The end of music

[ahasoft]

Eight hundred years ago, not a great deal of time by any measure but a human lifespan, the idea of harmony was unknown to musicians. By and large, the monks of the Middle Ages sang in unison, although with the passage of centuries someone got the idea of adding a second part that would move in parallel fourths. Fourths! A melody played in parallel fourths sounds open, characterless and inconclusive to our ears. What were they thinking?

And indeed, as time passed, the early experiments with multiple pitches became gradually bolder. Composers came to realize that the openness of fourths, fifths and octaves — their very ‘perfection’ — was actually something of a liability. Without the thicker, warmer sounds of the third and the sixth, music was too cool, too ethereal for varied emotional expression. Of course, liberty does not mean license. Some intervals — the diabolical diminished fifth, above all — had no place in music. While the long-term trend towards a more inclusive harmonic language was clear, important constraints remained in force. The strength of the I-V and V-I (‘authentic’) cadences, for example, provided a sort of universal substructure that was worked over by every important composer for hundreds of years, finally giving rise to the innumerable variations on sonata form in the Classical and Romantic eras.

But the unquestioned musical verities of one era turn inexorably into the chafing limitations of another. One by one the sacred cows were shooed away, and at last freedom reigned. Venturing ever farther afield, committed to ever-increasing chromaticity, composers introduced chords so colorful that their predecessors would hardly have admitted them as musical sounds at all. They turned to novel rhythms, novel forms, novel tonalities, novel instruments: an ever-accelerating cavalcade of novelty in an era of relentless exploration. Composers from Schoenberg onward have sought means of expression outside the envelope of musical convention, deploying techniques like tone-rows, microtones, polyrhythms, polytonalities, and all the rest. Exotic instrumental sounds have been conscientiously sought out and exploited at an ever-increasing pace. Where it once required a couple of hundred years to explore the possibilities even of the perfect fourth, in the modern era new techniques and devices can be born, displayed and discarded almost overnight. It has been a time of ferment and ceaseless innovation.

And it has left audiences cold, by and large. The accessibility of the 19th-century composers gave way to an intellectualized movement that may have stimulated the refined senses of the cognoscenti, and the elitist impulses of their poseur cronies, but failed to satisfy the human ear’s primitive love of simple rhythms, consonance, and predictable structure. And so the pendulum has swung back, away from the twelve-tone iconoclasts and conceptual ‘compositions’ like John Cage’s 4’33”, and toward the simpler, march-like, largely diatonic movie music of composers like John Williams. Most orchestral music heard today is in that mode, while ‘serious’ music is largely confined to the academy.

Composers like investigating new tools and possibilities. You can hardly blame them for that. Audiences listen to what they like, and would be fools to do otherwise. If the two have have grown apart, the fault is perhaps with music — music itself. The chromatically-oriented experiments of the past century brought exciting new possibilities to classical music. But from the point of view of the diatonic scale, chromaticity represents randomness, entropy, disorder. Beyond a certain point, attempts to heighten harmonic color shade into aural chaos. The same holds true for other musical devices. Virtually anyone can synchronize their responses to a plain two, three or four beat rhythm, but few can tap their feet — or indeed feel anything at all — when confronted with a tapestry of shifting polyrhythms, no matter how piquant such a thing may sound in theory.

But if harmony, rhythm and instrumentation have already been elaborated to the point of maximum variety and interest, beyond which additional complication sounds merely chaotic, what frontiers remain to be explored in music? Have all the possibilities been mined? Is there an end of musical history, and are we living it?

[lylowe]

"There is nothing new under the sun, but there are lots of old things we don't know." ~Ambrose Bierce

I'm not sure I'd agree that "harmony, rhythm and instrumentation have already been elaborated to the point of maximum variety and interest." I think there's plenty of good music left to be written, even within the constraints of tonal harmony. But, I think it's good to remember that not everyone considers tonal, tertian harmony and square rhythm a default mode to fall back on when other experiments fail. I've been reading Christopher Small's book Music, Society, and Education which reminds me that there are whole cultures of people for whom tertian harmony and square meters are not and have never been the cultural norm. Those so-called "primitive" cultures often practice music that is highly complex, especially rhythmically. It's entirely possible that the strand of music history that hails from European art music in the common practice period may have an end. (I'll be very sad if that happens during my lifetime!) But, that strand is a small part of a lengthy and global history of music which will exist as long as there are humans.

[ahasoft]

My knowledge of non-Western musical traditions is meager (perhaps I should be reading Small’s book too), but it’s always been my impression that only in the West has harmony been developed to a high degree, with other cultures ‘preferring’ elaborations in other areas — the melodic and rhythmic intricacies you refer to. This fact alone might be taken to suggest, if only hazily, the existence of a confining upper limit to the amount of complexity humans can enjoy, and of a rob Peter to pay Paul relationship between the different channels — rhythm, melody, harmony, structure, instrumentation — by which musical complexity can be effected. Isn’t it true that even though there is immense variety in musical traditions around the world, there are also common elements that arise over and over: a stable pulse with a subdivided beat, the various common pentatonic scales, and the use of bass drones, for example? That such recurrences occur in apparently independent cultures seem to indicate that the periodic table of musical elements is not that large, and that one day its variety might be exhausted. In a sufficiently Eeyore-like mood I might try to extend the argument to the other arts as well — the death of the novel, and so on. I agree it’s difficult to say whether we have already reached ‘peak music’, or when we could expect to do so.

On the other hand, I’m also bound to admit that curmudgeons in every generation see the imminent collapse of everything they hold dear, and that it tends not to happen. So I’m happy to cheer on your side of the argument and hope you’re right.

Great Bierce quote. If he were alive today he’d probably be firing off Devil’s Dictionary entries on Twitter.

[lylowe]

Well, my knowledge of non-Western musical traditions is meager, too. Maybe my optimism springs from the fact that there's so much music that I've not yet exhausted! You may be right about exhausting the possible combinations of musical elements. But, it just seems to me in my Tigger-like mood that every day holds something new to bounce about.

[Marya]

Jumping in at the deep end - I hope this isn't too much of a tangent - along the "end of the music" lines, I'm old enough to have seen people "discover" Celtic folk music twice. By "Celtic", I don't mean the likes of "Danny Boy"... I mean traditional Breton Kan-Ha-Diskan music, O'Carolan reels and airs, ancient Welsh harp. And what I'm also old enough to see is that the second wave has changed traditional tunes to fit modern musical tastes even more thoroughly and incompletely than the first wave (I was part of the first wave, so didn't realize quite what was going on).

Sometimes it's exciting to see the "new" interpretation; sometimes, it makes me sad - it feels they've taken all the heart out of it, because they don't understand what it is, and where it came from, or why it's important.

I suppose that is the nature of music - when all is said and done, it's just another form of communication. I still don't know if it's a good thing to be a complete traditionalist and preserve every single note; or a better thing to get inspired by the music and make it "accessible" to a new generation with no anchor point of connection. I suppose there are drawbacks and merits to both views.

On a cautionary note, however - one that pushes me reluctantly over to the "purist/preservation" side of the musical border - I once saw famed and brilliant Breton harpist Alan Stivell enthusiastically discover "rock", back in the 70's. Watching him play stale pentatonic riffs and committing Bagpipe sacrilege was truly awful. The only thing I can compare it to is watching Degas do paint-by-numbers.

But he was obviously thrilled with it.

Marya

[ahasoft]

Sometimes it's exciting to see the "new" interpretation; sometimes, it makes me sad - it feels they've taken all the heart out of it, because they don't understand what it is, and where it came from, or why it's important.

Culture evolves just as organic life does, by fits and starts from established positions, by random departures that very occasionally produce durable success. The Moonlight Sonata is only ever one disastrous mutation away from The Moonlight Sonata Polka. Such a monster would quickly prove unfit, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't be given one chance to thrive. Radical interpretations are valuable even if all they do is demonstrate the unfruitfulness of an approach. Deliberately distorting an established style may reveal the essence of the style more clearly. [For some reason this paragraph has devolved into a succession of dubious epigrams, and will now stop.]

On a cautionary note, however - one that pushes me reluctantly over to the "purist/preservation" side of the musical border - I once saw famed and brilliant Breton harpist Alan Stivell enthusiastically discover "rock", back in the 70's. Watching him play stale pentatonic riffs and committing Bagpipe sacrilege was truly awful. The only thing I can compare it to is watching Degas do paint-by-numbers.

After the stale riffs slowly spiraling up to the grimy ceiling and the awful sacrilege with the bagpipe I must say I was braced for something more lurid than Degas and his paint set. I see what you mean, though.

But he was obviously thrilled with it.

The pleasure expressed by performing musicians often exceeds that available to the listener, but you can't blame them for wanting variety. If Paul McCartney can afford an orchestra, let him try one for a while and see how it goes. He'll tire eventually. I'm not familiar with Alan Stivell, but I'm curious: did he abandon his twisted explorations of rock after a brief flirtation, or did he stay with it and (presumably) get better at it, or did he instead take up farming?

Nick