Thinking about the aesthetic critiques of Dada and Surrealism, yes, they were justified as a reaction to the horrible calamity of the First World War (and the Second for that matter), but the solution, to turn over creativity to the unconscious and the irrational while refreshing and certainly A solution, was not a very good one. I will mention just one reason why: without the diligent use of reason and planning, only fairly small aesthetic objects are feasible. So certainly painting, drawing, small sculpture and poetry are ideal media. But architecture, large sculpture and extended musical works are not. If you want to jump in and cite minimalist music then, ok, that might be an exception or it might simply be the case that they are long works based on short structures. You might also mention some early Shostakovich absurd pieces such as The Nose opera or some ballets, but these are actually short works strung together to form suites.
What cannot be produced under the strictures of Dada and Surrealism are large works like the symphonies of Bruckner or Mahler (or Shostakovich), pieces that take years to write and orchestrate and a large, highly-trained orchestra to perform. Large works of poetry like the Four Quartets of T. S. Eliot and large novels like In Search of Lost Time by Proust or Ulysses by James Joyce, while certainly containing whimsy and disjointed episodes, considered as a whole have an intricate structure.
I think we are still hunting for ways of organizing societies that don't rely on either fascistic or communistic authoritarianism! And yes, of course, the aesthetic challenges of organizing large forms are still with us--and they are the same ones that always existed. Pop music avoids the problem by not having large forms. Or not needing them!
I await your comments while listening to Bruckner.
7 comments:
If we look at biology there is not a fundamental difference between large and small vertebrates apart from size. An elephant morphologically is a very large anteater. Long nose, four legs, tail etc. Even internally there is not that much difference other than size.
I have I guess more respect for the difficulty of writing even enduring pop (or folk) music of small dimensions than Bryan does. Yes a lot of it serves as a quick sugar fix but the stuff that lasts a generation or more is very small in number even in the pop world. Pop music achieves more permanence also by arranging material in the form of an extended Album which generally last 35 - 45 minutes. This is a length equivalent to even 90% of orchestral works. We may remember A Day In The Life say but it is more permanent in its attachment to the album. Part of the problem is the relatively low level of instrumental ability of most pop musicians which limits what can be performed more than the material itself.
Even orchestral works that exceed an hour or so usually have to do something other than straight sonata form to extend it. We can see this in the symphonies of Bruckner and Mahler where various additions to sonata were made. Mahler often resorted to rondeau insertions which of course are just verse chorus forms allowing endless extension. Operas achieve length mainly due to the narrative form they subserve. So even classical instrumental works have difficulty going past 45-50 minutes.
So what is lacking today in creating extended orchestral works? I think it is simply what in language is called grammar. In the Medieval modal and Rameau tonal systems there was an audible grammatical arrangement of melody and harmony. While serialism attempted to do the same it failed the audible aspect in the view of a majority of the listening audience. Modern music has interesting disjoint relationships but much fewer that are conjoint. Without conjoint passages it becomes difficult to transition to and from disjoint passages in some audible way as well as establishing a way to distinguish degrees of disjointness. This is the relative attraction of minimalism which favors conjointness. Janacek also did some interesting things by establishing conjointness through immediate repetition and then moving to a disjoint passage.
But biological structure and aesthetic structure don't really have anything in common, do they?
My basic point, which I didn't bring out very well, is that short, smaller pieces are created much more easily with intuition and instinct than large forms.
I'm giving counter examples showing that largeness per se doesn't seem to require new organizational principles. So I think it would be more useful to determine what is uniquely different about long musical works other than their length. And do we really want to exclude intuition and instinct from the creation of large scale works that don't involve total serialization or chance?
"But biological structure and aesthetic structure don't really have anything in common, do they?"
Richard Taruskin liked to quote Haydn's complaint that if people can't remember what they've heard it can't touch their heart. Biological structure and aesthetic structure in works that "endure" tend to converge. George Rochberg went so far as to claim that serialism and post-tonal music was largely doomed to being forgotten because its composing partisans were not paying serious enough attention to how human memory and perception worked, though he didn't put it quite in those terms. Leonard Meyer, however, DID put it in those terms. Humans are predicting creatures and if at some point in the "Game" of listening they work out that they will never be able to guess what's going to come next they check out, ergo a lot of post-tonal serialist music was never going to catch on.
Biological structure and aesthetic structure aren't one-to-one but for works to "endure" there is probably going to need to be a significant overlap. Augustine said we use memory to perceive music and this has retrospective and prospective elements. If you can't remember what you just heard then the aesthetic structure is largely moot.
Maury's point about morphological correspondence across size disparities is, therefore, I think a pretty compelling point. It fits well with Leonard Meyer's observation that the Romantics were, if anything, more conventional than their 18th century forebears but they DISGUISED their reliance on convention by making things bigger (longer, louder, more full of timbrel variation) to hide the fact that they were often more square and long-winded.
I've thought about the thread topic some more as it is an interesting question. However I have trouble thinking of a factor which is Only true of longer musical works but not shorter ones. Obviously being able to write music aids greatly in writing and scoring long musical works but with the increasing computerization of sound and musical structure I don't think that will be a firm barrier for much longer.
Also short works can be as constructivist as the most constructivist longer work. Debussy's Syrinx for Solo Flute is far from a intuitive flight nor are the works of Webern. Conversely the longer orchestral works of Varese and the Masses of Ockeghem have been notoriously resistant to musical analysis.
This is not to say that short and longer works are equally difficult. For reasons that go into memory and attention limits as well as unhh basic biology, composing a long work that listeners are willing to sit through is very hard. But the problem is creating many more interesting passages than a briefer work and using alternating melodic and harmonic tension vs relaxation in an overall pattern that listeners can enjoy over the duration.
Maury, here is something characteristic of large forms, but not so much of small: motivic development. And yes, shorter works can have an intricate structure. But they don't necessarily have to. Why do you say that the masses of Ockeghem are resistant to analysis? His contrapuntal complexities have long been admired.
I should have said some of Ockeghem's Masses as a few are more analyzable. I'm referring to their motivic development which has been characterized as "irrational" meaning resistant to formal analysis. Obviously you can see a canon where it exists or the transposability of the Missa Prolationum.
Regarding the extended duration works, that was exactly the problem I was running into. A large form might have different proportions of various techniques without them being strictly limited to the large. Unquestionably it is more difficult to write such works because of the amount of material they contain. But even short works have to have more going for them than something simplistic to last a century. We listen to Schubert and Schumann songs, not the popular songs of their day.
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