THE MUSIC SALON: classical music, popular culture, philosophy and anything else that catches my fancy...
Saturday, February 26, 2022
The Most Bizarre Musical Category: "Classical"
The most embarrassing moment, for some composers at least, is when they have to answer the question: "what kind of music do you write?" It is embarrassing for so many reasons: first, because if you had any public profile at all the question would not need to be asked; it is embarrassing because you don't know how to answer it in fewer than 1,000 words; it is embarrassing because if this were after a concert of your music the question would also be unnecessary; but most of all, it is embarrassing because we really don't have a suitable name for what we do.
It sounds weird saying you write "classical music" because, as Frank Zappa pointed out, that was all written by dead white guys in wigs. I usually default to "contemporary classical" but that just has the wrong resonances and I don't really know what it means. "Classical music" as a genre term is hopelessly vague and general. What comes to mind is either Beethoven V or Mozart Eine Kleine and neither is anything like what I write. A popular term used to be "new music" but I think the juggernaut of commercial pop music has run that one over.
I think the truth is that classical music, especially that being composed today, is either a kind of fringe category of experimental pop music or it is simply an embarrassment to the musical world and probably racist and sexist. This is likely because the only way to really understand the category "classical" is through aesthetics and judgements of quality and we don't do that any more. From the perspective of the music business it is embarrassing that classical music even exists as its earnings are shamefully tiny. It seems like an archaic holdover from another era when it mattered. Ok, yeah, it is still something of a tourist attraction in Europe, like beer fests and dirndls, but as a viable and dynamic musical genre? Probably not.
And contemporary classical? Embarrassingly tiny earnings even compared to classical generally. Really, there is no point in even bothering with any of it. So, it makes perfect sense to start shoehorning in experimental pop and jazz pieces into the "classical category" at the Grammys. It is probably just a matter of time before the category is dropped altogether, after all it has no commercial importance.
Mind you, if you want to understand music from an historical and aesthetic point of view, well that is a whole other story. The truth is that "classical" music just does not fit into the modern commercial music categories.
The True Nature of Classical Music
That whole self-deprecating exercise was to show, I hope, that the usual approaches, trying to describe the qualities of classical music, trying to fit it into contemporary commercial music categories, defining it by the fact of notation and so on, really miss the mark. What classical music is, is a tradition and the only real function of the name is to alert us to the historical continuity of the tradition. We could call it art music or concert music or whatever, as long as we stipulate that whatever term we use it is simply a marker to refer to the music that originated in Western Europe during the dark ages in the form of Gregorian and other forms of chant and was elaborately developed through notation, counterpoint, harmony, voice-leading and many other devices, also mainly in Western Europe from the 12th century especially, and continues to this day.
Each composer creates or invents their own approach to the tradition, taking part of it, rejecting other parts, developing certain aspects and neglecting others. John Cage, for example, rejected just about the entire content of the tradition, and that was his relationship to the tradition. Steve Reich took one dimension of the tradition and developed it almost exclusively. Composers in the tradition can also absorb influences from outside the tradition: Bartók folk music of central and eastern Europe, Stravinsky Russian folk traditions, Haydn Hungarian folk musics, Steve Reich again, African drumming structures, Debussy Asian traditions. Someone like Toru Takemitsu is a fascinating blend of traditions: Japanese traditional music, obviously, but also American jazz and European classical traditions.
There is a great deal of music, probably most music created today, that really does not come from this tradition, essentially ignores this tradition, which is fine. But that music should not be called "classical music" and no disrespect intended. It just owes its allegiance to other traditions. Popular music around the world has taken certain elements from the classical tradition, but it has altered them to the extent that it is safe to say that nothing is owed now to that particular tradition.
The great clanging dissonance comes from trying to fit classical music into modern commercial categories. If classical music has commercial or economic dimensions, and certainly in some places it does, the Salzburg Tourist Bureau, for example, that is really incidental to its actual nature and character.
So please, let's just drop the classical category from the Grammys entirely and if necessary, set up a separate institution just for it.
Here is a performance that is an excellent demonstration of classical music best understood. The Norwegian Chamber Orchestra with Verklärte Nacht by Arnold Schoenberg.
29 comments:
Maury
said...
Yikes Bryan, you pooh pooh my oh so nicey nice categories of formal and informal music with the icky word - tradition!
Please pray tell what kind of tradition you compose?? Isn't that an embarrassing question too?
Contemporary classical music's biggest problem (aside from the name) is its attempts to cordon itself off from all the other not-commercially-oriented creative musics in the world. You implicitly draw a binary between classical and commercial pop, but the truth is that most "pop" music is not commercial. (How can "experimental pop" even exist? It's as much an oxymoron as "contemporary classical".) Jazz hasn't been commercial or popular for generations. Most beat-driven electronic music makes no money and few producers of it really aspire to. The vast majority of rap is being created in high school cafeterias and playgrounds for no reason except enjoyment and expression. If you are using "pop" as a euphemism for "beat-driven" or "Afrodiasporic", it would be better to state that directly. If you are saying "pop" to mean "popular", I have about a thousand different rappers and producers in my iTunes who are less popular than Mozart.
It is similarly weird to me to try to define "classical" by drawing a lineage between contemporary composers and Europe in order to distinguish them from, say, jazz musicians or producers of experimental techno. There is more musical continuity between Chopin and Esperanza Spalding than there is between Chopin and Brian Ferneyhough. As I said in the comment in your previous post, it seems like "classical" is a description of audience demographics more than anything pertaining to the actual music.
I think you need to operationally define what you mean by tradition although I suspect it is just an antique word for style and its underlying techniques. In informal music this is taught by gurus or mentors or listening and copying. In formal music it is taught by books and scores and school teachers/professors.
I would agree that the book of rules a composer or songwriter uses can provide more specificity to the formal and informal categories. So if we say someone composes formal music using the Ars Nova defined methods we have a pretty good idea of what would or would not fit into that category.
There is a psychological factor that comes into play though that increases the finer distinctions we make the more expert and knowledgeable we become about an art form. So this is how mavens discuss all kinds of very specific jazz styles for example that would be rather opaque to a general non expert listener.
Mr Hein, I agree that often the so called genres given are commercial categories either for the record/CD rack of past years or search terms on the web or accounting divisions at the labels. It also can be applied to audience demographics as you note which is just another way of describing customers.
I didn’t get around to this on the last thread so I’ll add some thoughts here. I agree with Ethan that notation alone isn’t enough and I also think the superficial sounds aren’t enough in themselves. I think there’s a deeper idea of lineage and practice involved with categorizations like this. A big part of that is ‘who/what is your music drawing from and who is it in dialogue with?’. To step outside of European classical and Jazz for a moment, an example that comes to mind is Jack Rose, an American steel-string player in the vein of John Fahey and Robbie Basho. His music is pretty much divided into blues/ragtime pieces and pieces styled after Indian classical music. His Indian pieces go beyond the superficial noodling that a lot of similar pieces fall into, he was clearly someone who had studied not only forms but specific ragas as well, basically he understood the aesthetics and syntax of the style well. The reason I would consider that music some other than Indian classical however isn’t because of his ethnicity or his instrument (there are plenty of non-Indian musicians in that tradition now as well as guitarists), but rather his music isn’t connected to the oral tradition, a lineage of teachers and musicians in dialogue with other musicians, it simply exists outside of that conversation. An analogy might be someone who is knowledgable about a religion, has read about it and maybe even finds some bits of it useful for their own life but isn’t actually a member, versus a practitioner who actually participates in the rituals and the community life of that religion. I think that example also points to some of the difficulties and overlaps with these distinctions because it’s very possible for example that a progressive Catholic may have a worldview much closer in many ways to a Tibetan Buddhist, than they would to say Rick Santorum. At the same time though, I think it’s a mistake to underestimate that connection that the two Catholics would share through that bond of shared ritual/practice.
Ethan to take your Ezperanza Spalding/Chopin/Ferneyhough comparison, it’s true on a superficial level that Ferneyhough and Chopin don’t have much in common but they do share a set practices, training, and broad musical understanding of things like gesture and affect that connect the two. It can be difficult to find the threads if you don’t really know the music but I could walk you through a piece like ‘Kurze Schatten’ and show you all the ways he’s drawing on that tradition (and that piece in particular even draws on a lot of harmonic gestures taken from composers like Liszt and Chopin.) You may say the superficial aspect is still more salient and that’s fine if that’s how you feel but that doesn’t mean the other stuff isn’t there. I’ve played that piece for him before and I can tell you he does these things very consciously and there’s no doubt about what tradition he’s part of. There’s a video of him on youtube coaching his piece for guitar duo that shows this. If you hate his music, it’ll probably be tough to get through the whole thing but even from the first five minutes or so you can get a sense of how he communicates about music. The references he makes, the way he talks about gesture, phrasing, timing are just like every conductor I’ve worked with or seen in rehearsals it’s a very specific way of talking that is distinct from say Jazz or Rock musicians I’ve played with, and I’d bet more similar to Chopin talking to an orchestra than Ezperanza Spalding talking to her band.
In response to the actual music that brought about this discussion it’s hard to say without knowing more honestly. I think based on sound alone genre distinctions are increasingly difficult to make as access to music gets so much easier and more personalized, so the distinctions would have to do largely with with the issues I raised above. The degree to which that’s useful or simply unhelpful gatekeeping is debateable, but for my more controversial take I’d say being to be part of the European classical tradition is largely based on coming to the music as a performer (in a broad sense) first rather than a listener. In that sense I consider the participatory element of it to be based on private practice and study, going along with Charles Rosen I think that’s the real heart of how the tradition gets passed along, canons are formed, etc. So in my mind whether or not the piece is in that tradition or not has more to do with what he expects others to do with it.
The problem I have is that I don't think the kinds of techniques and shared views you reference extends beyond the period of common practice so called. Baroque music had a different set of shared values, performance affects and secret references as did Renaissance music, Medieval modal music and chant. I agree that notation alone doesn't provide much specificity but I think does point to a crucial difference; namely the application of a specific and overt set of rules and musical elements to composition versus an informal inductive approach. I hear a pretty clear divide between these two forms of music.
So to the initial category of notation vs no notation we have to then apply the categories of shared style and its underlying techniques common practice and rules (which is what I assume Bryan is referencing with tradition) to start to narrow down how that higher order distinction functions in actual music compositions
Yes there are many branches in the tradition but I'd argue that if they are part of that tradition they all tie back to certain way of understanding and learning music that is rooted in the music of the Catholic church and European folk music. Tradition is dynamic and always changing so it is worth thinking about when enough reformations and mutations have turned it into something else altogether. Like you may think Ferneyhough's music has too many layers of mutation and abstraction to be recognizable as belonging to that tradition and while I'd argue with that, I also think that viewpoint is totally valid and you could argue that it belongs to another genre. Without a doubt there's a lot of gray areas but I believe say Schoenberg's music (to pick a less extreme example) is very much in dialogue with earlier periods in the tradition and acknowledges their influence while at the same time transforming them, whereas a different genre would be more like a seperate conversation (oversimplifying here of course because totally separate conversations as such are basically non-existent in today's world).
I think we need to distinguish between Western European religious symbology and ritual versus the music composed for various functions within the churches. It is a rather long distance between chant and Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. It is clear that the churches were very relaxed about stylistic changes both of the musical forms of religious music as well as the architecture of its buildings but quite rigid with respect to the religious documents, texts and rituals. And we have to note that there was a divide even there in Eastern vs Western Europe.
I said elsewhere that categorization of music can never be logically proved so it is just a question of utility and consensus. For myself I think there are fundamental breaks between chant, Ars Nova, the tonal system and atonal systems such as serialism. So I would be quite skeptical that we can find consistent musical gestures across these various styles other than something obvious like dynamics or fast slow motion. But I'm willing to be convinced by specific evidence.
I think that may be the first time I've ever heard the churches in Western Europe being called 'very relaxed' about stylistic changes in music!
As to your 2nd paragraph, I doubt I'll be able to convince a skeptic in a format like this but a good place to start would be Webern's lectures called 'A Path to New Music'. They're informal and meant for a lay audience but it covers exactly this, the connection between Schoenberg's music and European music going back to Gregorian chant. It's a little Hegelian in it's tone for my tastes, but I think his music examples are strong, he knows the history well and as a first rate musician himself he can discuss it intelligently from an insider's perspective. Krenek similarly wrote quite a bit on the subject, and if you study or sing his 'Lamentatio Jeremiae Prophetae' that's a pretty convincing argument in itself in my opinion. It's actually much easier to trace the links between the Schoenberg school and composers like Ciconia or Josquin (Isorhythm and canon are serial techniques after all) than say Schumann and those earlier composers (again though I'd still say they're present).
It's funny to see an argument against a continuity between European classical tradition and jazz, because among music academics it has been a longstanding axiom that *everything* in Western music grows out of Bach and Beethoven. This is why they make every music major, regardless of specialty, do the same core sequence of music theory, aural skills and music history. In most places, that core consists 100% of European canonical music (a few progressive schools tack Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk on the end.) So there I was at NYU with all these audio engineers and bebop saxophonists and Latin percussionists being forced to harmonize four-voice chorales and realize figured bass. There is, of course, no corresponding expectation that the classical performance or composition majors need to learn anything at all outside of the European core.
Anyway, at least in the US, literally everyone who goes to music school has to demonstrate a fair bit of knowledge of and competence in classical music. There might be a wide gulf between Esperanza Spalding and Brian Ferneyhough, but in my observation, there's a wider gulf between both of them and a self-taught bedroom producer who didn't go to music school. I know that four semesters is not the same thing as fifteen years of private study and immersion, but the universities enforce the classical core in a seeming effort to try to cram in all that enculturation. I am living proof that it doesn't work all that well, but it's not for lack of trying.
I'm sure that Brian Ferneyhough intends his music to have all kinds of continuity with Chopin and Liszt, and I'm sure that the continuity is audible to the specialized listener. But the similarities between jazz and Romanticism aren't "superficial", they are broad and deep. My take on the 20th century is that the classical vanguard broke hard with its own harmonic traditions at around about the same time that jazz musicians were starting to gain access to those traditions.
Ethan, one of the ironies of my interactions with John Borstlap is that he has name-checked Herbert Pauls' Two Centuries in One as a piece in his (Borstlap's ) defense that Romantic music has remained viable but since I went to the trouble of reading Pauls' work what Pauls proposed was that the basic harmonic continuity between Romantic pianistic vocabulary and jazz showed that, contrary to atonal schools, the 19th century vocabularies stayed in a steady connection to the musical mainstream. The 9th and 7th chords might get used differently in Rachmaninoff and Ellington but they show connections.
On my side as a guitarist I noticed how readily themes from early 19th century guitarist composers like Giuliani and Carulli lent themselves to being transformed into ragtime strains. Leo Brouwer once made a cogent observation that for we guitarists the boundaries between highbrow and popular guitar literature are significantly more permeable and less significant than they have been in the piano repertoire, whether the salon or concert rep of the 19th century.
I've read things to the effect that applied church music has always had a lot more improvisation and flexibility in execution of established norms (which I know firsthand and via reading) but traditions varied. Zwingli and Bullinger, legendarily, banned music of every kind from church services (Charles Garside Jr went so far as to argue in his book on Zwingli & the Arts that the Swiss Reformers banishing all music from church services made it possible for Genevan musical life to exist in a functionally secular realm). I've read snippets here and there from specialist writings that the concerns about musicians and musical cultures in the medieval period through the Renaissance had partly to do with musical concerns but also a fair amount to do with abuses of the beneficial system (ie simony etc) so that we might have to be careful to distinguish criticisms of the "what" of church music from the "how" of criticism of its patronage systems. Luther was effusive about Josquin while other Reformers objected to the systems that funded Josquin's music. I'm getting my toes wet on that literature lately and it's interesting to see how European composers could very clearly see how their work connected back to these traditions (and debates, as a context for defending contemporary works a la Webern, etc) and how those aspects of music history don't (or didn't) come across in US surveys much.
Bryan this is an excellent little article you've posted, and I'm equally appreciative of the reader discussion you've provoked. Although you guys are technically beyond me, I've decades of a thousand concerts and thousands of CDs collected and listened to.
And on that ground I assert Bryan has pretty much captured the essence of a slippery task, ie, defining "classical music":
a tradition ....whatever term we use it is simply a marker to refer to the music that originated in Western Europe during the dark ages in the form of Gregorian and other forms of chant and was elaborately developed through notation, counterpoint, harmony, voice-leading and many other devices, also mainly in Western Europe from the 12th century especially, and continues to this day.
I think that tradition extends beyond compositional devices and tonal systems but also to the instruments themselves, magnificently arrayed in modern orchestras. My ear is usually pretty confident in distinguishing "real" classical music from, say, musical theater or jazz, including non-classical elements that might be fused into some modern cross-genre music. Such non-classical elements might be using percussion to keep the beat explicit, "blue" notes or other bent notes, or electric instruments or any type of artificial or machine-generated sounds, or forms or formulae recognizable as derived from a different tradition than the composed works of the European classical tradition. In that sense, I wonder if "European" isn't somehow a more essential term than "classical" now that we've moved into a globalist age when it is no longer assumed which civilization's classical tradition we mean. Of course the problems with that are how traditions cross-fertilize in real life, so the boundaries often blur and overlap. As we know, all music was once new and so the true artist's work has a relationship to tradition that is a dialogue not mimicry. And of course a work of art is not merely a dialogue with tradition but more directly with life itself, as experienced and expressed by an original mind in a specific time and place.
But I think Bryan pretty much already said all that.
To Ary, Your arguments are well laid out but we just have a viewpoint difference. If you are referring to Palestrina and the Council of Trent flap, the fact that unofficial grumbling about music styles occurred within the Church is to be expected over 900 years of music development. The 20th C saw actual official bans in Germany and the Soviet Union over disfavored music. So overall the Church in practice at least has accepted quite radical stylistic change. As for the examples of supposed connection of serialism with prior history I think we have to see much of it as tendentious and motivated reasoning to minimize the break that serialism represented. Yes there was isorhythm but that has nothing to do with serialism really as a musical style. This is the issue I noted that there is no logically necessary basis of music categorization so that utility and consensus are the goals rather than some QED.
To Mr Hein, I would agree that there is continuity of jazz with the period of common practice. I also agree with your statement that the current divide is more between the musically illiterate performers and creators versus those educated either formally or through extensive reading.
Ethan I’m not sure if you’re comment “It's funny to see an argument against a continuity between European classical tradition and jazz” was directed at me but if so I’d say that’s an oversimplification or misunderstanding of what I was trying to say. I think Jazz is definitely a development of that tradition, there was really no way around that due to European hegemony. It seems to me though that since black musicians were almost entirely kept out of the highest levels of the tradition they had to invent a new direction to take the elements they were given, with a largely different value system and well of influences. Whether it ought to be or not though, it is largely a separate community now even if Jazz students are forced to take a few European classical theory and history classes.
You definitely don’t need to preach to me about the problems with music in higher ed!
“My take on the 20th century is that the classical vanguard broke hard with its own harmonic traditions at around about the same time that jazz musicians were starting to gain access to those traditions.”
This take I disagree with though. If you’re talking about someone like Schoenberg, and you think his harmonic approach breaks hard with someone like Liszt, then you definitely haven’t studied enough of either. Post world war 2 is another story though and if the music promoted by hardline Darmstadters constituted the whole of what's to be considered 'vanguard' then I'd agree. There’s plenty of music that developed out of the followers of Boulez, Cage and Stockhausen (Lachenmann and stuff like that) that I would argue crossed the line into something else altogether, but there was also a lot more going on than just in that small world (even with it's outsized influence on academic composition departments). Anyways I like Art Tatum fine but from what I've listened to I still just hear some superficial similarities in harmony but deployed in a static manner and used for very different expressive purposes. What’s really lacking for a deep connection in my mind is the motivic development and harmonic intensification processes that Liszt uses to build his big pieces. There’s nothing I’ve heard in Tatum that tries to do anything like the Sonata in B minor or the Mephisto Waltzes. If what you’re hearing is ‘broad and deep similarities’ then we are just working with different conceptions of those words.
The question: What is classical music? It is art. What is art? Hard to say other than an activity involving each of our senses plus imagination plus talent plus technique - something humans have done since the beginning of recorded time. What is the purpose of art? To make us fall in love with life more. The delight of the eyes, the delight of sound, of song of words of chant ... creation, done by an individual. As I've written elsewhere, the history of art is the history of individual assertion. Individual assertion has always abutted the going social illusion - medieval chanters had to work around the clergy (that demonic tritone); Renaissance musicians had to work around kings and princes (and the clergy); in the classical age composers had to work around the court & bourgeoisie concert supporters; in the modern age composers have had to contend with the market; but creators, composers writers, artists always find a way! Excellence will out. Remember: art objects create their own demand; nobody in Europe was crying out for Beethoven's 5th - or any other symphony for that matter; part of the push-pull of artists vs the social illusion is part and parcel of the excitement of art ... over to you ...
Thanks to all for a robust and stimulating round of comments. My larger point remains, I think, that classical music fits very poorly into contemporary genre categories because it is neither a style, nor a genre, nor a commercial category, but rather a very deep-rooted tradition that encompasses many styles, genres and categories. I see it as an ongoing practice because composers of today are still aware of and influenced by the tradition. Steve Reich recently commented that he was influenced by that first generation of contrapuntalists Léonin and Pérotin.
Thanks, Patrick. Nowadays it seems Scarlatti sonatas inhabit nearly every guitar recital, but back forty years ago it was Carlos Barbosa-Lima who was a pioneer in publishing a couple of books of transcriptions of Scarlatti sonatas for guitar.
Webern's essays get precisely at the thing that makes him so hard for a non-believer to get into. When he says that all composers are aiming for clarity and unity, that's plausible enough. However, he goes on to say: "Composition with twelve notes has achieved a degree of complete unity that was not even approximately there before. It is clear that where relatedness and unity are omnipresent, comprehensibility is also guaranteed. And all the rest is dilettantism, nothing else, for all time, and always has been." Now I know some of this is just the purple prose that was conventional at the time, but, like... really, Webern? I am supposed to take you and your music seriously when you make claims for it like this?
Schoenberg also said a few things that make you shake your head. The age of artists' manifestoes, of which these are examples, comes along about the same time that noble patronage was disappearing forever. These are both aspects of modernism that I think are related. Artists sought to place their work on a pseudo religious plane in order to command public attention and veneration. It didn't quite work, did it?
However there were many other artists ready to further the tradition in a myriad of ways that could be more easily appreciated by audiences. And there are even some that appreciate Schoenberg and Webern. Not to mention Alban Berg.
Bryan The issue I have is that you still have not precisely defined what you mean by tradition. So are you saying there is some quasi religious ethos that continues from generation to generation of composers and that is why it transcends styles? Or is tradition some topmost meta style? It is tricky to even equate tradition as polyphony such as with Perotin although polyphony and harmony are mostly a Western music component. Wouldn't it be simpler to say there is historical awareness now rather than some specific tradition? And in the past a new music style simply rejected earlier styles and confined them to the attic or worse.
As I have given innumerable ostensive definitions, I rather thought you were kidding. Indeed, this entire blog, all 3,500 or so posts is a rather large description of the tradition of, for lack of a better term, "classical music." The kind of definition I think you are requiring is both inappropriate and impossible. In the comment above, when I was referring to the pseudo religious impulse shown in certain artist's manifestoes, I was just responding to Ethan's comment. That might be a little wavelet in the stream of tradition, but certainly nothing definitive. Definitions serve to delimit, to restrict, to tie down and tie up. The very long cultural tradition I am referring to is rather outside that. The thing is, I think that a purely intellectual approach fails. I think that we who are part of the tradition are perfectly aware of it, but if you are not, you might doubt it even exists. We could go to a hundred concerts in which the tradition is exemplified in many different ways and you might still be asking me, but what do you MEAN by tradition? It is what W. V. O. Quine described as a "category error" where you literally can't see the university for the buildings getting in the way.
Yeah the Webern lectures have a style that’s tough to relate with today to say the least, and outside of historical curiosity I generally don’t recommend reading them. The few reasons I do suggest looking at them is to give a quick explanation for the connection between the 2nd Viennese composers and the earlier tradition (as I did here) or to get at the impulse for repeating a 12 note row, which in Webern’s mind was more spiritual/mystical (coming largely from Goethe’s and Swedenborg’s visions of nature and heaven) rather than coldly mathematical.
The only defense I can offer for quotes like the one you mention is that Webern speaking at that time wasn’t anyone with any real power, certainly not the power his name would carry in academia posthumously. It’s easy to imagine a tenured professor at a major university in the 1970s saying something like that to a classroom full of impressionable 18 year old composition students and to find it repulsive, but Webern was speaking to a small group of mostly non-musicians. At least a few of them were close friends and anyone else must’ve been somewhat sympathetic if they stuck it out past the first one. So the idea that a composer whose music was performed less and less in an increasingly conservative climate would say something like that to a few people who voluntarily attended a series of private lectures doesn’t strike me as all that objectionable. Particularly given how divisive the artistic world was at the time, an unpopular composer trying to sell his music with some grandiose statements and calling other composers dilettantes seems pretty mild.
Of all the first wave 12 tone composers, Krenek is the only one I think is actually a good writer and holds up today but even he has his moments. I doubt any of it would be enough to convert a non-believer though :)
Bryan, I'm not trying to annoy you but rather try to move the discussion to some mew insight if possible. The way you were referring to a new discussion of so called category error in the last thread led me to believe that you had come up with something new rather than as you say something that has been reiterated in various ways through the website.
I'm just pointing out that the statement for example, that the classical tradition is exemplified before us in the hundred concerts attended does depend in large measure on which hundred concerts we go to doesn't it? This is the strength and the limitation of inductive reasoning and categorization.
In the past did the concert going public of 1800 think that by going to a Haydn symphony they were part of an 800 year "tradition" or rather that the errors and inadequacies of past fustian music styles had finally been remedied? It is only in the 20th C that some appreciation for the older styles as older styles with their own integrity have come about including other non Western parallel musical styles such as Indian raga. That was why I raised the question whether the applicable term might be more along the lines of historical awareness than a rather vague use of the term tradition that doesn't involve specific musical techniques and an unbroken chain of mentors and students learning the same core plus extensions.
To me the tradition of which you talk seems a very recent anachronism imposing our historical awareness backwards. It is entirely possible though that henceforth this will in fact be a widely shared way of thinking about the various styles from chant and the troubadours forward but it would be something created now IMO.
Maury, you have long been a very perceptive commentator on the blog, so I would certainly not be annoyed!
"the statement for example, that the classical tradition is exemplified before us in the hundred concerts attended does depend in large measure on which hundred concerts we go to doesn't it?" Oh, absolutely! The tradition depends on the creation and preservation of aesthetic quality, that is really what it is about.
It is a partial truth that it was in the 19th century, largely through the work of German musicologists (and musicians like Mendelssohn) that the music of earlier times was brought to light. But at the same time, the deep roots of the Western tradition were faintly visible and referenced especially in Church music with its tradition of chant. Of course this also underwent a revival during the 19th century. We must also not forget that composers like Mozart and Beethoven were very aware of the music of Bach. Also, composers were long trained in counterpoint with texts by people like Johann Josef Fux dating from 1725 and in harmony with the collection of chorales by J. S. Bach put together by his son C. P. E. Bach shortly after his death. Also recall that the materials and methods of both Fux and Bach were based on long-established traditions.
So I think my reference to tradition is not vague if you look closely at the training of professional musicians.
I think a more nuanced way of addressing the question(s) Maury has brought up is which traditions? For instance, yes, there's Fux but there's been some question as to what extent Fux style counterpoint or Matheson style figured bass was considered "the" method or whether other approaches were favored in different regions. From the Robert Gjerdingen works I've read it seems Haydn trained with Porpora and that was more in the Neapolitan partimenti traditions than the Bach chorales et al tradition of pedagogy. I have been getting an impression, non-academic that I am, that some of the passionate push-back among new musicology has been the extent to which the apparent hegemony of Germanophile music theory and pedagogy doesn't even really account for the big Beethoven vs Rossini issues of even the 19th century, let alone the actual practices of the 18th century. If German approaches hadn't been presented as quite as much the one-size-fits-all as they apparently have been in just Anglo-American educational contexts some of the dust-ups we've seen in the last fifteen years might simply not have happened. Eugene Narmour wouldn't have bothered writing Beyond Schenkerism if he didn't think Schenkerian dogmas had become more influential than the internal coherence and viability of the method plausibly merited.
Especially as I've been reading about partimento traditions that seems like a big reason why we should try to be more nuanced about what was the "standard" pedagogy. I've proposed over at my blog that encouraging students to jam over stock bass lines in Neapolitan teaching traditions or teaching figured bass probably has more overlap with jazz pedagogy than with attempts at post-Bach counterpoint (do theory students still have to write scholastic fugues as part of exam requirements or was that just George Oldroyd era stuff?)
Thanks for mentioning the partimento teaching method. I was on the verge of mentioning it in my comment. This strengthens the argument I believe. The partimento tradition taught composers certain basic chord progressions like the romanesca, which dates from its use by the vihuelistas in early 16th century Spain. This method was used for centuries right up to the classes of Rimsky-Korsakov in the early 20th century.
We should always respect the details of history: there have always been strong non-Germanic elements in the tradition. Looking at Bach, we can discern French and Italian traditions that he synthesized with German ones.
Yes, music students do still write fugues. At least I certainly did in a graduate seminar titled "Fugue" in which we did literally nothing else.
29 comments:
Yikes Bryan,
you pooh pooh my oh so nicey nice categories of formal and informal music with the icky word - tradition!
Please pray tell what kind of tradition you compose?? Isn't that an embarrassing question too?
Contemporary classical music's biggest problem (aside from the name) is its attempts to cordon itself off from all the other not-commercially-oriented creative musics in the world. You implicitly draw a binary between classical and commercial pop, but the truth is that most "pop" music is not commercial. (How can "experimental pop" even exist? It's as much an oxymoron as "contemporary classical".) Jazz hasn't been commercial or popular for generations. Most beat-driven electronic music makes no money and few producers of it really aspire to. The vast majority of rap is being created in high school cafeterias and playgrounds for no reason except enjoyment and expression. If you are using "pop" as a euphemism for "beat-driven" or "Afrodiasporic", it would be better to state that directly. If you are saying "pop" to mean "popular", I have about a thousand different rappers and producers in my iTunes who are less popular than Mozart.
It is similarly weird to me to try to define "classical" by drawing a lineage between contemporary composers and Europe in order to distinguish them from, say, jazz musicians or producers of experimental techno. There is more musical continuity between Chopin and Esperanza Spalding than there is between Chopin and Brian Ferneyhough. As I said in the comment in your previous post, it seems like "classical" is a description of audience demographics more than anything pertaining to the actual music.
I think you need to operationally define what you mean by tradition although I suspect it is just an antique word for style and its underlying techniques. In informal music this is taught by gurus or mentors or listening and copying. In formal music it is taught by books and scores and school teachers/professors.
I would agree that the book of rules a composer or songwriter uses can provide more specificity to the formal and informal categories. So if we say someone composes formal music using the Ars Nova defined methods we have a pretty good idea of what would or would not fit into that category.
There is a psychological factor that comes into play though that increases the finer distinctions we make the more expert and knowledgeable we become about an art form. So this is how mavens discuss all kinds of very specific jazz styles for example that would be rather opaque to a general non expert listener.
Mr Hein,
I agree that often the so called genres given are commercial categories either for the record/CD rack of past years or search terms on the web or accounting divisions at the labels. It also can be applied to audience demographics as you note which is just another way of describing customers.
I didn’t get around to this on the last thread so I’ll add some thoughts here. I agree with Ethan that notation alone isn’t enough and I also think the superficial sounds aren’t enough in themselves. I think there’s a deeper idea of lineage and practice involved with categorizations like this. A big part of that is ‘who/what is your music drawing from and who is it in dialogue with?’. To step outside of European classical and Jazz for a moment, an example that comes to mind is Jack Rose, an American steel-string player in the vein of John Fahey and Robbie Basho. His music is pretty much divided into blues/ragtime pieces and pieces styled after Indian classical music. His Indian pieces go beyond the superficial noodling that a lot of similar pieces fall into, he was clearly someone who had studied not only forms but specific ragas as well, basically he understood the aesthetics and syntax of the style well. The reason I would consider that music some other than Indian classical however isn’t because of his ethnicity or his instrument (there are plenty of non-Indian musicians in that tradition now as well as guitarists), but rather his music isn’t connected to the oral tradition, a lineage of teachers and musicians in dialogue with other musicians, it simply exists outside of that conversation. An analogy might be someone who is knowledgable about a religion, has read about it and maybe even finds some bits of it useful for their own life but isn’t actually a member, versus a practitioner who actually participates in the rituals and the community life of that religion. I think that example also points to some of the difficulties and overlaps with these distinctions because it’s very possible for example that a progressive Catholic may have a worldview much closer in many ways to a Tibetan Buddhist, than they would to say Rick Santorum. At the same time though, I think it’s a mistake to underestimate that connection that the two Catholics would share through that bond of shared ritual/practice.
Ethan to take your Ezperanza Spalding/Chopin/Ferneyhough comparison, it’s true on a superficial level that Ferneyhough and Chopin don’t have much in common but they do share a set practices, training, and broad musical understanding of things like gesture and affect that connect the two. It can be difficult to find the threads if you don’t really know the music but I could walk you through a piece like ‘Kurze Schatten’ and show you all the ways he’s drawing on that tradition (and that piece in particular even draws on a lot of harmonic gestures taken from composers like Liszt and Chopin.) You may say the superficial aspect is still more salient and that’s fine if that’s how you feel but that doesn’t mean the other stuff isn’t there. I’ve played that piece for him before and I can tell you he does these things very consciously and there’s no doubt about what tradition he’s part of. There’s a video of him on youtube coaching his piece for guitar duo that shows this. If you hate his music, it’ll probably be tough to get through the whole thing but even from the first five minutes or so you can get a sense of how he communicates about music. The references he makes, the way he talks about gesture, phrasing, timing are just like every conductor I’ve worked with or seen in rehearsals it’s a very specific way of talking that is distinct from say Jazz or Rock musicians I’ve played with, and I’d bet more similar to Chopin talking to an orchestra than Ezperanza Spalding talking to her band.
In response to the actual music that brought about this discussion it’s hard to say without knowing more honestly. I think based on sound alone genre distinctions are increasingly difficult to make as access to music gets so much easier and more personalized, so the distinctions would have to do largely with with the issues I raised above. The degree to which that’s useful or simply unhelpful gatekeeping is debateable, but for my more controversial take I’d say being to be part of the European classical tradition is largely based on coming to the music as a performer (in a broad sense) first rather than a listener. In that sense I consider the participatory element of it to be based on private practice and study, going along with Charles Rosen I think that’s the real heart of how the tradition gets passed along, canons are formed, etc. So in my mind whether or not the piece is in that tradition or not has more to do with what he expects others to do with it.
To Ary
The problem I have is that I don't think the kinds of techniques and shared views you reference extends beyond the period of common practice so called. Baroque music had a different set of shared values, performance affects and secret references as did Renaissance music, Medieval modal music and chant. I agree that notation alone doesn't provide much specificity but I think does point to a crucial difference; namely the application of a specific and overt set of rules and musical elements to composition versus an informal inductive approach. I hear a pretty clear divide between these two forms of music.
So to the initial category of notation vs no notation we have to then apply the categories of shared style and its underlying techniques common practice and rules (which is what I assume Bryan is referencing with tradition) to start to narrow down how that higher order distinction functions in actual music compositions
Yes there are many branches in the tradition but I'd argue that if they are part of that tradition they all tie back to certain way of understanding and learning music that is rooted in the music of the Catholic church and European folk music. Tradition is dynamic and always changing so it is worth thinking about when enough reformations and mutations have turned it into something else altogether. Like you may think Ferneyhough's music has too many layers of mutation and abstraction to be recognizable as belonging to that tradition and while I'd argue with that, I also think that viewpoint is totally valid and you could argue that it belongs to another genre. Without a doubt there's a lot of gray areas but I believe say Schoenberg's music (to pick a less extreme example) is very much in dialogue with earlier periods in the tradition and acknowledges their influence while at the same time transforming them, whereas a different genre would be more like a seperate conversation (oversimplifying here of course because totally separate conversations as such are basically non-existent in today's world).
I think we need to distinguish between Western European religious symbology and ritual versus the music composed for various functions within the churches. It is a rather long distance between chant and Beethoven's Missa Solemnis. It is clear that the churches were very relaxed about stylistic changes both of the musical forms of religious music as well as the architecture of its buildings but quite rigid with respect to the religious documents, texts and rituals. And we have to note that there was a divide even there in Eastern vs Western Europe.
I said elsewhere that categorization of music can never be logically proved so it is just a question of utility and consensus. For myself I think there are fundamental breaks between chant, Ars Nova, the tonal system and atonal systems such as serialism. So I would be quite skeptical that we can find consistent musical gestures across these various styles other than something obvious like dynamics or fast slow motion. But I'm willing to be convinced by specific evidence.
I think that may be the first time I've ever heard the churches in Western Europe being called 'very relaxed' about stylistic changes in music!
As to your 2nd paragraph, I doubt I'll be able to convince a skeptic in a format like this but a good place to start would be Webern's lectures called 'A Path to New Music'. They're informal and meant for a lay audience but it covers exactly this, the connection between Schoenberg's music and European music going back to Gregorian chant. It's a little Hegelian in it's tone for my tastes, but I think his music examples are strong, he knows the history well and as a first rate musician himself he can discuss it intelligently from an insider's perspective. Krenek similarly wrote quite a bit on the subject, and if you study or sing his 'Lamentatio Jeremiae Prophetae' that's a pretty convincing argument in itself in my opinion. It's actually much easier to trace the links between the Schoenberg school and composers like Ciconia or Josquin (Isorhythm and canon are serial techniques after all) than say Schumann and those earlier composers (again though I'd still say they're present).
It's funny to see an argument against a continuity between European classical tradition and jazz, because among music academics it has been a longstanding axiom that *everything* in Western music grows out of Bach and Beethoven. This is why they make every music major, regardless of specialty, do the same core sequence of music theory, aural skills and music history. In most places, that core consists 100% of European canonical music (a few progressive schools tack Charlie Parker or Thelonious Monk on the end.) So there I was at NYU with all these audio engineers and bebop saxophonists and Latin percussionists being forced to harmonize four-voice chorales and realize figured bass. There is, of course, no corresponding expectation that the classical performance or composition majors need to learn anything at all outside of the European core.
Anyway, at least in the US, literally everyone who goes to music school has to demonstrate a fair bit of knowledge of and competence in classical music. There might be a wide gulf between Esperanza Spalding and Brian Ferneyhough, but in my observation, there's a wider gulf between both of them and a self-taught bedroom producer who didn't go to music school. I know that four semesters is not the same thing as fifteen years of private study and immersion, but the universities enforce the classical core in a seeming effort to try to cram in all that enculturation. I am living proof that it doesn't work all that well, but it's not for lack of trying.
I'm sure that Brian Ferneyhough intends his music to have all kinds of continuity with Chopin and Liszt, and I'm sure that the continuity is audible to the specialized listener. But the similarities between jazz and Romanticism aren't "superficial", they are broad and deep. My take on the 20th century is that the classical vanguard broke hard with its own harmonic traditions at around about the same time that jazz musicians were starting to gain access to those traditions.
So, like, the similarities between Art Tatum and Franz Liszt are not at all superficial, Tatum is basically Liszt plus blues tonality plus swing.
Ethan, one of the ironies of my interactions with John Borstlap is that he has name-checked Herbert Pauls' Two Centuries in One as a piece in his (Borstlap's ) defense that Romantic music has remained viable but since I went to the trouble of reading Pauls' work what Pauls proposed was that the basic harmonic continuity between Romantic pianistic vocabulary and jazz showed that, contrary to atonal schools, the 19th century vocabularies stayed in a steady connection to the musical mainstream. The 9th and 7th chords might get used differently in Rachmaninoff and Ellington but they show connections.
On my side as a guitarist I noticed how readily themes from early 19th century guitarist composers like Giuliani and Carulli lent themselves to being transformed into ragtime strains. Leo Brouwer once made a cogent observation that for we guitarists the boundaries between highbrow and popular guitar literature are significantly more permeable and less significant than they have been in the piano repertoire, whether the salon or concert rep of the 19th century.
I've read things to the effect that applied church music has always had a lot more improvisation and flexibility in execution of established norms (which I know firsthand and via reading) but traditions varied. Zwingli and Bullinger, legendarily, banned music of every kind from church services (Charles Garside Jr went so far as to argue in his book on Zwingli & the Arts that the Swiss Reformers banishing all music from church services made it possible for Genevan musical life to exist in a functionally secular realm). I've read snippets here and there from specialist writings that the concerns about musicians and musical cultures in the medieval period through the Renaissance had partly to do with musical concerns but also a fair amount to do with abuses of the beneficial system (ie simony etc) so that we might have to be careful to distinguish criticisms of the "what" of church music from the "how" of criticism of its patronage systems. Luther was effusive about Josquin while other Reformers objected to the systems that funded Josquin's music. I'm getting my toes wet on that literature lately and it's interesting to see how European composers could very clearly see how their work connected back to these traditions (and debates, as a context for defending contemporary works a la Webern, etc) and how those aspects of music history don't (or didn't) come across in US surveys much.
Bryan this is an excellent little article you've posted, and I'm equally appreciative of the reader discussion you've provoked. Although you guys are technically beyond me, I've decades of a thousand concerts and thousands of CDs collected and listened to.
And on that ground I assert Bryan has pretty much captured the essence of a slippery task, ie, defining "classical music":
a tradition ....whatever term we use it is simply a marker to refer to the music that originated in Western Europe during the dark ages in the form of Gregorian and other forms of chant and was elaborately developed through notation, counterpoint, harmony, voice-leading and many other devices, also mainly in Western Europe from the 12th century especially, and continues to this day.
I think that tradition extends beyond compositional devices and tonal systems but also to the instruments themselves, magnificently arrayed in modern orchestras. My ear is usually pretty confident in distinguishing "real" classical music from, say, musical theater or jazz, including non-classical elements that might be fused into some modern cross-genre music. Such non-classical elements might be using percussion to keep the beat explicit, "blue" notes or other bent notes, or electric instruments or any type of artificial or machine-generated sounds, or forms or formulae recognizable as derived from a different tradition than the composed works of the European classical tradition. In that sense, I wonder if "European" isn't somehow a more essential term than "classical" now that we've moved into a globalist age when it is no longer assumed which civilization's classical tradition we mean. Of course the problems with that are how traditions cross-fertilize in real life, so the boundaries often blur and overlap. As we know, all music was once new and so the true artist's work has a relationship to tradition that is a dialogue not mimicry. And of course a work of art is not merely a dialogue with tradition but more directly with life itself, as experienced and expressed by an original mind in a specific time and place.
But I think Bryan pretty much already said all that.
To Ary,
Your arguments are well laid out but we just have a viewpoint difference. If you are referring to Palestrina and the Council of Trent flap, the fact that unofficial grumbling about music styles occurred within the Church is to be expected over 900 years of music development. The 20th C saw actual official bans in Germany and the Soviet Union over disfavored music. So overall the Church in practice at least has accepted quite radical stylistic change.
As for the examples of supposed connection of serialism with prior history I think we have to see much of it as tendentious and motivated reasoning to minimize the break that serialism represented. Yes there was isorhythm but that has nothing to do with serialism really as a musical style. This is the issue I noted that there is no logically necessary basis of music categorization so that utility and consensus are the goals rather than some QED.
To Mr Hein,
I would agree that there is continuity of jazz with the period of common practice. I also agree with your statement that the current divide is more between the musically illiterate performers and creators versus those educated either formally or through extensive reading.
Ethan I’m not sure if you’re comment “It's funny to see an argument against a continuity between European classical tradition and jazz” was directed at me but if so I’d say that’s an oversimplification or misunderstanding of what I was trying to say. I think Jazz is definitely a development of that tradition, there was really no way around that due to European hegemony. It seems to me though that since black musicians were almost entirely kept out of the highest levels of the tradition they had to invent a new direction to take the elements they were given, with a largely different value system and well of influences. Whether it ought to be or not though, it is largely a separate community now even if Jazz students are forced to take a few European classical theory and history classes.
You definitely don’t need to preach to me about the problems with music in higher ed!
“My take on the 20th century is that the classical vanguard broke hard with its own harmonic traditions at around about the same time that jazz musicians were starting to gain access to those traditions.”
This take I disagree with though. If you’re talking about someone like Schoenberg, and you think his harmonic approach breaks hard with someone like Liszt, then you definitely haven’t studied enough of either. Post world war 2 is another story though and if the music promoted by hardline Darmstadters constituted the whole of what's to be considered 'vanguard' then I'd agree. There’s plenty of music that developed out of the followers of Boulez, Cage and Stockhausen (Lachenmann and stuff like that) that I would argue crossed the line into something else altogether, but there was also a lot more going on than just in that small world (even with it's outsized influence on academic composition departments). Anyways I like Art Tatum fine but from what I've listened to I still just hear some superficial similarities in harmony but deployed in a static manner and used for very different expressive purposes. What’s really lacking for a deep connection in my mind is the motivic development and harmonic intensification processes that Liszt uses to build his big pieces. There’s nothing I’ve heard in Tatum that tries to do anything like the Sonata in B minor or the Mephisto Waltzes. If what you’re hearing is ‘broad and deep similarities’ then we are just working with different conceptions of those words.
The question: What is classical music?
It is art. What is art? Hard to say other than an activity involving each of our senses plus imagination plus talent plus technique - something humans have done since the beginning of recorded time. What is the purpose of art? To make us fall in love with life more. The delight of the eyes, the delight of sound, of song of words of chant ... creation, done by an individual. As I've written elsewhere, the history of art is the history of individual assertion. Individual assertion has always abutted the going social illusion - medieval chanters had to work around the clergy (that demonic tritone); Renaissance musicians had to work around kings and princes (and the clergy); in the classical age composers had to work around the court & bourgeoisie concert supporters; in the modern age composers have had to contend with the market; but creators, composers writers, artists always find a way! Excellence will out. Remember: art objects create their own demand; nobody in Europe was crying out for Beethoven's 5th - or any other symphony for that matter; part of the push-pull of artists vs the social illusion is part and parcel of the excitement of art ... over to you ...
Thanks to all for a robust and stimulating round of comments. My larger point remains, I think, that classical music fits very poorly into contemporary genre categories because it is neither a style, nor a genre, nor a commercial category, but rather a very deep-rooted tradition that encompasses many styles, genres and categories. I see it as an ongoing practice because composers of today are still aware of and influenced by the tradition. Steve Reich recently commented that he was influenced by that first generation of contrapuntalists Léonin and Pérotin.
Somewhat off topic, but a wonderful composer and guitarist has passed:
https://www.washingtonpost.com/obituaries/2022/02/26/brazilian-guitarist-barbosa-lima-dies/
Thanks, Patrick. Nowadays it seems Scarlatti sonatas inhabit nearly every guitar recital, but back forty years ago it was Carlos Barbosa-Lima who was a pioneer in publishing a couple of books of transcriptions of Scarlatti sonatas for guitar.
Webern's essays get precisely at the thing that makes him so hard for a non-believer to get into. When he says that all composers are aiming for clarity and unity, that's plausible enough. However, he goes on to say: "Composition with twelve notes has achieved a degree of complete unity that was not even approximately there before. It is clear that where relatedness and unity are omnipresent, comprehensibility is also guaranteed. And all the rest is dilettantism, nothing else, for all time, and always has been." Now I know some of this is just the purple prose that was conventional at the time, but, like... really, Webern? I am supposed to take you and your music seriously when you make claims for it like this?
Schoenberg also said a few things that make you shake your head. The age of artists' manifestoes, of which these are examples, comes along about the same time that noble patronage was disappearing forever. These are both aspects of modernism that I think are related. Artists sought to place their work on a pseudo religious plane in order to command public attention and veneration. It didn't quite work, did it?
However there were many other artists ready to further the tradition in a myriad of ways that could be more easily appreciated by audiences. And there are even some that appreciate Schoenberg and Webern. Not to mention Alban Berg.
Bryan
The issue I have is that you still have not precisely defined what you mean by tradition. So are you saying there is some quasi religious ethos that continues from generation to generation of composers and that is why it transcends styles? Or is tradition some topmost meta style? It is tricky to even equate tradition as polyphony such as with Perotin although polyphony and harmony are mostly a Western music component. Wouldn't it be simpler to say there is historical awareness now rather than some specific tradition? And in the past a new music style simply rejected earlier styles and confined them to the attic or worse.
As I have given innumerable ostensive definitions, I rather thought you were kidding. Indeed, this entire blog, all 3,500 or so posts is a rather large description of the tradition of, for lack of a better term, "classical music." The kind of definition I think you are requiring is both inappropriate and impossible. In the comment above, when I was referring to the pseudo religious impulse shown in certain artist's manifestoes, I was just responding to Ethan's comment. That might be a little wavelet in the stream of tradition, but certainly nothing definitive. Definitions serve to delimit, to restrict, to tie down and tie up. The very long cultural tradition I am referring to is rather outside that. The thing is, I think that a purely intellectual approach fails. I think that we who are part of the tradition are perfectly aware of it, but if you are not, you might doubt it even exists. We could go to a hundred concerts in which the tradition is exemplified in many different ways and you might still be asking me, but what do you MEAN by tradition? It is what W. V. O. Quine described as a "category error" where you literally can't see the university for the buildings getting in the way.
Yeah the Webern lectures have a style that’s tough to relate with today to say the least, and outside of historical curiosity I generally don’t recommend reading them. The few reasons I do suggest looking at them is to give a quick explanation for the connection between the 2nd Viennese composers and the earlier tradition (as I did here) or to get at the impulse for repeating a 12 note row, which in Webern’s mind was more spiritual/mystical (coming largely from Goethe’s and Swedenborg’s visions of nature and heaven) rather than coldly mathematical.
The only defense I can offer for quotes like the one you mention is that Webern speaking at that time wasn’t anyone with any real power, certainly not the power his name would carry in academia posthumously. It’s easy to imagine a tenured professor at a major university in the 1970s saying something like that to a classroom full of impressionable 18 year old composition students and to find it repulsive, but Webern was speaking to a small group of mostly non-musicians. At least a few of them were close friends and anyone else must’ve been somewhat sympathetic if they stuck it out past the first one. So the idea that a composer whose music was performed less and less in an increasingly conservative climate would say something like that to a few people who voluntarily attended a series of private lectures doesn’t strike me as all that objectionable. Particularly given how divisive the artistic world was at the time, an unpopular composer trying to sell his music with some grandiose statements and calling other composers dilettantes seems pretty mild.
Of all the first wave 12 tone composers, Krenek is the only one I think is actually a good writer and holds up today but even he has his moments. I doubt any of it would be enough to convert a non-believer though :)
Bryan,
I'm not trying to annoy you but rather try to move the discussion to some mew insight if possible. The way you were referring to a new discussion of so called category error in the last thread led me to believe that you had come up with something new rather than as you say something that has been reiterated in various ways through the website.
I'm just pointing out that the statement for example, that the classical tradition is exemplified before us in the hundred concerts attended does depend in large measure on which hundred concerts we go to doesn't it? This is the strength and the limitation of inductive reasoning and categorization.
In the past did the concert going public of 1800 think that by going to a Haydn symphony they were part of an 800 year "tradition" or rather that the errors and inadequacies of past fustian music styles had finally been remedied? It is only in the 20th C that some appreciation for the older styles as older styles with their own integrity have come about including other non Western parallel musical styles such as Indian raga. That was why I raised the question whether the applicable term might be more along the lines of historical awareness than a rather vague use of the term tradition that doesn't involve specific musical techniques and an unbroken chain of mentors and students learning the same core plus extensions.
To me the tradition of which you talk seems a very recent anachronism imposing our historical awareness backwards. It is entirely possible though that henceforth this will in fact be a widely shared way of thinking about the various styles from chant and the troubadours forward but it would be something created now IMO.
Maury, you have long been a very perceptive commentator on the blog, so I would certainly not be annoyed!
"the statement for example, that the classical tradition is exemplified before us in the hundred concerts attended does depend in large measure on which hundred concerts we go to doesn't it?" Oh, absolutely! The tradition depends on the creation and preservation of aesthetic quality, that is really what it is about.
It is a partial truth that it was in the 19th century, largely through the work of German musicologists (and musicians like Mendelssohn) that the music of earlier times was brought to light. But at the same time, the deep roots of the Western tradition were faintly visible and referenced especially in Church music with its tradition of chant. Of course this also underwent a revival during the 19th century. We must also not forget that composers like Mozart and Beethoven were very aware of the music of Bach. Also, composers were long trained in counterpoint with texts by people like Johann Josef Fux dating from 1725 and in harmony with the collection of chorales by J. S. Bach put together by his son C. P. E. Bach shortly after his death. Also recall that the materials and methods of both Fux and Bach were based on long-established traditions.
So I think my reference to tradition is not vague if you look closely at the training of professional musicians.
I think a more nuanced way of addressing the question(s) Maury has brought up is which traditions? For instance, yes, there's Fux but there's been some question as to what extent Fux style counterpoint or Matheson style figured bass was considered "the" method or whether other approaches were favored in different regions. From the Robert Gjerdingen works I've read it seems Haydn trained with Porpora and that was more in the Neapolitan partimenti traditions than the Bach chorales et al tradition of pedagogy. I have been getting an impression, non-academic that I am, that some of the passionate push-back among new musicology has been the extent to which the apparent hegemony of Germanophile music theory and pedagogy doesn't even really account for the big Beethoven vs Rossini issues of even the 19th century, let alone the actual practices of the 18th century. If German approaches hadn't been presented as quite as much the one-size-fits-all as they apparently have been in just Anglo-American educational contexts some of the dust-ups we've seen in the last fifteen years might simply not have happened. Eugene Narmour wouldn't have bothered writing Beyond Schenkerism if he didn't think Schenkerian dogmas had become more influential than the internal coherence and viability of the method plausibly merited.
Especially as I've been reading about partimento traditions that seems like a big reason why we should try to be more nuanced about what was the "standard" pedagogy. I've proposed over at my blog that encouraging students to jam over stock bass lines in Neapolitan teaching traditions or teaching figured bass probably has more overlap with jazz pedagogy than with attempts at post-Bach counterpoint (do theory students still have to write scholastic fugues as part of exam requirements or was that just George Oldroyd era stuff?)
Thanks for mentioning the partimento teaching method. I was on the verge of mentioning it in my comment. This strengthens the argument I believe. The partimento tradition taught composers certain basic chord progressions like the romanesca, which dates from its use by the vihuelistas in early 16th century Spain. This method was used for centuries right up to the classes of Rimsky-Korsakov in the early 20th century.
We should always respect the details of history: there have always been strong non-Germanic elements in the tradition. Looking at Bach, we can discern French and Italian traditions that he synthesized with German ones.
Yes, music students do still write fugues. At least I certainly did in a graduate seminar titled "Fugue" in which we did literally nothing else.
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