bigideas

Here’s a write-up of my notes from our March 2008 event on classical music. I was particularly interested in a couple of things: firstly the standard narrative about how classical music changed in the mid-20^th century, and secondly the general question of making value judgements about something like music.

The Setup

We started with playing Mahler‘s 9^th symphony in the background while we all got food and beers in and caught up on the usual gossip. Here’s how it starts (yes, they’re tuning up at the beginning, don’t panic):

We also had some Caspar David Friedrich images rolling in the background to set the late-Romantic scene.

Now, Mahler’s 9^th makes a reassuring classical music noise. It sounds like proper high-art music, it’s big and serious and played by an orchestra. Maybe you like this kind of music and maybe you don’t, but as a sophisticated person you can probably appreciate that some music is good even if you personally don’t like it much.

Here’s an analogy. I don’t like beetroot, although I recognise that it’s good for me. I do like chicken katsu curry, though, even though I know it’s not healthy at all. I can hold those views without being inconsistent, because I can differentiate my personal taste from an objective measure of value like healthiness.

If you and I disagree over the quality of beetroot as a food, we can appeal to scientific evidence about it and reach an agreement. It doesn’t make sense for us to disagree if it’s simply a matter of personal taste.

In the arts, we have a vague idea that we can make this more objective kind of value judgement as well. Maybe we think that Mozart’s Requiem is better than Paul McCartney’s, or The Beatles are better than Travis, or that Public Enemy made better hip-hop records than Vanilla Ice, and that anyone who disagrees is simply wrong.

And we think we can tell the difference between that kind of value and mere popularity. We think popular opinion can be wrong, and that the best music isn’t always the most popular. I think these are things we all probably agree with intuitively as long as we don’t think about them too hard.

Now, imagine you were a young composer in 1910, and Mahler’s 9^th is what’s going on in classical music. Well, the language you’d have learned as a student, the langauge of late Romanticism, would probably have seemed like a rather intimidating thing to inherit.

Everything had got big and bloated. Pieces had become vast architectural structures, an hour long, or even more. Orchestras were stretching to hundreds of members, even over a thousand including the chorus for Mahler’s 8^th. The fashion for melodies was long and convoluted, often so much so that they were effectively hidden. Individual harmonies were often dense and mushy, involving so many notes that they threatened to become incomprehensible.

What are you to do as a young composer? Continue in the old language? Write pieces that are two hours long, for orchestras of two thousand people? In a language that was supposed to evoke the Pyrennees and the Rhine, while you were surrounded by cinema, flight and all the other signs of the emergent 20^th century?

The story you often hear about 20^th century classical music goes like this. Some time in the early part of the century a radical break was made with the tradition of “common practice” that had evolved gradually since the 1650s. Casting aside the time-worn techniques, a composer in the Mahlerian mould called Arnold Schoenberg invented something that came to be called “serialism”.

Help! Modernism!

Serialism was a way of writing music that disregarded a core feature of classical music since the time of Corelli: tonality. If you don’t know what tonality is, you can just think of it as an organising principle, a set of general ideas about how music should be put together, especially with regards to pitch.

And young composers, seeking novelty and an escape from the Romantic language of the older generation, enthusiastically abandoned tonality and adopted serialism. At this point I played a movement from the second piano sonata by Boulez as an indication of what high modernism, which developed out of Schoenberg’s idea, sounded like.

I can’t play that for you now, but YouTube has some good bits of Boulez’s piano music. Here’s Marc Ponthus talking about the second sonata:

The comments also reveal the affront people often feel when confronted with this sort of thing. Near the top, for instance, is this one, which is absolutely typical:

To compare or associate any modern atonalism with anything Beethoven wrote, particularly Ops. 106, is the crown jewel of insult and ignorance. Some will be fooled by this sort of thing, but no one with the least bit awareness of the language of music through the development of the overtone series would be fooled. Atonalism is to reject the ability to speak with music beyond noise. It is the voice of death. It is the sound of chaos, and is the only way academic snobs can pretend to be artistic.

If you prefer to take your music uninterrupted by comments from the performer, here’s a complete performance of Boulez’s first piano sonata, whose musical langauge is substantially similar:

If this is all too confrontational for you, you might enjoy the 7^th of Boulez’s Notations, which is rather delicate and lovely and has the virtue of brevity if you don’t have 8 minutes to spare (who does these days?):

Finally, here’s a clip from something more recent by Boulez; the glittering Sur Incises, for pianos, harps and percussion:

The story goes that this decision to break with tradition was a big mistake. The music that came after the break — what’s commonly known as “modernism” — was of less value than the music that came before. Whether you personally like it or not, the story says, the music just wasn’t as good; the geniuses and masterpieces of the past were conspicuous by their absence, and audiences pretty much disappeared. According to Jay Nordlinger:

After [Boulez] is gone [...] scarcely a note of his music will be heard. At least that is my suspicion. And I suspect the same is true of many, many other contemporary composers, in what we might call the Boulez school. I suspect that future generations will look back at our era [...] and say, “What in the world were they thinking? Why were they under this bizarre spell, or why did they think they had to pay this obligation?”

The great music of today, they say, is somewhere else, not in the symphonies and concerti and sonatas of the contemporary composers.

A typical assessment is that of Simon Heffer in The Telegraph:

Classical music in our times is a much devalued and prostituted art form. Most contemporary composers, padded by public subsidies of which Elgar could not even have dreamt, write works whose excellence is, for them and their small band of self-regarding followers, defined by their obscurity and ostentatious tunelessness. The absence of many recordings of such works, and the empty seats at concerts where they are given, says much of what one needs to know about them.

There’s even a conspiracy theory about this kind of high modernism: that it was deliberately “pushed” by the music establishment in preference to other tendencies. Students were strongly discouraged from using tonality, writing tunes or doing the other things that modernists had banished. Composers who persisted in such practices were ignored or, at best, considered “minor” figures. It was hard for them to make a living, because government funding, now a major source of income for classical composers, was directed towards what was considered the most “progressive” music. Here’s musicologist Susan McClary:

[M]uch of the university curriculum is devoted to a usually futile attempt at instilling a very artificial demand for academic music in young musicians. We [...] browbeat [students] with abstract analytical devices in hopes that they will be influenced by, say, stochasticism and will maintain the illusion that this kind of abstract experimentation informs the future of music.

and here, lest we forget, are The Hecklers demonstrating the strong feelings that Modernism still stirs up, even 50 years on (first few minutes only):

This was a clash not of personal tastes but of value judgements. One obvious question this raises is a philosophical one: to what extent can we elevate questions of artistic value above taste to a more objective level? Can we have a conversation about whether or not Boulez is a great composer in the way we can argue about whether katsu curry is healthy, or is it always at the level of whether it tastes nice? Is there an equivalent of “nutritional value” for music?

Another, less obvious question is broadly historical: is the story I just told true? Did modernism really represent a radical break with the past? Was that past really an unbroken tradition of two or three centuries? Or has this historical narrative been invented to justify these two, competing value judgements?

Other Things We Listened To

During the course of our discussion we played listened to a few other things. Among them were Penderecki’s Threnody to the Victims of Hiroshima. Bizarrely, the only versions YouTube has of this seminal piece are one that’s content-locked (presumably because it’s tagged as “adult”) and one that uses an episode of the Care Bears cartoon as visuals. I don’t really get the care Bears idea, but close your eyes and the music’s there alright:

We also listened to a bit of Stockhausen’s Kontakte as an example of early electronica. Here’s the whole thing (I think) with some random images:

and here’s a brief clip of a live performance of the same piece:

For the sake of contrast we also listened to some Mozart — here’s a piano being played by a child:

and some pop, which you can find for yourself.

Schoenberg and Continuity of Style

One question I was interested in was whether the story of modernism’s radical break with the past is actually true. In an attempt to convince people that abandoning tonality needn’t be such a big stylistic deal, I played bits of a string quartet by Bartok (which was tonal) and another by Schoenberg (which wasn’t), indicating the similarity of the two pieces in almost every respect except the technical point about pitch-relationships.

Perhaps a suitable substitute for those pieces (which I couldn’t find on YouTube) would be Bartok’s Violin Concerto No 1, which is tonal:

compared with Alban Berg’s, which is serial:

Although there are obvious differences in style, both personal and more general (Bartok’s piece has a distinct national folk element that Berg’s lacks), there’s not much evidence here of a radical break.

Schoenberg and his school can often be thought of as “expressionists”, occupying the aesthetic world of Edvard Munch and Nosferatu:

Here, for example, is Schoenberg in full-on late-Romantic swoon, in the string sextet version of his still-popular Tansfigured Night:

and here he is much later, in the expressionist oratorio A Survivor from Warsaw:

Now, of course the musical language has gone through some changes — nearly half a century separate the two pieces. Yet the expressionism of the later Schoenberg seems to me to be an extension and modernisation of the Gothic obsessions of high Romanticism, coloured now by Freudian psychoanalysis and, of course, the traumatic horrors of the two world wars. Don’t be fooled by the explicit political message of the later piece; Romanticism, across all the arts, could be stridently political, although that’s not part of the popular narrative about it, so it tends to be a bit lost on us.

Perhaps the ultimate example of this expressionistic Romanticism is the atonal opera Wozzeck by Schoenberg’s pupil Alban Berg. Here’s a very well-made 30-minute San Diego Opera video introducing the piece:

What’s more, serialism didn’t just happen in a vacuum. Schoenberg came to the technique after a long period of “free atonality” which is expressed in distilled form in his 6 Little Piano Pieces of 1911:

Here already we find many aspects of the language of Boulez’s piano music; the spasmodic rhythms, the move away from the thickness of Romantic textures towards a leaner kind of clarity, although there’s a look back to Chopin and Debussy here too. At the same time we get the highly expressionistic Pierrot Lunaire, which reminds us that Schoenberg wasn’t yet a Modernist. His obsessions with psychological extremes, and with “expression” and musical picture-painting, make this piece as much a part of the 19^th century even as its earnest extremity puts it firmly in the 20^th:

Hope you enjoy the vids and if you were there, hope you enjoyed the event too.