Re: [crazy_music] month-old roadkill [is: Schoenberg again, or rather the bitching about him]

xed@... schrieb:
>
> FROM: mclaren
> TO: new practical microtonality group
> SUBJECT: month-old roadkill
>
> In Message 8 of Digest 34, Klaus Schmirler wrote:
>
> "Why this needless bashing of a composer who never forced
> anybody to write according to his method...?"
>
> Here's why:
>
> "I have had [long intense conversations] over the course
> of several years with composers, many of whom were trying to
> recover from having been browbeaten into submitting to the
> dogma of serialism and/or academic atonality. Some of these
> were students who balked at sacrificing their creativity
> and imaginations to what they perceived as dead enterprises
> for the sake of academic legitimacy. But others were older; I
> remember especially an established composer in his fifties
> who shed bitter tears he recounted the years he spent writing
> music he himself detested." [McClary, Susan, "A Response
> to Linda Dusman," Perspectives of New Music 32, No.2, 1994,
> pg. 149]

Bad for them. But their bad luck was not that they sought out
Schönberg in Los Angeles (like John Cage did, composing very
different music)?

>
> "Trying to write tonal music at a place like Columbia in
> the 1960's and 70's was like being a dissident in Prague
> during the same period, with similar professional
> consequences." [Beckerman, Michael, "Tonality is Dead, Long
> Live Tonality," New York Times, 31 July 1994]
>
> "...The Serialists took over academia, insuring that
> their quasi-scientific method, which was ideal for the
> university, as the only one encouraged. As they gained
> prestige...they took control of grant-giving bodies,
> new musical ensembles and competitions. Everyone else was
> shut out, especially...tonal composers." [Schwarz, K. Robert,
> "In Contemporary Music, a House Still Divided," in "Notes,"
> (a quarterly index of record reviews from a large number
> of periodicals), January-April 1997]
>

The "international style" (named, I believe, after the glass, steel,
and concrete trend in architecture emanating from the Bauhaus school
of applied arts - one more of those friggin german things like
expressionism) developed around the time of Schönberg's death from a
fusion of ideas from Anton Webern and Olivier Messiaen among a
couple
of systematically minded composeres like Pierre Boulez, Luigi Nono,
and Karlheinz Stockhausen who shared all them kooky ideas about
"punctual" (pointillistic) music with Karel Goeyvaerts (or
appropriated them from him). Unaware that Milton Babbitt (a "kook"
according to my definition) was already fiddling for a couple of
years with their
"emancipation of the parameters" (a step or two removed from
Schönberg's ideas about pitch relations only).
It turned out that this was considered the thing to do; read: to
compose and to program. BTW, I get the impression that the U.S.
always had a share of tonal, post-romantic composers who were not
blacklisted, whereas in Germany the stylistic break was considered a
part of
reeducation (as the old teachers who could have represented some
continuity were for the most part implicated in Nazi politics - the
young ones developed their own new language).

> Klaus Schirmler claims Schoenberg developed his method
> "not in isolation."
> So what?
> The Aum Shin Rikyo cult had plenty of people working
> as a group. They were still kooks.

Well, if it's a cult it's a movement, whereas "kook" in my mind
denotes a single individual. (What are microtonalists?)

My point was meant to be that Schönberg "learned his Harmonielehre
from his students", i.e., there was some consensus (informed, of
course, by the deplorable state of cognitive science at the time)
about its contents when it was written.

> They still brewed sarin nerve gas and released it in a
> subway. They did it as a group. What does that matter?
> The question of whether Schoenberg worked in isolation
> has no bearing on whether or not he was kook.
> The test of whether a Schoenberg was a kook is whether
> his claims about music hold up under scientific and
> musical scrutiny. And they don't. Schoenberg's claims
> about the overtone series and about the alleged "evolution"
> of music are pervasively and demonstrably false, as countless
> modern musicologists and composers and music historians
> have pointed out.
> Schoenberg's ideas about music are as disproven and
> as dead as Karl Marx's ideas about economics:
>
> "Just as Marxist-Leninist thought led to forms of
> government meant to remedy the excesses supposedly caused
> by the exhaustion of capitalism, so Schoenbergian...
> practice was touted as the alternative to a purportedly
> exhausted system called `tonality.' These attempts to
> revolutionize, respectively, our economic and musical
> worlds had several other things in common besides their
> Germanic origin. The application or enactment of both
> ideologies required that their alternatives--and those
> who would support them--be publicly denounced and
> discredited, and a form of double-speak was employed
> in support of these `revolutionary' ideas. The apologists
> writing in `Pravda' held sway in support of a failing
> system in the same way that Herbert Eimert, Milton
> Babbitt, and Charles Wuorinen dominated the pages of
> `Die Reihe'and `Perspectives Of New Music' for many
> years. What is so interesting is the suddenness with
> which these applications of science--some have said
> pseudo-science--to economics and music have been
> rejected and are now seen as...experiments that
> failed because they denied basic human realities:
> economic and cultural diversity in the political
> realm and the necessity for perceptual forms of
> organization and the power of intuitive processes
> in the world of music." [Appleton, Jon, "Machine
> Songs III: Music in the Service of Science--Science
> in the Service of Music," Computer Music Journal,
> Vol. 16, No. 3, 1992, pp. 18-19]
>
> Klaus Schmirler goes on to say:
>
> "When Schoenberg talked about the `emancipation of the
> dissonance,' he was in fact trying to treat dissonances and
> consonances equal."
>
> Yes. And that's exactly why Schoenberg's claims and
> ideas fail so badly. As Fred Lerdahl has pointed out in
> "Cognitive Constrains on Musical Composition," once sensory
> consonance gets ripped free of musical syntax, the music
> becomes audibly incoherent because listeners no longer
> have a way to reliably hear musical organization. By
> throwing out tonality and discarding established categories
> of sensory consonance, Schoenberg produced complete syntactic
> breakdown. Without tonality and without traditional categories
> of sensory consonance established by hundreds of years of
> composers' intuition and audience feedback, nothing was left
> to organize music but private codes like serialism.
> However, private codes are incomprehensible. If someone
> speaks to you in a made-up language with no recognizable human
> syntax, you cannot hope to understand hi/r. Likewise, if
> someone composes in a private code (like Schoenberg's failed
> and faulty serialism), the audience cannot hope to recognize
> any musical organization in the piece.
> As a result, Schoenberg's music sounds boring and trivial,
> it lacks audible organization, and the audiences hears only
> incoherent spatters of notes and spasmodic random-sounding
> dissonances.
> This became inevitable as soon as Schoenberg ignorantly
> and foolishly decoupled sensory consonance from music
> syntax. And he did that by foolishly and ignorantly
> and arrogantly "trying to treat dissonances and
> consonances equal."

My problem with some of Schönberg's works, the early dodecaphonic
ones: The actual melody (expressly marked "Hauptmelodie" in the
scores, so Schönberg seems to have been aware of the problem) is
often totally hidden behind a flurry of sixteenth notes, probably
the incoherent splatters mentioned above. But I have no problem with
the melodies alone, and I have no problem with the whole pieces
before and after the 1920s. Does my opinion count?

> Sensory consonance and sensory dissonance (that is,
> rough and smooth intervals) are not equal. They cannot
> be treated as equal. They produce different physiological
> effects. They excite different regions of the brain.
> Trying to treat rough intervals as musically equal
> to smooth intervals produces the same effects as if a
> painter were to try to treat every color as the same as
> every other color and every outline as the same as
> every other outline. The result is complete syntactic
> breakdown -- a loss of the hierarchical organization by
> which observers can perceive order.
> This is as true in music as it is in art.
>
> "An artificial compositional grammar...can have
> a variety of sources -- metaphysical, numerical,
> historical, or whatever. (..)
> "In the Western tradition the trouble began...
> at the turn of the century. Anything became possible.
> Faced with chaos, composers reacted by inventing their
> own compositional grammars. Within an avant garde
> aesthetic it became possible to believe that one's
> own new system was the wave of the future. Boulez's
> generation was the last to believe this. To a
> younger generation these systems have come to
> seem merely arbitrary. The avant-garde has withered
> away, and all methods and styles are available to
> the point of profusion. (..)
> "It was inevitable...that early attempts at
> artificial [compositional] grammars--say, from the
> 1920s to the 1950s--were defecting in their relation
> to listening. Not enough was known about musical
> cognition; the basic questions had not even been
> framed. (..)

Consider all these attempts part of framing the questions, if you
want.

> "Most of human cognition relies on hierarchical
> structuring (Miller et al. 1960; Simon 1962; Neisser
> 1967). Studies in music psychology have indicated
> that the absence of perceived hierarchy substantially
> reduces the listener's ability to learn and remember
> structure from musical surfaces (Deutsch 1982). It does
> not suffice for the input organization to be structured
> hierarchically; such in fact is the case [much atonal
> serial music]. It is the relationship to the
> listening grammar that matters." [Lerdahl, Fred,
> "Cognitive Constraints on Compositional Systems," in
> "Generative Processes in Music," ed. John Sloboda,
> Clarendon Press: Oxford, 1988, pp. 235-239]

Neither is the better part of John Cage's music (audibly)
hierarchically structured. It invites a different - and still human
- paradigm of listening that is more passive. Ernst Krenek, who
wrote in all kinds of
styles, referred to it when he wrote (in the early '50s, when he
incorporated total serialism into his techniques, IIRC) something to
the effect that he organizes his material so that it does something
specific at some specific point while leading up to it in a way that
is obviously, but in a "hidden" way, related. Of course, just
listening "passively", being open to things developing in a way not
understod (or perhaps not being related at all) is not
interesting if you are researching cognition. Modern science may
have its biases and blind spots, too.

>
> By foolishly and ignorant trying to treat
> consonance and dissonance as the same, Schoenberg
> destroyed the hierarchical structure of his music
> and removed the relationship of sensory consonance
> with the listening grammar. As a result, serial
> atonal music suffers from an absence of perceived
> perceptual hierarchy, and this in turn largely
> destroys the listener's ability to recognize
> musical structure from the musical structure.
> A great deal of research in perception
> and cognition now supports these basic facts
> about human perceptual limitations, and even
> during Schoenberg's time Wundt and others were
> making pioneering studies which pointed out
> these basic human limitations on cognition and
> perception. By ignoring these basic human
> limits, Schoenberg proved himself arrogant
> as well as ignorant and incompetent.
>
> Klaus Schmirler makes a false statement when he
> claims:
>
> "Refuting Schoenberg's purpose by pointing out the
> dissonance of 3/4-tones and the consonance of near-thirds
> is quite beside the point."
>
> Of course it is. That's why I didn't say that.
> What I did was to quote a scholarly citation
> demonstrating that Schoenberg's method for allegedly
> obtaining the notes of the Western diatonic scale from
> the overtone series doesn't work. It is self-contradictory
> and incoherent and logically fallacious.
> If Schoenberg's method doesn't work, then he has
> failed to show that the Western diatonic scale
> derives from the overtone series. And that means
> that Schoenberg can no longer legitimately make an analogy
> between overtones and pitches in the Western scale.
> With that, Schoenberg's entire claim about the "emancipation
> of the dissonance" breaks down and collapses, revealed
> as self-contradictory nonsense, since no causal connection can
> be established any longer between the overtone series
> and the pitches of the Western 12-tone scale.
> Of course many other commentators have pointed this out:
>
> "Many attempts were made during the nineteenth century to
> give to the science of harmony a positive physical foundation by
> demonstrating that the diatonic scale, from which harmony is
> developed, is really a `natural' scale; i.e., that it is a
> selection of tones from the harmonic series. None of these
> attempts was successful." [Ferguson, Donald N., "A History of
> Musical Thought," New York: 1935, pg. 475]

Which doesn't mean you couldn't write music based on it. All
artistry is conning if you view it from outside its cultural
framework. Do Bach's and Messiaen's music really work as theology?
Are all the works based on fractals really mathematics? If music is
architecture, where's the roof? If music tells a story, how did
Dukas know about Mickey Mouse?

Astronomy developing from Astrology is a fine example, Most of the
"astronomers" made their living not as "pure scientists" in white
coats in a laboratory, but as astrologers at some court. And even
if a "gentleman scientist" in the renaissance
decided to watch the stars for their own sake, he had to learn from
astrologers first.

Isn't all this tuning talk a bunch of bullwash? I am almost sure
(but scientists aren't interested in thinking like this, so I am
left alone with my beliefs, kook that I am) that you can make music
very well without tuning anything at all, or without tuning more
than is necessary beyond establishing a same-different dichotomy.

But:

If you'd like to make music with others, or if you want to make sure
that you sing a liturgical piece the correct way, you might want to
quantify some aspects of your music a little bit. Whether you do
that by
comparing string lengths, cycles of overtones, or logarithms is very
much a matter of contemporary science. But whether your measuring
implements take their units from eternal truths or last night's
dream should,
societal acceptance aside, affect the value of the music very
little.

I wonder what your opinion is on this last bit (but I think it
should go on the Unpractical Wanking List then)

Klaus

>
> Klaus Schmirler goes on to claim:
>
> "And what's wrong with referring to current musical or
> even physical theory? However faulty it was, it had the
> value of being a starting point for Schoenberg's explorations."
>
> What's wrong is that when a person uses the language
> of science and the trappings of science without using
> the methods of science, then that person is practicing
> pseudo-science.
> Pseudo-science is nothing but a form of con artistry.
> Accordingly Schoenberg was nothing but a con artist, and
> not a very bright one.
>
> Klaus Schmirler's claim is false on its face that
>
> "...every theory, even Helmholtz's, is a legitimate theory
> if it can serve as a starting point for its revision"
>
> According to this logic, astrology served as the starting
> point for astronomy. Therefore astrology is a legitimate
> theory. Therefore we would teach astrology in the universities
> and give university degrees in astrology.
> Nope.
> Wrong.
> Despite the previous failures in logic, Klaus Schmirler makes
> an excellent point when he states:
>
> "But all this should not have any bearing on stylistic value
> judgements which are purely personal and should be treated as such.
> Compare Schoenberg's music or painting to the music or painting of
> his contemporaries (in Germany/Austria). Is it really the technique
> that turns you off? Is it really Schoenberg's dilettant ineptitude?
> Or could it be that you don't like the expressive content?"
>
> Like most Americans, European expressionism from
> the 1910s and 1920s doesn't interest me. A view of the world
> as a living hell full of nightmarish horror and meaningless
> chaos may have enchanted European audiences in the 1920s who
> had to live through W W I and its after-effects in Europe,
> but in my experience, expressionism proves unutterably
> boring in music and art. In music it's nothing but nightmarish
> grotesquerie and non-stop incoherent dissonance, while in
> art, expressionism typically involves splatters of turgid
> dark colors spewed across the canvas with no discernible
> organization, like the remains of a 3-week-old Mafia hit.
> Or, if you prefer, month-old roadkill.
> Incidentally, auction prices of abstract expressionist
> canvases in America have plummeted since the 1960s. Tom
> Wolfe recently gave a lecture in which he described Picasso
> as "the Beaugerou of the 21st century," and he's no doubt
> right. Ugly graceless celebrations of the visually grotesque
> like "Le Mademoiselles D'Avignon" have lost most of their
> appeal, and will soon likely quietly be spirited away to
> a tactful permanent retirement in the back rooms of the
> museums along with the third-rate Watteaus and the fifth-rate
> Cherubinis.
> In fact, an American TV commercial several years ago
> shows the American attitude toward expressionism.
> In this American TV commercial, the red screaming
> figure from "The Scream" stands in an animated sunset
> howling silently in horror. Then a Buick pulls up.
> The howling figure suddenly smiles, whips on a pair of
> sunglasses, and drives off in the Buick into the sunset
> in a landscape which has suddenly turned into bright
> cheerful pastel colors.
> The animation for this TV commercial was done in the
> style of Edvard Munch's "The Scream," and it summarizes
> the American attitude toward expressionism in a nutshell.
> Other countries do not seem to have shown much
> interest in expressionism either. Musical or artistic
> expressionism does not seem to have made much of
> an impact outside of Germany in the 1920s.
> In the cinema, expressionism seems to fare much
> better -- as in Robert Wien's "The Cabinet of Dr.
> Caligari," Fritz Lang's "Metropolis," Cocteau's
> "Blood of the Poet" and "The Last Laugh." (I forget the
> director.) European expressionist cinema, unlike European
> expressionist art or music, worked as an art form and continues
> to exert an influence in America to this day. For example, the
> recent American film "Dark City" represents pure German
> expressionism. A fine film, worth seeing if you haven't.
> ---------
> --mclaren
>
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