The Aesthetics of Novelty

I've been reading Carl Dahlhaus' Esthetics of Music. While a short book, it certainly provides a lot of food for thought. In the last chapter, "Standards of Criticism" he summarizes a lot of the aesthetic assumptions of modernism:

The commonplace fact that familiar things are not perceived but merely registered and that preconceptions get in the way of things themselves and hinder an impartial experience has been made the point of departure for a theory of art by formalistic estheticians, especially the Russians. The center of this theory is formed by the category of novelty. Only something that is so surprising and so off-putting as to escape habitual forms of reaction can have any prospect of being perceived esthetically... [Formalism can also] support an opposite extreme, the repossession of what is archaic. For a restoration of the remote past shares with an esthetic revolution the tendency to alienate. Both restoration and revolution, through the amazement they evoke, tend to cut loose perception from habits that prevent its being perception in the full sense of the word. [op. cit. p. 96]

I certainly recognize this aesthetic model as one that underlies the work of many contemporary composers such as John Cage, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, also the earlier generations of Schoenberg, Bartók and Stravinsky. In fact, I am strongly reminded of a book I read many years ago that captures the essence of this view: Seeing is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees by Lawrence Weschler, which is a monograph on the artist Robert Irwin.

But here is the odd thing: while I am very intent on discovering something new in every piece I write, I have never really shared the above aesthetic viewpoint. I think my generation (and later), born in the 1950s, has a different sense of things. For me, mere innovation can be empty tinkering. I have listened to hundreds of pieces written with the above aesthetic and found them to be remarkably similar and predictable from an expressive point of view! In other words, the jagged atonality of composers as different as Luigi Nono, Earle Brown, John Cage and Karlheinz Stockhausen sounds to me expressively very similar. And hence, to me, aesthetically irrelevant. What I am interested in is what is aesthetically expressive to the listener, something that takes the listener somewhere and preferably somewhere new. That this be an expressively authentic experience is more important than that it be novel or revolutionary.

I know I have used some words that are troubling: "authentic" for one. But this is crucial for me. The problem I have with a lot of modernism (and probably some postmodernism as well) is that it is technically novel and expressively uninteresting. The music of Edgar Varèse is importantly novel, but to me it often sounds like the soundtrack to a horror movie--and notice how many of these ominous devices have been stolen by the composers of horror movie soundtracks. Is this the authentic expressive content of Varèse's music? Or is it just that these sounds were new and therefore necessary to his aesthetic?

The procedure I prefer to follow is to take musical structures that may not be new, may be "archaic" perhaps and rediscover them, tilt them, turn them so that they regain their expressive charge. I acknowledge the point that Dahlhaus makes about the need to short circuit familiarity, but I can't buy the whole perceptual theory that underlies it. By juxtaposing things that might have been familiar with things that are not familiar, the whole work becomes a new expressive landscape. At least, that is my conviction.

Here are a couple of pieces, one by Edgar Varèse and one by Luigi Nono, by way of example:

I don't want to alienate my audience, I want to move them...

Alternatives to the Mozart Effect

A number of years ago some questionable research was used to flog books and other materials under the rubric the "Mozart Effect". Listening to Mozart or, more specifically, having your child listen to Mozart, will make them smarter. My reaction to this was "why Mozart?" If Mozart makes you smarter then surely listening to Bach would make you a lot smarter? But I wish I had thought of this clever idea:

I hope you can read that? Some are quite funny and accurate. Others are merely predictable. Still others are insultingly wrong or at least, waywardly inaccurate. The Shostakovich one is particularly objectionable, whereas the Bruckner one is right on the money.

Assuming that there is some effect on childhood development from listening to music, what do you think the results might be with these musical artists:

• B. B. King (child grows up always expecting the worse and keeps telling his or her dates that the thrill is gone)
• Rolling Stones (child is rebellious, always complaining that he can't get no satisfaction)
• Prince (child is multi-talented but obsessed with the color purple)
• Frank Zappa ( child develops a sardonic side and a fascination with ugliness)
• Rihanna (child is remarkably self-centered, constantly trying on new clothes and taking selfies)

This kind of thing quickly becomes tiresome, though, doesn't it? Let's listen to something from one of the new Prince albums:

That sounds just like what he was doing twenty or thirty years ago. Not that there's anything wrong with that.

UPDATE: Just discovered that Jessica Duchen has done this with excellent results:

The Chopin Effect:
Child insists on cladding the living room walls in dove-grey silk to ease piano practice.

The Mendelssohn Effect:
This child seems to speak so easily that he/she is dismissed at school as a brattish know-it-all. Later it turns out that he/she is exhausted because in fact he/she has been putting painstaking hours of revision into every sentence to make it sound effortless.

The Scriabin Effect:
Child starts putting coloured filters over all the lights in the house and reaches a state of desperate over-excitement when they meet and mix. It'll all end in tears.

Follow the link for several other possibilities! 

Top Music Schools

Here is an individual's independent list of what he feels are the top fifteen music schools in the US. There is some quibbling in the comments and here is some more quibbling over at Slipped Disc.

I am tempted to try and do the same for Canada, because all of these US-exclusive lists are rather misleading. But we Canadians hate to brag about anything, so... Unfortunately, I do not have the recent and thorough-going experience that would enable a really accurate evaluation of music schools, so I will just sketch out a few possibilities.

1. McGill University Schulich School of Music

Despite long-standing budget problems (ameliorated by a very large donation a few years ago), McGill continues to be what is probably the finest music school in Canada. It has a student body of close to a thousand students which enables the formation of three orchestras: a full symphony orchestra, a chamber orchestra and a Baroque orchestra. The standard of performance is very high and the school is also known for its outstanding programs in musicology, theory and composition. The school presents hundreds and hundreds of high-quality concerts every year including this one being presented today.

2. University of Toronto School of Music

Though they would like to think of themselves as number one, the U of T School of Music, though with a larger student body, does not seem to be on quite the same level as McGill. They have some fine ensembles, like the Afiara Quartet, associated with the school and along with the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto offer an impressive range of programs. I don't have enough personal knowledge to say much more.

3. Université de Montréal/University of British Columbia/University of Victoria

Here is where it gets really sketchy because these three all have fine, though different, music schools. I'm not sure how to order them as they are so different, so I am giving them a three-way tie. The Université de Montréal is a French-speaking school that does a lot of very innovative and fine things. It is where a lot of the very accomplished Conservatoire students go if they feel the need. UBC is a large school on a very fine campus and UVic is a small school on an equally fine campus. UVic is particularly renowned for its piano performance program, which is one of the finest in Canada. It has also produced a number of fine composers. UBC is a much larger school with some fine faculty members.

4. Conservatoire du Québec

This is a quite different kind of school, based on the French conservatory model. It has a number of branches around the province and the teachers are paid and provided benefits similar to those of civil servants. There are recent reports that there will be some severe budget cutbacks. The Conservatoire has produced some of the most accomplished performing musicians in Canada and you can find its graduates in orchestras coast to coast. Students can attend from an early age and by the time they are eighteen, are already accomplished musicians. Music is rather different from the other kinds of disciplines taught at university as to be an accomplished performer you really need to start serious study much earlier--for the violin, for instance, starting no later than seven years is probably advisable.

After this there are a host of fine university music schools in places like Brandon, Manitoba, Antigonish, Nova Scotia, London, Ontario and other kinds of music schools like the Banff Centre and the Victoria Conservatory of Music.

Which school you choose will depend on the particular kind of program you are seeking and, most importantly, what teachers they have that would be suitable for your needs.

If anyone wants to quibble about these admittedly sketchy rankings, please use the comments to do so!

Here, from the McGill Symphony Orchestra's program, is the Brahms Symphony No. 2 with the Vienna Philharmonic conducted by Leonard Bernstein:

Fun Music Quiz

I'm not sure why, but I'm always a sucker for music quizzes and here is a good one from the Guardian. My favorite question: Who wrote Frère Jacques? I only got seven out of ten on this one. Oh, and you have to do it without Googling, of course!

Friday Miscellanea

I just ran across a very interesting piece that is not only an analysis of bad academic writing, but also a typology of writing in general and instruction in how to avoid bad writing. Pretty useful piece! I try for a blend of classic style with a touch of jocular witticism here at the Music Salon.

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Robert Fink, who supposedly is to popular music scholarship what Richard Taruskin is to classical music scholarship, has a piece up at NewMusicBox that makes some rather bold statements:

those who frame the history of the musical present by categorically denigrating contemporary commercial popular music in favor of art music are holding on to a crude cultural distinction that mimics structural racism in America.

I’m not saying you can’t hate some pop music; I’m just saying you can’t, in the presence of a practicing postmusicologist, hate on all pop music just because it is popular, disguising elitism as self-pitying pride in new music’s marginalized market position.

What's a "postmusicologist"? Is that like a "posterboy for postmodernist musicology"? Well, never mind. While I think the second statement above is overheated and injudicious (probably stances required of postmusicologists) it is not very incorrect. You can hate some pop music, but you also need to recognize that there is also some quite good pop music out there. There is good and bad in all genres. Except grindcore, of course. But the last bit of the second statement, that stuff about "self-pitying elitism", is just a nasty sneer. So, back off, buddy!

The first statement is one of those absurd bits of nonsense that some people have been inflicting on us for a long time now. Equating noticing the superior aesthetic quality of art music over commercial popular music to structural racism is an intellectual felony. For one thing, he myopically assumes that America is The World. Speaking as a Canadian, which means I come from a place where there is not now and never has been "structural racism" against black people, I call BS on this. There is art music and commercial popular music all over the world, not just in America. Hey, America, this isn't about you!

Also, those shibboleth trigger phrases like "crude cultural distinction" and "structural racism" are just masks concealing a real poverty of thought. I gave up reading the piece after the first few paragraphs as it just didn't seem worth the effort. tl;dr!

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The latest entry in the science does the arts sweepstakes is an article in the Globe and Mail about how "Scientists are unlocking the biological secrets of creativity". It's more of the same beside-the-point blather that they keep feeding us in the mass media. What really amazes me is how thin the gruel is. This is the kind of profound understanding that the research results in:

The notion that the brain is doing all kinds of interesting gymnastics when listening to music is well established, popularized by McGill University professor Daniel Levitin and his best-selling 2006 book, This Is Your Brain on Music, in which he hypothesized music is a perceptual illusion in which the brain learns to impose structure on a sequence of sounds.

Ta-da!! Wow, now that is the kind of empty profundity that you don't see every day. Oh, wait, you do!

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And now my brain will impose some more structure on these little pixels with this item: regarding the burning issue of women orchestral conductors, Reuters has this story: "Malkki at helm of Finnish orchestra cracks glass ceiling". They write:

Orchestra conductor Susanna Malkki is used to being asked what it is like working in a male-dominated world.

"Maybe one day we will have reached a point where we won't have to discuss the gender issue at all," she said with a smile.

Hey Susanna? I quit discussing this issue about thirty years ago. One of my best friends, a woman, was studying conducting and doing quite well and I didn't for a minute think it was weird. Nor did I think so when several other women friends of mine were doing quite well as graduate students in composition. It is astonishing how much of our public space is occupied by phony debates designed to benefit certain people. By lying, essentially.

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What is Sinfini Music cutting through this week? Lots of stuff about the cello and an astonishingly inept review of a cycle of Shostakovich symphonies. Reviews these days have to be very brief but this one opens with a remarkably flabby bit of prose, saying very little in an awkward manner:

The first thing to say about this symphonic cycle is that it doesn’t sound like one. I mean that as a compliment. Yes, the production values are uniformly excellent, giving space to soloists to roam free in the Gotham City fairground of Shostakovich’s orchestral imagination, but conductor Vasily Petrenko makes a distinctive case for each symphony, requiring his Liverpool band to turn on a sixpence for the jump-cut sequences in the early and late works, and mining a broad, properly Russian vein of tragedy in the mid-period symphonies.

So, the conductor tries to give each symphony its due? Wow. In this passage on the Symphony No. 4, the writer manages to combine both aesthetic and historical error with cliché:

Another highlight of the cycle is the Fourth, the loudest, most obstreperous and confrontational of all 15 symphonies, and Petrenko holds together the many episodes of the massive first movement with an acute sense of its symphonic credentials but also conveying why this music scared even its composer, so much so that after an initial rehearsal he stuck it in the bottom drawer, where it lay for a quarter of a century.

The loudest and most obstreperous symphony is No. 7, not No. 4. Nearly all Shostakovich symphonies have massive first movements with many episodes. The phrase "symphonic credentials" has no meaning that I can discern and Shostakovich cancelled the premiere until after the death of Stalin not because the music scared him, but because he had just been denounced in Pravda for "formalism" and this symphony would have provided the perfect evidence for Stalin's henchmen and ended his career.

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And that gives us the perfect music to end this miscellanea with: Shostakovich, Symphony No. 4. Here is Haitink and the Chicago Symphony:

The Bad Music Playlist

Reading something where the writer was proposing that there be a National Museum of Kitsch, I immediately thought, "and a bad music playlist!" So as not to be accused of being a snob (I'm not a snob; I'm an elitist--there's a difference!), I will try to find examples from all genres.

Here is some particularly low-hanging fruit, but I had to start somewhere:

Another easy one:

And here is a dubstep mix of "Beat It" which very much does so:

Now for some classical. Here is a Grand Galop Chromatique that should never have seen the light of day. Composed by Franz Liszt:

For some of the best music that exhibits vulgar gaiety we turn to Offenbach:

Baroque composers couldn't reach the depths of badness that Romantic ones could. About the worst they could manage was a kind of mind-numbing boredom where every dull idea was immediately repeated. Here is a lute concerto by J. F. Fasch:

And that's at least the beginnings of a Bad Music Playlist! Enjoy.

Music Critics

I'm just finishing a fairly short, though dense, book on the aesthetics of music by Carl Dahlhaus and will put up a post on it when I'm done. It contains a number of interesting observations on music criticism. I also just ran across a blurb about a BBC interview with Jessye Norman that encapsulates rather well the current, contemptuous view of music critics:

“Oh, they might write it, but, darling, I don’t read it. I don’t need it. I know whether or not I have done onstage what I intended to do that night. … And if it doesn’t suit somebody who is sitting there, not having paid for their ticket to be there, and they find it not to their liking – what does it matter? Who are they?”

"Who are they?" indeed! Those contemptible little wretches, sitting there in the hall, clutching their free tickets, what do they have to say about my performance as an opera diva? Music critics have little credibility these days because the very act of music criticism has little credibility. The reason for this lies in four little words standing for another word: "not to their liking" which is proxy for the word "subjective". In other words, if what a music critic says about a performance is based on nothing more than their private preference, then we should pay no more attention to it than we would to the opinion of our gardener or the guy at the Home Depot. "Jessye Norman? I hear she's a pretty good singer?"

I'm quite sure that Jessye Norman is not in particular need of the usual variety of music criticism. She is a very well-established artist far along in her career. But the primary recipients of music criticism are really the audience members, current and future. And good music criticism should be quite different from private opinion. First of all, it needs to be informed opinion, based on a great deal of knowledge and experience. And second, it should be objective opinion, based on fundamental principles and not just on personal bias. I am not at all a fan of jazz, but if I had to review a concert of jazz, I would do my level best to discuss it objectively without any trace of personal bias. Apparently the received opinion these days is that such a thing is simply not possible. And I'm sure, for many of the critics working today, it is not. But that is because they are not good music critics.

Good music criticism is very difficult and there are few if any rewards for it. A certain amount of the posts on this blog count as music criticism and I try to make them as informed and fair as possible. Nearly all of my commentators seem to agree about that, which is gratifying. Even when we disagree, we do so in a civilized manner.

A certain amount of our aesthetic appreciation is certainly subjective, but not all. Another part is objective and the reasons I think so I have outlined in a number of places here at the Music Salon. Probably the most extensive of these posts were three I did taking inspiration from an unusual source: the English empirical philosopher, David Hume. I chose this because my feeling, very much buttressed by reading the Dahlhaus book, is that too much discussion of aesthetics is purely from the German idealist tradition. Hume provides a refreshingly common-sense alternative. Here the the links to the Hume posts: 1, 2, 3.

At its best, I think that good music criticism serves to answer a number of questions that are important to a serious lover of music:

• What are the elements of a good performance/interpretation? How do these vary with different musical periods?
• What are the elements or fundamentals of a good composition? How do these vary with different musical periods?
• Who are some of the relatively under-rated or little known composers, performers or pieces that might be worth investigating?
• Who are some of the relatively over-rated composers, performers or pieces that might not be worth your time?

Bear in mind that anyone striving to answer these kinds of questions has to be well-informed, an "expert witness" in Hume's sense, who is not just inflicting his own prejudices on you, but trying to make a fair judgement.

Obviously we need to listen to a performance by Jessye Norman to close this post. This is Der Erlkönig by Franz Schubert:

If you want to do a little comparing, have a listen to this version as well: