Puritanical Catholics and Papist Protestants

"Nothing may be read or sung in church unless it is taken from Sacred Scripture, or is at least in accord with it, or not in disagreement with it. It must be serious in tone without exciting laughter, in whatever tongue this is accustomed to be read or sung." (Council of Trent, 8:421).

In the Looking Glass of Its Art

"Artists and writers are the most important conduit of worldviews. As philosopher William Barrett wrote, an age sees itself 'in the looking glass of its art.' Anyone who wants to "understand the times and know what to do" (1 Chron. 12:32) must learn to interpret the images in that looking glass." Nancy Pearcey, Saving Leonardo

Get Yourself out of the Way

"The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way. (There is no good asking first whether the work before you deserves such a surrender, for until you have surrendered you cannot possibly find out.)" C. S. Lewis, An Experiment in Criticism

The Dionysian Middle Ages

Schoenberg in Structural Functions of Harmony views music as a swing back and forth between Apollonian and Dionysian epochs. Epochs of standardization and epochs of artistic liberation. That's not surprising, and it is surprising. Not surprising because he steals the idea from Neitzsche, and Schoenberg is just the person to do that. Surprising, because Schoenberg clearly in other places wants to view his atonal breakthrough of the 1920s as the capstone of musical progression since the 18th century. Yet here, in a more honest assessment, he's viewing the Second Viennese School (his school) as akin to the First (Mozart's and Haydn's) - standardization and regularization. Schoenberg, in the end, is sort of a mess. He's really an expressionist, a Wagnerian romantic on steroids, and it seems like he tries to mask it in 12-tone music, but it just comes off angsty, like his early tonal works. (Webern, oddly, doesn't come off as angsty - humorous, perhaps - but maybe that's my subjective opinion.)

But Schoenberg isn't whom this post is about.

Music history courses see the Middle Ages as a vehicle for getting us from monophony to the "tonal system" of music. It strikes me right off the bat as a bad way to approach any field of history - seeing it as another link in the chain that eventually leads to where we are in history. That's chronological snobbery, if anything is.

Modern music history really treats Medieval composers as if they're desperately groping to find the authentic V-I cadence. If only they could, they'd finally be out of the modal system they're in and into the system of chords and harmony that'll give us Bach and all that good stuff.

I was sitting in on a music history class at a big name university just recently, and I saw this happening. The professor showed the class how a typical V-I cadence results from the rules of species counterpoint. And it works perfectly well - imperfect intervals resolve to perfect ones, and we go from the bare-bones Medieval cadence to a tonal cadence you might hear in Bach. And so, naturally, we assume that the Middle Ages experienced just such a shift.

That's silly, though. One needn't listen to much hoquetus to know that these Medievals know exactly what they're doing with harmony. They're not kids at it. Maybe we just ought to consider the possibility that they choose the system they choose not because they can't come up with something better ("better" as defined as "more like the modern system"), but because they want to. They have a reason for doing the things they do, and a reason beyond, "We're having trouble figuring out how to make this sound natural."

What about the clever induction of the V-I cadence from species counterpoint? One has to remember where this comes from. I don't know - I don't have any sort of scholarship on this point, but it can't be from someone much earlier than Johann Fux. What does that mean? It means that this represents an "Apollonian" analysis of a "Dionysian" epoch. Fux is a regularizer. He's looking back on a period of relative freedom and imposing rules on it. That's what those darned Apollonians do.

That's my theory anyway. You all know this blog is me throwing out "theories", most of which are wrong, all of which are unproven. But let me go to college and try to find out if I'm right.

Attention Span in Music

If you listen to a symphony or a polyphonic mass, there are two levels at which you can understand the music:

(1) euphonically, that is, understanding it based on its good-sounding-ness

(2) formally, that is, according to its set-up.

A good symphony and a good mass can be understood on both levels. In fact, it's really not understood until it's understood on both levels. And with especially good symphonies and masses, it will be difficult to understand it as (1) without understanding it as (2). A really good composer is not obscure about the formal beauty of his piece. He draws you into its formal beauty, luring you in with its pleasant sound.

Take Beethoven. His music is engaging at any given moment, but it's difficult not to understand the overall drama of the sonata form present in the work. Beethoven is a Herodotus or a J. K. Rowling. The moment you're listening to is exciting, but he draws you into the bigger picture, the garden, wilderness, and garden-city of a symphonic first movement. Beethoven, good story teller that he is, lengthens your attention span.

Think of it this way—for a three-year-old, as he listens to Lord of the Rings being read to him, chances are he doesn't understand the big picture: the quest to destroy the Ring, Sauron trying to thwart Gondor, Sauraman, Rohan. But that doesn't mean that he can't feel the excitement during Helm's Deep. It doesn't stop him from looking like a stone when Frodo's finger's getting ripped off with teeth.

A twelve-year-old, on the other hand, is likely to understand the big picture. It isn't simply an instantaneous enjoyment of the moment that keeps him going. It's the unresolved tension way back in Book One that holds an inexorable grasp on his attention while he's reading Book Five. If you reflect for a moment, you'll realize it's really quite amazing that something he might have read three months ago is informing how and why he reads right now.

But why does the knowledge that The Ring Must Be Destroyed really matter that much? Couldn't it be that three-fourths of the way through the book, Frodo slips and falls, gashes his head, drowns in a river, and the ring gets forgotten for another thousand years? No. This couldn't happen any more than Sauron dying at the end from food poisoning. It's because the twelve-year-old recognizes form that he knows that none of these things would ever happen. That's why we feel gypped when an author pulls a deus ex machina. That's why everyone hated the last episode of Lost.

People recognize the form of stories. They know certain things are in the realm of possibility, and certain things aren't. Within that realm, what the author does is exciting. The bad guys might just win - that's in the realm - but the piece might also end on a picardy third, so to speak.

Which brings me back to my original point. In most cases (and, I grant, not all), the reason someone gets bored with a symphony is not because the symphony is boring, but because he is a boring person. He does not recognize a form. He's like someone who doesn't appreciate an exciting story when he hears one. But we must have pity on this sort of person and try to educate him to enjoy the tension of a story.

That's why Beethoven lengthens your attention span. If you recognize the form, if you understand what's in the realm of possibility and what isn't, you'll know that the symphony has its natural crescendo, climax, and resolution, just like a story. And if you realize that, you're the twelve-year-old of music, now, no longer the two-year-old. You don't simply have an instantaneous enjoyment of the music. What happened in the first few bars is informing how you see the end of the movement.

Why is that so hard? What I read a month ago at the beginning of War and Peace sticks in my head word for word as I read about characters at the end of the novel. But I have a hard time identifying a simple tune that shows up at the beginning of a piece six minutes later. Why is that?