Music as a "Private Language"

If you are a "contemporary classical composer" which is a complicated and misleading description, you inevitably have to wrestle with issues that a practical musician like a pop or hip-hop songwriter does not. Mind you, they have their own problems, but they are different ones. Our problems, as composers, have to do with aesthetics, communication, innovation, tradition and the whole idea of a musical "language". Of course, as has been noted many times, music is not a language. If it were, then there would be a dictionary in which one could look up the meaning of musical notes and phrases and, despite the best efforts of music semiologists like Kofi Agawu and Jean-Jacques Nattiez, there really isn't. Music, instrumental music without words, remains stubbornly general and abstract, communicating mood and atmosphere and not specifics like language does. Music is more poetic than poetry, one might say.

For contemporary composers a very keen problem has arisen which is that the traditional musical forms and genres from chant to sonata form to impressionism and minimalism have all used a "vocabulary" of pulse, melos and harmonic tension to structure and express mood and atmosphere to the listener. The modernists, struggling with the idea that all traditional tonal forms were exhausted and with the crushing blow to European civilization of the First World War, decided to toss aside all that and, as it were, start from zero with atonality and then serialism. Another strategy was to diminish the whole idea of narrative by using aleatory techniques.

For a very detailed discussion of how this happened as seen through the writings of Theodor Adorno and some conservative responses to it in the writings of Roger Scruton, read this post by Wenatchee the Hatchet:

https://wenatcheethehatchet.blogspot.com/2019/08/between-forms-of-non-choice-adornos.html

Quoting from the Adorno book of essays, p. 652

... The paradoxical difficulty of all music today is that every music that is written is subject to the compulsion to create its own language for itself, while language, as something that by virtue of its own concept exists beyond and outside of composition, as something that carries it, cannot be created purely by the will of the individual.

This is an issue I have brought up in a previous post. The problem I have with the music of advanced modernism, Boulez for example, is that he seems to have constructed a brilliant kind of private language that most listeners can find no window into. I connected this with the "private language" argument of Ludwig Wittgenstein:

The private language argument argues that a language understandable by only a single individual is incoherent

Not only incoherent, but incapable, in my view, of expressing either beauty or ugliness and therefore of little aesthetic value.

It took me quite a while, but my personal solution to the problem was to become a synthesist, one who happily will use both harmonic and aleatory techniques in the service of some aesthetic goal. I have not been tempted by serialism, but I wouldn't entirely rule it out. I think that the experimental music of the 20th century opened a host of windows and doors, few of which have been thoroughly explored and exploited for their expressive possibilities.

Now what would be a good envoi for today's post? How about something by Mozart, in whose music Wagner (quoted by Adorno) claimed to be able to hear the "dishes clatter on the table" i.e. that it was mere tafelmusik, music written to accompany banquets and hence full of clichés. While there was certainly reams of music like that written and performed, most Mozart rises rather above that! Here is one of the Salzburg symphonies Mozart tossed off at age fifteen upon returning from a trip to Italy: