Emancipation of the Dissonance?

Schoenberg's famous "emancipation of the dissonance" is one of the fundamental concepts in the history of harmony in the 20th century. If you go look at the Wikipedia article you will see the standard narrative. The history of harmony is the progressive acceptance of more dissonant intervals. From the perfect fourths and fifths of organum we move to the acceptance of the third in the High Middle Ages, progressing to the acceptance of the 7th and 9th, eventually arriving at the pinnacle of total chromaticism as advocated by Schoenberg and his pupils. Their 12-tone method is a way of systematizing the thorough use of all the chromatic tones.

The Wikipedia article is remarkably short for such a weighty and historically important concept, though, isn't it? This might be because there are a few problems with the whole idea. The two most significant ones are, first, that it is based on a misunderstanding of musical structure. As every harmony text informs us, the development of every new harmony in music history came about as a result of voice-leading! The harmonic series, though beloved of some theorists, actually had little to do with it. The third came about through a descent from the fifth to the tonic. The seventh in diatonic harmony is NOT an accepted dissonance, but a voice moving to the third of the tonic. Voice-leading demands that it resolve. The augmented sixth chords came about by means of a chromatic progression within a Phrygian cadence. Here is the relevant section from Aldwell and Schachter's Harmony and Voice-Leading:

You cannot understand harmony without understanding voice-leading, hence the title of the text. Using the harmonic series as a justification for more and more harmonic richness is just bizarre. Harmonic richness comes from voice-leading, that is, the conduct of the separate voices is what both creates and resolves dissonances. Trying to connect this with the harmonic series is just theoretical mumbo-jumbo. What was really going on in the early decades of the 20th century can be seen from a lot of different perspectives. But the one perspective we need to be particularly wary of is the one sold to us by the composers arguing for it: chromatic harmony as "emancipation of the dissonance." As I have talked about here, much of the aesthetic ideology of modernism is really disguised marketing. Such is the case here.

This brings us to the second problem with this concept: it is only a metaphor and a flawed one at that! Chromatic harmonies are not "emancipated" from anything! Emancipation is the granting of rights to previously disenfranchised groups of people. It is a moral concept having nothing to do with music. But it was a useful metaphor as it made dissonance seem moral, healthy and, most of all, historically inevitable. Once all the intervals were emancipated, around the time of the First World War, then the pinnacle of music history had been reached--as far as harmony is concerned. So what has happened since?

Alas, history has not cooperated with the emancipators. If you view harmony from the point of view of emancipating all the intervals, like so many slaves of the lords of tonality, then there really is nowhere else to go. Sure, for a while composers tried serializing everything they could think of, but this didn't last long and audiences didn't care much for it. So now we are in a post-historical phase where, surprise, surprise, consonance has been rediscovered.

Let's end with a couple of pieces. First, Structures for two pianos by Pierre Boulez, an example of total serialization from 1952-61:

And second, the de-emancipated return to consonance of the music of Enojuhani Rautavaara. This is the Symphony No. 8 from 1999:

History moving backwards? Or just a bad metaphor?

Two Musicians

My diverse and recondite tastes are, I'm sure, confusing for those programs that sites like Amazon and YouTube use to determine what sorts of things you might be interested in. For example, I went to YouTube to see what music they had by Milton Babbitt and the first clip on the "recommended" list was Toccata and Fugue in D minor performed by Vanessa-Mae. Just now I opened up YouTube and the first few recommended items are

• Beethoven, 7th Symphony, Allegretto
• An MIT lecture on music and technology
• a song, in Japanese, by Genki Sudo and World Order
• Martha Argerich playing Chopin, Ballade #1
• a student version of Greensleeves on piano
• a clip from Babylon 5

For me, the search for aesthetic 'truth' obviously involves a lot of comparing different things! (Well, except for Babylon 5, that's pretty much just entertainment.) So let's compare a couple of different things. How about Vanessa-Mae and Milton Babbitt? Here she is with the aforementioned toccata and fugue written by that Saxon organist, J. S. Bach:

I've said disparaging things about Vanessa-Mae from time to time, but viewed from the right angle she is pretty much perfect: young, sexy, good violinist and she really wants you to be happy and have fun. What could possibly be wrong with that? And if she does a funky version of Bach, well, so what? There are no rules in music, not nowadays. Millions enjoy her music so what's the problem?

Ok, now let's have a look/listen to Milton Babbitt. He may be less familiar to you. Babbitt is what Richard Taruskin calls the 'apex' of the thousand-year literate tradition of the West. Ever since people started writing down music a thousand years ago, there has been developing a tradition that looks to create complex, intricate music for those who have the intelligence and interest to hear and study it. In the 13th, 14th and early 15th centuries, composers wrote isorhythmic motets where there was a repeating rhythmic pattern, called the talea which was combined with a repeating melodic pattern called the color. As these two patterns had different numbers of units, the repetitions did not coincide. Composers also used different texts in different languages in different voices sounding at the same time and often created intricate textures in which one voice might imitate another voice, but backwards or upside-down or in different note values. The possibilities were endless. But all of this sort of thing is really only comprehensible if you are very familiar with the techniques, or study the score. Here is an example of some of this kind of writing; the last great isorhythmic motet--Nuper rosarum flores by Guillaume Dufay:

You can listen to this and enjoy it just for the sounds, but to actually understand what is going on will take study of the score. To understand what is going on in the music of Milton Babbitt will take considerable study of serialism in music, perhaps some mathematical set theory and a long sit-down with the score! It took theorists twenty years in some cases to figure out what was going on in some of this music. He is the exact opposite of Vanessa-Mae in the sense that he is trying to make music that is nothing but rules. Here is Babbitt's Composition for Four Instruments written in 1948:

If you want to study this piece, you might start with the Wikipedia article. Milton Babbitt (who passed away last year) does not care if inattentive, naive listeners do not 'get' his music. He is not writing for them. He is not really writing for anyone; what he is doing could be described as technical research into the possibilities of musical structure. He is a research scientist in music. Now, mind you, there are problems with this approach as it could be questioned aesthetically on the grounds that if it has no aesthetic appeal then it is not music as an artform, but rather a kind of mathematics. You can question what Vanessa-Mae is doing with precisely the opposite position that she is doing nothing whatsoever interesting with the music, just pandering to the audience.

My position is that I'm actually glad that both these musicians exist (or did, in the case of Babbitt). This is all music, in my view. And comparing how differently music can be approached and produced tells us about music and about ourselves. You can actually enjoy, appreciate and perhaps understand both what Vanessa-Mae and what Milton Babbitt are doing. Personally, even after giving both of them a fair hearing, I have to say that I don't see much possibility in listening/watching more performances of Vanessa-Mae as you can pretty much hear/see what she is up to the first time. But Babbitt is a little different. You may justifiably complain that he has utterly removed any trace of genuine human expression from his music, but still, it is definitely the case that repeated listenings and study of the score will reveal much more over time. So in that case, Babbitt's music is interesting--to me, at least--in a way that Vanessa-Mae's is not.

UPDATE: The clip from Vanessa-Mae has had over 629,000 views and another clip of the same piece, in a concert performance, has had over 8 million views! The Babbitt? A little over 7,000 views...