There’s a reason why we find it easier to “get” modern art than avant-garde music, and it’s not just about our natural conservatism and love of Mozart
Looking at Rothko: no harder to “see” than wallpaper
Fear of Music: Why People Get Rothko But Don’t Get Stockhausen
By David Stubbs (Zero Books, £9.99)
The writer Joe Queenan caused a minor rumpus in the austere world of contemporary classical music last year by complaining about how painful much of it is. He called Berio’s Sinfonia (1968) “35 minutes of non-stop torture,” Stockhausen’s Kontra-Punkte (1953) like “a cat running up and down the piano” and Birtwistle’s latest opera The Minotaur “funereal caterwauling.” “A hundred years after Schoenberg,” he wrote, “the public still doesn’t like anything after Transfigured Night, and even that is a stretch.”
Inevitably, Queenan was lambasted as a reactionary philistine. Performances of “modern” works like this were well attended, his critics said. And while Queenan took pains to distance himself from the conservative concertgoers who demand a steady diet of Mozart and Brahms, his comments were denounced as the same old clichés. Yet clichés become clichés for a reason. It’s true that these challenging works will find audiences in London’s highbrow venues, but the fact remains that Stockhausen and Penderecki, whose works are now as old as “Rock Around the Clock,” have not been assimilated into the classical canon in the way that Ravel and Stravinsky have. When someone like Queenan has earnestly tried and failed to appreciate this “new” music, it’s fair to ask what the problem is.
David Stubbs considers this important question in Fear of Music, but doesn’t come close to answering it. His speculative suggestion—that musical performance lacks an “original object” that, in the case of visual art, may become the subject of veneration or trade—clearly has little force, given that it applies equally to Beethoven and Birtwistle. Indeed, Stubbs’s analysis is part of the problem rather than the solution. Like economists trying to understand market crashes, he wants to place all the motive forces outside the system: his gaze never fixes on the music itself. To Stubbs, our responses to music are determined by our context and perspective, not by what we actually hear. His comparison of visual and musical art takes no account of how the two are processed in cognitive terms.
In explaining fear of the avant-garde through ideology, Stubbs is in good company. Theodor Adorno, perhaps the 20th century’s most renowned social theorist, was a passionate advocate of Schoenberg’s atonal modernism for political reasons: tonality, he declared, was the bastion of bourgeois complacency. Following Adorno’s lead, the hardline musical modernists of the 1950s and 1960s treated any hint of tonality as a form of recidivism to be denounced with Maoist vigour; Pierre Boulez refused for a time even to speak to tonal composers. The American composer Milton Babbitt’s 1958 essay “Who Cares if You Listen?” responded to the wider world’s hostility towards this new music by arguing that serious composers should simply withdraw from the concert hall, while offering no explanation for the public’s antipathy to “difficult” music beyond a belief that they were too ill-informed to understand it.
Looking at Rothko: no harder to “see” than wallpaper
No one can deny that audiences are conservative, whether they be Parisians rioting at the première of the Rite of Spring in 1913 or punks lobbing bottles at the art-rock group Suicide when they went on tour with the Clash. And Stubbs himself is justifiably indignant at the fact that even fans of conceptual art will parrot trite witticisms about the “cacophony” of much experimental music. But the understanding of the cognitive mechanisms of music that has emerged in recent years implies that it is not enough to tell ingrates bemused by Stockhausen to try harder.
There are certainly parallels in the way we make sense of acoustic and visual information. Chief among these rules are the “Gestalt principles” identified by a group of German-based psychologists in the early 20th century. These are a series of implicit mental rules that help people to make good guesses at how to interpret complex sensory stimuli by grouping them together. We make assumptions about continuity, for example: the aeroplane that flies into a cloud is the same one that flies out the other side. We group objects that look similar, or that are close together. Although the Gestalt principles are not foolproof, they make the world more comprehensible. Both in sound and in vision, the ability to interpret sensory data this way must have had evolutionary benefits.
One difference between the avant-garde in classical music and in visual art, however, is that late 20th-century music was apt to defy these organising principles, while visual art did not. Although some viewers may fret that they cannot understand what is in front of them, it takes no more cognitive effort to “see” a painting by Mark Rothko than it does to look at wallpaper. The fact we can see the painting at all as a coherent object gives our interpretive mind something to work on, even if we come up with nothing more than a vague sense of beauty, serenity or absurdity. Music can defy even this basic sort of cognitive parsing: it can refute our efforts to find coherence, rather as if a video artist were to present us with unstructured static. Even Jackson Pollock’s chaos is contained—but sound is at once everywhere and constantly shifting.
Many musicologists accept a definition of music as “organised sound.” Yet sound is structured into music not on paper, nor even in the mind of the composer, but in the mind of the listener. Music is sound in which the organisation must be audibly perceptible to a listener, not just theoretically present. And there are some universal principles that come into play in differentiating music from mere noise. For example, melodies that move in small steps tend to sound unified and “good,” while ones with large and frequent jumps between high and low notes are liable to seem fragmented and harder to make out. Regular rhythms also contribute to coherence, while erratic ones often confuse us. Tonality creates a hierarchy of pitch and a sense of “place” in the musical scale. But it’s not just tonal music that uses these cognitive aids: they are found in other musical traditions the world over.
The composer’s job is to manipulate the expectations that these principles produce—enough to avoid predictability and create a lively musical surface, but not so much as to lose coherence. Out of the interplay between expectation and reality comes much of music’s capacity to excite and move us. But what happens if these rules are undermined? In Boulez’s Structures I or Stockhausen’s Klavierstück VII, say, there is no discernible rhythm, and the melody line, if one can call it that, is as jagged as the Dolomites. In this situation, it is hard to develop any expectations about the music, and this absence of an audible relationship between one note and the next cuts off a key channel of musical affect.
And yet how can Structures I lack structure? It is, after all, one of the most “structured” pieces of music ever written. It was composed using “integral serialism,” a method related to the 12-tone or “serial” method introduced in the 1920s by Schoenberg. The serial method ensures that no note is used more often than any other within a piece of music, so that the piece cannot become anchored to any particular musical key, as it always was (to a greater or lesser degree) in the tonal tradition to that date. By the 1950s, serialism had become, in many schools of classical composition, the only respectable way to compose; anything hinting at tonality was considered passé and bourgeois. Yet Schoenberg not only failed to justify his horror of tonality but never came to terms with what its abandonment implied for composer and listener. Since atonality has no tonal “home,” there was nowhere to depart from or return to, so that beginnings, endings and structure became problematic.
This is not to say that atonality in general, and serialism in particular, is doomed to sound aimless and incomprehensible. There are plenty of other parameters that a composer can deploy to create coherent structures, and many have done so to great effect. But, increasingly, serial techniques were applied not just to pitch but to these other musical parameters, such as rhythm and dynamics. Such compositional methods progressively and systematically subverted any means of providing audible organisation. So it was unsurprising that audiences found the music harder to understand. For the serialist’s rules are not ones that can be heard. Boulez’s serial piece Le Marteau Sans Maître was acclaimed when premièred in 1955, but it took over two decades for anyone else to figure out how it was serial: no one could deduce analytically, let alone hear, the organisational structure.
Music, like any art, must be constantly rejuvenated by experiment. But “experimental” music surely only qualifies as such if it includes the possibility of failure. And if musical composition takes no account of cognition—denies that cognition has a role to play, or actively frustrates it—then composers cannot complain when their music is unloved. Sadly, although these difficulties afflict only certain strands of modern classical music, the fact that these strands were once dominant means that all the other possibilities for modern classical music get tarred with the same brush. Often the only thing that stands in the way of comprehension is a refusal to adapt on the part of audiences—to realise that it is no good trying to hear all music the way we hear Mozart. We need to find other “listening strategies.”
Yet it could benefit all concerned if some experimental music, like much of Stockhausen’s oeuvre and the ambient noises of John Cage’s silent 4’33”, were viewed as “sound art,” a term coined by composer Dan Lander and anticipated by the futurist Luigi Russolo’s 1913 manifesto “The Art of Noises.” That way, one is not led to expect from these compositions what we expect of actual music. For if music is not acknowledged as a mental process, sound is all that remains.
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Darwiniana » Avant-garde music vs art10-27-09
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Links, 10/28/0910-28-09
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Daily Digest for October 28th10-28-09
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links for 2009-10-28 « Fantasising Zombies10-29-09
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RenegadeBus » Blog Archive » Tough to Hear- Dallas art, film, theater, music, dance, architecture, ideas, stories, culture, life10-29-09
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He Cares If You Listen « Dave Williams’ Blog10-29-09
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Thursday links « eartotheground10-29-09
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Chi ha paura della musica “moderna”? « AscoltoMusica11-08-09
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Chi ha paura della musica "moderna"? at AscoltoMusica11-10-09
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Just a few more annoucements! « Panopticon11-11-09
Russ Thayer
“Music, like any art, must be constantly rejuvinated by experiment.” – Oh really, because in its evolution through experiment, it makes more of the unknown known and, furthermore, tests this knowledge in the context of subsequent discovery, like science? Or is “experiment” in art merely the aesthetic quirkiness of individuals trying to be original, which has nothing to do with the cultural embodiment of anything of wider scope or importance. The entire perspective is BS, and no amount of idoctrination can alter the fact that art and science make distictly different contributions to civilization and our awareness. People don’t like it because they don’t like the character disclosed in the artifact. The “artists” have lost their way in the larger masterpiece.
ashok
This was a quite excellent read! I am very curious to know more about “sound art” actually – I’d imagine that has parameters itself, and that some of the compositions you mention above might not even make that cut.
I thought the discussion of serialism was particularly apt; as you discussed the lack of a “home,” a beginning and an end so to speak, I was reminded of Aristotle’s Poetics, where he says the most elementary thing about drama (yeah, I know, it’s not music) – dramas have to have a beginning, middle and end.
Eric Hester
There is much sense in this article. One simple difference between modernist music and modernist visual art is that people actually choose which CDs to buy and which concerts to attend and so have the freedom to reject that which is obviously bad. But “works of art” are chosen by committees of “experts” and so the public has no say. One exception is the monumental art of tombs, where people spending their own money to commemorate those that they love, rarely choose modernist designs. Another parallel is in the literary arts: the modernist novel has not prospered because people actually buy novels and want something they can read. But people have stopped buying poetry; here in England this happened after the deaths of Betjeman and Larkin. So modernist poetry is published by subsidised presses but no one reads it. The worst art, though, is architecture where committees can use public money ( at least here in England) to commission buildings that no one likes or, in some case, do not even keep out the rain, which we have aplenty in England. Domestic architecture is still largely traditional because people are paying for that they want.
Diogenes
Highly interesting piece, though it overlooks the obvious point (as, to be fair, does Stubbs’s book): the real difference between Boulez and Barnett Newman is that you have to sit still and quiet for the former for a considerable time.
As anyone who works at Tate Modern can tell you, the average time the average punter spells in front of any canvas that isn’t baldly representational is about the time it takes to read the information card.
Stubbs’s book, that is, is premised falsely. The public no more gets avant-garde painting than it does avant-garde music. It’s simply that the former is easy to tick off the cultural experience chart – and make that a skinny latte.
Tali Makell
Once again, the need to pick on serialism and Schoenberg. One finds it in book after book, or article after article. I can understand why the total serialism of the 50s is \difficult\ for audiences. Much of it appears to lack any immediately discernible expressive component, although there are often beautiful sounds produced. But Schoenberg, Berg and Webern never employed total serialism. They came directly out of the tonal tradition and often employ aspects of the organizing principles which inform tonality. Listeners who have gone beyond a superficial understanding of the musical tradition from Bach to Wagner should find few difficulties with Schoenberg, at least, this has been my personal experience.
T,B.Root
Music invades the brain in a way that painting does not–like the difference between jumping into a river or just looking at a river. One inhabits music.
But the bigger point is that modernist music was based on aggressive dissonance while non-objective painting often sought total harmony? Rothko was nothing if not harmonious.
Raymond White
Experiments in both performance and listening are required. Take Stockhausen’s Klavierstück IX. Listen to early and late recordings. One should notice a demonstrable difference in phrasing, for example: the piece ‘becomes’ music. Take Herreweghe’s recording of Schönberg’s Pierrot Lunaire. Compare it to early recordings. It takes years for conductors and performers to get it right. Also, if one’s ears are trained by jazz first, it’s a lot easier to understand what’s going on. Allen Shawn’s \Arnold Schoenberg’s Journey\ will help in one’s struggles to understand that the music is not entirely contained in the score. Neither is it in the composer’s head. Performance, performance…..
Rory
Personally I have always been most excited by music that is at the point of fracturing, where the cracks can be heard but it has not yet shattered. Now I know why. Thanks.
Q. E. D. Bach
After Wagner it all sounds like cats running around in a piano or monkeys with instruments. Mahler, Bartok, Schoenberg, Debussy, Ravel, Berg, Webern, Stravinsky, Scriabin, Orff, Shostakovich, all of it is unbearable. Thank the heavens for Mostly Mozart concerts and all the orchestras that mainly program Baroque, Classical and early Romantic music. The rest of it is a war on the ears!
KevFors
The simple fact is that the politics of progressivism, (self-hate in the guise of utopianism), demanded that the free creation and appreciation of the arts be deformed toward Maoist ends. Thus the true, the beautiful, the sensible, the appreciable, the melodic, the enjoyable, the proportionate, themes, variations, joie de vivre… all that Bourgeoise nonsense… was replaced with dadaist sass and mannerist intellectual stricture wholly severed from the romance of real life.
That disaffected 20-somethings might find a home in such movements after wasting their college years reading marxist tracts instead of learning a trade that could provide for themselves and a family, is understandable. Childhood is tough to leave behind. However, by the wasted 30s the Maoism morphs into madness for the poor indoctrinated sap. And in order to validate their dogma-gone youth, the utopianist objective must be imposed by all means necessary.
In a weak country, this spells doom for all. But in a strong country, the Maoists can only get control of the arts, in order to ruin them with their breast-held collegiate prescriptions.
One can only hope that the Maoist project fails so miserably that all funding and interest dries up. Thus clearing the strangling vines away from the garden, that actual beds of flowers might grow once again.
Mike
Interesting article. It’s worth noting that serialism is not the only tradition in 20th century music. Minimalism, free jazz, and composers like Bartok and Shostakovich have all won audiences.
Drehleierguy
Bravo! Great article and (with the possible exception of KevFors) great discussion!
The point, I think, of any new, ‘difficult’ or experimental art (whatever the medium) is to challenge us, direct us into new ways of thinking and feeling, not just to massage our pleasure centres and allow us to congratulate ourselves on our good taste etc. Pleasure, of course, is important, but no more or less so than the thrill of the strange, the new, the challenging. I do get pleasure from not understanding a new work of art: I leave the theatre/concert/gallery etc. with much to think about, and this provides an intellectual enjoyment. When that kind of challenge is coupled with aesthetic enjoyment, I’d call it a grand night out.
There is a good case to be made for the importance of ‘challenging’ works of art in human development. Morse Peckham’s great book “Man’s Rage for Chaos” outlines a sociologist’s perspective on this topic. To paraphrase his argument, difficult or challenging arts provide a kind of ‘rehearsal for uncertainty’ that the brain requires to help survive in the world. I have yet to see evolutionary biologists pursue this line of thinking. There have been similar studies on the importance of exposure to sensually ‘wild’ environments (woods etc) on brain development. I suspect that the argument could be extended into arts.
The great composer James Tenney said (something to the effect) that the primary purpose of art is to change your mind, your ways of thinking.
As to the question of likening scientific experiments to artistic ones, I think it’s a good analogy. A scientist would say, in simplest terms “Let’s put these things together under these circumstances and see what happens.” How is the experiment of an artist any different?
Cheers!
Tim Saward
This is an amazingly insightful review, especially the sentence \Music is sound in which the organisation must be audibly perceptible to a listener, not just theoretically present.\ It sums up a crucial and overlooked distinction perfectly.
NP
First, I’m not sure if anyone else has caught this, but the riots are the premiere of Rite of Spring were not about the music, but the choreography. People paid top dollar to see the Russian Ballet, and what they got was dancers in flapper dresses bouncing up and down to the pulsing rhythm of the music. It would be like paying to see the Radiohead and getting Green Day instead…not that the one is bad, but you paid to see the other!
As for the claim that listening to music after Mozart is not worth the time, made by someone below, I challenge you to listen to Claire de Lune by Debussy, Durufle’s Requiem, Carmina Burana by Orff, or Vaughan William’s Mass in G Minor, and tell me that that music is “offensive to the ears”. I don’t dispute your love of Mozart and Brahms (Brahms is one of my favorite composers), but to claim that music after them is unworthy is too bold a claim.
Philip
hmmmm…I’ve across a few of these types of articles lately. For some reason going back 60 years to bash the European avant-garde and say that people don’t like their music because it’s a-rhythmic, atonal, a-whatever. A few points: 1) Comparing Rothko and Stockhausen is silly. Two totally different aesthetics. Feldman and Rothko….ok.
2) Let’s not forget that “classical” music itself is marginal at best at this point.
3) It’s been moving in that direction since the dawn of recorded music.
4) Modernist music spawned a number of influential styles.
5) Sound art is not what you think is.
6)Lots of people like lots of different styles of music for lots of reasons. And that’s ok.
I wish more time had been spent talking about the book. It looks interesting.
Ted Schrey Montreal
I suspect that the Rites of Spring really were supposed to be the Riots of Spring anyway. That’s my opinion, straightforward and uprite.
Will Orzo
Truly a terrible article.
I won’t even begin to address the hugely complex issue of why some music doesn’t appeal to some people, which is ultimately what this is all about. That is a question of taste (the Romans understood: De gustibus non est disputandum) and has far more to do with “context and perspective” than the author will allow.
But as far as critical reasoning goes…
Observe that the author’s thesis hinges on how music is supposedly “processed in cognitive terms”:
“…the understanding of the cognitive mechanisms of music that has emerged in recent years implies that it is not enough to tell ingrates bemused by Stockhausen to try harder.” But the only example given of the science that has emerged in “recent” years is that of “a group of German-based psychologists in the early 20th century.”
Yet there is a whole field of study that has emerged in the last 30 years from which to draw on! Why not refer to these authors for dressing up one’s subjective opinions in order to refute Stubbs? Unlike Gestalt psychologists, at least they are actually studying music cognition! With like, computers and stuff! If you are to advance an argument founded on principles of cognitive science, at least evince more than a passing familiarity with the contemporary literature. Heck- maybe even cite it!
Leaving aside several other flaws that mar this piece (note particularly the two paragraphs beating the dead horse of total serialism), one can only hope that the editors will in the future choose someone who has SOME familiarity with the field of music research, as opposed to someone regurgitating received opinions. The gulf of the two cultures is being bridged by savvy and sensitive thinkers in this world- let’s hear from them.
For those interested:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_cognition
Jpalarino
All profoundly beautiful art is ugly at first. And let us not forget that even a lot of the music of Beethoven, Berlioz, Tchaikovsky Debussy, et al was right picking for critics who slammed their music as trash and garbage. not music at all! Bah, This is nothing new. Let us just hope that the innovative musical thinkers of our time are remembered. Though, I have no real fear of this NOT happening.
On another similar but possibly provocative note Ravel once staged a concert , with albeit now no longer existing musical group, that wrote no composer names on any concert materials and asked the “sophisticated” audience to see if they could name the composers. The ending result was that many could not. Just a little food for thought.
John Borstlap
An excellent article, esp. the sentence: ‘Sadly, although these difficulties afflict only certain strands of modern classical music, the fact that these strands were once dominant means that all the other possibilities for modern classical music get tarred with the same brush.’ As a composer of new tonal music, it is startling to find that in my contacts with orchestras I need to specifically distance myself from the ‘usual modern music’ to be able to talk to programmers at all; in orchestral concert practice ‘living composers’ are considered a species best to avoid at all costs. The reputation of ‘new music’ has sunk so low, that it seems questionable that it ever can be restored. The absurd opposition of atonal music and progressiveness on one hand, and tonal music and conservatism on the other, is by now the most conservative view imaginable. But it must be said that by destroying tonal traditions, modernism has cut-off a normal connection with past practices, and now composers who want to write not only tonally but also in a way that has real artistic substance, will have to find-out for themselves how to handle the means of a disappeared art form, like artists in the renaissance tried to recreate the culture of antiquity – which, in the end, succeeded and which happened to be very fruitful.
Michael Travis
If you want modern, try Venetian Snares.
The album “Rossz csillag alatt született” is a good starter if you want some fragments of classical or jazz to hang onto.
Joe Schmoe
“His speculative suggestion—that musical performance lacks an “original object” that, in the case of visual art, may become the subject of veneration or trade—clearly has little force, given that it applies equally to Beethoven and Birtwistle.”
This is reason enough to see this guys is full of shit. As you said Boom, a picture is a physical object. Musical appreciation is a reaction, positive or negative.
“Like economists trying to understand market crashes, he wants to place all the motive forces outside the system: his gaze never fixes on the music itself. To Stubbs, our responses to music are determined by our context and perspective, not by what we actually hear. His comparison of visual and musical art takes no account of how the two are processed in cognitive terms.”
See above. “Context and perspective” is a fancy way of saying prejudice, expectations, conditioning, what we’re used to. It’s also indicative of what we have learned via exposure and reading/learning/thinking about music. Most people seem to think they can hear something once, for the first time and make a snap judgement about whether it’s “good” if I like it or not. Two completely different concepts.
Why can visual artists do whatever they want to (smear shit on a statue f the Virgin Mary for instance, and they are called cutting edge and invited to NY parties but Birtwistle is “incomprehensible” and never given a second listen?
I like Major 5ths and minor 3rds as much as they next guy. I like major 2nds too. A music prof I had in SF State many years ago played two snippets of music and asked us what we thought. Most students didn’t like either. He then asked which we thought was more “modern” and which was older. We guessed incorrectly. The more dissonant section was Anatolian music played with clarinets and the other was Stravinsky. Dissonance (aka “difficulty”) has nothing to do with modernity except to college history of music textbooks.
“In explaining fear of the avant-garde through ideology,…
Not fear, ignorance
Stubbs is in good company. Theodor Adorno, perhaps the 20th century’s most renowned social theorist, was a passionate advocate of Schoenberg’s atonal modernism for political reasons: tonality, he declared, was the bastion of bourgeois complacency. ”
What a load of shit. Sorry, crusty Austrian left wingers applying political theories to music sounds ridiculous. He hated jazz too as well as many other “modern” conveniences like the telephone etc…. what a turd.
Following Adorno’s lead, the hardline musical modernists of the 1950s and 1960s treated any hint of tonality as a form of recidivism to be denounced with Maoist vigour; Pierre Boulez refused for a time even to speak to tonal composers.
Might as well cut off your left hand too as it’s been around too long also.
The American composer Milton Babbitt’s 1958 essay “Who Cares if You Listen?” responded to the wider world’s hostility towards this new music by arguing that serious composers should simply withdraw from the concert hall, while offering no explanation for the public’s antipathy to “difficult” music beyond a belief that they were too ill-informed to understand it.”
It doesn’t pay to get huffy. Gotta have some kind of system setup to hear this unless you wanna play for your mother all your life.
We make assumptions about continuity, for example: the aeroplane that flies into a cloud is the same one that flies out the other side. We group objects that look similar, or that are close together”
Assumptions can be consciously changed. That’s the beauty of hearing music in a different way.
“Although some viewers may fret that they cannot understand what is in front of them, it takes no more cognitive effort to “see” a painting by Mark Rothko than it does to look at wallpaper.”
And I am convinced all these painfully thin black pants wearing pierced/tattooed poseurs I see at SF MOMA see just that but stand there for a minimum amount of time else you’re seen as a rube who isn’t really seeing the genius in front of you. You can, however, daydream about banging your room mate during Stockhausen.
“Even Jackson Pollock’s chaos is contained—but sound is at once everywhere and constantly shifting.”
Yes! That’s what’s so great about it you ignorant morons!
“Tonality creates a hierarchy of pitch and a sense of “place” in the musical scale.
Which can be changed…. thank you.
But it’s not just tonal music that uses these cognitive aids: they are found in other musical traditions the world over.”
As I said before, much music from the middle east and Africa etc… uses dissonance. How about Chinese music? Most people can’t stand it. Are the Chinese different than us? They grew up with a different tonal sense maybe. They learned it just as you can learn it but it takes effort to appreciate something different. Not necessarily like it, just accept it.
“The composer’s job is to manipulate the expectations that these principles produce—enough to avoid predictability and create a lively musical surface, but not so much as to lose coherence.”
This is pompous and assumes too much. Who is this git to tell the composer what to do? what s/he should do for the audience? Are composers monkeys dancing to the audience’s tune? Let the audience come to the composer, not the other way around.
“But what happens if these rules are undermined? In Boulez’s Structures I or Stockhausen’s Klavierstück VII, say, there is no discernible rhythm, and the melody line, if one can call it that, is as jagged as the Dolomites. In this situation, it is hard to develop any expectations about the music, and this absence of an audible relationship between one note and the next cuts off a key channel of musical affect.”
Yes, an affect that has been mined to DEATH. Time to move on and explore other areas not known yet. What’s wrong with the Dolomites by the way?
“Often the only thing that stands in the way of comprehension is a refusal to adapt on the part of audiences—to realise that it is no good trying to hear all music the way we hear Mozart. We need to find other “listening strategies.””
Now he plays both sides of the fence. You can’t say that earlier shit and the noffer an olive branch later.
Timothy Flint
It’s only a matter of how much time it takes. You can look at a painting in a few seconds but it takes half an hour or more to listen to serious music. People get bored and irritated that you are occupying their time.
Also, Rothko’s art is not avant garde. It is half a century old and rather staid by now. Contemporary art is not painting or sculpture, but esoteric issue-centered installations, constructions and performances that are easily as difficult and irritating as any contemporary music.
Tassilo
What an appealing theory! If I can’t hear it, then neither can anybody else. If I can’t discern patterns in it, then neither can anybody else. There may be certain universals required by all music, but neither of these half-baked thinkers knows what they are. The phenomenon mislabeled “atonality” would have been forgotten decades ago if much of the atonal repertory hadn’t fired the interests of musicians passionately committed to playing it, not because of patterns that nobody can hear but because of the exciting musical patterns they can and do hear. It was a mistake to pick on Boulez’s Structures I, a kind of failed theory experiment that neither Boulez nor anybody else has been interested in for decades. Most of Boulez’s music has very little to do with his momentary experiment with “integral serialism” in the early 1950’s. Shortly thereafter, he dismissed most integrally serial scores as “timetables for trains that never depart,” urging composers to “turn [their] backs on the monstrous polyorganization or condemn themselves to deafness.” Earlier he had complained to Stockhausen that the entirely rectilinear later paintings of Mondrian were “the most devoid of mystery” of any art of which he was aware, adding, “just so we don’t end up like that with our music.” (Boulez loved the earlier Mondrian, and particularly “the marvelous period of the trees.”) Boulez and other composers of the music these writers have in mind do in fact compose with human ears and minds for other human ears and minds just as Brahms and Mozart did: if it didn’t, nobody would be performing it, and we wouldn’t be having this discussion.
T Appleman
Has it occurred to you that future textbooks of high music may totally ignore serialism in favor of composers like Arvo Part because they are only concerned about the MUSIC written in the 20th century, not its counterfeits? That future critics may laugh at an era when large swathes of the ostensibly cultured simply assumed that a particular counterfeit of high music was the real deal?
Change in the arts is not a bad thing, but in the 20th century, artists working in various mediums made a major mistake: they assumed that aesthetic change could apply to the core axioms of their arts. What is the core axiom of music? It must be music, not screeching. What is the core axiom of poetry? That it must be verbal music, not — again — screeching. What is the core axiom of painting? That it must actually represent in a beautiful manner, something which a lyrical abstractionist successfully accomplishes — not everything has to be a traditionally representational landscape, portrait, or still life after all! — but which a Rothko or a Pollock does not.
Those who would redefine music or poetry or art as just about anything it is not are the real philistines, and they have much to answer for. Generations of talented youths have been going to occupied musical institutions rather than the real deal, their talents twisted in the direction of cultural Marxism.
There is a saying, however: ‘The heights remain inviolable.’ That means that no matter how many worthless counterfeits such as Stockhausen and Schoenberg fill the air and the institutions of high music with their, yes, CACAPHONY, there will still be Arvo Parts and Rachmaninovs quietly continuing to write MUSIC. These true geniuses will never disappear, even if institutionalized ugliness systematically labels everything that is good about their music ‘philistinism’.
A civilization in which beauty is no longer necessarily axiomatic to the production of works of art in any medium is not long for this troubled planet.
daniel fitzgerald
its very simple. visual art can be sold for 25 million dollars, while music can only profit the soul, not the market
Angel Bacon
Prof Beatrice Han-Pile’s contribution ( including about sound ) to this unusually enjoyable ( partly because Mr Bragg was less noisy than usual ) R4 programme was music itself ..
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episode/b00nfrrz/In_Our_Time_Schopenhauer/
N.B. Publishing ‘ The House of Sorrows ‘ article hints that Prospect is a bit stuck
for decent female writers . Why not commission la Pile to pen a piece or two ?
ClassAct
The difference between modern art and modern music is quite simple. Modern art is the investment in a single canvas that has already been “performed” and the investor has an interest in recovering the cost. A public educated in modern art will buy the reproductions, and thus recover the cost of the million dollar canvas.
For music, however, each performance is unique and to obtain all the performers, in addition to the virtuosi simply drives up the cost of music. There is nothing to recoup if the public taste in music keeps pace with the art. Thus public schools usually have art classes, but few have music classes.
The distinction is driven purely by the exigencies of profit and only in a derivative way by aesthetic criteria.
Anthony Nassar
I agree with much of this (notwithstanding a lengthy engagement with Adorno in my younger days, which I now regard as mostly wasted time), but it really lumps together too many kinds of music. In particular, it lumps together composers whose music has a character to which people respond: Sibelius, Nielsen, Bartok, Shostakovich, Britten. It’s no accident that Adorno would have derided most of them (did deride, in the case of Bartok and Sibelius).
Anthony Nassar
Sorry! I meant it lumps the above composers with the unlistenable Boulez, the late Schoenberg, Milton Babbitt, et al.
Bartalk
Yadda, yadda, yadda. One thing we all must keep in mind is modern art and music plays no part in most folks lives, and is only important to us members of the “Cultured” classes. I’ve spent many enjoyable hours analysing Babbitt and Boulez music, but do I need to hear it anymore? No. But the same holds true for Mozart. I don’t know of any work of his that is not well-crafted. This doesn’t mean that love everything he wrote.Much of it I feel is pointless twaddle. I love webern and Berg (his violin Concerto is my favorite of that genre). Some stockhausen and Xenakis I love, some I loathe. Are my opnions any more valid or invalid than anothers. These sort of dicussions always produce more heat than light.
mark ramsden
Zero books? says it all…Speaking of space, nothing and the void, (between Brian Eno’s ears) John Cage, composer of 4.33 wrote some very wise and witty words about music fifty years ago now. His zen parables easier to get than his music, and far more entertaining.
As Hanif Kureshi said of punk, “It’s great music but you wouldn’t want to listen to any of it.”
ps Huw Prall has choreographed two of the pieces off my “Above The Clouds”cd for performance at the Shakespeare Globe Dec 2 6.30 pm. Also doing the foyer at the National Theatre Dec 17th.
sorry for plug but was ripped off for decades as a session musician – while making cloth-eared imbeciles rich. I am now facing eviction. Thank you.
trollificus
Hmmm…are we not overlooking another important dynamic here? One as pathetic, counter-creative and stultifying as any bourgeois expectations of traditional beauty?
This is the herd dynamic: no music critic can remain a member of the herd (of “in-crowd”, hip-to-it, intellectually superior, politically correct people) if he or she goes all “The Emperor has no clothes!” and admits that most of this crap has no value as music. Allowing this effect in our assessment of the critical reaction to atonality and seriality leads us inevitably to the ugly conclusions of scam and elitism.
There is plenty of experimentation to be done with “real” music, cross-genre composition, creative instrumentation, ironic interpretation, etc., etc…
ps) I must here admit to a Neanderthal respect for “craft” and “skill” and even “giftedness” with regard to both visual and musical media.
Josh McNeill
Right from the beginning this article makes very little sense to me. Since when do people “get” Rothko more than Stockhausen? I’m pretty sure that most people are equally perplexed by both. Others have already gotten into all the other poorly thought out statements made in the article.
David
For an example of contemporary, classical, listenable music, may I point you in the direction of Piotr Rubik’s oratorios “Tu Es Petrus” “Psalterz Wrzesniowy” and “Cantobiografia Santo Subito”.
AJ
It baffles me that in this day and age– where I can barely find one person in my age group (20s) who can even name two pieces by Mozart, while being able to recite all the tracks on Lady Gaga’s album– that we are talking about how conservative people are and how they can only like Mozart. Give me a break. At this point in our oh so advanced culture, I’d LOVE to be able to say that a lot of people can actually sit through a Mozart symphony.
And you talk a lot about cognitive processes but still miss a big point.
We may have a cognitive method of making sense of music, but that is not all. To most ears and BRAINS, tonal music simply sounds like it took more talent to make and more hard work to put together. Sure, “Serialism” is a thought-out process, but not a musical process, period. If I wanted to think only in such mathematical terms (“let’s see, I used this note twice so far while I used all the others 3 times, so I need to put it here at the end. Ta-dah!”) it takes away from the sweeping feel that most tonal music has. ANd it does NOT only happen to music. Do you seriously think that Cage’s 4:33 took as much time to make as Cosi Fan Tutte? LOL. When a guy can’t come up with anything else, because it’s all been done before, it’s easy to “experiment” and “push boundaries” by seeing how far in the opposite direction you can go without pissing people off.
And this is NOT only happening to music. It happens in visual arts too. How many times do you see a questionable “statue” made of sponges or something represented as “art” in an exhibit, and how many time do you hear someone say “if that is art then I can be an artist too”?
It’s easy to CLAIM you are using a super-innovative “method” to create new art, but if it really looks like you slapped three random notes together (or three brush strokes), most of that supposedly ‘conservative” audience will be actually too jaded and wise to actually believe you.
Robert Livingston
I’m not a musician, and certainly not a musical theorist, but I love all of Schoenberg’s music passionately, and I consider Boulez the greatest musical genius of the second half of the 20th century. This is not philosophical, or indeed political, posturing. I simply love this music. The 20th century had just as many great composers as the 19th. Berio, Donatoni, Schnittke, Ruders, Ligeti, Messiaen, Xenakis, and, yes, even Stockhausen–I listen to all of these with great pleasure. And I know I’m not alone. Why do people find this so hard to accept?
George McKee
This book gets close, but still doesn’t really capture the problem with serial music, as these comments indicate. It seems to me that it was a success as the logical conclusion of the progression towards the complexification of harmony and the dissolution of tonality in Western music from the 17th thru 19th centuries, as an end in itself serialism makes three aesthetic errors that lead it to be profoundly boring.
First, it’s not primarily intended to be listened to. This is the same phenomenon that that occurs in conceptual art. It’s intended to be written about — the pleasure of imagining and talking about what it might look like or sound like is far greater than the pleasure of actually experiencing the work. Christo makes far more money from selling drawings of his installations than from selling tickets to see them.
Second, it denies all of its history. Serious serial works are not allowed to have any non-serial components. When Berg’s Wozzeck quotes from Bach’s “A mighty fortress” that’s a defect, not a triumph. I view atonality as a 13th key: A-G major and minor plus “none of the above”. Serialism’s requirement to use only permutations of the 12 notes is as restrictive as a requirement to use only C major chords for every bit of every composition. It can be done, but it’s not very interesting. Paul Hindemith had a theory of harmony that put atonality within a spectrum of harmonic centeredness; this seems much more reasonable to me.
Third, following from the first two errors, is that serialism lost contact with the cognitive and emotional processing in the listener. It’s much more closely related to
English bell tower change-ringing than it is to any other art form. In art, it’s related more to “op art” than it is to pure abstraction. Nobody would want to look at “the illustrated Fibonacci numbers”, yet serial composers are praised for incorporating such mathematics into their works.
Minimalism, arguably the next step beyond serialism, makes contact with the audience by creating an experience where the listener can recognize a plethora of patterns to enjoy, while the serialist program attempts to destroy any mental pattern that the listener might bring to the performance. Finding patterns and meaning in a performance is what music is all about — when the patterns do not make themselves apparent while the performance is occurring, the “musical experiment” has failed.
DX
Suicide were not art-rock.
G. Pedder-Smith
Looking at Rothko or even Pollock is not the visual equivalent of listening to modern classical music in a concert hall. Imagine visual images in bright discordant colours being flashed onto all the surfaces of a room in which you must sit with your eyes fixed open (like your ears which cannot be closed). After an hour or more you would probably have a headache and you might even be throwing up. The interesting question is why visual artists have been so much kinder to our senses than composers.
Andreas Burckhardt
Interesting. I wonder if shifting the problem to a question of labeling music/sound to differentiate them is the right way to go. Similarly there obviously is a difference between seeing (not looking) a Rothko as art or as wallpaper. In sound, too, it might be a question of learning to hear (not listening) in the sense that Pierre Schaeffer intended with acousmatics. After all, as John Cage once claimed, “music = no music”.
Thulani Earnshaw
If you change your listenning strategy you have to be able to exchange, at least temporarily, yr culture for another one.
Jeffrey Solow
I have never before come across the mentioned term Sound Art but years ago I decide that much modern music would be better classified as ‘sonic sculpture.’ Of course, one aspect of sculpture and other visual or plastic arts is that the viewer can choose to experience them for as long (or short) as he/she pleases while musical compositions, by necessity, have a defined duration.
Chris Taylor
Rothko’s writing about his own reaction to paintings by others can give us some insight into our response to ‘difficult’ new music.
As a young painter in his twenties Rothko taught drawing and painting to childeren in a poor part of New York. He organised an exhibition of their work. In a note about these paintings he wrote: \They are complete realisations of a subject that moves us by the beauty of its moods, by the fulness of its forms, and the excitement of its design. In short many of these pieces are capable of moving us emotionally. Without going into an involved discussion of the aesthetics involved, that is more or less what fine works of art do to us. It is significant that dozens of artists viewed this exhibition and were amazed and stirred by it. These children have ideas, often very fine ones, and they express them vividly and beautifully, so that they make us feel what they feel. Hence, their efforts are intrinsically works of art.\
These two last sentences define good art – in painting or music or anything else. It’s not a question of whether conventions are broken, or if there are discords, or what scales are used, or if shifts of rhythm disconcert us. If \they make us feel what they feel\, and if those feelings were worth passing on, then that’s enough.
The above Rothko quote is from \Rothko – Writings on Art\ (Yale Univ Press, 2006), p3.
ISBN-13: 978-0-300-1140-9.