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?

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.)

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.

Something Is Rotten

A brief thought experiment.

If you were a lover of Classical music in the 1850s, what kind of music were you most excited to hear? What composers dominated the scene? Strauss' waltzes were so popular the Queen of England requested he come and play them live for her himself. Dvorak's 60th birthday was celebrated as a national holiday and there were banquets in his honor. While he was still alive. We're even told people were amazed to find out, thanks to Mendelssohn, that J. S. Bach, from 120 years back, was a serious composer.

If you are a lover of Classical music now, what kind of music are you most excited to hear? What composers dominate the scene?

Dead composers. Dead music.

Penderecki on a Return to Tradition

"The avant-garde gave one an illusion of universalism. The musical world of Stockhausen, Nono, Boulez and Cage was for us, the young hemmed in by the aesthetics of socialist realism, then the official canon in our country, a liberation. It opened a new reality, a new vision of art and of the world. I was quick to realize, however, that this novelty, this experimentation and formal speculation, is more destructive than constructive; I realized the Utopian quality of its Promethean tone. I was saved from the avant-garde snare of formalism by a return to tradition." - Krzysztof Penderecki

Here is a link to probably Penderecki's most famous composition, which, I assume, is one of his more avant-garde. Thanks to Justin Jaramillo for the quote. (Who doesn't, for the record, necessarily condone anything on this blog.)

How Not to Argue about Church Music

There are a lot of common avenues of arguing about Church music that I think are seriously flawed and particularly destructive because they may be arguing for the right music for the wrong reasons. Here I'm simply outlining the ways I think are particularly unwise—perhaps in another place I can begin to outline the ways I think one ought to do it. (The bold affirms what I do not.)

1. Church music must be old. I've addressed this a bit already, but let me restate here. All music is, in a fundamental sense, traditional. It simply depends on what tradition you're plugging yourself into. Any contemporary Christian artists or praise choruses are doing just that—plugging themselves into musical traditions. Similarly, it did not take a thick layer of dust on Bach's manuscripts for his music to become traditional. His music was traditional from the moment he wrote it. It was in the tradition of Praetorius, Schütz, Pachelbel et al.

This is also a theological point. Most famously, but certainly not the only instance of it, Psalm 98 enjoins us to sing a new song to the Lord. More than simply citing chapter and verse is involved here, though. The Biblical principle is that of the Davidic liturgical revolution, where David took the dust-gathering Levitical traditions and started improvising. Peter Leithart in From Silence to Song points out that David seemed to herald in a special liturgical period, where he and the musicians could worship with the Ark of the Covenant face to face. If the Davidic liturgical revolution took place under these circumstances, how much more should music be jubilant, noisy, and, above all, new now that the veil has been torn?

2. Church music must be complex. The voice of the Church past speaks out strongly against this one. That's not an infallible argument, but nonetheless one difficult to reckon with. There is nothing complex about Gregorian chant or a Lutheran or Calvinist hymn or Anglican chant. If you're calling yourself a traditionalist, this is probably not the argument you want to employ. It's also important to remember that contemporary music is difficult for many people to sing along with for a reason—the rhythm tends to be devilishly hard. None of this is to say that Church music can't be complex. The really complex thing here is the issue, not the music.

3. Church music must be Classical. Sed contra. This is one I particularly take issue with. I would say the opposite—Church music needs to be not Classical. Remember what Classical means. Classical doesn't just connote "older", like classic rock connotes Led Zepplin (old, ha, ha, ha), but it also connotes the real Classical era, the era of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides. It's no coincidence that these men are one of the first recorded instances of art for art's sake and the use of the stage rather than the altar or the hearth as the background for music. Nor is it a coincidence that the movement that molded the direction Classical music would go was a group of Renaissance men who thought music needed to be less sacred and more like, of all things, the era of Classical drama. More about that here.

Think about it this way. If you have a problem with taking the devil-worship words out of a metal song and putting in great theology, then you should also consider there's a similar (maybe not so drastic) problem with Mozart's Requiem. Think about it—the same compositional techniques Mozart used for his definitively secular symphony he is now using for his ostensibly sacred requiem. If you think that simply slipping in good theology (well, even that's debatable) on top of secular music is in general a bad principle, then Classical music is precisely what you don't want your Church music to be.

This also gets into how you define Classical music, of course, but I think it's vital to understand it as a secular project, not a sacred one. So, this ends up going both ways—music that is truly sacred can't be considered Classical music. This isn't just an arbitrarily subversive category. Church music does need to be culture defining, not culture defined. It necessitates careful distinctions, and the clearest one is between High music that is sacred and High music that is secular. If this involves declaring that BWV 244 is not Classical music in the normal sense, oh well. It's a distinction that still needs to be made.

I'd also like to address, at some point, the concept of music as a mood enhancer. This should be enough for now.

Schoenberg on Emancipation and History

"The procedure [of the "atonal" school] is based upon my theory of 'the emancipation of the dissonance.' Dissonances, according to this theory, are merely more remote consonances in the series of overtones. Though the resemblance of the more remote overtones to the fundamental tone gradually diminishes, their comprehensibility is equal to the comprehensibility of the consonances. Thus to the ear of today their sense-interrupting effect has disappeared. Their emancipation is as justified as the emancipation of the minor third was in former times."

(Arnold Schoenberg, Structural Functions of Harmony, from "Apollonian Evaluation of a Dionysian Epoch".)

Schoenberg on Pre-Bach

"To base the teaching of counterpoint on Palestrina is as stupid as to base the teaching of medicine on Aesculapius. Nothing could be more remote from contemporary ideas, structurally and ideologically, than the style of this composer. Besides, his contrapuntal technique...does not demonstrate the more difficult problems and their solutions discovered only shortly after him." (Some Aspect of Counterpoint in Selected Works of Arnold Schoenberg, Boris William Pillin.)

It may be chronological snobbery, but it's an excellent example of a common, understated attitude amongst academia of (at least) the early 20th century toward Renaissance polyphony.

Atonality, the Logical Conclusion

"Thus Schoenberg, as well as many of his disciples, regarded atonality and the dominance of chromaticism as a logical, if not inevitable, historical phenomenon." (Some Aspect of Counterpoint in Selected Works of Arnold Schoenberg, Boris William Pillin.)

This much one can accept—the question is, the logical conclusion of what?

Music and the Public Square

While I am the last person to have an unnatural desire to apply Marxist historicism to everything I can get my hands on, it's worth noting that Classical music is, in much of its history, a matter of social distinction. You go to Classical music concerts if you're rich and you can pay for it. These boundaries are largely destroyed in the advent of commercial recording, but even now they still exist. If you want the real taste of Classical music, the live performance, the aspect of the connoisseur, you must go rub shoulders with the city councilmen and the local music theory faculty at a live performance. Maybe your dentist, your family doctor, your French teacher. Chances of seeing the plumber there? Adjuster? Not really that high. It's a bit like golf, but worse.

Is this a bad thing? Not necessarily. But it is worth noting that it can be fallacious when people formulate bombastic apologiai for Classical music, trying to win "back" the younger generation and the majority of people to the aesthetically superior form of music. The problem is, Classical music has never had a wide audience and, quite possibly due to commercial availability, never wider than today. It isn't a matter of getting Classical music back to a position of wide-spread appeal, since it may not have had it in the first place.

On the other hand, not all Classical music is like this. It doesn't seem likely that you're going to hear Brahms' 2nd piano concerto if you're a 19th century Dickensesque inn keeper. It does seem considerably more likely that you hear a Bach cantata if you're an 18th century inn keeper. Bach's music was music that was heard in church and, while, at its more corrupt moments, the Church's liturgy has been a matter of class, music of the church is music that is heard by all the congregation. And, in early Lutheran Protestantism more than anywhere else, perhaps, the music is informed (but not dictated) by the congregants' needs and their level of musical education. These early Protestant churches love congregation-lead music.

I've talked before about the tune that most of us sing O Sacred Head Now Wounded to—it was apparently a German love song. Both his predecessors and Bach himself took this tune and set it many different ways. (And, so did a few composers who came after him, most famously Brahms.) This is an example of the composers of High music lifting folk and popular tunes out of the culture and implementing them in a religious context. I think it would be a little unrealistic simply to attribute that to some already-existing quality in the folk song that merited its use in worship. Bach et al were, to some degree, trying to teach and edify by using something that would be, to most of the congregation, familiar.

Bach is an excellent example, but he's not the only example. As I've mentioned before, Josquin and Dufay do this with the famous tune L'homme arme, just barely leaving the tune recognizable but ubiquitous in their Missae L'homme arme. There's even a rumor that the tune Pange Lingua, to which is set St. Thomas' famous poem, was in fact a Roman marching song.

But does that mean that modern Church music composers should take a "melody" (coughcoughcough) from Coldplay or Regina Spektor and use it as the basis of a Kyrie? Yyyeah, no. That's dubious, to say the least. Not that I have anything against Coldplay or Regina Spektor (that would be appropriate in this post), but the issue is one of apples and oranges. Bach and Josquin were working on generations upon generations of people who had built up a Christo-centric culture. The music that came out of that culture was certainly not sinless and certainly not totally consistent with a Christian worldview. But the music didn't clash with Christian doctrine. Today, we have a totally different field to play on. Inevitably, a song (regardless of the ethos of its authors) that hits the top of the commercial music list is going to clash with the catechesis of Christian worship. That doesn't mean it's not going to work 100% of the time, but it does mean that there are many more issues to weigh in the balance and many more insidious cultural connotations to deal with. Bach and Josquin had a level playing field—they weren't in a battle with the majority of the culture. We are.

When the music of a culture is defined by the music of its Church (I don't think it ever isn't), when, in short, at the center of the public square is the music of worship, the effects on folk and pop music will be drastic. When this happens in Christian Churches, and we all come to hear, worship with, love, and understand the High music of the church, the gap between the aesthetically richest 10% and the aesthetically poorest 10% will be narrowed. But, as usual, it doesn't work to regulate that. It has to happen organically, over the course of generations and academic years and, uh, counterpoint classes. But then we won't be far from the sort of culture that writes quodlibets for a pastime. Everyone will be edified, musically, by being immersed in music they have, over time, come to understand. The give-and-take between the music of the Church and the music of the culture will be such as was not really possible for the majority of the history of Classical music.

Olivier Messiaen

The following article I wrote is taken from Quo Vadis, a Catholic periodical written by the students and faculty of Regina Coeli Academy. Reproduced with the permission of Quo Vadis.

Many of the Catholics spearheading a full return to the Tridentine Mass in America have started to meet during the summer at a Sacred Music Colloquium. This year they're meeting at Duquesne University in Pittsburgh. The Colloquium, on its website at MusicaSacra.com, points out that "[A]s Pope Benedict XVI and the Second Vatican Council have emphasized, [Gregorian chant] is integral to Catholic liturgical life and should be heard and experienced with wide participation in every parish." The weekend is spent educating congregants, choirmasters, and organists to read, become facile with, and themselves to be able to teach Gregorian chant to their respective parishes.

But, the average layman attending the conference will be in for a totally unexpected ride. After having heard the sublime and accessible (or so he might think) Gregorian chant during the Mass on Sunday morning, he may hear this piece, or one like it, for the postlude. The chords strike us as dissonant, ominous, jarring, angular, formless, arbitrary—all of which are nice for the background while Voldemort is doing damage with his magic wand, but what are they doing here, you ask, in liturgy? And what does this piece have to do with its title, "Dieu parmi nous", which is "God with us"?

Meet Olivier Messiaen. I'm 17 and he died the year I was born. He's recent. Messiaen (if you want to learn how to pronounce it, I recommend Mrs. Thompson's excellent French class) was a modern Classical composer. But I seriously doubt this is Classical music the likes of which you've heard before. In fact, I bet you haven't heard this kind of music anywhere before. Messiaen is unprecedented. There's no one like him. He's right there, teaching Pierre Boulez, hanging out with Schoenberg and Webern, and being one of the most popular modern Classical composers (which isn't saying much). Yet there's one strange thing about him that makes him totally different from everyone around him.

Messiaen claimed that his audience didn't really understand his music. And he wasn't just being your typical pouty artist complaining about how misunderstood he is. He said his audience didn't really understand his music because they didn't have even a basic grasp of Catholic theology. Yes, that's right, Olivier Messiaen was a devout Roman Catholic. "The illumination of the theological truths of the Catholic faith is the first aspect of my work, the noblest, and no doubt the most useful and valuable".

Nor was he (at least, by the end of his life) an overly-mystical, pagan-mixed, post-modern liberal Catholic who uses religion as an excuse to look more profound. (I'm thinking of someone like John Tavener, an English composer who converted to Eastern Orthodoxy...that is, before he converted to Hinduism.) Messiaen was a Thomas-Aquinas-saturated composer. His music, he claimed, dripped with Catholic theology and no secular audience could put a towel on it to dry it off. Of course, many of his (secular) friends, wet blankets that they were, liked calling his music "mystical". But he corrected them. He said his output was, "above all theological (and not mystical as the majority of my audience think)".

So, then, why does his music sound so strange? Why so surreal? And, if he thought his music really was an illumination of Catholic doctrine, how come he seems to be confusing the matter more with his really weird music? I can't claim to have a great answer to any of these questions. But I could draw a helpful analogy, perhaps. Messiaen understands something essential about theology—it's not always comfortable. In that way, he's a lot like another Catholic Thomistic writer, Flannery O'Connor. And, like with her, I'll warn you at the outset. Enter this strange world of theology-soaked art with caution. Those who have a strong, Medieval understanding of the world as a sacramental place know that you can't walk away from a visible means of invisible grace without being radically changed. The same holds true for the music of Messiaen.

This is Messiaen's Chorale of the Holy Mountain from his work "The Transfiguration of Our Lord Jesus Christ". It's for a huge choir and a huge orchestra. You'll notice right off the bat that Messiaen has a bunch of strange sounding chords that always resolve to a gorgeous E major chord at the end of every phrase (with two exceptions, when it resolves to an F sharp minor seventh chord, also stunningly beautiful.) It will sound very weird to you at first. But picture what's going on here—the Transfiguration happens on top of a mountain. Music about a mountain should feel very immense and wide. And Messiaen still retains a sharp focus and clarity throughout the entire chorale, sort of like the air at high altitudes. If you think of this as Howard Shore's soundtrack to Lord of the Rings (it does bear some similarities), it might make more sense.

Slightly edgier is this piece "Candor est lucis aeternae" from the same work. Here Messiaen is concentrating on "candor", which is a bright-sounding and bright-meaning word. If you listen closely (which you must, if you want to get anything out of this music), you'll hear the altos in the background singing the words. Everything else is an exuberant and dizzying frenzy of shininess. If you saw the old BBC Tailor of Gloucester with Ian Holmes, this may remind you of Christmas.

Now, why am I doing all this? Am I or are those crazies at the Sacred Music Colloquium suggesting that a return to Gregorian Chant and Palestrina entails the use of this kind of stuff? Messiaen may have been a Catholic, you say, but that doesn't excuse him from writing some ugly music.

Well, anyone who has read Shakespeare and certainly anyone who likes reading Shakespeare will tell you that you can't read Shakespeare and get it in the first 15 minutes. I had trouble keeping awake through the majority of MacBeth. And it's supposed to be riveting. But, of course, those who like Shakespeare, myself included, know it's an acquired taste. Like blue cheese. Like Messiaen. You have to read lots of Shakespeare and take it on faith that it's worth your time. Messiaen is obviously not as reputed as Shakespeare, but I'd still say he's worth your time. This music won't make sense to you the first time you listen to it, most likely. Okay. It didn't to me either. Keep trying. It's rewarding.

Heifetz on Modern Music

I occasionally play works by contemporary composers and for two reasons. First to discourage the composer from writing any more and secondly to remind myself how much I appreciate Beethoven.

The Monody Argument

Monody: "all styles of accompanied solo singing practiced in the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (as distinct from monophony, which is unaccompanied melody)." (A History of Western Music, B., G., P., pg. 312)

The Argument: that the harmonic direction of Classical music was a direct consequence of Monody and the Florentine Camerata.

Camerata:
(a) founded for "the purpose of rediscovering the manner in which the Greeks had used music with the drama". (A History of Music, Finney, 228)
(b) "The sense of the drama depended upon the words being audible to the hearers, and the early experiments of the Camerata were directed toward the discovery of a style of music which would make that possible." (ibid.)

Consequently, "these men began by discarding the whole polyphonic method" because
(a) "Only a solo melody, [G. Mei] said, could enhance the natural speech inflections of a good orator or actor." (A History of Western Music, B., G., P., pg. 311)
(b) "When several voices simultaneously sang different melodies and words, in different rhythms and registers, some low and some high, some rising and others descending, some in slow notes and others in fast [i.e. polyphony], the resulting chaos of contradictory impressions could never deliver the emotional message of the text." (ibid.)

The Monody Argument asserts that this establishment of melody and accompaniment directed the course of this style of music [i.e. Classical music] towards a primacy of harmony because

(a) harmonic interest is a necessity of the dry recitative
(b) harmonic interest necessity of the primacy of emotion (at least in the mind of the monodists and consequently in the mind of Classical music)

Chorale of the Holy Mountain

Atonality

"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.")

The Musically Gifted

Evgeny Kissin, 38-year-old concert pianist, debuted with the Ulyanovsk Symphony Orchestra at the age of 10. At 13, he gained international recognition for playing and recording both Chopin’s piano concertos with the Moscow Philharmonic Orchestra. He was, reputedly, able to hum a Bach tune along with his sister, who was then playing it on the piano, at the age of 11 months. So much for Wikipedia.

On YouTube, you can look up an interview with Kissin, who relates the instance of receiving a good review from a critic when he was 17, but with this barb at the end of the article - “In general, one gets an impression that, up till now, everything has been easy for Kissin in piano playing - sometimes even too easy. Both pluses and minuses of his art come from that fact. Now we only hear in his playing what comes from his great natural gift. This is, of course, wonderful, but in future, something definitely has to change. What? When? In which way? Everything will depend on that.”

Has everything been easy for Kissin in piano playing? When he was 17, he performed Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 with Herbert von Karajan. And this critic expects us to believe it was easy?

As a pianist (one, I might add, who is stunned by Kissin’s playing), I can confidently say that that is rot. My reader may say I’m being arrogant - supposing that my limited piano experience is vaguely the same as this child prodigy. But I still say it’s nonsense - Evgeny Kissin’s “great natural gift” consists of an environment saturated in great music, hours upon hours of disciplined practice at a young age, and memorization skills that were whittled when children eat memorization out of the can with a spoon. To suppose that it has been easy for Kissin, who ostensibly bears an inherent talent, is lazy of the critic and insulting to Kissin. He had to work to get where he was - to credit it to a “great natural gift”, like something he can’t control, represents a pathetic understanding the great pianists of our age.

Again, my reader may think I have turned into a soft-and-squishy liberal politician who can’t stand to see people not on an equal footing. I just can’t stand to be inherently unequal to Evgeny Kissin, so I’m stripping him of his natural talent. The same with Mozart. The same with Bach. Well, no, not exactly.

I’m taking my cues from Bach himself. According to Christoph Wolff, his most recent and well-respected biographer, Bach reputedly said, at the end of his life, that he had worked hard and achieved great things, and that anybody who worked as hard as he had could do the same things. This is coming from the man who is rumored to have improvised, upon request, a 6-part fugue for the prince of Germany. Can you do that? Could you do that if you worked hard?

Well, no, I don’t think you could in all likelihood. But Bach is speaking from a specific culture, and we can’t just throw his words out as the modest and humble words of a “gifted” man. Bach is speaking from a culture that, as Glenn Gould once related, considered family entertainment sitting around the fire and composing a “quodlibet” - a contrapuntal combination of two or more folk tunes into one coherent song. Imagine living in a culture where the standard for a 10-year-old’s entertainment was competing with his Dad at writing counterpoint. Now, would a Bach (or a Mozart) coming out of that culture be such an anomaly? And, yet, we wonder why there aren’t any Bachs or Mozarts today.

Gone is the notion of music as paideia. Music teaches. It educates. It trains. It disciplines. It cultivates. This was the opinion of Plato and Boethius, who both commented on what a sly weapon music was for propagandists. Music is a matter of education - if our children grow up in a culture of Lutheran hymns, quodlibets, Bach chorale preludes, and village performances of coffee cantatas, then what we could call “talented” musicians should pop up everywhere. And they do in Bach’s Europe. A few years after Bach died, Mozart was playing, blindfolded, for the Pope.

People think of “natural talents” in two ways - a gift from God to the child, as if his musical talent were some facet of his soul, sort of like a charismatic’s gift of tongues or prophecy, or perhaps a genetic disposition resulting from a sort of natural selection. The idea here is that many people start with piano lessons, but only the ones who have the right DNA and the parents with the most developed ear and limber fingers really have the chops. And they’re the ones that end up being on stage wowing us with their “talents”.

But, briefly, I’d like to remind those Christians out there who think I’m giving the glory to Kissin’s works rather than God’s grace, that the word the Old Testament uses for “artistic talent” is the same word it uses for “wisdom”. It’s something that God gives but that simultaneously a man acquires. That modern Christians see a tension between God’s grace and man’s works is not an excuse to rush after this idea of “natural gifts” but a clear indication that they need to read Thomas Aquinas, or, even better, John Calvin.

What about Jay Greenberg, the child with no musical parents, who attended Juilliard at 10 years old, composed an internationally broadcasted, fully orchestrated overture for the 9-11 terrorist attacks when he was the same age, and reputedly hears the music in his head - sometimes even several different pieces simultaneously - and writes it down just as he hears it? Surely this is a person with natural gifts and talents from God.

A very simple test can be done that reduces such claims either to absurdity or to a better grasp of reality. Imagine Jay Greenberg, if you would, born into a family of medieval aristocrats in the 14th century. Would he compose music that sounded like Rachmaninoff or Schoenberg or Beethoven or Bach, as he composes today? Or would it sound like Perotinus, Machaut, Dufay, and Josquin? His music bears the distinctive mark of environmentally induced music - the music he hears in his head does not come from some distant, detached spiritual psyche, granted to him by God upon birth. Yet this is seemingly the attitude that we take towards Greenberg.

To paraphrase Glenn Gould again, he also lamented the loss of equality between audience and performer. The performer is now lifted up as a talented genius, but Gould insists that this is the downfall of Classical music. He says,

“I think that what happened in the 18th century, when performers stopped being composers, was the great disaster for music. And I think that to look at it today as an irrevocable move and to say that this is not any longer correctable, that we cannot in fact get back to that glorious time when performers had a composer’s insight into music and when an audience consisted largely of people who performed and composed themselves - that we cannot get back to that is simply to say that music is finished. There are people around who would tell you that music in our purely occidental sense is indeed finished. I don’t share that gloom, I must say, but there’s good cause for it.”

Classical Music Is Dead, Part II

I'd like to clear up a few loose ends and objections that people have given me. This is an important premise in my larger argument for a return to the Medieval in composition (and a solution for the Church music crises).

Classical music is progressive. That's essential. But that's not the only thing that makes it classical. Something can be progressive and not classical. But something that isn't progressive is definitely not classical, no matter how hard it tries. Richard Wagner sounds very similar to John Williams sometimes. The difference is that Richard Wagner was from the 19th century and he leaned forward. John Williams is from the 20th century and he leans backwards. There is not enough in John Williams' music that is innovative in order for it, in a Classical setting, to be considered truly forward leaning. (As soundtrack music, I think he's extremely innovative and attention-arresting.)

There's a simple way to illustrate this - there are no composers who are considered universally classical that were not progressives and products of their time. An example of this would be, at random, Bach. It so happens Bach was extremely progressive. An example of this would not be a composer from the 20th century who was not progressive, because he would have to redefine what is historically the uniting principle of all Classical music in order to get his foot in the door.

But there are other things that make Classical music what it is. Classical music is an intentional expansion on the ideas of the Classical age. And by this, I do not mean Mozart, Salieri, and Haydn. I mean Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, who were asked by contemporaries the classical question, "What does it have to do with Dionysus?" The answer is, of course, that it has nothing to do with Dionysus. Classical is ars gratia artis - art for art's sake. It is secular. It is oriented around the stage, not Dionysus. It has nothing to do with the religious holidays anymore. It is now simply high drama for audiences in heels and ties. Or whatever they wore back then.

Classical music as we understand it is just this in a modern form. This can be shown clearly in the monodist movement of the 17th century. Monody was the birth of homophony, opera, and Classical music in its recognizable form. Their idea was not simply to nod back to Classical drama of ancient Greece but to manifest its rebirth and expand on its tradition. Out of this movement came a surge away from polyphony (music with many melodies) and towards the simpler homophony (music with one melody and some accompaniment) in high music.

This is why, properly speaking, anything before the rise of monodism or secular music in the West cannot be considered Classical music because it was not secular. It was religious. It answered the classical question posed above to Aeschylus differently - "It has everything to do with Dionysus." Or, more properly, Christ.

























(Theodore M. Finney, A History of Music. Revised Edition. New York, 1947. As much as his analysis is atrociously anachronistic in some areas, he provides a helpful chart for those interested in the shape of music between the 9th and 18th century.)

Cage on Music as Culture

John Cage describes his music as "an affirmation of life – not an attempt to bring order out of chaos nor to suggest improvements in creation, but simply a way of waking up to the very life we're living". Perhaps this is a greater proof than most that Classical music becomes absurd, if not impossible, in "the very life we're living".

Classical Music Is Dead

Had Brahms premiered a sonata that sounded like it belonged with powdered wigs, he would have come off stage with bits of rotten tomato stuck to his face. Mozart could write like Mozart, and Brahms could write like Brahms, and it's possible Mozart could have even written like Brahms, but Brahms could never write like Mozart. Nobody would listen.

Whatever Classical music is, it is progressive. It leans forward constantly. Any backward glance must be through this progressive lens, like Brahms glancing back at Haydn in theme and variation or like Grieg glancing back at the Baroque suite in the Holberg or like Vaughn Williams glancing back at Medieval fauxbourdon in O Vos Omnes. All of these works remain products of their time, however, and cannot be understand as anything other than the specific cultural output of the culture in which they were composed. Which is why Brahms would need to wear a powdered wig to write like Mozart.

This is a sine qua non of Classical music. Without this progressive element, it simply falls apart. Which is why it is impossible to consider the body of music currently being contributed into the Classical canon as valid Classical music. It isn't music that looks forward with any new theoretical lens. It isn't discovering chromaticism like Beethoven. It isn't dispensing with a consistent tonal center like Wagner. It isn't edging on modality like Ravel. It isn't using inordinate dissonance like Messiaen. It isn't being atonal like Schoenburg. It's pretending to sound like Rachmaninoff or Prokofiev or even Webern, but that's fallacious - Classical music must be a unique output of the culture in which it is placed, and our culture is distinctly different from the culture present in the 1950s or the 1920s or the 1880s.

Classical music is dead like Latin is dead. There's nothing new being added to it. You can take some roots and some prefixes and some suffixes and bring them together to have a slightly modified denotation, as might be necessary if you were working for the Vatican and wanted to put together a Papal encyclical. But Latin is still dead. It's not being changed or morphed inside the tongues and minds of Latinists. It's analyzed, studied, and prodded, but not spoken and certainly not changing.

But Classical music is only even possible in a society that values secularism and ars gratia artis. That's rendered moot by a society overrun with a strange mix of Kantianism and utilitarianism, which are, coincidentally, two of the monumental products of secularism. Classical music is oriented around the stage, which is itself only supportable in a society that values schola or leisure the way Rawls might value justice. Leisure, schola, and hence the stage are implausible constructs in a modern and post-modern society. Classical music is no longer possible since it would be a product of a society that cannot philosophically support the concept of classical.

There is a forgotten kind of High music, one whose teleology is lost on our music historians, analysts, and musicologists. It's High music that values leisure, necessitates schola, but rejects the stage, ars gratia artis, and other secular constructs. Music that centers around the altar, ars gratia Dei, etc. Because this is music, it is a product of a certain culture, but in this case, it is far more potent, efficacious, and sacramental in its makeup because it is the cultus, the center of worship. A culture that adopts an attitude of worship will see its culture molded and formed by the music it sings in its worship, since, at the center of every culture is cultus, your manner of worship.

What would our culture look like if we sang OCP? What would it look like if we sang Arvo Pärt?