I was playing Bach this morning, as I usually do, and was struck, as I have been countless times before, with the rich creativity of Bach's imagination. Using the most fundamental aspects of the common practice system, tonality, he weaves a constantly developing texture. Scales, arpeggios, cadences, modulations, turns and simple rhythmic structures are all he needs. Take the piece I was learning this morning, the prelude to the 3rd Cello Suite:
[The original key on cello is C major so that opening phrase falls two octaves to the lowest note. The piece has usually been transposed up a major sixth to A major, and at that pitch the temptation is to add some bass lines. There is an arrangement by John Duarte often played by Segovia and others. A couple of decades ago, Pepe Romero released a lovely recording of this piece, but in D major. If you tune the 6th string to D you can play everything exactly as it is on the cello and there is no need to add a bass line.]
She plays it a bit fast, to my mind, but that's ok. Just listen to how simple, basic, fundamental and at the same time creative, Bach is in this prelude. And he wrote hundreds of preludes, each one original and brilliantly creative. Another example is Domenico Scarlatti who wrote five hundred and fifty-five sonatas for harpsichord, all in binary form and using these same basic structural materials. Not to mention the hundreds of concertos by Antonio Vivaldi.
My point is that composers were able to use and re-use and use again the basic materials of common practice tonality without running out of ideas. This is an old story, of course. My favorite hilarious example is that of the music theorist who, sometime in the 16th century, complained that every single contrapuntal idea had been exhausted and no more originality was possible. And two hundred years later we have Bach, the greatest contrapuntalist of all.
But then in the early 20th the most progressive composers began to think that this whole system was exhausted. The primary figures were Claude Debussy, Arnold Schoenberg and Igor Stravinsky who each developed ways of ordering music that avoided the common practice structures. Fair enough! But I think we can see in this a subtext: perhaps the structures of tonality were not so exhausted after all? Composers like Jean Sibelius continued to use them for decades and they returned with the so-called "minimalists" in the 1970s.
I think that what was going on here was not so much or not only a theoretical breakthrough, but a civilizational breakdown of morale. Composers couldn't or didn't continue to compose within these structures because they felt the subterranean cataclysm that was about to engulf European civilization. Schoenberg's first forays into atonality date from 1908, just six years before the outbreak of World War I. His Pierrot Lunaire dates form 1912 and Stravinsky's masterpiece The Rite of Spring was premiered in 1913, the year before the war began.
Are these works tokens or harbingers of a civilizational breakdown and not just aesthetic experimentation? If you were looking for a topic for a research-heavy doctoral dissertation, that would be a good one.
Here is another piece from around this time, the Six Little Pieces op. 19 of Schoenberg:
From what I have read, the issue of music after WW1 in Europe was more governed by economics. Something similar happened in 17th C Germany with the 30 years War.
ReplyDeleteAs for tonal practice being abandoned in the late 19th C we could say the same about Medieval modal music which wasn't exhausted. It broke down from composers increasing use of tonal (Ionian) harmonic progressions as well as chromaticism.
When the arts become international as opposed to local then "progress" speeds up because everyone hears the same things from a variety of sources and makes comparisons of similarity and difference. So composers to get noticed or to show opposition to past style (eg Gluck, Wagner) have to do something noticeably different. Otherwise they get lumped together through generalizing tendencies.
George Rochberg, later in life, noted that there seemed to be oscillating patterns in Western music between epochs governed by symmetry and asymmetry in pitch organization. He gave as an example (maybe too sweeping an example!) that dorian was common in medieval and Renaissance music and then common practice tonality with is asymmetrical major and minor scales emerged. That era, in turn, gave way to an era of chromaticism in the Romantic through 20th century periods. Rochberg's proposal was that a potential next step would be to compose in ways that allowed for shifting between symmetrical and asymmetrical forms of pitch organization based on common gesture transformation. "Progress" would come from recognizing we don't "have" to oscillate between the two patterns. Another way to put it is to say Rochberg was working toward advocating conscious use of what some call code-switching in musical composition.
ReplyDeleteThe Hatchet:
ReplyDeleteI think Rochberg's dichotomy would be better expressed as an oscillation between balance and asymmetry (imbalance). It's hard to find an exact analogue to the 20th C fascination with symmetrical harmonic forms. This is probably due to our current fascination with harmony and everyone else's relative indifference to it apart from consonance requirements. Dorian mode has a scalar symmetry in palindromic terms but the medieval modal system would not understand it that way. Our current scales were organized then by tetrachords and pentachords. The octave also had a more formal existence in the Medieval system as seen in the plagal forms.
I'm not saying Rochberg was accurate in his appraisal of how the dorian mode was sued. :) When I read it I thought he might be using too abstract a conception of how dorian "worked'. I think balance and imbalance was what he was going for, however, and since, if memory serves The Dance of Polar Opposites was a posthumous work I'm going to cut him some slack on not coming up with a more concise way of making his point.
ReplyDeleteAgreed. Your caveat was well taken. I was just fleshing it out a bit but Rochberg's point is clear enough whatever its inexact expression.
ReplyDeleteThere are many reasons why I like jazz and other Black American musics better than the past hundred years of classical music. A big one is its sensible approach to harmony. Black musicians recognized that plain-vanilla Western European harmonic convention was stale, but rather than throw the entire concept of tonality out the window, they enriched it with the blues, and later with concepts borrowed from various non-Western tradition. The result is a world of harmony that stays fresh, dynamic and innovative, yet is also accessible and inviting. Hip-hop musicians have been living between the piano keys for fifty years now, and do it so deftly and effortlessly that various ignorant cultural authorities think the music isn't pitched at all.
ReplyDeleteIt's not that I disagree with the import of what you said but your account is highly selective. In fact IMO jazz followed the same trajectory as classical music with free jazz and lost popular status, not that it was ever completely mainstream. Then there is the fact that the vast majority of 20thC classical music played was tonal: Stravinsky, Sibelius, Elgar, Richard Strauss, Prokofiev, Shostakovich, Ravel and many more. It wasn't until the 50s and 60s that classical music sort of jumped the shark in the minds of many listeners.
ReplyDeleteAs for plain vanilla harmonic conceptions those mainly went out by Haydn's time and couldn't even be used as a descriptor of Bach's music. Almost all of the harmonic additions in jazz can be found in classical music if not used in exactly the same form. It is like augmented chords which were used in voice leading manner originally but then simply used as a dissonant chord.
The real difference between classical and non-classical is the rhythmic underpinning of current non-classical styles. Everything else is really flavor differences.
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ReplyDeleteThere is one major area of jazz harmony that can not be found in classical music, and that is blues tonality. Much of the chromaticism and other modernist harmony in jazz is motivated by the need to reconcile the European-derived harmonies of showtunes with African-derived harmonies of the blues. Aside from a few light pastiches, classical composers rarely attempted to engage with the blues, very much to their detriment, both creatively and in terms of audience engagement.
ReplyDeleteFree jazz was only one offshoot of midcentury jazz, and not the ultimately important one. Jazz has had its main impact in the present day through fusion, which led into disco and funk, and from there into hip-hop. There's a direct line from Herbie Hancock's 1960s acoustic piano playing to his 1970s funk playing to his 1980s hip-hop to his present-day collaboration with Kendrick Lamar's circle. There is another direct line running from James Mtume's playing with Miles Davis to his 1980s R&B hits to those hits being sampled in 1990s rap (not to mention Miles' own experimentation with rap at the very end of his life.) Free jazz gets a lot of scholarly attention, but it is a sidebar to jazz history, not its endpoint.
And to mention another genealogy, there is also a direct line from Robert Johnson in the 1930s to Eric Clapton, the Rolling Stones and Jimmy Page in the 60s and 70s.
ReplyDeleteDid free jazz really "lose popular status" in the long run? Today the majority of media outlets covering – and praising as classics – late Coltrane and the work of Pharaoh Sanders are pop-music-focused ones. Sure, free jazz never had a central Top 40 presence among the general population, but neither did modal or freebop.
ReplyDeleteModal jazz forms the harmonic and structural foundation of funk. For example, Pee Wee Ellis says that his horn chart for James Brown's "Cold Sweat" was a note for note copy of Miles Davis' "So What". And, of course, funk is the basis of electronic dance music and hip-hop.
ReplyDelete