Audiences hate modern classical music because their brains cannot cope

[Franco]

Philip Ball, author of The Music Instinct, has drawn on the latest scientific findings from neuroscientists to show structure and patterns in music are a fundamental part of musical enjoyment.

He said: "Many people still seem to find modern classical music challenging. If that is the case, then they can relax as it is challenging for a good reason and it is not because they are in some way too musically stupid to appreciate it.

"The brain is a pattern seeking organ, so it looks for patterns in music to make sense of what we hear. The music of Bach, for example, embodies a lot of the pattern forming process.

"Some of the things that were done by those composers such as Schoenberg undermined this cognitive aid for making music easier to understand and follow. Schoenberg's music became fragmented which makes it harder for the brain to find structure.

"That isn't to say, of course, that it is impossible to listen to, it is just harder work. It would be wrong to dismiss such music as a racket."

RTRH

[Florestan]

Audiences hate modern classical music because their brains cannot cope

Crap!

Mr Ball believes that many traditional composers such as Mozart, Bach and Beethoven subconsciously followed strict musical formula to produce music that was easy on the ear by ensuring it contained patterns that could be picked out by the brain.

More crap!

[karlhenning]

Testify, Andrei!

[Opus106]

Crap!

The state of newspaper headlines all over the world.

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

As so often happens, the cited expert is more nuanced than the headline would suggest:

"That isn't to say, of course, that it is impossible to listen to, it is just harder work. It would be wrong to dismiss such music as a racket."

He's right, isn't he?

[Franco]

Actually, in reading a review of the book (a different article in the same edition of the Telegraph) it sounded somewhat interesting. 

The real subject of the book is not why audiences do not take to atonal music.

[Florestan]

The first sentence is a sweeping generalization: "audiences" (which ones?) "hate" (oh really?) "modern classical music" (oxymoron notwithstanding, Bartok, Enescu or Prokofiev are just as modern as Schoenberg or Webern, yet their musical idioms are a world apart) "because their brains can't cope" (oh yes, they are genetically programmed morons).

The second sentence adds sheer nonsense to sweeping generalization: "Bach, Mozart and Beethoven subconsciously" (forget about the creative personality of an artist, everything boils down to subconsciousness) "followed strict musical formula" (oh yes, Beethoven is the epitome of formulaic music, while Schoenberg is the champion of free expression) "to produce music that was easy on the ear" (The Art of Fugue, anyone? Too many notes, Mozart!, anyone? Eroica or The Great Fugue, anyone?) ""by ensuring" (ensuring implies purpose and intention, and as such it can't be subconscious) "it contained patterns that could be picked out by the brain. " (sure, Mozart was the founder of neuroscience).

As I said: crap!

[Florestan]

The state of newspaper headlines all over the world.

[karlhenning]

"That isn't to say, of course, that it is impossible to listen to, it is just harder work. It would be wrong to dismiss such music as a racket."

He's right, isn't he?

This is pretty bad, actually.  Two elements are the soft bigotry of double-negatives . . . don't say it's impossible to listen to! . . don't dismiss it as a racket!

The third element is in affirmative voice, but at a 87% derogatory angle:  It's harder to listen to.  What, for everyone?  And, why does this matter?  Is music a labor-saving device?  (Well, for some listeners, yes . . . .)

And, as Andrei points out, as a sweeping generality, it is ultra-piffle.

[some guy]

Interesting how ahistorical such studies are, or at least how ahistorical the conclusions are, and how ahistorical discussions about "modern" music continue to be.

Audiences started to hate modern classical music, noticably and with malice aforethought, around 1810, and really hated it (contents of "it" different by then) by 1860. By then, audiences hated anything new, both avant garde and the consciously regressive. Writing like Mozart in the mid nineteenth century got you nowhere. (Writing like Brahms or even Sibelius in the early 21st century gets you everywhere!!)

The reasons for the hate were many and various, and none of them had to do (or maybe I should say "few of them had to do") with their brains being unable to cope. Besides, look at the modern music that people were hating then. Aside from the stuff that's disappeared, this is Schumann and Liszt and Wagner, folks like that. Bread and butter to today's listener, and apparently just chock-full of patterns to recognize.

Otherwise, I want to point out in regard to this thread's title, that Mr. Ball concluded in his study that listeners do NOT have trouble because their brains cannot cope!! ("...it is not because they are in some way too musically stupid to appreciate it.) That's the assertion we should be/could be talking about! [As Karl just did in the post that appeared while I was writing this.]

[karlhenning]

I do enjoy Vivaldi, his music doesn't demand any of my attention . . . .

[Cato]

My daughter sent me the article some days ago, and I just did not have the time to start a topic.

The ultimate point is that any "patternizing" imposed by the brain is subjective, and yes, takes concentration!  Poor babies!   

I was reminded of a book by a certain Professor William Thomson called Schoenberg's Error.

You can sample it here:

http://www.questia.com/library/book/schoenbergs-error-by-william-thomson.jsp

And you thought Schoenberg had not made any errors at all!

[karlhenning]

. . . And you thought Schoenberg had not made any errors at all!

Well, he caught most of them in the galleys . . . .

[Superhorn]

   I suppose it's human nature for people to often be hostile to things that are new and unfamiliar. It's no different in music. 
  It's not only modern music. Some one who is altogether unfamiliar with classical music will often rect with incomprehension and hostility to it.
  Also, people like what they are famiiar with, and often don't want to try something new, not only in music. 
  In my classical music appreciation class at a nursing home in New Rochelle, there's one lady who loves classical music, and her favorite composer is Rachmaninov, especially his piano concertos. She also loves Tchaikovsky and 19th century Romatic music in general.
  She absolutely hates anything "modern", and sometimes walks out on me,unlike the other members of my group.
  She doesn't even like Mahler!  If I play anything by Prokofiev,Shostakovich, Bartok, etc, she can't stand it.
Once,I played the very entertaining Khatchaturian piano concerto, not a difficult piece to listen to at all, and she hated it and called it"atonal, even though it's no more atonal than Brahms.  I explained to her that it's in the unusual key of D falt major.
The other listeners are always much more willing to try unfamiliar works, and I try to provide as much variety as possible.
Recently,I played the Schoenberg concerto first, and then the Rachmaninov 2nd piano concerto, which is one of her favorites. I tried to explain that this was like eating your vegetables first,and then having desert! Every one laughed! Of course, this lady did not like the Scheonberg, but was delighted to hear the Rachmaninov.

[karlhenning]

   I suppose it's human nature for people to often be hostile to things that are new and unfamiliar. It's no different in music. 
  It's not only modern music. Some one who is altogether unfamiliar with classical music will often rect with incomprehension and hostility to it.
  Also, people like what they are famiiar with, and often don't want to try something new, not only in music.

If you want to make enemies, try to change something.

[Brahmsian]

    I tried to explain that this was like eating your vegetables first,and then having desert! Every one laughed!

Some people don't actually like sweets, and are on a steady diet of veggies. 

[Superhorn]

  How do you like my new horn avatar?

[Brahmsian]

  How do you like my new horn avatar?

Sweet! 

[some guy]

I suppose it's human nature for people to often be hostile to things that are new and unfamiliar.

Are you saying I'm not human?

[Brian]

CAUTION: LONG BUT FASCINATING POST

The German newspaper Die Zeit published a more nuanced and much more interesting article on a similar subject several months ago. Near the end, it also presents a fascinating idea for the presentation of new music to audiences.

Here is a translation to English by my father, for me:

Too Crooked for Our Brains

New Music is hard work.  Neuroscientists and musical scientists research, why the sounds of Schőnberg, Stockhausen, and Cage only appeal to a tiny minority.
Christoph Drősser
Die Zeit, October 15, 2009 Issue
This translation was done on the plane and at DFW, so don't expect too high quality.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the composer Arnold Schőnberg is supposed to have said that in 50 years, people would be whistling his music on the streets.  This hope was not without foundation: revolutionaries such as Beethoven ran at first into incomprehension and rejection, before the Ode to Joy became a worldwide hit.  But Schőnberg has been dead for 58 years, and his twelve tone series have no more found their way into popular culture than the electronic experiments of Karlheinz Stockhausen or the sound collages of Pierre Henry.

New Music has gotten old in loneliness, and the contemporaries of "contemporary classical music" are slowly dying off.  The tiny audiences for New Music, who often only come to the concert because it is part of a series, often sits in incomprehension before this music.  Almost everyone knows the "Hurz" sketch by Hape Kerkeling, who makes fun of the deep divide between musicians and the public, which apparently accepts any nonsense as art.

The situation is completely different in contemporary art and sculpture: it is also often inaccessible, experimental, absurd, and ready to break every convention, but the museums of modern art are overrun with visitors.  What is different about contemporary classical music?

This weekend (the paper is dated 15 October 2009) this question will be discussed in Kempten in Allgäu – with participation of science.  At the Zeitklänge-Festival (roughly Time Sound or Contemporary Sound) they will play new music, and in parallel musical scientists, brain researchers, and philosophers will give their views of the phenomenon.  And in fact, new research results can contribute to the clarification of the question.

Unlike what one might perhaps expect, in these debates the absolute characteristics of music are rarely discussed, for example, whether modern sounds are "dissonant" or "not harmonic".  This isn't adequate, and suffers from the fact that consonance and dissonances are difficult to define.  Since the time of Pythagoras, people have attempted to define desirable musical sounds in terms of integer multiples of frequencies, but this effort is doomed to failure already for mathematical reasons.  After all, cultures outside of Europe show that our Western tone scale is by no means a fundamental natural law, nor is harmony based on sharp and flat.  Indonesian Gamelan music and Indian Raga scales sound wrong to European ears.

Only in recent years have the German researchers Gerald Langner and Martin Ebeling developed a complicated mathematical theory of consonance that can be tested against actual events in the brain.  "But even if you apply this consonance theory, modern music is not ad absurdum", says the musical scientist Herbert Bruhn from Flensburg.  Babies do show a preference for desirable sounds, but in the course of our lives we also listen with pleasure to music with dissonance such as Bach's harmonic games or the sometimes crooked sound painting of the Romantic era.  The researchers are astonished, how plastic our brains are.  The brain can "tune in to" the most different musical styles, and it changes constantly in the course of doing so.

The brain researchers have two explanations for this apparent variety: the first is "statistical learning", in which we pick up different musical styles in a similar way to learning a new language.  The second explanation lies in the game of fulfilling or disappointing expectations, a game which Homo sapiens apparently enjoys greatly.

Statistical learning happens when we extract rules and structure out of sensual impressions, without having anyone expressly explain them.  A small child learning to talk has no other choice: he has to distill out of the spoken sounds that stream into him, those that belong to his mother tongue (German has a different supply of phonemes than English).  The next step is to divide the continuous stream of sounds into sensible sections, such as syllables, words, and sentences.  Our brains do this automatically, in that it prefers those sounds and combinations that it hears especially often.

This is exactly how we learn music.  At first, we isolate out of the many possible tonal scales the one that dominates in our culture.  This becomes a preference that we can hardly escape from.  The brain is especially good at noticing small melodic elements – a musical phrase – which occurs again later in the piece.  The recognition of repetition is an experience of success that lets us understand the music.

It is precisely these experiences of success that New Music denies the listener.  The twelve tone composers who followed Schőnberg demand for example that in a so-called series all twelve tones of the western scale must be used before the first tone can be repeated.  Then the series is shifted by a couple of notes, played backwards, or played in mirror image.  It is quite a task to recognize such figures.  It is not just like remembering a 12 digit phone number, but also to recognize it when it is repeated with four added to each digit.  Psychological experiments have shown that only very experienced fans of this musical genre who have spent years on the task are able to do this.  The short term memory of most people is simply overwhelmed.

Eckart Altenműller or the college of music and theater in Hannover describes the paradox of New Music: "We can understand New Music better, if we listen to it more often – but it is composed in such a way that most people are not attracted to listen more often."  Specialists often do not understand why the public reacts with rejection, since their own brains have long since become trained to recognize the corresponding musical rules.

Do Schőnberg, Stockhausen & Co. leave us cold because we have been calibrated to simple musical rules by children's songs and radio pop music?  This alone cannot provide an explanation.  There are other highly complex musical directions, from Bach's fugues to modern jazz, which sound foreign at first, but are sufficiently fascinating that many people are attracted to them.  Why doesn't New Music manage it?  Here the game of expectations plays a role.  Our brains get great pleasure from the expectation game, and modern composers systematically make it difficult for the brain.

Music takes place in time.  Therefore, we apply our "future sense" to music, as the musical psychologist David Huron puts it.  In our evolution, it was important to be able to constantly predict the future from the present.  The person who recognized that a certain sound in the bushes meant that a saber tooth tiger was about to pounce, found it easier to avoid being eaten.  The better a person could predict the future, the better his chances of survival.  This is why we are calmed and satisfied, when our predictions prove true, and we are upset, sometimes even panicked, when our predictions go wrong. Music, Huron says, is a sort of dry run for this sense of the future.  With music we sharpen our ability to predict, without having to fear serious consequences if we fail.  A musical surprise does not induce panic, but it still registers in brain signals.  The musical researcher Stefan Koelsch, who now teaches in Brighton, proved at the Max Planck Institute for Cognitive and Neurosciences in Leipzig that even small violations of musical "grammar" lead to measureable brain activity – even in people who consider themselves not interested in music.

Interesting music is characterized by satisfying our sense of the future on the one hand, but then frequently intentionally violating it and thus creating excitement and tension.  Completely predictable music is boring, while completely unpredictable notes are not even recognized as music, but rather only as strange sounds – and nobody has fun with that.  "We cannot make music", writes David Huron, "that does not stimulate the machinery of human pleasure, and expect that people will in some mysterious way find the music irresistible."

"I also get goose bumps, when I recognize a twelve-tone series again"

Precisely this "pleasure principle" was for many modern composers a thorn in the eye, especially for the philosopher Theodor W. Adorno, who made a name for himself as a musical theorist.  He hated everything beautiful and pleasing in music, he condemned (without qualification) the emotionality of jazz music, and he expected continuous "innovation" from music. 

Modern music may fulfill these criteria without effort.  But is it in return intentionally without pleasure, simply an intellectual game?  Those who have made the effort to learn to listen can certainly be emotionally moved.  "I also get goose bumps, when I recognize a twelve-tone series again", says Eckart Altenműller.  "But this comes from decades of practice in New Music.  I wouldn't expect that of my secretary."  The secretary agrees unconditionally.

With their continual striving for innovation and for new sounds, composers leave the broad public behind – a bizarre characteristic of Western classical music.  In other cultures and in other styles of music, the existing is repeated in ever new variations, often with improvisatory elements.  In "serious" music there is an amazing contradiction: the music of the old masters from previous centuries is repeated again and again with exquisite precision, but if a modern composer were to use notes in the manner of Mozart, he would immediately be accused of kitsch.  "Mozart and Bach completely exhausted central European music", says Herbert Bruhn.  Since there is nothing more to add, one lands automatically in the world of experimental classical at some point, and experimental music sees itself obliged to dissolve all melodic and harmonic structures.

The British music scientist John Sloboda sees the reason for the poor acceptance of experimental music not just in the avant garde structures, but in the social interaction with the music.  Sloboda draws a comparison to modern art: in a museum the visitor can freely choose which picture to look at for how long, he can discuss it with friends or stop for a coffee to process his impressions.  "But if you go into a concert hall, it's like a prison".  The listener is stuck in a seat for hours, motionless and mute, while others determine the program.  "The modern public finds this unacceptable."

We look at abstract pictures – atonal music must also be seen

Can the form of the presentation perhaps help us to better hear the difficult to digest?  Sloboda tells enthusiastically about a very successful presentation of modern music in a museum in Manchester.  The listeners could wander between several rooms and stages, and only stayed if they felt really affected.  In this situation, emotions could freely flow between the musicians and the public.

Fans of new music like Altenműller say that a live experience contributes to the understanding of inaccessible sound worlds.  In a live presentation, an additional strength of our brain comes into play – empathy, the ability to put oneself into the world of feelings of another.  "Through expressions, posture, breathing and movement, in short by the actions of the interpreter (musician) who is dealing with the music", the piece becomes comprehensible.  Herbert Bruhn agrees: "I won't listen to this music on CD – the eye has to listen along".