EDITOR’S NOTE: Sir Roger Scruton was invited to the prestigious Donaueschingen Festival, at the very heart of music’s avant-garde movement, where he delivered this lecture in October 2016. We think it may be of interest to the many people who have been following our sometimes controversial series on the Darmstadt School’s role in undermining contemporary composition and diminishing our audiences. It is printed here with the gracious permission of the author.
Important composers, from Schoenberg and Stravinsky to Ligeti and Stockhausen, have been premiered in this place and before this audience. Along with Darmstadt, Donaueschingen has helped to restore Germany to the central place in European musical culture that it has occupied in the past and will always deserve. Now, in its latest and securest phase as the Musiktage, the Donaueschingen festival has become a symbol of musical modernism, and it is a great honour to be invited to speak from this podium to one of the most educated musical audiences in the world today. But in this short talk I will try to outline why I question the prominence in our musical culture of the experimental avant-garde.
In 1860 Wagner published a now famous pamphlet entitled The Music of the Future – Zukunftmusik. In it he expressed his view that it was not enough for music to be merely contemporary – zeitgenössisch; it had to be ahead of itself, summoning from the future the forms that already lay there in embryo. And of course Wagner was entitled to write in this way, given what he had achieved in Tristan und Isolde, which was finished the year before his essay appeared, and which introduced the chromatic syntax that was to change the course of musical history.
We should not forget, however, the wider context of Wagner’s argument. The obsession with the future comes from Ludwig Feuerbach, and ultimately from Hegel’s philosophy of history, which represents human events as motivated by the always-advancing logic of the dialectic. For Hegel history has a direction, and this direction is revealed in laws, institutions, and sciences, as well as in literature, art, and music. Each period is characterised by its Zeitgeist, shared among all the products of the culture.
In Feuerbach the Zeitgeist idea is allied to the belief in progress, understood in terms of the life and energy of human communities. The future, Feuerbach believed, is not merely a development of the past; it is better than the past. It marks an increase in knowledge and therefore in power over our own destiny and therefore in freedom. It is not easy now, after the communist and fascist experiments, to endorse the belief in progress that they both so vehemently shared. But somehow, in the arts, the belief survives. We spontaneously incline to the view that each artistic form and style must be superseded as soon as it appears, and that the true values of art require constant vigilance against the diseases of nostalgia and pastiche. Each composer faces the challenge: why should I listen to you? And each claims originality, authenticity, the plain fact of being me, as a vindication. Hence each tries to avoid repeating what has been done already or relying on formulae that, by dint of over-use, have become clichés. In everyday life clichés may be useful, since they evoke stock reactions and settled beliefs. In art, however, clichés are inherently meaningless, since they place mechanical reactions where real inspiration should be.
Wagner’s emphasis on the future of music was influenced by the Hegelian theory of history and Feuerbach’s use of it. But it was also rooted in a real sense of tradition and what tradition means. His innovations grew organically from the flow of Western music, and his harmonic discoveries were discoveries only because they also affirmed the basic chord-grammar of diatonic tonality. They were discoveries within the extended tonal language. Wagner was aware of this, and indeed dramatized the predicament of the modern composer in Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, which is his own striking reflection on ‘tradition and the individual talent.’ In that opera the plodding C major tonality of the Mastersingers is brought to life, not by remaking it entirely, but by moving it onwards, through the use of chromatic voice-leading, altered chords and a new kind of melody in which boundaries are fluid and phrases can be repeated and varied at liberty within them. In the course of the opera the chorus brings the new melody and the old harmony into creative relation, and the work ends jubilantly, with the new incorporated and the old renewed. This is nothing like the radical avant-garde departures that have dominated music in more recent times.
Right up until Schoenberg’s experiments with serialism, musical innovation in the realm of ‘classical’ music proceeded in Wagner’s way. New harmonies, scales, and melodic ensembles were imported into the traditional musical grammar, new rhythms and time-signatures were adopted, and with Stravinsky and Bartók organisation was inspired more by dance than by the classical forms. Debussy’s use of the whole tone scale, and Rimsky-Korsakov’s introduction of the octatonic scale led to music in which, while there was melodic and harmonic progression, there was often no clear tonic, or two competing tonics, as in much of the Rite of Spring. Schoenberg wrote of ‘floating tonality,’ others of atonality, meaning the loss of the sense of key, and the use of harmonies which, even if tied to each other by voice-leading, seemed to be unrelated and, by the old standards, ungrammatical.
None of that involved any rejection of the classical tradition: composers like Debussy, Bartók, and Stravinsky were renewing that tradition, and what they wrote was not merely recognizable to the ordinary educated listener, but also interesting and challenging on account of its new harmonic, melodic, and rhythmical devices. Both the continuous development of the romantic symphony in Sibelius, Vaughan Williams, and Shostakovich, and the incorporation of modernist devices into the tonal language, lay within the scope of the existing language: these were developments that issued naturally from the pattern of musical discovery that has characterised Western classical music from the Renaissance.
As things stand now, however, there is absolutely no guarantee that a new work of music will be recognized as such by the educated musical ear, or that it will be possible to hear it as an addition to the great tradition of symphonic sound. A radical break seems to have occurred, with two consequences that the listening public find difficult to absorb: first, modern works of music tend to be self-consciously part of an avant-garde, never content to belong to the tradition but always overtly and ostentatiously defying it; second, these works seem to be melodically impoverished, and even without melody entirely, relying on sound effects and acoustical experiments to fill the void where melody should be. I don’t say the emphasis on acoustics is necessarily a fault from the artistic point of view. I draw your attention to the example we heard yesterday, when Nathan Davies used live filtering to give the effect of resonators, extracting tones from white noise, and turning those tones towards music. The effect was undeniably striking, at times entrancing: as though the tones were being purified so that they can be used as though new. But until those tones are used, and used in melodic and harmonic structures, the result will remain at a distance from the audience, outside the reach of our musical affections. It is only the loved and repeated repertoire that will ensure the survival of music, and to be loved and repeated music requires a dedicated audience. Music exists in the ear of the listener, not on the page of the score, nor in the world of pure sound effects. And listeners, deterred by the avant-garde, are in ever-shorter supply: not in Donaueschingen, of course, but in the wider culture of our cities, where music will survive or die.
I identify four developments that have led to the place where we now are. Thanks to these developments a new kind of music has emerged which is less music than a reflection upon music, or perhaps even a reflection on the lack of music, or on the impossibility of music in the age in which we live.
The first development is, in many ways, the most interesting from the philosophical point of view, and this is the radical attack on tonality by Theodor Adorno and his immediate followers. Although Adorno linked his argument to his advocacy of Schoenberg’s twelve-tone serialism, the force of the argument is largely negative. It concerned what he was against, rather than what he was for. And Adorno’s argument carried weight in the post-war period because he was an ardent critic of the culture of capitalism, one who had attempted to adapt the Marxist critique of bourgeois society to the new social and political realities. Adorno’s critique of tonality was part of a systematic theory of the death of bourgeois culture. Tonality had to die because the bourgeois order had to die. And the desire nevertheless to cling to tonality, in the manner of Sibelius or Copland, even in the manner of the neo-classical Stravinsky, is bound to lead, Adorno thought, to empty clichés or sterile kitsch. Such is the inevitable result of attempting to make use of an idiom that has died.
This argument of Adorno’s, which is an application of the Hegelian Zeitgeist theory, is not easily answered, even if it is easily doubted. All artistic people are aware that styles, idioms and forms are living things that can also die, and that there is a need, integral to the artistic enterprise as such, to ‘make it new.’ This does not mean being iconoclastic or radical in the manner of the modernist avant-garde. It means conveying a message and an inspiration of one’s own. The true work of art says something new, and is never a patchwork of things already said. This is the case even when the work employs an idiom already perfected by others, as when Mozart, in his string quartets, writes in the language of Haydn.
Thomas Mann wrote a great novel about this, Doktor Faustus, meditating on the fate of Germany in the last century. Mann takes the tradition of tonal music as both a significant part of our civilisation, and a symbol of its ultimate meaning. Music is the Faustian art par excellence, the defiant assertion of the human voice in a cosmos of unknowable silence. Mann therefore connects the death of the old musical language with the death of European civilisation. And he re-imagines the invention of twelve-tone serialism as a kind of demonic response to the ensuing sense of loss. Music is to be annihilated, re-made as the negation of itself. The composer Adrian Leverkühn, in the grip of demonic possession, sets out to ‘take back the Ninth Symphony.’ Such is the task that Mann proposes to his devil-possessed composer, and one can be forgiven for thinking that there are composers around today who have made this task their own.
This brings me to the second development that has fed into the obsession with the avant-garde, and that is the invention of serialism. I call this an invention, rather than a discovery, in order to record the wholly a priori nature of the serial system. The new harmonies and chromatic melodies of Tristan were discoveries: musical events that came into being by experiment, and were adopted because they sounded right. In retrospect you can give quasi-mathematical accounts of what Wagner was doing in the first bars of Tristan. But you can be sure that you will not thereby be identifying Wagner’s own creative process, which was one of trying out new combinations and seeing where they lead.
By contrast, serial organisation was an invention – a set of a priori rules laid down by Schoenberg and adapted and varied by his successors. These rules were to provide a non-tonal grammar for music, determining what comes next independently of whether its coming next sounds right or wrong to the normal musical ear. It is not the tone or the scale but the maths that matters. There is no reason, of course, to think that serial organization should not also lead to sequences that do sound right, or come to sound right in time. But their sounding right is quite independent of the serial organisation.
One of the advantages of working with a framework of a priori rules is that you can say just why this note occurs in just this place: the series requires it. But in another sense you lack such an answer, since the series requires the note regardless of the heard relation to its predecessor. Moreover the grammar of serialism is not based on the scale or any other way of grouping tones dynamically, in terms of what leads to what. A series is the basis for permutations, not linear movements. In listening to music, however, we listen out for progression, prolongation, question and answer – all the many ways in which one tone summons another as its natural successor. Serialism asks us to hear in another way, with the brain rather than the ear in charge.
The result of this is that, while we can enjoy and be moved by serial compositions, this is largely because we hear them as organised as tonal music is organized, so that ‘next’ sounds ‘right.’ We may notice the serial structure; but it is the progressive, linear structure that we enjoy. In a great serial composition, such as the Berg Violin Concerto, we hear harmonies, melodies, sequences, and rhythmical regularities, just as in the great works of the tonal tradition, and we do so because we are hearing against the serial order. It is as though the composer, having bound himself in chains, is able nevertheless to dance in them, like a captive bear.
The third development, associated particularly with Boulez, Stockhausen, and Nono, is the move towards total serialisation. Composers decided to serialise time values, unpitched sounds, and timbres, hoping thereby to exert total control over everything. Interestingly enough this development went hand in hand with the emergence of aleatoric scores, in which instrumentalists are handed bundles of notes that they could choose to assemble in any order, or scores which ask for indeterminate sounds. Randomisation had the same effect as serialisation, which was to deprive musical elements of their intrinsic ways of relating to each other. Whether we impose a dictatorial serial order, or present notes in unordered bundles, we undo the demands of melody, harmony and rhythm, which are inherent in the traditional grammar, and replace them with systematic requirements that can be explained intellectually but not, as a rule, heard musically.
In 1970 Stockhausen composed a two-piano piece, Mantra, for this festival. In a subsequent lecture delivered in Britain, which can be seen on YouTube, he sets out the twelve-tone series on which the piece is based. He plays the notes one after another, assigning an equal time-value to each, and tells us that this melody occurred to him at a certain point, and that he decided to work on it, composing flights of new notes around each of its elements, arranging the series in conjunction with its own retrograde, and so on. What was most striking to me about Stockhausen’s description of what he was doing was the word ‘melody,’ used of this sequence that is not a melody at all. Of course there are twelve-tone melodies – for example the beautiful melody that Berg assigns to his destructive heroine Lulu in the opera of that name. But all that makes sequences into melodies is absent from Stockhausen’s theme: it has no beginning, no end, no up-beat, no tension or release, no real contour apart from its pure geometrical outline. It is a musical object, but not a musical subject. And as he explains what is done with it you understand that it is treated as an object too – a piece of dead tissue to be cut up beneath the microscope. We understand the distinction between subject and object because we ourselves exemplify it. The true musical theme is a subject in something like the sense that I am a subject: it has a consciousness of itself, a meaning and a point of view. This is simply not true of the helpless dead sequence that Stockhausen presents us in his lecture.
The effect of such innovations was to replace the experience of music by the concept of music. The typical avant-garde work is designed as the concept of itself, and often given some portentous title by way of illustrating the point, like Stockhausen’s Gruppen: a work for three orchestras in which notes are amalgamated into groups according to their acoustical properties, and tempos are defined logarithmically. Much can be said, and has been said, about this momentous, not to say megalomaniac, composition, and indeed its great success, like that of Boulez’s Le marteau sans maître, is not independent of the fact that there is so much to say about it, some of which Stockhausen himself had anticipated in his article ‘wie die Zeit vergeht..’, published in the third issue of Die Reihe. The score is not a notation of musically organized sounds, but a mathematical proof, from which the sounds can be deduced as theorems.
The eclipse of art by the concept of art occurred at around the same time in the visual arts, and for a while the game was amusing and intriguing. However, this particular bid for originality has dated much more rapidly than any of the harmonic discoveries of the late romantics. Do it once, and you have done it for all time. This is certainly what we have seen in the realm of conceptual art in our museums and galleries. And it is what we have heard in the concert hall too. In conceptual music the creative act is always, from the musical point of view, the same, namely the act of putting an idea about music in the place where music should be.
This leads me to the fourth development, which is in many ways the most interesting, namely the replacement of tones by sounds, and musical by acoustical hearing. Varèse, Pierre Schaeffer and their immediate successors awoke composers and audiences to the many new sounds, some of them produced electronically, that could enter the space of music without destroying its intrinsic order. These experiments are not what I have in mind when referring to the replacement of tones by sounds and musical by acoustical hearing. I am thinking of a more general transition, from Tonkunst to Klangkunst, to use the German expressions – a transition of deep philosophical significance, between two ways of hearing, and two responses to what is heard.
Sounds are objects in the physical world, albeit objects of a special kind whose nature and identity is bound up with the way they are perceived. Tones are what we hear in sounds when we hear the sounds as music. They have features that no sound can possess – such as movement, gravitational attraction, weight, and position in a one-dimensional space. They exemplify a special kind of organisation – an organisation that we hear and which exists only for someone who can hear it. (Someone might be an expert at hearing pitched sounds, and may even be gifted with absolute pitch, but still be ‘tone deaf,’ since unable to hear the musical organisation. Sequences don’t sound right to such a person, because they never sound wrong.)
The object of musical hearing is organised by metaphors of space and movement that correspond to no material realities. Music goes up and down, it leads and follows; it is dense, translucent, heavy, light; it encounters obstacles and crashes through them, and sometimes it comes to an end which is the end of everything. Those metaphors, and the order derived from them, are shared by all musical people. The order that we hear is an order that we – the musical public – hear, when we hear these sounds as music. And although there is, at any moment, an indefinite number of ways in which a melodic line or a chord sequence can continue without sounding wrong, the ideal in our tradition has been of an uninterrupted sense of necessity – each melodic and harmonic step following as though by logic from its predecessor, and yet with complete freedom.
When we hear tones we are also hearing sounds; but we are hearing in those sounds movement, organisation and gravitational forces in a one-dimensional musical space. That is the fundamental musical experience, the experience that causes us to hear one note as moving on from another, answering another, attracted to or repelled by another. It is what enables us to hear tension and release, beginnings and endings, goals and starting points. It is at the root of the art of music as we have known it, since it is what gives music its fundamental nature as an art of motion, which grips us and takes us with it in a space of its own. We are moved by music because music moves.
Of course there are sound effects too: sounds from the real world intrude into music, like the unpitched sounds of the percussion section, or the recorded bird-song that intrudes into Respighi’s Pines of Rome. But when we hear these sounds as part of the music they change character. They are no long noises, no longer events in the ambient soundscape, like the coughs from the audience on a cold winter’s day. They are caught up in the musical movement, becoming one with it, and dependent on the forward propulsion of which they are now a part. Thus a single piece of music, with no repeats, may nevertheless contain multiply repeated sequences of sounds. As objects in the material world sounds are identified and counted in another way from the way in which melodies, which are intentional and not material objects, are counted.
The intrusion of acoustical ways of thinking into the practice and teaching of music is something we owe to Boulez and Stockhausen, and to the educational practises that they established. In Stockhausen sounds from everyday life are accorded exactly the same value as sounds within music – they are, as it were, invited in from the surrounding world, as in the work Momente, in which all kinds of sounds and speech-forms are brought together in a potpourri of fragments. As Stockhausen himself says, this work has no real beginning and no end: like all his works it starts without beginning and finishes without ending. For it lacks those elements of musical grammar that make beginnings and endings perceivable. It starts nowhere and stays at nowhere until ending nowhere. The same is true of Boulez’s Pli selon pli, in which the exotic instrumentation and serial organisation do not conceal the fact that no moment in this work has any intrinsic connection to the moment that comes next. The experience of ‘next,’ and the inevitability of the next, has been chased away. In a concert devoted to music of this kind the audience can know that the piece is ended only because the performers are putting down their instruments.
Music (music of our classical tradition included) has until now consisted of 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 traditional music. And it is this ‘moving forward’ that is the first casualty when pitches and tempi are organised serially, and when sounds are invited in from outside the music. Add the acoustical laboratory and the result is all too often heard as arbitrary – something to be deciphered, rather than something to be absorbed and enjoyed in the manner of a conversation.
This is not to say that acoustical processing may not have a part, and an important part, to play in bringing sounds into a musical structure. Joanna Bailie, to take just one example, has used the recorded and digitally processed sounds culled in public spaces as inputs into music for which instrumentalists and singers create the musical frame. The atmospheric effect of this was heard here in Donaueschingen a day ago. However, in the work of such composers we see the reassertion of the musical against the acoustical ear, and perhaps even a path back to the place where music reigns in a space of its own.
All those four developments are of the greatest musicological interest, and I do not deny that they can be used effectively, to produce works of real musical power. But it is also clear to my way of thinking that they are responsible for a growing gap between serious music and the audience on which it depends, not necessarily financially (since after all there is a massive machinery of subsidy that keeps the avant-garde in business), but at least spiritually. If avant-garde music is ever to step down from the world of concepts into the world of tones, then it will be because the audience exists in whose ears this transition can occur. Take away the audience and you take away the concrete reality of music as an art. You turn music into an arcane exercise in the acoustical laboratory, in which groups of patient instrumentalists pump out sounds according to formulae which mean nothing, since meaning lies in the ears that have fled from the scene. Of course, not here in Donaueschingen, where the distinctive physiognomy of the avant-garde ear is very apparent all around us.
It is not enough to say that, of course. Adorno may have been right that the old grammar was exhausted, that post-romantic harmony had taken tonality as far as it could go, and that music must therefore find another way into the future, whether or not led by the avant-garde. The great question that we must still confront is whether rhythm, melody, and harmony are still available to us, in whatever modified forms, as we endeavour to write music that will be not only interesting, as so much avant-garde music undeniably is, but also enjoyable and calling out for repetition. We all know Schoenberg’s remark, that there is plenty of music still to be written in C major. But where is that music? Or rather, where is that way of writing, downstream from C major, that will restore to C major its undeniable authority for all of us, as it was restored by the final chords of Die Meistersinger?
Two aspects of modern culture place obstacles in front of us, as we search for the new idiom that will renew our musical tradition. One is the insistent presence of easy music; the other is the dictatorship exerted on behalf of difficult music. By easy music I mean the ubiquitous products of pop and rock, which influence the ears and the attention-span of young people long before they can be captured by a teacher. The audience for new music 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 sarabands – 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.
Americans tend to accept popular music and the culture around it, as providing the raw material on which the serious composer gets to work. From Gershwin to John Adams it has been normal to take some aspect of the popular music of the day and to show its connection to other and more long-term ways of musical thinking. Just as Gershwin rewrote jazz sequences in the language of counterpoint, so does Adams lift the ostinato four in a bar of the Rock group into an orchestral empyrean, where the flat-footed dance gives way to a gravitationless rhythm that moves and develops with the harmony. Adams uses the tonal language, not to make the kind of profound statement of a Beethoven or a Bruckner, but nevertheless to lift the young ear out of its groove and to make it listen. There is a lesson to be taken from this, which is that music is tested in the ear of the listener and not in the laboratory, and the ear of the listener is plastic, moulded both by the surrounding culture and by the everyday sounds of life as it is now. In a way Stockhausen acknowledged this, with his works that snatch sounds from the surrounding world, and work them into his quasi-mathematical textures. But the textures are feeble, with no musical propulsion, no intrinsic ‘next’ to bind one event to its neighbours. Adams wished to provide that propulsion, into which the sounds of the modern world could be dropped and immediately reshaped as music. But maybe there is something mechanical here too – an ostinato that uses rhythmic pulse to carry us through whatever harmonic and melodic weaknesses we might otherwise hear in the score.
The contrary obstacle also lies before us: the dictatorship of the difficult. Bureaucrats charged with giving support to the arts are, today, frightened of being accused of being reactionary. I suspect that everyone in this room is frightened of being accused of being reactionary. The history of the French salons in the 19th century, and of the early reactions to musical and literary modernism, has made people aware of how easy it is to miss the true creative product, and to exalt the dead and the derivative in its stead. The safest procedure for the anxious bureaucrat is to subsidize music that is difficult, unlikely to be popular, even repugnant to the ordinary musical ear. Then one is sure to be praised for one’s advanced taste and up-to-date understanding. Besides, if a work of music is easy to assimilate and clearly destined to be popular it does not need a subsidy in any case.
It is surely in this way that Boulez rose to such an eminence in France. In a book published in 1995: Requiem pour une avant-garde, Benoît Duteurtre tells the story of the steady takeover by Boulez and his entourage of the channels of musical and cultural communication, and their way of establishing a dictatorship of the difficult at the heart of the subsidy machine. At the same time as vilifying his opponents and anathematising tonal music and its late offshoots in Duruflé and Dutilleux, Boulez achieved a cultural coup d’état, which was the founding of IRCAM. This institution, created by and for him 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 tone, between Klangkunst and Tonkunst, and sees both as matters for ‘research.’ Maintained by government funds in the basement of its architectural equivalent, the Centre Pompidou, and 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. But only if it sounds difficult, disturbing, ‘challenging,’ ‘transgressive’ could a bureaucrat dare to provide it with a subsidy.
And this is why it is good that this festival exists. Even if it depends on the support of state institutions, it is also addressed to the musical public: it is an invitation to people to make their feelings known, and to make judgments for themselves – which is what I have been doing. It has played a part in exposing the avant-garde to judgment, and also in giving opportunities to young musicians to wrestle with difficult music and to find what inspired it. This place is testimony to the crucial relation between the work of music and its audience. It is proof that there can be an avant-garde in music only if there is an avant-garde audience to listen to it. Whatever the results, you are that audience and far more practised at stretching your ears in new directions than I am. I only wonder whether you might, from time to time, entertain the thought that one can be modern without being avant-garde, without lapsing into sound effects, and instead thinking in the old musical way, in terms of grammatical sequences, with a beginning, a middle and an end, sequences that linger in the ears and the memory of the listeners, so that even if they never hear the piece again, they sing it to themselves inwardly and find in it a personal meaning. It seems to me that, if there is, now, to be a music of the future it will, in that way, belong with the music of the past.
Yes, it is possible to be modern without being avant-garde. Despite accusations to the contrary, I strive for that in everything I write. Thank you.
Too bad Sir Roger did not mention the American concert music business as his fifth “development” and offered some equally insightful critique of it. Instead, he limits himself to praising a composer such as John Adams. Where’s the cultured, balanced assessment of the concert music business in the U.S. and the issue of style as a market niche? Is that the answer? Reich, Glass, the Bang on a Can composers, some making more money than the others, a few to the point of mass producing pieces that sound all the same, some even employing ghost composers for the sake of efficiency. Thus is the effect of consumerist culture in art, perhaps a by far more toxic development than any if the other four mentioned in this article.
As a composer in my eighth decade with no major commissions or awards to my name, and too old for “emerging composer” workshops or grants, I am grateful to you, Sir Roger, for these encouraging comments. You give me permission to use melody and progression shamelessly, albeit within a pan-diatonic idiom.
Sir Roger’s earlier explorations of the issue in his ‘Aesthetics of Music’ (Oxford University Press) are wholeheartedly recommended. The observation of the difference between sound and tone has nothing to do with ‘conservatism’ or any other world view, but is a neutral conclusion if the properties of music using tones and of music restricting itself to pure sound are carefully studied. But that does not mean that in music which is restricted to pure sound, there is no aesthetic quality: the beauty of (some) sound art is comparable with the beauty of patterns of colour in nature, or any physical material. Most sound art is pattern making, and there is nothing wrong with that, as long as it is not presented as music, which has this psychological ‘inner space’ created by the interrelatedness of tones, a space with a foreground and a background, and often with a middle ground as well, and a ‘perspective’ pointing towards a central tonal focus point. This space is also expressed in the scoring of orchestral music, where the masses are distributed according to the feeling for space as exercised by the composer, already clearly present in Haydn’s symphonies.
The problem is acute where sound art is presented as music and inserted in a musical programme: players and audiences don’t experience it as music because they expect something different, and react at best polite or respectful. Rejection of sound art as music is often labelled as ‘conservative’ by its advocates: audiences ‘don’t understand modern music’ and ‘only want to hear what they already know’, but this is nonsensical. The problem with such labelling is, that sound artists often do not understand music and only hear the sound it makes, which is then a clear explanation of their own views upon the matter:
http://subterraneanreview.blogspot.nl/2015/11/be-liberated.html
Because Sir Roger is a convinced conservative philosopher, his observations offer an easy label to advocates of sound art, but that would be to entirely missing the point. For Isaac Newton, astrology and alchemy were as important to him as his scientific explorations, but that does not make his scientific results suddenly suspect. The distinction between tone and sound opens the door to perceive music history from another angle, and especially 20C music history, and supports the idea that the recent recurrence of more tonally-orientated new music is not regression but progress, as long as progress is understood as an evolution from something bad to something better.
Sir Roger’s critique of postwar modernism may have seemed, to the Donaueschingen festival’s audience, as outdated, given the current pluralism in the new music scene which gives equal status to pop music and ‘Schlager’ and theatricals. But the current field of new music everywhere as organised in established institutions like this festival, is still based upon the context as created in the postwar modernist heydays, which means that the only taboo still cultivated there is the one that questions this very context. Therefore, Sir Roger’s lecture was strongly criticized, which is a good sign, since it is better that a real argument is being felt as such than the tolerance towards senseless nonsense which, for instance at the modernist hub Darsmstadt Summer Courses, goes for ‘new music’:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jwlCD2y2tBA
If classical music as a genre has to survive in modern times, it will have to reject sound art and such theatricals as part of its art form, and invite new contributions to the musical repertoire that continue to develop its cultural context and artistic values. Especially in times when classical music is under pressure by critique from populist and egalitarian world views, it should not only explain its openness to everyone who wants to extend his/her musical experience, but also make sure that it presents the best it has to offer and takes distance from art forms that have nothing to do with music.
PS: The picture above the article aptly depicts the nature of much of the established ‘contemporary music scene’, as exposed at the festivals like the Donaueschingen. Very funny!
Why, thank you, Mr. Borstlap! I had a laugh about it myself when I picked it out.
I believe that great listenable music in the Western classical tradition is still being produced, despite all the efforts of Stockhausen, Boulez and their followers. It’s not hard to come up with a list of compositions of the last 50 years that have the potential for inclusion in the canon. Here are just a few examples: the cello concertos of Dutilleux and Lutoslawski, Peter Lieberson’s orchestral settings of Neruda poems, the symphonies and concertos of Rautavaara, and Saariaho’s opera “L’amour du loin”. However, I see a problem with the listening audience. Until the 1960s (at least in the US), students going to university aspired to what they saw as the elements of Western high culture: art, literature, music, dance, cinema,… This cultural transmission ended suddenly in the late 1970s, and it’s hard to see how it can be recreated.
In the sixties, apart from some justified objections to unchallenged authority, a grave mistake was made by labelling the concept of ‘high art’ to the dustbin of history. This self-destructive petulant gesture of ignorant youth everywhere in the west, deprived them of a learning trajectory, hence the erosion of civilization we see all around. The riches of high art have to be rediscovered again which means, a type of curriculum in the educational system very different from the current ones. I am sure many youth would welcome something of meaning and aspiration if offered to them.
Indeed the Lieberson Neruda songs are a master piece, born from existential confrontations. Maybe our civilization first has to undergo comparable trauma before the meaning of high art can be reassessed again. Given the news nowadays, this may not be very far in the future.
Once again I quite agree with your line of thought John. Maybe the world is headed in a direction that requires trauma to facilitate higher states of awareness, hence higher levels of esoteric artistic appreciation than is currently the case. Certainly, if that is the case, it does seem as if the pot cooking up the transformative recipe is close to boiling. I still maintain that serialism and atonalism in the 20th Century were necessary for new directions in the aesthetics of music to take hold, just as punk did in the 1970’s for Rock. Just because something is not entirely pleasant does not always mean it is without purpose. Thank you everyone on here for the maintenance of musical thought !
And the left continues its unraveling of civilization, just to be different. Future historians will have a good laugh at their expense. To us, it’s not so funny.
But ‘the right’ is doing a comparable job, with its populist delusions and dangerous hate mongering, which seems to me more directly threatening than postmarxist deconstruction.
The biggest hurtle for classical music isn’t Boulez or Stockhausen or their followers. whoever they may have been. It is pop culture which has rendered classical music and other art music, such as Jazz, irrelevant. This had little to do with changes in musical syntax or the “emancipation of the dissonance” or other supposed “departures from traditional musical norms”. As a musician myself, I find Sir Robert’s “analyses” facile and useless. I have had no problem at all adjusting to the various stylistic changes that have occurred in music and the other arts over the past 50 years, though I agree that critics such as Adorno have had far more influence than his ideas on the subject merit. Further, I agree that total serialism was a blind alley that led nowhere, but find it unfortunate that Schoenberg, Berg and Webern have been tossed into the same category despite their never have employed this approach.It must be borne in mind, however, that even Boulez and Stockhausen realized the limits of this approach, though both had written some fine music using this technique. The reign of total serialism was brief and its adherents moved on. In the final analysis, canceling the 20th century is not an option, despite the eternal whining of conservative listeners and would-be pundits whose social position affords them an audience. In the arts as in everything else, there are those who do excellent work and those who don’t. Sir Robert is entitled to his tastes and so are those of us who disagree with him.
This comment reveals, let us say, a very superficial understanding of the subject, as the misspelling of the name of the author demonstrates (it is Sir Roger). The lecture is about the distinction between the tone and the sound, which designates the difference between the materials of music and of sound art. The first uses the sound as a carrier of meaning, creating an interrelated network of tonal relationships which can be experienced as an inner space in which musical energies can move, the second tries to make sound patterns as such interesting and aesthetically pleasing. The first is music, an art form which has a psychological / emotional dimension; the second is an art form without such dimension and thus, remaining fully stuck on the material level, which is OK but which is not music. That Sir Roger goes back to the origin of this distinction, results from the awareness that the current bizarre nature of much of the established ‘new music scene’ (see the picture above), which isolates it entirely from the central performance culture, stems from the context as created in early postwar modernism which was itself based upon misunderstanbding the early modernists Schoenberg and Webern, and seeing in the 12-tone system a way of removing the psychological / expressive dimension from the material: the ‘chromatic field’, where every note is an entity in itself and can take-on any position in an artifically created context. You don’t need any musical talent (in the traditional sense) to create such ‘music’, and that explains the proliferation of modernist composers in those years and ever since. You need intelligence, feeling for sound patterns, fantasy, and the skills to produce scores to produce sound art, but not the complex musical and emotional understanding of what makes a musical work effective and expressive.
The distinction between tone and sound throws a new light on both 20C music and 20C sound art and when the latter will no longer be compared to music, which only shows its poverty and flaws, its own qualities as pure sound can be experienced for what they are. For instance, listened to as pure sound, the early piece ‘Notations’ by Boulez in its orchestral version is very interesting and holds many beautiful moments of sound patterns; equally much of Feldman’s work offers beauties like his ‘Coptic Light’. Sir Roger’s point is that we have to listen to the works according to the context in which they are conceived, and try to understand them true to their nature.
This is a much needed (if somewhat prolix) indictment of the modern avant-garde, but it suffers from several ailments.
Notably, the distance that popular music has now devolved, largely devoid of melody itself, requiring absolute harmonic condescension (bordering on two chords), with drum-track like rhythms in much of it, really means that today’s millennials — unless they search out earlier eras or speciality niches — are musically impoverished in a way that parallels their literary poverty on encountering the detritus of deconstructionism in our modern English departments. If they listen only (mainly) to this pap that I hear today on the radio, they are largely musical illiterates, no offense intended. The music itself (if it can be called that) regresses the listener in real time, stunting the human animal both intellectually and emotionally.
Meanwhile, at the other extreme, Scruton seems still way too soft-headed about the sheer vortex that postmodern music has obtained, utterly too placid on the dangerous disconnect for (now) decades of musical experimentation and any sort of public support beyond the minute percentage who indulge this deconstruction of form in the way that disciples of Derrida or Foucault might obsessively pick over the carcass of Western literature.
Scruton is way too little, too late, on bringing a proper magnitude to the depth of the problem.
I do not know what the answer will be, but I very much doubt these two worlds can be bridged. I think rather a reactionary temperament is indeed called for, one that will rediscover the glories of Haydn, Beethoven, Mozart and Mahler for new audiences. (Mahler’s too hard for most at this point.)
The thing that I find irksome about the pedants (what else shall we call them) who tire of the Canon, is just how absurdly they reduce its enormous size to a dismissive phrase (“I’ve heard that.”) 99.9999% of the human race has not had a full-saturation of the estimable works of Mozart alone, let alone the major figures that have animated Western tonality, before it went off the deep end.
One could spend a lifetime ever-deepening into the works of Johann Sebastian Bach (I have), revisiting them countless times and discovering new riches over his vast oeuvre. (Normal mortals do not “imbibe” the B Minor Mass, in all its implications, on first, third, or tenth hearing.) Would that we had more major conductors and composers with a shred of common sense, with less of a lust for making a historic name and more of a lust for bringing the very best music to and into the world.
Some visual artists decades ago saw that the existing institutions were only doing a disservice, took matters into their own hands, and established an independent system of education based on much earlier functional models. They managed to discredit the avant-garde further, increase the market value for both their own paintings and historical paintings, create additional employment opportunities, and train both professionals and amateurs to higher levels than the universities at lower cost. Classical musicians should have done the same thing.
While the distinction between creating new sounds and doing something musical with them expressed in the lecture is accurate, the problem is that while doing so, the same assumptions about 19th and early 20th century trends are made as in practically every article criticising contemporary music. No one ever seems to take the opportunity to say that many of the “innovations” of that era were what led to the current state of music, not even in the comment sections. Not in the sense that atonality was a logical development of romanticism, as its advocates usually claim. The increasing chromaticism, extended chords, distant key changes and abrupt volume changes supposedly intended to challenge listeners actually desensitised them, leaving them with an increasingly vague sense of what was musical or not. This is especially obvious from music theory texts, which lost clarity in the eighteenth century but became convoluted wastes of time in the nineteenth. The largest contribution to this problem was the artifice of “tonality” in the strict sense. This started as a convenience for quickly writing simple polyphony, then people unaware of its purpose developed pseudo-intellectual obsessions with “extending” it into meaninglessness.
This desensitisation is also part of why western popular music is of terrible quality, failing at its supposedly intended purpose of being light fun. A lot of popular music from the Balkans, Caucasus and some Middle Eastern countries does not have long term musical development or creative song forms, but uses logical rhythms, has some variation in time signature and phrase structure, instruments play actual melodies, and there is plenty of ornamentation. It is close to their traditional music, but uses modern technology and is better suited for parties. Popular music from western countries has the same lack of development and variation in form, but usually has either extremely simple rhythms or spastic “grooving” ones, instruments play either block chords or short disjunct sequences, and real ornamentation gets replaced by things like gasping vocal noises or string bends. It has some traits not found in any traditional music (and others found only in the most primitive), is dominated by both sloppiness and extreme simplicity, and deviations from that simplicity are in the form of something jarring.
Other popular music merely lacks ambition and creativity; western popular music, like the other side of the same coin the avant-garde, goes to extremes to avoid any kind of organised complexity. One prefers to leave out the “complexity” and the other the “organised”, although there is some overlap. This is why it is so annoying to see jazz or showtune influenced composers constantly hyped as some kind of opposition to the avant-garde; they are part of the same problem, “tonal” or not.
I understand why this lecture is much friendlier and more forgiving than the avant-garde generally deserves, since it is quite rare for them to offer an invitation like that, and the audience would normally never hear such a message. Unless it was very well recieved, I am not sure it was worth the effort (or for others to play nice with them after the fact by calling their works “sound art” in the comments). People who would attend Donaueschingen are even further beyond hope than most people in western societies, actively promoting their self-destruction and gloating over it rather than sitting around letting it happen. The future of music will be mainly in the hands of those who ignore such festivals in the first place. Those that either had little exposure to rock “music”, or saw it as sick music for sick people from an early age. Those that recognise that when something has collapsed after long term degeneration, fixing it demands reverting to an earlier state free from degeneration, not reverting to the highly degraded state right before the collapse happened. Such people are a rarity in most of Europe (and what they accomplish is not very encouraging), practically nonexistent in america, but numerous enough in some other countries to move the future of music towards the east. Having fallen far below the technical standards it used to have during wars and plagues and well before the invention of electricity, western music in any of its present forms will have little to offer an increasingly competitive and multipolar world.
Dymitry,
I am in 95% agreement with your excellent incisions above. Please see my original comment on this page as well; it’s very in line with your points.
One point you make in passing which I think might be open to misconstrual. You say:
“The largest contribution to this problem was the artifice of “tonality” in the strict sense. This started as a convenience for quickly writing simple polyphony, then people unaware of its purpose developed pseudo-intellectual obsessions with “extending” it into meaninglessness.”
While I think I take your point that the pseudo-intellectual obsessions of extending it have themselves become absurd, the earlier phraseology of your first and first-half of your second sentences seems to posit => there is something inherently arbitrary about the rules of tonality itself, which strictures were say, merely a connivance for polyphonic exploration.
While polyphony would indeed one of the greatest justifications in the world for tonality being what it is (it permits musical complexity of a kind that otherwise can only coil from the 2D melody) it strikes me immediately, given what little I know, that tonality graphs the physical properties of the human ear to find the Greek ratios more or less pleasing, with some rounding, and that the hugely satisfying consummation of upward root motion by 4ths is about as primeval to the human brain as the urge for food, water, or sexual intimacy.
On the question of tonality itself, I would rather hope we could have more composers writing new music in earlier styles, or styles that represent subtler offshoots of, say, the Baroque.
There is however one other (depressing) canard only briefly mentioned in passing in this whole article: That thematic exhaustion has precluded substantive creation in the Western tonal vocabulary without too high a degree of mimesis. Curious what your thoughts are on this.
I now see why that sentence looks confusing; by “tonality in the strict sense” I meant as opposed to modal polyphony. Early harmonic rules were abstractions that combined underlying melodic and contrapuntal rules into something more limited than real polyphony, but convenient for a keyboard player or when using figured bass, and without having much effect on the main melody or the rhythm. Later harmonic rules, in attempts to move away from the original limitations, often ended up interfering with the more fundamental rules that harmony was originally based on. Now tonal music has the least organically developed melodies ever, with many popular songs, minimalist works, and film scores that sound like the result of someone filling in a chord chart with passing tones and arpeggios.
Upward root motion by a fourth such as v-i is an effective contrast because of what it contains. In a very wide range of monophonic songs, the most common intervals between the last note in a phrase or section of a phrase and the note before it are a second in either direction, a fifth down, or a fourth up. The v-i motion layers three of these endings together. V-I is even more effective because of the contrast between the minor and major second motion, which was seen in late medieval times as a preference for minor intervals to contract and major intervals to expand. The balance of many ideal ratios, and between symmetrical and asymmetrical equivalence, that music depends on, can be greatly enhanced by some harmonic concepts, but weakened by others.
People would be more likely to compose in earlier styles if there were both better musical education and an infrastructure to support them.
There is a lot of thematic exhaustion, but not very much structural exhaustion; many possibilities for musical form have been almost completely ignored.
Comparing serious art music with popular music is confusing the context. Classical music as a genre is NOT entertainment, although entertainment is sometimes part of it. What happens in the field of entertainment is entirely irrelevant to where Scruton was talking about and the problems of musical culture in the modern world.
There have emerged a number of composers, who can increasingly be heard in concert, who connect with earlier, premodernist music and develop it further in their own, personal way: David Matthews (UK), Nicolas Bacri (France), and quite a lot in the USA (Jake Heggie, Paul Moravec, Aaron Jay Kernis, Jennifer Higdon, Pierre Jalbert and others). They may not all of them be great masters (although I strongly believe there are at least a couple of them on that level), but they form the authentic and very musical context from which great works can be born.
There no longer exist an ‘avant-garde’, the term only relates to a group of modernist composers shortly after WW II. Composers following in the aesthetic footsteps of Boulez, Stockhausen, Xenakis et al, are very conventional indeed. What happens at festivals like the Donaueschingen, are gatherings of conventional modernism, where inclusion of Schlager and pop (both forms of entertainment, not of serious art forms) try to get some life into the scene. The invitation of Scruton could be understood as such an attempt, to get something like a discussion on the rails, and indeed there was much critique on what he had to say, which was spotted and mentioned in the German reviews. Whether it had any positive effect, can only be seen when new tonal music is being performed and discussed at such festivals. Chances are slim, but it is entirely irrelevant since the struggle to restore classical music to its former level is taking place in the context of the central performance culture, not in the modernist scene which would offer the wrong context. This is demonstrated by the performances of works by Peter Lieberson, Paul Moravec, Nicolas Bacri, David Matthews etc. by regular symphony orchestras, i.e. in teh context of the classical tradition, where such new works belong – they don’t need the modernist scene.
‘Playing nice to the avantgarde’ by making the distinction between tone and sound, is not ‘nice’ at all, since it undermines the claims of sonic art to be music and to become part of the central performance culture on
a fundamental level. It seems to me of some importance, to say it politely, to make clear distinctions between on one hand, classical music as a genre as practiced in the central performance culture (the symphony orchestras, opera houses, chamber music venues etc.), and the scene of sound art, or modernism (in the wides sense) with their specialist soloists, ensembles and concert series, special (often unusual) venues, and festivals (like the Donaueschingen). The postwar development of the modernist scene as an alternative to the central performance culture has made this culture vulnerable to the accusation of being a mere museum culture, and in spite of the occasional inclusion of modernist works in otherwise classical programmes (which have always shown not to work well). This is the territory of the problem: the ‘walled-off’ classical music world, in spite of regular performances of new music, and the new music scene. The classical music world is thus in a position where it seem to lack a real connection with the modern world, by a) offering mainly ‘old’ repertoire and b) being resistant to new works which represent contemporary life – and with these new works, often the modernist variety is meant. But this position cannot be fully understood if the distinction between classical music and the modernist scene is ignored. Outside these two cultures there is the vast ocean of entertainment but, however omnipresent in the modern world, it is irrelevant to the mentioned problem. Classical music has its own context which needs to be preserved. If classical music would be annexed into the pop world, it would simply disappear.
What happens in the field of entertainment would only be entirely irrelevant if it had no effect on “serious art music” at all, which does not fit the evidence. Even this lecture itself contains lines such as:
“By easy music I mean the ubiquitous products of pop and rock, which influence the ears and the attention-span of young people long before they can be captured by a teacher.”
“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.”
“There is a lesson to be taken from this, which is that music is tested in the ear of the listener and not in the laboratory, and the ear of the listener is plastic, moulded both by the surrounding culture and by the everyday sounds of life as it is now.”
As well as the part most strongly related to what I was writing about:
“From Gershwin to John Adams it has been normal to take some aspect of the popular music of the day and to show its connection to other and more long-term ways of musical thinking. Just as Gershwin rewrote jazz sequences in the language of counterpoint, so does Adams lift the ostinato four in a bar of the Rock group into an orchestral empyrean, where the flat-footed dance gives way to a gravitationless rhythm that moves and develops with the harmony.”
I explained what is wrong with western popular music, because it is very common for composers to combine classical music with it, and it is poorly understood why such composers should not be supported. They ruin any credibility that classical music has as being an elite art form with high quality standards, and serve the globalist agenda of destroying traditional European culture as much as any of the Darmstadt school did.
The “central performance culture” will collapse as soon as enough bankers and oligarchs find better methods of tax writeoffs. The techniques of the old masters would survive in other ways if there were enough interest in them.
Do you have more that I might read about this? And do you have any examples of contemporary music which is good and which has a future? You speak of those unencouraging examples in Europe, and examples in the east. Who are these people?
I would take issue with very many of the statements made in this essay but for now here are a few. “I question the prominence in our musical culture of the experimental avant-garde.” What prominence would that be? “…to deprive musical elements of their intrinsic ways of relating to each other.” What is an “intrinsic” (by which presumably is meant “not culturally determined”) way in which musical elements can relate to one another? A little knowledge of musical cultures outside the Western sphere should be enough to convince anyone that there is nothing “intrinsic” about the way musical elements in the context of that cultural sphere relate to one another. “… the ideal in our tradition has been of an uninterrupted sense of necessity – each melodic and harmonic step following as though by logic from its predecessor…” – who is this “we”? “As Stockhausen himself says, this work has no real beginning and no end: like all his works it starts without beginning and finishes without ending.” Like SOME of his works, certainly; but this categorical statement betrays a very limited knowledge of Stockhausen’s work, the most recent example cited having been composed almost half a century ago – just as no music prior to the 18th century is cited at all, presumably because it doesn’t behave according to the supposedly eternal rules of what is and isn’t acceptable in music, as in: “What was most striking to me about Stockhausen’s description of what he was doing was the word ‘melody,’ used of this sequence that is not a melody at all”, succeeded by some really not very convincing justifications for this strange assertion – “it has no beginning, no end, no up-beat, no tension or release” – not unlike the centuries-old gagaku music of Japan, really, or for that matter the organum of the Notre Dame school. Finally: “In a concert devoted to music of this kind the audience can know that the piece is ended only because the performers are putting down their instruments.” Sometimes this might be the case (and why should this be a problem?), as for example in performances of free improvisation, another entire method of creating music which is ignored here (although not in Donaueschingen) but in the vast majority of cases it isn’t, certainly not in the case of the Boulez work cited, which begins and ends with exactly the same emphatic chord, or in Stockhausen’s supposedly surgical “Mantra”, whose ending the composer describes as “like someone who’s humming a melody of music which he’s heard ages ago. It reminds him of his childhood; his whole life has passed and at the very end he still remembers the very simple tune without all its complications.” While this essay takes aim at pseudo-philosophical justifications of so-called modernism, it does so using pseudo-philosophical justifications of an anti-modernist stance which rely on an unquestioned worship of values attributed to around three centuries of history of (a highly circumscribed canon of) one among the many strands that constitute the richness of human musical culture. It is a highly limited and limiting way to look at things, in distinction to the imaginative freedoms expressed in the work of all the famous names mentioned.
If musical culture is seen as a mere human construct, then the logical conclusion is that it can be replaced by any other construct. Such constructs are then seen als entirely artificial, in the sense of: unrelated to instinctive, ‘hard-wired’ modes of perception and embedding cultural meaning into artifacts. From such a point of view, Scruton’s lecture becomes incomprehensible because he uses terms like ‘intrinsic’, ‘prominent’, ‘tradition’. But such vision is ignorant of the fact, that human culture is rooted in biological and emotional frameworks which are universal; they operate under the surface of the cultural construct. Every cultural artifact (including works of art music) is a human construct, but if it is to have artistic and aesthetic value and meaning, it will be rooted in these deep layers of perception that are universal. Hence the possibility of understanding music of non-Western cultures, and the embracing of Western classical music by a culture so different from Western roots as the Chinese culture, and the interesting phenomenon of immigrants working in the Western classical performance culture, or descendents of immigrants, and being as good and talented and accultured as the ‘locals’. That Scruton argues – in the restricted space of a lecture for an audience assumed ignorant of his work in musicology – from a point of veiw of the classical Western tradition of only the last couple of centuries, does not diminish the point he wanted to make: in art music, including European music of the periods before 1750 and the art music of non-Western cultures, sounds are turned into tones relating to each other on the basis of a tonal resonance, which in turn is based upon the laws of physics – i.e. part of nature. Going beyond the boundary of this fundamental context, is creating another context.
There is something like the ‘holistic nature of human perception’ (Steven Semes), which can make distinctions between a well-made Chinese ritual pot and a sloppy one, between a visual monstruosity like the Parisian new Philharmonie and the Viennese Musikverein, between a true musical work and sonic pattern making:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vpDuiWD-Ysk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=04q6N24CAWk&feature=youtu.be
Let it be noted that these comparisons are not meant as merely a demonstration of differences of taste, but as a matter of fundamentals.
Your “logical conclusion” isn’t logical at all. Your claim that musical culture is biologically determined ignores tens of thousands of years of cultural history If “we” were hard-wired to enjoy European symphonic music why has it only existed for a tiny fraction of human history? and why doesn’t everyone enjoy it without having to be educated into its whys and wherefores? Your claim that “the art music of non-Western cultures” is inevitably based on “tonal resonance” doesn’t hold for gagaku music (as I already mentioned) or for gamelan music. Perhaps you should study these (and the science of genetics, and what you call the “laws of physics”) a little more closely before making blanket generalisations. You seem to think you have demonstrated the truth of your spurious fundamentals by comparing two pieces of architecture and two pieces of music but you have only demonstrated the limitations of your taste; as of course does Scruton himself.
Good lord!
Are you Richard Barrett from musical tourette syndrome fame??
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sc_fh0M9v8
Hi there Mr. Barrett,
here’s a quote about Ferneyhough, that is equally applicable to you!
“Personally I dislike his pretentious unfounded alien-styled inhumane chaotic pseudo-random material, which exists only for it’s own sake and creates sensory responses that are not of the composer’s intention, but just happen to occur.
Make no mistake: Ferneyhough is no real composer; and the fact that this has never been accordingly stated or criticized shows the times in which we live: Feed the people any rubbish, with just a hint of added intellectual superiority and they’ll believe it and worship your ‘message’.
… Ferneyhough… the charlatan king of pretentious wishful implication”
I got a good laugh out of Sir Roger’s outmoded rantings. It’s telling that the most recent composition that he cites, Pli Selon Pli, is now more than 35 years old. Such avant garde! His dismissal of rock music is even more outdated – “prog rock” was exploring complex meters and tonalities in the 1970s, and is now considered a phase as classical as romanticism, preferred only by the geezers of Top Gear. Noise rock has come and gone as a distinct genre, now fully assimilated, and the space of “black MIDI” that followed in the footsteps of Conlon Nancarrow is almost exhausted, ready for integration as well. Hip-hop producers are exploring dimensions of music that only a few of Donaueschingen’s avant-gardists can imagine, and proving the validity of their work by enthusiastic acceptance from millions of fans.
I got a good laugh from your characterization of Sir Roger Scruton’s thoughtful and measured remarks as “outmoded rantings”. Good on you, ol’ son! As a “geezer” with a fondness for the “prog rock” genre, I would be reluctant to overhype its harmonic and metrical audacity. Your encomium to hip-hop producers is also amusing, since you identify its exploratory validity by its popular acceptance.
Entertainment has nothing to do with art music. Where hip hop et al is considered on the same level as art music, any argument is self-defeating.
For people, interested in the workings of the modernist mind, it might be instructive to see how easy it is to forget the basis of music when lost in the labyrinth of the postwar vision. Richard Barrett, who has been kind enough to offer a modernist point of view, is a composer of colourful sound, which presumably gives him the idea that Scruton merely argues from the position of a restricted taste. Because, any sense of musical value is then seen as a restriction, since it does not embrace the field of sonic art, where other values reign:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ptEa_Zkk4jU&feature=youtu.be
In my opinion, this is an interesting and at times beautiful, and at other times entirely ridiculous, piece of sonic art. But it is not music, since there are no tones in it, but mere sounds, also the pitches are mere sounds and can easily be replaced by other pitches without distorting the effect. It is an exercise in limitless randomness in a ‘flat’ space, there is no tonal depth in the sense of perspective in it. It is entirely understandable that Barrett has no idea how to deal with a mind like Scruton’s, and he should be forgiven for that – otherwise he would not write such works.
From a modernist point of view, all references to tradition and its hierarchical values, based upon acculturation, and education, are mere a matter of taste, and the limitness of sonic art is considered a so much wider territory of experience. Sonic artists feel their territory as something liberated from the past and from tradition, a field of freedom. So be it. But it can equally be argued that this happy freedom is based upon taste, and a serious lack of aesthetic awareness.
As Barrett says:
“Your ‘logical conclusion’ isn’t logical at all. Your claim that musical culture is biologically determined ignores tens of thousands of years of cultural history. If ‘we’ were hard-wired to enjoy European symphonic music why has it only existed for a tiny fraction of human history?”
This is a nonsensical remark, since many things in human history developed only late, as the technical talents of man have been present for a long time until circumstances were favourable enough to let them blossom. We know of the latest technical inventions which were offered to the Chinese court in the 17th century by Western diplomats, but they were simply stored in a cupboard as curiosa, instead of being studied and learned from – Chinese culture was not ripe for such things. And then, we are not ‘hardwired to enjoy European symphonic music’ but to perceive the different proportions of sound waves which form the harmonic series. Upon these proportions, tone systems have developed, which are a human construct. It is the physical properties of the harmonic series which makes it possible to experience the energies operating within the tonal systems.
“…… and why doesn’t everyone enjoy it without having to be educated into its whys and wherefores? Your claim that ‘the art music of non-Western cultures’ is inevitably based on ‘tonal resonance’ doesn’t hold for gagaku music (as I already mentioned) or for gamelan music.”
It goes without saying that musical perceptivity differ from individual to individual, as other senses differ between people, and between animals as well, for that matter. Education is a help, and it does not mean that musical perception is not hardwired. Walking is hardwired in humans but we all had to be helped to get it done properly when we were young kids. Art music in other cultures sometimes does not sound tonal in the Western sense (the major-minor system), and the modernist composer will see this as a justification for his own endeavor. But gagaku is as tonal as any other traditional music, the tones relate to each other within a scale, or mode:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5OA8HFUNfIk
The same with gamelan: its pitches are organised slightly differently from Western tonal systems, and more carelessly so (they differ with every gamelan ensemble), because the pitches are more decorative, the essence of gamelan lies in its metrical and rhythmical heterophony… Focussing, when listening, on the pitches alone is a quite boring experience, it is the metrical and rhythmical whole that creates the interest:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZZTfu4jWcI
So, it is, for the modernist mind, easy to miss the point of the real nature of tonality and its relation to the artifical constructs of tone systems in use in the different musical traditions of humanity. I always think that such restrictions are ‘hardwired’ in modernism, since at the core of its ideology is the idea that there is no natural property in music, as its works amply demonstrate.
Neuroscience appears to support the claim that ‘atonal music’ bypasses the hardwired perception system of patterns in the brain:
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/science/science-news/7279626/Audiences-hate-modern-classical-music-because-their-brains-cannot-cope.html
We can only conclude that the mindset of postwar modernism is the fruit of a denial of nature, and a historic phase that offered people with a restricted insight in the nature of music and with an even more restricted aesthetic taste, the opportunity to explore sonic territories which – due to the liberation from musical ‘limitations’ – offer ample interest for the listener who will have to forget what the art of music was, is and possibly could be. There is nothing against sonic art, but when its philosophies are applied to music, the result can only be dissonance that cannot be resolved.
“History will say—history says now—that the 12-tone movement was ultimately a dead end, and that the long modernist movement that followed it was a failure.”
“Deeply flawed at their musical and philosophical roots, unloving and oblivious to human limits and human needs, these movements left us with far too many works that are at best unloved, at worst detested. They led modern classical music to crisis, confusion, and, in many quarters, despair, to a sense that we’ve wasted decades.”
See
http://www.davidvanalstyne.com/pg-problematonalmusic.html
and
http://archive.wilsonquarterly.com/essays/music-without-magic