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.

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.

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.

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).

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?

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.

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.")

Qualitative and Quantitative

I cringe whenever "traditional" and "contemporary" are pitted against each other, since they really go together like a horse and carriage. You can't have one without the other. This misguided notion of their mutual exclusivity is because we think of "traditional" as a quantitative term and "contemporary" as a qualitative one. In reality, it's just the opposite.

"Traditional" usually means something like, how many years of dust have piled up on the manuscript. But it's not a question at all of how many but of what kind. Something is traditional because of the tradition it plugs itself into. On the other hand, contemporary usually means (especially to the traditionalist) new and, hence, cheap. But this is misguided as well. This can all be illustrated by the simple fact that J. S. Bach was contemporary when he was writing his music. Who says it isn't traditional?

Once we release ourselves from this false conception of the traditional and the contemporary, the whole situation becomes much simpler. The Scriptural mandate for "new songs" and contemporary music is inescapable. It now depends upon what kind of contemporary music. This necessitates a method, a theory, an education, an analysis, a science, and a tradition of its own that Church composers can plug themselves into. This will make them simultaneously traditional and contemporary composers.

So, you ask, that's all very nice, but what's the concrete side of this? What musical science and analysis and theory and education and tradition should we be composing new music in? The answer is obvious - a culture, with its worldviews, doctrines, and presuppositions, that can produce music like Josquin, Dufay, and Perotinus is one that must have a coherent, methodological approach to it. Why else would he be called Magister Perotinus? He teaches something. All we have to do is teach it once again.

One more comment on tradition and the qualitative definition. As much as it is a qualitative sort of thing, tradition is inescapable. No matter how revolutionary your music is, it is always in some sort of tradition. As much as many people would like to think ex nihilo Schoenberg fit, even he can be traced through Wagner through Beethoven through Bach, all the way back to Magister Perotinus. You may digress from tradition and you may even revolt from it, but in so doing, not only are you still being affected by it, but all that you'll do is revolt into a different tradition. It's still always tradition, though. This holds true for Schoenberg and for Zep.

So, it becomes even more important when we approach what usually passes for worship music in, say, PCA, OPC, PCUSA, and all those other Reformed denominations. What tradition is your music plugging itself into? What culture does it sound like it's coming out of? Does it sound like, if you took away the words, it would be a bad imitation of a mild (or not so mild) pop song? It should be terrifying to us that our music is always traditional when we analyze what tradition it came out of.