tradition, or better informed about its real recent achievements, than Robert Reilly. His book should be on every serious music lover’s shelves, and readers should consult it whenever, in a world of relentless and erudite noise, they are surprised by beauty, and wish to hunt down the criminal responsible.

 

Surprised by Beauty: A Listener’s Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music, by Robert R. Reilly, is published by the Ignatius Press in San Francisco and is available in our bookstore.

Business

Classical Music’s New Golden Age


EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted here with the gracious permission of City Journal, who first published it in the Summer 2010 issue of their magazine.

Anyone inclined to lament the state of classical music today should read Hector Berlioz’s Memoires. As the maverick French composer tours mid-nineteenth-century Europe conducting his revolutionary works, he encounters orchestras unable to play in tune and conductors who can’t read scores. A Paris premiere of a Berlioz cantata fizzles when a missed cue sets off a chain reaction of paralyzed silence throughout the entire sorry band. Most infuriating to this champion of artistic integrity, publishers and conductors routinely bastardize the scores of Mozart, Beethoven, and other titans, conforming them to their own allegedly superior musical understanding or to the narrow taste of the public.

Berlioz’s exuberant tales of musical triumph and defeat constitute the most captivating chronicle of artistic passion ever written. They also lead to the conclusion that, in many respects, we live in a golden age of classical music. Such an observation defies received wisdom, which seizes on every symphony budget deficit to herald classical music’s imminent demise. But this declinist perspective ignores the more significant reality of our time: never before has so much great music been available to so many people, performed at levels of artistry that would have astounded Berlioz and his peers. Students flock to conservatories and graduate with skills once possessed only by a few virtuosi. More people listen to classical music today, and more money gets spent on producing and disseminating it, than ever before. Respect for a composer’s intentions, for which Berlioz fought so heroically, is now an article of faith among musicians and publishers alike.

True, the tidal wave of creation that generated the masterpieces we so magnificently perform is spent; we’re left to scavenge the marvels that it cast up. The musical language that united Bach, Schubert, Mahler, and Prokofiev finally dissolved into inaccessible atonalism by the mid-twentieth century; subsequent efforts to reconstitute it have yet to gather the momentum of the past. But in recompense for living in an age of musical re-creation, we occupy a vast musical universe, far larger than the one that surrounded a nineteenth-century resident of Paris or Vienna. We can hear the beauty in the poignant chromaticism of Gesualdo and the mysterious silences of C.P.E. Bach, no less than in the by now more familiar cadences of Beethoven and Brahms.

And at a time when much of the academy has lost interest in history, contemporary classical-music culture is one of the last redoubts of the humanist impulse. The desire to know the past has grown white-hot among certain musicians over the last 50 years, resulting in a performance revolution that is the most dynamic musical development in recent times.

 

A twenty-first-century music lover plunged into the concert world of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries would find himself in an alien land, surrounded by strange customs and parochial tastes. Works that we now regard as formally perfect were dismembered: only a single movement of a work’s full three or four might ever be performed, with the remaining movements regarded as inessential. Musical forms, such as the sonata, that are central to contemporary performance practice were kept out of the concert hall, considered too difficult for the public to absorb. And the universal loathing directed by today’s audiences at the hapless recipient of a mid-performance cell-phone call would have struck eighteenth-century audiences as provincial, given the widespread use of concerts and opera as pleasant backdrops for lively conversation.

But the greatest difference between the musical past and present is what we might call musical teleology: the belief that music progresses over time. That belief had consequences that many contemporary listeners and musicians would find shocking. Throughout much of Western history, older works held little interest for average listeners – they wanted the most up-to-date styles in singing and harmony. Seventeenth-century Venetians shunned last year’s operas; nineteenth-century Parisians yawned at the elegant entertainments written for the Sun King. Composers like Bach, today viewed as cornerstones of Western civilization, were seen as impossibly old-fashioned several decades after their deaths. In his 1823 Life of Rossini, Stendhal wondered: “What will happen in twenty years’ time when The Barber of Seville [composed in 1816] will be as old-fashioned as Il Matrimonio Segreto [a 1792 opera by Domenico Cimarosa] or Don Giovanni [1787]?” Stendhal’s musical crystal ball obviously had its flaws.

Berlioz was in many ways a musical teleologist himself, but he fiercely opposed the widespread outcome of the belief in musical progress: the posthumous rewriting of scores. Performers and publishers unapologetically revised works that we now regard as transcendent, seeking to correct their perceived deficiencies and bring them up to newer standards of orchestration and harmony. After describing a particularly brutal mauling of The Magic Flute for its 1801 Paris premiere and a dumbing-down of Carl Maria von Weber’s Der Freischütz, Berlioz erupts: “Thus, dressed as apes, got up grotesquely in cheap finery, one eye gouged out, an arm withered, a leg broken, two men of genius were introduced to the French public! …No, no, no, a million times no! You musicians, you poets, prose-writers, actors, pianists, conductors, whether of third or second or even first rank, you do not have the right to meddle with a Shakespeare or a Beethoven, in order to bestow on them the blessings of your knowledge and taste.”

Conservative pedagogues altered scores as well – on the ground that they were too modern. Berlioz headed off at the last minute what he called “emasculations” to Beethoven’s avant-garde harmonies that the influential music critic and teacher François-Joseph Fétis had surreptitiously introduced into a forthcoming edition of Beethoven’s symphonies.

For all Berlioz’s efforts to preserve the score’s integrity, however – during a performance of Gluck’s Iphigénie en Tauride, he shouted from the audience: “There are no cymbals there. Who has dared to correct Gluck?” – he could not dislodge the practice of “improving” older works of music. Virtuosi added to a piece whatever fireworks the composer had carelessly neglected to include. In 1837, Franz Liszt had a pang of conscience over his habit of pumping up his performances of Beethoven, Weber, and Johann Nepomuk Hummel with rapid runs and cadenzas. He briefly saw the error of his ways: “I no longer divorce a composition from the era in which it was written, and any claim to embellish or modernize the works of earlier periods seems just as absurd for a musician to make as it would be for an architect, for example, to place a Corinthian capital on the columns of an Egyptian temple.” But he soon fell off the wagon and went back to crowd-wowing revisions, reports Kenneth Hamilton in his mesmerizing study of Romantic pianism, After the Golden Age.

Over the course of the nineteenth century, the concept of a musical canon emerged and displaced the zeal for new music in concert programming. Yet the updating of scores continued. Gustav Mahler added new parts for horns, trombones, and other instruments when he conducted Beethoven’s symphonies. An influential edition of Beethoven’s piano sonatas by the pianist and conductor Hans von Bülow recommended that pianists substitute Liszt’s ending of theHammerklavier Sonata for Beethoven’s own, “to give the closing measures the requisite brilliancy.”

Even in the canon-revering twentieth century, the teleologists remained cheeky. Arnold Schoenberg explained his reorchestration of Handel’s Concerti Grossi, op. 6, as remedying an “insufficiency with respect to thematic invention and development [that] could satisfy no sincere contemporary of ours.” At the start of a 1927 recording of Chopin’s Black Key Étude, the pianist Vladimir de Pachmann announces: “The left hand of this étude is entirely altered from Chopin: it’s better, modernized, more melodic, you know.” A contemporary listener, drawn to Beethoven, Handel, and Chopin precisely for what is unique in their voice and sensibility, can only marvel at the confidence with which earlier generations declared such music in need of improvement.

 

In the second half of the twentieth century, a performance practice broke out that rejected, in the strongest possible way, the teleological understanding of music. An overwhelming drive possessed certain conductors, instrumentalists, and singers to re-create the music of the pre-Classical era – from the medieval through the baroque periods – as it was performed at the time of its composition.

These musicians discarded the modern steel-strung and -armatured instruments that had evolved in the nineteenth century and learned to play the gut-strung, fragile instruments of the Renaissance and baroque periods. They pored over music treatises, prints, and other historical materials to discover, say, how a seventeenth-century violinist attacked his instrument, how he handled the shorter, curved bow of the period, how he phrased and ornamented a line, how much vibrato he used. Needless to say, any thought of “modernizing” a score’s harmonies or orchestration was out of the question. These history-obsessed musicians didn’t want to bring the music of the past into the present; they wanted to enter the past on its own terms. The stylistic particularities of older music that, according to the teleologists, limited its potential, were for these revolutionaries its very essence.

The results were a revelation. The sound of these performances of Bach, Handel, and Vivaldi was light and nuanced; the music pulsed with energy. Trading the large modern orchestra for small baroque ensembles of temperamental instruments was like exchanging a leather-upholstered Cadillac for a frisky, unbroken colt. The premodern horns – unreliable and highly prone to indiscretions – blared out with a glorious astringency. The timpani shot from the orchestra with hair-raising force. Conductors emphasized the dance elements in baroque music, inflecting certain beats within measures as a courtier might beckon to his dance partner. An unfamiliar and seductive voice – the countertenor – emerged to take on roles in baroque operas and masses that castrati originally sang.

This “early-music” movement (also known as “period-instrument” and “authentic-performance”) was a deliberate strike against the classical-music establishment. It provoked a counterreaction and a sharp philosophical debate about the nature of performance and the proper role of historical knowledge in music-making (see appendix). Listeners and performers remain divided over whether the music of Bach and Mozart is best realized by a nineteenth-century-era orchestra using contemporary methods of expression (violinist Itzhak Perlman maintains: “I’m certain Haydn and Mozart would have adored our modern approach to phrasing and vibrato”) or by a small period-instrument ensemble seeking to re-create earlier performance techniques.

But regardless of such disagreements, the value of the movement to our musical life has been indisputable. It has unleashed arguably the most concentrated rediscovery of lost music in history. Composers that had lain silent for centuries – Jean-Féry Rebel, Johann Friedrich Fasch, Heinrich Ignaz Biber, to name just a handful – are heard again. Hundreds of groups of specialists are busily digging into twelfth-century plainchant and thirteenth-century troubadour traditions. Unfamiliar repertoire by overly familiar composers is also being restored. The Naïve label, in one of the greatest recording projects of the early-music movement, is releasing all of Vivaldi’s operas. A wind blows through these magnificent, mostly unpublished works, but even when the rhythms are most propulsive, a deep melancholy pervades the music. Naïve’s recording of the haunting duet for mezzo and chalumeau (a proto-clarinet) from the oratorio Juditha Triumphans, “Veni, me sequere fida,” is alone a contribution to civilization.

The public’s ear for this music has expanded accordingly. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, a few aristocratic salons hosted private performances of Renaissance and early baroque music, but outside those elite settings, there was no commercial demand for pre-Classical music. Today, by contrast, enough people are eager for works from remote eras to put the medieval a cappella ensemble Anonymous 4 on the top of Billboard charts. Jordi Savall’s Renaissance music group Hesperion XXI brings audience members to their feet during performances. Early-music festivals have even reached Missoula, Montana, where Heinrich Schütz’s Musikalisches Exequien was performed in March 2010, and Indianapolis, which offered Spanish ballads from the time of Cervantes in June 2010. The New York vocal group Polyhymnia invites its audience to “glimpse behind the tapestried walls of the ducal court at Munich, to hear the psalms kept for the private use of their patron,” assuming in their listeners the same desire to know the past that animates the performers themselves. Amateurs also perform this previously discarded music. Camps teaching medieval chant are ubiquitous, from Evansville, Indiana, to Litchfield, Connecticut. Reed, viol, and lute players can brush up on their skills at the Summer Texas Toot in Austin; San Jose, California, hosts a workshop for recorder players.

The movement has also demolished one tiresome credo of classical-music critics: that the way to revitalize the concert tradition is to program contemporary music. It is surely the case that the concert repertoire, derived from a narrow slice of the musical universe, is in desperate need of new music. But the critics are wrong in defining “new music” exclusively as contemporary. The public could not be more unequivocal: it finds little emotional significance in most contemporary classical music, especially that produced in academic enclaves. The early-music movement offers two alternative definitions of “new music”: the standard repertoire, such as Mozart’s symphonies, performed in entirely new ways; and unknown repertoire from the pre-Classical period. Though the reinterpretation of the standard repertoire has had the biggest commercial impact, it is the second definition of “new music” that should animate concert programming today. Countless compelling works, not just from the pre-Classical period, cry out for rediscovery: Haydn’s Sturm und Drang symphonies, Dvořák’s piano music, and virtually unknown composers such as Zdeněk Fibich. Thousands of listeners, frustrated by the constricted concert canon, would eagerly support the performance of unknown old music.

 

The caliber of musicianship also marks our age as a golden one for classical music. “When I was young, you knew when you heard one of the top five American orchestras,” says Arnold Steinhardt, the first violinist of the recently disbanded Guarneri Quartet. “Now, you can’t tell. Every orchestra is filled with fantastic players.” Steinhardt is ruthless toward his students when they’re preparing for an orchestra audition. “I’ll tell them in advance: ‘You didn’t get the job. There are 250 violinists competing for that place. You have to play perfectly, and you sure didn’t play perfectly for me.’ ”

The declinists who proclaim the death of classical music might have a case if musical standards were falling. But in fact, “the professional standards are higher everywhere in the world compared to 20 or 40 years ago,” says James Conlon, conductor of the Los Angeles Opera. A vast oversupply of students competing to make a career in music drives this increase in standards.

Much of that student oversupply comes from Asia. “The technical proficiency of the pianists from Asia is staggering,” says David Goldman, a board member at New York’s Mannes College of Music, where applications are at a record high. “They arrive here with these Popeye arms, and never miss a note.” Asia has fallen in love with classical music; many parents believe that music training is an essential part of their children’s development. “The only way to survive when you’re in a pool of literally hundreds of thousands of other Asian kids is to outwork your competition,” says Tom Vignieri, the music producer of the effervescent NPR show From the Top, which showcases school-age classical musicians.

Far Eastern countries are trying to build up their own conservatory system to meet the demand for music training – Robert Dodson, head of the Boston University School of Music, recalls with awe the Singapore Conservatory’s 200,000 square feet of marble – but so far, demand outstrips supply. When Lang Lang, today an internationally acclaimed pianist, was admitted to Beijing’s Central Conservatory in the early 1990s, he was one of 3,000 students who had applied for just 12 fifth-grade spots. And those 3,000 were the cream of the 50 million children who study music in China, including 36 million young pianists.

For now, the West’s conservatories continue to attract Asia’s top talent. Nineteen-year-old Meng-Sheng Shen, a slender freshman at Juilliard, dreamed of a concert career while still a piano student in Taiwan. “In Taiwan, I felt: ‘It’s not that hard to win,’ ” he says. In New York, however, “you see a lot of people who play really well,” Shen marvels, and so this acolyte of Chopin, Liszt, and Rachmaninoff has recalibrated his plans to include the option of teaching as well as concertizing.

Plenty of young Americans, too, are pursuing training in the nation’s 600-plus college music programs, whose unlikely locations, such as at California State University, Fresno, testify to the far-flung desire for musical sublimity. An efficient talent-spotting machine vacuums up promising young oboists and violinists from every Arkansas holler and Oregon farm town and propels them to ever-higher levels of instruction and competition.

The poise and exuberance of these budding performers can be breathtaking. At the 2007 finals for the Metropolitan Opera’s National Council Auditions, a young tenor’s eyes shone with the erotic power of commanding that massive house, a smile of mastery playing over his lips, as he flung out the high Cs of “Ah! mes amis” from Donizetti’s La Fille du Regiment. (The moment was captured in the documentary The Audition.) A self-possessed black pianist from Chicago, Jeremy Jordan, coolly unfurled the feathery arpeggios and midnight harmonies of his own virtuosic transcriptions of Wagner, Richard Strauss, and Saint-Saëns at a Juilliard student recital this year. Beneath Jordan’s laconic demeanor lies a deep belief in classical music. “It’s not as if kids don’t like music like this,” the lanky 20-year-old insists. “Liszt, Wagner, Chopin – it’s beautiful; it just takes one hearing.”

 

But however vibrant classical music’s supply side, many professionals worry that audience demand is growing ever more anemic. Conlon calls this imbalance the “American paradox”: “The growth in the quantity and quality of musicians over the last 50 years is phenomenal. America has more great orchestras than any country in the world. And yet I don’t know of a single orchestra, opera company, or chamber group that isn’t fighting to keep its audience.” The number of Americans over the age of eight who attended a classical-music performance dropped 29 percent from 1982 to 2008, according to the League of American Orchestras (though attendance at all leisure activities plummeted during that period as well, including a 36 percent drop in attendance at sporting events).

Recent conservatory graduates, struggling for work, find their commitment to a music career tested almost daily. “The culture seems to have a shrinking capacity for what I love,” says Jennifer Jackson, a 30-year-old pianist who studied at the Peabody Institute in Baltimore. The audience has a limited ability to follow serious music, Jackson says. “To make a profit, you have to intersperse lots of things that people can handle musically.”

These perceptions, however valid, should be kept in historical perspective. Much of today’s standard repertoire was never intended for a mass audience – not even an 1820s Viennese “mass audience,” much less a 2010 American one. Nineteenth-century performers regarded the music that constitutes the foundation of today’s repertoire with trepidation, since they feared – rightly at the time – that it would prove too challenging for the public. Composers wrote sonatas and chamber works either for students or for private performance in aristocratic salons, not for public consumption. True public concerts – those intended to make a profit – resembled The Ed Sullivan Show, not the reverential communing with greatness that we take for granted today. Light crowd-pleasers – above all, variations on popular opera themes – leavened more serious works, which were unlikely to be performed in their entirety or without a diverting interruption. At the 1806 premiere of Beethoven’s Violin Concerto in Vienna, the violinist played one of his own compositions between the concerto’s first and second movements – on one string while holding his violin upside down. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony premiered at Paris’s leading concert venue in 1832 with romances and tunes by Weber and Rossini spliced between the third movement and the choral finale, according to James Johnson in Listening in Paris.

By the end of the nineteenth century, public concert practice more closely resembled the norm today, with symphonies and sonatas usually performed in their entirety and without other works spliced into them. Many soloists began performing marathon recitals of highly demanding works. This programming of exclusively serious music for public consumption in the late nineteenth century was no more consistent with how that music was originally performed than it is now, and it represented as much of an unforeseen advance in the listening capacities of the public.

 

Today’s classical-music culture differs from the past in one more important way: recording technology. No composer before the advent of the gramophone ever anticipated that his music would be endlessly and effortlessly repeatable. At best, he might hope that his musician friends would give a few additional performances of his latest piece before new styles and works superseded it. The ease of repetition that recording technology enabled puts an enormous strain on the excessively limited canon that emerged from the nineteenth century – one that could have proved fatal. Yet not only have Schubert’s piano sonatas and Chopin’s nocturnes, Beethoven’s string quartets and Brahms’s intermezzi, survived the move from the private salon to the public concert hall; they have triumphed over the potentially stupefying overfamiliarity inflicted on them by instant replay and the accumulating weight of hundreds of thousands of performances. The exquisiteness of this music is such that it continues to seduce, decades and centuries after its expected eclipse.

The radical transformation of how people consume classical music puts the current hand-wringing over an inattentive, shrinking audience in a different perspective. Beethoven’s Eroica Symphony premiered before an audience of 100 at most. These days, probably 10,000 people are listening to it during any given 24-hour period, either live or on record, estimates critic Harvey Sachs. Recordings have expanded the availability of music in astounding ways. The declinists – led by the industry’s most reliable Cassandra, the League of American Orchestras – do not account for how recordings have changed the concert culture beyond recognition.

Recordings have also, it is true, taken a toll on the communal, participatory aspect of music-making. But the explosion of classical music on the Internet has revived some of that communal element. The ever-expanding offerings of performances on YouTube, uploaded simply out of love, demonstrate the passion that unites classical-music listeners. A listener can compare 15 different interpretations of “Là ci darem la mano” at the click of a mouse, all – amazingly – for free. Organized websites, such as the live classical-concert site InstantEncore.com, are creating new ways of disseminating music that will undoubtedly reach new audiences. Even with recording technology’s impetus for passive, private listening, the percentage of amateur musicians studying classical music has risen 30 percent over the last six years, from an admittedly small 1.8 percent to 3 percent. Many of those nonprofessional musicians, as well as their children, are uploading their own performances onto the Web.

Contrary to the standard dirge, the classical recording industry is still shooting out more music than anyone can possibly take in over a lifetime. Has the pace of Beethoven symphony cycles slowed down? We’ll survive. In the course of one month arrive arias by Nicola Porpora, an opera by Federico Ricci, a symphony by Ildebrando Pizzetti – three composers previously known only to musicologists – Cherubini’s Chant sur la Mort de Joseph Haydn, and Haydn’s The Storm. This cornucopia of previously lost works is more than any of us has a right to hope for.

 

The much-publicized financial difficulties of many orchestras during the current recession also need to be put into historical perspective. More people are making a living playing an instrument than ever before, and doing so as respected and well-paid professionals, not lowly drones. There were no professional orchestras during Beethoven’s time; he had to cobble together an ensemble for the premiere of his Ninth Symphony. Even mid-twentieth-century America had no year-round, salaried orchestras. In 1962, most concert seasons were half a year long.

But under pressure from an increasingly militant musicians’ union and with an infusion of funding from the Ford Foundation in 1966, many orchestras started paying their players annual, or close to annual, salaries. In part to justify those higher salaries, orchestras expanded their concert seasons and the frequency of concerts within each season. Neither Beethoven nor Brahms envisioned that a single orchestra would perform three or four concerts a week, critic Joseph Horowitz notes in Classical Music in America, much less that its members would draw six-figure salaries. The low pay of a typical late-nineteenth-century musician made possible the huge orchestral forces that Bruckner and Mahler summoned as a matter of course. Today’s composers usually write for much smaller ensembles, having been priced out of the symphonic form by unionized wages.

Nevertheless, professional orchestras in the US today dwarf in number anything seen in the past. In 1937, there were 96 American orchestras; in 2010, there are more than 350. Where union restrictions don’t exist, the music scene is even more vibrant. Volunteer adult orchestras outnumber professional orchestras two to one. New youth ensembles launch every year; there are now nearly 500 in the United States. Though Los Angeles County alone has more than 40 youth orchestras, the leading state in student involvement is Texas, where more than 57,000 high school musicians auditioned last year for slots in prestigious all-state music ensembles.

Chamber-music groups have also proliferated in the last 50 years. Arnold Steinhardt recalls that back when he was studying the violin, you could count on one hand the number of string quartets and other ensembles: “Chamber music was not a profession then; it was for people who weren’t good enough to have a solo career.” Nowadays, new quartets form constantly, many associated with colleges and universities. It took nearly the entire nineteenth century for the string-quartet repertoire to broaden its appeal beyond a narrow band of connoisseurs; today, the audience for chamber music extends far beyond traditional urban centers of culture. Iowa City hosted a Haydn quartet “slam” last year in honor of the 200th anniversary of the composer’s death. String players from ages eight to 78 performed all 83 of Haydn’s quartets.

It is fair to ask whether the foundation-fueled postwar expansion of orchestras artificially and unsustainably pumped up the supply of musicians and ensembles. But there is ample evidence of a continuing unmet demand for classical music throughout the country – especially in places that can’t afford the salaries and long seasons that America’s unionized musicians expect. This March, the New York Times’s invaluable Daniel Wakin chronicled the travails of the Moscow State Radio Symphony Orchestra as it slogged through a poorly paid nine-week bus tour to smaller cities and towns around America – places like Ashland, Kentucky, and Zanesville, Ohio, which are “hungry for classical music programming.”

It’s even harder to spot a demand deficit at the other end of the glamour spectrum. Though Wagner fans incessantly lament the shortage of Heldentenors, the source of the problem is not a decrease in capable Siegfrieds and Tristans but the mushrooming of Ring cycles in China, Russia, and Japan, among other locales. Likewise, as Plácido Domingo explains in a collection of interviews called Living Opera, hand-wringing about singers who find themselves pushed too early into roles for which they are not yet ready reflects the worldwide increase in theaters and opera companies, which require a constant supply of singers.

 

However bounteous today’s classical-music culture is for those already inside it, the number of children who have the opportunity to be captivated by classical music is still much lower than it ought to be. “The arts fell out of US schools in the 1980s; all the music is gone,” James Conlon observes in Living Opera. “Now we have a generation of adults who make money, accomplish what they think is the fulfillment of life, but they’ve never had any contact with the classical arts – neither music nor literature. For me that’s a national disgrace.” Most leading music institutions have energetic outreach programs to try to compensate for the loss of public music education. But some school bureaucracies make no effort to accommodate these programs.

The public schools’ sclerosis has fueled the growth of community music schools that offer low-cost private lessons and ensemble work to children and their parents. The schools, heirs to the music program for immigrants at Chicago’s Hull House, are particularly important in urban areas, where arts education has withered far more than in suburban and rural school districts. Philadelphia’s buoyant network of schools trains thousands of students each year.

Such endeavors could reach far more children if they enjoyed better funding. That will require changing the priorities of America’s patron class, says Leon Botstein, the president of Bard College and conductor of the American Symphony Orchestra. “What is different today is that the nation’s elite, the very rich, don’t care about classical music,” he observes. “The patron class is philistine; instead of Andrew Carnegie, we have Donald Trump. Some rich guy with a hedge fund wants to be photographed with Angelina Jolie, not support the Cleveland Orchestra.” Bill Gates didn’t help matters when he proclaimed gratuitously: “I have no interest in giving to opera houses.” Younger philanthropists seem to be following Gates’s lead in spurning the arts, write Matthew Bishop and Michael Green in Philanthrocapitalism. The celebrity-bedecked Robin Hood Foundation enjoys extraordinary cachet on Wall Street; organizations that promote classical culture, far less so.

 

Two of the best hopes for building future American audiences may come from outside the country. Gustavo Dudamel, the 29-year-old Venezuelan conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic, is the closest thing the classical-music world has to a Leonardo DiCaprio. His tousle-headed exuberance, thousand-watt smile, and undoubted conducting skills have thrilled the press and public and created huge interest in his future career.

But it is Dudamel’s past that may be his most important contribution to classical music. Dudamel is the most famous graduate of Venezuela’s initiative to teach slum children to play classical instruments, and in so doing to develop the self-discipline that will carry them out of the ghetto. More than a quarter-million poor children in Venezuela enroll in the nearly 200 youth orchestras that belong to El Sistema Nacional de las Orquestas Juveniles e Infantiles de Venezuela (“El Sistema,” for short). In 2002, another El Sistema graduate, the double bassist Edicson Ruiz, became at 17 the youngest musician ever to join the Berlin Philharmonic. The brainchild of José Antonio Abreu, a left-wing economist committed to “social justice,” El Sistema could not be a stronger rebuke to the multicultural dogma that currently governs American education and welfare programs. Its premise is that all children should be exposed to the West’s highest artistic accomplishments. “The huge spiritual world that music produces in itself ends up overcoming material poverty,” Abreu has said. “From the minute a child is taught how to play an instrument, he’s no longer poor.”

Dudamel’s charisma and hip Latino ethos could make it safe for Silicon Valley moguls to fund classical-music education without worrying about accusations of elitism. Perhaps the sight of Venezuela’s Simón Bolivar Youth Orchestra playing its heart out could persuade even the liberal Ford Foundation to return to its roots in classical arts funding. “We have lived our whole lives inside these pieces,” Dudamel says. “When we play Beethoven’s Fifth, it is the most important thing happening in the world.”

Thanks to the publicity around L.A.’s new conductor, an initiative headquartered at the New England Conservatory of Music now trains music postgraduates to start local El Sistema programs worldwide. But much more could be done. Why not a Play for America program, modeled on Teach for America, that would send music graduates into poor communities to teach and perform for two or three years?

The other source of future classical-music demand is China. “I’m very hopeful,” says Robert Sirota, head of the Manhattan School of Music. “If China graduates 100,000 pianists a year, it changes everything.” The best predictor of attendance at classical concerts is playing an instrument. Asia’s passionate pursuit of music training for its children will create not just tomorrow’s professional musicians, of whom there is no dearth, but tomorrow’s audiences as well. And like El Sistema, the phenomenon of countless poor young Asians practicing fanatically for the privilege of a career performing Scarlatti and Rachmaninoff torpedoes the image of classical music as the bastion of wealthy white elites. When the 12-year-old Lang Lang competed for the first time with Europeans, he worried that their heritage would give them an interpretive advantage. “It’s your native music as well,” his father reminded him. “It belongs to anyone who loves it.”

 

Music records the evolution of the human soul. To hear how the elegance of the baroque developed into the grandeur of the classical style, which in turn gave way to the languid sensuality and unbridled passion of Romanticism, is to trace how variously human beings have expressed longing, desire, triumph, and sorrow over the centuries.

Not everyone will hear that changing sensibility; some may find the soul’s echo elsewhere. But the present-day abundance of classical music – of newly rediscovered works, consummate performances, thousands of recordings, and legions of fans – is a testament to its deep roots in human feeling. And it is a cause for celebration that so many people still feel drawn into its web of lethal beauty, in a world so far from the one that gave it birth.

Appendix: The Early-Music Quarrel

 

By the mid-twentieth century, nearly all performers respected the letter of the score and dedicated themselves to realizing its spirit as well. But to the early-music advocates, the establishment musicians seriously misunderstood that spirit, at least regarding the pre-Classical repertoire.

Over the course of the twentieth century, the baroque composers – above all, Bach and Handel – had been taking on more and more weight and waddling ever more ponderously, as mainstream conductors assimilated them to late-Romantic performance styles. Early-eighteenth-century works sounded suspiciously Wagnerian – with long legato lines and a smooth, creamy sound, performed by ensembles many magnitudes larger than anything ever marshaled during the baroque or classical eras. Conductor Ivan Fischer recently recalled a Leopold Stokowski performance of Bach, after which musicians left the stage to pare down for Bruckner, the epitome of late-Romantic gigantism. While massive ensembles may have magnified the spiritual force of the music for some listeners, the orchestral inflation at the very least obscured the intricate contrapuntal writing for different instrumental voices. With a chorus of 200, no one is going to hear the flutes delicately doubling the sopranos’ line in a Bach oratorio.

In rejecting this supersized sound, the early-music acolytes (whose first modern wave included Gustav Leonhardt, Frans Brüggen, Nikolas Harnoncourt, Ton Koopman, and Christopher Hogwood) embraced a fallen historical consciousness, compared with the prelapsarian innocence of mainstream musicians. (The authenticity movement had late-nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century antecedents, but those early experiments never achieved critical mass.) Where the great titans of traditional twentieth-century performance – conductors such as Wilhelm Fürtwangler and Otto Klemperer – assumed a continuity between the past and the present that guaranteed the fidelity of their interpretations, the early-music advocates saw discontinuity. The essence of the music of the past was no longer intuitively available to us but required historical research to recover, they believed. A gulf separated Bach’s world from ours; we could no longer assume that modern performing traditions expressed his intentions.

 

The early-music movement quickly attained commercial success and just as quickly provoked a backlash, primarily from musicians who objected to the implication that their performances were inauthentic. Some objections were aesthetic: these old instruments sound weak and thin, critics said; stronger models have superseded them for good reason. We need a revival of period strings as much as we need a revival of period dentistry, one wag observed. In a 1990 interview, violinist Pinchas Zuckerman called historical performance “asinine STUFF… a complete and absolute farce. Nobody wants to hear that stuff.”

Other objections were normative. “Musical archaism may be a symptom of a disintegrating civilization,” musicologist Donald Grout wrote at the start of the modern period-instrument movement. A composer of early music, if he came back to life today, would be astonished by our interest in how music was performed in his own times, Grout asserted. “Have we no living tradition of music, that we must be seeking to revive a dead one?” the composer would ask.

The most interesting challenges to the historical-performance movement, however, have been philosophical. Historically accurate performance is unattainable, critics like Richard Taruskin of the University of California at Berkeley charged. There are too many stylistic unknowns, too many variables regarding tempo and phrasing, to think that treatises on technique or illustrations of musicians playing an instrument can lead to the movement’s Holy Grail: the way a piece sounded at its creation. Further, the very idea of an authentic performance is incoherent, the skeptics said: Which performance of a work should we view as authentic? Its premiere? But what if that performance – or every subsequent one during a composer’s lifetime – failed to realize the composer’s conception because of inadequate rehearsals or mediocre musicians, as Berlioz so frequently experienced?

The naysayers pointed out that the context of musical performance has changed so radically from the pre-Romantic era that we cannot hope to re-create its original meaning. For most of European history, music belonged to social ritual, whether it accompanied worship, paid homage to a king, or provided background for a feast. A large concert hall filled with silent listeners, focused intently on an ensemble of well-fed professionals still in possession of most of their teeth, has no counterpart in early-music history. Early-music proponents, the detractors added, are highly selective in their use of historical evidence. No one today conducts the operas of Jean-Baptiste Lully, for example, by pounding a staff on the floor, as conductors did in the court of Louis XIV to try to keep time in an ensemble of less-than-perfectly trained musicians.

Taruskin launched the intended coup de grâce. The predominant early-music style has nothing to do with historical evidence, he charged, and everything to do with the modernist aesthetic. The style’s fleet rhythms and transparent textures are a reaction against the excesses of subjectivity and expression characteristic of Romanticism; the shaky historical arguments on its behalf are just after-the-fact window dressing.

 

Several of the arguments against the period-instrument movement had bite. They reflect the skepticism regarding the possibility of knowing the past that dominates today’s universities and that gets used (improperly) to justify junking the study of history, philology, and literary tradition. The proponents of period performance heard and considered these sophisticated objections. Then something wonderful happened. They responded, in essence: “Yeah, whatever.” They tweaked their rhetoric, junked the term “authenticity” and anything else that sounded too authoritarian – and went right on doing what they had been doing all along. That is because their hunger for the past – for discovering how the musicians at the Esterházy palace interpreted crescendi or how much vibrato a cellist performing Bach’s cello suites in the 1720s would have used – was so great that no amount of hermeneutical skepticism could extinguish it.

The influential restorer of French baroque opera, conductor William Christie, exemplifying this attitude, lamented in 1997 how little we know about the hand gestures used in ballets and operas in pre-Revolutionary France. Gestural art is “a field that is painful for me right now,” he told Bernard Sherman in Inside Early Music. Christie’s pain is precious. It comes from an instinct in short supply in the rest of the culture: the belief that the past contains lost worlds of expression that would enrich us if we could just recover them. The desire to learn how a shepherdess in a Rameau opera may have inclined her hand to Cupid is an attribute of an enlightened humanity. (Unfortunately, Christie has since abandoned the project of re-creating baroque opera stagings and choreography, leaving the Boston Early Music Festival and Opera Lafayette as the sole ensembles committed to courtly theatrical sensibility as well as musical practice.)

An early informal truce between modern-instrument ensembles and the historicists has long since broken down. According to this unwritten understanding, the historicists would claim the pre-1800 repertoire, while leaving nineteenth-century works to the modern symphony orchestra. It was not long, however, before the proponents of historical “authenticity” marched all the way into the twentieth century, blithely piling one historical anachronism onto another, as if to confirm Taruskin’s skepticism regarding the evidentiary basis for their work. Period-instrument groups such as the Philharmonia Baroque and the Orchestre Révolutionnaire et Romantique use the evocative Waldhorn in Brahms’s works, for example, even though Brahms himself could not persuade his contemporary brass players to give up their spiffy new valved horn for that difficult ancient instrument. In addition to adopting “historical” practices that didn’t exist, the historicists ignore widespread nineteenth-century performance traditions that did exist. There has been no movement to revive “preluding,” for example, in which a pianist improvised chords and arpeggios before breaking into the actual published score of a work, because such behavior would too forcefully violate contemporary concert norms. Nor has the habit of teleologically updating scores been adopted. This paradox points to the conceptual meltdown point of the authenticity movement, where it becomes clear that the most unhistorical practice in the history of music is the concern for authenticity.

Such conundrums do not subtract from the enormous contribution that the early-music movement has made to our experience of music. Traditional orchestras, especially in Europe, have subtly changed their sound and approach to the standard repertoire in response to the competition. Sadly, we will never know whether the period-instrument movement has come close to past performance style (though Taruskin is wrong that historical materials cannot provide meaningful guidance). But the effort to recover our musical past remains a noble one.

Philosophy

The Music of the Spheres, or The Metaphysics of Music


EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted here with the gracious permission of Intercollegiate Studies Institute, who first published it in their Fall 2001 issue of Intercollegiate Review.

 

[In] sound itself, there is a readiness to be ordered by the spirit and this is seen at its most sublime in music.

—Max Picard

Despite the popular Romantic conception of creative artists as inspired madmen, composers are not idiots savants, distilling their musical inspiration from the ether. Rather, in their creative work they respond and give voice to certain metaphysical visions. Most composers speak explicitly in philosophical terms about the nature of the reality that they try to reflect. When the forms of musical expression change radically, it is always because the underlying metaphysical grasp of reality has changed as well. Music is, in a way, the sound of metaphysics, or metaphysics in sound.

Music in the Western world was shaped by a shared conception of reality so profound that it endured for some twenty-five hundred years. As a result, the means of music remained essentially the same – at least to the extent that what was called music could always have been recognized as such by its forbearers, as much as they might have disapproved of its specific style. But by the early twentieth century, this was no longer true. Music was re-conceptualized so completely that it could no longer be experienced as music, i.e. with melody, harmony, and rhythm. This catastrophic rupture, expressed especially in the works of Arnold Schoenberg and John Cage, is often celebrated as just another change in the techniques of music, a further point along the parade of progress in the arts. It was, however, a reflection of a deeper metaphysical divide that severed the composer from any meaningful contact with external reality. As a result, musical art was reduced to the arbitrary manipulation of fragments of sound.

Here, I will sketch of the philosophical presuppositions that undergirded the Western conception of music for most of its existence and then examine the character of the change music underwent in the twentieth century. I will conclude with a reflection on the recovery of music in our own time and the reasons for it, as exemplified in the works of two contemporary composers, the Dane Vagn Holmboe and the American John Adams.

 

According to tradition, the harmonic structure of music was discovered by Pythagoras about the fifth century BC. Pythagoras experimented with a stretched piece of cord. When plucked, the cord sounded a certain note. When halved in length and plucked again, the cord sounded a higher note completely consonant with the first. In fact, it was the same note at a higher pitch. Pythagoras had discovered the ratio, 2:1, of the octave. Further experiments, plucking the string two-thirds of its original length produced a perfect fifth in the ratio of 3:2. When a three-quarters length of cord was plucked, a perfect fourth was sounded in the ratio of 4:3, and so forth. These sounds were all consonant and extremely pleasing to the ear. The significance that Pythagoras attributed to this discovery cannot be overestimated. Pythagoras thought that number was the key to the universe. When he found that harmonic music is expressed in exact numerical ratios of whole numbers, he concluded that music was the ordering principle of the world. The fact that music was denominated in exact numerical ratios demonstrated to him the intelligibility of reality and the existence of a reasoning intelligence behind it.

Pythagoras wondered about the relationship of these ratios to the larger world. (The Greek word for ratio is logos, which also means reason or word.) He considered that the harmonious sounds that men make, either with their instruments or in their singing, were an approximation of a larger harmony that existed in the universe, also expressed by numbers, which was “the music of the spheres.” As Aristotle explained in the Metaphysics, the Pythagoreans “supposed the elements of numbers to be the elements of all things, and the whole heaven to be a musical scale and a number.” This was meant literally. The heavenly spheres and their rotations through the sky produced tones at various levels, and in concert, these tones made a harmonious sound that man’s music, at its best, could approximate. Music was number made audible. Music was man’s participation in the harmony of the universe.

This discovery was fraught with ethical significance. By participating in heavenly harmony, music could induce spiritual harmony in the soul. Following Pythagoras, Plato taught that “rhythm and harmony find their way into the inward places of the soul, on which they mightily fasten, imparting grace, and making the soul of him who is rightly educated graceful.” In the Republic, Plato showed the political import of music’s power by invoking Damon of Athens as his musical authority. Damon said that he would rather control the modes of music in a city than its laws, because the modes of music have a more decisive effect on the formation of the character of citizens. The ancient Greeks were also wary of music’s power because they understood that, just as there was harmony, there was disharmony. Musical discord could distort the spirit, just as musical concord could properly dispose it.

This idea of “the music of the spheres” runs through the history of Western civilization with an extraordinary consistency, even up to the twentieth century. At first it was meant literally, later poetically. Either way, music was seen more as a discovery than a creation, because it relied on pre-existing principles of order in nature for its operation. It is instructive to look briefly at the reiteration of this teaching in the writings of several major thinkers to appreciate its enduring significance as well as the radical nature of the challenge to it in the twentieth century.

In the first century BC, Cicero spelled out Plato’s teaching in the last chapter of his De Republica. In “Scipio’s Dream,” Cicero has Scipio Africanus asking the question, “What is that great and pleasing sound?” The answer comes, “That is the concord of tones separated by unequal but nevertheless carefully proportional intervals, caused by the rapid motion of the spheres themselves…. Skilled men imitating this harmony on stringed instruments and in singing have gained for themselves a return to this region, as have those who have cultivated their exceptional abilities to search for divine truths.” Cicero claims that music can return man to a paradise lost. It is a form of communion with divine truth.

In the late second century AD, St. Clement of Alexandria baptized the classical Greek and Roman understanding of music in his Exhortation to the Greeks. The transcendent God of Christianity gave new and somewhat different meanings to the “music of the spheres.” Using Old Testament imagery from the Psalms, St. Clement said that there is a “New Song,” far superior to the Orphic myths of the pagans. The “New Song” is Christ, the Logos Himself: “it is this [New Song] that composed the entire creation into melodious order, and tuned into concert the discord of the elements, that the whole universe may be in harmony with it.” It is Christ who “arranged in harmonious order this great world, yes, and the little world of man, body and soul together; and on this many-voiced instrument he makes music to God and sings to [the accompaniment of] the human instrument.” By appropriating the classical view, St. Clement was able to show that music participated in the divine by praising God and partaking in the harmonious order of which He was the composer. But music’s end or goal was now higher, because Christ is higher than the created cosmos. Cicero had spoken of the divine region to which music is supposed to transport man. That region was literally within the heavens. With Christianity, the divine region becomes both transcendent and personal because Logos is Christ. The new purpose of music is to make the transcendent perceptible in the “New Song.”

The early sixth century AD had two especially distinguished Roman proponents of the classical view of music, both of whom served at various times in high offices to the Ostrogoth king, Theodoric. Cassiodorus was secretary to Theodoric. He wrote a massive work called Institutiones, which echoes Plato’s teaching on the ethical content of music, as well as Pythagoras’s on the power of number. Cassiodorus taught that “music indeed is the knowledge of apt modulation. If we live virtuously, we are constantly proved to be under its discipline, but when we sin, we are without music. The heavens and the earth and indeed all things in them which are directed by a higher power share in the discipline of music, for Pythagoras attests that this universe was founded by and can be governed by music.”

Boethius served as consul to Theodoric in AD 510. Among his writings was The Principles of Music, a book that had enormous influence through the Middle Ages and beyond. Boethius said that

music is related not only to speculation, but to morality as well, for nothing is more consistent with human nature than to be soothed by sweet modes and disturbed by their opposites. Thus we can begin to understand the apt doctrine of Plato, which holds that the whole of the universe is united by a musical concord. For when we compare that which is coherently and harmoniously joined together within our own being with that which is coherently and harmoniously joined together in sound – that is, that which gives us pleasure – so we come to recognize that we ourselves are united according to the same principle of similarity.

It is not necessary to cite further examples after Boethius because The Principles of Music was so influential that it held sway for centuries thereafter. It was the standard music theory text at Oxford until 1856.

 

The hieratic role of music even survived into the twentieth century with composers like Jean Sibelius. Sibelius harkened back to St. Clement when he wrote that “the essence of man’s being is his striving after God. It [the composition of music] is brought to life by means of the logos, the divine in art. That is the only thing that has significance.” But this vision was lost for most of the twentieth century because the belief on which it was based was lost.

Philosophical propositions have a very direct and profound impact upon composers and what they do. John Adams, one of the most popular American composers today, said that he had “learned in college that tonality died somewhere around the time that Nietzsche’s God died, and I believed it.” The connection is quite compelling. At the same time God disappears, so does the intelligible order in creation. If there is no God, Nature no longer serves as a reflection of its Creator. If you lose the Logos of St. Clement, you also lose the ratio (logos) of Pythagoras. Nature is stripped of its normative power. This is just as much a problem for music as it is for philosophy.

The systematic fragmentation of music was the logical working out of the premise that music is not governed by mathematical relationships and laws that inhere in the structure of a hierarchical and ordered universe, but is wholly constructed by man and therefore essentially without limits or definition. Tonality, as the pre-existing principle of order in the world of sound, goes the same way as the objective moral order. So how does one organize the mess that is left once God departs? If there is no pre-existing intelligible order to go out to and apprehend, and to search through for what lies beyond it – which is the Creator – what then is music supposed to express? If external order does not exist, then music turns inward. It collapses in on itself and becomes an obsession with technique. Any ordering of things, musical or otherwise, becomes simply the whim of man’s will.

Without a “music of the spheres” to approximate, modern music, like the other arts, began to unravel. Music’s self-destruction became logically imperative once it undermined its own foundation. In the 1920s, Arnold Schoenberg unleashed the centrifugal forces of disintegration in music through his denial of tonality. Schoenberg contended that tonality does not exist in nature as the very property of sound itself, as Pythagoras had claimed, but was simply an arbitrary construct of man, a convention. This assertion was not the result of a new scientific discovery about the acoustical nature of sound, but of a desire to demote the metaphysical status of nature. Schoenberg was irritated that “tonality does not serve, [but] must be served.” Rather than conform himself to reality, he preferred to command reality to conform itself to him. As he said, “I can provide rules for almost anything.” Like Pythagoras, Schoenberg believed that number was the key to the universe. Unlike Pythagoras, he believed his manipulation of number could alter that reality in a profound way. Schoenberg’s gnostic impulse is confirmed by his extraordinary obsession with numerology, which would not allow him to finish a composition until its opus number corresponded with the correct number of the calendar date.

Schoenberg proposed to erase the distinction between tonality and atonality by immersing man in atonal music until, through habituation, it became the new convention. Then discords would be heard as concords. As he wrote, “The emancipation of dissonance is at present accomplished and twelve-tone music in the near future will no longer be rejected because of ‘discords.’” Anyone who claims that, through his system, the listener shall hear dissonance as consonance is engaged in reconstituting reality.

Of his achievement, Schoenberg said, “I am conscious of having removed all traces of a past aesthetic.” In fact, he declared himself “cured of the delusion that the artist’s aim is to create beauty.” This statement is terrifying in its implications when one considers what is at stake in beauty. Simone Weil wrote that “we love the beauty of the world because we sense behind it the presence of something akin to that wisdom we should like to possess to slake our thirst for good.” All beauty is reflected beauty. Smudge out the reflection and not only is the mirror useless but the path to the source of beauty is barred. Ugliness, the aesthetic analogue to evil, becomes the new norm. Schoenberg’s remark represents a total rupture with the Western musical tradition.

The loss of tonality was also devastating at the practical level of composition because tonality is the key structure of music. Schoenberg took the twelve equal semi-tones from the chromatic scale and declared that music must be written in such a way that each of these twelve semi-tones has to be used before repeating any one of them. If one of these semi-tones was repeated before all eleven others were sounded, it might create an anchor for the ear which could recognize what is going on in the music harmonically. The twelve-tone system guarantees the listener’s disorientation.

Tonality is what allows music to express movement – away from or towards a state of tension or relaxation, a sense of motion through a series of crises and conflicts which can then come to resolution. Without it, music loses harmony and melody. Its structural force collapses. Gutting music of tonality is like removing grapes from wine. You can go through all the motions of making wine without grapes but there will be no wine at the end of the process. Similarly, if you deliberately and systematically remove all audible overtone relationships from music, you can go though the process of composition, but the end product will not be comprehensible as music. This is not a change in technique; it is the replacement of art by ideology.

Schoenberg’s disciples applauded the emancipation of dissonance but soon preferred to follow the centrifugal forces that Schoenberg had unleashed beyond their master’s rules. Pierre Boulez thought that it was not enough to systematize dissonance in twelve-tone rows. If you have a system, why not systematize everything? He applied the same principle of the tone-row to pitch, duration, tone production, intensity and timber, every element of music. In 1952, Boulez announced that “every musician who has not felt – we do not say understood but felt – the necessity of the serial language is USELESS.” Boulez also proclaimed, “Once the past has been got out of the way, one need think only of oneself.” Here is the narcissistic antithesis of the classical view of music, the whole point of which was to draw a person up into something larger than himself.

The dissection of the language of music continued as, successively, each isolated element was elevated into its own autonomous whole. Schoenberg’s disciples agreed that tonality is simply a convention, but saw that, so too, is twelve-tone music. If you are going to emancipate dissonance, why organize it? Why even have twelve-tone themes? Why bother with pitch at all? Edgar Varese rejected the twelve-tone system as arbitrary and restrictive. He searched for the “bomb that would explode the musical world and allow all sounds to come rushing into it through the resulting breach.” When he exploded it in his piece Hyperprism, Olin Downes, a famous New York music critic, called it “a catastrophe in a boiler factory.” Still, Varese did not carry the inner logic of the “emancipation of dissonance” through to its logical conclusion. His noise was still formulated; it was organized. There were indications in the score as to exactly when the boiler should explode.

 

What was needed, according to John Cage (19121992), was to have absolutely no organization. Typical of Cage were compositions whose notes were based on the irregularities in the composition paper he used, notes selected by tossing dice, or from the use of charts derived from the Chinese I Ching. Those were his more conventional works. Other “compositions” included the simultaneous twirling of the knobs of twelve radios, the sounds from records playing on unsynchronized variable speed turntables, or the sounds produced by tape recordings of music that had been sliced up and randomly reassembled. Not surprisingly, Cage was one of the progenitors of the “happenings” that were fashionable in the 1970s. He presented concerts of kitchen sounds and the sounds of the human body amplified through loudspeakers. Perhaps Cage’s most notorious work was his 4’33” during which the performer silently sits with his instrument for that exact period of time, then rises and leaves the stage. The “music” is whatever extraneous noises the audience hears in the silence the performer has created. In his book Silence, Cage announced, “Here we are. Let us say Yes to our presence together in Chaos.”

What was the purpose of all this? Precisely to make the point that there is no purpose, or to express what Cage called a “purposeful purposelessness,” the aim of which was to emancipate people from the tyranny of meaning. The extent of his success can be judged by the verdict rendered in the prestigious New Grove Dictionary of Music, which says Cage “has had a greater impact on world music than any other American composer of the twentieth century.”

Cage’s view of reality has a very clear provenance. Cage himself acknowledged three principal gurus: Eric Satie (a French composer), Henry David Thoreau, and Buckminster Fuller – three relative lightweights who could not among them account for Cage’s radical thinking. The prevalent influence on Cage seems instead to have been Jean Jacques Rousseau, though he goes unmentioned in Cage’s many obiter dicta. Cage’s similarities with Rousseau are too uncanny to have been accidental.

With his noise, Cage worked out musically the full implications of Rousseau’s non-teleological view of nature in his Second Discourse. Cage did for music what Rousseau did for political philosophy. Perhaps the most profoundly anti-Aristotelian philosopher of the eighteenth century, Rousseau turned Aristotle’s notion of nature on its head. Aristotle said that nature defined not only what man is, but what he should be. Rousseau countered that nature is not an end – a telos – but a beginning: man’s end is his beginning. There is nothing he “ought” to become, no moral imperative. There is no purpose in man or nature; existence is therefore bereft of any rational principle. Rousseau asserted that man by nature was not a social or political animal endowed with reason. What man has become is the result, not of nature, but of accident. And the society resulting from that accident has corrupted man.

According to Rousseau, man was originally isolated in the state of nature, where the pure “sentiment of his own existence” was such that “one suffices to oneself, like God.” Yet this self-satisfied god was asocial and pre-rational. Only by accident did man come into association with others. Somehow, this accident ignited his reason. Through his association with others, man lost his self-sufficient “sentiment of his own existence.” He became alienated. He began to live in the esteem of others instead of in his own self-esteem.

Rousseau knew that the pre-rational, asocial state of nature was lost forever, but thought that an all-powerful state could ameliorate the situation of alienated man. The state could restore a simulacrum of that original well-being by removing all man’s subsidiary social relationships. By destroying man’s familial, social, and political ties, the state could make each individual totally dependent on the state, and independent of each other. The state is the vehicle for bringing people together so that they can be apart: a sort of radical individualism under state sponsorship.

It is necessary to pay this much attention to Rousseau because Cage shares his denigration of reason, the same notion of alienation, and a similar solution to it. In both men, the primacy of the accidental eliminates nature as a normative guide and becomes the foundation for man’s total freedom. Like Rousseau’s man in the state of nature, Cage said, “I strive toward the non-mental.” The quest is to “provide a music free from one’s memory and imagination.” If man is the product of accident, his music should likewise be accidental. Life itself is very fine “once one gets one’s mind and one’s desires out of the way and lets it act of its own accord.”

But what is its own accord? Of music, Cage said, “The requiring that many parts be played in a particular togetherness is not an accurate representation of how things are” in nature, because in nature there is no order. In other words, life’s accord is that there is no accord. As a result, Cage desired “a society where you can do anything at all.” He warned that one has “to be as careful as possible not to form any ideas about what each person should or should not do.” He was “committed to letting everything happen, to making everything that happens acceptable.”

At the Stony Point experimental arts community where he spent his summers, Cage observed that each summer’s sabbatical produced numerous divorces. So, he concluded, “all the couples who come to the community and stay there end up separating. In reality, our community is a community for separation.” Rousseau could not have stated his ideal better. Nor could Cage have made the same point in his art more clearly. For instance, in his long collaboration with choreographer Merce Cunningham, Cage wrote ballet scores completely unconnected to and independent of Cunningham’s choreography. The orchestra and dancers rehearsed separately and appeared together for the first time at the premiere performance. The dancers’ movements have nothing to do with the music. The audience is left to make of these random juxtapositions what it will. There is no shared experience – except of disconnectedness. The dancers, musicians, and audience have all come together in order to be apart.

According to Cage, the realization of the disconnectedness of things creates opportunities for wholeness. “I said that since the sounds were sounds this gave people hearing them the chance to be people, centered within themselves where they actually are, not off artificially in the distance as they are accustomed to be, trying to figure out what is being said by some artist by means of sounds.” Here, in his own way, Cage captures Rousseau’s notion of alienation. People are alienated from themselves because they are living in the esteem of others. Cage’s noise can help them let go of false notions of order, to “let sounds be themselves, rather than vehicles for man-made theories,” and to return within themselves to the sentiment of their own existence. Cage said, “Our intention is to affirm this life, not bring order out of chaos or to suggest improvements in creation, but simply to wake up to the very life we’re living, which is so excellent….”

That sounds appealing, even humble, and helps to explain Cage’s appeal. In fact, Cage repeatedly insisted on the integrity of an external reality that exists without our permission. It is a good point to make and, as far as it goes, protects us from solipsists of every stripe. Man violates this integrity by projecting meanings upon reality that are not there. That, of course, is the distortion of reality at the heart of every modern ideology. For Cage, however, it is the inference of any meaning at all that is the distorting imposition. This is the real problem with letting “sounds be themselves,” and letting other things be as they are, because it begs the question, “What are they?” Because of Cage’s grounding in Rousseau, we cannot answer this question. What is the significance of reality’s integrity if it is not intelligible, if there is not a rational principle animating it? If creation does not speak to us in some way, if things are not intelligible, are we? Where does “leaving things as they are” leave us?

From the traditional Western perspective, it leaves us completely adrift. The Greco-Judeo-Christian conviction is that nature bespeaks an intelligibility that derives from a transcendent source. Speaking from the heart of that tradition, St. Paul in his Letter to the Romans said, “Ever since the creation of the world, the invisible existence of God and his everlasting power have been clearly seen by the mind’s understanding of created things.” By denigrating reason and denying creation’s intelligibility, Cage severed this link to the Creator. Cage’s espousal of accidental noise is the logically apt result. Noise is incapable of pointing beyond itself. Noise is the black hole of the sound world. It sucks everything into itself. If reality is unintelligible, then noise is its perfect reflection, because it too is unintelligible.

 

Having endured the worst, the twentieth century has also witnessed an extraordinary recovery from the damage inflicted by Schoenberg in his totalitarian systematization of sound and by Cage in his mindless immersion in noise. Some composers, like Vagn Holmboe (19091996) in Denmark, resisted from the start. Others, like John Adams (b. 1947) in America, rebelled and returned to tonal music. It is worth examining, even briefly, the terms of this recovery in the works of these two composers because their language reconnects us to the worlds of Pythagoras and Saint Clement. Their works are symptomatic of the broader recovery of reality in the music of our time.

In Vagn Holmboe’s music, most particularly in his thirteen symphonies, one can once again detect the “music of the spheres” in their rotation. Holmboe’s impulse was to move outward and upward. His music reveals the constellations in their swirling orbits, cosmic forces, a universe of tremendous complexity, but also of coherence. Holmboe’s music is rooted and real. It reflects nature, but not in a pastoral way; this is not a musical evocation of bird songs or sunsets. Neither is it an evocation of nature as the nineteenth century understood nature – principally as a landscape upon which to project one’s own emotions. To say his work is visionary would be an understatement.

Holmboe’s approach to composition was quite Aristotelian: the thematic material defines its own development. What a thing is (its essence) is fully revealed through its completion (its existence) – through the thorough exploration of the potential of its basic materials. The overall effect is cumulative and the impact powerful. Holmboe found his unique voice through a technique he called metamorphosis. Holmboe wrote, “Metamorphosis is based on a process of development that transforms one matter into another, without it losing its identity.” Most importantly, metamorphosis “has a goal; it brings order to the process and enables it to create a pattern of the same perfection and balance as, for example, a classical sonata.” Holmboe’s metamorphosis is something like the Beethovenian method of arguing short motives; a few hammered chords can generate the thematic material for the whole work.

Holmboe’s technique also has a larger significance. Danish composer Karl Aage Rasmussen observed that Holmboe’s metamorphosis has striking similarities with the constructive principles employed by Arnold Schoenberg in his twelve-tone music. However, says Rasmussen, “Schoenberg found his arguments in history while Holmboe’s come from nature.” This difference is decisive since the distinction is metaphysical. History is the authority for those, like Rousseau, who believe that man’s nature is the product of accident and therefore malleable. Nature is the authority for those who believe man’s essence is permanently ordered to a transcendent good. The argument from history leads to creation ex nihilo, not so much in imitation of God as a replacement for Him – as was evident in the ideologies of Marxism and Nazism that plagued the twentieth century. The argument from nature leads to creation in cooperation with the Creator.

Rasmussen spelled out exactly the theological implications of Holmboe’s approach: “The voice of nature is heard … both as an inner impulse and as spokesman for a higher order. Certainty of this order is the stimulus of music, and to recreate it and mirror it is the highest goal. For this, faith is required, faith in meaning and context or, in Holmboe’s own words, ‘cosmos does not develop from chaos without a prior vision of cosmos.’” Holmboe’s words could come straight from one of Aquinas’s proofs for the existence of God. For Holmboe to make such a remark reveals both his metaphysical grounding and his breathtaking artistic reach. This man was not simply reaching for the stars, but for the constellations in which they move, and beyond. Holmboe strove to show us the cosmos, to play for us the music of the spheres.

Holmboe’s music is quite accessible but requires a great deal of concentration because it is highly contrapuntal. Its rich counterpoint reflects creation’s complexity. The simultaneity of unrelated strands of music in so much modern music (as in John Cage’s works) is no great accomplishment; relating them is. As Holmboe said, music has the power to enrich man “only when the music itself is a cosmos of coordinated powers, when it speaks to both feeling and thought, when chaos does exist, but [is] always overcome.”

In other words, chaos is not the problem; chaos is easy. Cosmos is the problem. Showing the coherence in its complexity, to say nothing of the reason for its existence, is the greatest intellectual and artistic challenge because it shares in the divine “prior vision of cosmos” that makes the cosmos possible. As Holmboe wrote, “In its purest form, [music] can be regarded as the expression of a perfect unity and conjures up a feeling of cosmic cohesion.” Arising from such complexity, this feeling of cohesion can be, he said, a “spiritual shock” for modern man.

 

Just as Holmboe, whose magnificent works are finally coming into currency, represents an unbroken line to the great Western musical tradition, John Adams is an exemplar of those indoctrinated in Schoenberg’s ideology who found their way out of it. Adams ultimately rejected his college lessons on Nietzsche’s “death of God” and the loss of tonality. Like Pythagoras, he “found that tonality was not just a stylistic phenomenon that came and went, but that it is really a natural acoustic phenomenon.” In total repudiation of Schoenberg, Adams went on to write a stunning symphony, entitled Harmonielehre (“Theory of Harmony”) that powerfully reconnects with the Western musical tradition. In this work, he wrote, “there is a sense of using key as a structural and psychological tool in building my work.” More importantly, Adams, explained, “the other shade of meaning in the title has to do with harmony in the larger sense, in the sense of spiritual and psychological harmony.”

Adam’s description of his symphony is explicitly in terms of spiritual health and sickness. He explains that “the entire [second] movement is a musical scenario about impotence and spiritual sickness; … it has to do with an existence without grace. And then in the third movement, grace appears for no reason at all … that’s the way grace is, the unmerited bestowal of blessing on man. The whole piece is a kind of allegory about that quest for grace.”

It is clear from Adams that the recovery of tonality and key structure is as closely related to spiritual recovery as its loss was related to spiritual loss. The destruction of tonality was thought to be historically necessary and therefore “determined.” It is no mistake that the recovery of tonality and its expressive powers should be accompanied by the notion of grace. The very possibility of grace, of the unmerited intervention of God’s love, destroys the ideology of historical determinism, whether it be expressed in music or in any other way. The possibility of grace fatally ruptures the self-enclosed world of “historically determined forces” and opens it up to the transcendent. That opening restores the freedom and full range of man’s creativity.

Cicero spoke of music as enabling man to return to the divine region, implying a place once lost to man. What is it, in and about music, that gives one an experience so outside of oneself that one can see reality anew, as if newborn in a strange but wonderful world? British composer John Tavener proposes an answer to this mystery in his artistic credo: “My goal is to recover one simple memory from which all art derives. The constant memory of the paradise from which we have fallen leads to the paradise which was promised to the repentant thief. The gentleness of our sleepy recollections promises something else. That which was once perceived as in a glass darkly, we shall see face to face.” We shall not only see; we shall hear, as well, the New Song.

Composition

The Post-Modern Ear


In Gurrelieder, Verklärte Nacht, and Pelléas et Mélisande Schoenberg showed total mastery of tonality and of late romantic harmony, and these great works entered the repertoire. But by the time of the Piano Pieces op. 11 Schoenberg was writing music which to many people no longer made sense, with melodic lines that began and ended nowhere, and harmonies that seemed to bear no relation to the principal voice. At the same time it was clear that Schoenberg’s atonal pieces were meticulously composed, according to schemes that involved the intricate relation of phrases and thematic ideas, and this was another reason for taking them seriously.

In due course meticulousness took over, leading to an obsession with structure and the quasi-mathematical idiom of twelve-tone serialism, in which the linear relations of tonal music were replaced by arcane permutations. The result, in Schoenberg’s hands, was always intriguing, and often (as in the unfinished opera Moses und Aron, and A Survivor from Warsaw) genuinely moving. Schoenberg’s pupils Alban Berg and Anton Webern developed the idiom, the one in a romantic and quasi-tonal direction, the other towards a refined pointillist style that is uniquely evocative. For a while it looked as though a genuine school of twelve-tone serialism would emerge, and displace the old tonal grammar from its central place in the concert hall. Figures like Ernst Krenek in Austria, Luigi Dallapiccola in Italy and Milton Babbitt and Roger Sessions in America were actively advocating twelve-tone composition, and also practising it. But somehow it never took off. A few works – Berg’s Violin Concerto, Dallapiccola’s opera Il Prigionero, Krenek’s moving setting of the Lamentations of Jeremiah – have entered the repertoire. But twelve-tone works remain, for the most part, more items of curiosity than objects of love, and audiences have begun to turn their backs on them.

It should be remembered that those experiments were begun at a time when Mahler was composing tonal symphonies, with great arched melodies in the high romantic tradition, and using modernist harmonies only as rhetorical gestures within a strongly diatonic frame. In England Vaughan Williams and Holst were working in a similar way, treating dissonances as by-ways within an all-inclusive tonal logic, while in America inputs from film music and jazz were beginning to inspire eclectic masterpieces like Roy Harris’s Third Symphony and Gershwin’s Rhapsody in Blue. A concert-goer in the early 1930s would therefore have been faced with two completely different repertoires – one (Vaughan Williams, Holst, Sibelius, Walton, Strauss, Busoni, Gershwin) remaining within the bounds of the tonal language, the other (Schoenberg and his school) consciously departing from the old language, and often striking a deliberately defiant posture that made it hard to build their works into a concert program. Somewhere in between those two repertoires hovered the great eclectic geniuses, Stravinsky, Bartók and Prokoviev.

The contest between tonality and atonality continued throughout the 20th century. The first was popular, the second, on the whole, popular only with the elites. But it was the elites who controlled things, and who directed the state subsidies to the music that they preferred – or at least, that they pretended to prefer. From the time (1959) when the modernist critic Sir William Glock took over the musical direction of BBC’s Third Programme, only the second kind of contemporary music was broadcast over the airwaves in Britain. Composers like Vaughan Williams were marginalised, and experimental voices given an airing in proportion to their cacophony. During the 1950s there also grew up in Darmstadt a wholly new pedagogy of music, under the aegis of Karlheinz Stockhausen. Composition, as taught by Stockhausen, consisted in random outbursts that could be described, without too much strain, as groans wrapped in mathematics. The result makes little or no sense to the ear, but often fascinates the eye with its nests of black spiders, as in the scores for Stockhausen’s Gruppen or the 6th String Quartet by Brian Ferneyhough.

The trick was successful. Stockhausen’s works received and still receive extensive, usually state-subsidised performances all across the world. His older Austrian contemporary, Gottfried von Einem, who was at the time writing powerful operas in a tonal idiom influenced by Stravinsky and Prokoviev, was in comparison ignored, not because his music is trivial, but because he was perceived to be out of touch with the new musical culture and exhibiting dangerous vestiges of the romantic worldview.

Those days are past. It is now permissible to like Sibelius and Vaughan Williams, and to believe that they are superior – which they clearly are ­– to Stockhausen and Boulez. It is permissible to reject the notion that tonality was made irrelevant by the atonal school, and to recognise that some of the greatest works in the tonal tradition were composed in the middle of the 20th century: Rachmaninoff’s Rhapsody on a Theme of Paganini, for example, Strauss’s Four Last Songs, Britten’s Peter Grimes, major symphonies by Shostakovitch and Vaughan Williams, Aaron Copland’s Clarinet Concerto and Appalachian Spring. Some of these – the Rachmaninoff and the Strauss – could be seen as extracting unexploited remainders from the tonal tradition. Others – Britten  and Copland – were more actively engaged in renewing the tonal tradition, drawing out new kinds of melodic line and novel harmonic sequences.

In The Philosophy of Modern Music (1958) Theodor Adorno argued that tonality was nothing but the exhausted remainder of a dead tradition. But by the time he wrote it was atonality and not tonality that was exhausted. The radical modernist idiom was kept going by Darmstadt, by the system of official patronage and by the fact that real musical education, which used to be a household requirement, had been effectively destroyed by the invention of broadcasting and recording, so that few people felt confident in questioning the radical avant-garde. But the real experiments – those that drew freely on the tonal tradition and on the eclectic spirit of Western civilisation, like the Turangalila Symphony of Messiaen, the remarkable Star-Child oratorio by George Crumb, and the triple concerto of Michael Tippett – entered the repertoire without any need for the critical hype and institutional support enjoyed by Stockhausen and Boulez.

There is another reason for the brief ascendancy in those days of the avant-garde, and one that bears heavily on the future of Western music. During the course of the 20th century a wholly new kind of popular music emerged. Nobody can say, in retrospect, that the waltzes and polkas of Strauss or the operettas of Léhar and Offenbach belong to another language and another culture than the symphonies of Brahms or the music dramas of Wagner. Strauss (father and son), Léhar, Offenbach are now counted in the “classical” repertoire, just as much as Wagner, Brahms and the other Strauss. And the distinction between popular entertainment and high art is internal to their repertoire: the Overture to Die Fledermaus and the Hungarian Dances of Brahms surely stand side by side. They reach back across a century and a half to the dance suites of Bach and the ballets of Rameau – serious celebrations of joyful and light-hearted ways of being.

Only in the 20th century did popular and serious music finally divide, and the principal reason for this was jazz. The origin of this remarkable idiom is veiled in obscurity, though it is evident that it absorbed, along the way, both the syncopated rhythms of African drum music, the blues notes that come from attempting to unite the pentatonic and the diatonic scales, and the chord grammar of the Negro spirituals. The jazz idiom showed a remarkable ability to develop, so that an entirely new harmonic language grew from it, and soon became the foundation of a new kind of popular song and dance. It was this quintessentially American idiom that most got up the nose of Adorno during his time as an exile in Hollywood, and which served as his proof that tonality was destined to degenerate into short-breathed melodies and repetitious sequences.

It is true that improvisation around a “jazz standard” is a very different thing from the far-ranging musical thinking that we find in the concert-hall. A work that returns constantly to the same source for refreshment, and goes on “forever” precisely because it goes on only for a moment is a very different thing from the symphony that develops thematic material into a continuous musical narrative. But Ravel, Gershwin and Stravinsky showed how to incorporate jazz rhythm and melody and even jazz harmonic sequences into symphonic works that had some of the long-distance complexity of the classical tradition. Meanwhile there emerged a new form of popular music, on the edge of jazz, but reaching into the world of folk melody and light opera. This was the idiom of the Broadway Musical and the American Song Book. Brilliant musicians like Cole Porter, Hoagy Carmichael, and Richard Rodgers became household names, with songs that our parents knew by heart, and which defined a new kind of taste. This was music to be sung around the house, which normalised the emotions of ordinary people as they endeavoured to cope with the new world of machines, gadgets, social mobility, fast romance, and easy divorce. Thus began the great fracture in the world of music between “pop” and “classical”, in which it became ever more important for the critics to side with the classical tradition, and to find something that distinguished modern composers in that tradition from the “easy listening” and “light music” that filled the suburban bathroom.

For a while, therefore, there was an added motive for composers to take the path of radical modernism, and so to give proof that they belonged to the great tradition of serious musical thinking. A composer like Boulez, ensconced in the madhouse of IRCAM in Paris, could be, as Hamlet put it, “bounded in a nutshell and count himself king of infinite space”. Insulated from the vulgar world of musical enjoyment, sending out musical spells into the electronic ether, the composer began to live in a world of his own. That it should be Boulez who received the accolades and not Maurice Duruflé or Henri Dutilleux is explained by the enormous publicity value of difficulty, when difficulty is subsidised by the state. The radical modernists had succeeded in persuading the official bodies that they were keeping alive the flame of high art in the face of an increasingly degenerate pop culture. And for a while, following the transformation of rhythm and blues into a universal idiom of song and dance by Chuck Berry, The Beatles, and The Rolling Stones, it seemed as though they were right. What did this new popular music have to do even with the comparatively refined language and domestic charm of the Broadway musical, still less with the symphonic and operatic traditions?

But then the whole thing collapsed. Impassable divides have an ability to survive in the old hierarchical culture of Europe; but they don’t last for long in America. Composers like Steve Reich and Philip Glass had no desire to separate from their hippy friends, or to lose the most important benefit that makes the life of a composer worthwhile, namely money, and the audience that provides it. There emerged the new idiom of minimalism, in which the harmonic complexities of the modernists and those of the great jazz musicians like Monk, Tatum, and Peterson were both rejected in favour of simple tonal triads, often repeated ad nauseam on mesmeric instruments like marimbas. The result, to my ear utterly empty and the best argument for Boulez that I have yet encountered, succeeded in entering the repertoire and gaining a young and enthusiastic audience. This music is written for the concert hall, but uses the devices of pop: mechanical rhythm, unceasing repetition, fragmented and constantly repeated melodic lines, and a small repertoire of chords constantly returning to the starting point. It has joined the world of “easy listening”.

Whether Reich and Glass entitle us to talk of a new and “postmodern” idiom in the world of serious music I doubt. For this is not serious music, but a kind of musical void. Listening to Glass’s opera Ekhnaton, for instance, you will be tempted to agree with Adorno, that the musical idiom (let’s not speak of the drama) is utterly exhausted. But then along came John Adams, whose mastery of orchestration and knowledge of real tonal harmony began to redeem the minimalist idiom, and to bring it properly into the concert hall. And other American composers followed suit – Torke, Del Tredici, Corigliano, Daugherty – writing “tonal music with attitude”, inserting advanced harmonic episodes into structures that make thematic and rhythmical sense. In Britain a new wave of tonal composers has also emerged, some of them – like James Macmillan, Oliver Knussen, and David Matthews beginning as radical modernists – but all moving along the path mapped out by the great Benjamin Britten, out of the modernist desert into an oasis where the birds still sing. Such composers learned the lesson taught (however clumsily) by Reich and Glass, which is that music is nothing without an audience, and that the audience must be discovered among young people whose ears have been shaped by the ostinato rhythms and undemanding chord grammar of pop. To offer serious music to such an audience you must also attract their attention. And this cannot be done without rhythms that connect to their own bodily perceptions. Serious composers must work on the rhythms of everyday life. Bach addressed listeners whose ears had been shaped by allemandes, gigues and sarabandes – dance rhythms that open the way to melodic and harmonic invention. The modern composer has no such luck. The 4/4 ostinato is everywhere around us, and its effect on the soul, body and ear of post-modern people is both enormous and unpredictable. Modern composers have no choice but to acknowledge this, if they are to address young audiences and capture their attention. And the great question is how it can be done without lapsing into banality, as Adorno told us it must.

Composition

Tonal Affinities and Their Denial, Part I


EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is the first part of a two-part series. You can read the second part here.

Nearly a century after Arnold Schoenberg averred it to be the future of Western art music, dodecaphony remains the single most startling turn in the history of music – any music. Its advent in 1923 was, as the late composer George Rochberg once pointed out, the only occasion in the history of any known culture that tonality – in the general sense of pitch hierarchy, not the specific signification of the major/minor system – had been denied. It is my two-fold purpose to show that 1) The denial failed, because it is an acoustic impossibility, and, more importantly, 2) The attempt at denial, and the belief system built around that attempt, corrupted the vitality and creativity of Western art music, leading to its present marginalization. Along the way, it will be necessary to expose the philosophical roots of what musicologist William Thomson has called “Schoenberg’s Error,”1 and to suggest some alternatives to that thinking.

What I have called dodecaphony is often referenced as “twelve-tone” (in the UK, “twelve-note”) music and is frequently used in tandem with the related but altogether different word, “serialism.” Schoenberg’s innovation arrived in these two different parts: Dodecaphony was the idea that all dozen tones of the chromatic scale should be employed by a composer before any were repeated, while serialism was a mode of compositional procedure in which the twelve tones were laid out in a row or series, and then manipulated formally via ages-old techniques of inverting, reversing and transposing the rows. Serial composition, in other words, was a most efficient way of ensuring that the essential aesthetic of dodecaphony – the lack of tonal implications in the relationships among pitches – was adhered to.

Here is Schoenberg, recalling in his essay, “Composition with Twelve Tones,” how he came up with his inventions:

After many unsuccessful attempts during a period of approximately twelve years, I laid the foundations for a new procedure in musical construction which seemed fitted to replace those structural differentiations provided formerly by tonal harmonies. I called this procedure ‘Method of Composing with Twelve Tones Which are Related Only with One Another.’ This method consists primarily of the constant and exclusive use of a set of twelve different tones. This means, of course, that no tone is repeated within the series and that it uses all twelve tones of the chromatic scale, though in a different order. It is in no way identical with the chromatic scale…..[The method involves ordering the twelve tones of the chromatic scale into a row, known as the Basic Set, and using that row and its properties exclusively throughout the composition in question.]2

(Emphases Schoenberg’s.)

The bold statement “twelve tones which are related only with one another” is the crux of the watershed that was Schoenberg’s aesthetic. By “related only with one another,” Schoenberg meant related solely by virtue of being placed in positive relation to each other; as John Cage would later explain it, tones in Schoenberg’s method (and in Cage’s) are “related” in the sense that one piece of furniture in a room is “related” to the other pieces of furniture in that room – they are all in proximity to each other. “Related” in the old tonal sense had meant related to each other hierarchically, as parts of some larger tonal scheme, precisely the thing Schoenberg was seeking to dissolve. This might better be called a “non-relationship” than a relationship; and of course, it is possible to posit non-relationships, at least in the abstract. It is possible to toy with the idea, for example, that each color exists independently of all other colors, that green and purple and orange are not part of a spectrum, but isolated phenomena, and to create a color theory based on that idea. If that were done, however, it can be assumed with relative certainty that the theory would not be taken as anything other than a fanciful “as-if.” Put forth as a universal concept, it would be denied vigorously as clearly and incontrovertibly false. Dodecaphony, by contrast, was hailed as a step forward in an inevitable progression toward a new music.

Why? How was such an aesthetic, asserted without any intellectual or empirical support, accepted as orthodoxy for decades? And why have the acoustic premises of dodecaphony, which are, as is easy to demonstrate, utterly false, never been flushed from music history? Why, in other words, are dodecaphony and the developments that followed from it considered a legitimate part of music history, instead of an aberration in need of correction? There must be some core idea at work that lends the air of being true to abstract assertions like Schoenberg’s, whatever their status in the world of empirical experience. Prior to that, though, there must exist misunderstanding, at a most fundamental level, of what is meant by some of the vocabulary attached to this discussion. Take for example, the word “chromatic.” A typical music critic’s description of dodecaphony generally assumes “chromatic” to apply. Of course, it does not. “Chromatic” has meaning only in contrast to “diatonic,” and both rely for context on the major/minor system of key centers. Music is diatonic when deployed in a particular key of seven tones – major, minor or modal – and becomes chromatic when it slides between those seven, “borrowing” pitches from other keys. When all possible pitches, diatonic and chromatic, are assembled, we have the “chromatic” scale, though in truth it is a diatonic scale (any diatonic scale, depending on where the set of twelve stops and starts) with chromatic embellishments added. What Schoenberg did was to treat the chromatic scale as independent of its origins in the diatonic scale, to employ the twelve tones merely “as a collection of materials,” as Thomson explains it. Dodecaphony is not chromatic any more than it is diatonic. It is, strictly speaking, neutral.

The roots of dodecaphony are generally traced back to Wagner, and especially to Tristan und Isolde, which might with good reason be called the rough musical equivalent of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. As Critique of Pure Reason was a turning point in Western philosophy, Wagner’s score was a turning point in Western music, and for a similar reason. Kant’s text famously placed a limit on what we might know; the synthetic a priori meant that experience is shaped by the categories that populate our consciousness, and therefore we cannot know “the thing-in-itself.” Centuries of assumptions to the contrary were overturned, even made to look naive, by Kant’s observations. Likewise, the harmonic ambiguities of Wagner’s music revealed the foundation of the tonal system developed in Europe after the Renaissance to have been built on sand. From the late Renaissance to the middle of the 19th century, the system of major and minor keys had held the place of an absolute. Systematic tonality defined music-making with its hierarchies of pitch classes. But in the early pages of Tristan rose a chord that would become infamous as the machine of that system’s overthrow. In Harvard’s Charles Eliot Norton lectures for 1973, Leonard Bernstein dramatized the seeming anarchy created by the Tristan chord:

What key are we in? Or no key at all? Did that cadence on the dominant seventh indicate A minor? But the dominant never resolves to the A minor tonic. Instead, there is a long pause, and the phrase is repeated, higher, more intense, with the rising minor sixth now stretched, transformed to a major sixth, again ending on a dominant, but in a different key.3

Bernstein continues, astonished at every turn by Wagner’s ability to suggest multiple possible keys – or no key at all – at once. One needn’t understand the technical harmonic terms to catch the thrust of what Bernstein is saying: From the moment of Wagner’s Tristan (1868), harmonic stability can no longer be taken for granted. After Kant, there was no way to know “the thing-in-itself.” One might say that, after Wagner, there was no way to know “the key in itself.”

The reason for Wagner’s manipulation of tonal ambiguities cannot go unmentioned. Shortly after writing the libretti to the four music dramas of his Ring of the Nibelung and commencing the scoring of the first of them, Wagner read Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea. Never before had a composer been so directly influenced by a philosopher. Previously a committed revolutionary, Wagner now saw the world as illusory, a chimera of pain followed by extinguishment, the only conceivable moral path being that of Buddhist-like renunciation.

And so, the music for the last three of Wagner’s four Ring installments, and especially the music for his next serious music drama, Tristan und Isolde, pushed tonality in the direction of its seeming dissolution, analogue to the Schopenhaueresque theme of renunciation. What could be musically more illustrative of the illusion of material reality than the unraveling of the music itself? What could be dramatically more effective than a libretto in which the characters attempt to maintain the lie of creating a new world through political and ethical reform, while the music denies this possibility in its very nature, seeming to dissolve the world of sound through sound itself? Of course, the actual unravelling of music would not be possible. To do that literally, to eliminate music, would be, perhaps, to tell the singers and musicians to go their own way and sing and play whatever they wish (a notion to keep in mind when we trace the lineage of Wagner’s influence). No, the depiction of disillusion, the musical portrayal of abjuration, could not consist literally in the removal of music, but rather the employment of music to the end of suggesting that the real world is illusory.

There is a doubling-back here that is fascinating. In order for Wagner to sketch this portrayal of a world of illusion, it was necessary for him to employ musical skills, which were in turn assumed to be non-illusory. In other words, systematic tonal music (the only music at the time) was based on the deployment of notes in perfect hierarchical relation. By manipulating this relation so as to undermine the sense of hierarchy, by employing the sort of harmonic ambiguity related above by Bernstein, Wagner was able to suggest that the relation did not exist – that tonality, and by extension, the world of the senses, was indeed a world of illusion. But this suggestion of illusion rests in turn for its effect on tonality’s non-illusory validity! The point cannot be overemphasized: Wagner did not deny tonality in the Ring and his later operas; rather, he masterfully exploited its potential for ambiguity via extreme chromaticism, painting in music a world in which every sensible thing – including tonality, the very thing doing the painting – does not “really” exist. Little wonder that Claude Debussy called Wagner “the poisonous old magician,” and that W.H. Auden, saying the same thing with an opposite normative twist, dubbed him “the greatest genius who ever lived.”

Schoenberg was the most devoted advocate of Wagnerian extreme chromaticism. Yet he also took great exception to the formal ramifications of that innovation.4 His objection lay along the same lines as his admiration, because the very ambiguity that forged a new harmonic language had also dissolved the traditional structures of Western art music. For example, in a fugue, a subject or subjects are submitted to contrapuntal development over a series of overlapping statements in different keys. Sonata-allegro form presents an expository section that explores themes in contrasting keys, followed by a development that at length returns the themes to the main key of the piece, etc. Without stable key centers, these forms and others were rendered inchoate. Schoenberg, then, sought to impose structural norms on the new language of harmonic ambiguity. He viewed increasing harmonic ambiguity as historically determined and therefore inevitable, but the accompanying dissolution of structure could not stand for long.5 From the late 1890s through the first two decades of the 20th century, Schoenberg pushed Wagnerian harmonic ambiguities to their limit, eventually composing what is sometimes called “atonal” music, but which Schoenberg dubbed, with greater accuracy, pantonal music. Pantonality consists in the avoidance of single-tonic tonal implications altogether, as opposed to the ambiguity of Wagnerian chromaticism. The razor-thin line dividing one from another is difficult to define. It is better illustrated, ideally, by listening to Schoenberg’s major scores, from the clearly Wagnerian Verklarte Nacht (1899) to the doubtlessly pantonal Gurrelieder (1913).

Eventually, however, the ambition of avoiding single tonalities, and the mentally draining task of note-to-note decision-making that such avoidance entailed, overwhelmed Schoenberg. His solution: “He opted for Wagnerian chromaticism, but then he relentlessly adapted it to creations of Brahmsian autonomy.”6 In the final number of the four piano pieces making up his Op. 23 (1923), Schoenberg deployed the system that Theodor Adorno would call “a comprehensive principle of construction…transformed into an a priori form,”7 and that American composer George Rochberg, after first embracing and then vehemently rejecting it, would term “the pathology of the 20th century.” Borrowing from his hero Brahms the intense manipulation of short melodic motifs instead of long-lined melodies, Schoenberg struck on the idea of treating each pitch sui generis, without reference to any wider concept of “tonality.” Treated thusly, the composer could manipulate cells of notes in an abstract manner, shaping form, not from harmony, but from “objective” patterning.

This was the “Wagner” half of the undertaking. The “Brahms” half consisted of creating a structure to house this new chromatic vocabulary: the variation of the rows by transposition, inversion, and retrograde procedures; in other words, serial composition. In this way, a single row could generate 48 different twelve-tone statements for the composer to manipulate. The result was no longer simple pantonality, but anti-tonality: a sonic struggle to reverse how tones had related to each other throughout centuries of Western art music. To review how this had worked, we can conceive of each of the twelve tones in the collection of chromatic scale as capable of receiving what Thomson calls “pitch focus” to become a tonic. Therefore, each note is a tonic, or a dominant, or a subdominant, etc., depending on which note among the twelve receives pitch focus. Focus on a B-flat as tonic, and F is the dominant. Focus on the F as tonic, and B-flat becomes sub-dominant. On and on this relational interchange goes, and as the focus shifts, the same B-flat that was tonic to itself and subdominant to F becomes dominant to E-flat, a major third to G-flat, a second (the supertonic) to A-flat, etc. It is a kaleidoscope of shifting pitch relations that eventually produces twelve major and twelve minor scales. Such is the syntax of the major-minor system: the deployment of pitches in relation to each other as multiple, interlocking hierarchies. The hierarchy is fluid (giving it the inherent potential for ambiguity so brilliantly exploited by Wagner) because any of the twelve notes can “take turns” being the home pitch, or tonic; in other words, a piece may be in any one of twelve different keys (twenty-four allowing for major and minor deployments), and may change key from passage to passage, or even measure to measure.

This is how each of the twelve tones functions in tonal music – taking turns in a game of sonic hierarchy, playing roles from royalty (tonics and dominants) to peasants (neighboring chromatic tones, perhaps), complete with the possibility of revolution in the form of key changes. Taken as a whole, however, the twelve tones of the chromatic scale are just a vocabulary lacking a syntax, a syntax added only when a single note receives pitch focus and is “made party to hierarchical relationships” by this focus, as Thomson puts it. “As a construct, the chromatic scale is nothing more than a useful representation of pitch resources, a listing of ingredients,”8 lacking the tension of hierarchy that underlies the phenomenon of tonality. This is demonstrable by the fact that the chromatic scale can start on any note and the resulting scale will have the same note-to-note relationship as if one started on any other note. This is not true of the major and minor scales, for which note-to-note relationships must change as the tonic moves from one pitch to the next. Even the whole-note scale, developed to intensity by Debussy, has two possible, mutually exclusive iterations (CDEF#G#A# or C#D#FGAB). But the chromatic scale has only one.

This was exactly what Schoenberg sought to exploit in the idea of dodecaphony: a flat assemblage of notes without hierarchy. No more concern about which key(s) might be present, because the 12-tone row banishes all keys. No more worry about note-to-note procedure, because by avoiding all possible tonal connections in the very form of a piece, one’s path to atonality is smoothed. Manipulate the 48 possible permutations of your original twelve-tone row, and you have composed without fear of having made connections between notes, save in the positive sense that the notes are gathered in proximity to each other (“twelve tones which are related only to one another”).

But there’s an obvious problem. The same flatness of relationship that made the chromatic scale fodder for “equal” treatment of tones divorced it from syntax; indeed, the two statements – “lacking hierarchy” and “lacking syntax” – are restatements of each other. The chromatic scale, played sequentially or arranged as a row, is inherently non-syntactical, and music – all music of all cultures at all times in history to which we have access – had, until this moment in Western history, always exhibited a syntax deriving in some manner from the inherent hierarchic implications of the overtone series. This derivation was not theoretical, but practical. As Thomson writes, it came from “people opening their mouths” and singing.9 Vocal practices were later transferred to instrumental ones. To take a representative example from outside the Western tradition, the drone of the Indian sitar results from the direct observation of the acoustic fact of hierarchical pitch-relations. Six or seven of that instrument’s 17 to 20 strings are fretted, and the player plucks these to produce tones. But the remainder are free-floating strings intended to vibrate along with the pitches produced by the player. They ring in sympathy in accordance with the pitch played; in other words, when a fretted note is played, the amount of resonance exhibited by any certain string will depend on its place in the overtone hierarchy of the plucked note. If the note played is, for example, a “D” (in Western nomenclature), then any string tuned to “A” will resonate boldly, as that is the first pitch in the overtone series of “D” after other “Ds.” A string tuned to “B” will resonate less boldly, and one tuned to “E” still less so, etc. As the player moves from note to note, each individual, sympathetic string resonates at varying levels of intensity, depending on its place in the pitch hierarchy of the note played. This makes the color of the sound shift constantly as the overtone series glides from note to note, altering the hierarchy of its pattern with each change of the fundamental tone.

We must stop here to consider the difference between the two different, but related meanings of “tonality.” As we have noted, all musical cultures, prior to the advent of dodecaphony, have in some manner involved relating notes to one another in a hierarchy. Europe’s major/minor scales and India’s ragas are but two examples. Native America’s cedar flute tradition employs a minor pentatonic scale; traditional Chinese string instruments are played according to the ratios of 1/2, 1/3, 2/3, etc., ratios exactly correspondent to the overtone series. There are no exceptions. It is in this broad sense that all music (except dodecaphony, apparently) is tonal (first meaning): its practice relates in some manner to the inherent hierarchy of the overtone series. But Western musicians often use the word “tonality” to refer to the major/minor scale system that was modern Europe’s particular response to the overtone series (second meaning). This was how Schoenberg meant “tonality,” when, for example, he contrasted it to Europe’s earlier modal system of organization, which involved fewer notes and a less definite sense of the tonic pitch. (This is why medieval chant, which is modal, sounds “floating.”) Modality was tonal in the first sense, like all other music. But it was not tonal in the second sense of exhibiting major-minor scale relationships. Thomson points out that Schoenberg declared modality to be “pre-tonal” (implying the first meaning) because it lacked the diamond-hard relationship of dominant to tonic that characterizes tonality (second meaning). This conflation of tonality/first meaning with tonality/second meaning is all the more confusing because, in its first meaning, tonality allows no “pre-tonal” state; it is an always-already reality of pitched sound.

So, by abandoning tonality in the second sense of the Western major/minor system, and substituting for it a system that expressly undermined any other possible tonal connections in the first sense, Schoenberg made in essence the claim that Western tonality was the only system of tonality-in-the-first-sense that mattered. Tonality-second-sense was the only possible ultimate expression of tonality-first-sense; therefore, Schoenberg reasoned, the time had come to abandon tonality in both its meanings. The advent of serialism, far from being the liberating act its champions professed it to be, was actually a bold example of Eurocentric hubris. Schoenberg conceived of “tonality” narrowly, only in the sense of the European major/minor system, and his (seeming) innovation of dodecaphony was announced from within this system alone. A pall of cultural hegemony hangs over dodecaphony, confirmed by Schoenberg’s most infamous statement regarding his invention of it, from a letter to a friend in 1923: “I have made a discovery which will ensure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years.”10 Boastfully nationalistic, the statement is also made tragically poignant by the fact of Schoenberg’s Jewish heritage, in light of the coming Holocaust.

Endnotes

1 William Thomson, Schoenberg’s Error.

2 Arnold Schoenberg, “Composition with Twelve-Tones” (1941), Style and Idea: Selected Writings of Arnold Schoenberg, Leonard Stein, ed., trans. by Leo Black, Faber and Faber, 1975, p. 218.

3 Leonard Bernstein, The Unanswered Question: Six Talks at Harvard, Harvard, 1976, p. 231.

4 William Thomson, Schoenberg’s Error, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991, passim.

5 Note, as this description progresses, a dialectical triad expressed. Tonality (thesis) contains its own self-contradiction as ambiguity (atonality as antithesis), resulting in the synthesis of Schoenberg’s dodecaphony.

6 Ibid., p. 175.

7 Quoted in Stefan Muller-Doohm, Adorno: A Biography, Polity Press, 2005, p. 118.

8 Ibid., p. 88.

9 Ibid., p. 142.

10 Arnold Schoenberg, quoted in Stuckenschmidt, Hans Heinz. 1977Schoenberg: His Life, World and Work, trans. by Humphrey Searle. Schirmer Books, p.277.

Composition

Tonal Affinities and Their Denial, Part II


EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is the second part of a two-part series. You can read the first part here.

It is at last clear that Schoenberg’s error was to ignore the inherently hierarchical nature, not just of Western tonality, but of pitched sound itself. It is hierarchy that makes the lower relations among overtones perceived as “consonant,” while the upper partials are heard as “dissonant.”1 It is hierarchy that puts a melodic line in the foreground and its accompaniment in the background. It is hierarchy that links pitch to duration, making it impossible, outside of pure abstraction, to consider a pitched sound separate from how long it endures in time. It is possible, of course, simply to assert outright that hierarchy is of no importance. It is also possible, in designing aircraft, to assert the notion that airfoil is an arbitrary construct, and to design aircraft that ignore the principles of airfoil, and to contemplate these designs in purely abstract fashion. But if these designs were materially realized, the resultant aircraft would not fly. Similarly, music designed along principles that contradict the ontic realities of pitch hierarchy and the perceptual requirements of human psychology can be contemplated abstractly, but the sounds thus produced will not “fly” – that is, it will not be perceived as music, and if it is not perceived as music, it is quite possible that it is not music. This observation is controversial only because its application is potentially conservative.

Consider the following three sets of English-language words:

My cat Luna has thick black fur and a cold wet nose.

Has cat a fur and thick Luna nose wet black my cold

Luna My fur has thick black cat nose and cold wet a

The first group of words comprise a standard English sentence conveying information about a cat with the proper name, “Luna.” From this we know that Luna belongs to me, and that she has black fur and a nose that is cold and wet. The second arrangement of the same twelve words has been deliberately re-ordered so as create zero-to-minimal syntactical sense. It is a word-row, devised with the end in mind of treating each word as a thing-unto-itself. Syntactical relations between any two consecutive words were avoided, though “thick/Luna/nose” come dangerously close to forming a semantic trio. The third set was ordered via a process of tossing a coin (a quarter). I divided the initial sentence into two parts of six words each: “my cat Luna has thick black” and “fur and a cold wet nose.” I flipped a coin to determine which half the first word in the new sequence would come from: heads for the first set and tails for the second. I narrowed the choice down further with each successive flip until the sequence reproduced here emerged.

It is fair to say that the second and third sets are very much alike, as neither can be construed as exhibiting syntax of any sort, and therefore neither conveys information. An English speaker reading the initial sentence would have no trouble connecting noun to verb to modifier, etc. But in both the second and third sets, while the reader will recognize parts of speech – “cat” as a noun, “my” as a possessive, etc. – the words cannot, because of their lack of syntactical order, be made to fit into any syntactical scheme. What Schoenberg did with pitches was similar to what I have done with the second set of words above. True, Schoenberg chose his rows from among a chromatic scale that was already, in and of itself, a flat collection of materials, but his dodecaphonic/serial method took special care that this flatness should be maintained as the dozen were deployed in the non-sequential order called a series or row. This does not occur outside a specific set of imposed rules. If, for example, I were to choose from among the twelve chromatic pitches, without reference to any rules, a series of pitches using only my ear as guide, there is a good likelihood that the same intuition which makes humans sing certain groups of notes together but not others would lead me to pick tones that suggested a triad, perhaps, or pyramiding fifths, or some other grouping related to the overtone series. Even within the constraint of having to play all twelve tones before playing any of them twice, it is possible to choose pitches that suggest tonal hierarchy, which is why Schoenberg cautioned serial composers to avoid thirds and sixths in their rows, and how Alban Berg, Schoenberg’s student, managed to compose the only serial works that have entered the repertoire precisely because they contradict that edict. (The row governing Berg’s Violin Concerto is so tonal-friendly that it allows the interpolation of a Bach Chorale.)

In the third set, the method has changed, but the result would be equally frustrating for any English-speaker trying to make sense of it. The process of choosing words at random, using a decision-generating device like a coin flip, would seem to be the opposite strategy from carefully selecting words according to a set of rules. And yet, the results are surprisingly similar. Written words are visual representations of the sounds in spoken language, which must, to be language, incorporate syntax. When they are used outside that definition, it is arguable that they are no longer words-as-such. A coffee mug used to plant a violet is a flower pot. Mathematical symbols used to adorn a shower curtain without regard to their function are decoration. And words arranged as patterns – randomly or consciously designed – are, perhaps, objects for some kind of contemplation. But they are not words. There is nothing at all wrong, of course, in converting a coffee mug to use as a flower pot, and mathematical symbols may look elegant on a shower curtain. At issue is the idea of continuing to call the mug a mug and, even more pertinently, the claim of doing mathematics by arranging them for strictly visual purposes. If putting cosigns and tangents willy-nilly on a piece of cloth is not mathematics, how is it that playing notes without regard to their function in music is music? All serialist and most aleatory composers employ pitches that were originally intended to form musical scales, the salient feature of which is the tension created by the hierarchy of relative weights given to those pitches (the tonic, the dominant, the subdominant, and so on down the line), to the end of creating sonic patterns that ignore the hierarchical pitch arrangement that originated the pitches-as-such. (This should remind us of Wagner’s use of tonality to suggest that tonality is invalid, mentioned earlier.) It would seem, then, that serial and aleatory musics are more accurately called “anti-music.” But again, this approach is controversial, as it results in a conservative, even reactionary aesthetic. If we are allowed to say that serialism is not “really” music, why not “that hip-hop crap ain’t music”? This is the usual form taken by the fear that too-precise a definition of an art will narrowly restrict artistic freedom.

Our third example above is there to illustrate the eventual product of Schoenberg’s thesis: aleatory music. The two processes – Schoenberg’s careful plotting of tone-rows and the tossing of coins associated with John Cage – could not, prima facie, be further apart. Yet they each result in the use of pitched sound as something other than pitched sound-as-such, just as the second and third arrangements of words in the verbal examples above used words other than as words. Cage acknowledged Schoenberg as his master, and with good reason. A brief historical sketch of Western art music post-Schoenberg to Cage illustrates the relationship:

Serialism reached its peak in the 1940s and ‘50s, as the music of Anton Webern, Schoenberg’s pupil, achieved a startling level of chic. Every composer who wanted to be au courant tossed aside Stravinskian neoclassicism for the sonic pointillism of Webern – even Stravinsky, whose “conversion” to serialism in the late 1950s was taken as the final fall of all musics but the serial.

By the time of Stravinsky’s “conversion,” plain serialism was already old hat. In 1951, a young Parisian named Pierre Boulez had proclaimed “Schoenberg is dead” (he had in fact just died, his death possibly linked to an anxiety attack over the digits of his age [76] that year – 7 and 6 – adding up to 13; Schoenberg, the inventor of 12-tone music, suffered from extreme triskaidekaphobia) and proceeded to move “beyond” serial procedures. Boulez’s advance took the form, however, not of rejecting serialism, but of expanding it to cover all aspects of music. Serialism ordered only the twelve pitch classes, but Boulez’s “integral serialism” commandeered the ordering of music’s other parameters as well. For instance, a dynamic “row” might be assembled thusly: f, ppp, mp, ff, p, mf, fff, etc.. So, if the piece being composed began forte (f), its next dynamic would have to be pianississimo (ppp), and the next one mezzo-piano (mp), and so on. A score composed for, say, violin, trumpet, vibraphone and double bass would likewise have the pitches of its tone-row performed by a parallel series of timbres: If the bowed violin played the first note of the series, then the second note might be played by the trumpet, the third by the double bass pizzicato, the fourth by the violin pizzicato, the fifth by the vibraphone, the sixth by the double bass bowed, etc. And of course each one of these was at a different dynamic as per the dynamic row we have described. So if the first hexachord of the pitch row was, say, DA#AD#BC#, the dynamic row might be f-mp-ff-pp-ppp-fff, and the timbre row violin pizz./trumpet/vibraphone/double bass bowed/violin bowed/double bass pizz.

This is a marvelous game and entertaining for the composer who plays it. The result can yield an idea or two that might not have occurred to the composer in the normal (non-serial) process of composing music. But its expressive potential is extremely narrow – in fact, the whole point of the process is to turn the usual (in Western terms) expressive voice of the composer over to the process itself. The composer chooses the various rows, but then the interlocking rows are left on their own to manufacture the relationships (in the new, positivist, Schoenbergian sense) of one pitch/timbre/dynamic to another pitch/timbre/dynamic. Control no longer belongs to the composer, who is but a sort of manager of the process.

But our example is missing one important factor. For, just as dodecaphony abolished tonal pitch relations, integral serialism abolished the beat. Analogous to Wagner’s blurring of key centers, various composers in the early 20th century had ruptured the familiar beat patterns of two, three, and four counts with complex patterns that shifted, perhaps, from five to two to seven to one-and-a-half to nine. The beat was “all over the place.” Why not simply get rid of it? The positive aspect of rhythm is simple duration. Therefore, it’s possible to posit durations as related only to each other, and not to the hierarchic arrangement of metered beats. For our set of pitches-with-timbres-and-dynamics above, let’s add durations in the mode of fully integral serialism. I choose for my duration series: an eighth note, a half note, a dotted eighth-note, a quarter-note, a whole note, and a sixteenth note. This actually leaves some room for personal decision-making, as the durations may overlap.

Integral serialism’s aesthetic domination was brief and its pure practitioners were few. Boulez and the American Milton Babbitt were its most prominent figures, and a few years in the 1950s were its heyday. Waiting in the wings was a young American musical artist grown unsatisfied with his own innovations, which were primarily related to timbre. John Cage’s invention of the prepared piano – a piano with erasers, bolts, wooden dowels, etc., stuck between its strings – made possible the presentation of varied colors on an acoustic piano that normally would have required electronics. Cage achieved a certain fame with this and with his whimsical early compositions, but he was restless to push back what he felt was a Western aesthetic bound up with ego and with fake “self-expression.” Cage wanted the subject out of the picture altogether, and when he encountered integral serialism, the path became clear. In integral serialism, the order of things is pre-determined by rows set in place by the composer, but then “let loose,” as it were, to generate music by means of a neutral playing-out of the material (as illustrated above). Why not then also remove control of the originating rows, as well? Instead of shaping a row of twelve tones and other rows of different dynamics, etc., why not simply generate sounds by chance? It was a brilliant move, and while Cage probably did not think of it this way, it is possible to look at it as, in essence, calling modernism’s bluff. You want notes unconnected to each other save by their mutual proximity? Then throw some dice and let it go at that.

Boulez and Cage were musical allies for something like two minutes. As soon as Boulez understood what Cage was about, he withdrew his approval. Composerly control was apparently important, after all, though it is difficult to see why, given the premise that isolated pitch/duration/timbre/dynamics were the ideal. The difference between the isolation created by conscious row manipulation and that created by pure chance was illustrated in the manipulations (above) of the sentence about my cat. For all intents and purposes, there is none.

The line of thought from Wagner to Schoenberg to Boulez to Cage can now be neatly sketched:

Wagner: It is possible to obscure the sense of key center, making the listener unsure of where she is, tonally.

Schoenberg: Then let’s be rid of tonal relations between pitches altogether and create a music without the background presence of hierarchic connections.

Boulez: If it is acceptable to abandon tonal pitch-relationships, then let’s go a step further and free ourselves from the supposed expressive relationships involving color and dynamics. Most importantly, let’s do unto duration something analogous to what Schoenberg hath done unto pitch. Down with the measured count! Let us free duration from the hierarchy of the beat.

Cage: You’re right! There exist no inherent relationships among tones, durations, or anything else. Nor are pitch and duration, etc., even necessary to what we might call “music.” Music is sound listened to inside a frame, nothing else. Listen to traffic and frame it as music, and it is music.

It’s a short intellectual distance from step two to step four, and it was a brief historical distance as well. Schoenberg died in 1951. The following year, Cage conceived his iconic piece, 4’33”, which calls for the performer(s) (any instrument or group of instruments) to remain quiet for four minutes and thirty-three seconds, while the ambient sounds of the audience and the hall produce the work of art. 4’33” is consistently referred to as a piece of music, and is even published and available for sale at $5 and change. (The idea of copyrighting a set of instructions without any determinate content is the concept of intellectual property at its most audacious.) With it, we have arrived at a place in which, not only are pieces that operate on premises opposite to how we hear pitched sound considered legitimate and even historically necessary, but sound itself is considered equivalent to music, provided it is labeled as such. It is nominalism unchecked, and it is taken today by mainstream academic and popular commentators as common understanding. In Music, Language and the Brain, Anirrudh Patel defines music as “sound organized in time, intended for, or perceived as, an aesthetic experience.”2 With the possible exception of objections to the word “organized,” which to a Cageian smacks of egocentric control, it’s hard to imagine anyone taking serious exception to that definition, even though it literally means that, if I cough and burp, organizing said sounds by initiating the cough and controlling the rate of the burp’s emission, and this subsequent experience provides me what I or another person perceive to be an aesthetic experience, then I have made music. Lest the reader think I am setting up a straw man, Patel also says, bluntly and with the full force of seeming authority: “(I)t is quite clear that there are no sonic universals in music, other than the trivial one that it must involve sound in some way.”3 Noise is only noise when called noise; the same sounds called music are music. At the conclusion of his book, Thomson puts it another way, a reframing of Patel’s commonplace that exposes its absurdity. The ultimate utterance about music, given the legitimacy of the line of thought from Schoenberg to the avant-garde, Thomson observes, is simply: “There are sounds.”4 Thus are nominalism and materialism complicit in the same dead end.

But are there even sounds? If music doesn’t exist qua music, but is merely sound framed as music, how can the skeptic be sure that sound itself exists? Pure skeptics, indeed, find a belief in the existence of sound to be quite ridiculous. Sextus Empiricus propounded this in the Second Century CE. The argument, in his “Against the Musicians,” amounts to saying that just because vibrations in the air are registered by ears as sound does not lend existential status to sound as such; sound remains merely an experience, not an entity.5 This is the same argument used by those who say that music does not exist as a category separate from sound: “Just because certain sounds are registered by ears as music, over and above sound, does not lend special existential status to music as such.” Once a concept is denied as having any status over and above its material ground, then any other concept attached to that material ground is immediately suspect as well. A vibration in the air is measurable by means other than ears. Therefore, this line of argument goes, “hearing” as such, and “sound” as such, are superfluous; their phenomenal existence apart from the strictly material fact of measurable vibration is an empty concept. Consistent materialism, this illustrates, must result in the erasure of the subject entirely, or the subject is opened to the possibility of qualifying material facts in terms of its experience, thus giving the lie to materialism as such. Most materialists, however, ignore the fact that sound is not a positive fact; that it is not strictly material, but always already an experience. Both true skeptics and metaphysicians recognize this, and come down on opposite sides of it. The skeptic says, in essence: Sound is already an experience, and as such lacks real existence. The metaphysician says: Sound is an already an experience; therefore, let us start with that. Music, too, is an experience, and the experience of music-as-such is separate and different from the experience of sound-as-such. The materialist cannot claim that “music is just sound” and at the same time resist the observation that “sound is just vibration.” Ears are not required for the material phenomenon of frequency to occur, and therefore the materialist who claims that music is nothing more than sound must also claim that sound is nothing more than disturbances of the air. Neither music nor sound can be said to exist as-such, because to make either claim is to introduce a subject, and as soon as a subject is introduced, non-material axiology necessarily shows up. There is no subject without the affect of value. To rid philosophy of one is to rid it of the other.

Having seen where things led, from the first sounding of the Tristan chord in 1868 to silence/noise-as-music less than a century later, we are at last in a place to consider Nietzsche’s famous rejection of Wagner for what it truly was: A rejection of the very future we have outlined, a future Nietzsche saw coming. Modernism, as he said repeatedly, would be the death of Man, save Man’s rescue by the Overman. Only, what was modernism? What idea or philosophical approach distinctive to 19th-century Europe was so powerfully destructive that it stood to bring Western civilization itself to an end? Nietzsche notoriously swung wide at every figure in sight, from Plato to Christ, but modernism was not one of these easy targets. His attempt to pin down modernism in music takes this potent form in Human, All Too Human:

The artistic objective pursued by modern music in what is now, in a strong but nonetheless obscure phrase, designated “endless melody” can be made clear by imagining one is going into the sea, gradually relinquishing a firm tread on the bottom and finally surrendering unconditionally to the watery element: one is supposed to swim. Earlier music constrained one – with a delicate or solemn or fiery movement back and forth, faster and slower – to dance: in pursuit of which the needful preservation of orderly measure compelled the soul of the listener to a continual self-possession: it was upon the reflection of the cooler air produced by this self-possession and the warm breath of musical enthusiasm that the charm of this music rested…. [Endless melody] endeavors to break up all mathematical symmetry of tempo and force and sometimes even to mock it; and he is abundantly inventive in the production of effects which to the ear of earlier times sound like rhythmic paradoxes and blasphemies. What he fears is petrification, crystallization, the transition of music into the architectonic – and thus with a two-four rhythm he will juxtapose a three-four rhythm, often introduce bars in five-four and seven-four rhythm, immediately repeat a phrase but expanded to two or three times its original length.6

And then comes the prescient intuition of what may come from all this, the sort of foresight that earns Nietzsche the label of cultural prophet: “A complacent imitation of such an art as this can be a great danger to music: close beside such an over-ripeness of the feeling for rhythm there has always lain in wait the brutalization and decay of rhythm itself.”7 (Emphasis mine.)

There it is, from 1878, a vision of integral serialism’s arrival seven decades hence. One wonders why Nietzsche did not apply his observation to harmony as well as to rhythm, and indeed one can substitute the word “harmony” for “rhythm” in the sentence above and it is just as accurate a prophecy. Nietzsche had begun his intellectual life six years prior as Wagner’s champion in his first book, The Birth of Tragedy. He had perceived the dramatic impact of the older man’s music as Dionysian antidote to the Apollonian “petrification” of the music of the day – something Nietzsche, too, feared. (And rightly so. Mid-19th century academic music was a frigid landscape.) But now, Nietzsche saw, Wagner’s way out of things was capable of producing something much worse than a temporary freezing up of music’s creative urges: it had the potential of leading to the dissolution of music itself.

In this light, Nietzsche’s rejection of Wagner in favor of Bizet can be understood, not as some kind of angry filial punishment of the father figure, nor as the frantic grabbing for a life-preserver in the middle of a churning Wagnerian sea, but as the conscious turn of a sharp musical mind from swimming-into-musical-nihilism to standing on solid ground. Nietzsche chose to turn his back on Wagner’s innovations because he saw in them the seeds of a future in which music itself would die. Was he really so wrong?

Endnotes

1 Schoenberg put this distinction to one side, re-positioning consonance and dissonance along a continuum, with consonance more and dissonance less “comprehensible.” Yet this does nothing other than restate the distinction. It relieves the distinction of bifurcation, but only by arranging for consonance and dissonance as hierarchy in another form. Even so, Schoenberg writes as if the consonant-dissonant continuum eliminates hierarchy itself.

2 Aniruddh D. Patel, Music, Language and the Brain, Oxford University Press EBook (2008), 2.2.1.

3 Ibid., 2.2.1.

4 William Thomson, Schoenberg’s Error, p. 196.

5 Sextus Empiricus, Against the Musicians, trans. By Denise Davidson Greaves, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986.

6 Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human. Trans. R.J. Hollingdale, (1986) Cambridge University Press pp. 275276.

7 Ibid., p. 276.

Composition

The Blind Spots of Pierre Boulez


EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted here with the gracious permission of both the author and Slipped Disc, the publication for which it was originally written.
We encourage our readers
to see the lively discussion that follows the essay on Slipped Disc.

I first played under the baton of Pierre Boulez more than a quarter of a century ago, shortly after I joined the Chicago Symphony. I always admired him as a human being. He was kind, brilliant, generous, and by all accounts a great and loyal friend. On more than one occasion he rescued the Chicago Symphony on short notice after other conductors had to cancel on us. Indeed, he and Bernard Haitink stepped in to steer the orchestra’s artistic fortunes following Daniel Barenboim’s abrupt departure in 2006. All of us in the orchestra are very much in his debt.

But in addressing his legacy, I feel that another aspect of his life must be acknowledged. As a polemicist, he had a profound effect on how we thought about music for much of the 20th century and beyond. On the whole, I think this effect was far from beneficial.

In an essay that dates from 1980, the composer Ned Rorem describes a lecture that Boulez gave on the subject of Debussy’s Etudes. Boulez, according to Rorem, characterized an E-natural in the eighth bar of the Etude-in-Fourths as “a veering from the key center”. Rorem pointedly disagrees, hearing it as “a ‘blue’ note”. Indeed, Rorem hears “the whole lush piece as a jazz improvisation.” Boulez’s premise, Rorem tells us, is that “all roads lead to dodecaphonism” (i.e. to twelve-tone atonal music).

Debussy was one of Boulez’s heroes and so, in Boulez’s view, his music must be heard as a harbinger of the glorious atonal world to come. Rorem’s essay reminds me of something I read back in my college days, Herbert Butterfield’s The Whig Interpretation of History. Butterfield brilliantly takes the conventional wisdom of the historians of his time to task in this brief book from the 1930s. He feels that they regarded history as a teleological phenomenon; mankind was “progressing” towards a world-view that, coincidentally, was the world-view held by these historians. All previous modes of thought, then, were judged as enlightened or reactionary according to how closely they resembled the views of the Whig Historians.

Unfortunately, a teleological narrative is extremely problematic in regard to artistic achievement. Einstein could supersede Newton and antibiotics clearly work better than leeches. But can we truly “progress” beyond Bach or Mozart? Ironically in a man who was famed for his “modernism” Boulez’s faith in man’s eternal journey ever closer to perfection seems a quaint 19th century mindset. It is a way of looking at the world that was, for most of us, discredited by the nightmare of the 20th century’s totalitarian conceptions. We learned the hard way that the rational mind of man was not inexorably advancing toward a utopian future.

Like any good Whig, Boulez picked good guys and bad guys from the pantheon of composers. He favored those whom he could fit into his own narrative, that the entire history of western music was a long struggle to throw off traditional tonal practice. Not many composers before Debussy earned his approval. The only composer born before 1860 I can remember him conducting more than once in the 25 years I played under his baton is Berlioz. Even in the 20th century, there was no shortage of composers who did not conform to Boulez’s March of Progress, and were thus unworthy of his consideration.

In an interview with the Chicago journalist Dennis Polkow on the occasion of his 85th birthday, Boulez went to some length in trashing Dmitri Shostakovich:

I heard [the First Cello Concerto] twice over the years, and I am not saying that it made me physically sick or anything like that, but Tchaikovsky was more radical than Shostakovich. I heard the Fifth Symphony a few years back here in Chicago; it is so conventional. And Symphony Fifteen, this business of long quotes from Rossini, what a poor excuse for some imagination. If we are to play Shostakovich, why not Hindemith?…

You know, in the history of music, there are composers without whom the face of music would be completely different, and composers whom if they had never existed, it would have made no difference whatsoever.

This is as eloquent a manifesto as one could want for the world-view and unstated assumptions of the Whig Historian. Composers, Boulez implies, are to be judged by whether or not they change “the face of music”, and it is clear what manner of changes were required to earn his approval. Whether or not music is beautiful or enables the audience to experience something that it finds meaningful and valuable is apparently beside the point.

In addition, it is dismaying to see Boulez, who was ordinarily so kind and gracious, condemning Shostakovich’s Fifth for being “conventional”. Shostakovich was nearly destroyed for writing music that displeased his Soviet taskmasters. He wrote the Fifth Symphony in the style he did because his career and perhaps even his life depended upon it. To condemn this music for being “conventional” is rather like telling a political prisoner, “You know, you really should get out more!”

And yet, can’t the argument be made that Shostakovich was, in his way, more progressive than Boulez? The “business of long quotations” that Boulez ridicules in the 15th Symphony always struck me as an inspired use of “found objects”, which, in a work that dates from 1971, presages such contemporary visual artists as Alan Rankle and Tracy Emin, not to mention the samplings of preexisting recordings that are often used in rap and hip hop. There is nothing comparable in the music of Boulez. Indeed, I find that his angular melodic shapes and the thoroughgoing dissonance of his harmonies never entirely left the sound world of the Second Viennese School, notwithstanding the superior sophistication and flexibility of his serial techniques, the often daunting rhythmic complexity, and the greater variety in timbre achieved through electronic technology and the subtlety and complexity of his instrumentation.

There were other blind spots in Boulez’s aesthetics that affected his view of Shostakovich. An element of Shostakovich that Boulez could not even acknowledge, so foreign was it to his own viewpoint, was the Russian’s use of popular elements in his music, of folk materials, military marches, and dance rhythms. In this, Shostakovich (and Mahler and others before him), foresaw the melding of high and low art that is so much a part of our present artistic landscape.

I always felt that this limited Boulez when he conducted composers such as Bartok and Mahler, whose styles were deeply affected by popular elements and folk materials. One work I performed with him countless times was Mahler’s Seventh Symphony. In the third movement, which to me is the best music in the symphony, the climax is a crushingly vulgar fortissimo waltz theme grotesquely orchestrated with an appallingly banal accompaniment. Mahler marks the music “Wild”, and it should be horrifying. I always imagine Mahler as a neurotic child encountering drunken, brawling soldiers at his father’s tavern near their barracks in rural Bavaria. It would be hard to conjure a more harrowing depiction of Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil”.  But in the hands of Boulez it always came across as bizarrely elegant – not too fast, not too loud, very accurate. It would have been hard to miss more completely the point of the music.

Inexplicably, more than a few critics accepted his view reducing Mahler to a mere way station on the road to Schoenberg (and Boulez). In a review from October 7, 2010 of a Boulez performance of Mahler 7 with the Chicago Symphony, John Von Rhein, of the Chicago Tribune wrote: “It took the alert ear of Boulez to recognize the distant footfalls of the Second Vienna School in Mahler’s weird harmonic clashes.”

Indeed, critics almost universally praised Boulez’s Mahler interpretations, even of this berserk symphony, for their Apollonian vision. The logic escapes me. Would we praise a diva for a similarly cerebral depiction of the Mad Scene in Lucia? “By not letting herself get overwrought, and calmly singing as if she were at a Presbyterian Church service, the soprano let us really see the melodic lines and harmonies as Donizetti wrote them…”

Would we praise an actor doing Lear for his emotional detachment, and marvel at how he seems so unaffected by his daughters’ betrayal of him that for once we really see Shakespeare’s words as they appear on the page? In passages such as this excerpt from the Seventh, vulgarity is at the very heart of the music; it wallows in the popular culture of Mahler’s time. It never seemed to occur to Boulez that this music must be tied to the world that inspired it outside of the notes on the page.

This is another way in which the world left Boulez the “modernist” behind. His aesthetics were almost obsessed with stylistic consistency. He derided composers past and present for using preexisting structures and tonal schemes with which to organize their material, rather than reinventing the structural wheel with each new work according to the nature of the material therein. In his essay Debussy and the Dawn of Modernism he lauds his hero: “What was overthrown was…the very concept of form itself, here freed from the impersonal constraints of the schema…demanding a technique of perfect instantaneous adequacy.” I’m not sure what “perfect instantaneous adequacy” is. Maybe it works better in the original French.

Later, this essay is even more opaque, at least in translation: “Motion, the instant, irrupt into his music, not merely an impression of the instant, of the fugitive to which it has been reduced, but really a relative and irreversible conception of musical time, and more generally, of the musical universe.”

In any case, we get the idea. Each piece of music must create its own form according to the material being manipulated; it must owe nothing to anything that exists outside its own microcosm. This unfortunately leaves out a lot of the way the world actually exists in our time. If I walk a mile or so north from the Chicago Symphony’s hall, I see a joyous cacophony of architectural styles, promiscuously borrowing from millennia of human history – neo-gothic structures like the Tribune Tower, Frank Gehry’s post-modernist conception at Millenium Park, a few Modernist rectangles, Renzo Piano’s lighter-than-air confection for the modern wing of the Art Institute, and so on.

Many composers since the mid-20th century have reflected this aspect of our world in their music. The Soviet master Alfred Schnittke even coined a term for it: Polystylism. The Chicago Symphony currently has two brilliant young composers-in-residence, Mason Bates and Anna Clyne, who write music that is a glorious mash-up of, among other things, club music dance beats, electronic wizardry, and classical techniques both contemporary and anachronistic. It seems to me that this is the future, and Boulez’s paeans to Debussy’s structural integrity are very much the past. Yet still, it is almost impossible to find anything written about Boulez that doesn’t pay homage to his cutting-edge modernism.

The image of the creative artist as misunderstood genius who is appreciated only by posterity is a cliché. Like many clichés, it has some elements of truth to it. Mahler, Schubert, Bruckner, and Berlioz are certainly appreciated more today than they were in their lifetimes. With Boulez, though, we have a new phenomenon. Here is a composer that started as an enfant terrible urging us to blow up opera houses and ended up a stalwart Establishment institution – and yet never had to write any music that mainstream classical music audiences actually wanted to hear to achieve his climb to eminence.

Indeed, it became somehow bad form to point out that his music is not very successful with the public. In January 2010, the Chicago Symphony sponsored a chamber concert featuring many of his works in honor of his 85th birthday. I was told that the Chicago Architecture Foundation, which has the good luck to be located next to Symphony Center, was overrun with literally hundreds of patrons fleeing the concert at intermission, still clutching their programs. I was told this by one of the refugees. Naturally, this mass exodus was not deemed worthy of mention in any of the press accounts of the event, just as there is a polite silence in the local press about the banks of empty seats at the Chicago Symphony that still result from any program in which the music of Boulez is prominent.

How could Boulez come to such prominence while composing music of such limited appeal? I believe that it was his Whig sensibility, and his success in getting the rest of the world to buy into it, that enabled him to achieve this. The powers that be in classical music decided that Boulez was right. Atonality was the only true path, the goal that we had been unwittingly striving toward ever since the first Gregorian chant. If you were writing tonal music by the middle of the 20th century, you were irrelevant, or, as Boulez put it in his notorious 1952 essay “Eventuellement…”, “useless”. So it didn’t matter whether audiences actually liked it – that was the new music they got. History and Progress had allowed us no alternative.

For a couple of generations after World War Two, composers who employed elements of traditional tonality became endangered species at the music schools of our great universities.

Of course it is simplistic to say that Boulez by himself caused this. But there was no denying his power as a polemicist – and the power of his considerable personal charm. His Whig narrative became accepted wisdom. Tonality, and music that communicated to the traditional classical audience, were consigned history’s ash heap.

This was a tragedy for American music. Whenever I perform Copland, or Bernstein, or Barber, I think of how the 1940s must have looked to American musicians at the time. Copland was an established talent, basking in the great success of his Third Symphony and the ballets. Bernstein had arrived on the scene in a big way, composing the Clarinet Sonata and On The Town in that decade. Barber was hitting his stride, and there was a phalanx of highly skilled composers of the second rank on hand, such as Walter Piston and William Schuman. Our nation was poised like Bohemia at the time of Smetana and Dvorak, or Russia in the heyday of the Mighty Five, to tell our story in classical music, to create an indigenous national school. It was not to be. Barber’s lyricism got him laughed off the stage. Copland was cowed into writing twelve-tone music in the 1950s. And Bernstein had his greatest successes on Broadway and on the podium.

One of Boulez’s staunchest allies was my old Music Director, Daniel Barenboim. It was under Barenboim’s auspices that Boulez was named Principal Guest Conductor of the Chicago Symphony, and Barenboim frequently programmed the music of Boulez and his acolytes. He never deigned to conduct the 20th century composers Boulez would have described as “useless”, unless he was compelled to accompany something along the lines of a Prokofiev concerto. He was pretty open about his disdain for the more tonal currents of our time. But one time, he did condescend to conduct Samuel Barber. It was our first concert in Chicago after 9/11, and he selected Barber’s Adagio for Strings to commemorate the tragedy.

I always wanted to ask him why, when it came time to bring people together in a shared emotion (Wasn’t this a prime motivation for why humanity has always turned to music in the first place?), his esteemed Schoenberg and Boulez suddenly weren’t up to the job and he had to resort to the benighted modal harmonies of Samuel Barber. Doesn’t this tell us something profound about the limitations of the “progress” that Pierre Boulez always insisted we had made?

Composition

The Clothes Have No Emperor


De mortuis nil nisi bonum: of the dead, nothing unless good. But you can take it too far, re-inventing someone who was a power-hungry manipulator, by allowing no one to speak for him save his partisans, many of whom owe their careers to promoting him. As the French say, on a ras le bol with Pierre Boulez, whose death in January has called forth such a spate of idolatrous prose that the sceptics among us have begun to wonder whether French culture is not after all as dead as its critics say it is, if this minor composer and intellectual impresario can be lauded as its greatest recent product. Yet no one in the official channels of cultural appraisal has sown a seed of doubt.

Boulez has three achievements to his name. First, his compositions, presented to the world as next in line to the serialism of Webern, and the “place we have got to” in our musical evolution; secondly, his presence in French culture, diverting government subsidies away from anything that might seem to endorse ordinary musical taste towards the acoustic laboratory of the avant-garde; thirdly, his work as a conductor, for whom clarity and precision took precedence over sentiment. His dominating presence in French musical life is proof that, once the critics have been silenced, the self-appointed leader will be accepted at his own valuation. Condemning all competitors as “useless”, and hinting at a revelation, a “system”, that authorised his doings as the musical Zeitgeist, Boulez was able to subdue whatever timid protests might greet his relentless self-promotion. His disciples and acolytes have spoken abundantly of his charm, and it is clear that, once the period of initial belligerence was over, and his opponents had been despatched to the dust-heap of history, Boulez was a smiling and benevolent occupant of his self-made throne. But did he rule from that throne over fertile territory, or was this sovereignty an expensive illusion?

Boulez’s manipulation of the French subsidy machine has been explored and exposed by Benoît Duteurtre, in a book published in 1995: Requiem pour une avant-garde. Duteurtre tells the story of the steady takeover by Boulez and his entourage of the channels of musical and cultural communication, the new power networks installed in the wake of May 1968, the vilification of opponents, the anathematising of tonal music and its late offshoots in Messiaen, Duruflé, and Dutilleux, and the cultural coup d’état which was the founding of IRCAM. This institution, created by and for Pierre Boulez at the request of President Pompidou in 1970, reveals in its name – Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique ­– that it does not distinguish between sound and music, and sees both as matters for “research”. Maintained by government funds in the basement of its architectural equivalent, the Centre Pompidou, IRCAM has been devoted to “sound effects” created by the avant-garde elect, whose products are largely, to coin a phrase, “plink selon plonk”. Absorbing a substantial proportion of a budget that might have been used to sustain the provincial orchestras of France, IRCAM has produced a stream of works without survival value. Despite all Boulez’s efforts, musical people still believe, and rightly, that the test of a work of music is how it sounds, not how it is theorized.

Boulez did, from time to time, produce music that passed that test. He had a fine ear, and no one can doubt that every note in every score was intensely thought about – but thought about, and thought about as sound. Boulez’s was an acoustical, rather than a musical art, with meticulous effects and sonorities produced in unusual ways, according to arcane theories that are inscribed on the hidden side of notes held close to the chest. He burst into the concert hall as a young man in order to heckle the last attempts at tonal composition, dismissing all who were not serialists, and presenting his seminal Le marteau sans maître in 1955 as showing the direction in which serialism must go.

The instrumentation of that work – alto voice, flute, guitar, vibraphone, viola and percussion – reflects the composer’s obsession with timbre and sonority, used here to prevent simultaneities from coalescing as chords. With time signatures changing almost every bar – a 2:4 here, a 5:16 there and so on – and grace notes dropped into every staff, the score resembles a palimpsest from an alchemist’s recipe-book, and the composer’s refusal to describe the serial organisation, insisting that it is obvious and apparent to the ear, has led to a quantity of learned literature. The writers of this literature largely assume that Le marteau is a masterpiece and the turning point of post-war music, because Boulez himself has said so – not in so many words, for he was far too modest for that, but because he pointed speechlessly to its evident perfection.

In a hard-hitting article the American composer and musicologist Fred Lerdahl has told us what the fuss is all about.* The inability of the critics to discern the organisation, serial or otherwise, of Le marteau, Lerdahl argues, is the direct result of the fact that the listening ear is organized by another grammar than the one here used (ostensibly, at least) by the composer. Here is what Wikipedia has to say about this episode:

Despite having been published in 1954 and 1957, analysts were unable to explain Boulez’s compositional methods until Lev Koblyakov in 1977. This is partially due to the fact that Boulez believes in strict control tempered with “local indiscipline,” or rather, the freedom to choose small, individual elements while still adhering to an overall structure compatible with serialist principles. Boulez opts to change individual notes based on sound or harmony, choosing to abandon adherence to the structure dictated by strict serialism, making the detailed serial organization of the piece difficult for the listener to discern.

The Wikipedia article chooses there to close the discussion, with a reference to Lerdahl’s article. But it misses the real point. As Lerdahl argues, serialism construes music as an array of permutations. The musical ear looks for prolongations, sequences, and variations, not permutations, which are inherently hard to grasp. Hence music (music of our classical tradition included) presents events that grow organically from each other, over a repeated measure and according to recognizable harmonic sequences. The “moving forward” of melodic lines through musical space is the true origin of musical unity and of the dramatic power of serious music. And it is this “moving forward” that is the first casualty when permutations take over. Add the “plink selon plonk” of the acoustical laboratory and the result is heard as arbitrary – something to be deciphered, rather than something to be absorbed and enjoyed in the manner of a conversation.

You can test this quite easily by comparing one of the many modernist masterpieces that Boulez condemned with a rival composition by the great man himself. From the beginning, in Le marteau, to the interminable instrumental twiddles of Pli selon pli, Boulez gives us music that has little or no propulsion from one moment to the next. The fundamental musical experience – fundamental not just to our classical tradition but to all music that has been sung, played, and danced from the beginning of time – is that of virtual causality, whereby one moment seems to produce the next out of its own inner dynamic. This is the primary experience on which all rhythmic, melodic, and harmonic invention depends, and it is absent – deliberately absent – from Boulez.

To say this is not to display an attachment, whether or not “bourgeois” or “reactionary”, to the old forms of tonality. It is to make an ontological observation: to say what music essentially is. So take a piece every bit as adventurous in its sonorities as Boulez, in which traditional tonality is marginalised, but which nevertheless adheres to the principle of virtual causality in musical space – say the violin concerto of Dutilleux, or the powerful chaconne movement from the same composer’s first symphony. At once we are in another world, a world that we know, moving with the sounds we hear, and hearing them not merely as sounds, but as movements in a space mapped out in our own emotions. I have to use metaphors in order to describe this experience – for reasons that I make clear in The Aesthetics of Music. But they are metaphors that we all instinctively understand, since they invoke the phenomenon of music itself.

There is a reason for referring to Dutilleux, apart from the fact that it is the 100th anniversary of his birth. For he was, in his own way, every bit as adventurous as Boulez, with the same desire to take music forward into the modern world, to build on past achievements, and to take inspiration from the great achievements of French music, painting, and poetry at the beginning of the modern period. In the 1960s and 70s he was dismissed by Boulez and his entourage as a “bourgeois” composer, smeared as a “Nazi collaborator” (in fact he was active in the resistance), and excluded from the privileges of the true avant-garde. But his music, unlike Boulez’s, has a regular place in concert programs, and speaks to the ordinary musical listener in accents that are both new and (with a certain justified effort) comprehensible.

If we look back at Boulez’s presence in French culture, during the years around 1968 when he was the Gauleiter of the avant-garde, we must surely understand him as the instigator of a false conception of music – not only of the place of music in high culture, and in the civilisation that is our greatest spiritual possession, but of the nature of music itself. He deliberately, and in my view uncomprehendingly, undid the distinction between musical tone and acoustical sound; he mathematized and scientized a practice that is meaningful only if it is seen as a creative art, and he justified every kind of intellectual pretension, just so long as it was intellectual, and just so long as it could be seen as the latest attempt to épater le bourgeois.

Of course he was a true musician too. Faced with real music he had an instinctive grasp of how it might be performed so as to reveal all the currents of thought contained in it. As a conductor he set an example that many have wished to follow, and with reason. Still, even there, his personality showed itself. His meticulous version of Wagner’s Ring cycle shows a conductor who appreciates in thought what can be understood only in emotion. And this version will always be appreciated as a monument to our times, a kind of revenge on Wagner, which is also, when taken together with Chéreau’s marxisant production, a revenge on Germany. Seeing Boulez in that way, I think, we reduce him to his real size, and can begin to appreciate his true historical significance, as a by-product of a disastrous war.

* “Cognitive Constraints in Compositional Systems”, in John A. Sloboda, ed., Generative Processes in Music, Oxford 1988.

Architecture

Classical Modernity


EDITOR’S NOTE: This essay is reprinted here with kind permission of the author. It first appeared on his blog, where the reader will find much more of interest.

Sometimes one hears the critique that classical music is no longer compatible with modernity. What “modernity” is supposed to mean always remains in darkness, as if the very word “modernity” were so obvious in its meaning that any further explanation would be superfluous. If “modern” means “of this time, of today,” this category is quite ephemeral because tomorrow there will be another today. But it is something else: modern culture, with its contemporary human condition, is felt as a fundamentally different way of life with values and experiences, strongly deviating from the past. All this is of course a generalization, but it paints a mood, and suggests that culture of the past has become “another country,” inaccessible to modern people. And it is quite remarkable that the core repertoire of classical music stems from that “other country”: modern musical life has one foot firmly in the past. And since the other foot inevitably stands on the brittle ground of contemporary times, the position becomes increasingly uncomfortable if the culture of the past is seen as fundamentally different from modern life experience.

Is there any fundamental contradiction found in putting a CD with a Mozart symphony in the player while driving a modern car on a paved road through the suburban sprawl of a big, modern city? Or in performing a piece by J.S. Bach on a piano, or his Brandenburg Concerti on modern instruments? Or in viewing a Vermeer painting dressed in modern “clothes” – the canvas being lightened by carefully adjusted spotlights which were unthinkable in the 17th century? The Historically Informed Performance (HIP) movement in music, which presents music from the past on old, authentic instruments or else on exact copies of them, is a very modern phenomenon and nobody would demand that such performances are presented with the musicians dressed in 18th-century garb, with candles on their music stands. On the contrary, successful ensembles like John Eliot Gardiner’s Orchestre Revolutionnaire et Romantique, though composed of period instruments, use all the modern means and recording facilities available to spread their vision – which does not in the least diminish other possible interpretations of the same music. It all forms a rich palette of varied artistic experience which is the hallmark of true modernity.

I think that our human nature, in its essential elements, does not differ very much from that of our ancestors and that changes in society, lifestyle, and opinions happen quite slowly while the basic human needs remain the same. Since the 19th century, the West has been fascinated by the leaps of progress made in science and technology, which inevitably fed the myth that “progress” would be the answer to all the troubles of mankind. Looking back at the upheavels of the 20th century, we know now that this is not the case. In science and medicine, progress is definitely of great value, but in other spheres of human activity, “progress” is a dangerous notion because it may disguise decline and erosion, as can be noticed in the visual arts where obvious decline in abilities and aesthetic sensibility is so often sold as “renewal.”

Our distorted view of the relationship between modernity and culture has much to do with the idea that culture develops like a timeline: first this, then that – development from A via B to C and so on, with the implication and the hope that it is, in general, an upward line. If this were so in culture, we would end up with some obvious absurdities, like the notion that Picasso was an improvement on Velasquez, and that Xenakis was an improvement on Bach. In fact, the art of the past is with us in our present. It has not just survived the erosion of time but transcended the boundaries of time and place. The best works from the past are thus contemporary forever and any new art can only aspire to contribute to the ongoing accumulation of works, representing the creative mind of humanity. History in art thus looks like a quantitative accumulation process, and not like a timeline.

During my studies in Rotterdam in the seventies, the musical world was shocked by the appearance of a new music intending to break with the music from the past – which was still very much alive in performance practice. There were heated debates, and music – old as well as new – became gravely politicized. If audiences rejected Boulez or Stockhausen they were bourgeois and did not understand their times; and people embracing the Brave New World of sound demonstrated their keen commitment to modernity. Since the political climate of those days was predominantly Left-wing, modernity was Left, and bourgeois rejection of modernity in music was Right. So simple was the world in that time. In my parental home, classical music was a natural presence through radio and recordings, forming an organic backdrop to a rather bohemien life style: both my parents were painters. I never considered music as being related to some political point of view, and I was quite surprised when, in my first years at the conservatory, Beethoven, Mahler and Ravel were labelled “outdated” and “bourgeois” by my teacher, who tried to get our small group of composition students interested in the “real stuff”: Schoenberg, Berg, and Webern and everything following from their heroic explorations. Interestingly, the music of Schoenberg had never been aired on the classical stations at home, let alone Berg and Webern, and our record collection went no “further” than Ravel’s piano concertos and Bartok’s Concerto for Orchestra and Third Piano Concerto. Also, I was surprised to find out that all the music which I had got accustomed to was “old.” I never experienced Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, and Brahms et al as something “old” or as something far removed in time. In contrary, it was all very “of now” and bursting with life. Something that was so directly expressive and fresh could not possibly be of “another country.” Of course I knew that the music had been written long ago, but given the character of the music, that seemed to be entirely irrelevant, and loving and understanding that music did not make me feel “old fashioned” or “’bourgeois” – which would have been quite strange given the rather chaotic and un-bourgeois milieu in which I was growing up. But in the composition class, all that was put into a very different context.

Of course the students were fed with all the “subversive” music which was, in general, rejected by bourgeois concert life. I remember these group listening sessions as fascinating nightmares during which we were led into the dark world of atonal despair and into the postwar experiments with pure but chaotic sound and electronics. On one particularly sunny and clear April morning, the Three Orchestral Pieces of Alban Berg seemed suddenly to turn the weather into a dark hole of rain and angst: a thunder storm had landed on the quarter. Exercises in dodecaphony and serialism posed some considerable challenges, and I found it interesting to wrestle with complex constructions – like trying to get a puzzle right and hoping that the image that would appear in the end would be something artistically meaningful. (It almost never was, since a puzzle is not an artistic undertaking.) A falling fifth in one of my early pieces provoked some contemptuous sniffing by the teacher because it reminded him of the beginning of Beethoven’s ninth symphony – an embarrassing faux pas which I should avoid in the future if I ever wanted to be a composer. All this made very clear that music was not just music, but an embodiment of political values related to interests: so much new music was being written but not accepted in concert practice, where people were supposed to merely repeat the same “old” works like zombies in a perpetual state of comatose cultural confusion, ignorant of the demands of modernity which was knocking on the closed doors of the concert hall.

Modern visual art did not suffer from those bourgeois rejections and quickly developed a specialized market with big money passing through ever more eager hands, accompanied by a rapidly emerging army of theoretical “experts” encouraged by the infinite horizon of necessary and salaried explanation. Interestingly, the museums with the “old” collections everywhere in the Western world continued to attract visitors, as is still the case today – and now those works have become another half century older since the new wave of modernism appeared. Modernist music and modernist visual art created a territory of their own, separate from the culture of the past, underlining the “newness” of the phenomenon and its disconnection from existing art and music. To explain this distinction, theory and ideology were wielded as weaponry against the scepticism of “the bourgeois.”

Understanding that musical meaning was not to be found in modernist ideologies, I began to study art history, hoping to find examples of debates which could throw a light upon those of the present. And indeed, I found some: in 17th-century France a debate flared up among artists and architects around the question of whether or not modern artists were superior to those of Antiquity – the art of the ancient world then being considered so great that one should always try to take it as an example. It appeared that the rejection of a past culture was a relatively recent phenomenon and that in former ages the accumulated presence of achievements from the past was merely a huge repertory of means to be used and varied in the present. Sometimes harking back to an even older past was, for that reason, considered more “modern” – like the revival of classicist architecture near the end of the 18th and deep into the 19th centuries and the entire Italian Renaissance which was inspired by the art of Antiquity, both movements adapting the achievements of the past to the different needs of modern times. Opera was invented as a fantasy about the way the great plays of Ancient Greece might have been performed. Sources spoke of reciting and singing accompanied by instruments, but because concrete information was completely lacking, composers had to invent such presentation themselves – a beautiful example demonstrating modern invention as a result of looking backwards.

Panthéon de Paris
Panthéon de Paris

After my studies in Rotterdam I spent a year in Paris, keeping myself alive with private music teaching and a shabby little job at the Chamber of Commerce, where I sorted cards and filed them alphabetically and fetched coffee for the office’s real employees. Exploring the poetical cityscape and visiting the Louvre and the big monuments was a revelation: beauty and aesthetic meaning was everywhere – not as some alien object in a glass box, but as a natural part of life. To take just one from numerous examples, the Panthéon – this impressive monument to “the great men of the fatherland” – had been designed as a church in a very spare classical style, with a hughe dome topping a really excentric structure. The outside looks like a very square tomb, but the inside is light and elegant with vaults airy as a gothic cathedral. And indeed, the architect, as I discovered, had wanted to create the same high-rising effect of the medieval churches but with the vocabulary of classicism. The result is breathtakingly beautiful and also very original, now forming an important signifyer of identity to the nation.

Panthéon de Paris
Panthéon de Paris

A very instructive lesson in classicism: although the separate elements are borrowed from examples (the entirely traditional, “over-used,” but always impressive temple front; the dome following the design of the dome of St. Paul’s in London; the tall interior with customary pillars and vaults, using 18th-century decoration in a structure resembling gothic vaults), the resulting mix has a distinctively original effect, demonstrating Roger Scruton’s description of originality as the personal touch which becomes visible against a background of tradition. Also, it’s not ”just” a temple front: details and proportions are extremely well-designed, adding to the effect of tallness and forceful expression of grandeur.

Leonardo da Vinci: Virgin of the Rocks, c. 1483-1486. The mystery of new life in the loving, golden light of a spiritual presence that is, at the same time, entirely human and emotionally accessible.
Leonardo da Vinci: Virgin of the Rocks, c. 14831486. The mystery of new life in the loving, golden light of a spiritual presence that is, at the same time, entirely human and emotionally accessible.

Of all the treasures of the Louvre I only want to mention the Italian paintings from the Renaissance, showing that the particular imaginings of ages ago are capable of transmitting their beauty and meaning to crowds of people living in entirely different circumstances.

It became very clear to me that, in an artistic sense, “the past” does not exist. The works exist. The implication is of course that artists today can take these works as examples to learn their craft, so that they acquire the means to express their own inner drive to contribute to the better aspects of the world. After my return to the Netherlands, it became my goal to get to the heart of the classical tradition – classical in the widest sense, like we speak of “Indian classical art” as distinct from “modernity” – and to learn to adopt the techniques which were best suited to what I wanted to “say” in the “language” of music. As with all cultural endeavors, we learn through imitation. In the process of internalizing creative processes we become what we have learned, and the craft turns into a personal means of expression.

Titian: Pastoral Concert, c. 1510. With its complex yet quasi-improvised structure, both in terms of the flat surface and its three-dimensional depth, it looks like a slow middle movement of a Mozart symphony. (I always wondered why the guys in this painting, obviously discussing the music, don't pay the slightest attention to the ladies, who do so much their best to distract them.)
Titian: Pastoral Concert, c. 1510. With its complex yet quasi-improvised structure, both in terms of the flat surface and its three-dimensional depth, it looks like a slow middle movement of a Mozart symphony. (I always wondered why the guys in this painting, obviously discussing the music, don’t pay the slightest attention to the ladies, who do so much their best to distract them.)

 

Of course such ideas fell completely outside the world view of modernism and of modernity as a narrowly defined moment on the timeline of history – and outside the established circles of “contemporary music” with their specialized festivals and performances by specialized ensembles. But maybe that was a good thing, because exploration and development that is endorsed by establishments may hinder the inner freedom that is a precondition of authentic creation – certainly if such establishments cultivate ideologies, party lines, and taboos for their adherents. Attempts to restore something of the classical tradition in music are, of course, important targets for taboos in a cultural climate where a narrow-minded notion of modernity is de rigueur. Yet we have seen in today’s contemporary music scene those hard-line taboos erode considerably. And in the end, that may offer possibilities of development exceeding those of modernism and its watered-down progeny, the ideas of which seem by now completely exhausted and feeble in comparison with the best of our traditions.

Even if we acknowledge that we live now in a post-postmodern era, I believe that works of art available or accessible to us should be judged by their ability to enrich our lives and that we must make ourselves accessible to the ideas and aesthetic expressions contained therein, because they may have something of value to impart to us. This is basically a timeless, a-historical position. And from that position, we can see how much of the art and music from the past is still very much present all around us, and how powerfully it still “speaks” to us. This is a reassuring sign that the human condition may be strong enough to endure even the most disruptive influences of modernity; and it shows us that one of the blessings of this same modernity is that so much art from the past is still available and accessible. More and more painters, architects, and composers no longer feel inhibited to explore these examples of humanism for their own artistic endeavors. And it seems to me that this is contributing to the available territory of meaningful art. May this be a renaissance of authentic culture, taking its place within the broad context of available, contemporary artistic experience.

×

Your map to places only the dorkiest dare to go.

Subscribe to find out more about the ideas behind our ideas. And the progress of our projects.

Your email address is safe with us. Unsubscribe anytime.