Yahoo Tuning Groups Ultimate Backup tuning Re: [crazy

> From: <xed@...>
> To: <crazy_music@yahoogroups.com>
> Sent: Wednesday, July 11, 2001 11:33 PM
> Subject: [crazy_music] month-old roadkill
>
>

Brian, what happened to your START treaty? *YOU* were the
person who asked that "we" stop posting about Schoenberg's
theories on this list, and here you've devoted 16K to writing
some more about him. So even tho I agreed to abide by the
terms of your START treaty, I feel compelled to respond on
this subject again, because I still see you propogating
your own personal opinions as tho they were "fact".

And no, I'm not going thru the trouble of finding and
quoting the citations, because it *does* take up too much
time that I'd rather spend on microtonal music. You have
Schoenberg's books... read them again if necessary, keeping
what I say in mind, and you should be able to draw pretty
much the same conclusions I have.

Most of the Schoenberg citations I would need here are
contained in my previous post on this subject anyway,
Date: Wed Jul 11, 2001 1:34 am,
Subject: Re: [crazy_music] Monzo's dreary effort to defend the indefensible,
archived at
/crazy_music/topicId_279.html#279

> 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 *never* made any scientific claims whatsoever.
He insisted himself that what he presented in _Harmonielehre_
would not even hold up to scrutiny as a "theory", and referred
to it simply as a "method". His primary aim in this book was
to teach his students basic Euro-style harmony and to suggest
some possible new directions based on evolution from those
techniques. He was, first and foremost, a creative artist.

In this regard, I find it extremely unfortunate that the
only available English translations (the abridged one of
Robert D. W. Adams from 1948 and the complete one of Roy E.
Carter from 1978) were both given the title "Theory of Harmony"
by the translators. In my opinion, "Treatise on Harmony"
probably would have been the best way to render "Harmonielehre"
into English, especially considering Schoenberg's insistence
that he was not writing theory.

> 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.

And, as Schoenberg himself said, might turn out to be the case.
So why are you beating this dead horse?

> 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.

Schoenberg did not "throw out tonality", and never claimed
to do so. In fact he detested the label "atonality" that the
reviewers and critics slapped on his post-1907 compositions.
He preferred to think of it as "pantonality". It would do
you well to think deeply about the difference, and about
the fact that the man himself had this attitude.

> 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 is *your* personal opinion and the response of *some*
(perhaps even *most*) listeners in any given random sample.
It is *not* a "fact", for which your presentation here might
easily allow a reader to mistake it.

When I listen to a good performance of Schoenberg's music,
I am his audience, and I hear coherent motivic organization
and harmonic structures spanning the entire gamut from
mellow consonances to spasmodic random-sounding dissonances,
which I perceive as giving his compositions a range of
emotional expression far wider than anything composed before him.

(Also, please keep in mind that when I discuss my love
for Schoenberg's compositions, I'm speaking specifically
of his early work c. 1893-1913 and his latest pieces post-1946.
I too never really cared much for his serial pieces from
the 1920-1945 period, with a few notable exceptions.)

> By ignoring these basic human limits, Schoenberg proved
> himself arrogant as well as ignorant and incompetent.

Why not instead say that "By ignoring these basic human
limits, Schoenberg was branching out into a totally new
type of compositional procedure that bears no relation
to anything any composer before him had dared to try".

My version seems to me to be just as valid as yours.

> If Schoenberg's method doesn't work, then he has
> failed to show that the Western diatonic scale
> derives from the overtone series.

And again, he referred to it as "the possibly incorrect
overtone theory". Dead horse.

> 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.

I don't (and won't) see it that way. Schoenberg was very
careful all thru _Harmonielehre_ to say that 12-tET is an
*imperfect compromise*.

He did entertain the possibility of using microtonal scales,
and rejected them simply because post-1907 he was getting
very negative reviews from the newspaper critics (who, it
must be remembered, represent only a tiny segment of the
total potential listening audience, but who wield enormous
power over influencing a large portion of that audience),
and he certainly felt that it would be counterproductive to
compose his new music for instruments that did not even exist
and scales with which only a tiny minority of musicians in
his time and place had any familiarity.

It's important to realize that Schoenberg's only means of
income at this time in his life was from his handful of
students and the meager royalties and fees he received from
his compositions. He would certainly reject microtonality
on the grounds that it would have had a severely negative
impact on his ability to survive.

> 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.

Brian, now I challenge you. Please cite, from Schoenberg's
own writings, every instance you can find where he "uses the
language of science and the trappings of science". I've
studied his work in great detail, and never found that.

He employed the "possibly incorrect overtone theory" as
an *analogy* to what he perceived in standard harmonic
practice, and to suggest possibilities for expansion of
that practice, and he stated this explicitly.

> 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.

So teaching something in a university is your criterion for
determining whether something is a "legitimate theory"?
Then that makes all that crap 12-tET serialist stuff that's
been hacked out in American universities for 50 years legitimate.

Why not teach astrology in universities? Would there be something
wrong with that? Perhaps then we'd be able to find out *why*
so many millions of people all over the world put so much faith
in it.

> 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.

I think what it really summarizes in a nutshell is how some
advertizing guy came up with what he thought was a great way
to catch viewers's attention in hopes that it would help
Buick sell more cars.

And in general in American advertizing there's a tendency
to take unpalatable images and transform them into something
easier to digest, pairing it with the implication that buying
the product in question is the means toward effecting
that transformation. To me, that commercial doesn't say
a hell of a lot about attitudes toward expressionist art.

Along with Van Gogh, Munch happens to be my favorite artist,
and has been for a long, long time... way before "The Scream"
became a late-20th-century icon with mass appeal.

> In the cinema, expressionism seems to fare much
> better

Here at last I agree with you. Note that Schoenberg had
a keen interest in film, and as early as 1914 was involved
in plans to make his opera _Die Glï¿½ckliche Hand_ into a film
with live orchestral and vocal accompaniment. I'm really
disappointed that it never happened.

> -- 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.)

F. W. Murnau was the director of "The Last Laugh".
You'd probably be interested in the fact that Dean Drummond
composed a new score for it, utilizing some of Partch's
instruments. I wrote a review of it which is at
http://www.virtulink.com/immp/jux/newband2.htm

-monz
http://www.monz.org
"All roads lead to n^0"

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