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.

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.

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.

Running a Race in Zero Seconds

"Wagner's art recognises only superlatives, and a superlative has no future. It is an end, and not a beginning."

Edward Hanslick (1825-1904), in: Pleasants, ed., Hanslick's Music Criticism (1950).

True, but slightly misplaced. Hanslick may have thought Wagner was a superlative, but he was only the necessary comparative to Schoenberg, who was the true superlative. Taking a tonal center away from a piece as a whole was Wagner's subversion in the Tristan prelude. But taking it away at any and every given moment was the next, logical step. Perhaps another quote is appropriate about Wagner, then.

"Is Wagner a human being at all? Is he not rather a disease? He contaminates everything he touches -- he has made music sick. I postulate this viewpoint: Wagner's art is diseased." Friedrich Nietzsche, Der Fall Wagner (1866).

Classical Drama, Classical Opera

An interesting quote from Music With Ease:

"It is a far cry from the date of the first extant opera to the music-dramas of Richard Wagner. The opera, as regards its essential form, is old enough. [T]he Greeks knew it, and it was probably well established before their time. In the tragedies of Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, there was musical recitation, and the choruses were sung in unison. But only a measure or two of this ancient music remains to show what it was like. It is to the age of the Renaissance, with its attempts to revive old-time Greek art, that we owe the first specimens of what we mow understand as opera."

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.

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.

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?

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)

"The Obselescence of Epic"

Brooks Otis, in his Virgil: A Study In Civilized Poetry, devotes his second chapter to exploring the "epics" written after Homer, the Callimachan rejection of any sort of modern epic, and then the set-up in ancient Rome that would allow the Maecenas group (which included Horace and Vergil) to write polished, continuous epic once again. Otis notes several interesting things:

(a) Homer had written the Greek epic and it was the specific output of his culture and milieu. Callimachus and Theocritus argued that their contemporary relation to the subject matter of the Iliad and the Odyssey was such that a recreation of that was impossible. "It was not only the genius of Homer which made him unapproachable: it was also his age and his ideas." (Otis, Brooks. Virgil: A Study In Civilized Poetry. "The Obsolescence of Epic", pg. 6.)
(b) In positing that epic could no longer be written, Callimachus and Theocritus were not trying to subvert the path of poetry radically by killing or finishing off the epic form, saying "It's impossible to write epic any more. And, just in case it is possible, I'll give it a few more stabs." Otis says, "Unlike Euripides, [Callimachus and Theocritus] had no new, iconoclastic ideas, but at least they were willing to accept the results of his iconoclasm and to acknowledge the almost complete obsolescence of the heroic-mythical world view." (ibid., pg. 9)
(c) "The fact that long epics still continued to be written did not [for the Callimachan school] in the least alter this general situation." (ibid., pg. 16.)
(d) The definition of poetry, subsequent to Callimachus and the rise of "light" and lyric poetry, had been dominated by the Homeric subject matter to the degree that the Greeks hardly considered poetry not dealing with the heroics of men and the deeds of gods to be poetry at all. "This was [Homer's] mythical subject-matter—more exactly, his limitation of poetry's proper content to a cycle of heroic myths in which men were almost inextricably mingled with gods and other divinities.... Homer's influence and reputation had in effect fixed heroic myth as the proper subject of poetry." (ibid., pg. 6.)

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.")

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?