The World that Has No Music in its Soul

     One of my favorite journals is The Intercollegiate Review, a superb compendium of conservative thought -- not partisan or Republican thought, nor laissez-faire economic thought (as is found in Reason or The Independent Review), but that strain of philosophy we inherit from Burke and Dr. Johnson, Tocqueville and Paul Elmer More, that remembers that man is fundamentally a spiritual creature.  You can buy him all the bread and wine he can consume, but if the satisfaction of appetite is all his life is going to be about, he'll prowl like an animal in a cage.  Even the sky will be a ceiling too low for his aspirations.

     This spring's issue of The Intercollegiate Review, though, is terrific from front to back; I could (and might) post a blog on each of the articles in it.  But I thought I'd start with one that I know will set the typewriter keys clicking, as it resumes a discussion we've been having here for a long time.  Composer and writer Webster Young, in a piece called "Can There Be Great Composers Anymore?," argues that we are seeing, finally, a turn away from the Viennese school of atonality and arbitrarily imposed restrictions (a strange combination, those two) that characterize the music of Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, and their followers.  He also claims that minimalism, that movement that swept through all the arts but took up special residence in music and architecture, may also have spent its meager self.  If so, we may see composers returning to classicism -- by which he means something a little bit different from the colonnades of Palladio and the Greco-Roman lintels of Leon Battista Alberti.  Young is calling for a return to the language of the music of the past, as the foundation upon which to build anew.  In other words, he rejects the modernist cult of novelty and self-styled "originality":

     "One of the advantages of a common practice is that it allows a succession of composers to improve upon the works of their predecessors -- just as in science, researchers build upon previous research.  Mozart could take the work of Gluck, Haydn, or the composers of the Mannheim school, and improve upon it, having the advantage of objectivity and the energy of youth.  The resulting music of Mozart is not, therefore, a quantum leap over and beyond Haydn and Gluck: it is just enough of a refinement of form to make Mozart the high point of his era."

     Without a "common practice" or a "language" to work from, it is hard to see how any really first rate art can be produced.  Without, for example, the centuries of songs of the Trojan War, passed down by memory from singer to singer, we have no Iliad, no Odyssey, which may (we don't know for certain) be as superior to those old songs in beauty, in intellectual subtlety, and in thematic complexity as Shakespeare's 1 Henry IV is to the early Tudor morality plays or the Corpus Christi cycles.  But without the Corpus Christi plays we have no Shakespeare.  Without almost three centuries of love poetry in Italian and Provencal to precede him, and without the same three centuries of theological disputations in monastic schools and then in the new universities, we do not have Dante and the Divine Comedy.  So I think Young is quite correct to note that "modernism has been about revolution, individualism, and novelty," and to conclude from those mistaken aims that modernism must inevitably have undone itself.  It so estranged its audiences that many critics, taking modernism for granted, argued that western classical music had been exhausted -- when actually, as Young says, it was only modernism that was exhausted:

     "The methods and ideals of the avant-garde have produced very little of lasting value in music in the last fifty years.  The now century-old, superannuated avant-garde (a contradiction in terms) has, in the process, alienated audiences and ruined the economics for new music.  As the modernist fog clears, a common practice in music -- like that of the New Tonality now developing -- will be reborn and recognized.  If a neoclassical criticism can now also emerge, composers will once again build upon the past and upon each other's work, creating beautiful new melodies and nobly redefined forms.  Eventually, a genius will appear who, like Mozart, will owe almost everything to those who went before him."

     Three cheers for that new genius.  But I have one nagging doubt.  It's this: the "common language" Young is talking about must transcend the boundaries of the music workshops and studios.  Palladio built his churches and palaces for a people who believed in the nobility of the ancient world, and who wished to emulate its virtues of restraint and balance.  You could have a Palladio in the days of Alexander Pope.  You cannot have Palladio now.  When Palestrina wrote his Masses, he was inspired by prayers that washerwomen and plowboys had heard every week of their lives; it was part of their common, lived experience.  Without that inspiration from something beyond Renaissance Italy, and something the composer shared with all kinds of people who were not composers or singers, you do not get the exalted music and theology of the Credo of the Mass for Pope Marcellus.  When Puccini wrote his lush and schmaltzy and eminently enjoyable operas, he wasn't just giving the folk singers and mandolin players something to emulate as from on high; he was himself inspired by that music.  He lived in a culture -- and that culture happened to sing of love, constantly, and had been doing so since long before Dante.  You can't really separate Nessun dorma from Torni a Surriento, nor either one of them from Dante and Tasso and Titian and Raphael and Manzoni and Verga.

     But what happens when you don't have a culture?  I've argued this before, but it bears repeating.  I'm taking the word literally.  You have a culture when you cultivate those beliefs, customs, celebrations, and virtues you hold most dear; and in this sense culture is by nature conservative and often proudly local.  That's why totalitarian systems despise it; it stands in the way of the flattening of variety that the modern state demands.  But this consumer society of ours despises it, too.  It stands in the way of the itch for the new-and-improved, for novelty for the sake of vanity.  The last hundred years, in part through no consciously evil plan, has seen the gradual replacement of culture with mass entertainment.  One of my professors, when he was a boy long ago in the prairies of Saskatchewan, had a neighbor who recited Paradise Lost as he worked the plow.  I have to believe that such memories -- though maybe not of an entire twelve-book poem -- were not so uncommon then; old hymnals, for instance, often do not bother to print the music, even though congregations sang in four-part harmony.  What do we have, now, in our minds?  What is the language of our collective memory?  This haunting lyric comes to mind:

          Rice-a-Roni, it's flavor can't be beat!
          Rice-a-Roni, the San Francisco treat.

Or this:

          Sit right back and you'll hear a tale,
          A tale of a fateful trip,
          That started from this tropic port
          Aboard this tiny ship.

     That's not culture.  It's the object of nobody's devotion.  It expresses no great yearning.  It's common, sure.  I don't think it's any foundation for art.  Among us now, I don't know what is.

Comments

[ben]

Can there be great composers anymore?

Well I think that Henryk Gorecki is pretty good, but his greatest works come out of the rich culture of Polish Catholicism.

Are there such rich cultural expressions and forms in modern America? I'd say yes, but they are few and far between.

[Clifford Simon]

When I have time, I intend to collect CDs of American composers: Copland, Roy Harris, Virgil Thompson, and others. Surely there's some local culture in that, for those who are willing to go get it.

I know that there exist many "sacred music" recordings of decades ago, from before the time of "Christian Rock." Some of these, I expect, are just old kitsch, some are just masterful new recordings of hymns that are still old and not local, ... but I wonder if there's some local culture in the mix, too?

[labrialumn]

What think you of the contention of Hans Rookmaker, popularized by Francis Schaeffer, and probably predating either of them by generations, that the art comes of the cultus, or belief system, and that the art expresses ideas?

One can see how some might return to the actual physics of sound as a result of the rejection of reason by the "post-moderns" (who are neither post nor all that modern). But won't they be doing that for the same reason that people seek the New Age for "ancient wisdom" or that Chant was was on the charts last decade, or that heresiarch MacLauren accepts all sorts of traditions, so long as truth claims are surgically removed from them?

Then, if these things are so, might it not also be the case that people operating from the same weltanschauung as Palestrina might not produce music of similar beauty and intricacy? The weltansiht of the present is quite different, but men and women are still men and women, dogs and horses are still dogs and horses, and the cry to God for mercy is as it has been.

[Christopher Culver]

Condemnations of modernist music seem to often be American-centric. Schoenberg and Boulez may drive audiences away in the U.S., but in France (Boulez) or Finland (Schoenberg) these concerts tend to sell out.

And instead of seeing modernist music as anti-devotional, consider that in the former Soviet Union modernism and Christian devotional music went hand in hand. Just look at the output of Schnittke, Gubaidulina, early Pärt, or Knaifel, all devout Orthodox* The popular composers of the era, on the other hand, also accepted the Soviet taboo against religious expression.

(Well, Schnittke converted to Roman Catholicism, but had an Orthodox priest as a spiritual father.)

[Rob G]

For some enlightening thoughts on this whole subject see Robert Reilly's book 'Surprised by Beauty: A Listener's Guide to the Recovery of Modern Music.' Reilly's columns on classical music in Crisis Magazine are well worth mining. Many are available on the mag's website.

One mistake to avoid here is to equate 'modern' music exclusively with dodecaphony. While the latter does certainly seem to have exhausted itself (it was, as many of its proponents now realize, severely self-limiting), other currents have arisen to take its place, some good, some bad, and some ugly, which can also be described as modern. Boulez and his crowd would probably say otherwise, but there it is.

I agree with what Tony says about contemporary society having no culture to speak of, or if there is a culture it is largely a mishmash of conflicting and competing claims and images. In that sense, perhaps the most culturally telling music is the 'collage' style, where composers throw together all sorts of musical ideas into one work. There seems to be some underlying notion that this is supposed to be profound, but it generally results in a sort of organized cacophony (which, of course, is quite reflective of modern culture!)

One hopeful sign Reilly points to in his book is not only the advent of what Young calls the 'New Tonality,' but the revival of interest in tonal composers who were brushed aside as irrelevant during the heyday of atonality. Americans like Piston, Diamond, and Hanson, and Europeans like Atterburg, Holmboe, and Karl Weigl, are gaining a new hearing after years of neglect.

[cnb]

It is one thing to talk about our loss of a real popular culture, and another to consider the breakdown of tradition in high culture. If we are focusing on the latter, as Young seems to be doing, then the atonal movement in music is an apt example. In that case, tradition didn't just breakdown: it was murdered -- or, as Webern himself put it, "We broke its neck."

Schoenberg used to say that atonality was a natural and "inevitable" development in our musical tradition, but his private papers tell another story. With the post-war avant-garde, led by composers like Boulez and Cage, the rejection of tradition became violent, replaced by a kind of lust for ugliness. The whole enterprise was underwritten by a contempt for the audience and its tastes. Is it any wonder people stopped listening?

If there has been any great music written since 1950, it has been by composers who, in one way or another, musically or spiritually, retained deep roots in tradition. Shostakovich and Britten are probably the best examples, though both have been dead for thirty years now. Arvo Part and John Tavener have gained (relatively) wide audiences with their religiously-grounded music, and, as other have pointed out, a number of composers have toiled in obscurity, writing beautiful and communicative music, while the atonal fever worked itself out.

It may be true that atonality is finally dying off, exhausted. But I fear that the damage has been done: concert music has largely lost its audience, and it will be a long, difficult road to get it back.

In his recent book, The Rest is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century, Alex Ross provides good insight into the motives and methods of the musical radicals of the last century. It's an instructive read.

[Rob G]

"It is one thing to talk about our loss of a real popular culture, and another to consider the breakdown of tradition in high culture."

In a certain sense this is probably true, but I believe that the two are usually related. I'm not sure the dividing line between popular culture and 'high culture' can be so starkly drawn.

[cnb]

I agree that popular culture and high culture can't be entirely separated. I'm not sure to what extent the collapse of the two can be related in the special case of twentieth-century music.

The main developments within popular music were the rise of blues, jazz, and rock, and the technological advances that made their widespread distribution possible. The new genres -- especially jazz -- did have an impact on classical composers: think of Gershwin, Stravinsky, and Les Six, for example. But by then the Schoenbergian revolution had already taken place. The jazz-influenced classical music was the stream that maintained its popular appeal.

It was the technological changes that has had such a pulverizing effect on local culture, turning us from producers into consumers, but again those developments took place after the musical tradition's spine had been snapped in Vienna. The easy proliferation of pop music did accelerate or exacerbate the problems in classical music -- composers who were having trouble getting an audience simply sniffed in contempt and wrote music without regard for whether anyone liked it -- but I don't think we can say it caused the problems.

I think it is also worth noting that atonality as such is not necessarily the problem. There are composers, like Britten, Messiaen, Takemitsu, and even Webern -- not to mention those who write horror film soundtracks -- who have made strangely beautiful music in this way. The deep problem is the contemptuous, angry spirit with which so much of it was written. Schoenberg famously bowed to the orchestra, turning his back resolutely against the audience, and maybe it is that attitude that has really destroyed classical music -- destroyed it from within.

Rob G, I'll second your endorsement of Robert Reilly's column in Crisis magazine. He is sometimes too indiscriminate in his praise, and he rarely comes within earshot of the core repertoire, but he more than makes up for it with enthusiasm and understanding.

[marie]

The separation of Americans from high Western culture is surely aided by our consumerist culture, but I'd blame our self-destructive educational philosophies as much. I remember participation in an art appreciation program for elementary school children at out local university art museum. Adults were warned not to provide any information about the subject matter of the paintings - many of which portrayed biblical or historical subjects. It was explained that the provision of such information would stifle the children's creative response to the art itself. Cultural context would be harmful to their development of critical skills. I nearly came to blows with a matronly docent when she haughtily dismissed some kid's question about the identity of the lady handing the guy the apple.

[Judy K. Warner]

Marie, every time I hear a story about our education system I think it can't get any worse, and then I hear a worse one.

[Tony Esolen]

Marie,

I second Judy's comments. I think, often, it would be better for young people never to go to an art gallery at all, never to read a play by Shakespeare, and never to read a novel by Dickens, than to have it all spoiled in the bud by such cynicism -- and sheer ignorance.

[AMTuba]

One thing I find "misses the point" within all these arguments is the assumption that 20th century atonal composition, particularly that of Schoenberg, is entirely baseless and shuns the path from whence it came. I simply can't agree to that on any acceptable level; Schoenberg was doing quite the opposite, and if you have never heard the term "emancipation of dissonance" then you are entirely missing the point of twelve-tone and atonal composition.

It doesn't seem to me that Mr. Young or Mr. Esolen really took into account that chromatic and 'dissonant' music had been around since the time of Beethoven. You don't have to look far to find Beethoven's use of nonharmonic tones frequent, oftentimes "weakening" the key centers which he previously established. Wagner used chromaticism to enormous lengths, and would often write long passages of dissonance without any resolution in the immediate musical future (listen to the overture for "Tristan und Isolde"). And Debussy did everything within his power to break down functional harmony, planing wildly in 4ths and 5ths into the stratosphere without ever saying "my piece is in C major and this is why." Strauss too, was using eight or nine note tone-rows in his pieces and oftentimes not repeating them until the previous had been repeated (this concept flourishes within 12-tone composition). By the time Schoenberg came along there was dissonance everywhere in music, but it was still thought of as dissonance.

My overall point being that just because you don't appreciate 'the sound' of atonal music doesn't mean that it wasn't the next logical step in the musical timeline. If you take into account the composers listed above and also add Mahler, Stravinsky, Charles Ives, Satie, Scriabin and Ravel, you find that it's very easy to 'lead into' atonality and not just brush it off as "modernist exhaustion." To assume that Schoenberg was producing twelve-tone rows just because he wanted to be different is to leave yourself to a severe disadvantage. After all, Schoenberg himself even said that he did not invent atonality, he simply discovered it.

And I am vehemently opposed to the opinion that atonal music is baseless for building for the future. Perhaps is someone listened to a little more atonal music, they'd grow to understand it? Just because it sounds different doesn't mean it's bad and baseless. In addition, even without writing completely atonally we can still allude and build off Schoenberg's emancipation. It's now much more widely accepted to have intense dissonances in pieces of music; it creates a tension that was previously not there. Not only that, I greatly admire the person who pointed out that film music has benefited so well from this "baseless" movement. I'm sure Star Wars wouldn't be quite as impressive without all the techniques Williams ripped from the Viennese school.

I'd comment more on the culture, but a lack of musical understanding due to nothing more than close-mindedness is a subject one can expound for days on.

[Rob G]

"In addition, even without writing completely atonally we can still allude and build off Schoenberg's emancipation."

Yes, but as 'cnb' said above, the problem is not so much the atonality itself, but the idea that with the advent of 12-tone music, the tonal became irrelevant. This attitude was expressed with some vehemence and condescension by Boulez and his followers, and those who disliked atonality were seen as backwards, behind the times, etc.

I don't mind a certain amount of dissonance, aleatory, minimalism, etc., in the music I listen to, but I'd reject the notion than any of these methods/approaches are an "advance" on tonal music, and that if I believe otherwise I'm closeminded.

[Will]

One of my professors, when he was a boy long ago in the prairies of Saskatchewan, had a neighbor who recited Paradise Lost as he worked the plow.

I think we do not fully realize what we have lost in the last thirty or forty years as far as public education goes. My own father, who only went through high school (in the 1930's; he was then drafted into the Army in WWII), can still remember some of "Macbeth" from his high school days. I suspect in forty or fifty more years very few, if any, will be able to say such a thing.

[V-Dawg]

I have only recently begun to learn something about music (I graduated from college less than a year ago, after all, and didn't study music growing up), but it seems to me that atonal music holds the same place in music as does free verse in poetry. True free verse is foreshadowed in various ways by Whitman, Hopkins, Robert Browning, and others. In one sense, Eliot, Pound, and the other high modernists were simply doing the next logical thing. It becomes obvious, however, that most high modernists were consciously rebelling against the past and rejecting its forms along with its ideas when one looks at their overall work.
When Eliot embraced Christianity he did not cease writing free verse. I think this is fine, for both free and metrical verse have a place. It is wrong, though, to entirely reject the past and posit innovation as the only option.

[AMTuba]

As to Rob G's comments, I'd simply like to not that if you played Tchaikovsky's 4th symphony to someone living during the time of Mozart, they would most likely pass it off as irreverent garbage that had no musical qualities whatsoever. It takes time for society's musical tastes to change, and simply because Schoenberg's new music may have been a little preemptive, it doesn't mean it's not important. There is tons of great atonality out there that can please a wide variety of audiences. And as for Boulez, I find him to be a bit off philosophically, specifically in his expressions of integral serialism. The sheer fact that integral serialism sounds ever so similar to the chance music of John Cage almost brings the atonal and serialist movements full circle. In no way do I think that atonal music should call for a complete rejection of the past; I just want to stress that it can be a new way of understanding music. It is also important not to ignore this new understanding, because even if it doesn't 'sound good' it still happened.

I've thought about this for much of my day, and I realized that I was putting music into categories of "tonal" and "atonal" and "minimal." While these labels aid the music student and listener in identification, shouldn't there be a certain attitude that all music is music? You can have certain genres you prefer, but on the whole I believe that one should be a bit more open to different styles. After all, you may not be a fan of horror books, but does the work of Poe not excite you?

Lastly I'd like to say that even though you "don't mind a certain amount of dissonance, aleatory, minimalism, etc., in the music [you] listen to," you still allow it and without it I can assure you that your music wouldn't be half as good. Nobody 'likes' atonal music the first time they hear it, but if you give it a chance it can open up a much broader musical world for you. I don't mean to call you close minded, but I just don't feel like you're giving it an adequate chance.

[Rob G]

"While these labels aid the music student and listener in identification, shouldn't there be a certain attitude that all music is music?"

No, this is precisely what I disagree with. To paraphrase, I think, Roger Kimball, you can't equate Bach and Bob Marley. Now I happen to like both Bach and Bob Marley very much, but I know what Kimball's getting at, and I agree with him.

I believe that some musics are inherently better than others; that is why I believe that dodecaphony had, overall, a more negative effect on concert music than a positive one.

As far as film music goes, I think that most film music is rather banal when listened to apart from its relationship to the film. There are exceptions, of course, but not too many IMO.

[Maclin Horton]

I'm interested in the question of Schoenberg's motivation. I read a book about him a few years ago--can't remember the author's name but the title was the composer's name, and I think it's considered a fairly authoritative work--which said something along the lines of what Amtuba says above--that he really did see it as a natural development, not as a Dada-type act of destruction.

Amtuba, I have to suppose that you have far more training and/or aptitude for music than the average person. A significant part of the problem with the music we're talking about is that its organizing principles simply aren't detectable to an ordinary listener--for us, twelve-tone and aleatory music don't sound that different from each other.

I think I can say with justification that you're not going to find many people who are much more open-minded about music than I am. I'm almost 60 years old and have given serial and other atonal/dissonant composers many chances over many years of listening to music, and I don't hate it, but very, very little of it means much to me. I've heard, for instance, the Berg violin concerto, usually advanced as a work accessible to those who don't like serialism, at least half a dozen times, and I have yet to have any reaction stronger than "that's interesting." I do, however, love Pierrot Lunaire, because in that case the weird and spooky music makes sense in relation to the texts. And I'm afraid "weird, "spooky," etc. are the inevitable reactions of most people to the basic sound.

I think at best this music will never really be loved by any but the very sophisticated and technically knowledgeable. I mean, it's not like it's still new or anything.

[Nick]

Seriously...what's wrong with Copland? An I a knuckle dragging savage or something? Or is his stuff too common to be hip?

Does Danny Elfman's movie work count as interesting? Edward Scissorhands : Main Titles (which I think is fine without the movie a hundred times over)? Batman Returns: End Titles? Sommersby: Main Titles (never even seen the film)?

Duel of the Fates by John Williams?

As to popular TV and culture how about Dr. House citing Proverbs 31 throughout a whole episode (was it friendly...no...but I don't expect that from the world *ever*)

#12 on iTunes "Free Fallin" by Tom Petty (I was shocked too) has a pretty moral message and makes explicit reference to culture as I think it would be defined by Dr. Esolen.

#79 on iTunes "When You Were Young" by the killers makes explicit religious references:
"They say the devil's water, it ain't so sweet
You don't have to drink right now
But you can dip your feet
Every once in a little while

You sit there in your heartache
Waiting on some beautiful boy to
To save you from your old ways
You play forgiveness
Watch it now here he comes

He doesn't look a thing like Jesus
But he talks like a gentleman
Like you imagined when you were young
(He talks like a gentlemen, like you imagined when)
When you were young

I said he doesn't look a thing like Jesus
He doesn't look a thing like Jesus
But more than you'll ever know"

The closing lyric is actually pretty interesting in that it makes, by a group that I'm pretty sure is pure secularist, a theological point because it draws on a common Christian culture.

[cnb]

Maclin, you ask about Schoenberg's motivations. In the book I mentioned above (The Rest is Noise) Alex Ross looks at this question. Amtuba alludes to the justification for atonality that Schoenberg offered publicly -- for instance, in his book Harmonielehre (1911). He argued that the Western tradition of harmony was breaking down, and he pointed so some of the same examples as Amtuba: Wagner, Mahler, Strauss, Debussy -- all had made use of dissonant harmonies and non-traditional scales. Schoenberg couched his critique in the language of social Darwinism and race theory: the traditional Western system was diseased and degenerate as a result of harmonic "inbreeding and incest". He tried to argue that atonality was the logical, rational outcome of this historical process.

This story didn't convince those around him, however. I mentioned above Webern's brief account of what really happened to the tonal system: "We broke its neck". Privately, in his letters, Schoenberg gives the impression that his radical break with tradition had little to do with the logic of history, and much to do with his own psychology. To Ferrucino Busoni he wrote, "I strive for: complete liberation from all forms, from all symbols of cohesion and logic." "Art belongs to the unconscious! One must express oneself! Express oneself directly! Not one's taste, or one's upbringing, or one's intelligence, knowledge, or skill," he wrote in a letter to Kandinsky. Make of that what you will.

[AMTuba]

Rob G, you cant equate Bach and Bob Marley because you haven't tried. You are simply looking at musical 'aptitude' and not judging the times in which they lived. If you were from Jamaica, Bach's music probably wouldn't hold as much meaning for you as Marley's would. Now, I understand that I should constrict my arguments to western musics, so I'll say this: To find the connections between musicians and composers across generations you simply need to listen on an evened plane. Sit down and say "okay, what was Mozart trying to accomplish with his Jupiter symphony?" and then at the same time say "okay, why did the Beatles perform 'Love Me Do?" You'll find eventually that it's not how important a musician was, but how important their musicality was. The fact that 'newer' music hasn't had the chance to influence as many people doesn't discredit it as art; just give it another century in the wine cellar. Already, you can witness the advent of Jazz as a 'classical' and 'academic' art form, as it is taught in all the major Universities and Conservatories. Who's to say that rock n' roll will not make it in? It's significantly younger than jazz, but already there is enough study of the music theory behind the Beatles and Jimi Hendrix that there are courses taught in it.

The other thing I'd like you to keep in mind is my favorite quote from Frank Zappa, a man who understood everything from primitive social rock to complex classical:

"My theory is that music is good, it's the only religion that delivers the goods. And anybody who wants to hear any kind of music is entitled to hear that music because it's good for you – it makes you feel good. If you like it, go for it. Just because I don't like it doesn't mean anything – it's a matter of personal taste."

And Maclin, I am a music student so obviously I realize that this music isn't for everyone. I just try my best to help people understand ALL music on an intellectual level. And as Schoenberg himself looked to move classical music into the volumes of academia (just as literary analysis and upper-level mathematics have done), I also admit that this music is not for everyone.

[Nick Milne]

I had a lengthy post just now, but the comment software decided that it looked like spam. I guess it's been forwarded to someone for approval, maybe? I don't dare just repost it in case the system decides to do something even less polite.

[Christopher Culver]

> I think at best this music will never really be loved by any but the
> very sophisticated and technically knowledgeable.

Back before he went completely bonkers, Stockhausen was selling out stadiums with his avant-garde stylings. Even in his last years, he was capable of selling out 2000-seat venues and many of the patrons were young people with little musical training.

[Rob G]

"My theory is that music is good, it's the only religion that delivers the goods. And anybody who wants to hear any kind of music is entitled to hear that music because it's good for you – it makes you feel good. If you like it, go for it. Just because I don't like it doesn't mean anything – it's a matter of personal taste."

And I'm diametrically opposed to this view; I'm in no sense a cultural relativist. It is nice to say that it's all a matter of personal taste, but frankly, that's ridiculous. Would you say the same thing to a man who had a plate of rotting meat sitting on his desk instead of a bouquet of flowers because he liked the smell better? Would you not think rather that his olfactory tastes were somewhat off?

Note also that Zappa was profoundly anti-religion and specifically anti-Christian. Despite his musical acumen I don't count him as an authority.

"I just try my best to help people understand ALL music on an intellectual level."

This makes sense, but there are some types of music that I don't like enough to WANT to understand. Understanding may help me appreciate the skill and musicianship involved, but it won't necessarily cause me to like the music.

"Even in his last years, he was capable of selling out 2000-seat venues and many of the patrons were young people with little musical training."

I'd put this down to two things: a severe case of "the emperor's new clothes" syndrome, and the fact that young people are apt to mistake "that sounds cool!" for "that's really good!" I know this because I can see it in my own life. When I go back and listen to some of the stuff that I thought was really great in my college days, I'm often embarassed by how bad it is.

By the way, I'm a musician myself, so I can look at all this somewhat from the inside, so to speak. I'm not a mere 'academic' listener.

[Judy K. Warner]

Rob, as a very amateur musician myself, I always appreciate your comments on music. You usually articulate and clarify what I vaguely think.

[Rob G]

Actually, Judy, I'm not really a musician -- I'm a drummer. ;-)

[Tony Esolen]

This comes to me from a Lenten lurker on the blogsite:

Amtuba's argument depends entirely upon blurring distinctions. Virtually all Western music has made use of dissonance and chromaticism from its written inception, not just since the time of Beethoven. E.g., the Renaissance polyphonic mass composers made quite free and expressive use of these as expressive devices. But music that uses chromaticism and dissonance within a tonal framework is quite different from music that consciously abandons and rejects tonality altogether. It is the difference between e.g. a dish of heavily spiced Chicken Vindaloo vs. eating spoonfuls of spices without any chicken. Amtuba also obfuscates in other ways. Wagner's device of repeatedly not resolving the dominant seventh in "Tristan & Isolde" creates tension but is not itself dissonance per se. The eight or nine tone rows of e.g. Richard Strauss are not 12-tone rows, the omission of the remaining notes being crucial to establishment of a tonal framework. Debussy did not do "everything within his power to break down functional harmony," as he relied upon use of whole-tone and pentatonic scales in generating his harmonic progressions.

As Rob correctly notes, "the problem is not so much the atonality itself, but the idea that with the advent of 12-tone music, the tonal became irrelevant. This attitude was expressed with some vehemence and condescension by Boulez and his followers, and those who disliked atonality were seen as backwards, behind the times, etc." What was in the hands of Schoenberg and Berg a particular idiosyncratic but expressive and effective musical system was taken up by others lacking their genius, turned into a sterile formulaic system, and then forcibly imposed in musical conservatories for decades as ideological orthodoxy with all the rigor of a Stalinist re-education camp. And the attitude was summed up neatly in Milton Babbitt's notorious essay "Who Cares If You Listen?" which essentially told concertgoers to go [expletive deleted] themselves because composers only wrote music for themselves and a tiny technically proficient elite of fellow composers and performers. (Paul Hindemith had a properly blunt response to such totalitarian musical ideologues in the closing pages of his 1951 Norton Lectures, published as "A Composer's World," where he contrasts the plea of "Seid umschlungen, Millionen!" in Beethoven's 9th Symphony with the totalitarian insistence of the dodecaphonists "You *must* believe in my system.")

As for atonalism and dodecaphony being "the next logical step in the musical timeline" -- this equivocates between "logical" as possible and necessary outcomes. Also, it does not mean that atonality and dodecaphony constituted positive advances in music. In exactly the same sense, Fascism was "the next logical step in the historical timetable" from nationalism. Should we therefore welcome Fascism as just being "different"?

The problem, as figures ranging from Paul Hindemith to the conductor Bruno Walter noted, and a point to which Tony Esolen alludes, is that tonality is natural (Hindemith discusses the mathematics and physics of sound waves in this regard), whereas atonality is artificial in a way that does not imitate nature but self-consciously seeks to reject and transgress against the order of nature. Indeed, it is the very exaltation and idolization of the transgressive that accounts for the decadence of modern Western culture. The statement that "By the time Schoenberg came along there was dissonance everywhere in music, but it was still thought of as dissonance" is true -- but it necessarily recognizes tonality as the standard from which dissonance deviates. The problem lies precisely in the abandonment and rejection of this realization such that the "emancipation of the dissonance" becomes either sheer lawlessness (e.g. Cage and "chance music") or else a forcibly imposed ideology in which perversion is made the mandatory norm.

And this leads to the final point. The foundation of moral and epistemological relativism is aesthetic relativism. Compare the following:

"Perhaps is someone listened to a little more atonal music, they'd grow to understand it? Just because it sounds different doesn't mean it's bad and baseless. In addition, even without writing completely atonally we can still allude and build off Schoenberg's emancipation. It's now much more widely accepted to have intense dissonances in pieces of music; it creates a tension that was previously not there."

"Perhaps if someone watched a little more homosexual interaction, they'd grow to understand it? Just because it behaves differently doesn't mean it's bad and baseless. In addition, even without abandoning traditional marriage we can still allude and build off sexual emancipation. It's now much more widely accepted to have sexual perversions in personal relations; it creates a tension that was previously not there."

This is not to accuse Amtuba of supporting sodomy or pederasty; it is rather to point out the sorry sogginess of his argument here. "Different" does not equate to "progress"; and there are some things to which we should not expose ourselves, for the good of our own souls, because they willfully transgress the natural order, as mankind found to its sorrow with the first taste of the forbidden fruit.

As for "I'd comment more on the culture, but a lack of musical understanding due to nothing more than close-mindedness is a subject one can expound for days on" -- my own collection of music contains works by Schoenberg, Berg, Webern, Varese, Lutoslawski, Penderecki, and Husa, among other 20th c. composers. I once presented a paper at a scholarly conference on a comparative analysis of Schoenberg's "Moses und Aron" and Hindemith's "Mathis der Maler" as presenting different visions in Weimar germany of the role of the artist in society. The research for that included extensive reading in the letters and essays of Schoenberg (whom CNB does not quite fairly represent) and Hindemith. Perhaps, instead of being so peremptorily dismissive of those who do not share his taste for atonal and dodecaphonic music, Amtuba might consider that opposition to such is not based simply on "close-mindedness" (as opposed to his own self-supposed superior enlightenment), but rather precisely on an understanding of the nature of music, human culture, and divine economy and order.

[Judy K. Warner]

I wonder who that Lenten lurker might be ;-)

[Tony Esolen]

My dear commenters:

Thanks for an engaging discussion -- I hope it continues. I am making no aesthetic judgment about the music of Anton Schoenberg here. I don't happen to like that music at all, but that's not exactly the point. Not to say that Rob and Judy and my Lurker don't understand the point -- but let me clarify anyhow:

1. The greatest art, in any genre, is inconceivable without a foundation in a vibrant culture.

2. Culture is not the same thing as mass entertainment, mass sports, mass marketing.

3. If you have to put the word "niche" before it, it isn't culture, because

4. A culture cultivates what a people as a whole believe are their most precious beliefs about the world and man's place in it; you cannot have culture without the cultus.

5. As examples: There is no Shakespeare without the centuries-old and rollicking and popular Corpus Christi plays and, later, the morality plays.

6. There is no Dante without 300 years of love poetry behind him.

7. There is no Beethoven's Ninth without Schiller, and no Schiller without Christian and neoclassical Europe.

8. I am not saying that musicians and authors still do not influence one another. Obviously, there is no John Cage without Anton Schoenberg, as there is no Sylvia Plath without Marianne Moore; but

9. Tracing genetic influences of one artist upon another is not the same thing as showing how the culture itself -- see definition above, again and again -- gives rise to great art.

10. The example of free verse (by the way) proves my point. In fact there is nothing that free verse does that had not long been done by Shakespeare, Milton, Browning, even Virgil and Homer. But the free verse of Eliot and Whitman is anchored still in a musical tradition: one can, if one reads Latin or Greek, hear the long roll of the dactylic hexameter in their lines (e.g., "OUT of the CRAdle ENDlessly ROCKing"). Free verse helped destroy that tradition, though, with the result that

11. We have not had a truly popular American poet of any quality at all since Robert Frost.

12. It is not true -- the history of the arts does not bear it out -- that, once a technique is mastered, we simply "build" upon it and go onward and upward. Rather

13. The history of the arts is almost equally a history of techniques lost and forgotten, especially when the cultures that developed them, for specific cultural purposes (see again and again the definition of "culture" above), cease to exist. Those who are writing iambic pentameter right now -- and the habit is, thankfully, returning -- cannot hold a candle to the practitioners of old, because they no longer know the "tricks". Please don't make me supply the examples. A few lines from Wordsworth would make a current metrist sound like somebody singing Mary Had a Little Lamb. Don't even mention Shakespeare.

14. The history of the arts also shows that there are ages of greatness and ages of decadence and ages of oblivion. Specifically:

15. Drama has known only sporadic periods of flourishing in history;

16. And the same thing goes for sculpture, though to a lesser degree.

17. It is also not true that aesthetic quality is merely subjective. Not unless we are willing to argue that the most popular writer of our day, Stephen King, is as good a writer, as deep a thinker, as fine a craftsman, as keen a seer into the human condition, as were any of the three most popular writers during the age of Queen Elizabeth: Edmund Spenser, Philip Sidney, and William Shakespeare.

18. It does not matter that people from Jamaica would not understand Bach. People from Podunk USA do not understand Shakespeare. They do understand the Simpsons. The Simpsons are clever. They are not Shakespeare. By the way, I do think they would understand Bach, given half a chance; you'd be surprised what interest there is in European classical music outside of Europe (the Philippines, Japan), as for a long time now we've had great Shakespeareans coming from the British schools in India.

19. But no great art is produced without a great (and not private!) vision of the world. Tolkien had that vision supplied to him on the side, as it were, not by his own England, but by the England he loved that still harked back to the Middle Ages. He had it supplied by Roman Catholicism and his study of medieval epics. Tolkien was a rare bird, though.

20. There is no common vision of the world now in America; we are post-cultural (which is another way of saying that we are on the road to becoming post-human, ugh). Therefore our art can only aspire to technical cleverness and a severely restricted range of possibilities. Walker Percy, a very good novelist of our age, would have been a great novelist in a better time.

[Rob G]

Hear, hear, Tony! Couldn't agree more.

As to modern poetry and Frost, I was going to bring up that very issue myself.

[Tony Esolen]

I want to stress that the comment above -- not my last one, but the second to last one -- is NOT MINE. I wish it were! But I'm not the expert in music that the Lurker is! I'm still a-larnin'.

[Maclin Horton]

Ditto what Rob G said about Stockhausen's popularity. A certain bohemian type has long been subject to faddish enthusiasm for extremely unconventional music. I've known quite a few such, and Stockhausen managed to attract a lot of them. Most of them don't stick with it for very long, because it's more an accoutrement of anti-bourgeois sentiment than a real musical taste.

I love Bob Marley, too, but he's not on the same level as Bach. Or rather, let's say that there are a number of meaningful qualitative distinctions between them, and Bach is, let's face it, better. Reggae, like a lot of popular music, is best considered a type of folk music. I love many, many styles of popular music, but it's a mistake to think that there is no serious distinction between it and, say, Mozart.

Zappa's statement just amounts to esthetic nihilism.

By the way, the Schoenberg book I read was this one by Charles Rosen.

[Nick]

Is Steven King in the top three in the English England/America? I don't think he is. Ms. Rowling is there (wonderful insights into behavior and draws heavily on cultural tradition). I think second is Mr. Pratchett who is probably one of the best and most prolific authors of our age. That he writes fantasy comedy turns many people off, but his insights into human nature I think are top notch. His book, "Small Gods," about a young man who discovers his god has been demoted to a turtle is a fascinating story. If we're allowed to talk about authors who were just a hair older, Tolkien and Chesterton weren't that long ago.

[cnb]

If I did misrepresent Schoenberg, it was unintentional. I'm basing what I say on what I know, but I don't know everything, and would be happy to be corrected.

The Lenten Lurker is right, in my view, to trace the driving force of the avant-garde to a mutilation of natural aesthetics. Listening to these people -- Stockhausen, Cage, Xenakis, Babbitt, Boulez -- one can't help thinking that they have abandoned specifically musical inspiration, and have replaced it with mathematical or conceptual "cleverness". Some of their scores are more aesthetically pleasing to look at than to hear. The fact that they were making music was sometimes overlooked, or so it seems.

I'm not well instructed in the history of other arts, but I believe they have suffered a war with tradition that is broadly analogous to what happened in music. This makes me suspect that part of the explanation lies deeper. I'm reminded of the argument Jacques Barzun makes in The Use and Abuse of Art: the Romantic emphasis on the artist as genius, rather than craftsman, led to art being seen as self-expression, not solid workmanship. The trouble is that to be great, an artist, expressing himself, must be original, and so must distinguish himself from those around him, and from those who came before. When this is the dynamic driving artistic evolution, no tradition will survive for long.

**

According to LibraryThing, the three most popular authors are, in order, J.K. Rowling, Stephen King, and Terry Pratchett.

[Nick Milne]

This is ridiculous. I have a substantial and, I think, relevant comment that I'm trying to post here and "TypePad's antispam filter" keeps "[flagging] it as potential comment spam."

What in the world am I doing wrong?

[Nick Milne]

And yet it allows me to post these small messages...?

I tried typing it out again in different words, but that didn't work either. It says that it's been held in review for the blog's author. Could that author please approve it?

This is all very frustrating. I've been commenting here for months now, but this is the first time I've encountered this problem.

[Rob G]

Nick, try breaking it up into smaller posts. Sometimes a lengthy thing with few breaks won't make it through.

[Tim]

Nick,
make sure there are no "catch-words" in your post that a spam filter might be looking for. The only time I got refused was when I had that drug word in my post which starts with a "v" and ends with an "a" and purports to help we fellas defy gravity - you know, Bob Dole's favorite vitamin; probably the most looked for word in all spamalot!

[Bill R]

"I wonder who that Lenten lurker might be ;-)"

Well, we'll keep his identity secret, Judy, but he should know that the Lenten police still go after second-hand bloggers.

[Michael]

>>Well, we'll keep his identity secret, Judy, but he should know that the Lenten police still go after second-hand bloggers.<<

The Anglicans aren't big on enforcing much these days. (Judy, "Lenten Lurker," et al.: I know most of you are of the Old Anglican/contnuing Anglican Anglo-Catholic variety. All in good fun.) Also to Lenten Lurker--I still disagree with you. =)

[Nick]

Is Steven King in the top three in the English England/America? I don't think he is. Ms. Rowling is there (wonderful insights into behavior and draws heavily on cultural tradition). I think second is Mr. Pratchett who is probably one of the best and most prolific authors of our age. That he writes fantasy comedy turns many people off, but his insights into human nature I think are top notch. His book, "Small Gods," about a young man who discovers his god has been demoted to a turtle is a fascinating story. If we're allowed to talk about authors who were just a hair older, Tolkien and Chesterton weren't that long ago.

[Nick]

Didn't mean that to happen...

[Judy K. Warner]

>>>Well, we'll keep his identity secret, Judy, but he should know that the Lenten police still go after second-hand bloggers.<<<

Actually, I was wondering, since I've given up chocolate, whether it would be okay for my husband to sneak some into my mouth while my eyes are closed. Would that be analogous?

[Nick Milne]

Alright, trying it in a broken-up way...

Part One:

There are a number of modern composers doing very promising things, in general terms.

Piotr Rubik is producing some quite excellent choral music, or at least was as recently as 2005. I haven't been following his latest output. Karl Jenkins alternates between being marvelous and bewildering, but much of his work is worth your time - particularly his Requiem, which flows quite pleasantly throughout various musical traditions (some of them non-Western, though it rarely seems out of place), and his "mass for peace," The Armed Man, which reaches great heights, particularly in the "Benedictus." Eric Whitacre is also doing some nice chorale work, tough I'm not familar enough with him to make any recommendations.

[Nick Milne]

So, that one worked. Let's see if the problem lies in the next batch...

Part Two:

The man I'd really like to recommend here, however, is Bear McCreary, and I do this by way of prefacing some further remarks. McCreary has been turning out unparalleled work in recent years in the form of the score for Battlestar Galactica, of all things. Some of it is unmemorable, but some of it is unforgettable. There is a real and orchestral beauty to it that stands apart from its inspiration (though the show is quite good as well), and there is in all of it a certain synthesis of musical types that strives towards the excellent rather than merely the eclectic. All three seasons' worth have been great, though the second season has the best individual pieces and the third season works best as a sort of suite when listened to on its own.

Tracks to consider include "A Promise to Return," "Lords of Kobol," "The Shape of Things to Come," "Roslin and Adama," "Kobol's Last Gleaming" and "Precipice." If you're willing to only try out one (by downloading it, say), make it "A Promise to Return," I beg you. If you don't like it you can easily delete it and then pray for my confusion and destruction. If you do like it, though... you might be very happy.

[Nick Milne]

I discovered the problem. I had included a reference to a popular file type used for the digital distribution of music (starts with an m, ends with a 3). Once removed, it no longer objected. The rest of my post follows...

Part Three:

All of which, as I said, is a preface to my contention, in apparent agreement with several others here, that not enough credit is being given to the composers of scores for films and television shows. Here is music that really is popular, and public, and which inevitably slithers its way into the public consciousness. There may be nothing breathtaking to the connoisseur about John Williams, for example, but it might be instructive to consider just why his themes resonate so well with so many people in spite of being so entirely against the "styles" of the times in which they have been produced.

I don't know that such music could easily be dismissed as "mass media," either, as might be suggested. This may certainly be true of the generic tracks laid over the latest police procedural or horror film, but it can not so easily be said of something like Maurice Jarre's Lawrence of Arabia, Ennio Morricone's The Legend of 1900 (or The Mission), or Javier Navarrete's Pan's Labyrinth, all of which are a sort of beauty made manifest.

Consider also:

- Yann Tiersen's work on Amelie
- Carter Burwell's score for The Hudsucker Proxy (especially "Prologue," an achingly beautiful piece)
- A very few tracks from Craig Armstrong's score for Plunkett & Macleane ("Hanging" and "Escape" in particular, and played in that order)
- Alfred Newman's score for Anastasia (1956; his son's score for the 1997 animated film of the same name is also surprisingly pleasant)
- Some of Wim Mertens' work on The Belly of an Architect, particularly where pianos are concerned
- John Debney's Passion of the Christ Symphony, an expansion of his score for the film

And that's only the beginning. Bruce Broughton, Michael Giacchino, Harry Gregson-Williams, and many others are doing Good Things With Music. I think we've become so used to the idea that the average person has no appreciation for fine music that when that person does appreciate some sort of music we simply assume that it can't be fine. This hardly seems fair.

There, Typepad, how do you like me now?

[AMTuba]

This will most likely be my last post here, so you can throw your hats and strike up the band as you will. I have on final thought, and unless someone's response really starts my motor I don't see much more of a reason to continue, as we've reached a point that has outlined fundamental philosophical differences that will probably do nothing more than to raise my blood pressure. Mr. Esolen, while I have respect for your writing I would advise you to try and learn how to express yourself through music so that you understand the intensely personal experience it can be. Your equating music to homosexuality and fascism says to me that you don't hold it in as high esteem as I do. Perhaps this is only because I have gotten such wonderful things out of music that I believe everyone else can do the same. This is obviously the most optimistic view possible, but each of us has their own way of personal expression, and if they were to come under attack we would defend it to the best of our abilities.

This 'final thought' comes more from the article itself rather than the way one can listen to or think about music. All personal preference aside, I'd simply like to approach the argument that atonal music, at least in a Schoenbergian sense, is completely baseless with nothing to learn from it.

It's fairly obvious that atonal music is an extreme music (seeing as how it resides in the furthest extreme from accepted western music) from an art movement filled with extremists. But while the music that lives in this extreme claims to be completely devoid of the music that came before it, what it clearly is playing on is the assumption that the listener has heard what came before it. This is quite similar to many of yours fundamental problems with my theory about music, which I guess is why so many people here seem to be objected to atonality all together.

But if anything can be learned from that argument, it's that we need to take a good, long look at the extreme that Schoenberg took music to and ask what we learned about music on its way there. In this sense, atonality isn't baseless at all, because we now know that music can reach a certain extreme where it ceases to be accepted as music. Once again, look to the chance music of John Cage and compare it to the integral serialism of Pierre Boulez. They sound so remarkably similar despite the methods achieving them are so fundamentally different. The resulting point is that we now know that music can go in that direction and that it can do those things. The comparison of Boulez (whom I personally loathe, as his music removes any sense of personal interpretation) to Cage (who experimented more with the fact that music is the only art form that doesn't exist beyond performance) really only deals in this extreme, but I guess what I'm really trying to get at is the line where it ceases to be music and becomes nihilistic rubbish that ceases to adhere to any accepted definition of music. The primary argument of the last 50 years is that this line doesn't exist. Personally, I think that it does but it's a matter of personal taste as to where to draw it. Most of you seem to think that this move back to tonality means that the line is getting drawn closer in Bach's direction and that all those who believe the line don't exist are wrong. I thank God every day that music is really the only art form where this argument can exist.

But whether or not this line exists is beyond what I really, truly want to try and get across here. What I urge all of you to do is take this music that rejects everything music should stand for and bring it back on your terms. Not every Schoenberg piece completely rejected their western history; take his "Gigue" from suite for piano. It illustrates a common idea in the 20th century that, for instance, your piece doesn't have to be a march but it CAN be about a march. There is tons of this in both Ives (Country Band March) and Hindemeth (Symphonic Metamorphosis) as well. But at the same time, if Schoenberg was simply looking to erase all contact with western music then why did he so quickly exhaust twelve-tone serialism in favor of atonal music with more repetition and definition? Why did Berg seek tone rows that alluded to tonality? Perhaps this complete rejection really did spark something: a movement that made more of a comment on western music as opposed to simply building upon it. Don't just pass it off with the idea that "it rejected us so we'll reject it." Look for evidence that they did or didn't. If this music really doesn't carry any influence then why are there composers who claim its influence upon them? Why did so many composers (Copeland, Stravinksy) experiment with atonality if there was nothing to be gained from it? Perhaps there is simply something to be understood in knowing your limits. The questions of where those limits should be are the questions that have been debated on this article and beyond.

Whether or not music holds the same aesthetic value for any of you is beyond me; but those chills in my spine that I experience as the horns begin Tchaikovsky's 4th symphony is a feeling I have yet to find anywhere else on the planet. I suppose I can't express it to you all any further, and I also suppose that it's the fundamental flaw in my argument. But that flaw is the greatest flaw I have ever come close to and I will relish in it for the rest of my days. Enjoy your argument, I will be listening.

[AMTuba]

My apologies. I seem to have neglected to proofread myself in the first paragraph. That comment about studying music yourself should be direct at Lenten Lurker and not at Mr. Esolen, who simply quoted from a blog.

[Rob G]

Nick, I'd certainly agree with you that there are film composers doing good stuff: I'm partial to Morricone myself (I was very glad to see that he finally got an Oscar last year, a Lifetime Achievement Award), I love much of the work that Angelo Badalamenti has done for David Lynch's films, and I've enjoyed some of James Newton Howard's scores. And one of my favorite pieces of modern music, bar none, is Cliff Martinez's score for Soderbergh's "Solaris," which to me is a near perfect combination of minimalism and tonal ambience.

As far as concert music goes, my favorite contemporary composer is the Latvian Peteris Vasks. His 1st and 2nd symphonies and his violin concerto are especially good. You mentioned Eric Whitacre, who is a very good choral composer, and I would add Morten Lauridsen, whom I think is even better.

The problem with film and TV music (I'm far less familiar with the latter, as I don't watch TV) is that it is not often considered separate from the film. With all the popularity of, say, John Williams' scores for the Star Wars or the Indiana Jones movies, I'd say that the attraction to the music is based almost solely on people's familiarity with the films. The music, good as it may be, doesn't succeed because of its quality, but because of its relationship to the film.

Of course, I don't think that this observation need take anything away from the quality of the music -- some film music, if cast in concert form, would work very well, I think -- but it seems to me difficult to gauge the cultural impact of film music when it is so tied up with its associated medium.

[Rob G]

"The primary argument of the last 50 years is that this line doesn't exist. Personally, I think that it does but it's a matter of personal taste as to where to draw it."

Yes, but does this not amount to the same thing? As Maclin said above, it results in aesthetic nihilism.

No one here is rejecting atonality in toto, as is clear from everyone's comments above. I think the Lenten Lurker is correct in that atonality is best used as a spice. How much spice can be up to the individual, but there is a point where chicken curry ceases to be chicken curry, namely, the point where there isn't any more chicken in it.

And I certainly agree in principal with your final paragraph, as far as the power of music is concerned. But I don't understand how what you say is a 'flaw' in your argument, or why you embrace that flaw. Care to expound?

[Tony Esolen]

I agree with Nick that some excellent music has been composed in this century, both within and outside of movies. Not that I'm an expert about that -- I can't even remember right now the famous composer of the score for Ben-Hur. But nowhere did I say, or did Webster Young say, that excellent music had ceased to exist. There are some excellent novels being written now. But without some common vision of the world and man's place in it, you will not get Faulkner or Dickens or Melville or Dostoyevsky. The soil will be too thin. You will get literature of a second-rate age.

[Nick Milne]

Amtuba: [John] Cage (who experimented more with the fact that music is the only art form that doesn't exist beyond performance)

This is not true. I mean, Cage may have done this, but music is not the only art form describable in this way. Architecture, most significantly, has the same problem (or virtue).

Rob:

That's a good point, and one I had hoped to address, or, maybe, gently dismiss. While it's true that the initial introduction to a quality score likely comes from the film or show in question, and that one's experience of it will necessarily be endowed with at least some degree of nostalgia or fondness for that film or show, I find it hard to accept that this is necessarily a problem.

Let's consider Mozart's Coronation Mass. Being inspired by it and having a reverent and worshipful attitude towards God often go hand in hand, but this does not diminish the music, and it certainly does not diminish God. Both are "doing their job," as it were; the music glorifies God even as God inspires the music.

Now, I do not mean to be glib or blasphemous in forming an analogy here with something else in the place of God, as when saying that Maurice Jarre's score pushed Lawrence of Arabia beyond what the film could accomplish on its own even as the contents of the film inspired that score in the first place. But that's what happened, after all, and it's important that the listener (and the viewer) keeps both of these things in mind when listening (or viewing).

Perhaps this is not as coherent as I would have liked, and I beg your pardon for it. I guess what I'm saying is that art forms and their inspirations do not easily exist apart from one another, and so when you say that it would be "difficult to gauge the cultural impact of film music when it is so tied up with its associated medium," I can only respond that it would be impossible to gauge it otherwise.

Tony:

Ben-Hur's score was the work of Miklos Rozsa, and you're quite right to remember it, if not the name of the man behind it.

And that's a fair point. I suppose I wasn't responding so much to you, specifically as to the sort of doom and gloom sentiments which sometimes come of the lament that we have no greatness. This does not, naturally, imply that we have nothing good at all.

[Christopher Culver]

I don't know why people are going on so much about Boulez and "integral serialism", since Boulez only wrote a couple of integral serialist pieces in the early 1950s ("Polyphonie X" and "Structures Livre II"). Boulez hasn't written anything totally serialist for over 50 years now, and the works of the last quarter century like "Repons", "...explosante-fixe...", and "sur Incises" make much use of research into the physics of sound for great effect (Boulez having been director of IRCAM for a time).

[Rob G]

'when you say that it would be "difficult to gauge the cultural impact of film music when it is so tied up with its associated medium," I can only respond that it would be impossible to gauge it otherwise.'

I agree. Since film music doesn't often stand alone, as it were, one can't at present judge its effect on the musical culture. Perhaps as time passes, and as the link between the films and their music becomes less apparent (like the link between Palestrina's music and the actual Mass, or the Mozart example you mention), we may be better able to determine its musical standing.

[Rob G]

'I don't know why people are going on so much about Boulez and "integral serialism"'

The complaints about Boulez are not about his compositions, but about his dismissal of modern tonal music as irrelevant.

[Christopher Culver]

> about his dismissal of modern tonal music as irrelevant.

Even that is 50 years in the past. As a conductor, Boulez has subsequently championed the music of contemporary figures like Gyorgy Kurtag, Gerard Grisey and Augusta Read Thomas who never bought into twelve-tone serialism.

[Rob G]

"Even that is 50 years in the past."

Perhaps, but the damage was done.

[AMTuba]

To show how great my will power is, I will post on an article I had already resigned to not posting on:

"Yes, but does this not amount to the same thing? As Maclin said above, it results in aesthetic nihilism."

There's a difference between saying the line exists and exclaiming that the sheer fact that the line exists is an absurd notion that hinders 'artistic progress.' Take "4:33" by John Cage, for instance. My interpretation is that Cage says music can exist out of anything at any time anywhere. And while "4:33" illustrates this point beautifully, I don't necessarily agree with it. There is nothing for an audience to cling to in "4:33." It's merely an artistic assertion that 'it can be done because I just did it.' And I guess I'll have to concede here and say that sure, just because you did it doesn't mean it's good. But then again I know plenty of people who think it's a great piece with plenty of ideas behind it. Obviously I'm a tuba player myself, and I've spent countless hours at the back of an orchestra twiddling my thumbs and trying to stay awake while the rest of the orchestra gets to enjoy the 'soft' movements. An entire piece that focuses on these actions is a great novelty, but it is a novelty that only exists due to the other things around it. But I'm not here to debate Cage, as the tone of the article seems to be more about atonality and what can be pulled from it. As for Boulez, he's just a prime example of how one can't exist in such an extreme philosophy forever. Eventually you have to come back to your figurative 'line' again.

And as for my 'fundamental flaw' I come to approach it as manifest relativism, where I might get chills from Tchaikovsky the same way others get chills from Sinatra. I guess it's all a matter of taste, but saying one artist is 'better' than another is still a difficult thing for me to say. As CNB put it previously:

"The trouble is that to be great, an artist, expressing himself, must be original, and so must distinguish himself from those around him, and from those who came before. When this is the dynamic driving artistic evolution, no tradition will survive for long."

If you, as an artist, are distinguishing yourself in an original and unique way I'll accept what you are trying to do or I'll explain why you are neither original or unique. As obtuse as 'found' art from the DaDa movement is, you've got to hand it to those artists that they 'found it first.' They did what they set out to do. Whether or not it's good art is up to the test of time. Whether or not it's aesthetically pleasing is up to the individual, I think. Simply observe that man who follows the DaDa exhibit around and "uses" Duchamp's "Fountain." He takes the meaning Duchamp placed on a toilet and says "no, sir, it's still a toilet." But once again I could simply be delving into aesthetics, which is really impossible to argue.

[Maclin Horton]

I think the underlying disagreement here, Amtuba, is about whether there is an objective standard of quality in art. I believe there is, even though it's very difficult to define in terms that everyone will accept. I believe, for instance, that Shakespeare's work is objectively superior to Harold Robbins's, superior in fact and not just in my subjective appraisal. My grounds for believing that are outside the scope of a blog comments discussion.

The more specific question about music is not so much whether atonality and dissonance have a place, which I think we all agree they do, as whether, taken as a foundational principle and not as a "spicy" variation, they provide a fruitful soil in which a great musical culture can grow. Most of us arguing against you here don't think that they do or can.

By the way, Rob, I'm stealing that line about the chickenless curry.

[Rob G]

Maclin, I think those are good summaries of the disagreements here. You used Shakespeare and Robbins, I was going to use Wordsworth and Rod McKuen, but the point is the same. For music I think you could use, say, Sibelius and Sousa. I have no problem with Sousa, and his music brings much pleasure to a lot of folks, but I doubt you'll find many knowledgeable people who'd say that he was as good a composer as Sibelius.

Feel free to use the chicken line -- adjust recipe to taste.

[AMTuba]

Well if it's a 'fruitful soil' you're looking for, I'm inclined to agree. I don't see anywhere in it a starting place for something greater, and that is assuming integral serialism is understood as well. The whole movement, to me, is somewhat of a self-contained unit that highlights a certain amount of extremity. But just as I pointed out earlier, it's important to understand the whys and hows that go along with it. It's influence comes from the fact that composers experimented with it and pushed that boundary; without going that far we wouldn't know that we could travel in that direction. I suppose composers could have assumed, but there's a lot more to be said in developing an idea through and just assuming that something is possible.

And I think that the influence itself, what little there was, carries itself out almost indirectly. You can see it in the textural music that sprang up in the 50's and 60's. "Threnody: For the Victims of Hiroshima" is a wonderful portrait that plays nothing more with indeterminate sounds and textures in an entirely atonal fashion. The influence isn't entirely in the sound in the same way certain Beethoven pieces sound like Mozart pieces, but there were ideas that were expressed through atonality that carried influence. But like I said before, it's not a "fruitful soil" for a whole new music to flourish; it's an exploration of ideas and possibilities.

As for subjectivity versus objectivity, I proudly admit that I am both young and stupid, but that's not going to stop me from absorbing everything I can (within reason, obviously, please don't attack my morals here). My only assumption can be that I'm arguing with people who have been around for a lot longer than I have and have seen/compared/analyzed a lot more things than I have. I have to remain subjective because I still can't see how objectivity makes enough sense and applies itself to enough things. Someone mentioned before that the music they listened to when they were in college completely embarrasses them today. Well, give me time to get embarrassed. If what you all are saying about objectivity really is correct then I will eventually figure it out for myself all in due time.

And as far as your chicken curry goes, think about how bland your chicken would be without all those wonderful spices!

[Pentimento]

"Sit right back and you'll hear a tale,
A tale of a fateful trip,
That started from this tropic port
Aboard this tiny ship."

About these lyrics you say: "That's not culture. It's the object of nobody's devotion. It expresses no great yearning. It's common, sure. I don't think it's any foundation for art."

I'm not sure I agree with you there; those couplets could very well be the beginning of an epic like The Odyssey. In themselves, they do not reveal much, but they could in fact be the beginning of an epic like The Odyssey, which has been the object of a great deal of devotion. Yet you disparage them because you know that they are in fact from the theme song of "Gilligan's Island" (a show that actually has more in common with the Iliad than the Odyssey). But so what? Are they objectionable in themselves as lyrics? Or is this perhaps a little bit of snobbery?

Also, while you criticize the text, you say nothing of the music, so I'm not sure how this makes your point. Perhaps it is verse in the service of sitcom that bothers you. If you are looking for great modern composers, however, they are not that hard to find. Take a listen to the American George Crumb and the Scottish James MacMillan.

[Judy K. Warner]

It seems to me that great music has multiple levels, so that it can be enjoyed at some level by the average person as well as by a sophisticated listener. Everybody who has contributed to this discussion so far understands music at the deepest level. But much of the music that is being discussed has no appeal at all unless you have that kind of understanding of music. I guess that relates back to Tony's original post. If music is not based in a common culture, it can be anything, and has to be understood only by the composer and a few others. So those who don't want to or can't understand it are left with advertising jingles.

[Veli]

The soundtrack to The Hudsucker Proxy consists almost entirely of music by Aram Khachaturian

[James A. Altena]

Well, I didn’t expect Tony to post my e-mail to him verbatim on MC! But having said “A”, I will now say “B” and the "Lenten Lurker" will now belatedly respond to "Amtuba" at greater length.

1) “Your equating music to homosexuality and fascism says to me that you don't hold it in as high esteem as I do.”

Leaving aside the initial misidentification of Tony’s posting of my message as being by Tony himself, this completely misunderstood and misconstrues my statement:

“This is not to accuse Amtuba of supporting sodomy or pederasty; it is rather to point out the sorry sogginess of his argument here. ‘Different’ does not equate to ‘progress’; and there are some things to which we should not expose ourselves, for the good of our own souls, because they willfully transgress the natural order, as mankind found to its sorrow with the first taste of the forbidden fruit.”

I quite obviously did not equate music to homosexuality and fascism; I simply pointed out the gross logical deficiency of Amtuba's argument.

2) Likewise, no one here has argued that “the argument that atonal music, at least in a Schoenbergian sense, is completely baseless with nothing to learn from it.” This is simply a strawman of Amtuba’s own devising, and the rest of his post is therefore largely irrelevant (though I will address one point in it.)

The same is true of his now repeated claim that the arguments here are based on subjective “personal preference” rather than objective criteria, or about subjective “personal expression.” Once again, the appeal to aesthetic relativism which I previously point out rears its ugly head.

3) As for “I would advise you to try and learn how to express yourself through music so that you understand the intensely personal experience it can be” – even without Amtuba’s careless misidentification of my message which Tony posted as being by Tony himself, this statement is indefensible given the fact that the post specifically stated several aspects of my longstanding involvement in music, including appreciation of contemporary music. To that previous information I might add that for many years I played the trombone, euphonium, and basstuba (so we have something in common, Amtuba). I have been a longtime choir member and now cantor for my parish; and I once co-taught an adult education college course at the U. of Chicago on Wagner’s “Ring” cycle with a close friend who is a musicologist and recognized academic authority on Franz Liszt. (A student in the class was then vice-president of the Wagner Society of America, and he was so enthusiastic about the course that he had me give a paid lecture to a meeting of the Chicago chapter.) I also have a growing collection of over 3,000 classical music CDs and some 750 LPs.

So, Amtuba might cease his repeated attempts to denigrate those who disagree with him here as being musical ignoramuses, lacking his level knowledge and sophistication.

4) "It's fairly obvious that atonal music is an extreme music (seeing as how it resides in the furthest extreme from accepted western music) from an art movement filled with extremists. But while the music that lives in this extreme claims to be completely devoid of the music that came before it, what it clearly is playing on is the assumption that the listener has heard what came before it. . . ."

If this "extreme music . . . claims to be completely devoid of the music that came before it," then how can one even know that it is music at all, rather than nonmusical noise? And, on the other hand, if "it clearly is playing on is the assumption that the listener has heard what came before it," then by definition it cannot be so completely divorced, but must have some points of relation with what came before it.

5) "I guess what I'm really trying to get at is the line where it ["extreme music"] ceases to be music and becomes nihilistic rubbish that ceases to adhere to any accepted definition of music. The primary argument of the last 50 years is that this line doesn't exist. Personally, I think that it does but it's a matter of personal taste as to where to draw it. . . ."

To say that a line that demarcates music from non-music exists but that "it's a matter of personal taste as to where to draw it" is logically incoherent. If the line if purely subjective ("a matter of personal taste") then it doesn't exist objectively. And if it does exist objectively, then the line is not a matter of personal taste. Thus the utter vacuity and bankruptcy of John Cage's 4'33" and the so-called "found art" of the Dadaists mentioned in your subsequent posts. 4'33" is not an "artistic assertion" because it has not artistic content. And (pun intended) it illustrates nothing beautifully. And those "plenty of people who think it's a great piece with plenty of ideas behind it" are the vacuous, decadent, corrupt poseurs that dominate "modern art" circles. The same applies to the Dadaists and their latter-day camp follower. Their so-called "found art" is likewise not art at all, as it fails to fulfill the most elementary classical criteria for genuine art, such as (for starters) the combination of discrete content according to discrete form according to the principles of order, clarity, and harmony. Just because someone calls himself an "artist" does not truly make him one; and just because someone calls something a "piece of art" does not make it such either. Both must fulfill certain objective criteria to be properly such. (Amtuba might check out various book by philosopher of aesthetics Roger Scruton, e.g. "Culture Counts"; "Modern Culture"; "The Aesthetics of Music"; "The Aesthetic Understanding"; "Art and Imagination".)

6) “What I urge all of you to do is take this music that rejects everything music should stand for and bring it back on your terms. . . .Don't just pass it off with the idea that 'it rejected us so we'll reject it.' Look for evidence that they did or didn't. If this music really doesn't carry any influence then why are there composers who claim its influence upon them? Why did so many composers (Copeland [sic], Stravinsky) experiment with atonality if there was nothing to be gained from it? Perhaps there is simply something to be understood in knowing your limits."

This is again nonsense. To re-employ the sexuality metaphor, are we supposed to “take this sexual perversion that rejects everything chaste sexuality should stand for and bring it back on your own terms”?? Again, this does not equate music and sodomy; it merely exposes the complete illogicity of the argument.

7) "And as for my 'fundamental flaw' I come to approach it as manifest relativism, where I might get chills from Tchaikovsky the same way others get chills from Sinatra. I guess it's all a matter of taste, but saying one artist is 'better' than another is still a difficult thing for me to say.

If you can't even say so much as e.g. Arnold Jacobs is a better tuba player than yourself, then you simply disqualify yourself from being able to make any comment on any artistic subject at all.

8) "As CNB put it previously: 'The trouble is that to be great, an artist, expressing himself, must be original, and so must distinguish himself from those around him, and from those who came before. When this is the dynamic driving artistic evolution, no tradition will survive for long.'

"If you, as an artist, are distinguishing yourself in an original and unique way I'll accept what you are trying to do or I'll explain why you are neither original or unique."

Which misses the point of CNB's comment entirely. Whenever an artist sets his primary goal as producing something "original" rather than producing something good, he will pervert and corrupt his art by striving merely for novel effects, no matter how perverse or shallow and shoddy. By contrast, if he strives to produce something good, then originality will take care of itself in the process. It is ultimately a matter of egoism (pursuit of self-assertion) vs. humility (pursuit of the good, the true, and the beautiful without regard to self).

9) "As for subjectivity versus objectivity, I proudly admit that I am both young and stupid."

Why be proud of admitting to be stupid? (Which no one here has accused you of, in any case.)

10) "I have to remain subjective because I still can't see how objectivity makes enough sense and applies itself to enough things."

This is so incoherent as to be inexplicable.

11) "And as far as your chicken curry goes, think about how bland your chicken would be without all those wonderful spices!"

Which again misses the previous point made about using a spice as a spice, not as a meal in and of itself.

12) Finally, as for “you don't hold it in as high esteem as I do” – no one could hold music in higher esteem than I do, as the foregoing information about myself should make evident. In fact, I clearly hold it in higher esteem than Amtuba precisely because I do not believe that music is reducible merely to formal elements or subjective aesthetic preference. Rather, I maintain that it also has objective moral and spiritual content. And therefore, just as we as Christians must exercise custody of the eyes, so we must also exercise custody of the ears. For we are not dealing here only with matters of aesthetic judgment (which are not merely subjective, either), but with an art which (like all art) has an inherent power to shape souls for good or evil. (If Amtuba is curious, he can check out my posts on this topic on previous MC threads, e.g. the extended debate on the "What About U2?" thread of 04/26/2007)

I am reminded here of an incident related to me a number of years ago. At a clergy conference in his diocese (the Philadelphia region), Episcopal Church Bp. Allen Bartlett enthusiastically noted a significant increase in the size of the "Religion" book section at Borders, Barnes & Noble, etc. One of the clergy responded, "But, Bishop, most of that is 'New Age' material." The bishop looked back at him blankly, with an expression that clearly indicated he didn't see that to be a problem -- i.e. any interest in "religion" and "spirituality" had to be a "good" thing. There was was no conception that spirits are not neutral or indifferent, that there are good and bad spirits, and that we must take heed not to expose ourselves to the latter. The same is true of music. It is a means by which we make ourselves susceptible to virtue or vice, by shaping our minds and hearts.

[avaleigh]

Have you heard of the site where you can download free music? Check it out at avaleigh.co.uk

[avaleigh]

Have you heard of the site where you can download free music? Check it out at avaleigh.co.uk

[Melinda]

The Gilligan's Island theme song was an inspired example for your thesis, as it, or a reasonable facsimile of it, is used in many parishes on Good Friday. (Check out the verses of Gather #420)

[Stuart Koehl]

Thomas Day, in his classic "Why Catholics Can't Sing", points out the uncanny similarities between the contemporary Catholic hymn, "Here I am, Lord" and the theme from "The Brady Bunch".