In the arts declarations that our brains are not what the brains of humans fifty or a hundred years ago were have been common, if not exactly commonplace, for a century or few.
I realize that many American musicians and composers feel as though we're too beholden to music from the common practice era but, still, many a guitarist who has never been inside that scene in academic terms could start to get the idea that the insiders are protesting too much. There are protests about the way things seem to be inside the nexus of music industries that may seem more powerful to the professionals than will be salient to amateurs.
So when I read something like this it's interesting to read professionals scoff at this sort of manifesto even when, as a hobbyist musician, I fail to see that the assertions made are convincing and also get a sense that the entrenched professionals don't have the most generous response either.
So here's something from Catherine Lamb that, along the way, talks about how we listen and how we perceive is different than it was a decade ago: [more after the break]
http://www.sacredrealism.org/catlamb/writingsinterviews/Lamb_the_form_of_the_Spiral_Harvard_lecture2020.pdf
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We are transitioning into a new era of music. How we listen and how we perceive is different than it was one decade ago, 50 years ago, 100 years ago, 500 years ago... We cannot and do not know what the music of Gioseffo Zarlino or Mian Tansen was really like, because they were experimenting from their current positions in the world, (16th century Italy/India), but we can imagine some things from our own position towards them now. So that everything begins from our individual point outward (forward/backwards/up/down/in/out), through filtering and windows of reality and in our own interactions with others, throughout our musical lives.
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In this new era, we need to divorce ourselves from habitual musical thinking and terminologies. Not that we can’t describe rhythm, melody, harmony as we have, but that we need to expand what these elemental musical terminologies really mean and function as. Standard harmonic theory simply does not apply anymore to the modern composer. It was helpful 100 years ago when looking towards a particular past, and then when serialists took that particular theory and inverted it and warped it, or how Ruth Crawford Seeger approached her own dissonant counterpoint. It has been helpful for songwriters, and a more complex variation of it for jazz musicians over the past 100 years, but now in our new era of the listener’s music, this simply does not apply anymore.
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Decades ago when I was thinking about attending seminary I got some advice from a professor of biblical studies and the advice included "I wouldn't recommend attending the Ivy League schools". The professor, and I'll just name-drop William Lane, advised that by the late twentieth-century the Ivy League had, in his assessment, become a scene revolving around a guild mentality among scholars who were writing more for each other as a scholarly guild than out of pastoral concern for laypeople.
Obviously, since I'm writing about this in 2020, I could not forget those words. I have never felt "called" to be a pastor or a minister of any kind. In fact I have rejected being in any kind of clerical capacity. Call it a loyal low church Protestant commitment to the idea that clericalism is not something we need more of in church life.
Now I mention that because over the last twenty years I have begun to get a sense, having not made it into academics in music or music history, that what Dr. Lane warned had become prevalent in biblical studies has become prevalent elsewhere, that a guild-based clericalism is a risk in any academic context, particularly in the United States but only for reason that this is where I was born and raised.
Jacob L. Wright wrote a fascinating monograph on David and Caleb in Israelite memory where he highlighted that it was a scholarly commonplace in the 19th century to assume that Samuel-Kings whitewashed the life and times of King David, yet to observe what was actually written of David suggests that he was not presented in a favorable light. A man who started a war from personal vanity that plunged the court into intrigue and surreptitious murder by policy that was called out as an abuse of royal power by a prophet who predicted that intra-familial strife would never depart from the Davidic line; and a man who then had to suppress three insurrections or coup attempts and ended his life literally and figuratively impotent after having conducted a disastrously ill-advised census that led to thousands upon thousands dying hardly seems like a story devoted to "whitewashing" the life of King David. Wright proposed that there are some ideas dubious enough that the only way they can survive is because enough scholars are so emotionally and socially invested in the idea they keep the obviously bad idea alive through social cohesion.
I do happen to think we don't "have" to be bound by the idea of conventional common practice era harmony or even equal temperament in our time. But I read statements such as Lamb's with some skepticism. It comes across like the statement of someone within a guild speaking to people within a guild. People "out there" who are not inside such musical guilds with academic training want to be able to dance to music, for instance, or have a tune and I don't think it's a bad thing to give people tunes. I'm not a dancer myself but I don't think it's a bad thing to give people music with some kind of groove. Even cranky old Adorno argued, in his opaque and tortured prose, that the best of the Western music tradition had some mediation between a sonata style "argument" of developed ideas and "groove" of dance-based rhythms.
To say we're in a "listener's era" while suggesting that the theories of harmonic organization that have emerged in human behavior in the last few centuries are not applicable seems like a rhetorical sleight of hand, it magically shifts terms through a substitution. We're not so "modern" as to think that a friendly handshake isn't still, in theory, a way to give someone a greeting. Kisses and hugs from loved ones have not become obsolete, however antiquated they are since the dawn of humanity.
Maybe industry inside figures feel it's important to keep up with the times. There's something to be said in favor of keeping up with what's going on in scholarship if you're a scholar ... but the chasm between college-based music and music as an art and hobby practiced almost anywhere else seems like it could not get much bigger. A post-spectralist set of tools that no longer take common practice harmony for granted can be invoked to say that we shouldn't be straitjacketed by the nomenclature of old forms of music theory but I can still use things like i, iv, V and the concept of oblique motion to describe what goes on in Michael Jackson's "Thriller" without having to use any of Tenney's terminology invoked in the quoted lecture. That's not me saying you can't enjoy Tenney's work or Lamb's for that matter, just that the average guitarist is already not thinking in terms of the block chords of pianos for thinking about harmony. Pianists aren't going to generally take for granted that you can produce the same pitch on three different strings simultaneously and think of ways to exploit the microtonal differences between a C sharp on the second string and the C sharp natural harmonic you can get at frets 4 or 9 on the A string on a guitar.
But I remain unconvinced that the human ear and brain is as different now from the human brain and ear of fifty years ago as I was twenty years ago. I don't subscribe to what Jacques Ellul described as the Myth of Progress in technological/technocratic societies. I think it's great for us to master as many musical forms of expression as practical in our time without feeling obliged to reinvent wheels.
POSTSCRIPT 3-21-2020
I remembered to go back and find a passage from Leonard B. Meyer in Style and Music that seems pertinent to regular invocations that "we" perceive music differently now than fifty years ago and that therefore "we" need to rethink things like harmony.
STYLE AND MUSIC: THEORY, HISTORY AND IDEOLOGY
LEONARD B. MEYER
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
COPYRIGHT (C) 1989 BY LEONARD B. MEYER
ISBN 0-226-52152-4
page 20
Strategies are compositional choices made within the possibilities established by the rules of the style. For any specific style there is a finite number of rules, but there is an indefinite number of possible strategies for realizing or instantiating such rules. ... For this reason it seems doubtful that styles are ever literally exhausted, as they are sometimes said to be. ... most changes in the history of Western music have involved the devising of new strategies for the realization of existing rules, rather than the invention of new rules. Rule changes, as suggested earlier, occur only on the highest level of the history of Western music--that is, the level designating epochs such as the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Age of Tonality (ca 1600-1918), and the "Age of Modernity." Within these epochs what changed was strategic constraints.
page 31
...The distinction between rules and strategies helps, I think, to clarify the concept of originality, as well as its correlative, creativity. For it suggests that two somewhat different forms of originality need to be recognized. The first involves the invention of new rules. Whoever invented the limerick was original and creative in this sense, and Schoenberg's invention of the twelve-tone method also involved this sort of originality. The second sort of originality, on the level of strategy, does not involve changing the rules but discerning new strategies for realizing the rules. A Bach or Haydn, devising new ways of moving within established rules--or an Indian sitar player improvising according to existing canons on an age-old rag--is original and creative in this way. "It is surprising to note," observes Josephine Miles,
that the so-called great poets as we recognize them are not really the innovators; but if you stop and think about it, they shouldn't be. Rather they are the sustainers, the most deeply immersed in tradition, the most fully capable of making use of the current language available to them. When they do innovate, it is within a change begun by others, already taking place. ["Values in Language", p 11, Critical Enquiry 3, No.1 1976 pages 1-13]
And the same seems true in music. For though some composers have both invented new rules and devised new means for their realization--Schoenberg is surely the exemplary instance--most of the acknowledged great masters (Bach and Handel, Haydn and Mozart, and even Beethoven) have been incomparable strategists. [emphasis added]
page 109-110
... most of the stylistic movements broached during the past seventy years--serialism, neoclassicism, aleatory music, statistical music, and so on--can be regarded as attempts to devise viable stylistic constraints not merely on the level of strategies, but on the level of rules. Because choosing becomes problematic in such circumstances, one of the symptoms of stylistic instability is, as noted earlier, a noticeable decline in the productivity of composers. [emphasis added]
page 135
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Because cultures are as a rule replete with possibiltiies, it is not primarily the advent of novelty that needs to be explained, but its [i]use[i] and, even more importantly, its subsequent replication.
... To make the point forcefully and with only slight exaggeration, the difference between a crackpot and a genius is not primarily a matter of fecund invention; both readily devise novel, imaginative, even eccentric, possibilities. Rather the difference lies in the ability of the genius to choose with perspicacity. On a higher historical level, why did certain patterns, forms, or genres, rather than others that we equally available, appeal to a particular compositional/cultural community, so that they were replicated in a kind of consensus of current compositional choice? Why, in short, do some constraints continue to be chosen while others, however aesthetically satisfying they may have been, disappear, apparently without historical consequences?
page 140
... In short, innovations that are compatible with the constraints and proclivities of human perceptual and cognitive processes will tend to be comprehended as coherent, stable, and memorable relationships. As such they have a reasonable chance of being replicated as aspects of the idiom of a composer or as part of the dialect of the compositional community.
The probability of such replication seems dependent on three other characteristics of patterns: generality, versatility, and redundancy.
... to be replicated a patterning either must be generalizable or must be the realization of some general principle. For example, a number of composers were evidentally influenced by Debussy's aesthetic ideals--for instance, an emphasis on sound per se, achieved through the weakening of syntactic, goal-oriented processes and a concomitant increase in the importance of secondary parameters. Others have been influenced by (have replicated) his chord construction through the superimposition of thirds. For both these aspects of his style are generalizable. But those who have sought to emulate his harmonic style have only succeeded in parroting, because Debussy's characteristic chord successions were, as far as I can discern, negatively derived. that is, they resulted from avoiding progressions normal in the harmonic syntax of tonal music. But because the negation of one set of orderly relationships need not give rise to some other orderly set, Debussy's harmonic language probably cannot be generalized and cannot, through replication, be influential in shaping the development of new harmonic constraints.
Years ago I met someone who wrote song lyrics who told me she wanted to subvert cliches. When she explained how she did this I told her that it seemed that trying to subvert cliche meant she was still under their control. A cliche, if it can be used for communicative purposes, could be just the thing a lyric needs. Art isn't in the rejection of every so-called cliche but in learning when to make the cliche work for you to express something.
We've had centuries since Beethoven to hear about how artists and poets and so on must not be beholden to cliches or conventions but a good deal of the history of arts, or a good deal of the arts throughout history, suggest that casting off the conventions of the arts of the time is less typical than mastering the conventions of the time and place you're in and bending those conventions, so to speak, toward the end of expressing what you want to express.
Per Meyer, there have been a lot of attempts to create and consolidate new constraints yet when we consider what music has stuck around in the last century and a half musicians established plenty of new constraints but one field at a time and usually not across every possible field of musical activity. Adorno sniffed that jazz didn't add anything new to harmony or melody that wasn't already in Debussy and we can grant that point and yet Adorno found the timbres of jazz and pop music, the Wurlitzer organ particularly and also the mute-driven timbrel mutations of brass, to be irksome. Many a brilliant jazz musician pioneered a new range of timbres while not necessarily introducing harmonies or melodic turns that the likes of Adorno couldn't say were found first in the Western concert music tradition. For all of Stravinsky and Schoenberg's revolutionary moments in rhythm and pitch organization Stravinsky's approach to orchestration was indebted to his teacher Rimsky-Korsakov.
Here we are in 2020 and there are bids at staking out new terrain or consolidating terrain explored by earlier composers and musicians. That's fine. I'm still curious about experimental music but if we stick with the scientific metaphor a friend of mine years ago who got her doctorate in the hard sciences once told me "Ninety percent of science is failure, and the other ten percent of science is figuring out why you failed, but it's in that ten percent where you can make scientific breakthroughs that can help people." I shared her words with another friend who is a scientist and the second friend said with a sigh, "That sounds like it was said by a real scientist."
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