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?

10 Reasons Why to Use an iPod (and Earphones)

Not the iPod as it is used, but the iPod as it can be used. The iPod (with earphones)...

1. Destroys the concept of background music. Making music sound good is dangerous. Once our ears hear something pleasant, we can start to think that we understand the music. Music is meant to be pleasant, and the best music, the most pleasant—but when pleasure is extracted from the High music the same way pleasure is extracted from popular music, two things happen. (1) Popular music will always win (as it should, if that is the competition), and (2) High music becomes disappointing.

The iPod and similar technologies change all that. With the iPod's earphones pushed firmly in your ears, the music demands your attention. As C. S. Lewis says about art, "We sit down before the picture in order to have something done to us, not that we may do things with it. The first demand any work of any art makes upon us is surrender. Look. Listen. Receive. Get yourself out of the way." Not that I would suggest that a picture is better appreciated by looking at it with your nose touching the canvas. The iPod with earphones is preferable to CD players and computer speakers because it is far closer to the experience of live performance.

2. Is less individualistic and more corporate than music on a CD player. The iPod makes you aware of the performer. Your left speaker plays certain sounds into your left ear, and your right speaker plays certain sounds into your right ear. With this, you get a sense of distance between the players. This is fantastic. It's a constant, conscious or subconscious reminder that music is a communal thing.

3. Replaces music as a science. That teenager, doing the closest thing to lying down that you can in a chair, eyes on vacation and slobber collecting on his lip. Yeah, him. He has earphones in and he understands about popular music what Classical musicians don't understand about their music. We think he's rude when it takes yelling at him to pull him out of his musical seance. He probably is. But what if, instead of our caricatured teenager, we have someone whose profession in life is the study of J. S. Bach. Suddenly, the fact that it takes yelling to get him out of his iPod infatuation is a good sign. Like the college student engrossed in his calculus. Or biology. Or history. Or Latin.

Or music.

4. Teaches you about poetry. I was listening to a 12th century Christmas song on my iPod when I realized the guy was singing in Latin and I recognized the words. The iPod managed to remind me that it was just as sensible to say that I was hearing poetry as to say that I was listening to music. That sound of the saliva from the singers' dentals and labials can be heard much more deliciously when they're spat right onto your eardrums. Again, it's more like live performance.

5. Teaches you about ambience. Just like HD TVs can show you the pores on your favorite news anchor's face, the iPod lets you hear all the gory details of the music without everyone yelling at you to turn down the volume. Why is that an advantage? Yes, you guessed it. It's more like live performance. The iPod teaches you that music isn't on paper.

6. Teaches you about liturgy. Liturgy assaults the senses. It comes from all sides. That's what makes a football game so fun. When you listen to a Bach oratorio on an iPod, it's like a football game. Like I said in #2, you feel distances. You hear the details. You sense the contour. Texture is a thing only the best Bose speakers can emulate for a CD player. For an iPod with earphones, it's the name of the game. Antiphony, cyclicality, and juxtaposition are all heightened with your earphones.

7. Teaches you about polyphony. This was, to me, the most shocking and delightful thing about my iPod. At last I could hear mimesis. Out of my left ear came the soprano doing a motif, and then from my right ear a bass doing the same motif an octave lower. The iPod cheerfully murders the idea that counterpoint is beautiful only on paper. Ahh, I thought. It's almost like I'm there. Now, tell me you can hear the counterpoint on your CD player like that.

8. Teaches you about conversation. Mortimer Adler said Western civilization was engaged in a Great Conversation. Well, he was right, about music, anyway. The iPod imposes canonicity. You can move your thumb a centimeter and flip over centuries. Think of how that can change perception of music. It's the difference between having a Bible made up of separate scrolls for each book and having a Bible in one leather-bound volume. What's that do you to your understanding of theology? A lot.

9. Teaches you criticism. On my iPod, I have six (6) different recordings of Ravel's La Valse. I can put them all on a playlist and listen to them one after the other. Why would I want to? Well, they all just do that climax wrong. Simon Rattle goes slow enough that you lose the waltz. Pierre Boulez just drags. Charles Munich goes too fast. Bernstein is almost right—the trumpet crescendo is brilliant—but, there's just something. Hm.

10. Teaches you humility. My iPod Nano is smaller than a baby's foot and can hold 8 GBs of music. Yahoo answers says that's 2000 songs, which means that it can probably hold about 800 of mine. The "Cover Flow" feature is enough to remind me that there are galaxies of music I haven't visited, and I can flip through them with my thumb. It's a humbling thought. And fun.

(11. There's this cool game on my iPod called Vortex...just kidding. This is all thanks to my cousin Madeleine, who decided I was just awesome enough of a relative to deserve an iPod for Christmas. You can blame my corrupted self on her.)

Natural Talent and the Real Me

Behind both [Roman Catholic and Protestant] views of baptism is the notion that the "real me," what makes me uniquely me, is some internal ghostly me that remains unaffected by what happens outside and is unchanged by what happens to my body. Neither the Protestant nor Catholic considers a third option, the possibility that baptism, precisely as an external and physical ritual, might actually affect who I am. Both the Protestant and Catholic, in short, seek to locate some eternal, unchangeable, autonomous "me" deep within. Ultimately, this is idolatrous. It is an effort to find some divine me inside the human race. Christians aren't supposed to believe any such thing. (The Baptized Body, Peter J. Leithart, "Starting Before the Beginning".)

When Christians say to a talented person, "You've been given a gift," oftentimes (not always, granted) there is an implicit presupposition there. We're talking about some raw propensity or ability that God simply infused in this person's soul. If Jay Greenberg had been born in the 8th century, he still would have been Jay Greenberg, the Gifted Musician. The more realistic crowd (ostensibly) chalks it all up to genetics, but it's often expected in the religious world to really attribute this to some sort of supernatural activity. God gave me a real gift, and that's a part of Who I Am, no matter what context I'm in. I was born with it.

I think the implicit assumption here is the same as the one Leithart identified in modern Protestant and Roman Catholic views of the sacraments. There's some sort of Inner Me, the part of my soul that's unchangeable and the way it is, regardless of my environment or whether or not I can help. In the end, the notion of "giftings" as we see it today is based on a flawed anthropology. It's-Just-The-Way-I-Am can be the justification for pedophilia or congressmen who have affairs, if you buy the notion, but it shouldn't be the way Christians account for people who are darn good at playing the violin. It certainly wasn't always the way Christians accounted for it. (Nor is it particularly flattering to the violinist, whose gift from God was, more likely, the discipline to practice incessantly.)

Messiaen, the Not-Mystic

"When asked if he has ever felt the 'joy of mysticism' (a moment of epiphany, of certainty) during the act of composing, the response is a resolute, 'No, not at all. When I am working, there are so many things that require immediacy, so many details to manage, that all I can do is be attentive to what I am doing. I do not experience what you mean. I do not contemplate but act.'" (Olivier Messiaen, from The Reinvention of Religious Music: Olivier Messiaen's Breakthrough Toward the Beyond, Sander van Maas, "It Is a Glistening Music We Seek".)

Simple, Hilarious, Popular, and Modern

Percy Dearmer prefaces The Oxford Book of Carols with the opening sentence,

"Carols are songs with a religious impulse that are simple, hilarious, popular, and modern."

How about that?

More Monody Argument

"The 'new music' immediately found imitators all over Italy and soon spread to other countries. The older contrapuntal art of the seventeenth century did not, of course, disappear; but the first half of the seventeenth century witnessed a gradual modification of the language of music owing to the interaction of the new monodic idea with the older contrapuntal principles, and the efforts of composers to find a means of reconciling the two. ...The integration of monody with the traditional practices of music and the earliest adaptation of the resultant new style to opera were achieved during the first half of the seventeenth century." A Short History of Opera, "The Immediate Forerunners of Opera", pg. 38-39.

The Monody Argument.

What Else Is New?

One of the most well-known moments in Western music is the stark tension of measures 12-16 in Wagner's Tristan und Isolde Prelude (1:17-1:50). The theme gets increasingly fragmented, increasingly higher, and always resolves on an unresolved dominant seven. At last, only two notes of the theme are left with no harmony underneath, until suddenly an unexpected chord bursts out of nowhere:









Wagner is taking advantage of the harmonic ambiguity in the third and fourth measures of the excerpt above. The passage can be put into simple chords as follows:









The question mark represents the lack of any harmony. What's this doing compositionally? It's creating a huge amount of tension. The listener is looking for resolution, and instead of giving it, Wagner simply takes away all harmony and leaves a two-note strand of music without any sort of context. While we're waiting for any sort of resolution, he suddenly gives us what we're not expecting—yet another unresolved dominant seven, this time an E-major minor-7 chord.

What's particularly interesting is that this isn't a new tactic. Harold C. Schonberg in his book The Great Conductors points out that "even the most important chords of the nineteenth century—the ones that open Tristan und Isolde—had previously occurred, almost note for note, in Liszt's song, Ich möchte hingehn, composed in 1845, more than ten years before Wagner 'composed' the Tristan opening." But the harmonic ambiguity Wagner uses a few measures later is actually a tactic used much, much earlier by none other than Johann Sebastian Bach in his Christmas Oratorio, BWV 248, Flösst, mein Heiland, flösst dein Namen.














Bach, too, is fragmenting his theme, taking away its unresolved harmony, and then surprising us with yet another dominant seventh chord. This can be analyzed similarly:











So, don't bother to do anything new harmonically. Chances are, Bach has already done. As Arnold Schoenberg points out in Style and Idea, Bach was really the first composer to use a tone row. Right there, in BWV 869, the final Fugue in the Well-Tempered Clavier! (Erm. Well, you get the idea.)

A Matter of Taste

"This is in sharp contrast to the relatively minor status of individual 'taste' in Western musical practice and aesthetics from the ancient Greeks until the late eighteenth century. To an earlier age, our contemporary idea of a complete relativism in musical judgment would have seemed nonsensical. One could no more make valid individual judgments about musical values than about science. Music was no more 'a matter of taste' than was the orbit of the planets or the physiology of the human body. From Plato to Helmholtz, music was understood to be based on natural laws, and its value was derived from its capacity to frame and elaborate these laws in musical form. Its success was no more a matter of subjective judgment than the laws themselves." (Who Needs Classical Music?, Julian Johnson, "Musical Values".)

Messiaen, the Theologian, not Mystic

"Pure music, profane music, and above all theological music (and not mystical, as the majority of my audience think) alternate in my production." (Olivier Messiaen, from The Reinvention of Religious Music: Olivier Messiaen's Breakthrough Toward the Beyond, Sander van Maas, "It Is a Glistening Music We Seek".)

Atonality Out of Necessity

"The method of composing with twelve tones grew out of a necessity. In the last hundred years, the concept of harmony has changed tremendously through the development of chromaticism. The idea that one basic tone, the root, dominated the construction of chords and regulated their succession—the concept of tonality—had to develop first into a concept of extended tonality. ...[I]t became doubtful whether a tonic appearing at the beginning, at the end, or at any other point really had a constructive meaning. ...In this way, tonality was already dethroned in practise, if not in theory." (Style and Idea, Arnold Schoenberg, "Composition with Twelve Tones".)

Compare with this.

Music Is Community

"Music is communal property, made and played as a shared activity whether it is carried on by a solitary individual or a large group. The difference between the band performing at a huge open-air concert and the person who plays a guitar in the privacy of his or her bedroom is much less significant than it appears. The activity of making and listening to music involves us in something that is never merely personal. In this sense, music is like a language; when we "speak" or "listen" in musical language, we participate in a signifying system that is communally shared and defined, something that is larger than our own use of it and that we enter whenever we involve ourselves in music." (Who Needs Classical Music?, Julian Johnson, "Musical Values".)

Why Sing Goudimel?

This is something I wrote a while back, attempting to explain why Goudimel uses so many root and so few inverted chords. It's not as clear as I'd like it to be, but it's a start.

--

Our goal is congregations with ever-increasing, corporate activity in worship. One of the oldest tools for enhancing this activity, especially in early Protestant traditions, is the singing of hymns in parts. The problem with this is that congregations don't know how to sing in parts. They don't know how to begin to learn. This goes back to a deeper problem, an attitude that musicianship is a mater of talent, of divine gift, of genetics. It's not. It's a combination of two things - discipline and conditioning.

Claude Goudimel gives you both. Goudimel's approach to part writing is, at best, unusual. But it's a conscious attempt to compel a congregant into becoming a musician. His method is simple - give each person a sense of identity with one of the four voices of a hymn. Your identity as a soprano, alto, tenor, or bass is something that has a tangible application in the sound. Your section has a distinctive way it jumps around or honks a note. The best of it all is that this means you don't have to read music to learn, but learning how to sing naturally ends up teaching you how to read.

It starts with the melody, which is usually pretty catchy. This doesn't really pose a problem. The next part that we naturally want to hear is the bass, since it gives us a sense of the harmony of the piece. Theoretically speaking, if you're a bass, there are three possible notes you can sing with each melody note without creating dissonance, since Goudimel's policy is almost always to have the bass note sing the root position of any given chord. But, of course, nobody really thinks in those terms when they're singing. Simply due to the fact that most other possibilities than the one Goudimel writes are awkward and unsingable, it's intuitive for a bass to sing it the way Goudimel wrote it. From the point of view of someone learning, there's simply a distinctive sound that accompanies his identity as a bass. From the composer's perspective, Goudimel simply never (well, hardly ever) writes an inverted chord.

From hereon out, it's pretty simple. You have a soprano and a bass line in place. The rest essentially fills in the blanks. The alto and tenor parts, which would seem to be more difficult since they're close to each other, again, have that intuitive sense of what not to sing because the other parts are already singing it. To dip again into the theory behind it, at any point, either the alto or the tenor is going to be singing a note that neither the bass nor the soprano are yet singing. For the person who's learning, it sounds funny otherwise. To help distinguish between the two parts, either of the two middle parts at any point is going to be doing something melodic, while the other is honking on one or two notes. Simply by virtue of the fact that there are only two possibilities for each voice at any given time, and neither can do both at once, possibilities are limited and parts become intuitive.

What's important to realize is not how it happens but that it happens. Goudimel is forcing people who aren't comfortable with music to listen to themselves, listen to those around them, distinguish notes from notes in thick textures, and identify themselves with a particular sound. This is, perhaps, why the people who usually end up looking down on Goudimel are those who know the most about music. Not all Goudimel hymns are created equal, and most of them are milk. As long as we keep in mind that the meat is, say, Bach, we're on the right track. But Goudimel is good for where we are now - introducing the idea of sanctifying corporate worship. It's a matter of creating better musicians through a delicate mix of discipline and conditioning.

Suzuki and Talent

If the Suzuki method has proven that a toddler can acquire excellence in musical performance the way he learns a language, why can't we extend the logic to musical composition? A daughter seeing her father having fun working calculus problems on a page will, without a doubt, turn out to be great at math. So, maybe it's that, and not his genes, that allowed Mozart to be writing those symphonies at 3. Or whatever. (In the words of Michael Flanders, "I very much wanted to play the music of Mozart, in particular his wonderful horn concerto in E flat, which he wrote at about the age of 18 months. Marvelous man.")

Suzuki's brilliance lay in one core idea—mimesis. Children can pick up a language when they're one year and two years old, becoming fluent in a tongue high school students in a different country spend years and undesirable toil to accomplish the same thing. What allows toddlers to do that?

Suzuki said it was seeing their parents do it. When a child sees his mother and father using language, he wants in on it. He can see the pleasure and the utility that results from language, so he imitates, with no textbook knowledge of grammar, of phonetics, idioms, or anything. Only his ear. Suzuki, therefore, insisted that parents take lessons with their children. You can see the result—the 4-year-old who would never practice before would be jumping up and down, throwing a tantrum because his mother got to practice and he didn't.

So, can we try the same thing with composition?

Plato and Schoenberg

"Moreover, so much of music as is adapted to the sound of the voice and to the sense of hearing is granted to us for the sake of harmony; and harmony, which has motions akin to the revolutions of our souls, is not regarded by the intelligent votary of the Muses as given by them with a view to irrational pleasure, which is deemed to be the purpose of it in our day, but as meant to correct any discord which may have arisen in the courses of the soul, and to be our ally in bringing her into harmony and agreement with herself...." (Plato, Timaeus, [47d and ff.].)

Most modern readers would dismiss this as the typical Platonic idea that any sort of art needs to have a message. Music should "correct any discord" inside us and bring harmony into our souls. Composers of the last 500 years have certainly used music more as a means of portraying reality rather than delivering a sermon or giving us inner peace. That way, Stravinsky's Rite of Spring can be a "beautiful" piece insofar as it represents well the reality that he's trying to portray, much like a painting of a battle can be beautiful, though its subject is grotesque.

Harmonic Emancipation and Its Dissenters

"The forces that ultimately to lead to the breakdown of the tonal system, or at least the end of its dominance of Western music traditions, may be viewed as the logical extension of the direction in which music had been developing since the beginning of the nineteenth century.... We might also note that melody was gradually released from its traditional harmonic associations, with the result that melodic and harmonic successions began to exist in their own coloristic right." (Tonal Harmony with an Introduction to Twentieth-Century Music, Kostka and Payne, "Tonal Harmony in the Late Nineteenth Century.")

Think of it this way - if you set your goal as beating the fastest record for the 100-meter dash, the logical conclusion is that you want to run the race as close to zero seconds as possible. The "breakdown of the tonal system" is the "logical extension" of the trajectory of music in the 19th century, whose goal had been taking harmony to the most emancipated place possible. Schoenberg himself talks about this and certainly views the atonal system in these very terms.

But there is always a reaction away from any dominant movement. (No puns intended.) Practically all the music that is not in the German tradition of increasing chromaticism can be categorized as a vague return to modality. Kostka and Payne even note this. Think for a moment.

The French school was dominated by Debussy and Ravel in the turn of the century and the first half of it. They worked, primarily, in the whole tone scale and the Dorian mode. (Check out Jeau D'eau, for instance.) Olivier Messiaen was also a central figure and not entirely atonal. He worked in "modes of limited transposition". Even in a piece like La Transfiguration, he wanders far, but never entirely away, from E major throughout the entire work.

The English school was dominated by figures like Vaughn Williams, Holst, Walton, and Britten. Look how much of their music employs the Church modes. (The Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis comes to mind immediately, but so does Jupiter, Somerset Rhapsody, any of the choral music of Walton and Britten and showing up prominently elsewhere.)

The Russian school is enormous and odd. But look at Petrushka by Stravinsky, Scheharazade by Rimsky-Korsakov. When not gushing with Wagnerian chromaticism (like Rachminanov) or verging on atonal (like everyone else), even the Russians resort to static harmonies and "tonal" centers without dominant chords.

Modality permeates music that is not along this central trajectory (as at least Schoenberg thought it) of Classical music. It seems that Classical music is obsessed with looking back at two things - primarily, the Classical age of drama (like the Monodists and Wagner) and, secondarily, the folk and Church music that provides a strangely removed flavor.

A gorgeous, concrete example of all this is the Somerset Rhapsody by Gustav Holst (previously mentioned). Check it out - he stays almost entirely in modes (Dorian, Aeolian, Lydian) with a few splashes of harmonic color. It's peaceful and almost fairy-tale-esque in tone. Then, for whatever reason, Holst decides to go Wagnerian (listen to the chromatic scales in the violas and woodwinds) at 6:15 in the recording until it fades away about halfway through the seventh minute. A wonderful example of the conflict present in most 19th and 20th century composers between a look back at modality and a look forward toward harmonic emancipation.

Bach and Newton

"In August 1750, just days after Bach's death, Agricola wrote:

He [Finazzi] denies his [Bach's] music the effect of pleasure for the listener who would not savor such difficult harmony. Yet, assuming the harmonies [that is, musical structure] of this great man were so complex that they would not always achieve the intended result, they nevertheless serve for the connoisseur's genuine delight. Not all learned people are able to understand a Newton, but those who have progressed far enough in the profound science so they can understand him will find the greatest gratification and real benefit in reading his work."

("Prologue: Bach and the Notion of 'Musical Science'". Johann Sebastian Bach: The Learned Musician. Christoph Wolff.)

Several interesting things here - the fact that Wolff feels that "harmonies" and "musical structure" are somewhat synonymous in the 18th century German tongue (drawing any tempting conclusions would be unsubstantiated conjecture on my part) and also the fact that, were it a reference to what we'd actually call Bach's harmonies, we wouldn't think of them as complex at all. We've been acclimatized in that respect. If it's a broader "musical structure" that's so complex (such as setting a poetic German text to 9 part choral harmony and two separate orchestras), I see what they mean. Finazzi's still wrong, though. Bach's congregations didn't seem to mind his "difficult harmony" so much, after all.