Non-repertory music to recommend a long-time long-suffering listener

[North Star]

Judging from the response to Brian, I would recommend something else, a different way of listening.

Right now, you listen to music in order to hear what you like. I recommend that if you really want to expand your listening repertoire, you listen to music in order to like what you hear.

This will make all the difference in the world, I promise you.

Post of the Year.

Hear hear!

[Parsifal]

Excellent advice.

And absolutely essential for some music...

[(poco) Sforzando]

Okay some guy...

Velimir, no bun fights but pre-tonal music inevitably becomes a pleasant diversion regardless of how complex it is since nobody can understand it.

Best, Sean

a) Sean, there are 7 billion people in this world. Surely someone understands pre-tonal music.
b) For once, I agree with you (on Havergal Brian's Gothic). Perhaps I should now hear the symphony again and change my mind so I can disagree with you.
c) I'm a little creeped out by that photo you posted . . . .

[Sean]

Sforz

a) I'm afraid there can be a trillion if you like- no conscious entity can understand non-tonality because music is a relationship with discords and concords in physics not a manufactured intellectual construction, which is what modality by necessity is. For all Roger Scruton's faults I agree with his book when it says tonality is the only music that will ever mean anything to us. Or any aliens anywhere in the universe. (Actually there's a bit more to it than that, but I'll skip it.)

b) I think I must admit that I don't get Brian. But I suspect there are good reasons for that...

c) Oh, the photo, okay. She did just come over to me and this other guy I was with and ask to be photoed, so we then also swapped cameras. In a fit of deference though I've swapped it.

[some guy]

...no conscious entity can understand non-tonality because music is a relationship with discords and concords in physics not a manufactured intellectual construction, which is what modality by necessity is. For all Roger Scruton's faults I agree with his book when it says tonality is the only music that will ever mean anything to us. Or any aliens anywhere in the universe. (Actually there's a bit more to it than that, but I'll skip it.)

Wow. When I first read this, I thought, what a mindblowing mishmash. But it's not so bad. It's just that things are presented out of order. So let's rearrange this so the premise comes before the conclusion (and so the adjectives precede their nouns). Music is a physical relationship between discords and concords, not a manufactured intellectual construction, like modality. Therefore no conscious entity can understand non-tonality.

So conscious entities--the entities, one should note, who do things like manufacture intellectual constructions (it's just a thing that we do)--cannot, by definition, understand the things that they make. That's a very interesting contention. Made possible, partly, by a confusion about what physics is, I'm sure.

As for Mr. Scruton's contention, only tonality will ever mean anything to us, I really need some notice as to who "us" is. Scruton's "us" certainly doesn't include me. Besides, tonality, this non-intellectual, non-manufactured, wholly natural thing that developed (naturally, of course) out of modality (that manufactured, intellectual construction) and has only been a thing for a couple of hundred years, is the only thing that will ever mean anything to anyone, aliens included.

That's a very interesting contention, too.

The laws of physics, just by the way, apply to manufactured things as well as to "natural" things. The fact that something operates according to the laws of physics says nothing one way or another about the naturalness or the manufacturedness of that thing.

[Karl Henning]

Assertions whose subject is "no conscious entity" ... this conscious entity is amused.

[Sean]

Sure, it occurred to me it wasn't crystal but I'd like to try to keep this somewhat brief.

Music is a physical relationship between discords and concords, not a manufactured intellectual construction, like modality. Therefore no conscious entity can understand non-tonality.

Yes, that's correct. By understanding music of course I mean that we have an aesthetic experience, not that we understand the score or the harmonic system on an intellectual level- the point about art needless to say is that it provides a non-rational realm of meaning for us.

Of all harmonic systems only tonality is securely grounded in a parallel with acoustics and the necessary experiences of agreeableness of concord and roughness of discord. Though dissonance in context is fine of course the whole point about it is that it's finally resolved or that it has a reference to resolution that makes sense of it.

Nobody wants to listen to noise and in tonality the most consonant acoustic interval of the octave is the most important interval and the most dissonant acoustic interval of the minor second is the least. No other system matches this, regardless of trifling equal temperament counterarguments.

17th century tonality was a wholly objective discovery provided for by modality and not just the latest cultural convention. People who don't understand this don't know their music, or are lunatics.

There are issues about non-art or folk musics that can use dissonance as a point of reference but I argue they're continuous with the culture and part of the way of life rather than objectified artistic and critical reflections of it- they're a different kind of thing.

I didn't mean that the latest cooked up sky castle harmonic system from the ivory tower set who never listen to anything can't be understood and justified on the intellectual level- clearly it can.

But there are reasons connected with aesthetic epistemological gap-bridging that mean that music must make reference to physics in order for it to be understood as music by conscious experience. What I mean is that in intellectual terms there's no final justification why the desk in front of us is there but we live life as though it is because truth is in fact permanently hidden from the reasoning mind and can't be foregrounded.

And likewise we have to accept aesthetically that infrequently coinciding wave peaks sound agreeable because it is intuitive obvious that they should and Schoenberg of course was never very happy with his long tangled arguments for all that emancipation nonsense. Consonance and dissonance are bedrock.

Neither commonsensical perception about the world nor experience of art are rationally grounded, and both the failure of the central pillar of the Western philosophical tradition and post-tonal harmony show the bankruptcy of our culture and wider civilization.



I have my thoughts on long file so if you're keen enough PM me, otherwise I bow out I'm afraid.

[Karl Henning]

As for Mr. Scruton's contention, only tonality will ever mean anything to us, I really need some notice as to who "us" is. Scruton's "us" certainly doesn't include me.

Quite possibly, only tonality will ever "mean anything" to Scruton or Sean.  (That tiny snip sound was a mind drawing tightly shut.)  Some of us use our intellectual freedom in a curiously self-enslaving manner.

[Cato]

Sforz

a) I'm afraid there can be a trillion if you like- no conscious entity can understand non-tonality because music is a relationship with discords and concords in physics not a manufactured intellectual construction, which is what modality by necessity is. For all Roger Scruton's faults I agree with his book when it says tonality is the only music that will ever mean anything to us. Or any aliens anywhere in the universe. (Actually there's a bit more to it than that, but I'll skip it.)

I am either exalted  0:)  or insulted    by these comments! 

Believe it or not, and I have a good number of witnesses to verify that I AM  0:)  a conscious entity, I do indeed understand "non-tonal" music quite well.  These same witnesses will swear that my understanding is not a delusion.

And what would "non-tonal" music be precisely?  Silence?  Because...

All sounds have "tones" of course, although they may not be found in a typical scale.   Percussion works may be scored on single lines, but if anything has a sound, it produces a wave, and that wave has a mathematical property, just like the wave for C at 440.

If non-tonal music = silence, that also is quite comprehensible.   0:)

The pure percussion movement of Tcherepnin's First Symphony I understood quite well.

If by non-tonal one means music that does not use a scale, that also is demonstrably false, since many people can indeed understand the music behind e.g. parts of the score by Bernard Herrmann for Psycho, or Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, which do not use a typical scale.

music is a relationship with discords and concords in physics not a manufactured intellectual construction, which is what modality by necessity is.

Music by definition is an intellectual construction!  Even birds, with their small brains, have been observed varying their calls, for whatever reasons!  Music needs a brain behind it!

"...which is what modality necessarily is."

With that phrase you contradict yourself: modality uses chords and discords, which is what you seem to desire!

One of the ways to construct music without scales and traditional harmony is by treating sounds as paint for a canvas: in Schoenberg's works, one often hears a section begin very simply, not unlike the initial strokes of the artist's brush on the canvas.  The music builds and builds and when the "canvas" or the musical space is filled, i.e. when it reaches a climax of some sort, Schoenberg starts over with a new canvas.  His musical compositions can be heard as a series of paintings at an exhibition with an over-arching theme.

Therefore, one does not "necessarily" need traditional tonality to create music.

Q.E.D.   0:)

[Karl Henning]

[...] Music by definition is an intellectual construction!  Even birds, with their small brains, have been observed varying their calls, for whatever reasons!  Music needs a brain behind it!

I can avouch that our parakeets are possessed of a more active musical intelligence than (it seems) is Sean.

[Sean]

Karl, no worries, it crossed my mind that you're one of those impersonating computer programs but I guess there's some consciousness in there somewhere...



Cato, I know, this discussion is a vortex that draws people in.

I have a few witnesses to my consciousness too, quite a few of those pretty grudging ones to be sure.

Non-tonal is basically before 1600 and a range of stuff after 1900.

Yes you can have music considered only in terms of form- as well as unpitched percussion some Birtwistle and electronic constructions come to mind. But music in essence is melody, underwritten by harmony, and I won't entertain any disagreement.

Regarding Hermann or the op.16 tonality can be widely construed, as long as it respects consonance and dissonance of physics and doesn't basically try to divorce the two and make a howling laughing stock of itself for posterity. Obviously I'm not equating tonality with some Mozartian format- you don't need traditional tonality as you say.

Music by definition is an intellectual construction!

No, not at all. Intellectual construction in music is entirely at the service of aesthetic content and the intuitive experience of the right hand side brain. Composers whose music fails to transcend the score are forgotten.

Modality was a halfway house that hadn't yet organized consonance and dissonance. Paraphrasing Schoenberg, it was one heap big hoot of a cultural mistake.

The music builds and builds and when the "canvas" or the musical space is filled...

This is what happens in ordinary tonal listening and familiarization through repeated listening. It doesn't really happen in non-tonality.

[Karl Henning]

c) I'm a little creeped out by that photo you posted . . . .

YMMV, but I have no wish to view any image which Sean posts to the What Do You Look Like? thread . . . .

[Sean]

Quite so James but there's such a thing as art that isn't working very well in its own terms, quite apart from any terms its recipients may have.

The easiest response to this challenge is dismissal and that is lame. Music should not be dismissed because it isn't catchy or easy-listening etc.

[Cato]

Quote from Sean:

Non-tonal is basically before 1600 and a range of stuff after 1900.
. But music in essence is melody, underwritten by harmony, and I won't entertain any disagreement.

The last statement ends the discussion, such as it is.  Narrow-mindedness in general prevents people from expanding their personalities.

Closed-mindedness absolutely prevents such development.

Cato wrote:

Music by definition is an intellectual construction!

No, not at all. Intellectual construction in music is entirely at the service of aesthetic content and the intuitive experience of the right hand side brain. Composers whose music fails to transcend the score are forgotten.

Completely contradictory, (and you do not even realize it), as well as being disproven by neurological research from the last 30 years on how music is understood by the ENTIRE brain, not just part of it.  Music needs a brain, whose activity involves conscious thought, not merely some thoughtless emotional response.

Yes, even a bird brain has some conscious thought!   0:)

Modality was a halfway house that hadn't yet organized consonance and dissonance.

Please tell that to e.g. Machaut and wait for the roars of laughter!   

Cato wrote: (Concerning Schoenberg's music)

The music builds and builds and when the "canvas" or the musical space is filled...

It doesn't really happen in non-tonality.

Even someone who does not read music could look at the scores of Erwartung or of a work by Varese and see that it actually "really" does happen in "non-tonality" (a nonsensical term, as mentioned above).

Q.E.D.

[Sean]

[Karl Henning]

Proof that a conscious entity can write reams of stuff about music, devoid of insight. And have James like it 

[bhodges]

But music in essence is melody, underwritten by harmony, and I won't entertain any disagreement.

I see.    Well, that pretty much sums it up and ends the discussion, doesn't it?

--Bruce

[Cato]

An example?

A question fraught with peril!  James, you are brave!

Quote from: Sean on Today at 04:44:30 AM

   

But music in essence is melody, underwritten by harmony, and I won't entertain any disagreement.

I see.    Well, that pretty much sums it up and ends the discussion, doesn't it?

--Bruce

Amen!   0:)

[Archaic Torso of Apollo]

Proof that a conscious entity can write reams of stuff about music, devoid of insight.

Well yeah, but that's part of the fun 

The overriding problem that folks like Sean and Scruton have is historical. If tonality is the only music that makes sense to us, why did it take until the 16th/17th century to develop our current system of tonality?

Also left open is the question of whether something that makes even better sense than tonality may be developed. At that point, some Sean of the future may be declaring that system "the only music that can make sense to us."

[Sean]

James, examples of art that don't work in their own terms are those not communicating to the aesthetically capable individual and which stubbornly remain in terms of head rather than heart. Serialism is the most developed and most deleterious one, rising to 1950s total serialism and maximum contrivance and silliness but the same goes for such scatterbrained postwar ideas as musique concrete or microtonality.

Moreover Hindemith probably knew as much about composition as Shostakovich but his music isn't invested with the same artistic inevitability or unity: aesthetics can't be detailed out in intellectual terms and in that sense remains a mystery but I assure you it exists.

Cato, well music is primarily melody, I guess I'll have to stand by that, any other view is going to be just too wacky right now. I didn't quite mean to seem close-minded though.

Good point about the holistic brain experiencing music, but what's happening is the rational left is being subsumed by the intuitive right...

And remember Ewartung and Varese aren't so bad though- they're pre-serial works.

Velimir, it took 50 000 years to develop fossil fuels and the industrial revolution. That doesn't make them just culturally situated- they are really, actually, objectively useful things.