Chorale of the Holy Mountain

High Music and Folk Music, Part I

Johannes Tinctoris, in his treatise Concerning the Skill of Counterpoint, begins with a quote from Horace's Ars Poetica:

"Scribendi recte sapere est et principium et fons." That is, to understand or to have knowledge (sapere) is the first principle and the fountain (principium et fons) of writing well (scribendi recte).

It's worth noting that Tinctoris is drawing a pretty clear corollary between the skill of poetry (ars poetica) and the skill of counterpoint (ars contrapuncti). He's importing a principle from the one for the other so he can explain to his reader the difference between just scribendum (writing) and scribendum recte (writing well). The difference is sapere.

Understanding this in cultural context is important. In the 15th century, counterpoint is the not-uncertain capital of the Church. The French chansons, the obvious exception to the vast majority of contrapuntal pieces serving a liturgical function, was stylistically not all that different from the many of the liturgical pieces (take, for example, the similarity between Josquin's Absolon fili mi and his Je ne me puis tenir d'aimer). Obviously, because of the lack of commercialization and the printing press, the audiences to this sort of secular music was extremely limited, probably to nobility and their clergy.

So, when Tinctoris starts off saying that knowledge is key to writing well, he's not talking about writing a nice tune that a troubadour might sing or the latest local hit song in the tavern. Tinctoris is talking about High music. And the first thing he points out about this music that distinguishes it from just any music (hence the recte, "well" qualifying scribendi, "writing") is the possession of a body of facts concerning counterpoint.

Folk music is music centered around the village square or the domestic hearth. In the 20th century, with the rise of commercial music, it may center around the LP or the iPod, but I think it's still the same principle. There's a fundamental difference between this and High music. High music can be described as requiring ars or τεχνη or skill. That skill comes only through a knowledge of the theoretical techniques and musical precedent.

"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.")

Musical Education and Presuppositions

Lewis' quotation should have made the thoughtful, modern reader suspicious. If we were to educate our children, as Plato suggests, to have a specific emotional reaction to a waterfall or a Beethoven symphony demanded by the intrinsic value of the waterfall or the Beethoven symphony, we would be presupposing and imposing a conception of what is good, true, or beautiful on our children rather than educating them generally and allowing them to decide according to their own aesthetic intuitions. In imposing our cultural standards on our children, one might say, we are taking away a facet of their free will, and this, according to fellows like Kant and Locke, would be holding their individuality in contempt and thwarting their freedom to make choices based off who they are, rather than choices based off what their parents want them to be.

This sort of reasoning is primarily effeminate in its refusal to adhere to absolute values. To say that there is an absolutely wicked act or an absolutely magnanimous act is to suppose that, regardless of what other opinions are, the act is either wicked or magnanimous absolutely. It is not a matter for you to decide - it simply is. Hitler was a bad person. So far, my ostensibly effeminate audience would agree. But if I were to take this absolute truth to its obvious conclusion - that anyone who says otherwise is wrong (and is either ignorant and bad himself) - my audience would squirm and backpedal and qualify. No one would suppose that aesthetic tastes (especially musical tastes) are so clear-cut as moral judgments. But just because the path to adherence to an aesthetic standard is hard to follow does not mean that the path does not exist or should be abandoned.

This sort of reasoning is also foolish in its blind hypocrisy. Fish can't walk, donkeys can't fly, and men can't stop presupposing a conception of what is good, true, and beautiful. These cultural impositions on our children are always present, and never more than today. In the pedagogical act of refusing to draw a judgment on a waterfall or a Beethoven symphony for the sake of not imposing cultural, aesthetic standards, a teacher imposes the cultural, aesthetic standard that there are no cultural aesthetic standards. This is what he teaches, unwittingly or not, to his students with his ambivalence.

Musical education, like all education, always presupposes a conception of value. A student of Derrida or Nietzsche (as most modern educators are) would probably tell you there is no intrinsic value in art or music, which is, if nothing else is, a value judgment on the art or music. But a Medieval education presupposes that mimesis of the Trinity is always intrinsically good, true, and beautiful, which is why counterpoint, symmetry, and the antiphon demand a certain emotional response.

The Abolition of Man

"Aristotle says that the aim of education is to make the pupil like and dislike what he ought. ...Plato before him had said the same. The little human animal will not at first have the right responses. It must be trained to feel pleasure, liking, disgust, and hatred at those things which really are pleasant, likeable, disgusting, and hateful. In the Republic, the well-nurtured youth is one 'who would see most clearly whatever was amiss in ill-made works of man or ill-grown works of nature, and with a just distaste would blame and hate the ugly even from his earliest years and would give delighted praise to beauty, receiving it into his soul and being nourished by it, so that he becomes a man of gentle heart. All this before he is of an age to reason; so that when Reason at length comes to him, then, bred as he has been, he will hold out his hands in welcome and recognize her because of the affinity he bears to her.'" (The Abolition of Man, by C. S. Lewis, from "Men Without Chests", Collier Books, pp. 26-27.)

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.”