source file: mills2.txt Date: Fri, 5 Jan 1996 14:16:09 -0800 From: "John H. Chalmers" From: mclaren Subject: novelty, craftsmanship and microtonality --- Among its many blessings, musical modernism bequeathed post-1945 composers the freedom to explore new musical forms and new musical languages. Among its many sins, musical modernism elevated novelty as sole yardstick of musical value. Like Marxism, musical modernism is now defunct. Each ideology discredited itself after failing its promise to engineer the ultimate state of human affairs. In the case of Marxism, history had reached its end...or so its followers were told. Any day, "real soon now," world communism would produce a workers' paradise. Similarly, in the case of musical modernism, musical history supposedly ended in the 1920s with Schoenberg's invention of the tone row and the various fetishes concocted by post-Webern serialism. After 1930, (according to the modernists) no further musical evolution was possible. All future serious music, from 1930 until the end of time, could consist only of successively more subtle refinements of serial atonal technique. (Some would call them successively more bizarre perversions of the basic fetish, but this is a matter of terminology. Whether one calls one's attire "a stylish informal outfit" or "leather S&M bondage gear" depends on one's point of view.] Of course the existence of *this* microtonal tuning forum disproves musical modernism's claims. If 12-tone serialism was in fact the beginning and end of all musical wisdom, why did subsequent generations of composers bother to reach outside the 12 sacred tones? After all, serial atonality stood at the very apex of musical evolution-- so any deviation from that orthodoxy constituted a fall from grace. Microtonality can only be viewed by the modernists as, in John Cage's words, "just another wing on the chapel," one of the most breathtakingly short-sighted faux pas by a Zen master of short-sightedness. Thus anything other than the standard 12 tones per octave constitutes a debased state of musical practice, according to the Holy Writ brought down from Mount Princeton by Milton Babbitt and his toadies. This, of course, shows up one of the most glaring flaws of modernist dogma: in idolizing novelty for its own sake, modernism creates a self-destructive paradox. To wit: if it's the ultimate endpoint of musical evolution, then any other kind of music cannot be taken seriously. But if novelty is the exclusive measure of musical value, then music MUST constantly change in order to be taken seriously. Thus modernism demands that, in order to measure up, new music simultaneously remain the same and constantly change. Since this is obviously impossible, modernist music faced irreconcilable internal conflicts. One harks back to the berserk computers in old Star Trek episodes: "ERROR! ERROR! ILLOGICAL! ERROR!" There remains the question of which of the three tenets of musical modernism can be salvaged for future generations of composers--if indeed *any* of its tenets can be salvaged. The existence of this forum would tend to undermine the odd notion that there is something sacred about the number 12 when applied to divisions of the octave. The whole idea is reminiscent of those alleged "666"s in the Procter & Gamble's logo. But what about the value of atonal serialism, and of using novelty as the exclusive basis for judging the quality of new music? Like most late 20th-century trends, the reaction against serialism has gone overboard. Some excellent serial music was composed early in this century--almost all of it prior to 1945. Perhaps with a reduction in the total number of tones (Schoenberg's first serial composition used 11 out of 12) or a change to new tuning sytems, or the separation of the yoked requirements of atonality and serialism (in 19-tone equal temperament, for instance, a 12-tone serial row can modulate from one key center to another--see M. Joel Mandelbaum's Prelude No. VI, 1961) serialism will provide a useful direction for future composers. This leaves the question of using novelty as a yardstick for quality. By itself, novelty is a dead end. One of the most peculiar and interesting experiences I've had recently is in making up a computer hard disk file of 3 CD recordings interleaved at random. The three compostions are the second movement of Schoenberg's "Five Orchestral Pieces" from 1915, Stockhausen's "Gruppen" from 1958 and Elliott Carter's "Orchestral Variations" from 1989. Each of these compositions was created about 30-40 years apart, yet the overall effect of listening to them is that they're basically the same piece of music. This illuminates the paradox of using novelty as the standard for judging new music. After a generation of trying all possible new combinations of instruments and musical structures, new music got caught in a rut. Very quickly all possible wacky schemes for generating new shock-value stunts are used up: scraping phono cartridges, shooting a machine gun at a piece of manuscipt paper, rolling naked women in paint on a graphic score, performing a score without sound so that only the finger-clicks of the woodwinds and rustle of string players' sleeves make noise; composing huge textural pieces in which every piece in the orchestra perforrms a different melody, notating impossible-to-play solo instrumental pieces with far too many embedded tuplets and extended techniques for humans to perform; ad nauseum. Wjether it's whipped cream and hamsters, or flipping coins and burning pianos...the whole sorry spectacle tends to blur after a while. After a few years, every possible three-card musical monte trick that could be tried *had* been tried. Thereafter, so-called "serious" modern composers ran up against the limits of the human perceptual system. While they continued to produce music that *looked* ever more complex on paper, to the human ear it *sounded* the same as last week's purportedly "breakthrough" new composition, and as next week's supposedly "groundbreaking" new composition, because the human perceptual system had saturated. Beyond a certain level of complexity, all those notes lumped into a big random glob; beyond a certain level of rhythmic subtlety, all the embedded n-tuplets sounded like a Parkinson's patient playing "chopsticks." Thus novelty (paradoxically) when pushed to its outermost limit forced modern composers away from so many perceptible and comprehensible musical structures that the only structures and techniques left were imperceptible. The result? Random-sounding junk. This is the state at which so-called "serious" composers (most of whose compositions could not be taken seriously) had arrived by the late 70s, and it is also the reason for the existence of this tuning forum. As a result, novelty is not a useful yardstick of compositional value. Any more than the length of a composition is useful as a measure of value... Other measures of compositional quality must be found. I would suggest craftsmanship and competence, at the risk of being burned at the stake--since these values are even more discredited nowadays than atonal serialism. As witness young composers like Alison Cameron--folks with plenty of raw musical talent who haven't yet mastered elementary musical skills like learning when to take a breath (metaphorically speaking), or constructing a musically interesting dramtic arc... Much less the arcane and forgotten art of counterpoint. Oddly, although serialism and atonality have been completely devalued by the doyens of today's musical avant garde, most composers who call themselves post-modernists still worship at the musty altar of novelty and still obsess over the length of their compositions. This is true even in microtonality, and it's proven a real surprise to me. More than one person has dismissed this or that just intonation composition on the grounds that "it's just another 7-limit piece," or "it's just another example of 13-limit." We who compose outside the 12 tone scale should take note (all puns intended) of this lamentable trend and be on our guard against it. Just as novelty was ultimately self-destructive and trivializing when misused as a measure of musical quality, it is equally self- destructive when applied as the gauge of a microtonal composition's worth. One of the greatest sins of musical modernism was the devaluation of basic competence in favor of stunts and scams. This ultimately led to the eradication of a whole spectrum of basic skills from an entire generation of composers. Until the recent advent of the MAX composition language and the widespread use of MIDI in post-modern music, counterpoint was a lost art among modern computer composers. (With notable exceptions: Lansky, Schottstaedt, et alii.) The ability to write an interesting melody, add another equally interesting melody on top of it, turn them both upside down and add another interesting melody on top, then reverse the whole front-to-back and add another interesting melody on top, ad infinitum... This is a forgotten skill. Just as few post-modern artists have any aptitude at draughtsmanship because drawing is no longer emphasized in modern art classes, today's generation of composers have virtually no skill at counterpoint-- because it is a subject no longer emphasized in modern music classes. Instead, elaborate formal methods are the focus of contemporary composition courses-- beginning (naturally) with pitch class matrix trivia and progressing through ever-more-convoluted, ever-more-novel algorithmic contortions. (I should add here that the current species counterpoint exercises used in composition classes are not only useless in teaching real-world contrapuntal skills, but probably destructive. Students get the idea that counterpoint is a dusty 16th- century academic exercise without redeeming practical value; the only way to *truly* teach counterpoint is to require students to compose *real* pieces of music using the techniques perfected in the era of ars subtilitas. Since few music teachers are nowadays qualified to do this, it's hardly any surprise that counterpoint is a lost art. After all--how many of today's music professors can even *pronounce* "ars subtilitas," much less demonstrate expertly the contrapuntal techniques perfected in that era?) I have not addressed the question of serial counterpoint as such since with more than two widely-separated notes serial counterpoint is neither interesting nor perceptible, and thus cannot be said to exist save in an abstract sense. To his great credit, Webern understood this; the bulk of his middle-to-late works use no more than two notes (lines) at once. To their great discredit, subsequent generations of serialists ignored this lesson. For proof of my contention one need look no farther than the alleged compositions of John Cage, John Corigliano, Brian Ferneyhough and Larry Austin. These duffers demonstrate a complete lack of contrapuntal skills--indeed, their level of contrapuntal ability is so remedial as to embarrass even a junior high school student. Fortunately, MIDI and MAX have radically changed the character of avant garde. Music and composers of more recent vintage are beginning to discover that some rudiments of contrapuntal craftsmanship are helpful when algorithmically combining separate melodic strata. Oddly enough, formal gyrations and contortions with this or that fractal or this or that chaotic attractor do not suffice to produce interesting melodies combined and manipulated in interesting ways. Gosh... What a shock, eh? In the same way, the extinction of the short composition is a trend much to be lamented. Indeed, short pieces of music survive nowadays only as commissions for large orchestra--the truism being that if you compose anything too long and too hard, it will take more than 1 rehearsal to learn and the orchestra won't play it properly as its one and only public performance. The idea that a 2-minute composition is inherently less "weighty" or less "substantial" than a 2-hour composition is a bizarre notion, and one I'm at a loss to explain. One would expect that the collapse of the romantic-composer-as-titan myth would also have discredited enormous complex multi-hour-long pieces of new music as the ultimate ideal for the po-mo composer... But no. Oddly enough, po-mo compositions seem to have suffered *more* hypertrophy of late, rather than *less*-- po-mo works have grown even *more* Wagnerian as the 20th century winds to a close. Thus Stockhausen's wacky unlistenable multi- day-long opera "Licht," LaMonte Young's preposterous day-long drones, and the rest of the sorry spectacle of longer-is-better snore-a-thons. The idea that a 2- or 3-minute-long composition isn't a serious piece of music seems to have taken root even in this tuning forum. Amazing! It's a weird and outlandish delusion... According to this off-kilter topsy-turvy logic, Bach's inventions aren't "real music," they're just "sketches" or "demonstrations." This is a concept so strange that it just bounces off my brain...I cannot imagine the hebephrenic state in which such a conclusion makes sense. The quality of a composition depends, one would expect, on the quality of the compostioin... not on its tuning, its length, its instrumentation, or any other incidental factor. It seems to me that this is an especially mischievious misconception, and one against which we must be ever-vigiliantly on guard. Particularly in the case of microtonal compositions. With so many tunings to explore, xenharmonic composers are especially liable to produce many short compositions rather than a few long ones. ("So many tunings...so little time.") Thus the pathological and fetishistic worship of sheer length--the more minutes, the better the piece--is particuarly pernicious when misguidedly applied to microtonality. --mclaren Received: from eartha.mills.edu [144.91.3.20] by vbv40.ezh.nl with SMTP-OpenVMS via TCP/IP; Sat, 6 Jan 1996 06:20 +0100 Received: from by eartha.mills.edu via SMTP (940816.SGI.8.6.9/930416.SGI) for id VAA19051; Fri, 5 Jan 1996 21:20:24 -0800 Date: Fri, 5 Jan 1996 21:20:24 -0800 Message-Id: <960106001847_33235881@mail04.mail.aol.com> Errors-To: madole@ella.mills.edu Reply-To: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Originator: tuning@eartha.mills.edu Sender: tuning@eartha.mills.edu