The Meaning of the Text

This week's current events lead one to muse a bit on the question of text and meaning. In a reply to a comment on this post I wrote the following:

Beardsley is famous for being the co-author of the enormously influential paper, "The Intentional Fallacy". He points out that we must make a crucial distinction between the author's intent and the aesthetic object. When the author says he is going to write a poem about trees and we look at the poem and indeed, it is about trees, there is no real problem. But if the artist says he is making a sculpture that will symbolize inhumanity and oppression and we go and look and all we see is a granite sphere two feet in diameter, then we have a problem and the proper solution to the problem is to discount the artist's intention and whatever he or anyone else says about it. All we really have to work with is the aesthetic object itself.

However, the issue is not quite so easily resolved. Here is another take on intentionalism with regards to legal reasoning from this blog:

...the very notion that a text can speak apart from the signification of that text by some agency — some human with some intent that he attaches to a set of arbitrary marks or sounds — is an absurdity: A text is no more alive and capable of speech than a lump of coal, and documents are no more alive than the paper or pixels they’re written on.

Is the only difference here between the ontological status of something as an aesthetic object, hence something apart from and different than a "moral agent", and something else that is a record of a speech act of a moral agent?

What is the difference between a musical score and things a composer says or writes? That there is a real and considerable difference I think is clear. Mind you, a musical score may contain speech acts, but it is not itself a speech act, but rather an aesthetic object or the instructions for creating an aesthetic object. (The ontological status of a piece of music is always a bit ambiguous...) Also, the speech acts contained in a musical score have a special status themselves. A composer may write a melodic line and append the word "dolorously" to it, indicating to the performer the kind of expression that he desires. The notation is exact in terms of pitch and duration (quarter note B flat at tempo quarter note equal to 60 beats per minute), but just how do you play the melody "dolorously" as opposed to "cheerfully"? Well, that's what we pay performers the big bucks for! The answer is context-dependent. In other words, show me the melody and I can suggest a way of playing it that might be "dolorous". The composer might not have written that instruction, but just the melody itself and a performer might decide on his own to play it in a dolorous fashion. Here is the interesting bit: the composer might intend and the performer play in such a way as to express dolor with the melody without either of them actually thinking of the word "dolorous"! I say this because neither composers nor performers "translate" music into speech or text as a typical activity. We just do music.

Music is not, therefore a "speech act" though a musical score may contain items that look a lot like speech acts: the tempo word Allegro for example or the instruction pizzicato. But these are not garden-variety speech acts, rather they are more like the instructions that come with your Ikea furniture: connect panel A with panel B using connectors C and screws D.

When a composer talks about a piece he has composed, perhaps giving it a program as Berlioz did his Symphonie fantastique, what status should we assign to his remarks? Take these comments by Berlioz on the first movement of his symphony:

The author imagines that a young musician, afflicted by the sickness of spirit which a famous writer has called the vagueness of passions [le vague des passions], sees for the first time a woman who unites all the charms of the ideal person his imagination was dreaming of, and falls desperately in love with her. By a strange anomaly, the beloved image never presents itself to the artist’s mind without being associated with a musical idea, in which he recognises a certain quality of passion, but endowed with the nobility and shyness which he credits to the object of his love.

This melodic image and its model keep haunting him ceaselessly like a double idée fixe. This explains the constant recurrence in all the movements of the symphony of the melody which launches the first allegro. The transitions from this state of dreamy melancholy, interrupted by occasional upsurges of aimless joy, to delirious passion, with its outbursts of fury and jealousy, its returns of tenderness, its tears, its religious consolations – all this forms the subject of the first movement.

How should they be taken? Are they part of the aesthetic object? Separate from? A mere autobiographical revelation of how he thought he was inspired to write the music? Later composers like Mahler who had similar inspirations went to some lengths to bury them so that audiences could simply take the music as it was. Program note writers, of course, then proceed to dig out the supposed "programs" for the works.

For my money, I think that everything that Berlioz said about his symphony other than what is contained in the score is not part of the aesthetic object but instead relates events surrounding the creation of the aesthetic object, what the composer thinks about it, suggestions for interpretation of the aesthetic object and so on. In other words, externalities, not internalities.

I wanted to put a facsimile of the original edition of the symphony here, showing the page before page one of the score, where composers put the instrumentation and any special instructions, but that does not seem to be available on IMSLP so here is the first page of the score:

Notice there is nothing there about "sickness of spirit" or "passions" or "beloved image" or any of the other things mentioned in Berlioz' note. Nor do we hear any of those texts during the performance. So these are all externalities that are not part of the musical aesthetic object.

Let's have a listen. This is the Orchestre Philharmonique de Radio France together with the Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra conducted by Gustavo Dudamel:

UPDATE: Ok, yes, the word "passions" appears as part of the title of the first movement: which raises the very interesting question of the ontological status vis-à-vis the aesthetic object itself of the title appended to the aesthetic object. Is it part or not? Is the designation "Symphonie fantastique" part of the Symphonie fantastique? Is "Symphony No. 98 in B flat major" part of the aesthetic object that we hear as the Symphony No. 98 in B flat major. I don't actually think so any more than the word "Cinnamon" on the spice jar is the spice itself.

Concerto Guide: Bartók, Piano Concerto No. 1 (1926)

Béla Bartók is one of the most important composers of the first half of the 20th century and, along with Liszt, one of the two most important Hungarian composers. What does "important" mean, in this context? The prevailing ideology (or "practice" if you want a neutral term) during the first half of the 20th century was modernism, which largely meant innovation in the basic materials and structures of music: melody, harmony and rhythm. Bartók is important because he wrote music that was innovative, but also that was influential on other composers and, most importantly, that resonated with audiences strongly enough that it became widely performed. All this adds up to "important".

Now for some details. Bartók was innovative and original in a number of ways. He developed new notational practices such as extending a beam over a barline to indicate a rhythmic grouping. Here the beams for the piano part extend over the barline between the 3/4 and 2/4 measures to show how the phrase should be grouped:

Example from the Piano Concerto No. 1, first movement

Another innovation was, in a context of frequent changes of meter, to write the time signatures very large and centered on each group of instruments. That looks like this:

Click to enlarge

Previously the time signature would only appear on each individual stave; showing them like this makes them much more visible for the conductor (this is only done in the score, obviously).

Bartók also used a lot of very unconventional key signatures in his Mikrokosmos for piano, but we don't see that in this piece, where there are no key signatures. The first movement begins with  low Bs in tympani and piano and ends with a big chord of E, B and F#, so not in C major!

The Wikipedia article on this piece, while giving some historical information, is not too revealing about the music itself. Without doing a lot of research to see if there is any kind of consensus on this, the first movement appears to me to be in sonata-allegro form. It is hard for anyone writing a piano concerto to completely ignore the Mozart concertos.

The piece begins, unusually enough, with the piano and tympani on a B pedal accompanying the orchestra that presents fragments of a theme. The piano then presents it more fully:

Notice the repeated note motif, the shifting time signature and the scale passages with chromatic interpolations. Later there is an important anapest motif in the winds. In this example, in dialogue with the piano, note the beams crossing over the barlines:

Click to enlarge

(An anapest, taken from prosody terminology, is a rhythmic figure with two short notes followed by a longer one.)

To end sections, Bartók uses this vamping figure instead of a conventional cadence:

This new theme appears, related to the anapest motif:

Then, in a different tempo, we have this theme, presented in the piano:

These themes are then given a development and here is a fairly typical page:

As you can see, this concerto is pretty challenging for everyone: the pianist, the orchestra and the conductor.

After this, I hear something resembling a recapitulation and then the first movement ends with an abbreviated version of that cadence figure, using the same notes.

Bartók's method seems to be to use the broad structural outlines of classical forms, but to fill them with entirely different material: much more dissonant and metrically complex. His music has an intense expressivity that is very compelling, which probably accounts for a lot of his enduring popularity.

Now let's listen to the whole piece. This is the French pianist Jean-Efflam Bavouzet with the London Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Vladimir Jurowski:

Pilgrimage to Ojai

Joss Whedon, until he started directing super-hero epics at least, had this unique knack for turning your expectations upside down. I particularly remember one episode from Angel, an underrated series, where Angel is sent to visit a swami in Ojai, which is where you would expect to find a swami, for some therapy. Imagine his surprise when the swami opens the door and he turns out to be a burly, aggressively blue-collar, no-nonsense kind of guy with the demeanor of a retired traffic cop. He loves to put Angel through the wringer, asking him why he, a vampire, in a particularly sunny climate, drives a convertible of all things. When Angel gives a particularly implausible answer, the swami says, "pal, that car IS your problem!"

All this is a lot funnier if you know much about Ojai, a kind of rustic retreat for gurus, self-discovery and celebrities in recovery.

Every spring since 1947 a contemporary music festival has been held in Ojai, sixty-five miles northwest of Los Angeles. This year Alex Ross, of the New Yorker, attended and provided a fascinating write-up of the events. Here is a taste:

At the heart of the 2015 festival, which unfolded from June 10th to June 14th, was a solo program by [music director and percussionist Steven Schick], and its centerpiece was “Zyklus”—a magisterially ambiguous creation that combines precisely notated sections with more open-ended passages that leave considerable choice to the performer. Schick’s interpretation, which he has been honing for forty years, is a sinuous audiovisual ballet in which hard-hitting, rat-a-tat drum solos intermingle with subtle, whispery sounds, as of a tapped gong or a brushed gourd. Although Schick meticulously plans each performance, he gives the impression of engaging in intuitive action, as if no score existed and the music were all muscle memory. The distinction between idea and gesture was similarly blurry in his accounts of Xenakis’s percussion pieces “Rebonds” and “Psappha,” and it disappeared altogether in Vinko Globokar’s “?Corporel,” which calls for a semi-naked percussionist to make sounds with his or her amplified body, slapping hands against skin.

This is not the only contemporary music festival in California, Cabrillo also comes to mind, but it sounds like it might be the most interesting. There was lots to listen to:

In all, there were eighteen concerts (I saw thirteen), featuring forty-seven composers, most of them living.

Go read the whole article for the whole picture. Well, as much as possible, given Alex Ross' usual policies. What do I mean? Alex is an excellent writer and a strong advocate for contemporary music. But like all activists he is more of a booster than a critic. The contemporary world hates criticism of course as it is way too judgmental. Unless it is criticism of a Certified Oppressive Group™ of course. You know, Christians, White Males, Traditional Classical Music. So the problem with everything Alex writes is that he only writes about music that he likes to advocate, and everything he likes to advocate is automatically wonderful. So, out of those eighteen concerts, of which he saw thirteen, featuring forty-seven composers, the closest he comes to not saying every single piece by every single composer was just wonderful, was this brief passage:

Works are sometimes criticized for being too accessible; such was a not uncommon reaction to a piece performed at this year’s festival, Michael Harrison’s “Just Ancient Loops,” in which the cellist Maya Beiser spun out soothingly euphonious lines.

"Works are sometimes criticized" but not by Alex. Still notice the subtle hint that "soothingly euphonious lines" are bad--for being too accessible.

Out of forty-seven composers, I would expect that ten or fifteen would be writing interesting, compelling music, about twenty or twenty-five writing ok or pretty good music and the remaining five to ten writing bad, boring, agonizing, painful music. In Alex Ross' world, this latter group simple doesn't exist. Which is why I never really trust anything Alex says.

But, the festival still sounds like a great series of concerts, which probably vary considerably in quality and style, depending on who is the musical director (it changes every year), something else Alex doesn't talk about. So I am very, very strongly tempted to attend next year's festival. Get my ears blown back. Hopefully there won't be too much "semi-naked percussion".

Stockhausen, Zyklus, unknown percussionist:

UPDATE: One of my favorite things about Alex Ross' writing is his adroit use of what we might call the Dispensable Double Adjective/Adverb. It is this skill that has perhaps brought him so much of the acclaim he currently enjoys. There is a particularly savory example in the first quote above where he describes Stockhausen's Zyklus as "a magisterially ambiguous creation". You see, just saying it is "ambiguous" would be ordinary--heck, anyone could write that. It is more of a stretch to say it is "magisterial" because, for one thing, what does that even mean in this context? But combining them as he does: "magisterially ambiguous" is the creative brilliance that got him where he is today. Plus, half-a-point for using the word "creation" instead of composition. It is the kind of prose decoration beloved of those who also are hooked on Martha Stewart.

Some other examples from the article linked to above, so you see what I mean:

• speaking, spluttering chorus
• soothingly euphonious lines
• coolly spastic “Dialogue de l’Ombre Double,”
• sinuous audiovisual ballet
• subtle, whispery sounds
• free, impassioned rendition
• helter-skelter, electronically enhanced cadenzas
• jagged lightning streaks
• vast, hushed creation
• tonally refined and rhythmically vigorous accounts
• staggeringly flexible vocal soloist
• subdued, eerie fabric
• darksome bitonal chords
• incrementally shifting clouds
• the blendings of harmonics were grand and dire

Sometimes the two elements of the device support one another, other times they contradict one another and on rare occasions, such as the last example, he reverses the order. But a lot of the time the pseudo-poetic effect comes from the fact that the two terms are simply irrelevant or incompatible with one another. And, of course, that they communicate next to nothing about the music itself!

But if you want a good-paying gig with a major media institution in the cultural field, using this kind of formula, combined with never criticizing anyone or anything, will likely spell success for you.

The Case of Conlon Nancarrow

Conlon Nancarrow is one of the more fascinating 20th century composers, not only because of the nature of his music which is, as almost no music is, truly unique. His career, or rather non-career, is almost as interesting as his music. Sparked by a festival of his music hosted by the new Whitney Museum in New York, Nancarrow is attracting quite a lot of attention these days. An example is an extended article on him in the New York Review of Books by Andrew Katzenstein titled "The Prince of the Player Piano." And this is where his uniqueness comes from: most of his compositions were incised directly on player piano rolls and are not humanly possible to play. In this, they are more closely related to computer, electronic or synthesized music than to traditionally composed music. Here is an introduction to Nancarrow from the article:

Nancarrow’s interest in the player piano arose partly out of necessity, as there was a scarcity of conservatory-trained musicians in Mexico City, where he lived for decades in self-imposed exile until his death in 1993. But even before he left the United States in 1940, he was drawn to the technical possibilities of the machine, which can play faster and with greater precision than the most virtuosic pianist. Nancarrow explored the limits of the player piano with staggering imagination and persistence, diligently punching piano rolls by hand and often with the aid of a magnifying glass. He lived in obscurity and near-isolation for many years before his work was championed by prominent composers such as the Hungarian experimentalist György Ligeti, who claimed that Nancarrow was the most important composer of the late twentieth century. Only after his fame grew did Nancarrow again write works—still highly demanding—for human musicians.

Born in 1912 in Texarkana, Nancarrow played trumpet in jazz bands during his youth. He studied composition in Boston with Roger Sessions, who helped popularize European modernism in America, and the neoclassicist Walter Piston, whose other students included Elliott Carter and Leonard Bernstein. Drawn to Communism while in Boston, Nancarrow later joined the Republican Army during the Spanish Civil War and, upon his return to the US, was unable to get his passport renewed because of his political beliefs. He settled in Mexico City instead and there began his work for player piano.

 The excellently-researched article, while very informative, also raises a few questions. As an expatriate myself, living in Mexico like Nancarrow, I am quite sure that Mexico City, even in the 1940s, did not lack in "conservatory-trained musicians", though they may have had no interest in playing the music of Nancarrow as their tastes were likely too conservative. Also, I suspect there is more to the story of his leaving the US than is related here. I have known people who were drawn to Communism and fought in the Spanish Civil War on the Republican side and returned without problems to the US--went on and fought in the Second World War as well. So, I think it is time for a neutral examination of the life and works of Nancarrow that will delve into these sorts of questions.

The article has some interesting details about the complex mathematical relationships between the voices in some of the studies for player piano. They are often mensuration canons in which the two voices have a mathematical relationship that is not only impossible for a human to play, but also likely impossible for a human to hear as we are not used to even trying to hear this sort of relationship:

The tempo ratio in the twelve-voice Study #37 is 150:160 5⁄7:168 3⁄4:180:187 1⁄2:200:210:225:240:250:262 1⁄2:281 1⁄4, which is derived from the frequencies of notes in a chromatic scale.

Let's have a listen to Study 37, to hear how that works out:

Well, ok. Not sure I am hearing all 12 voices. It would be useful and interesting to have a transcription of this in conventional notation, but that is likely impossible. The lack of one is a serious obstacle to any theorists sitting down and actually analyzing this music. Until someone does I'm not sure I would simply accept all the things said about this music as being true.

However, it is well worth your while to read the whole article and listen to the several clips that it contains.

There is a lot remaining to be thought and said about the music of Conlon Nancarrow, not least its aesthetic burden and social and political import. Despite the advocacy of prominent figures like György Ligeti, the position or status of the music of Nancarrow is still very much a question mark. One index of this is the fact that Richard Taruskin deftly sidesteps the issue entirely by completely ignoring Nancarrow in his mammoth Oxford History of Western Music. There is no entry in the index for Nancarrow, but there is considerable space given to that other American eccentric, Harry Partch.

Time to move on from the booster/discovery stage to the sober evaluation stage, I suspect.

The Magic of Musical Instruments

Ever since I was a child I have felt the magic of musical instruments. They just have a kind of numinous aura: they speak when you pick them up or touch them! Not all of them, of course. You can't actually pick up a piano and if you pick up a tuba it does not have quite the same magic.

I suppose I am mostly talking about the kind of instruments that were always kicking around our house. My mother was mostly a fiddler so there were a few violins in cases hidden behind the easy chair and under the couch. But there were also guitars, mandolins, banjos, an octophone and even an upright piano, though that felt more like a musical piece of furniture.

But string instruments, they definitely have the magic. Because, when you pick them up, they thrum with tension. The slightest tap or movement can set the strings moving and with them a sound. There is an energy, a dynamic, to string instruments even when they are not being played. The strings of a classical guitar, when tuned up to pitch, exert a torque of about 125 lbs on the bridge.

String instruments speak to you as you touch them. Nothing else in the house does--well, ok, the radio (we didn't have a tv), but that kind of "speech" is all too mundane. No, the speech of string instruments is like the speech of oracles: obscure and veiled in mystery.

To many guitarists their instruments have a personality: B. B. King's Gibson was always Lucille and she even has her own entry in Wikipedia.

Click to enlarge

He even wrote a song for her:

My guitar is named Hermione, not after the character in Harry Potter, as I named her in 1983, when she was built, long before the books were written. No, she is named after the daughter of Helen of Troy, said to be even more beautiful. Instead of the face that launched a thousand ships, my Hermione is the sound that launched a thousand concerts:

And here she is with Leyenda by Isaac Albéniz:

Friday Miscellanea

As regular readers well know, the Friday Miscellanea is where the less-serious items end up. And what could be less serious than an article about what songs go with your favorite beer? (Any Deadmau5 concert perhaps, but I digress.)

The least-objectionable combination on the list is Gotye's Somebody That I Used to Know and Stella Artois. But I would suggest instead a delicious combination of my favorite beer, Mort Subite from Belgium, drunk while listening to a Vieuxtemps violin concerto.

Mort Subite runs about 9% alcohol. Here is Sarah Chang with the Violin Concerto No. 5 by the Belgian composer Henri Vieuxtemps:

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We all struggle with those weird and wacky Internet abbreviations, so now there is a handy guide to them:

IYKWIMAITTYD!

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Gunther Schuller has passed away at 89 years. He was a pioneer in what he termed "third stream" music, i.e. music that combined different genres and styles. Here is an example, his "Variants on a Theme of Theolonius Monk" in collaboration with Jim Hall:

Alex Ross offers a brief eulogy with this quote from Schuller:

"Third Steam is a way of composing, improvising, and performing that brings musics together rather than segregating them. It is a way of making music which holds that all musics are created equal, coexisting in a beautiful brotherhood/sisterhood of musics that complement and fructify each other. It is a global concept which allows the world's musics— written, improvised, handed-down, traditional, experimental— to come together, to learn from one another, to reflect human diversity and pluralism. It is the music of rapprochement, of entente—not of competition and confrontation. And it is the logical outcome of the American melting pot: E pluribus unum."

While you have to admire the idealism, the critic in me can't help but mention a few caveats: first of all, this manifesto subsumes musical considerations into purely political ones, likening the practice of making music in different styles as "segregation", giving musical styles "civil rights" as if they were persons, absorbing all the musics of the world as if they were all immigrants to America's melting pot. As a Canadian, it makes me shake my head in puzzlement. The point where it all falls apart is the idea that "all musics are created equal" which is nothing more than the myth of multiculturalism asserted as a fact.

The way I see it, good music is created by means of a ruthless process of elimination and self-criticism that cruelly throws out everything that is not of the highest quality. But maybe that's just me...

* * *

This paper, titled "A Sustainable Music Industry for the 21st Century" looks quite interesting. Judging from the abstract, it is an historical and economic analysis of how we got where we are and what can be done to fix it.

* * *

As a composer I try to model myself after the great Japanese artist Hokusai who said:

From around the age of six, I had the habit of sketching from life. I became an artist, and from fifty on began producing works that won some reputation, but nothing I did before the age of seventy was worthy of attention. At seventy-three, I began to grasp the structures of birds and beasts, insects and fish, and of the way plants grow. If I go on trying, I will surely understand them still better by the time I am eighty-six, so that by ninety I will have penetrated to their essential nature. At one hundred, I may well have a positively divine understanding of them, while at one hundred and thirty, forty, or more I will have reached the stage where every dot and every stroke I paint will be alive. May Heaven, that grants long life, give me the chance to prove that this is no lie.

Here is one painting from his famous series "Thirty-six views of Mount Fuji", this one is "Imume Pass in the Kai Province":

Click to enlarge

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I swear Tom Service at the Guardian is getting more sensible by the day. Here he is condemning the latest cynical mashup of Brahms and Radiohead.

Have we really reached this nadir of all musical cultures where we can no longer distinguish the meaningful differences between anything, and that the only index of pop music’s quality is how it can be smeared within a symphony, or the only way that classical music can be relevant is if it’s oleaginised as part of this nausea-inducing mash-up?

In some circles, yep. But if you actually listen to the clip, or part of it, as I did, it is rather different than described. Yes, it does combine Brahms and Radiohead, but less offensively than it might have. Instead of a Berioesque clashing of different musics, it is as if Brahms had been listening to a lot of Radiohead while composing his First Symphony. This then alternates with pops concert arrangements of Radiohead songs with orchestral accompaniment. The whole thing is much blander than, say, John Zorn. I also have to disagree with another thing Tom says:

Berio, John Zorn and the whole culture of sampling across all the musical art forms relies on the creative juxtaposition and superimposition of pre-existing musical fragments, and is an essential part of compositional practice wherever you work in music.

No, this kind of mix 'n match fusion is NOT an essential part of compositional practice. In fact, one of the big problems with every piece is to find the focus so the music does not just wander around indiscriminately. I think this is what you might call a "radio" problem. We are used to twirling around the radio dial and hearing a bit of this and a bit of that, so we are become insensitive to stylistic heterogeneity. But the integrity of an artwork demands, I think, a stylistic unity.

Now I have a confession to make: after listening to the Steve Hackman arrangement, I realize that I have done something a bit similar. In my song sequence Songs from the Poets one of the songs is a setting of the poem Annus Mirabilis by Philip Larkin. In it he mentions the "Beatles' first LP" so of course the guitar part is permeated with short phrases and motifs taken from four of the songs on that album. But while some of them are like little quotations, much of the setting is a blend of motifs from the album with my own setting of the poem. Or, rather, my setting of the poem has as background the sound of motifs from the Beatles' album. But I think it still achieves a stylistic unity because, like Bartók with a folk song, I structure the harmonies using ideas from those motifs--they become structural foundations of the song.

I'm going to be recording the songs with a fine singer in September. Keep your eye on this space!

* * *

Hmm, well the correct musical envoi to this miscellanea is a song by the Beatles that was among the first pieces to exhibit the blending of different musics in a really creative way. The song is "I Am the Walrus" by John Lennon and you have to imagine hearing this on AM radio in the late 1960s to get the full effect. Note how at around the 2 minute mark it is as if you had moved the tuning dial and suddenly were listening to a different station:

Oh, and the lyrics are wrong, it is "they are the eggmen."

The Spirits of the Times

The German word for this is "Zeitgeist" (nouns are capitalized in German), but that word is so over-used and misused that I think I prefer the English version. Plus, I forget what the plurals of "Zeit" and "Geist" are. Yes, I think there is a spirit of the time and each time has a different spirit. I say "spirit" instead of "mood" or "taste" because it is a bit more neutral.

What I am saying, in more concrete terms, is that the music of a particular era, no matter who composed it, tends to have a certain feel, a certain spirit, to it. I twigged to this reading Rosen on Classical style who mentions somewhere that the Classical Era composers wrote particularly unconvincing religious music. I say "unconvincing" meaning not that the music was not good and aesthetically convincing, but that it was religiously unconvincing. Both Mozart and Haydn wrote reams and reams of religious music, but it is indistinguishable from the mood and spirit of their other music. The musical vocabulary is identical with that of their secular music. To pick one of a host of examples, the soprano aria "Panis vivus" from the Litaniae de venerabili altaris sacramento in B flat, K. 125 is indistinguishable, apart from the text, from any number of soprano arias from Mozart's operas. That aria is at the 3:54 mark in this clip:

We tend not to notice this because the Mozart religious music we are most familiar with is probably the Requiem which is considerably darker than his other religious music--not surprising as it was written on his death bed. But if you listen to a selection of his and Haydn's other religious music it is generally as bright and cheery as their symphonic music or as lyrical and touching as an opera aria. But not religious in any discernable way. Here, for example, is the Kyrie from Haydn's Missa Sancti Nicolai:

"Kyrie eleison" means "Lord, have mercy" in Greek and it is hard to imagine a cheerier or less-appropriate setting. Compare this to J. S. Bach's setting from his Mass in B minor. This is Philippe Herreweghe, conducting the Chorus of Collegium Vocale, Ghent:

Now that is serious religious music.

My larger point is that by comparing how Classical Era composers set religious texts with how Baroque composers did, we can read off a change in the spirit of the times. Haydn and Mozart were full in the flush of the fresh air of the Enlightenment and their music is overwhelmingly bright, positive and charming. They can touch darker moods as Haydn did in his "Sturm und Drang" symphonies and Mozart did in his Symphony No. 40 and Requiem, but these are the exceptions. Just look at the number of major keys vs minor ones. Out of over forty symphonies Mozart wrote only two in minor keys and Haydn scarcely more than a dozen out of over a hundred symphonies. Compare this with the very large number of pieces that Bach wrote in minor keys.

Similarly, we can gauge another shift in spirit in the Romantic Era as minor keys become, not only popular, but almost universal. In the past, musicological evaluations of the characteristics of different musical eras tended to focus on the technical devices used by composers and in recent years this has shifted to the reception of the music and its social history. But the aesthetic quality of the music and its shift in emphasis from era to era has, in my opinion, been neglected.

To take another striking example, let's look at some pieces from another era: the extreme complexity of the music characteristic of the post-WWII era. The composers to note are Pierre Boulez, Karlheinz Stockhausen and John Cage, all of whom I have talked about at length here. But I want to look at them from a different angle: how they exemplify the post-war spirit.

There are perhaps three elements in the spirit of this time to note: ebullient optimism, benumbing post-traumatic stress and worship of technological advance. The first two are at odds with one another and present in different amounts in different places. Post-war America was more optimistic because they won the war, but did not suffer the way Europe did because it was not fought on their soil. The Europeans had just a bit of this optimism, which was overshadowed by the destruction of so much of their culture and people--especially of course, the Jews, who were almost eliminated from Europe. But both America and Europe were worshipers of technology because it was that that won the war and the advances were so numerous and promising. It was during and immediately after the war that classical guitarists, to choose a minute example, switched from gut strings to the newly-invented nylon. Radar, the jet and a host of other discoveries transformed the post-war world. Another new invention was the recording tape which was a crucial element in forming the aesthetics of both Stockhausen and Cage.

Let's grab the bull by the horns and listen to three pieces from the immediate post-war period. First, an excerpt from the Sonatas and Interludes for prepared piano by John Cage:

Next, Klavierstück IV by Stockhausen:

Finally, Structures, Bk 1 by Boulez:

All three of these pieces are from the early to mid 1950s. Just as you would expect, the one that has quite a different aesthetic is the Cage. Remember, the American and European experiences of the war were quite different. What these three pieces all have in common is the worship of technology. I know it is a bit unusual to apply that concept to music but it is apt. [UPDATE: I should have said to compositional strategies, not "music" tout simple as music has always used some form of technology.] All three of these pieces use radically new technical ideas. In the Cage it is the use of screws and other devices to enormously alter the sound of the piano. In the case of Stockhausen we read in Wikipedia that:

Reinforced by his studies with Meyer-Eppler, beginning in 1955, Stockhausen formulated new "statistical" criteria for composition, focussing attention on the aleatoric, directional tendencies of sound movement, "the change from one state to another, with or without returning motion, as opposed to a fixed state"

And Boulez is particularly known for rejecting all previous musical styles and saying:

"[A]ny musician who has not experienced—I do not say understood, but truly experienced—the necessity of dodecaphonic music is USELESS. For his whole work is irrelevant to the needs of his epoch."

Ah yes, the needs of the epoch. That is exactly my point. The post-war era, like all musical eras, had a particular spirit and a key element was new compositional technique. It sometimes led to what we usually call "technology", such as in Cage's preparations, a new kind of piano technology, or Stockhausen's tape music, an obvious technology. But the Greek word technos which forms part of our modern word technology, originally meant "art" as in something artificial, newly created by humans. Any new compositional technique, whether inserting screws into a piano, using statistical criteria or serializing all aspects of music, is a new compositional technos or technology.

As for the benumbing post-traumatic stress, I think this comes out in the strict avoidance, by all three of these composers, of any personal expression whatsoever. In some ways this is the most radical strategy of all.

I think that provides sufficient examples to present my point that each age has its proper aesthetic spirit.

UPDATE: One of my very alert commentators points out that the Cage Sonatas and Interludes were actually composed in the mid to late 1940s, not the early 1950s when he experienced a significant aesthetic shift. What I should have chosen instead was his Music of Changes, composed in 1951. Which actually makes my point even more powerfully as it is very similar, from the listener's point of view, to the textures of the Boulez and Stockhausen pieces: