Intermittent Blogging

I feel a bit like California's PGE utility company who said yesterday that the blackouts could continue for another decade. Does anyone else find that almost incomprehensible given that California is home to the highest technology on earth? As I was saying, I feel a bit like PGE because my blog has been dark all too often lately--in the past week I have only managed two posts, the Friday Miscellanea and a brief one on decorative rosettes on guitars and lutes. Heck, I used to do double that in a single day.

When I started this blog, eight years ago, I had a lot of pent-up stuff to say. Teaching music can be grueling, but it is also a satisfying outlet for creative thought and after a few years of doing almost no teaching, I found I had a lot to say. These days the impulse to instruct is less intense and besides, I have talked about a lot of the most interesting stuff already and the more boring stuff is, well, boring. Plus, as I edge more and more into my role as composer, I find that I no longer want to simply pass on the half and semi-truths that are commonly expressed in music classes. In the immortal words of Kanye West, "First rule in this world, baby, don't pay attention to anything you see in the news."

Yes, of course, in the more refined circles of classical music education and criticism, the falsehoods are considerably less blatant (there being so much less at stake, or is there?), but they are still present. For example, a couple of things about Schoenberg that are widely believed, but quite untrue. His Verklärte Nacht was not the first piece to have a minor ninth chord in last inversion in a prominent place. Beethoven, in the introduction to the last movement of his Quartet, op 18, no 6, also uses that harmony. A much more major error is the often-expressed view that Schoenberg wrote "atonal" music. Actually, everything he wrote, including his later twelve-tone pieces, was tonally organized in various ways. His so-called early "atonal" music shows characteristics of tonal attraction and resolution and in his serial compositions he often sets up analogues to traditional tonal organization, but using different transpositions of the original row as stand-ins or developments of different chords or harmonies.

Another kind of misapprehension  was in the Wall Street Journal this week in a piece titled The History of Song Is All About Outsiders.

Innovative songs almost always come from outsiders—the poor, the unruly and the marginalized.

The scholars Milman Parry and Albert Lord confirmed this fact in the 1930s, when they set out to trace the origins of ancient epics like the Iliad and the Odyssey. Their research took them to Bosnia, where they met Avdo Mededović, an illiterate peasant farmer they dubbed the “Yugoslav Homer.” Accompanying himself on a one-string instrument, Mededović performed a single story-song that took seven days to complete and went on for 12,311 lines—roughly the same length as the Odyssey. He performed entirely from memory, aided by patterned improvisations of the kind used by jazz musicians.

Parry and Lord later declared that every one of the great singers of tales they encountered during their field research was illiterate. The ability to sing an epic poem was not only a skill that couldn’t be taught in college, but a formal education would almost certainly destroy it.

Now of course there is a grain of truth there. It is indeed true that one of the basic functions of music schools, even if not recognized as such, is to crush genuine creative originality. But while a great deal of innovation tends to come from outside the usual sources, simply being an outsider is neither necessary nor sufficient. You mustn't forget that genuine creativity is very rare and almost all those outsiders have nothing to offer. You could spend a great deal of effort sorting through outsiders before you found a crumb of talent. So another important function of music institutions is to offer a place where a talented outsider can come to tap into the traditions and practices that are essential to being able to shape inspiration into a form that can be transmitted.

Also, who is and isn't an outsider is definitely a matter of perspective. I can guarantee that their Yugoslav Homer came out of a long-standing oral tradition, just as the original Homer did. And Bob Dylan, with all his innovative ideas, has always been thickly interwoven with the whole tradition of American popular song, from Depression ballads to homespun country. Here's an example:

Even a famously eccentric outsider like Harry Partch is only an outsider from a certain perspective. He did everything he could to overturn the basic principles of tuning used in the 20th century mainstream, and he did it by going back to a far more ancient tradition deriving from ancient Greece.

A great deal of creative innovation turns out to be creative primitivism as the artist seeks out some deep wellsprings in his soul. Where do creative ideas come from? Let's ask Leonard Cohen. This is from an acceptance speech he gave on being given an honor by the King of Spain:

"Poetry comes from a place that no one commands, that no one conquers. So I feel somewhat like a charlatan to accept an award for an activity which I do not command. In other words, if I knew where the good songs came from I would go there more often."