| |
As a
result of decades of effective indoctrination, the
contemporary musical establishment has successfully
“established” a politically correct principle regarding
harmonic-based music: we can listen to it, we can study it,
we can play it, we can sing it, we can dance to it, we can
spend a small fortune on training, concerts, and recordings
of it.
But we
mustn’t compose it.
No matter
how deeply harmonic music touches our soul—Berlioz defined
harmony in 1837 as “the craft of how to group sounds to make
chords that are generally perceived as pleasant or
beautiful, and the art of linking them in a logical
sequence”1—we are told to regard this music as old-fashioned
and obsolete. But if it was appropriate for Mozart to
compose this type of music, why should it be wrong for us?
Mozart could write in 1781: “Passions, whether violent or
not, must never be expressed to the point of exciting
disgust, and... music, even in the most terrible situations,
must never offend the ear, but must please the listener, or
in other words, must never cease to be music.”2 Why do we
cherish his music but cringe at accepting the philosophy
that informed its style? How have we failed to recognize
that the love of his music is the love of the standards
and values that sustain its high quality?
It
appears that, today, we are too intimidated by what has
become the musical establishment of our own time to stand up
and protest the truly grotesque and hideously disturbing
sounds of modern music. Why? Because little is known (even
among musicians) about the actual mechanics of lyrical
musical composition and the many long years of study that
are required to cultivate sophisticated compositional
skills. In another revealing statement Mozart once confided,
“People are mistaken if they think that my art has come easy
to me. I assure you, dear friend, no one has devoted so much
effort in the study of composition as have I. There is
scarcely a famous master in music whose works I have not
diligently, and often repeatedly, studied.”3
Thus we
learn from a genius seemingly inspired by heaven that the
ability to create beauty and pleasure in music—and to do it
with class and taste—is not the ineffable gift of grace,
mysteriously endowed on a select few, but the product of
talent, discipline, and above all, the technical skills,
especially harmony, which have provided composers prior to
the twentieth century with the knowledge of the forms
necessary to produce great masterpieces of sonic beauty. In
direct opposition, the training of composers in the
twentieth century is based on a repudiation of
harmony and tradition, and that rejection in both theory and
practice has perverted the beautiful sounds of music into
something repulsive and unrecognizable. Understanding the
roots of this transformation is the first step toward the
restoration of classical music to its lofty position among
the high arts. Indeed, a Renaissance of good taste in music
must be preceded by a Renaissance of specialized
training—the kind offered to composers when excellence and unapologized-for beauty characterized the goals of serious
musical composition.
Standards
and the Value of Rules
Prior to
the twentieth century, devotion to “rules”—objectively-valid
techniques—had always been the practice of the greatest
composers. “To become a composer,” Beethoven advised, “one
must first have studied harmony...during a period of from
seven to eleven years, so as to accustom one’s self to bend
the inventive faculty to the rules, whenever imagination and
feeling shall awaken.”4
Franz
Joseph Haydn (1732-1809), one of Beethoven’s teachers,
reported, “I would sit down, and begin to improvise, whether
my spirits were sad or happy, serious or playful. Once I had
captured an idea, I strove with all my might to develop and
sustain it in conformity with the rules of art.”5
It might
be argued that Mozart, Haydn, and Beethoven lived at a time
when compliance with rules was expected, while later
Romantic composers were presumably less inhibited by
stylistic regulations. A question can also be raised
regarding the content of these rules: did they always refer
to the minutiae of academic harmony? Response to these
points is best illustrated by two instances of popular,
respected, and influential Romantic composers whose own
music was rich with harmonic expressiveness, yet whose
intellectual explications of the manifold laws of harmony
were comprehensive and authoritative.
In the
first case, music lovers familiar with the passionately
romantic music of Peter Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) might be
surprised to learn that the composer of the Romeo and
Juliet Fantasy-Overture and
Swan
Lake was a professor of harmony at the Moscow
Conservatory, where he was known by his students for being a
stickler about rules. Although it may seem incongruous to
us, today, for such a pedant to have composed passionate and
heart-wrenching music, the truth is that his technical
expertise enabled him to enrich his famous melodies with
gorgeous harmonies. In 1872, he wrote a detailed textbook
based on a strict style of pedagogy entitled, Guide to
the Practical Study of Harmony.
The next
example is Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov (1844-1908), a composer
of some of the most enchanting and exotic classical music
ever written, e.g., Sheherazade. He, also, was a
professor of harmony, and like Tchaikovsky, he produced a
textbook called, Practical Manual of Harmony; this
book is so rule-bound one is tempted to convert its lessons
into software for composing music. His views on music were
equally mechanistic. When asked about the meaning of a
particular chord, he replied, “I don’t know what it means; I
just know it has three resolutions.” Nevertheless, his
teaching methods influenced many of his students, some of
whom became prominent composers of early twentieth-century
music. Even Rachmaninoff (1873-1943), one of the last
popular Romantic composers, was taught by students of both
Rimsky-Korsakov and Tchaikovsky.
The
prominence these textbooks achieved in the Russian
educational system not only attests to the efforts of two
musical giants devoted to promoting and disseminating the
craft of their art, it also confirms the traditional
dependency of the creative process in classical music on the
acquisition and observance of rules of formal techniques.
The rationale for having rules and standards in those days
was based on the idea that some things in music are better
than others, and what is “better” is knowable and should be
learned. In 1862 Hector Berlioz, composer of the dazzling
Symphonie Fantastique, incorporated this idea in his
definition of music as “the art of combining sounds so as to
touch the emotions of intelligent persons endowed with
special, cultivated faculties.”6
The
concept of standards includes more than the creation of
pleasant sounds. It also embraces the idea that music has
spiritual and moral components. In a letter from 1841
regarding the establishment of a new school of music, Felix
Mendelssohn (1809-1847), the most respected and influential
composer of his time, expressed his preference for the
attainment of nobility in music:
The following principle must serve as a basis for the whole
Institute: that every sphere of art can only elevate itself
above a mere handicraft by being devoted to the expression
of lofty thought, along with the utmost possible technical
finish, and a pure and intellectual aim; that also solidity,
precision, and strict discipline in teaching and learning
should be considered the first law, thus not falling short
in this respect of any handicraft; that in every department,
all teaching and learning should be exclusively devoted to
the thoughts intended to be expressed, and to that more
elevated mood, to which technical perfection in art must
ever be subordinate.7
This
eloquently stated principle is based on the premise that
music is first and foremost a craft. What makes it an art
depends on the purpose for which the craft is engaged. In
today’s “anything goes” atmosphere, the status of “art” is
automatically conferred on new music without regard for
craft, without an appreciation of the sublime.
The
Crisis and Controversy of Atonality
Today,
instead of learning the techniques of harmony, student
composers—where they learn any compositional technique at
all—study “twelve-tone” composition for the purpose of
producing “atonal” music, or music without a tonal reference
point, i.e., a chosen “key.” This system, developed by
Arnold Schoenberg (1874-1951), the most dominant influence
on twentieth-century music, eradicated any vestigial remains
of tonality in music by advocating the use of all twelve
undifferentiated notes of the octave with equal frequency;
no one tone could be used twice until all the other eleven
were used once. In other words, his system completely
nullified the advantages of having scales. His goal was the
“emancipation of the dissonance.” In this system, there
would be no recognition of consonance or dissonance in the
traditional sense and no need for rules regarding the
resolution of dissonances. Stravinsky agreed with Schoenberg
when he said, “Dissonance is no longer a symbol of disorder,
nor consonance a guarantee of security.” Consequently,
although consonant chords are prohibited in this style
because of their associations with tonality, we hear
dissonances all the time in twelve-tone music. They sound
repellent to our ears because they are not treated properly
(not modified by consonance) and not placed in a context in
which they can be resolved. To verify the aesthetic anarchy
that this system has created we need only listen to
Schoenberg’s music. There are no satisfying resolutions of
dissonance, no elegant chains of consonantal chords, no
dramatic modulations. The father of atonal music simply
believed that his cacophony would someday be accessible to
the public because people would get used to it as they
became more familiar with it.
The heart
of the tonality dispute centers precisely on the subject of
musical rules. Are they based on nature or are they
man-made? Tchaikovsky spoke for the former position when
he wrote that rules existed for “satisfying the musical
ear.”8 He showed how the laws of harmony can guide composers
to write in conformity with our innate sense of aesthetic
awareness. Today we might express this in terms of a
biological or neurological predisposition. (In the late
1960’s, scientists conducted an experiment with rats that
demonstrated even those animals’ preference for listening to
the music of Mozart and Haydn rather than the music of
Schoenberg!)
Most
composers in the twentieth century hold the latter position,
glorifying the perverse in music and denying the validity of
our natural inclinations, saying that nothing is inherently
universal about rules. If rules are culture-specific, they
claim, Schoenberg’s music has validity and vitality no
matter how counter-intuitive it may seem, and our inability
to appreciate it must be attributed to our ignorance and
cultural provincialism.
The most
popular argument in support of atonality, the
“historic/inevitability” argument, claims that atonality
necessarily followed a period when every possible harmonic
combination had already been tried.
The
obvious fallacy with this argument is that harmony is more
than just the sound of chords; it also involves their
connections. The number of possibilities for combining
chords in different contexts is almost infinite. For
example, the famous enigmatic chord in Wagner’s Tristan
und Isolde can also be found in Beethoven, but Beethoven
used it merely as a passing chord, while Wagner
conspicuously featured it to signify an important motif of
the opera. Another fallacy with this argument is that
harmony is not an end in itself but a means to an end, its
purpose being the aesthetic, emotional and intellectual
enjoyment of the listener. The goal of musical development
should always be the creation of quality in music, not just
the invention of new sounds. The number of ways this quality
can be achieved is limited only by the skill, talent, and
integrity of the composer.
J. S.
Bach (1685-1750), regarded by many musicians for almost
three centuries as the greatest of composers, wrote in a
conservative style that was already “old-fashioned” in his
own time, yet he enabled future composers to develop the
potential of tempered tuning to an extraordinary degree
through his monumental Das wohltemperierte Klavier,
probably the most important piece of music ever written—When
Mozart’s wife heard him play it, she asked why he could not
compose like that. Robert Schumann compared the relationship
of music to Bach with the relationship of a religion to its
founder, and Wagner called Bach “the most stupendous miracle
in all of music.” Brahms, Beethoven, Chopin, Bruckner,
Mendelssohn, and so many other brilliant composers studied
Bach intensively as a major part of their musical training.
Significantly, Bach produced no new sounds; instead,
he composed with unsurpassed skill, infusing his music with
a quality that served future generations of composers and
teachers as the supreme model of excellence.
What
vanished in the twentieth century was not the capacity of
harmony to create new chords. What has disappeared—disavowed
by twentieth-century theorists—are the skills, knowledge,
and confidence that have sustained and inspired composers
for centuries to exploit the available harmonic resources
available to all composers of all time.
The
Demise of Harmonic Education
Today,
expertise is completely lacking in the traditional
understanding of harmony. The pursuit of a Ph.D. in Music
Theory (the “literary criticism” of music) does not require
such knowledge, and graduate students are barely exposed to
its authentic teachings at all. What passes for harmony in
the modern music curriculum is a corrupted, revised and
watered-down travesty of what used to be a powerful tool in
the composer’s workshop. Students who take these courses are
invariably bewildered by what they learn; even the textbooks
that effectively served to train composers in the eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries are virtually unavailable today.
Music Theory is now presented not as training for
composition nor as a search for authenticity in
understanding a composer’s intentions but as an exercise for
its own sake, creating pseudo-sophisticated systems of
analysis based on whatever theory is currently in vogue.
Because
it is not fashionable to value the intentions of composers,
“scholars” are no longer fluent in the prescriptive
musical language once used. “Prescriptive” implies
standards, standards imply discrimination, and both conspire
against the unqualified acceptance of modern music.
“Prescriptive” also means that teachers can be evaluated
according to the degree of their own mastery of the rules of
harmony. The easier-to-use descriptive analysis,
being non-judgmental, is therefore more popular in
universities.
Music
Theory has become blind to the true spirit of music. Gone is
the respect for the rules of craft that guided the great
composers of the past. Also gone is the sensitivity to the
emotional issues that were so important to those
composers—specifically, how those concerns were translated
into musical notes and through those notes conveyed to the
musically-sensitive listener. The most important element
missing from modern musical analysis is the exploration of
those technical procedures which enabled composers to
achieve a sense of beauty, pleasure, and sensuality in their
music.
The
correlation between the sad state of music theory and the
poor quality of contemporary musical composition is no
accident. All composers still dream of being regarded
someday as a second Beethoven, but they are being misled
about what actually made that great composer great. Current
musical thinking emphasizes how he broke with tradition
rather than how he learned from it, yet Beethoven himself
wrote in 1809:
There is hardly any treatise which would be too learned for
me. I have not the slightest pretension to what is properly
called erudition. Yet from my childhood, I have striven to
understand the intentions of the better and wiser people of
every age. Shame on an artist who does not consider it his
duty to achieve at least as much.9
What, in
fact, made Beethoven great was the superb quality of his
music, praised by generations of discriminating and
well-trained musicians. No modern composer of atonal music
ever achieved such erudition, but well-entrenched interest
groups who dominate the musical establishment refuse to
admit that entire careers are built on a bankrupt idea that
will never gain acceptance with the musical public. Using
the recording industry as an objective criterion for
evidence of a composer’s popularity—today!—we have only to
compare the total number of different recordings made for
each of the two contrasting groups of composers: the
academically-endorsed Second Viennese School (Schoenberg and
his star pupils, Berg and Webern) versus the Viennese
classicists (Haydn and his famous students, Beethoven and
Mozart). The contrast is startling: the Muze computer
program, which contains a list of all available recordings
on CD’s, currently shows about 800 different recordings for
the three modern composers of the Second Viennese School.
For the three Viennese classicists, it lists about 24,000!
So, in
reality, which style is better suited to speak to our age?
Or, perhaps, to any age? Even without technical
expertise, it should be obvious to all but the most
brainwashed that after a century of failure, Schoenberg’s
system can never compete with the natural superiority of the
harmonic system. It follows that we ought to become
reacquainted with the philosophical foundations of
the music we enjoy so much in order to free ourselves from
the inhibitions that stifle our creative activity. At this
time not only do influential advocates of modern music
continue to perpetuate the exclusive study of modernist
composition in schools, they also persist in imposing their
unpopular artistic philosophy on the public in defiance of
its wishes. This myopic and oppressive ideology requires a
new “sound” for new music, no matter how offensive, vulgar,
shallow, or pretentious—the very qualities that objective
standards would have forestalled. In the words of Virgil
Thompson in 1954:
Explaining the public to the artist is management’s
business and that of older artists. Defending the public
against the artist is nobody’s business, not the
impresario’s, nor the politician’s, nor the clergy’s, still
less than that of the critic, whose living depends on the
survival of the art he speaks for.10
How
different is this public-be-damned philosophy from the
ideals of the past. Haydn wrote to the musical community of
Bergen on the Baltic Sea island of Rügen in response to a
letter thanking him for The Creation, which they had
just performed there for the first time:
Often, when contending with obstacles of every sort... a
secret feeling within me whispered: “There are but few
contented and happy men here below; everywhere grief and
care prevail; perhaps your labors may one day be the source
from which the weary and worn, or the man burdened with
affairs may derive a few moments’ rest and refreshment.”
What a powerful motive for pressing onward!11
The role
of music should be to please the listener, and harmony does
just that; it is the sonic “beauty” that sweetens the path
to the more complex tastes of the art of music. Josef
Rheinberger (Richard Strauss’ instructor) taught that
harmony was “nine tenths of the whole art.”12 Unfortunately,
its sublime potential for creating glorious beauty, evoking
passions and providing refined pleasure—not to mention
satisfying our need for emotional inspiration!—is considered
inappropriate for contemporary musical expression. Worse,
students with a taste for those characteristics cannot find
music schools or conservatories to help them develop their
talents for composing truly moving music.
Our
cherished repertoire can grow richer, but only if we
recognize the importance of returning to the thinking
of the composers we admire from the past. Perhaps one future
day, when the full range of the techniques of harmony are
restored to the classroom, talented students can begin again
to compose music that will thrill us all, anew.
Footnotes
1)
Hector Berlioz, The Art of Music and Other Essays,
1994.
2) John Amis & Michael Rose, Words About Music, 1989.
3) Mozart Speaks, 1991.
4) Vincent D’Indy, Beethoven.
5) John Amis & Michael Rose, Words About Music, 1989.
6) Hector Berlioz, The Art of Music and Other Essays.
7) Mendelssohn Letters.
8) Peter Tchaikovsky, Guide to the Practical Study of
Harmony.
9) Warren Kirkendale, Fugue and Fugato in Rococo and
Classical Chamber Music, 1979.
10) Henry Pleasants, The Agony of Modern Music, 1955.
11) H.E. Parkhurst, A Complete System of Harmony,
1905.
Michael
Miller, a former professional violinist, attended Oberlin
Conservatory of Music and is a graduate of Temple University
School of Music. He is now working on a book that will
explicate the compositional techniques of great Romantic
composers.
Copyright
© ART Ideas. All rights reserved. |
