The Crisis of Tonality

[mc ukrneal]

It seems so simple to me, but it's apparently almost impossible for some people to imagine that anything they dislike can be genuinely liked by someone else.

I think many of us think we are more expert in matters of taste then we really are. And secretly (meaning we think it, but dont usually say it), we often look down on others (putting it nicely) for their sense of taste (or style). It is a difficult decision to step back from one's current point of view and allow it to be changed. Some have a harder time than others. Others feel threatened, because they think a challenge to their taste/opinion is a challenge to them personally (their opinions are not separated from their self worth). And it can be hard to understand why something you detest with all your being would be embraced by someone else with all their being.

As a kid, I always remember consciously telling myself to be flexible and open to new thoughts, because I didn't want to be like someone I knew/had seen/was related to/etc. But not everyone values this so highly.

There is also the element of understanding something. If you study something (and truly begin to understand), you usually build some sort of appreciation for it, even if you continue to dislike it. This is the way it is for me with some composers or works of music, whether it be Schoenberg, Richard Strauss, or JS Bach (yes, that Bach). So I continue to listen to what I prefer, but with some pushing of boundries to keep me honest - and sometimes a door opens unexpectedly (a truly magical moment).

[Luke]

I know, this point has already been made, but it can cope with being made one more time...

That lie is from the Second Viennese School and their followers that everything tonal had already been written! 

There is still plenty of good music to be written in C Major

Could you be more wrong if you tried, Teresa? The lie, if there is one, is certainly yours. But I did like this quasi-scientific approach....

Perhaps less than one percent of all tonal music [h]as been composed

[Dax]

Along with my latest article
The near destruction of Classical Music by the Second Viennese School

In which you will find

Degeneracy applies to music as well, we used to have decency laws.  There is some music that is so degenerate that it should not exist.  Schoenberg's assault against the world of music should be banned, just the same is we ban child pornography, murder and other socially unacceptable behavior.  Why we tolerate this as a society I do not know.  Until such as time we as a society realize real freedom is not the freedom to be degenerate BUT the freedom from degeneracy.

Is anybody else reminded of a particular 20th century ideology here?

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

I'm all in favor of banning Schoenberg, since it will only promote interest in his music 

[jowcol]

Trying to avoid any sweeping value judgements here, but there is another potential issue I have is with the serialist approach is that there are some fundamental issues in the acoustics of sound, and intervals, which serialism tends to avoid.  One of the most basic is the "impurities" of the equal-tempered scale as opposed to the natural-tempered scale-- when one is looking at intervals from a purely acoustic approach. La Monte Young's interest in the natural-tempered scale was a clear example.

One of the issues I have serialism is that, to my uneducated ears, it even further messes with the acoustic principles which you bascially get (although not perfectly) in a diatonic scale on equal tempered instruments.

But I'm not knocking the value of the serialist school, just saying that it was not a panacea.

I'll currently on travel, but I'd like to pull some quotes by Schoenberg from the Fisk Anthology Composers on Music, if the *&%&%^!! at our library has returned the copy.  From my limited knowledge, Schoenberg reminds me of Miles Davis, is that several of his quotes seem to contradict others. 

As a fan of the minimalists, it's nice to know that they can raise the same amount of hackles as the 2nd Viennese school when it comes to many listeners.  It's the same pride I took in the albums I'd play to annoy my parents, or better yet, the yuppies next door in my Dorm during college.

Actually, Theresa, although you don't seem to care for the minimalist school (which doesn't hurt my feelings one bit-- ), they were ardent believers in tonality, and some of them tried to go back to some of the earliest principles.

As far as the 1 %, I think that is an overstatement.  The mathematical branching factor in music is so profound that, even in purely diatonic music with no accidentals and say, only quarter notes, the possible number of compositions that can be written is essentially limitless.

I love a lot of the same artists that Theresa does, and, most of the time, would rather listen to them than a Webern or a Chopin-- but I don't feed need to bash on the contributions of either one.  It's a big tent out there.  If music is love, I don't see having much time to hate.

My son plays cello, and keeps saying how all rap music is bad.  I tell him  that, although I haven't found a rap work that has really moved me, you can't dismiss an entire genre of music until you have really surveyed it.  There may be one out there I'll like.  I don't feel motivated to find it, but I hope my mind isn't closed if that one work ever crosses my path.

[jowcol]

I'm all in favor of banning Schoenberg, since it will only promote interest in his music 

LOL!  Wasn't he the one that bit the heads off of chickens at his concerts?

[Dax]

In the nineteenth century, composers started using increasingly prominent chromatic notes and modulating to ever more "distant" keys. Their musical language became increasingly rich and complex - you only need to try humming along to Beethoven's Grosse Fugue to realize that chromaticism had come a long way since Mozart. The result was that music began to feel less secure and stable, and it became harder for the listener to predict what will happen next. Many composers such as Schubert, Liszt and Chopin built on Beethoven's chromaticism, but it was Wagner - specifically with the opera Tristan und Isolde - who took tonality to the edge of breaking point, with music in which there are so many and such extreme modulations that it is very difficult to keep up. The famous "Tristan chord", the first chord heard in the prelude and the musical seed for much of the rest of the opera, is the ultimate paradigm of tonal ambiguity: each time it is used it can lead the music into one of many different keys, creating a sense of moving towards ever-shifting harmonic goalposts.

Wagner's precedent was taken up by many composers such as Strauss, whose musical language is characterized by unpredictable changes of key - one can feel almost musically sea-sick listening to Metamorphosen - and Mahler, who exploited large-scale tonal ambiguity and sometimes ended symphonies in different keys to which they had begun. But for Schoenberg and Debussy, Wagner's language represented only a starting point.

In the first decade of the twentieth century Schoenberg abandoned the chromatic Wagnerian tonality of Verklarte Nacht, described by one critic as sounding as though "someone had smeared the score of Tristan whilst the ink was still wet", and attempted to let his compositions flow directly from the subconscious. But before long he began to crave for a structural principle to replace tonality, which he eventually found in his twelve-tone techniques.

While Schoenberg deliberately exhausted and then abandoned tonality, Debussy took a more evolutionary approach, gradually dissolving traditional scales and harmony in a beguiling evocative soundworld. Instead of seeking a replacement for the goal-oriented structures of traditional tonal music, Debussy placed priority on the moment, making sensation as important as ongoing development. In pieces like Prelude a l'apres-midi d'un faune and his opera Pelleas et Melisande tonal scales and chords are present, but not consistently, and not used in a traditional way.

Perhaps it's one of the purposes of message boards such as this one to debunk such a tired, dated, over-generalised and "progressive" approach to music history. With stuff like this, one wonders where to start.

[quintett op.57]

just regretting Liszt is still regarded as a lesser composer.
Regarding tonality, his work is huge and various, especially at the end of his carrier.
Most of his contribution is often attributed to Wagner or Debussy instead.

[jowcol]

Is anybody else reminded of a particular 20th century ideology here?

"There is nothing quite as beautiful as the sight of a brightly burning book."
Walt Kelley, Pogo

[karlhenning]

LOL!  Wasn't he the one that bit the heads off of chickens at his concerts?

Bats.

[karlhenning]

I mean, does Sibelius have anything to say that wasn't said already by earlier romantics (much better, too)? Was Shostakovich any more than a fabricator, who constructed an imitative musical world with what material he'd pilfer from everyone else?

While I have to credit you with an original and interesting point of view, it actually is so shocking to me that I find it almost repellent.

Listen to the emotional arc of Sibelius' Sixth Symphony, from springlike freshness to false confidence to a nearly bottomless sense of loss, and try to find a predecessor who was able to speak these words. No, don't answer Tchaikovsky's Sixth; that is a symphony preoccupied from beginning to end with its own doom and utterly convinced of its tragedy. Sibelius' Sixth is the tragedy of a fresh-faced innocent climbing up out of the dregs and then, through forces beyond his power, falling back down again, despairing, friendless, and completely lost. It is the eager stranger in a new land which does not extend a welcome. It is Billy Budd; it is Ophelia; it is Emily Dickinson; it is Frederic Henry.

Listen to the fear within Sibelius' Fifth. What symphony expresses fear, and absence of self-confidence, like this one does? Each of the Sibelius symphonies are like human beings, fully formed, with majestically independent personalities. The Beethoven symphonies are like nine granite columns of the temple of humanity, essential parts of ourselves; the Brahms Fourth is a Shakespearean tragedy; the Schubert symphonies are Shakespearean comedies. The mature Sibelius symphonies are people. The Fifth person is deeply troubled - can we say he is deeply troubled by Schoenberg? I would argue yes. He is deeply troubled that the world is leaving him behind, that it has devolved into chaos in the form of World War I and in the form of atonalism. He flirts with submission and defeat: the bassoon solo in the first movement, a solo which for an agonizing moment surrenders to a music without direction, without fixed forms in the traditional ways.

The story of the Fifth Symphony is the story of a man trying to reassure himself. The initial climax is a reassurance; the transition between the two parts of the first movement is an attempt to cheer himself up and march toward a happy ending. The happy ending he does arrive at is too much, too forced. It's not honest. The slow movement betrays this. Even the finale betrays it: listen to the dissonant, disagreeable trombones right before the exultant final pre-silence chord. Was it painful reaching this conclusion? Yes; you can hear the pain in the silence.

Of course, we very plainly disagree. I don't think Sibelius, Shostakovich, Atterberg, the R. Strauss of Metamorphosen, Tubin, Dorman, Prokofiev, Barber, Bernstein, Poulenc, Milhaud, Bax, Rachmaninov, or Braga Santos were doing nothing but rehashing cliches. I don't think Schoenberg's twelve-tone music can be labelled romanticism in a way which is fair to both Schoenberg and romanticism. I think of Shostakovich as one of the Great composers; in fact, I often come close to considering him as important a voice as Beethoven or Bach, and by the end of my life will probably arrive at that conclusion and figure out why. I could talk about some works of Shostakovich, or Rachmaninov, but this post is long enough already.

Suffice to say that, in this man's view, many composers of the 20th century found ways to innovate, express new things, and reach new pinnacles of achievement without "following from Debussy and Schoenberg." Today many such artists face serious compositional problems - balancing "popular" with artistic elements, the challenge of melody, creating effective new structures, avoiding charges of simplicity or populism, and just generally finding new things to say - but the thing about great composers is that they find ways of answering such questions. And I am certain that more than a few great tonal, melodic composers have yet to be heard.

EDIT: Updated list of 20th century composers who aren't cliched, with thanks to jochanaan for pointing a few of them out in a parallel thread.

Nicely said, Brian.

toucan, it is no great endorsement of your musical insight, that you see no difference between Sibelius and "earlier Romantics," and that your sole evaluation of Shostakovich is "a pilferer." Fooey, have you ever gauged yourself there.

[karlhenning]

Tonality never died and anyone who thought it did is a fool. There is still a lot to be said in tonal music. Listen to the inventive things Arvo Part is composing or the sounds that Rautavaara is coming up with. You may not care for these two composers, but to imply that tonality has reached its saturation point is absurd and simply uneducated.

Short and to the point.

From my viewpoint, the curious thing is that there were some composers once on a time who were really invested in the idea that tonality was somehow passé.  I think it of value to consider the question why.  I don't think there is anyone of any musical weight here at GMG who honestly believes that tonality is "dead."

[Luke]

Short and to the point.

From my viewpoint, the curious thing is that there were some composers once on a time who were really invested in the idea that tonality was somehow passé.  I think it of value to consider the question why.  I don't think there is anyone of any musical weight here at GMG who honestly believes that tonality is "dead."

As to the why, the usually trotted out idea is something to do with the war, with wanting to start afresh from first principles and without being weighed down by cultural baggage...I can understand this argument, and I can imagine the atmosphere of the times being conducive to such thought, I think. I'm not sure how true it really is in, however, although I know there are writings from the time which make this case, this connection, explicitly.

For me, as a musician, not a polemicist, I refuse to see tonality-atonality as an either-or, one-side-or-the-other split. There is a huge amount of fluidity along the way (my own music, for example - I really don't know where on the line it falls, much of the time), and in the real world that's much more interesting, I think, than these unhelpful dichotomies.

[karlhenning]

As to the why, the usually trotted out idea is something to do with the war, with wanting to start afresh from first principles and without being weighed down by cultural baggage...I can understand this argument, and I can imagine the atmosphere of the times being conducive to such thought, I think. I'm not sure how true it really is in, however, although I know there are writings from the time which make this case, this connection, explicitly.

It does seem to be an argument which flies in the face of no few inconvenient facts, especially the fluidity, the non-dichotomy, whereof you speak, Luke.

[Brahmsian]

Oh my God, seriously!  Does every single thread on this site now have to be about Schoenberg, or Schoenberg bashing or defending Schoenberg.

It's getting a little ridiculous.

[Josquin des Prez]

just regretting Liszt is still regarded as a lesser composer.
Regarding tonality, his work is huge and various, especially at the end of his carrier.
Most of his contribution is often attributed to Wagner or Debussy instead.

He is considered a lesser composer because he wrote lesser music.

[quintett op.57]

when he was younger

[mc ukrneal]

Oh my God, seriously!  Does every single thread on this site now have to be about Schoenberg, or Schoenberg bashing or defending Schoenberg.

It's getting a little ridiculous.

I took a small shot at Bach (in hopes of shiftling the discussion away from Schoenberg in particular), but was ignored! Maybe I should have trashed him (bach) just to change the subject?!?! 

[karlhenning]

Bach's fine, of course;  those of us who like Schoenberg a lot can hardly be faulted for a sharp spike in listening at present : )

[Brahmsian]

I took a small shot at Bach (in hopes of shiftling the discussion away from Schoenberg in particular), but was ignored! Maybe I should have trashed him (bach) just to change the subject?!?! 

You can trash Bach all you want.  He gets an over abundance of praise.  If he were alive, his head would be the size of Mt. Rushmore.