Complexity and the Primitive

I was passing by the central plaza the other day (I live in a medium-sized town in Mexico with a large foreign population) and noticed that there was a fiesta of the indigenous people going on:

Indigenous celebration in Mexico: click to enlarge

The costumes are quite elaborate and the dancing is accompanied by a great deal of frenetic drumming. This got me thinking about the aesthetic categories of "complexity" and "primitive." Wikipedia defines "complexity" as this:

Complexity characterises the behaviour of a system or model whose components interact in multiple ways and follow local rules, meaning there is no reasonable higher instruction to define the various possible interactions.

In music, an important strand in composition since the early 20th century was various realizations of complexity in musical structure. The complexities of rhythm in parts of Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring in 1913 were followed by added kinds of structural complexity in Webern, Bartók and in the post-war period even greater manifestations in the total serialism of Boulez. It reached a peak in the New Complexity of composers like Brian Ferneyhough in the 80s and 90s.

Back to the indigenous celebration. The aesthetic here is actually quite complex in that the visual effect of the costumes is extremely "busy" with an intricate variety of designs, shapes and colors. The drumming is similarly complex with a simple beat overlaid with layer upon layer of subdivision and syncopation. This is complexity, though you might want to say it is just a few people wearing a lot of feathers and beating on drums.

There are some interesting anomalies here that are worth looking at. One of the assumptions of modernism, exemplified in writings by Milton Babbitt, was that musical progress was inevitably tied to musical complexity. Ease of listening was simply not a consideration. Musical structure was to become more and more intricate and multi-layered. Simplicity was equated with lack of sophistication, even with the primitive. However, this trend was not without its critics. Eric Ulman (quoted in Taruskin, Oxford History of Western Music, vol. V, p. 476), who was a student of Brian Ferneyhough, one of the leading figures, wrote:

the "complex" score becomes an intimidation mechanism, staving off critical scrutiny by cultivating incomprehension, substituting colorful notational and verbal detail for musical detail, and depending on an inevitable inaccuracy of interpretation for either a genuinely improvisatory performative power or a final excuse for the failure of the material to present itself audibly.

The intricate and colorful detail is what we also find in a great deal of so-called "primitive" art. It is as if the creators cannot resist more and more layers of color, design, rhythms and so on.

We are not supposed to use the term "primitive" as it is Eurocentric and pejorative. Instead the preferred terms are ethnographic or "tribal" art. However, this does not reveal the contrasts that I am wanting to make. We equate complexity with progressive, or have at times, while at the same time equate the primitive with the simple, crude or rudimentary. The reality is quite different. Tribal art, as we can see in the costumes in the photo above, is anything but simple, crude and rudimentary. It is often complex, intricate and multilayered.

So what we might want to examine is the relationship between aesthetic quality and complexity. Modernism more or less equated them, but so does much tribal art. That should cause a bit of cognitive dissonance! What if aesthetic quality is really unrelated to complexity, or if complexity is only one possible aesthetic axis and not necessarily an important one. Can a great musical composition be NOT complex? Are there great pieces of music that are great partly because of their simplicity? Putting it that way almost provides us with the answer. Pieces that come immediately to mind are a host of pieces by Haydn, Mozart and Beethoven and even quite a number by Bach. The latter is often thought of as writing very complex music and it certainly can have those attributes. But the quality and the complexity are not closely correlated. For example, one of Bach's greatest preludes is the first one in the Well-Tempered Clavier, Bk I:

The prelude, for all its harmonic richness, has the simplest texture imaginable. Or take this example from Haydn. The "Quinten" quartet is so called because the first movement is entirely based on two falling fifths and nothing more:

Beethoven's most famous piano sonata begins with a movement of extreme simplicity:

Adding layers of complexity, fleshing out the orchestration with more instrumental color and layering in rhythmic subdivisions and syncopations would ruin each of these pieces. This is because the gratuitous use of complexity is actually often an aesthetically primitive strategy as it substitutes random detail for coherence, clarity and balance. The crucial element in the definition of complexity from Wikipedia is this:

a system or model whose components interact in multiple ways and follow local rules, meaning there is no reasonable higher instruction to define the various possible interactions

The problem clearly emerges because without the "higher instruction," which I would rephrase as overarching aesthetic principle, what we get is a confused and incoherent surface with too many conflicting currents to make aesthetic sense. Good pieces of music avoid this by having a "reasonable higher instruction," that is, a unifying element that brings everything into focus. The three pieces I quote above, and a host of others, demonstrate this characteristic.

Just some Sunday musings for your consideration... Correct me in the comments.