The Sound and the Fury: a Century of Music.

[ahinton]

not accusing just asking if some of modern music is 'situated' in protest and provocatively discordant is all ... no jazbo would find that in the least off putting or reprehensible ...

In my view, if there are any wholly genuine examples of such a phenomenon, I suspect that they represent a vanishingly small proportion of music creativity as a whole and are accordingly also of little importance in the scheme of things.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

not accusing just asking if some of modern music is 'situated' in protest and provocatively discordant is all ... no jazbo would find that in the least off putting or reprehensible ...

Hmm. Richard Barrett and Helmut Lachenmann are certainly keen to make their Music a statement of protest against social and political injustice - and many people might consider it to be "provocatively discordant". But for some of us who love their work, the "dissonance" isn't just there to be "provocative": it's an essential part of the vigour, logic and lyricism of the Music - a demonstration that "ugly" sounds can have an eloquence and power all of their own (become "beautiful", if you like) when given their opportunity to speak for themselves.

[ahinton]

Hmm. Richard Barrett and Helmut Lachenmann are certainly keen to make their Music a statement of protest against social and political injustice - and many people might consider it to be "provocatively discordant". But for some of us who love their work, the "dissonance" isn't just there to be "provocative": it's an essential part of the vigour, logic and lyricism of the Music - a demonstration that "ugly" sounds can have an eloquence and power all of their own (become "beautiful", if you like) when given their opportunity to speak for themselves.

Precisely! Statements of protest against political and social injustice are clearly by definition intended to provoke reactions to those injustices and the music is being used as an instrument towards that particular provocation - a kind of agent provocateur, if you like. "Dissonance" is in any case not only relative but also contextual - i.e. influenced by its context. What, for example, of the "dissonances" in Salome or the clusters in Ein Heldenleben? Context is all, really; one can make common chords sound "dissonant" if the context in which they are placed successfully achieves this. Then there's the perceived "dissonance" of place, in terms of "consonant" harmonies being shoehorned into a succession that sounds to some ears "dissonant" (although this has been going on since Gesualdo at least!)...

OK, I don't happen to believe that it's possible to use music alone to make statements of protest against social and political injustice, but that's only my viewpoint - I do not and indeed would not claim that it's "right".

Anyway - what you said!

[aka Calum Da Jazbo]

thanks for the elucidation

[Boilk]

Composers simply do not compose ... to be listened to only by their peers

I think post-WWII, peers and the musical establishment played a big part in many cases. I do think some composers are guilty of having written music which kowtowed to the fashions of the day (e.g. serialism in the 50s and 60s) in order to garner respectability - much of it no doubt ingrained in conservatories or by composition teachers.

These days there is a compositional smörgåsbord of 'respectable' styles and techniques, so composers can follow a path that may be closer to their heart than their intellectual prowess. In general, anything now goes (even Eric Whitacre being given valuable airtime to voice his...ahem...considered opinions on Schoenberg).

[salymap]

Too bitty in both sound and picture for me, although I enjoyed it. Perhaps material for two programmes and surely made for the US market.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I do think some composers are guilty of having written music which kowtowed to the fashions of the day (e.g. serialism in the 50s and 60s) in order to garner respectability - much of it no doubt ingrained in conservatories or by composition teachers.

But 'twere ever thus! Think of all the British Music written between 1920 - 1960 that "kowtows" to the RVW (or, alternatively, Les Six) "fashion", or all the contemporaries of Ravel and Debussy in France, or all the mini-Hindemiths and the stale loaves of the sub-Boulangeries! And, to be fair, some not half-decent Music can result.

The figures who matter most (to most people for the most time) are the ones who either create "the fashions of the day"(rather than "kowtowing" to them) or those who plough their own furrow regardless of how out-of-step with "fashion" this might seem to others.

[aeolium]

The figures who matter are the ones who either create "the fashions of the day"(rather than "kowtowing" to them) or those who plough their own furrow regardless of how out-of-step with "fashion" this might seem to others.

There are plenty of figures who matter to me who were neither creators of fashions of the day nor necessarily out of step with contemporary fashion yet had their own individual voice. Also you could argue that without an established musical style it would not be possible even for the revolutionary originators like Beethoven to create what they did, and therefore even the 'foot-soldiers' of music matter.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

There are plenty of figures who matter to me who were neither creators of fashions of the day nor necessarily out of step with contemporary fashion yet had their own individual voice.

You are quite right - there was an unpleasant suggestion that other figures didn't "matter" in my clumsy original which I certainly didn't intend (as I hope is suggested by the "some not half-decent Music" comment) and which I have amended.

What I was hoping to pick up was Boilk's idea of the "guilt" of some composers' "kowtowing" to fashionable trends, and the suggestion that this was a particularly "post WW2" Musical phenomenon. I think this is a timeless state of affairs.

[aeolium]

[Ian]

What I was hoping to pick up was Boilk's idea of the "guilt" of some composers' "kowtowing" to fashionable trends, and the suggestion that this was a particularly "post WW2" Musical phenomenon. I think this is a timeless state of affairs.

There was a time when “kowtowing” to fashionable trends wouldn’t have been that different to “kowtowing” to popular trends. Of course, it is more likely that composers were excited by these trends rather than cowered by them - which the term kowtowing implies.

In the second half of the the last century ‘the fashion of the day” referred to here was financed by state and institutional (including academic) subsidy and, if anything, positioned itself in opposition to popular culture. Whether or not composers “kowtowed” is not something any of us can really ever know given the complexity of human motivation - and the fact that composers are hardly likely to admit it even if they were following the line of least resistance.

[Boilk]

What I was hoping to pick up was Boilk's idea of the "guilt" of some composers' "kowtowing" to fashionable trends, and the suggestion that this was a particularly "post WW2" Musical phenomenon. I think this is a timeless state of affairs.

I'm not suggesting that the composers themselves felt any guilt! Only that I have found some of them 'guilty'. Irrespective of how good the music was or wasn't, would Stravinsky and Copland (to name but two) have "gone serial" in later life if Schoenberg hadn't invented a 12-note technique? For many composers it seems as if serialism was de rigueur in the 50s and 60s.
Stravinsky, of course, certainly didn't need anyone's approval, but Copland was less self-confident and did somewhat dry up creatively in the later decades.

[ferneyhoughgeliebte]

I'm not suggesting that the composers themselves felt any guilt! Only that I have found some of them 'guilty'.

I don't understand your choice/use of the word "guilt".

Irrespective of how good the music was

But the whole point, as far as I'm concerned, is that "Good Music" is its own "justification" - indeed, I find the suggestion that it should seek "justification" rather bizarre.

would Stravinsky and Copland (to name but two) have "gone serial" in later life if Schoenberg hadn't invented a 12-note technique?

I really don't know how to understand this question, Boilk.

For many composers it seems as if serialism was de rigueur in the 50s and 60s.

True; just as "Impressionism" seems de rigeur with many composers in the '90s & '00s - or Neoclassicism in the '20s & '30s - or Wagnerianism in the '80s & '90s - or Minimalism in the later '80s & '90s. 'Twere ever thus!

Just as many other composers in all these periods whose work remained untouched by the prevailing trends: Xenakis, Ligeti, Carter, Birtwistle, Lutoslawski, Cage and Feldman to name just a few composers who never used serialism in their mature works of the '50s & '60s, for instance. This, again is nothing new.

I'm not disagreeing with your idea that there are "fellow-travellers" of an Artistic movement, just with your singling out Serialism as somehow particularly pernicious in this respect. As far as I'm concerned, the achievement of Moses und Aron, of the Requiem Canticles, of Pli selon Pli, of Gruppen, of Philomel amongst dozens of other masterworks that set my pulse racing just to think about them, is cause enough for rejoicing.

You might call it my "guilty pleasure"!

[Serial_Apologist]

Stuckenschmidt's (and for all my little reading knows, others') chronicling of Schoenberg's compositional evolution would appear to reveal that AS arrived at his own 12-tone method as a consequence of following the inner consequences of having shaken off the residues of post-Wagnerian, post-Brahmsian harmonic thinking over a period predating even the abandonment of tonality in the "Hanging Gardens" song cycle of 1908. Growing preponderance of notes "foreign to the prevailing key", coupled with greater concision, occasioned initially by Schoenberg's turn to a more compressed form of expression, and later by the need he felt to apply formally cohering principles to wayward gestures inspired by inner feelings previously unexpressed by tonal means, led to the discovery that he had been building micro-complexes which figured more of the total chromatic, both vertically and horizontally, without fewer pitch repetitions, spontaneously. From this, as he said, came the idea of serial pitch ordering, and he found himself able, as he said to a friend, to compose with the same spontaneity that he had felt in his youth.

I think there is ample evidence, both from what one has read, but also from the idiomatic consistency marking the later, more formalised "free atonal" works such as "Pierrot Lunaire", and early serial compositions such as the "Serrenade" Op 23, to suggest a "natural" evolution from the one state to the other. One might go further in suggesting that the "naturalness" of the step was also evidenced in the closeness of evolution in both Schoenberg's and Webern's works around the years 1921-24 was such that Third Viennese School scholars have found considerable difficulty in determining who achieved what first. Was Webern ahead of Schoenberg?

The point about serialism's fashionability revolves around the question of at what point harmonic thinking needed to be reached in any composer's work for any transition from free chromatic to serially-determined to become a genuine aesthetic choice, i.e. one arising "spontaneously" out of the evolutionary context and stage reached. One could imagine composers close, or drawn ever closer to thinking naturally outwith the diatonic system, which might have included (outside the 3rd Vienese School circle) Bartok, Szymanowski, Hindemith, Zemlinsky, Bridge and even Weill at certain not necessarily overlapping stages chronologically, geographically, and/or historically, slipping into a serial mode of thinking their music, were all things equal, whereas with others outwith the Austro-German tradition such as Dallapiccola, a more drastic kind of overhauling of their previous mode of expression had to be involved. Difficult though it is for a non-musician such as myself to conceive the mental processes thereby involved, amounting seemingly almost to some kind of spiritual conversion, it goes (for me) without saying that atonality in itself expanded the expressive means and then formal options open to music - one of which, while not inevitable, was preordaining the ordering of atonal pitch material; "second generation" serialists such as Lutyens and Searle spoke of applying such disciplines freeing them from ingrained habits of musical thought and expectation, and one has to ask oneself, what this so very different from the "shock" of the new represented by the "usurping" of the old church modes by just the major/minor diatonics at the turn of the Renaissance? - and we can see where that led!

[Roehre]

Stuckenschmidt's (and for all my little reading knows, others') chronicling of Schoenberg's compositional evolution would appear to reveal that AS arrived at his own 12-tone method as a consequence of following the inner consequences of having shaken off the residues of post-Wagnerian, post-Brahmsian harmonic thinking over a period predating even the abandonment of tonality in the "Hanging Gardens" song cycle of 1908. Growing preponderance of notes "foreign to the prevailing key", coupled with greater concision, occasioned initially by Schoenberg's turn to a more compressed form of expression, and later by the need he felt to apply formally cohering principles to wayward gestures inspired by inner feelings previously unexpressed by tonal means, led to the discovery that he had been building micro-complexes which figured more of the total chromatic, both vertically and horizontally, without fewer pitch repetitions, spontaneously. From this, as he said, came the idea of serial pitch ordering, and he found himself able, as he said to a friend, to compose with the same spontaneity that he had felt in his youth.

I think there is ample evidence, both from what one has read, but also from the idiomatic consistency marking the later, more formalised "free atonal" works such as "Pierrot Lunaire", and early serial compositions such as the "Serenade" Op 23, to suggest a "natural" evolution from the one state to the other. One might go further in suggesting that the "naturalness" of the step was also evidenced in the closeness of evolution in both Schoenberg's and Webern's works around the years 1921-24 was such that Second Viennese School scholars have found considerable difficulty in determining who achieved what first. Was Webern ahead of Schoenberg?

The point about serialism's fashionability revolves around the question of at what point harmonic thinking needed to be reached in any composer's work for any transition from free chromatic to serially-determined to become a genuine aesthetic choice, i.e. one arising "spontaneously" out of the evolutionary context and stage reached. One could imagine composers close, or drawn ever closer to thinking naturally outwith the diatonic system, which might have included (outside the 2nd Vienese School circle) Bartok, Szymanowski, Hindemith, Zemlinsky, Bridge and even Weill at certain not necessarily overlapping stages chronologically, geographically, and/or historically, slipping into a serial mode of thinking their music, were all things equal, whereas with others outwith the Austro-German tradition such as Dallapiccola, a more drastic kind of overhauling of their previous mode of expression had to be involved. Difficult though it is for a non-musician such as myself to conceive the mental processes thereby involved, amounting seemingly almost to some kind of spiritual conversion, it goes (for me) without saying that atonality in itself expanded the expressive means and then formal options open to music - one of which, while not inevitable, was preordaining the ordering of atonal pitch material; "second generation" serialists such as Lutyens and Searle spoke of applying such disciplines freeing them from ingrained habits of musical thought and expectation, and one has to ask oneself, what this so very different from the "shock" of the new represented by the "usurping" of the old church modes by just the major/minor diatonics at the turn of the Renaissance? - and we can see where that led!

Webern was ahead of Schönberg in reaching atonality: The string quartet M.79 (with the Jakob Böhme motto) predates opus 10 by nearly a year. Schönberg did define the dodecaphony, but Webern may intuitively applied dodecaphony at approximately the same time.